by Mia Madison
Most likely a nurse would be here to take them to an examination area before she completed the paperwork, but the woman still looked worried. Of course she did—her son was in pain.
Andrea was on the phone and there were no other patients waiting, so I rose and walked around the counter. “Hi,” I said, crouching down in front of the boy. “I’m Becca.”
“I’m Tim,” a small voice said.
“Please, can’t we just see someone now? He’s really uncomfortable,” the woman said. “I think it’s heat stroke. They were running around outside for hours this morning.”
I frowned for a moment, my eyes focusing on the sky beyond the emergency room doors. It was a partly sunny day and not all that warm. Tim’s little face did look flushed, though. “Why don’t we go sit down, and I can keep Tim occupied while you fill out the form? That way, when they call his name, everything will be ready.”
For a moment the woman looked grateful, but then concern clouded her features again. “Come on, Tim.”
We walked over to the waiting area, and Tim’s mom handed me the clipboard with the chart and lifted her son onto a chair. Tim winced as she picked him up—and so did I, watching his face screw up in pain.
I chatted with Tim while his mother filled out the paperwork. “Are you on a soccer team?”
Tim had his head bowed and was breathing a shallowly. His voice was soft. “No. I’m not old enough. Next year.”
“Were you playing soccer with your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Did you trip over the ball at any point? Or did you and one of your friends maybe crash into each other while you were playing?”
“Of course not,” his mother said. “I was watching them from the window the whole time. They’re good boys.”
“They must be,” I said, my tone pleasant, “If Tim here is any indication. He looks like one of the good guys.”
His mother smiled vaguely as she continued to focus on the form, but I kept my gaze on her son, my eyebrow raised, willing him to answer my question. With my hands, I made a motion, trying to make it look like they were crashing into each other. At long last he nodded, hunching his shoulders forward. Even those small movements seemed to hurt him.
Poor little guy. But he’d just confirmed my suspicions.
“Are you Tim Davis?” Jessica, a friendly nurse with curly blonde hair, joined us.
“Yes.” Mrs. Davis stood up.
“Come with me, please.”
Tim’s mom started to lift him by his underarms, but I reached out and stopped her. Astonished, she stared at me.
“It’s best not to pick him up, Ma’am, until the doctors and nurses can determine what’s hurting him.”
“It’s heat stroke,” she said indignantly. “He’s weak. He needs help.”
Fortunately, Jessica chimed in. “It never hurts to be cautious, Mrs. Davis. Tim, can you walk?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice small. But instead of getting off the chair, he turned to me. “Are they going to hurt me?”
My heart melted. The poor little boy was scared and in pain. I thought for a minute. “It already hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“They’re going to fix that. And you wanna know something cool?”
He lifted his head and met my eyes for the first time. “What?”
“They’re probably going to take an X-ray of your chest. You’ll be able to see your heart, lungs, and ribs. It’ll be like if you had X-ray vision and looked in a mirror.”
“Cool.”
“Think Superman ever does that?”
Tim laughed slightly and then winced, making me feel guilty as hell. I hadn’t meant to make him laugh. “Can you go with Jessica now?”
“Yes.” He slid carefully off the seat.
“If you’re feeling better, stop by the desk on the way out and let me know if you acquire any other super powers.”
“Okay.”
Mrs. Davis and Tim followed Jessica into a small exam room. The cheerful nurse gave me a thumbs up before pulling the curtain shut.
Feeling happy all of a sudden, I bounced to my feet. I may not save lives like the doctors and nurses, but at least I’d made Tim feel a little better about being here.
Deciding I needed some caffeine, I turned toward the hall—and stopped dead in my tracks. Dr. Hottie was there, leaning against a wall and gazing at me in a speculative way. He looked… tall. And frickin’ gorgeous. He didn’t have on scrubs today. Instead, he wore black pants and a crisp button-down gray shirt under a white lab coat. A stethoscope hung loosely around his neck.
He looked good enough to eat, but it made me wonder how long he’d been standing there. And damn, I’d thought of him as Dr. Hottie again. I needed to stop doing that—if I called him that a second time, my face would likely get so red that it would catch fire.
“You’re good with kids,” he said.
“Umm… thanks. They’re great.”
“How’d you know it was his ribs?”
Uh-oh. My dad would kill me if he thought I was dispensing medical advice in any way, shape, or form. “I didn’t… it just seemed like it might be a possibility. I’ve read that broken or fractured ribs can happen when kids are playing sports or even just goofing around.”
Mortified, I stopped. I didn’t want Dr. Hawthorne to think that I was lecturing him.
But he just smiled. “It was a good call.”
“Thanks.” His words filled me with a warm flush, but suddenly I didn’t know what to do. Stand there blushing in front of him? Continue down the hall and get something to drink? If I did that, would he leave? Or would he come with me?
But then I saw that Andrea wasn’t at the front desk anymore, so I started edging toward it.
Dr. Hawthorne followed.
“Are you studying medicine?”
A small shiver of relief stole through me. At least he knew I was in college. I’d been half afraid he thought I was a volunteer still in high school. Sometimes people thought I was younger than I actually was.
“No, business. I’m a junior.”
He grinned and ran a hand over the stubble along his jawline. “We need business majors or places like this would run out of money.”
Unwilling to turn my back on him, I nodded still stepping backwards towards my station. I jumped when I felt something brush the back of my arm. Turning, I saw it was the ficus plant in front of the reception desk.
Glancing back at Dr. Hawthorne, I gulped. He was even closer now. Not too close, he was standing at a normal distance for conversation, but it felt close to me. Especially with those pale blue eyes that seemed to be drilling into me. The silver-gray color of his shirt made his eyes seem even more vivid.
“Never considered it?” he asked.
“What?”
“Being a doctor. After all, it’s in your blood.”
“Oh. Well… my Dad thinks that…” Dammit. I didn’t want him to think that I was some little kid who did whatever her father told her to. Even though it was, for the most part, true.
I tried again. “I mean, business classes are interesting.” Some of them. A few. But I was also taking all the science classes I could. Not that anything was going to come of it, but I loved taking them, especially Advanced Biology. Ever since my mother’s terminal illness, I’d read everything I could about physiology. I liked learning how everything in the body worked. Or was supposed to work.
“Hold out your hand.”
His order seemed so out-of-the-blue that for a minute, I frowned up at him before realizing I was probably making a really bizarre face.
Dr. Hawthorne laughed. “I’m not going to steal it. Just hold your hand out, waist-height, palm down.”
I complied, unsure why he wanted me to do that. I even managed to hold steady when he reached around me, the sleeve of his lab coat touching my arm. He plucked a small object off the top of the reception desk.
Tearing my eyes away from his, I recognized the blue i
tem in his hand. It was a small, globe-shaped stress ball that had been left by a pharmacy rep last week.
“Keep your hand still,” Dr. Hawthorne said. He placed the stress ball on the back of my hand, balancing it on my ring, middle, and index fingers.
We both watched as I held my hand still, keeping the ball from moving. After fifteen or twenty seconds, he took back the ball, his long fingers touching mine in the process. “You have steady hands, like your old man.”
The approval in his voice made me flush with pleasure. Or maybe it was his touch. “Thanks.”
“You could be a surgeon—if you wanted to be.” His blue eyes reflected his smile, but it was clear he was serious. And that made my heart soar almost as much as his nearness.
But then I remembered it wasn’t meant to be. My father had been dead set against it the few times I’d cautiously brought it up. And he paid for my tuition. The money I made each summer only covered a few months of living expenses. “I can’t… I mean, sometimes I think about it, but—“
“Good. Keep thinking about it,” he said, overriding my objections. “See you later, Becca.”
I watched him walk away, my thought process less on the field of medicine—and more on how his backside looked cute even though it was currently covered by a lab coat.
Suddenly, I grinned to myself. That made two things my father probably wouldn’t want me to be thinking about today.
“Good afternoon, Rebecca.”
A few hours later, I was stopped by another doctor, this one looking decidedly less warm and friendly than Dr. Hawthorne had been earlier. “Hi Dad.”
“What’s that?” He gestured toward the huge rolling case I was pulling.
“Brochures and stuff for the outreach tour.”
“Ah, yes. I expect you to represent the hospital in the best possible light.”
“Of course I will.” Suddenly, my father’s attitude felt stifling. I was a grown-up. Maybe I couldn’t handle everything perfectly—certainly I turned into a tongue-tied idiot when Dr. Hawthorne was around—but I could handle this. “I did this last year, Dad. It went well.”
“Yes. Dr. McNulty said as much.”
For a moment, I was shocked. A compliment? From my dad? Or at least from Dr. McNulty, who was a sixty-five-year-old pediatric surgeon who’d been at the hospital for nearly forty years. He was the grandfatherly type, and last year, we’d gotten along well during the outreach tour. Jessica, the ER nurse, had been the third member of our party, and I’d enjoyed our week away from the hospital. And away from my dad’s overbearing ways.
Feeling emboldened, I took a deep breath. “I like talking about the hospital. You do good work here, really interesting work. I’d love to learn more about it. In fact, if I take an overload this fall, there’s this class on genetics being offered, and maybe I could—“
Dad’s expression hardened. “Your role is to keep Dr. McNulty and the nurse organized, not talk about medicine.”
“I know, but—“
“And genetics is hardly standard fare for a business major.”
“I know, but—“
Dad looked at his watch. “I must get back upstairs. I’ll see you tonight, Rebecca. I’ll be back late, so go ahead and have dinner on your own.”
My heart sank at his dismissal. “Yes, Dad.”
“And don’t leave your packing until the last minute.”
I won’t. I’m not a kid, I thought.
But wall I said was, “Yes, Dad.”
Owen
“How’s it going at the hospital, my boy?”
Uncle Max was pretty much the only family member who still liked me. My parents had given up on me when I joined Doctors Bridging Worlds. My father passed away while I was in Uganda, and my mother currently lived near her sister in upstate New York. Uncle Max was the only Hawthorne left in this town my ancestors had helped settle.
“Fine,” I said, hearing the lack of enthusiasm in my voice. “I’ve got a desk. An office. A little plaque bearing my name on the door. What I don’t have are patients, cases, or surgeries.”
Max squinted at me. “None?”
“Two surgeries since I started,” I admitted. I was used to back-to-back surgeries under the most extreme conditions. What I wasn’t used to was twiddling my thumbs.
“Maybe you could use the downtime.” Max cut into his pancakes with the precision of the surgeon he used to be. We were at Betty’s Diner, which he’d claimed was the best place for breakfast in all of Taylorsville.
“If I needed downtime, I would’ve retired, not returned to the hospital. You said Greg Miller would welcome me with open arms.”
Max cocked his head to the side. “No tearful reunion? No hugs?”
For just a moment, a memory surfaced: me leaning over Becca Miller, adjusting her pillow in her hospital room. The sweet scent of her. The bright eyes. The hope. And innocence. And—unless I’d imagined it—the admiration. “Nope, no hugs.” Not from either Miller, which was good in one case and bad in the other.
Max took a long swig of coffee. “You’re not eating.”
Absently, I scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. A big western-style breakfast had been a rarity the past decade, and it had sounded good when I’d ordered it. But now that it was in front of me, it was less appealing than I imagined. And the part I’d eaten felt too heavy in my stomach. The coffee was good, though.
“I’ll never understand what happened between you two. You were like peas in a pod when you were growing up.”
“Times change,” I said, not wanting to get into it.
“Remember how you boys used to come over to my house after school to watch reruns of M*A*S*H? How much you’d laugh together?”
Oh yeah. I’d forgotten that. Max had lived nearest to the school. If we went to Greg or my house, we missed the beginning of each episode. “It was a good show.” And it had been. It had fed our desire to become doctors.
“Hey maybe when you’re in your office with nothing to do, you can watch M*A*S*H. While you were overseas, they got this thing called Netpicks. I don’t know how it works, but apparently you can watch anything and just have fun. They call it Netpicks and chill.”
I sputtered into my coffee. Hard to imagine that I’d lived on the other side of the world for ten years but was still more up-to-date on pop culture references than Uncle Max. Well, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t that hard to imagine. He’d always been cheerfully out of step with the rest of Taylorsville. “Never change, Max.”
I signaled the waitress and handed her my credit card. “Unfortunately, I have to leave. They called a last minute meeting this morning at the hospital. Someone obviously screwed up by accidentally inviting me.”
“I know. I’m going too,” Max said, shoveling pancakes into his mouth at a faster pace.
“You are?”
“I’m still on the board. I can drop in anytime I like. And sometimes I do, just to keep them on their toes.”
Hmm. I wonder if Uncle Max annoyed Greg as much as I apparently did? If so, this might be an interesting meeting.
Twenty minutes later, I was fighting to stay awake. My previous idea that the meeting might be interesting had been way off. Greg was droning on and on about various administrative issues to a roomful of bored medical professionals. The only thing that even remotely qualified as interesting was that Greg’s daughter was there. Becca sat in the back, pen and notebook in hand, looking amazingly fresh and alert for this time of day.
It was good to see her. Despite her protests, it was clear she was interested in a career in medicine, and for whatever reason, Greg didn’t seem to want that. For a minute, I mulled over that, frowning. My oldest-friend-slash-current-enemy had never had a problem with female doctors before. Was it possible he didn’t see that the girl had the intelligence, dedication, and patience to be a good doctor? Or was there some other reason he didn’t want her to enter his field?
But obviously Becca was a determined young woman—otherwise s
he wouldn’t have chosen this as her summer job. And a beautiful young woman. Today she wore a soft pink sweater over a white dress and low sandals. She was wasted at the reception desk down in Emergency. If she’d just drifted from room to room, smiling her sunny smile, she would’ve lifted patients’ spirits instantly.
“Which brings me to the last order of business,” Greg said, and I nudged Max who was nodding off. He’d probably need a few minutes to get his bearings before heading home.
“The community outreach tour is next week. Each year, a team of Hawthorne Memorial staff visits local communities, talking about the hospital and its services. They’ll also stop at local schools to talk about the medical field in general.”
Greg paused and scanned the room as did I. Most of the people were nodding in a noncommittal way. They all knew about this outreach tour though I hadn’t. So why was Greg bringing it up now?
“As those of you on the night shift undoubtedly know, Dr. McNulty, who was supposed to spearhead the tour, broke his hip last night.”
There were a few gasps, and I winced in sympathy. I’d known John McNulty when I was here the first time around, and he was a good man. Though I’d only seen him twice since I got back, he hadn’t seemed old enough to have that kind of injury—though broken bones could occur at all ages.
“This brings us to the main reason for this meeting. The outreach tour is all set to go. All arrangements have been made. If we cancel it now, we won’t be able to free up the staff until next summer. Therefore, we need another doctor to take John’s place.”
Suddenly the room was filled with doctors who were diligently taking notes, looking at their phones, or examining their hands. None of them appeared to want to make eye contact with the chief of surgery for fear of being picked. It reminded me of a high school class when no one wanted to be called on by the teacher. Well, except for Greg and me. We’d always vied with each other to answer questions.
“How about you?” Max whispered in what he seemed to think was a quiet voice.
“Huh?”