by Dianne Drake
“Fulfillment may be the simple things like snowball fights, especially if you’re getting it with the people you care about. Or something on a much grander scale, like seeing your dreams for your daughter coming true. But if you limit your fulfillment to only isolated incidents, to things that may happen on rare occasions, you’re missing out on all the other amazing things around every minute of every day And I don’t want Sarah missing out on any of that. I want her to see everything, to experience everything. And not with a narrow view the way I did for most of my life. The way you do now. I want so much more for her than that, Mark.” With a weary sigh, she kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up.
“You think my view is narrow?”
She twisted to look at him. “Isn’t it? You’re here to teach one thing, then you’re leaving, when there could be so many good things here for you, things that, if you’d let them, would be your reason to stay. But leaving is all you see in front of you, which, in my opinion, makes your focus about as narrow a one as I’ve ever seen.”
“Earlier, I taught a class on ocular health and how it relates to the diabetic condition. Then I taught a class what the hemoglobin A1C means in terms of their overall health. I taught that class, by the way, in the snow, using the various components of a snowman as my example. You know, the more out of balance the various parts are, the more unstable the snowman. So how do you figure that’s narrow?”
“It’s narrow because Neil and Eric are appealing to your greater sense of obligation to be here and do all this. It’s not you being here on your own, doing it on your own. And there’s a difference.”
“Not really. They’re trying to put all my little pieces back together again because they’re good friends. You know, trying to fix a broken friend, while I’m trying to help out some friends who need help. It’s not a big deal.”
“Because you want to be fixed?”
“Because I’m not as narrow as you think.” His voice gentled. “Neil Ranard and Eric Ramsey are the two best friends I’ve ever had, and I wouldn’t have turned them down, no matter what the circumstances. In my own life, I may be pretty far gone. But you don’t turn your back on friends.”
“You’re not as gone as you let on.”
“What I’m not is in anything for the long haul. If you want to call that a narrow view, feel free. I call it a goal, not unlike the goals you have. Except mine are simple. Get it done, get out. No lists.”
“And my goals are moving me toward something, while yours are moving you away.”
“You’re right. I’ll admit it. Mine are moving me away from…everything I want to move away from. Your goals are admirable, mine are survival. Self-indulgent, some people would call it.” He sat Fred down onto the sofa next to him and reached over, picked up Angela’s feet, pulling her into a foot-rub position.
“You may be a lot of things, Mark Anderson, but you’re not self-indulgent.” She settled back into the cushions to enjoy the feel of his hands on her feet. Now, if anything could ever be called self-indulgent, this was it. She liked being pampered. Wasn’t used to it, but she definitely could get used to it. Especially from Mark. “You really don’t have to do this,” she said, hoping against hope he wouldn’t quit.
“If I had the narrow view you seem to think I have, I’d probably agree. But my view is wide enough to see how you’re running about twenty-five miles a day, between the camp and your daughter. And I have it on good authority that you’re still managing hospital dietary stuff from here. So, in my not-so-narrow view, I think that deserves a foot rub.”
His first squeeze to the arch of her left foot was pure heaven, and all she could manage in reply was a contented sigh.
“Not bad for a man with a narrow view?”
“Maybe I’m changing my mind, because I’ve never had a foot rub before, and this is so—”
“Did he ever treat you nicely?” Mark interrupted. “Indulge you a little bit? I mean, I was the first with flowers, but I can’t believe I’m the first with a foot rub.”
The question jolted her out of her languid mood. “What?”
“Treat you nicely. Did your ex-husband ever treat you nicely?”
She thought about it for a minute. Flashed back to those years, when she’d been the one doing the pampering, doing the indulging. The one giving all the foot rubs, all the back rubs… “Probably not. But at the time I don’t suppose I realized that.”
“But he never hurt you.”
She shook her head. “Not physically. Brad’s not a violent type. Not even a mean type. I don’t think he ever sets out to intentionally hurt anybody. But the thing is, he never really considers anyone’s feelings other than his own. So I guess you could call him selfish.”
“And you never saw that in him?”
“Oh, I probably did. But I was deluding myself into thinking I could change him, that once I’d shown him how nice life could be after we’d settled down, he’d be happy to change. But the thing I never took into account was that we didn’t want the same lives.”
“You’re not mad as hell at him over Sarah? For not being involved with her, not even wanting to see her?”
“Maybe I should be, but I’m not. It’s his loss, not having her in his life. If anything, I should probably be sad for him because he’s missing so many wonderful things. In all honesty, though, Brad wouldn’t be a good father. A child requires so much attention and Brad wouldn’t know how to handle himself if someone around him needed more attention than he did. Too bad, too, because Sarah’s the best thing he’ll never get to know.”
“You’re an amazing woman, Angela Blanchard. Because I’m still mad as hell at my ex-wife, and there’s nothing in me that wants to change the way I feel.”
Angela sat up a little bit, to look at him. Not enough, though, to pull her feet out of his amazing touch. “Hanging onto the anger will tie you in knots. As long as you’re dealing with it you can’t move on.”
“But what if I want to stay angry? What if she deserves that anger every day I can give it to her?”
“She might deserve it, Mark, but do you? Because the anger will cost you, not her. She’s not here, she’s not seeing it or feeling it. Which means the anger is for you. Not her.”
He squeezed her arch too hard and she flinched.
“Is it because your father-in-law died? Is that why you’re so angry at yourself? Because, as a doctor, you know that sometimes the hard choices don’t work out the way you want them to. I’ve seen that with Eric. Two months ago he lost a patient—a little girl. She had leukemia, and he’d done everything in his power to make her better. Dinah said he didn’t sleep, didn’t eat… And after she died he sat in a dark room for two days, refusing to let anybody in. He hated losing that child, but he dealt with it because that’s what you deal with when you’re the doctor. And I know you’ve gone through losing other patients…”
“Not the same.”
“No, it’s not the same. And I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like when that patient is someone you love. But you yourself said he wanted you to take care of your wife first. How could you not do that?”
“The thing is, I think he probably knew he was dying, but he also knew that…that my wife was pregnant.”
“What?”
“Not far along. Not far enough for her to tell me. But her father knew. And naturally he wanted her cared for first.”
“I do understand that. If it were between Sarah and me…” She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the sad picture there. “It would always…will always…be Sarah.” Once again, the pressure he applied to her foot turned hard, almost to the point it hurt. So she wiggled out of his grasp and sat up, cross-legged, looking at him. “You can’t fault the man for that, or even be angry with yourself for how it turned out. You weren’t the one making the choice.”
“No, I wasn’t. But I’m mad as hell anyway for the way it turned out.”
“The baby. Did your wife…?”
He shook
his head. “At the hospital, the doctor told me how lucky she was. She had some substantial cuts on her face, some that would require plastic surgery. After she had the baby. That’s how I found out.” He frowned the frown she knew so well. “After that, I had a month to live with that pregnancy, trying to console my wife over the death of her father, trying to keep her calm for the baby’s sake. Trying to remember that Tom had given his life to protect that baby. And in that month I became quite the doting husband. Started making plans, thinking about what it was going to be like being a father. Of course, I was blocking out the fact that my wife was in a different place altogether. Fixing on her scars. Obsessed with not looking pretty. And hating me, at the same time, because her dad was dead. The accident was my fault, not saving his life was my fault. Her scars…”
“Your fault.”
He nodded. “But that was fine, because if she needed someone to blame, which she did, I had broad shoulders. And all along I was sure it would get better once the baby was born. Honestly, I didn’t give the marriage a chance, but at that point it was all about…” He swallowed hard. Didn’t finish the sentence. “Then one day Norah went on a trip. Didn’t tell me, didn’t let me know where she was. I was worried to death. Hired an investigator to look for her. No luck. But two months later she came home without facial scars and also without our baby. She’d had an abortion because the plastic surgeon wouldn’t do elective surgery on her while she was pregnant.”
“I can’t… I don’t know what to say.”
“She did. She told me the only reason she’d wanted the baby, to make her father happy. He’d wanted a grandchild. With Daddy gone, there was no reason to continue the pregnancy. So she didn’t.”
“Without telling you? Didn’t you even have a clue?”
“You’d think I should have, wouldn’t you? But no. Once again, I’d missed the obvious. So what the hell kind of a track record is that for a trauma surgeon?” He shut his eyes. “And you can’t get around the fact that I should have seen it coming.”
“But even if you’d known, could you have stopped her?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question a million times. Maybe I could have said something…convinced her to wait a few more months. Hell, I’d have gotten on my knees and begged if it would have done any good. But…”
“But she did what she wanted to do. And it wasn’t your fault, Mark. She made a horrible, regrettable decision that was not your fault.”
Mark dropped his head back to the sofa. Opened his eyes, stared up at the ceiling. “And you wonder why I’m leaving medicine? Well, that’s it. The most important thing in my life that I should have seen coming, and I missed it. Totally missed it.”
“Because that’s what Norah intended. She hid it from you. And, as you recall, I already did trust my daughter to you. Remember? After you pulled us out of the Christmas train, when the avalanche covered us…you were so good with Sarah. And with her hysterical mother. I trusted her with you then, and I would right now.”
“Then you’d be wrong to do it.”
“I burnt a perfectly good goulash last month. Maybe the best goulash I’ve ever made.”
He twisted his head to look at her. “What?”
“Goulash. You know, stew beef, tomatoes, onion, garlic, paprika…Hungarian goulash. It was cooking away ever so nicely, then all of a sudden it was burnt to a crisp. Smoking in the pot.”
“OK, so you burnt your goulash. And that means…?”
“In and of itself, nothing. Goulash is easy to burn. But the thing is, I know that’s the case when I cook it. Most of the time my goulash makes it to the table, gets served up on some rather tasty homemade poppy-seed noodles, instead of being dumped down the drain. Yet that wasn’t the first pot of goulash I’ve lost.”
“Are you comparing your situation to mine? You lost goulash, I lost…”
“Not at all. What I’m talking about are the expectations we set ourselves. I fully trust that my next goulash will be perfect. Why do I believe that? Because I know I can do it. I’ve had setbacks, but I’ve had successes, and every time I set out to make a goulash, I intend it to be a success, know that I can do it. Or else why bother? But you’ve lost what you intend for yourself, what you know you can do. All you can see are the setbacks now, and you’ve lost sight of the successes. You had horrible setbacks. Two of them, actually. Something I’m not comparing to burnt goulash, by the way. And you’re not letting yourself get past all that because it’s easier to stay where you are, being angry at yourself for what you didn’t see or do or couldn’t anticipate, rather than moving forward with the belief or trust that comes of knowing what you can do. I know I can make a good goulash, but what do you know, Mark?”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” He stiffened in defense. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Angela?”
“See, right away you’re challenging me, when you should have said you know you’re a good doctor. Deep down, I believe you do know that, but somehow that got buried so deeply you can’t find it right now, so you’re running away from the things that remind you of what you think you’ve lost. And if you let yourself back into that place in your life where you truly take that knowledge to heart, to where you allow yourself to fully trust that you’re still that good doctor, in spite of the setbacks, you run the risk of hurting yourself again, or admitting that you have human frailty like the rest of us do. You’ve put yourself so high up on a pedestal, Mark, that even you can’t see yourself, and your expectation is that’s where you should be, no matter what. Facing the fact that the pedestal gave way has become your biggest obstacle. It’s what you’re running away from…running away from the fact that you’re just like the rest of us.
“But you know what? You’re not the gruff doctor who goes around scowling all the time. That’s a facade. The one meant to keep people way, the one meant to keep people from seeing that you’re scared to death of being up there so high. You’re the doctor who takes everything to heart too much, and it hurts you, and you don’t want people to know that, don’t want them to see that you’re struggling to get through the best way you can. And I don’t know why that is. Don’t know why you’ve got all these unrealistic expectations of yourself.”
He shoved up off the sofa, his face red with anger. “You know what? I have a new goal for your list, Counselor. You think you’ve got an answer for everything, so why not turn that into your next conquest? I hide behind unrealistic expectations for myself, and you hide behind too many expectations. I don’t want to accomplish enough and you want to accomplish too much. So maybe I am running. I’ll admit that. But aren’t you running as hard and fast as I am? Just in a different way?”
His raised voice startled Sarah, who woke up with a cry. Angela was immediately off the couch, running to get to her daughter. No time to make it right with Mark now. No time for anything. Not now, and not when she returned to the main room of the suite moments later, with Sarah bundled in her arms, sniffling. Mark was gone by then. Gone, along with Fred. Out the door without so much as a slam. But she felt the slam. In her heart. “So, Sarah,” she said, taking her daughter to the tiny kitchen area for a snack. “This is where I tell you that we’re fine, just the two of us. That we don’t need anybody else in our lives. Especially not—”
“Daaa…” Sarah said, looking out over the empty room.
“You’re right. Especially not Daaa.” The thing was, though, she did want him in her life. “And he does give the best foot rubs.” More than the foot rubs, though, she simply liked having him there. Liked it more and more each day. But she’d already wasted so many years chasing one man all over the world, and every road she’d taken, except the one that had gotten her to Sarah, had turned into a dead end. All Mark was showing her, so far, was a dead end. So, could she do that again? Could she chase after another man who was determined not to settle down?
One look at Sarah was all she needed. “Foot rubs or not, we don’t need him. Even if we do want him. And
we do want him, don’t we, Sarah?”
The answer to that question didn’t lie in her head. It rested in her heart, a heart that was on the edge of shattering. Because, no matter what she wanted, her choices were clear. And Mark couldn’t be one of them.
“You’re looking…tired.” Dinah took Sarah from Angela, but rather than heading straight for the door she stayed standing in the doorway for a moment, watching her sister. “Something you care to talk about?”
Angela shook her head. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m just tired.”
“The kids keeping you awake?”
“The kids are fine. I think we exhausted them yesterday, with all the outside activities. And I think restructuring their diets is having some effect. Mellowing them out a bit.”
“Scotty Baxter?”
“He’s OK, so far. Trying harder to keep up with the other kids, which is good. We’re keeping a closer eye on him, and Mark is working hard, trying to make him understand that just one candy bar can cause a whole series of unfortunate events. So far, it’s working. Mark’s got a good way with the children. They love him.”
“So do you, don’t you?”
Angela looked over at her sister. “Would it matter if I did?”
“Have you two talked?”
“I think we’re past that now.” She shook her head. “It ended before it even got started.”
“Then he’s not worth trying again?”
“I’ve got so much going on right now…”
“Which keeps you at your own distance. The more you do, the less you have to get involved on that level where you’d have to take a big risk? In other words, hiding behind your goals and ambitions? Line them up all around you so nothing can get in and hurt you again?”
Practically the same thing Mark had said to her. “That’s not true! I’m totally involved here.”
“But are you involved the way you want to be for the rest of your life? Because if you keep pushing people like Mark away from you, this is the rest of your life.” Dinah hitched Sarah up on her hip and stepped into the hall. “Look, I don’t want to keep lecturing you. You’re doing good things with your program. You’re a great mother. Eric is singing your praises as a dietician at the hospital. It’s a good life, Angela. You’ve put Brad behind you, even if you don’t know that yet. And I think when you finally come to terms with it, that’s when you’ll figure out the rest of your life. Anyway, the girls are planning a tea party for Sarah. They’ve invited friends, baked cookies, so stop by later if you have time. If not, I’ll bring her back before bedtime.”