What kind of man was he?
A man who didn’t deserve to be loved by Polly or anyone else on earth.
Her lids fluttered and cracked open. He sat straighter. “You need anything?”
She studied him for several seconds with reflective eyes, as if she could read his thoughts, then shook her head soberly and went back to napping. He reached for her hand out of obligation, his fingers nearly as numb as his heart had become over the last few hours, and he stayed by her side for the remainder of the afternoon. In limbo. Lost, without a tether. Prayers unanswered. His heart cracked apart. He had nothing left to offer.
“They’re ready for her in the procedure room,” the nurse said at the cubicle entrance.
John jumped to his feet, prepared to go along with Polly.
As if she’d sensed his rote response, she looked at him. “I’ll be fine. You don’t have to come along.”
“Are you sure?” He didn’t even put up a fight.
“Positive.” She squeezed his dull grip and he kissed her forehead, though his lips were numb, too.
“See you later, then,” he said, watching the gurney roll down the corridor, not sure he recognized his own flat and distant voice.
Polly put her stained work clothes in the plastic bag provided by the hospital. She’d changed into the clothes John had brought from home. “I’m ready,” she said that evening.
“Okay.” He stood, his eyes drifting everywhere but to hers. “I’ll bring the car round and meet you at the ER entrance.”
The transportation clerk waited nearby with a wheelchair. Protocol was protocol, and Polly felt too weak and achy to fight it.
When she met him at the curbside of the hospital exit, John hopped out of the car ready to assist her from the wheelchair, seeming robotic and acting out of duty. Yet he was here, she reminded herself, attempting to hold onto the positive. At least he hadn’t run away from their depressing mess.
His hand felt chilly to the touch when he helped her stand. Again, his eyes avoided hers and she curled her lower lip and chewed on it just to have something else to concentrate on.
Unable to think of a single thing to say, Polly remained quiet on the drive on Central Park South toward Sutton Place, choosing instead to watch the tree-lined streets they passed. Once they were back in the apartment, he helped her to the guest room, where he’d already pulled back the covers in readiness. He must have planned making the change from lover to guest when he’d come back earlier to get her change of clothes and the car.
“I thought you’d be more comfortable in here,” he said when she’d sent him a questioning glance. The ball of emotion swelling in her chest sank to her stomach when she noticed how detached he seemed. Cold even.
Too weak and bumped up to protest, she got under the covers and let him tuck her in.
Every considerate thing he did felt distant and done out of obligation as the evening wore on. He brought her a tray with soup and crackers, helped her to the bathroom when she wanted to get ready to turn in for the night, and assisted her back to bed as if she were a fragile ninety-year-old woman. Making her feel nothing like the woman he’d made love to.
Polly had hoped to curl into his protective embrace tonight. To sleep next to him and feel his heat radiate over her, healing her. Together they could get through this by clinging close and comforting one another. She’d hoped to regain the strength that had hemorrhaged out during the course of this incredibly long day by being by his side. But John had sent her back to the guest room without even asking her, as if without the pregnancy he no longer had reason to make her a part of his life.
What they’d made together was no more.
She was plumb out of tears as she lay in the darkness, staring at the white ceiling.
Today she’d been kicked down the stairs, she’d lost her baby, and somehow during the horrific series of events she may as well have been kicked in the gut again, because now she’d lost John, too.
Three days later Polly insisted on going back to work. She couldn’t bear the thought of being a prisoner in John’s apartment another day, and longed for the distraction of a busy orthopedic ward. They’d hardly spoken since the miscarriage and she felt more like an obligation than a lover and a grieving partner.
At times he’d pulled so deeply inside himself that she’d felt like an invasive war lord, demanding attention whenever she’d tried to engage him in the simplest things.
“Want to help make a salad?” she’d said the previous night, insisting making her own dinner.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’m not hungry.”
She ate alone while he sequestered himself in his study. They hadn’t taken one meal together since the miscarriage.
At work, word traveled fast. During the Monday morning report Polly accepted each and every hug from her friends and fellow staff. It felt good to be back. At least in Darren’s and Brooke’s eyes she saw genuine sadness, something missing from John’s. When she looked into his eyes, the unfathomable detachment made it seem like he wasn’t there. As if he’d checked out for good.
Piling the pain of losing John on top of the heartache of her miscarriage, she could barely stand up straight. The house had become heavy with silence, washed in colorless depression. At night she’d hole up in her room working on a bitter-sweet but necessary project.
Warm hands rested on her shoulders. For an instant Polly imagined John had walked up behind her. He’d barely touched her since she’d lost the baby. Maybe there was still hope? Maybe all could be well again? She turned to find Raphael, his kind eyes probing hers, and she tried not to look disappointed. “You’ve got a phone call,” he said.
“Oh, thanks.” Shaken out of her thoughts, she forced a shift in her attitude. She was at work and needed to give it her full concentration. She punched the blinking light and picked up the receiver. “This is Polly.”
“Ms. Seymour, it’s Mrs. Goldman.” Her landlady. “I have someone interested in taking your room. I know you paid me for an extra month, but …”
“No. Please, Mrs. Goldman, I’d like to keep that room a little while longer. I’m paid up through August and September. If you’d like, I’ll pay for October now, too.”
Agreeing on a compromise, Polly hung up the phone feeling less helpless in her current living situation by having another option.
“Who in the blazes messed with the bed traction in Room Twelve?” John sounded like an ornery bear as he headed toward Brooke at the nurses’ station. His rugged, masculine appeal had vanished along with his civil mood.
“P.T. was in there earlier,” Brooke said, straightening her shoulders and making her taller-than-average frame seem even taller.
“Get them up here, now!” he growled, and stormed off to the next room.
Brooke glanced at Polly, alarm in her eyes. How quickly they’d forgotten how difficult John could be. No longer an avowed people-pleaser, Polly shrugged, realizing she’d also lost her magic touch where John was concerned, and went seeking solace in her assigned patient room. A teeny-bopper with bright eyes and a lively attitude was just the distraction she needed. Sweet. And thank heavens for small favors.
“Who forgot to put Brandon Seamus in the CPM machine today?” John’s baritone carried all the way across the ward.
Darren popped his head up as Brandon was his patient. “Last week we had an in-service from P.T. that said the continuous passive motion device didn’t make a difference by six weeks post-surgery.”
“Did I DC the order?”
“No, sir.”
“Then get off your duff and put his knee in the machine. Now!”
Polly came out of her patient room, shaken and embarrassed for John. “There’s no reason to speak to Darren like that. He was following the recommendation of Physical Therapy.”
“Did I ask your opinion?”
“I don’t care if you asked it or not. You don’t have the right to talk to your staff like that.”
He looked at her
as if he hated her and everyone else in the world, harrumphed and walked away. “I’ll have a little talk with P.T. about going over my head and disregarding my orders,” he said when he passed Brooke.
Knowing deep in her heart the pros and cons of using a CPM machine after knee procedures wasn’t the issue, Polly felt queasy for John. She wished she could find a way to reach him before he quarantined himself completely from the world of the living.
That evening John cooked again. Maybe it was his way of apologizing? After having a well-prepared but tasteless meal in silence, Polly finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. “I think I’ll go for a walk to the park.” There were two parks nearby and the one she had in mind overlooked the East River.
“I’ll go with you.”
She’d known he’d say that. Not because he wanted to be with her but because he wanted to protect her. From what? She’d walk to a beautiful park in a well-to-do neighborhood. It was still only early August, and it wasn’t even dark out yet. But she’d depended on his twisted sense of obligation to accompany her, to open up the opportunity to talk. Maybe, while they walked and enjoyed the evening, she could crack that ever-hardening shell he was doing such a fine job of constructing.
The night air was still thick and humid. Polly chose a brisk pace and John had no problem keeping up. If anything, she had to widen her stride to match his.
“So, what’s been going on?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” He gave her a look as if she’d just landed from planet crazy.
“You’ve been very bristly.”
“I’ve bent over backwards to give you space, to help you heal.”
Silence doesn’t heal anything. She didn’t want to go there right now. She wanted to intervene on her co-workers’ behalf, before John drove them to resign one by one by one. The orthopedic kids didn’t need to deal with constant staff turnover along with all their other ailments.
“I’m talking about work, about how you’re chewing everyone’s heads off, like before I came …” Her voice drifted off. She didn’t want to suggest she’d had anything to do with his turnaround in attitude at work … before everything had gone to hell in a handbasket.
“Nurses are tough. They can take me. Always have.”
End of subject.
They entered the park lined with red bricks and bushes. She found an empty bench facing the river and sat. Inhaling, she realized the air was nothing like the sea. This humongous East River by the huge city smelled like life itself—of car exhausts, hot cement, hordes of people—yet the pewter-colored water overcame it all and offered a hint of refreshment. Polly needed to be refreshed. Living on this side of town with John, however briefly, this view had become one of her favorites in the city.
A jogger passed by. A hundred yards behind a woman with a stroller walked her baby. Polly had to look away, choosing to focus on the long steel sculpture of the Queensboro Bridge rather than lost possibilities.
“People can take all kinds of things, but they shouldn’t have to. Your berating everyone wears skin thin.” She reached for his hand, a gesture she’d given up on since he’d brought her home from the hospital. “You’re hurting, John, and you’re taking it out on the people around you.”
It wasn’t obvious, but she felt his hand recoil the tiniest bit. “Look, you handle things your way, and I’ll handle them mine.” She let go of his hand just as the woman with the stroller came by.
They sat for several more minutes staring at the river, thousands of necessary words going unspoken. How could she get through to John in his emotionally shutdown state, where the only feeling allowed to appear was anger?
“You ready to go back?” he said. “I’ve got an early surgery tomorrow.”
With that, they walked back to his apartment in silence, Polly feeling as though she had cement bricks chained to her ankles.
By the end of the second day back at work and after several more outbursts from John towards the staff, Polly dreaded going home with him again. How much could she take of his foul mood while she grieved? And yet at home he’d become docile, so docile, in fact, she’d begun to suspect he was no longer alive.
“I think I’ll walk home,” she said, at his office door that Tuesday evening.
He stood and came around his desk. For the first time in days she saw an expression besides anger on his face, but she couldn’t make out exactly what it meant. “But you’re too weak to walk all the way home.” With brows lowered, looking gruff, his words didn’t match.
“I managed working all day yesterday and today without problems. I’ll be fine.”
“Only two days back at work, five since the miscarriage. All the more reason to let me drive you.”
Obligation. Pure obligation. Though it was the first time he’d mentioned her miscarriage since the day it’d happened, and that struck Polly as progress. But not enough to want to spend another painful night in his presence, longing to crack his hardened shell, to get back to that wonderful man she’d known so briefly. John wouldn’t allow it.
“So we’ll have more time to sit in that dead apartment of yours and stare at each other?”
His brows shot up. Surprise tinted his brown stare. “I thought you’d appreciate some peace and quiet.”
“More like rest in peace, you mean? Just bury me and get it over with, why don’t you?”
He folded his arms. “I’ve done everything I possibly can to make you comfortable.”
“Including shutting me out.”
“I didn’t think we needed to talk about our loss just yet.”
“You banished me from your room, John.”
With the topic becoming personal, he strode around her and closed his office door. “You can’t stand the sight of me.”
“What in heaven’s name gave you that impression?”
“It’s my fault you lost the baby. Why would you want to be anywhere near me, let alone sleep in the same bed?”
She shook her head. “You don’t know me at all, do you?” With that, she swung open the door. Didn’t the man know the meaning of comfort, both giving and getting, by sharing sadness? “I’ll be home later, don’t wait up,” she said, and took off down the hall determined to find something to do to keep her busy until it was time to go to bed. Maybe she’d stop at the bookstore the next block over and read until she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Oh, wait, there was that letter she needed to write, she shouldn’t put it off another day. She could write the letter at the bookstore.
Anything not to have to face the man who’d checked out on her when she’d needed him most.
CHAPTER TEN
TWO MORE DAYS of living with John had drained the flow of energy from Polly’s core. She could barely lift her head off the pillow. Would this be the story of her life? Drifting from person to person, never really cared for, ever to be seen as an obligation and nothing more?
She sat bolt upright. No. She wouldn’t settle for that. She deserved more. She was young, she could get pregnant again if she ever found the right man. Melancholy thoughts about what she’d almost had with John, how he could be “the right man”, how her dreams of having her own family had been just within reach but had been snatched away at the last moment invaded her thinking. A cruel joke.
Getting out of bed, she grabbed her robe and headed for the shower. Passing the kitchen, she smelled fresh coffee brewing, piquing her senses. Now that she could drink coffee again, she’d pour herself a cup and enjoy it. She was damned if she intended to live the rest of her life like a ghost, the way John had chosen to do. In his case, an angry, bitter ghost.
She got into the shower and scrubbed herself to near shining, ready to take on the world again. But this time she wasn’t going to fall back into her old ways. Nope. From now on the only person she intended to please was herself. This would be the summer and fall of Polly, and she wouldn’t let an out-of-touch-with-his-own-feelings sad-sack like John drag her down one more inch.
As she toweled off
and combed out her hair, she made plans. She’d ask Darren to help her move out over the weekend and she’d go back to Mrs. Goldman’s and put this sad episode of her life behind her. Little Caledonia would forever have a special place in her heart, and she’d honor her miscarried baby by living each day, not merely existing as John had chosen to do. She couldn’t be around negative people any more. She just couldn’t.
The John she had glimpsed and fallen in love with was long gone. How could she possibly tie herself to a man who wasn’t even able to tell her how sad he was after the miscarriage? He’d cried half a dozen tears at the ER, but since then an iron wall had been erected, and she could waste a lifetime trying to scale it but never succeeding.
No. There was nothing here for her at the 56th Street apartment. Striding down the hall, she came to an abrupt stop when she saw John in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal, and was perplexed by the pop of feelings in her chest. When he saw her there was a sheepish quality to his glance. Surely he knew—how could he not?—he’d become unbearable at work and to live with. Yet what was up with that tiny circle of softening in her chest? She had to ignore it, harden up like he had, or she’d never get away.
“Good morning, John,” she said, as if she’d walked into a business meeting.
“Polly.” He kept spooning the cereal to his mouth yet watched her move around the kitchen.
She poured herself a cup of coffee, spilled in some creamer, took a sip and smiled. “Hmm, I’ve really missed this stuff.”
His lips quirked but not enough to call it a smile.
“I’ve decided to walk to work today.”
He’d finished his cereal and dropped the bowl into the sink. “It’s supposed to get really hot, you may want a ride home.”
“No, thanks.” She rummaged through the cupboard to find a bowl and poured herself some cereal, too. They liked the same brand, just as they liked so many other similar things.
Didn’t matter. That was the past. This was her future. The new Polly only lived for Polly now, regardless of a guy’s taste in cereal.
“I’ve got surgery in an hour, so if you’re sure you don’t want a ride …”
NYC Angels: Making the Surgeon Smile Page 14