Four Chambers: Power of the Matchmaker

by Julie Wright

  I shook my head. “He actually made really good money, better than the snobby professor.”

  “I always wondered about that. What did he do? What was his talent?” Everett hadn’t been nearly so intrigued with any of the other guys and their stories, but the busker captivated him.

  “Street magic. He was really good too. Sometimes I half-believed he really could make things disappear and reappear.”

  Everett scratched at his five o’clock shadow. “So he sounds pretty cool. What happened with him?”

  I smirked. “Turns out I was better at disappearing than he was. One day I just knew it wasn’t going anywhere and had to move on.”

  “Ouch. I just went from jealous of him to sorry for him.”

  “Leaving him was a kind truth,” I said, recollecting a conversation we'd had so, so long ago.

  We both fell silent after that, the game over. Surprisingly, talking about all those relationships had been pretty therapeutic and fun.

  But with a few moments of time to consider the conversation, my mind wandered to dangerous places.

  “Did you love any of them? Those other women?” I hated myself for asking the instant the words left my lips.

  He leaned back in his chair and lifted his eyes from his empty plate to mine. “I’ve only ever been in love three times. None of those women made that list.”

  I wondered the identities of the other two when he clarified for me. “Three times. One woman.”

  The intensity of his gaze left no question as to the identity of that one woman.

  “Oh,” I whispered, unable to look away, unable to breathe, unable to think.

  Was he saying he loved me still?

  What would that mean to me if he did?

  My heart felt like it was going into some sort of arrhythmia. How ironic would a heart attack be on a date like this? “Everett . . .”

  “Do not say my name like that,” he said.

  “Like what?” I picked up my water glass and tried to hide my feelings in the act of taking a drink.

  “Like you’re considering a disappearing act.”

  I laughed, spraying water over him. I didn’t even apologize for the spray. “You do know we work together. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good. I want us to be okay. Nothing weird between us.”

  “You mean aside from our convoluted dating history?”

  “Yes. Aside from that.”

  “And from the fact that we’re gunning for the same position at the hospital?”

  “That’s a minor inconvenience, but yes, aside from that as well.”

  I agreed with him. But we both knew that agreements and reality were not the same thing at all. In the interest of making the conversation less intense, I shifted the topic to Hazel and when she would arrive and what exactly was expected from me, and did Dr. Herald, the department chief, know about the little PR stunt?

  I had to ask that last question because I had the feeling that Miss Pearl was the sort of woman who liked to do things under the radar if she could get away with it. Not that I blamed her. I liked things that way too. But this was one of those overly public times where under the radar was not going to work.

  Dr. Herald was in favor of our PR stunt, according to Everett. So admin approved. The physicians approved. There was nothing left to do but go through with the whole thing.

  “When is Hazel coming?”

  “It’ll be a few months. Product development want to get the new toy right before they launch it to the hospital. And because it’s going to little kids as well, they need to make sure it meets all the safety standards.” He wiped his napkin over his mouth, an indication that dinner’s end had come.

  I stood and walked with him back to the parking garage. We discussed different places we lived, different reasons for leaving those places, and he finally told me what I hadn’t been willing to listen to before.

  “I didn’t know you wanted that apartment,” he said as we walked.

  I rolled my eyes. “It so doesn’t even matter anymore.”

  “You didn’t talk to me again for months after that. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. But I had to get out of my apartment or I might have killed Adam.”

  “I had roommates to kill, too, you know.”

  “You probably did, but you would’ve wanted to add my roommate to your hit list if you had any idea what his plans for you were and if you had any idea the excruciating detail in which he explained those plans to me.”

  When I stared in disgust at Everett, he slid a sideways glance at me and shrugged. “I told you the guy was a player. You cannot believe how worried I was when you actually went out with him. I should’ve spray-painted TOOL on his car.”

  We stopped at the elevators and waited for the doors to slide open. I laughed. “Yeah, well . . . I can take care of myself.”

  “So you keep proving. I’m sorry about that whole apartment thing.”

  “I’m sorry about that whole leaving you at the Hatch Shell.

  “You’re forgiven,” he said.

  “Will you be so forgiving if I get the surgeon position?” I asked.

  He hesitated before grinning wide and saying, “You would deserve that job.”

  He hadn’t meant to hesitate, I was sure of that. He probably didn’t even know he had hesitated, but I knew.

  “What about you? Will you be so forgiving?”

  Of course I said yes.

  But I hesitated too.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Through the next month, Everett and I didn’t date exactly—probably a direct result of our individual hesitations, but we gravitated toward one another in a way that felt unpreventable. We took lunch together more often than not. We sat by each other in staff meetings. We discussed ways to improve workflow and patient satisfaction.

  We remained polite when the retirement of Dr. Mendenhall was officially announced. It would take a long time to choose and vet another physician. Everyone knew it. But everyone’s eyes all went to where Everett and I sat next to each other. Those eyes all seemed to say, let the games begin.

  We had officially become competition.

  The thing about working at a hospital is that they move at a snail’s pace to get anything done. It took them five months to hire Everett. It would likely take them at least that long, and maybe even longer, to decide on a surgeon.

  If we’d been working for a private clinic, the decision would be made by physicians, and the process would be relatively short. At the hospital, everything was run by the people with the MBA’s. They worked in a world of committee and paperwork.

  Miss Pearl smiled a lot through the whole process. She acted cool and collected as she watched Everett and watched me and nodded as if satisfied with whatever it was she saw.

  She smiled when Everett made puppets out of tongue depressors and entertained his patients and their parents, and half the staff. Of course, his antics made me feel like I needed children to leave my office laughing as well, so I made up jokes about tongues that were very sad when they left my office because tongue depressors did that sort of thing. Half the time the kids got the jokes and laughed, other times they blinked at me with big wide eyes.

  Miss Pearl still smiled at me, even with my blunders.

  Even as I felt the need to step up my game and prove I deserved the position, I also felt the pull of Everett’s genuine friendship. If I had my hands full, he jumped to open the door for me. If I patted pockets, trying to find loose change for the vending machine, he was there to loan me a few quarters. If he caught me crying over patients in the hospital—even if they weren’t my patients—he handed me a tissue without saying a word.

  Likewise, If Everett failed to remember to take a lunch break, I handed him an apple or a protein bar from my stash of get-through-the-day-treats. If he felt frustration over symptoms of patients he couldn’t place, I talked him through them until we had some plausible leads. If he snarked or growled at disorderly orderlies, I rolled my eyes at
him and told him to stop being such a jack-wagon. He usually apologized to the orderly after that. It was usually Camille he had to apologize to.

  We had a synchronicity to our friendship that worked like a precision timepiece. The mention of ex relationships with each other or with others was a source of friendly banter, instead of the awkward mess it could have been.

  In all that, Everett didn’t move to anything more than my friend. In all that, I resisted the urge to close my eyes and lean into him. Becoming competition shifted our friendship.

  Competing with him was like staying in the same pose day in and day out, waiting for the photographer to finally snap the picture.

  No one showed up at that stage in the medical career without a drive and ambition to see things through to the end. Everett was no different. Neither was I. We both wanted the job. We both wanted the position badly enough to not back off in order to give the other one space. His tenacity in spite of the fact that we had a tangle of unexpressed feelings toward each other made me respect him more, even if I didn’t always like him.

  Not liking him was part of that tangle of unexpressed feelings. Liking him too much was another part. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that I only looked after Everett’s well-being because Miss Pearl told me to, and had yet to tell me to quit.

  Had she given him the same directive?

  Since she often took him aside and spoke to him quietly and his gaze inevitably slid toward me, I had to assume she'd told him to look after me the way I was supposed to look after him. Perhaps she did it to guarantee we would be able to work together regardless of who got the position. Perhaps she did it because she wanted the position to go to the one with the greater ability to show compassion under stress. Whatever her reason, it made me distrust the idea of Everett having feelings for me still. He loved the same woman three times. What were the chances of such an intelligent man being foolish enough to love that same woman a fourth?

  Time passed quickly under the watchful eye of Miss Pearl and the eight surgeons who wanted to put in their own recommendations regarding us. And before I knew it, Hazel showed up with a whirlwind of activity. I had no appointments that day so that Hazel could boss me around as she saw fit.

  And she did see fit.

  She swanned in to the hospital amid camera flashes and an entourage, as though she walked the red carpet to a blockbuster premiere. Dr. Herald greeted her with wide smiles and hearty handshakes. They stopped for a few photos and then he brought her to me as if we'd never met before and needed an introduction.

  She hugged me and said, “Let’s get you set up for hair and makeup.”

  I cast Everett a bewildered glance as she took my hand and tugged me into my office. Her entourage wasted no time redecorating my office to look like a day spa. Mirrors, lighting, brushes and hair product, and a fold-up box of more cosmetics than could be found at any department store counter were all spread over my desk.

  When a handful of hair pins that looked like torture devices tumbled out onto my desk, I shot a look in the mirror at Hazel standing behind me. “Does Everett have to endure hair and makeup?”

  “Nope. This visit is about Doctor Andra Stone, the silent heartbeat of Boston Children’s Cardiology.”

  “And that doesn’t sound over the top to you?”

  She bent down and put her face next to mine in the mirror. “The world will love it. I promise.”

  I totally called the hair pins. The stylist with the pink pixie cut working my head over stuck at least fifty of those pins straight into my scalp. No amount of scowling or ow-ing slowed the woman down.

  By the time she was done with me, I had an up-do that no sensible doctor would ever want to endure, but it did look nice.

  They did the interview first. And they did it in Everett’s office so they had a good shot of the enormous canvas photo of Everett and me and the store launch. I was asked all kinds of questions regarding my position at Boston Children’s; the type of interaction I had with the patients and why I decided to start being the hospital Santa Claus by sneaking in toys while the children slept.

  Miss Pearl stood with Dr. Herald behind the cameraman. They both smiled at me with encouragement, so I decided to share the whole story.

  “Well, there was this little girl named Zoe. She’s a great kid. She loves unicorns and Thor, which I know is a funky combination, but those two things were her total favorites. She came in with end-stage heart disease. She was a candidate for a transplant. We used ventricular assist devices while she waited for a donor, but it had been a while. Some kids do really well on the VADs and can even go home and go to school while they wait for a donor. But the VADs didn’t seem to be much help to Zoe. She worsened every day. The problem was that it wasn’t just her heart that was failing her. She lost her will to fight somewhere in all the days of sitting on that hospital bed. Her will to live failed her every bit as much as her heart did.

  “I just wanted to do something that might lift her spirits a little. So I found that she really liked reading. I went to a children’s book store and bought her a bunch of books where the kids were heroes beating impossible odds. I hoped that if she could read about someone else fighting a huge battle and winning, maybe she would believe she could win too.”

  Someone behind the cameraman sniffed. I couldn’t tell who the sniff came from, but someone else must have felt the same way I felt about little Zoe’s situation. Telling the story made me want to cry as well.

  “While I was at the bookstore, I saw a doll that held a book in her arms. The doll came from Hazel Covington’s company, Second Childhood, and it hit me that I could not only help this one child, but I could help another child somewhere else in the world. I bought the doll and the books and left them in her room with a note that told her to pay attention to the heroes in the books.”

  “And what happened after that?” the interviewer asked.

  I smiled and felt the tears burn hot at my eyes. I blinked them back since crying on interviews was incredibly lame. “She began to improve. She muscled her way through a lot of bad days until a donor came through. She’s doing great now. I’m proud of her for realizing she wasn’t powerless. Her heart might have been weakening, but that didn’t in any way diminish her own power to be strong.”

  The interviewer flashed the camera a knowing smile. “This story, all by itself is filled with extraordinary generosity. But Doctor Stone didn’t stop with this one child. No. She went on to provide toys and books to many other children in the hospital, even if they weren’t being treated by cardiology. Doctor Stone has been the generous donor of over 150 toys for the residents of Boston Children’s hospital. Tell us why you continued with the other children, Doctor Stone.”

  The hot lights set up for the cameras smothered me, and all the attention embarrassed me. But I answered the questions and explained my reasons for acting as I had. When the interview finished, they shooed me aside and interviewed a few of the other physicians, including Everett—who was asked to explain the significance of the portrait on his wall.

  The whole thing made me blush vigorously and all felt kind of over the top until Dr. Herald gave me a wink and a thumbs-up before he walked away to attend to his own duties. But that thumbs up made all the circus worth it. That thumbs up was an approval from the department chief. Any approval would help me with consideration for the surgeon position.

  During lunch, Hazel sat with me. Everett had appointments and everyone else faded away to their own meals.

  “So you like working here?” Hazel asked.

  “Love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life.”

  “Everett’s the same way. This is all he’s ever wanted to do. He turned out to be a pretty great kid, even if our Grace and Dad were a little whacked in actual parenting skills.”

  I smiled. Her parents were definitely different, but then, mine weren’t much better, just an opposite side of extreme. I always imagined good parents landed somewhere in the middle. “He di
dn’t turn out too badly, did he?”

  “I was sorry with the way things ended between you two. I’m glad to see you’re getting another chance.”

  I nearly coughed out the bite of spinach leaves I’d taken. A second chance? Did she not know that we’d already blown through a second chance and a third one as well? Did she not know how utterly not-going-to-happen Everett and I were as a couple?

  I chewed with voracity and swallowed hard so I could clarify as quickly as possible. “We’re just friends, now.”

  “Hm.” She steepled her fingers and rested her chin on them, a female replica of her brother. “That’s too bad,” she said after a minute. “I mean, it’s too bad that people think that the word just belongs in front of the word friends. Good friends make the best companions. I’ve always thought my parents’ problems stemmed from the fact that they weren’t ever really friends, you know?”

  I gave a rueful smile. “My parents probably could have benefitted from a healthy dose of friendship, as well.”

  She shrugged and picked up her sandwich. “So maybe 'just friends' is something to think about?”

  “We’re also up for the same promotion.”

  She shrugged again and took a bite of her sandwich, the big kind of bite that let me know she had no intention of responding, which was too bad because I really wanted to know what she had to say about that. Hazel was a successful business woman. How would she handle a man she had a relationship with competing with her?

  Her mother would probably hire a hit man to kill the competition off. My mother would bat her eyelashes, let him win, and hope she scored a ring out of the deal.

  What would I do?

  Second Childhood donated 500 toys to Boston Children’s. Boston Children’s signed a contract to carry Second Childhood toys in their gift shop and the whole day ended with a lot of congratulating and handshakes.

  Hazel and Everett stayed with me while I cleaned up my office and prepared for the next day. “Any deliveries tonight, Santa Clause?” Hazel asked.

  I grinned. “Sure. You guys can come along.”

  With the reporters and cameras gone, the brightly decorated halls felt blessedly silent. I took them to all my favorite places and peeked in on many of the sleeping children. Everett and I took turns giving brief medical histories of each child we looked in on so Hazel understood what was at stake for them.