by Dawn Steele
“I have an appointment with Dr. Kirk Fitzpatrick,” she tells the receptionist, a black lady with dyed blond hair.
“He’s busy right now. Emergency case came up. He had to schedule an urgent operation in the minor surgery theater.”
“Oh.”
“It’s OK,” the lady says crisply. “You can wait over there with the patients.”
There are plenty of patients seated in the waiting area outside the clinics. Shannon notes the other doctors working there – four names altogether. Dr. Kirk Fitzpatrick is listed outside one of the rooms. Although he is the departmental chief, his embossed sign does not appear to be bigger than the others.
A girl in her early teens with gnarled fingers and bent legs is seated at a corner, and Shannon takes the empty seat beside hers.
“You all alone?” she asks the girl.
“My Mom had to go to school. She’s a teacher there. She will come and fetch me during her lunch hour.”
Shannon observes the girl’s finger joints. They are extremely deformed and her knuckle joints are very swollen.
“That hurt?”
The girl grimaces. “Yes.”
“I’m Shannon.”
“Martha.” The girl waves her index finger. “Sorry if I can’t shake your hand.”
“How long have you had it? It’s JRA, right?”
JRA is juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
“Since I was eight. I started early. Guess I’m one of the unlucky ones. It’s pretty bad today. I’m on so many painkillers I’m practically a junkie.”
“Let me have a look at that. I’m a physiotherapist. I came here to apply for a job.”
Martha slowly stretches out her left arm, her face wincing. Her fingers remain curled and painfully immobile.
“They’ve tried everything,” she says. “Anti-rheumatics. Penicillamine. Steroids. But the joint destruction goes on. I can’t write anymore. The principal is trying to let me sit for my SATs with a tester.”
“SATs? I didn’t think you were that old.”
“I’m eighteen.” When Shannon reacts with surprise, Martha nods. “Steroids since I was nine. It retards my growth. I don’t even have my periods like normal kids.”
With newfound sympathy, Shannon takes the girl’s left hand.
“Maybe this will make it better,” she says.
“I doubt it. I’ve been coming here for years, and I’ve even gone to hospitals upstate, but nothing ever makes it better.”
Shannon strokes the girl’s fingers and knuckles gently, noting how knobby they are. Then she channels what has always been within her – the healing power which has been the crux and bane of her entire life. It’s subtle, and she sends a spool of it into the girl’s curled hand.
Martha almost withdraws her hand in shock.
“It tingles,” she says in wonder. “What did you do?”
“It’s just my special massage. I have more static electricity in my body than most people. Don’t worry, you’ll feel better after a while.”
Static electricity is one way of calling it, she supposes, though most people would have viewed her natural gifts as anything but science.
Martha stills her hand, her eyes growing rounder and wider as Shannon continues to massage her fingers and send healing impulses into them.
“I can’t believe, but the pain is gone,” she says.
More than that will be gone by tomorrow, Shannon thinks. The joints and bones will need some time to remodel and knit, but she has started the process and it is irreversible. She dare not send too much power into Martha for fear of being flagged. But she sends just enough so that Martha’s recovery can be attributed to pharmaceutical science.
“Let me have your other hand,” she instructs.
She is so focused on what she is doing that she fails to register the presence beside them.
A throat clears and a deep voice says: “Peggy out there tells me you’re looking for me?”
Shannon looks up.
Standing next to them is a gorgeous young man of about twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His long dark hair has been swept back and tied in a ponytail, and he wears the green scrubs of a surgeon. His eyes are a startling sea-green, and his features are so exquisite as to be almost pretty. But he carries himself in a very masculine way, with his hands tucked into his pants pockets and with his feet apart.
His beauty is so stunning that it immediately hits her like a blow.
“You’re Dr. Fitzpatrick?” she says.
“Last time I checked.” His sharp eyes observe Martha’s hands. “Making friends? My sister tells me you’re new in this town.”
Shannon is a little flustered in the presence of the man’s overpowering presence. She stands up and holds out her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Kirk Fitzpatrick shakes it. His touch sends a delicious thrill coursing up her arm.
What’s happening to her? Yesterday, she just had hot sex with a very hot man who made her feel like no one ever did before. And today, she meets another hot man who does exactly the same to her, only in a different way. And this new man might just be her boss!
Are her hormones in ascendency or something?
“How are you, Martha?” Kirk says in a kind voice. “Been waiting long?”
“Um, great . . . I think, Dr. Fitzpatrick.” Martha is still looking at her hands, which appear exactly the same. Only she seems to have more mobility in the joints now. She flexes her fingers in increasing wonder. Shannon reckons that to be completely uninterested in Kirk, either Martha has to be a lesbian or her joints have just been transmogrified in a manner unbeknownst to her previously.
She has to hide a smile.
“I’ll see you later in my clinic, OK? Just let me interview this young lady first.” Kirk gestures to Shannon. “Shall we?”
He turns to go into his clinic, and Shannon gathers up her tote bag to follow, with a parting, “See you soon” to Martha.
Martha looks up, her eyes shining.
“Dr. Fitzpatrick?” she says in a loud voice.
Kirk turns. “Uh huh?”
“Whatever you do, don’t let this woman get away. You have to hire her! Please!”
Shannon flushes as Kirk nods and smiles at Martha.
“I’ll think about that.”
He opens his clinic door.
“After you,” he says to Shannon.
She enters, butterflies of a different sort fluttering in her stomach. She wonders what fate has in store for her now.
*
The clinic is neat, with all the medical instruments put away nicely on the shelves and trolleys lined with green cloth. Kirk seats himself behind his desk while Shannon takes one of the chairs across from him. A skeleton hangs from a hook in a corner, and she has to wonder if it’s real. Glossy posters of bones and joints are plastered onto the bare parts of the walls, and a tendon hammer sits on the desk like a phallic symbol.
She notes his personal mementoes on the shelves behind him – photos of his voluminous family, she presumes. She recognizes Ellie. One of the photos shows a family of seven siblings who resemble one another in some ways and not in others. There are five women and two men altogether. Kirk has the same eyes as his older brother, but he is handsomer by far and more prepossessing.
“So, Shannon Bellamy, can you tell me more about yourself?”
Shannon hands him her document folder containing her degree and accreditations. She gives him some professional details, but nothing personal and certainly nothing that cannot be accessed via her resume.
“Impressive,” Kirk finally says, leaning back into his executive chair, which protests with a creak.
“Thank you.”
“I meant what you did back there.”
“Huh?”
His beautiful green eyes narrow shrewdly. “Martha has never been in remission from her JRA long enough to expect a full recovery. But what you did to her was a first. I have never seen her so surprised in the entire time she has been coming here.”
Shannon shifts nervously.
“I didn’t do anything. I just gave her a massage. I have lots of static electricity in my body.” She gives a short laugh. “People used to say I’m a walking generator.”
“I think we both know it’s more than that,” Kirk says in a quiet tone.
Shannon raises her eyes to meet his. His green ones are serious and understanding.
“Would you like to work here, Shannon? You and I both know you have gifts. This is a safe environment for you to practice them.”
The silence between them weighs heavily.
Kirk goes on when she doesn’t say anything, “You get a basic salary with benefits, and on top of that, you get a commission for every patient you treat.”
He writes down a sum on a notepad, tears the top sheet off and hands it to her. He smiles.
“How does that look to you?”
Her cheeks dimple. She finds herself warming to this quick-thinking, handsome doctor, who obviously is far, far more than meets the eye.
“Yes,” she says.
“And remember, don’t tell anyone here about what you can do,” he warns.
She pauses.
Then she says, “How did you know I can . . . do what I do.”
He smiles sadly. “Let’s just say I have had personal experience with people who have your kind of gifts, except that they use them for anything but healing.”
SETTLING IN
For the next week, Shannon is kept so busy at the clinic that she scarcely has time to do anything else. Between work and making their new house a home, it is all she can do not to collapse into bed, exhausted, every night.
Using her gifts makes her more tired than usual, but it is a good kind of fatigue – akin to exercise. To not use them would be to keep them bottled up inside her so that she becomes choked and restless. She is glad to be allowed to use them again.
As for Dr. Kirk, he is a whirlwind of activity at work. From sunup to sundown, and sometimes well beyond, he is there, everywhere – tirelessly seeing and diagnosing patient after patient, sending them for X-rays and MRI scans, setting splints and bandages, operating and repairing. As Shannon is not his nurse or directly affiliated with what he does from day to day, she hardly works with him except for when he has a case to refer to her.
“Mrs. Doherty needs rehabilitation,” he would say, and leave her to decide what is best.
Or:
“Mr. Hirsch has had a stroke, and the left side of his face is paralyzed. See if you can get those smiling muscles working again.”
He does most of this through the phone or as a written instruction on the patient’s case file, so she hardly has any face to face time with him. Which suits her fine. He is her boss, after all, and their relationship must be kept strictly professional.
Kirk’s nurse is Patty Kane, and she is particularly chatty during lunch hour. They are at the cafeteria. Shannon has chosen a chicken salad and a bottle of orange juice. Patty is beside her at the chow line. Her tray is laden with a plate of roast chicken with loads of gravy and mash potatoes, and she has added in a bowl of raspberry Jell-O.
“So you’re the new girl,” she says to Shannon.
“I guess I am.”
“I heard you rented the old Pullnam place.”
“I did.”
Patty is a brunette with an upturned, freckled nose. “Do you sleep well at night?”
“Yes.” Shannon finds the nurse particularly intrusive for someone she doesn’t know at all, but she is too polite to blow anyone off at this stage. “Why do you ask?”
Patty wrinkles her button of a nose. “It’s just that the Pullnam place is rumored to be haunted.”
Haunted? Shannon does not have ESP, but she has felt no vibes of ghostly activity there.
She frowns. “How is that so?”
They reach the cash register, and Shannon reaches for her wallet.
“I’ll get that,” Patty says with a smile. “Consider it my welcome gift to you.”
“Thanks.”
Shannon wonders if this is Patty’s way of poking her nose in further, but she has very few friends in Dolphin’s Bay so far, and it might not hurt her to get to know some people if she is going to live here semi-permanently.
Once Patty has paid for both of them, she ushers them to a secluded spot in the cafeteria.
They seat themselves.
Patty says in a hushed tone, “Old Man Pullnam wandered out to the woods one year ago. They found his mutilated body two miles away from his house. They say an animal has gotten to it, it was so badly chewed.”
Shannon remembers the wolf howl she has been hearing for many nights now, starting from the night with Lucien in the maze. A pang squeezes her chest when she thinks of Lucien, but she brushes him firmly out of her mind.
“This happened a year ago?” she says carefully.
“Yes.” Patty is clearly the town gossip and she delights in having someone new to tell her stories to. “There are wild animals in the woods. Wolves, coyotes and the like.”
“I reckon.”
“Old Man Pullnam would not be the first to go that way. Dolphin’s Bay has had a history of animal attacks going back as far as the 1930’s. The attacks are sporadic. No one ever sees the animals or lived to tell the tale. Troopers have gone into the woods to survey the area. They found wolves and coyotes and shot them. But the attacks still go on. That is why the police put out an advisory to those living near the forest. Has Deputy Janssen been to see you?”
Shannon has been working all day. So if the good Deputy has dropped by, either Jared has received him and forgotten to mention it to her or no one was home.
“No.”
“He’s slipping. He usually makes a personal visit to newcomers in the area, especially when there’s a pretty girl around.” Patty smiles. “You are very pretty, you know.”
Shannon blushes. “Thank you.”
They continue to make small talk for a while. Then Shannon says, “Does Dr. Fitzpatrick do lunch?”
“He doesn’t eat lunch.” Patty studies her. “You’re not having designs on him, are you?”
“Huh? No, of course not!”
“Well, you wouldn’t be the first to, believe me. Every girl comes in here and falls for him in one way or another, but he doesn’t date. Rumor is that he has a girlfriend back East. He trained in John Hopkins, you know, and word is that he’s pining for some colleague of his back there.”
“You’re his clinic nurse and you don’t know?”
“No one knows anything about him. He’s real close-mouthed. All work and no play, I suppose.” Patty sighs.
“Maybe he’s gay.”
“Gay? I don’t think so. He’s very male, although I suppose plenty of gay men are very masculine as well. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know the score with him so you don’t go around having your hopes dashed.”
“Thank you for being so charitable.”
Patty laughs. “Do I detect a hint of sarcasm there? You’ll do fine here. Some of the other guys are already talking about asking you out. You’re still single, right?”
“Yes. Though I’m not technically looking to start a relationship.”
“Been through a bad one?” Patty says sympathetically.
Boy, is she nosy! Shannon thinks. Though she doesn’t sense anything but warm curiosity and kindness on Patty’s part.
“Let’s just say I need to cool off a bit.”
Patty winks. “I’ll let the word out to the guys. But anytime you change your mind . . . ”
Shannon laughs. Despite everything, she likes Patty.
*
After a grueling Friday, Shannon is looking towards a long, nice weekend just chilling out after her first week at work. She drives the Toyota to a local supermarket she has noted called ‘Safeway’s’. It is fairly large with a huge parking lot half-filled with cars.
As she alights from her car, a familiar white Mercedes draws into the empty parking lot next to hers.
&nb
sp; Shannon looks up in surprise. Lucien Walker comes out of the driver’s seat and saunters over to her, smiling.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.” She never expected to see him again, and so this is a major surprise.
OK, if she is to be honest with herself, she did check her phone now and again to see if there were any text messages or missed calls from him. And whenever they were none, she quelled her disappointment and busied herself with work.
“I saw your car out there and I decided to follow you.” As soon as he said this, he seems ill at ease, which has to be unusual for Lucien. “Um, I didn’t mean it in a stalker mentality sort of way. I just thought it would be nice to . . . you know, see how you’re getting along.”
His hair is neatly combed back and his face is a paragon of Nordic male beauty, as always. She remembers her limbs being entwined with his glorious body, and a flush creeps into her cheeks.
“Well, you could have called,” she says.
And the moment she said this, she wishes she could take it back. The last thing she wants to do is to sound like a whiny girlfriend. They just had sex for one night, for goodness sakes! They are very far from actually dating.
“I mean,” she adds hastily, “you are not obliged to call, of course. What we had was great . . . that was what it was.”
Why does everything that is coming out of her mouth feel so lame? She half-wishes a great big hole would open up and let her dive into it. Lucien’s presence is reducing her to her tongue-tied, trembling-kneed roots, and that is the farthest from what she wants to be in front of him.
He doesn’t seem to be as composed as he usually is, either. But then, she doesn’t know him that well. She doesn’t know him at all. He gave off the veneer of a devil-may-care, sophisticated player at first meeting. It may not be who he truly is.
“Well,” he says awkwardly, “you did leave the next morning. You didn’t even leave a note. I was going to take you to breakfast and ask if you wanted to stay longer at Pine’s Bluff. Until you can get your feet on the ground, of course.”
“Oh. Thank you. That’s very nice of you.”