by Edie Claire
Thane threw his friend a sour look. It was fine for Dave to be chipper — the ranger had already had not one, but two cracks at finding the glacier cub. Thane was still waiting, and when you’d waited a whole lifetime for something, even one extra night and a morning seemed endless. Still, he couldn’t blame Dave for the delay. It was entirely appropriate that the landowner’s permission be acquired before Thane set out, particularly since Dave — not knowing Thane was coming — had promised the man just yesterday that they would keep the hunt between the two of them. With luck, Mei Lin would get the requisite permission on her visit to the cabin this morning, and Thane and Dave could set out first thing this afternoon.
Dave had other work to do this morning, anyway. The rebounding sea otter population of Glacier Bay wasn’t going to document itself.
Thane’s spirits buoyed as the boat headed out onto the open water. The ocean air was crisp this morning, and he drew in a deep, satisfying lungful as he took in the view. The broad expanse of Glacier Bay was beautifully uncrowded with vessels, even at the height of the tourist season. Since the whole area was a preserve, permits to motor into the bay were limited. Every day, a few gigantic cruise ships would sail in for a peek, but they didn’t explore far before heading back out again. Most of the bay’s craggy shoreline remained desolate. Few human eyes spied more than a small sample of the myriad sandy beaches, rocky cliffs, and abundant wildlife that were encircled by the ice-capped peaks towering in the distance. Yet whether humans watched or not, rare seabirds frolicked continually between the ocean buffet and their cliffside nests, while farther up in the narrow inlets, ice chunks floated and blue-white glaciers spilled from deep crevices in the mountains.
“So, where’d you end up camping last night?” Dave called out over the humming sound of the motor. The sun was in rare form today. Hardly a cloud was in sight, making the water a clear, deep blue. “Did you get in at Bartlett Cove? I heard they’ve been pretty full up lately.”
Behind his bushy beard, Thane’s lips curved into a smile. “Yeah, I heard that the campground was crowded. I could have pitched my tent anywhere, but Mei Lin wouldn’t have it. The guesthouse was rented out already, but she said I’d be an idiot to camp in the rain when there was a whole extra bedroom and bathroom on the first floor of Elsie’s house. I figured she was right.”
Dave’s mouth twisted with disapproval. “You behave yourself with Mei Lin, you hear me? She’s a good girl.”
Thane grinned. Dave’s paternal protectiveness toward Mei Lin pleased him; it proved that his mentor was also a fan. Sadly, the only things that had transpired between himself and Mei Lin last night had been great conversation and a giant tub of popcorn. Both had been interrupted far too soon by a call from Mei Lin’s parents, at which time Thane had felt obligated to quietly excuse himself downstairs. He had tossed and turned half the night looking forward to seeing his hostess again at breakfast, but then he’d overslept. When he woke, the house had been empty of all but a pot of coffee — freshly brewed, this time — and an apologetic note. Mei Lin regretted not being there to share breakfast with him, but she wanted to get to her patient bright and early. She hoped to be back soon with the landowner’s blessing, after which Thane would be free to stalk the little bear family to his heart’s content.
He had been sorely disappointed to miss her. But he would definitely enjoy her return.
“There’s number one,” Dave called out, pointing. A sea otter was floating on its back nearby, looking like a furry log with arms. “How about you make yourself useful and keep the log?”
Thane picked up the clipboard.
“I mean it about Mei Lin,” Dave added, catching Thane’s eyes. “We’re rather fond of that young lady around here.”
Thane shook his head with a sigh. “And here I was thinking you were fond of me. Are you going to warn her off, too?”
Dave clucked his tongue with a scowl. “Just count the damn otters.”
***
Mei Lin arrived at Stanley’s cabin to find him sitting out on his porch, bright-eyed and fully dressed. An exuberant Kibbe ran out to meet her and accepted his usual tummy rub.
“Good morning, Nurse Sullivan,” Stanley called out as she neared. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
She smiled. He looked so much better. His color was good, his hair was carefully combed, and there was no trace of feverish sweat on his forehead. “I’d love one,” she replied. “You’re feeling well?”
He leaned over the water barrel he was using as a table, lifted a pot, and poured coffee into a second, waiting mug. “I do,” he acknowledged, extending the mug.
Mei Lin took it and noticed that his hand was shaking. She sat down on the upturned washtub that had been Dave’s seat yesterday and took a sip. “Still hot!” she praised. “You’ve been busy this morning.”
He nodded, his blue eyes sparkling with pride. Mei Lin hadn’t been wrong — it was his resemblance to Thane that had sparked her earlier sense of familiarity. The two men didn’t really look alike apart from their eyes, but the contrast of light and dark in their irises was uniquely affecting. “Your magic pills are doing their thing, I suppose,” he replied, sounding mildly disappointed. “And before you ask, yes, I took last night’s and this morning’s. Have to see that bear, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” she murmured, wondering. She owed the glacier cub a debt of gratitude. Stanley had taken enough antibiotic now that he even if did decide to stop treatment, his own immune system might be able to stave off the remaining infection. Then again, it might not. His fate would depend on his overall state of health as well as the vagaries of the particular bug. Nothing was guaranteed. “How’s the wound looking today?”
“Coming along,” Stanley replied, lifting a pant leg and twisting his ankle so she could see. The swelling in his calf had gone down considerably, and the hot, angry red color around the cut had faded to a dissatisfied reddish-pink. The drainage had decreased to one tiny area and even that appeared to be drying up.
“Beautiful!” she said, delighted. “Comparatively speaking, of course.”
He grinned at her, and despite his wrinkled skin and coffee-stained teeth, the humor in his eyes gave him a boyish look. “I was hoping you’d be impressed.”
Mei Lin’s mind skipped back to Thane again. It didn’t take much; she’d been thinking about him constantly for the last fourteen hours. Unfortunately, they’d spent precious little of that time together, thanks to some incredibly bad timing on her mother’s part. “I am extremely impressed,” she conceded. “At this rate you’ll be up and stalking innocent wildlife in a matter of days.”
“That’s the plan,” Stanley acknowledged with good humor. “Today, the outhouse. Tomorrow, the world.”
Mei Lin smiled tentatively. He seemed a wholly different man from the one she had peeled off the cabin floor three days ago. But appearances could be deceiving. “You made it to the outhouse?”
“And back,” he crowed. “Had to rest once or twice, but no concussive falls occurred. I count that a victory.”
“As well you should,” Mei Lin agreed. “As long as you’re careful not to overdo. Infection can really sap the life out of you. Most people are weaker than they imagine.”
He feigned outrage. “How dare you call me ‘most people!’ I am exceptional in all ways.” His teasing tone turned serious, and his eyes locked on hers. “As are you, my dear.”
Mei Lin sensed a trap.
“Dave and I had a very interesting talk yesterday.”
She sighed. “Oh?”
“I understand that this nurse practitioner thing isn’t just a passing thought,” he said accusingly. “You’ve already had the training. You’ve even passed the boards.”
Mei Lin said nothing. The strong coffee had lost its appeal.
“He told me you turned down a plum job right here in Gustavus!” Stanley exclaimed. “Elsie Dunn had folks look into it, and there’s a hospice doctor in Juneau who’d love to extend his pr
actice out this way.”
“So I’ve heard,” she replied defensively, her joy in the morning diminishing. “And I hope he is successful. There is a huge need here.”
“So what’s the problem?” Stanley pressed. “Can’t deal with the weather?”
She frowned. “Please. I’m from Maine. Weather isn’t an issue. The darkness took some getting used to, but I managed.”
“So?” he barked back at her. “Don’t tell me you bagged the whole idea just because of what happened with a few bad actors at one nursing home. Because that would be stupid. And you’re not stupid.”
Mei Lin set her cup down by her feet and rose, feeling restless. She wasn’t used to being challenged so directly. At least not since she’d ditched Josh. Her family was more tactful. Her sister had always been a master at unspoken criticism; her mother talked in carefully couched, self-esteem-preserving therapist speak; and her father let his wife speak for him on any halfway sensitive matter. All three had objected to Mei Lin’s dropping her nurse practitioner plans, but none of them had called her decision “stupid.” Name-calling had been Josh’s area, and Mei Lin didn’t have to listen to him anymore. She didn’t have to listen to Stanley, either.
“It wasn’t just that,” she defended. “But even if it was, I’m entitled to make my own decisions.”
“And I’m entitled to call them as I see them,” Stanley went on, undeterred. “So what if you couldn’t tell what those nurses were capable of? Neither could anybody else who worked with them, including whoever hired them and supervised them. What makes you so special you get held to a higher standard?”
Mei Lin started to answer, but couldn’t. He wasn’t looking at the situation right. Somehow.
“Should everyone who signed off on their hiring resign?” he pressed. “Maybe everybody who ever worked with them and didn’t suspect anything should resign, too. Then you’d improve patient care.”
Mei Lin groaned. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“That would be ridiculous,” he agreed. “I’ve lived this business longer than you’ve been alive, Mei Lin. Medicine attracts some of the best people on earth and some of the worst, and I’ve worked with plenty of both. How many mistakes do you think you’re allowed? Three? Five? You’d still have to eliminate every surgeon I know!”
“I realize that everyone makes mistakes!” she argued, frustrated. The porch was too small to pace on, so she stepped down onto the ground. “Clinical errors, unintentional oversights, the simple slip of a hand on a rough day — those things can happen to anybody. But having practitioner-level responsibility requires a certain baseline of sound judgment, and I can assure you, I don’t have it! The business at Silverson wasn’t the turning point for me, it was the nail in the coffin.” She whirled to face him again. “The fact is, my judgment sucks. Period! Okay?”
Stanley replaced his coffee cup on the water tank and folded his hands calmly. “You think? Give me an example.”
“I can give you four examples!” she spouted. “Josh, Anthony, Jeremy, and Travis!”
Stanley looked skeptical. But he said nothing. He waited.
Mei Lin blew out a frustrated breath. He was too damned good at this. Now she was stuck. “I was so convinced that Josh was a great guy I dated him for six years and then decided to get engaged and move with him halfway across the country,” she confessed. “But he was really a self-absorbed control freak. Little by little, without my even noticing, he gradually became more dominating. And more demeaning. And like a fool, I put up with it. I put up with it all!”
“So you married him?”
“No! I dumped him and moved to Texas on my own.”
Stanley shrugged. “You broke it off. And you were, what, teenagers when it started? Spare me. Go on.”
Mei Lin’s face grew hot. “I thought Anthony was a great guy, too, and I was twenty-four when I met him. He was a fellow nurse who asked me out on my first day of work in Dallas and we had a whirlwind thing going for about six weeks. Until the next new hire started and he dropped me like a rock. That was his pattern, you see. Falling for Anthony’s BS was like a hazing ritual in that department — it was also prime entertainment for the staff. For anyone who bet I’d last a month, I paid off three to one.”
Stanley clucked his tongue. “Toxic work environment. It happens. Rebound thing, besides. So… you stuck around and fought for your man? Challenged the new girl with broken bottles in the parking lot?”
Mei Lin stared at him. “Of course not! I transferred to another department. The new group was much more professional.”
He smirked. “Uh-huh. Next?”
Her face got redder. Stanley’s know-it-all attitude was getting under her skin, and she hardened her tone. “Jeremy was worse. Only a complete fool would have been taken in by him. And I was. I believed his whole sob story about how his ex had broken his heart, ruined his credit, and taken off with his only means of transportation. I believed him when he said that he was making a better salary now and that he could easily afford the payments on a new truck… if only he could get someone to cosign the loan for him.”
Stanley winced. “Ouch. How much did that cost you?”
“See!” Mei Lin cried, feeling vindicated. “You only heard that much and you know what happened!”
“The car got repo’ed, leaving you on the hook for thousands?”
“Yes!” Her face felt like fire. She had never told anyone — not Elsie, and especially not her family — the extent of that particular debacle. The truth was too humiliating. The truth was that she was still making payments on the damn thing.
“Okay, yeah, that was stupid,” Stanley agreed mildly, leaning back in his chair. “With me it was a Shelby Cobra. Bright red beauty, shiny black stripe. What a gorgeous set of wheels! I had zero chance of paying for it on a resident’s salary. Ruined my credit for a decade. Guess I should have quit surgery then, huh?”
Mei Lin stared back at him. She felt like screaming, but settled for gritting her teeth in frustration. “You’re missing the point. I agree: no one is perfect. But when a person repeatedly shows poor judgment in pretty much all major life areas, that means something! What it means is that they shouldn’t hold life and death decisions in their hands!”
Stanley pursed his lips and considered. “You’re right, nothing is as dangerous as a nurse practitioner who’s naive about romance and personal finance. It’s a good thing I’m a surgeon, since I’m lousy with money and have women on four continents wishing me to hell. What about the last guy?”
“Travis was a registered sex offender!” Mei Lin blurted. She’d never told anybody that before either. “I met him at a bus stop and we went out four times before I had the sense to check him out online! He’d spent eighteen months in jail after a sting operation caught him trying to arrange an out-of-state meeting with an underage girl!”
“Now there’s a scumbag,” Stanley agreed. “What made you decide to check him out?”
“I don’t know! He seemed nice enough at first, but there was just—” She broke off when she realized Stanley was smirking again.
“Something that bothered you?” he finished for her. “How oddly perceptive. For a lousy judge of character, I mean.”
Mei Lin turned away. He was turning her argument into mincemeat, damn him.
He chuckled a little nervously. “I’m sorry. I know that none of this is funny to you. Come and sit down again, please? Indulge a supercilious old fool with nothing better to do than give unwelcome advice.”
Mei Lin felt totally off balance. She returned to her seat as requested and picked up her cup, but quickly set it down again. The rim was coated with dog drool.
“You’re young,” he said more gently. “You’re a glass-half-full kind of person and you’re idealistic about our profession, which is fine. But your expectations for yourself — and all the rest of us — are unrealistic. Some of the best trauma surgeons I know are arrogant, narcissistic jerks with completely screwed-up personal lives. But
if I’m bleeding out from a car wreck, you’d better believe I’m calling whoever’s best in the OR and to hell with the rest of it. And if I’m stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with an infected leg and a bad attitude, the last nurse who’s going to inspire me is some holier-than-thou ex-military woman who treats me like a child. What I need is a nurse who is alive, someone creative and a little unconventional. Someone soft enough to care, but with enough sass to handle wild bears and stubborn old goats alike.” He softened his voice. “People like that don’t wander by every day, Mei Lin. ”
She looked into his piercing light eyes and could see that he meant every word he was saying. She could also see that saying it was important to him. She dipped her chin, embarrassed that her eyes were tearing. She choked out a laugh. “I’m terrified of bears.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?” he replied. “And thanks to you, so am I.”
For a long time, neither of them said anything. He sipped at his coffee while Mei Lin dried her eyes with her sleeve. She supposed, despite herself, that the man did have a point. But she didn’t want to think about herself and her professional life right now. She had come up here for other business — business that was infinitely more pleasant to think about.
She cleared her throat and changed the subject. “I have to ask you something. Dave wants to know if it’s okay if he brings someone else here with him this afternoon. Another wildlife specialist.”
Stanley frowned. “I thought he agreed we wouldn’t tell anybody else. At least while the cub’s still on my land.”
“He didn’t tell anyone local,” Mei Lin explained. “And it happened before he’d promised you that. It was right after I told him; he was so excited he contacted a colleague in Canada, someone he knew was equally obsessed with glacier bears. He wouldn’t have told Thane either, I don’t think, if he suspected he’d jump on the first plane up here!” Hearing her own words suddenly made her doubt them. Had Dave really been all that surprised? She’d only known Thane a few days herself, but after witnessing the manic gleam the words “glacier bear” had put in his eyes, she would expect no less of a reaction. Perhaps Dave had actually been hoping his friend would join him?