Lakeside Hospital Box Set

by Cara Malone

  That was what she’d been trying to determine in the elevator before Riggs and Donoghue’s conversation started dominating the small space, and she decided that she felt okay about the test.

  She asked, “How about you?”

  “I think so, too,” Megan said. “Alex helped me run probably a hundred practice cases in the last couple of months and I’m not going to lie – I think having a paramedic fiancée gave me an advantage because she deals with patient triage on a daily basis.”

  “Thanks for letting me join you the other day,” Chloe said. “I really appreciated it.”

  “Any time,” Megan said. “What’s your next rotation, anyway?”

  “I’m going into psychiatry,” Chloe said. “You?”

  “Pediatrics,” Megan said, and Chloe smiled.

  “Have fun with Dr. Thomas. She’s great,” she said. She opened the car door and started to get out, then looked back at Megan and asked, “Did Ivy give any indication about how she did?”

  “Come on,” Megan said. “You know damn well she aced it.”

  Chloe laughed again and got out of the car. Megan put it in drive and headed down the road for the very short final leg home, and Chloe climbed the stairs up to her apartment. They were somewhat icy despite the awning above them so she walked carefully, then went into the dark apartment. It felt like more than a single day had passed since the last time she was here, and the test had felt like it had been much longer than eight hours.

  Chloe turned on the desk lamp sitting on the parsons table beside the futon. She still hadn’t bothered to acquire any more furniture, but it cast just enough light on the room to be functional. She’d spent most of the last month trying to concentrate on studying, but she’d managed to unpack her clothes and hang them in the bedroom closet, and she’d taken a few of her kitchen items out of their boxes as she needed them. Otherwise, all of the décor that made the apartment into a home had stayed right where she’d packed them. She’d been busy, and tired, and there didn’t seem to be much point in nesting.

  The studying was over now, though.

  Chloe took off her coat and hung it the bedroom closet along with her white lab coat, ready for Monday when her next rotation would begin. Then she kicked off her shoes and went in her socks to the kitchen. There was a dish drying rack, a coffee pot and an electric kettle on the counter, and she hadn’t needed much else. She filled the kettle and retrieved a mug from the drying rack, then picked a box of flavored tea from the cupboard while she waited for the water to boil.

  Being alone in the apartment always reminded Chloe of Ivy. Their romance had been such a whirlwind over a very brief period, but it had almost all taken place here. Now when Chloe looked at the futon in the living room, she saw Ivy laying naked across it, her body inviting Chloe to join her. With most of her other possessions still boxed, it was the focal point of the room and it was hard to look anywhere else.

  Chloe poured her cup of tea and as she sipped it, she walked into the center of the living room and crouched down in front of the first box she crossed. Inside it were a half-dozen candles and a couple of throw pillows that she’d kept on the couch when she lived with Megan.

  It was time – time to move in and time to stop torturing herself over someone who didn’t have room in her life for her.

  Chloe set down her tea and unpacked the box, setting the pillows on the futon and finding places for the candles in the bathroom and on the living room windowsills. She had three more days alone and with nothing to do before her psychiatry rotation began on Monday and she was determined to turn the apartment into a home.

  23

  Ivy

  When Ivy returned to her apartment that night, she dismantled the wall of notes behind her desk. There were hundreds of flashcards there - symptoms, diseases, acronyms, tests and protocols all color-coded and grouped according to the body system they referred to. They had never left Ivy’s side for the last three years, steadily growing into the massive collection that nearly covered the wall.

  She didn’t have much use for them anymore, though, because she was pretty confident that she’d passed her exam. The final step in the medical licensing process wouldn’t take place for more than a year, after graduation from medical school and her first year as a surgical resident. For the first time in three and a half years, there was no more studying to do.

  Ivy carefully took down each flashcard, stacking them neatly on her desk according to subject and then packing them away in the drawer. It took close to an hour, but when the wall was blank again, she pushed her desk up against it and sat down, at a loss for what to do with herself.

  She settled on checking her email and was pleased to find that Dr. Isaac had finally submitted her performance evaluation for the surgical rotation.

  Dr. Chan is a meticulous worker and a knowledgeable student. She learns new skills quickly and has a natural aptitude for surgical medicine. She may spend a little too much time with patients, but a new doctor would be lost without compassion.

  Ivy rolled her eyes at that last bit – Krys’s dumb ideas strike again – then she printed a copy of the evaluation for inclusion in the portfolio she’d been building throughout her rotations. Ivy had half a mind to bring Dr. Isaac’s remarks to the ER just to show Krys that her concerns over Ivy’s bedside manner had left a mark on her evaluation.

  She went over to her bed in the corner of the room and lay down, looking at her blank slate of a wall. Now that there were no flashcards or case studies to distract her, Ivy had nothing to keep her from thinking about Chloe.

  She’d only seen Chloe for a second as she and Megan walked out of the testing center together, but she looked satisfied, like she’d done well on the exam. Ivy yearned to reach out and ask her personally, but she doubted she was strong enough to talk to Chloe without wanting to be with Chloe. Besides, the more time passed, the more Ivy realized how badly she’d dealt with that whole situation. She’d gotten scared, felt everything she’d been working toward slipping out of her fingers, and she panicked.

  She’d hurt Chloe.

  And Chloe probably didn’t want much to do with Ivy as a friend after she’d treated her like that, even if Ivy thought she was strong enough for that friendship to continue.

  “You’re an asshole,” Ivy muttered to herself, putting her hands over her face in frustration. She stayed like that for a few minutes until her phone started vibrating on the desk and she got up to check it. It was Victor’s number and she laughed, thinking, oh good, someone to agree with me, before answering. “Hello?”

  “How did the test go?” It was Ivy’s mother, talking to her on speakerphone. Ivy could hear her father and Victor talking to each other, something about law, in the background.

  “I think it went well,” Ivy said.

  “Think or know?” her father asked, cutting Victor off mid-sentence. He said, “When I took my licensing exam, I had a gut feeling that they’d gone well and I was right.”

  Ivy thought for a second – not long enough to let Victor horn his way back into her moment – and said, “Know. I passed.”

  “Good girl,” her mother said.

  “Tell us about it,” her father prompted.

  Ivy sat in her desk chair and talked them through each and every case, giving as many details as she could remember. Victor disappeared after a while, not wanting to listen to even a recap of anything medicine-related, and Ivy’s mother mostly just said ah and mm and oh when she didn’t understand the medical terms, but it was nice to have her father’s undivided attention. He wanted to know every diagnosis Ivy considered, every rationale she’d come up with, and every test that she’d ordered. Her parents were both hanging on her every word for almost half an hour and it was everything she’d ever wanted from them.

  So why didn’t it feel as good as she’d always thought it would?

  By the time Ivy got to the last case, Victor had come back to deliver one last jab. He said, “There’s always a chance that you blew
it so don’t throw out your notes just yet.”

  “I would never throw out my notes,” Ivy scoffed.

  “When do you find out your score?” her mother asked.

  “Early February,” Ivy said. After she’d been prompted by her father, she realized that she really was certain that she’d passed, but it would still be a very long couple of weeks while she waited to know for sure.

  “Call us as soon as you know,” her mother said. “We’ll talk to you later.”

  “Bye, Ma,” Ivy said. “Bye, Pa, Victor.”

  On top of the agony of waiting for her scores, January turned out to be one of the slowest months of Ivy’s life. She started a rotation in the radiology department, which she’d saved until after her surgery rotation as a sort of treat. Radiology was regarded by a lot of the other medical students as an easy rotation - the department did dozens of scans a day, from x-rays to CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds, and the medical students’ responsibilities were mainly to prep the patients. It meant easy work and short shifts. Ivy had thought it would be nice to take a breather after her surgical rotation and the medical licensing exam.

  It turned out to be one of her worst ideas ever.

  Ivy and the other medical students on her rotation did the same menial tasks for the same set of scans again and again all day long. After her shifts, Ivy had nothing to study and nothing to distract her from the two things that dominated her mind – the results of the exam and Chloe.

  She might have been able to wait patiently for her exam scores if it wasn’t for Victor, who had taken to texting her a couple of times a week, keeping her updated on all the fancy job interviews he was going on and asking if her scores were in yet.

  Not yet, she said over and over again, gritting her teeth every time she had to type out the same six letters.

  She knew her brother was just teasing her, and that she’d pestered him in similar ways many times before, but she was tired of the mind games they played with each other. She knew she’d done well on the exam and now that she was nearing the end of medical school and Victor was about to be hired as a lawyer, Ivy didn’t feel the same urge to compete with him. Their paths were diverging and she wanted her parents’ approval, but it was no longer her highest priority.

  She’d learned this year, thanks to Chloe and Krys, that there were more important things in life than being the best at everything.

  Every day after Ivy’s shift in the radiology department, she went back to her apartment and logged into the medical licensing board’s website to check on her scores. Every day, a blank page awaited her and when she logged out, she was left sitting in an empty apartment with nothing to do except think about what she’d lost, and why she’d pushed Chloe away.

  In all of that spare time she suddenly had, Ivy was beginning to confront the possibility that she’d lied to herself about how much she could handle. She thought it was impossible to juggle both school and the intense emotions that came when she was with Chloe. She thought she couldn’t have it all because she’d gotten so wrapped up in her new life with Chloe, but was that true, or had she simply given in to fear?

  Megan had figured out how to be a top medical student and a loving partner. She’d slid down the class rank a few places ever since she started dating that paramedic, but she was still a fierce competitor for Ivy and she could hold her own. And even though Ivy had lost nearly two full weeks to her intense affair with Chloe, she was no worse for the wear. Dr. Isaac still gave her the recommendation she needed during her surgical rotation and she expected to pass her medical licensing exam.

  Ivy had panicked and let her family feed her insecurities rather than looking at the situation logically. The more time she had to sit alone in her apartment without any index cards on the wall to distract her, the more Ivy was sure that she really could handle life and medicine.

  In the quiet, lonely evenings in January while Ivy waited for her test results, waited for her rotation to end, waited for the next stage of her life, she wondered what it would be like to really let herself be with Chloe.

  That was, if Chloe would take her back.

  It was the end of the first week of February when Ivy finally got her exam scores.

  She’d had a long day of trying to calm claustrophobic and disoriented patients so they wouldn’t move during their MRIs and when she went to the locker room to change her shoes and go home, one of the other students in her rotation came in with a huge smile on her face.

  “Did you check?” she asked Ivy.

  “Check what?”

  “Your scores,” the girl said. “They’re posted!”

  “You passed?” Ivy asked, already digging her phone out of the pocket of her scrubs and sitting down on the bench. She couldn’t wait until she got home, or even long enough to run to the medical library and use one of the computers there.

  “Yeah,” the girl said. “I’m going to meet some friends for drinks to celebrate. Do you want me to wait while you check your scores?”

  “No, thanks,” Ivy mumbled, lost in focus as she logged in.

  The girl grabbed a backpack out of her locker, but she lingered instead of heading for the door. Her name was Simpson or Samson, something like that, and she had never been one of the people on Ivy’s radar as a competitor. It was nice to not be alone right now, though, and Ivy accepted her company as she came a little closer to the bench.

  The website was loading slowly – maybe because she was using her phone, or maybe because all across the country, anxious medical students were logging in to find their scores. Ivy tapped her foot impatiently – she was sure that she’d passed, but that didn’t stop her from feeling just a bit nervous, especially with an audience.

  The page loaded and while Ivy was building up the courage to click on the link that would reveal her score, the locker room door opened again and Krys entered with her signature speed.

  “What’s going on?” she asked when she saw the two of them hunched over Ivy’s phone.

  “The exam results were posted,” Simpson or Samson said. “Ivy’s checking her score.”

  In a completely uncharacteristic moment, Krys paused. She left her locker unopened and came over to join them, putting a hand on Ivy’s shoulder. Ivy held her breath and clicked the link.

  Passed.

  She let out a long, relieved breath and her little audience looked over her shoulder to read the page.

  “Awesome,” Simpson said, grinning again, and Krys patted Ivy on the back.

  “There was never any doubt in my mind,” she said, and that confirmation felt better than any parental attention Ivy had ever managed to wrestle away from Victor. Krys never doubted her, and Ivy knew she shouldn’t have, either.

  “Do you want to join us at the bar?” Simpson asked. “There’s a bunch of us going to the place down the street.”

  “No,” Ivy said. “I think I’m just going to sit here and savor the feeling for a few minutes. Thanks, though.”

  “Join us if you change your mind,” the girl said with a shrug, then headed out of the locker room.

  “You don’t want to celebrate?” Krys asked when Simpson was gone.

  “Not with them,” Ivy said. The first person who had flashed into her mind when she found out the scores had been posted was Chloe, but she wasn’t sure that was possible.

  Ivy had been waiting almost four years to brag about this moment to her parents – preferably while Victor listened and scowled in the background – but now that it had finally come, she didn’t need that validation. She just wanted to celebrate with her friend, the girl she loved.

  “But there is someone that you can celebrate with?” Krys asked. When Ivy didn’t answer right away, she added, “Look, I’d take you out for a drink myself but I have a feeling you’d go Stage 5 Clinger on me if we ever hung out beyond the hospital walls…”

  Ivy was just deciding whether to be offended at this, but Krys laughed to show her that she was joking. Then she went on.

  “�
�and anyway I have to get to the clinic where I moonlight,” she said, checking her watch. “My shift starts in fifteen minutes.”

  “I didn’t know you had a second job,” Ivy said. “They don’t pay you enough here?”

  Krys shrugged and said, “It’s not about that. I told you the life of a workaholic isn’t glamorous. I’m serious – go celebrate with someone. This is a big moment.”

  She congratulated Ivy one more time, then left the locker room. Ivy let her words sink in, her heart beginning to beat fast in her chest, and before she could talk herself out of it, she dialed Chloe’s number. It rang two, three, four times and Ivy started to wonder if Chloe was on call, still working, or just ignoring Ivy’s call.

  But then she answered, Chloe’s sweet voice saying her name. “Ivy?”

  “Did you see your score yet?” she asked.

  “They’re posted?” Chloe’s voice became anxious to match Ivy’s mood.

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “I just checked mine.”

  “How’d you do?”

  Instead of answering the question, Ivy blurted, “Are you home right now?”

  “Yes,” Chloe said.

  This was it – the leap of faith. Ivy asked, “Can I come over? I’d like to talk to you in person.”

  The line was silent for a beat and Ivy wondered if she was about to be rejected. She wouldn’t blame Chloe if she said no, but her heart was begging her to say yes. Then, after what felt like an eternity and was probably only a few seconds, Chloe said, “Sure.”

  “Thank you. I’m on my way,” Ivy said, feeling breathless as she stood up from the bench. “Go check your score.”

  She hung up and threw her coat over her scrubs, then headed for the exit. As she went, Ivy made a second phone call. This one connected much quicker and she heard her brother’s voice.

  “Ivy?” he said. “Do you have news?”

  “I sure do,” she said. “I’m in love with Chloe, I did something really stupid after Thanksgiving and I’m about to beg her from the bottom of my heart to forgive me, oh – and I passed the medical licensing exam. I just thought you should know.”