The trouble was I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even if it was Tom’s doing, another attempt to derail Logan and me, I needed to know exactly what it meant. If it was nothing, fine. If it was something, well, I couldn’t plan a life around a lie.
I had to confront Logan. I needed the truth. However damaging it may prove.
14
“Not everything in this world is as simple as it may seem to you,” was all Logan kept saying over and over, and I eventually had to leave it there. He hadn’t been pleased with me presenting it to him late at night, and he seemed tired as much as annoyed, unwilling to engage, so I returned home alone.
When I commenced my shift the next morning, having slept very little, Tom sported a broad grin all day long, but since I’d instinctively known it was him who shoved the photo under my door, I refused to let him get to me.
Logan and I still went surfing, and we were still together, but my asking about the photo caused us to drift, like there was physical distance between us even when there was absolutely none. We both knew it but said nothing. It wasn’t so much that Logan wasn’t ready or willing to tell me what the photo meant; it was more a case of the photo serving as confirmation of what Tom had suggested, namely that Logan was hiding something.
Everyone is allowed a secret or two, of course, but I thought we were at a place where something big like this would make for essential disclosure. But then I hadn’t revealed one big thing about me, either: my wealth. What if it was simply something he was embarrassed about like that? The only reason I never said anything about it was because I didn’t want him thinking I was just playing at being a nurse, a tourist on the disaster trail, like those builders who came out from the UK for two weeks to rebuild the school and spent half the time partying and hitting on local girls. And hitting on nurses like Stacy, but you can imagine how that went.
I wasn’t like those people. And my money would muddy the mission I was following. It didn’t define me.
What if this photo meant more than that? What if it did define Logan, or alter the way I felt about him?
As the days went on, Tom started making sideways remarks about Logan again, hints and strange, cryptic questions which revealed he was busy with a cold and calculated plan of some sort.
“How is Doctor Logan today?” he’d say, or “It must have been quite a thing to deal with, don’t you think?” and all I could do was pout and roll my eyes and act like I knew all about whatever “it” was. The worst of this time was that I had no answer to these comments, and as much as I wanted to defend Logan, there was simply no way for me to do so. He wouldn’t talk to me at all about it.
Strangely, later that day, my father called me out of the blue and the whole conversation centered around how much he wanted for me to be happy, how he was proud of me no matter what, and how he thought I needed a stable relationship to complete my life.
“Thanks for saying that, Dad, but I am very happy at the moment. I do have a boyfriend, and I’ll tell you more about it when I’m ready.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Jen. Just remember, it would be far better to marry a real doctor than someone who used to be a doctor. With all the baggage that brings.”
With one single sentence, my dad blew the whole thing wide open. It was obvious for a long time that Logan wasn’t always a nurse, that Tom’s hints and scorn referred to Logan’s past, but that’s not what the sentence blew open. Not only did his words tell me Tom had been in contact with my dad, regaling him with tall tales about Logan, but it also meant my dad believed him. More upsetting still, he’d sided with Tom on the issue.
“I appreciate your concern, but please don’t run the whole ‘life is not about excitement’ sermon by me again. Mom told me all about the two of you carrying on in the barn after you walked three miles a day for your bit of excitement.”
“I’m disappointed to hear you talking that way, my angel. Things were different when we were younger, and you are now comparing apples to oranges.”
“Well, please let me pick my apples and keep the oranges away from me. I will never be with a bastard like Tom again, no matter how many times you try to convince me.”
The phone call didn’t end well at all, especially revealing how my mom shared the information about the barn. My mom’s talk with me had been on a confidential basis, and I felt like a traitor for having blurted it out.
One thing was certain, though—I couldn’t carry on like this. No matter what happened in the past, all I cared about was the future, but if the future were filled with snide remarks and unfounded suspicion, it would be a sad place indeed.
It was time for a serious discussion with Logan.
15
“You’re making it hard for me to trust you when you won’t tell me about your past,” I said over lunch on the Galaxy Lounge’s stoop overlooking the beach.
Logan immediately crossed his legs and gazed out to sea. “Be patient. I will tell you all about it when I’m ready.”
But I was being driven into a corner, not only by Tom, but by my father, and I could only imagine what Stacy would say if she knew I was allowing a potentially relationship-wrecking secret to fester. I needed some answers, so I pressed straight ahead.
“That’s not enough for me, at this point. You know I’m working with Tom, and he keeps making weird remarks. Now he’s gotten my father involved.”
“What is it that Tom’s told you?”
“He keeps referring to you as ‘Doctor Logan Storm,’ and now my father is on my case about it being better to be with a ‘real doctor.’ I don’t care if you changed disciplines or dropped out of medical school, or … I don’t know; maybe you punched a surgeon or something. I don’t care what it is. I just need to know.”
Logan shook his head slowly. “Tom’s words are the stupid remarks of a jealous guy, and your father is looking out for your best interests.”
“You’re not going to tell me the truth about this.” It was my turn to shake my head and gaze at the ocean. “I just hope it doesn’t give Tom the kind of ammunition he needs to shoot us down.”
Logan did not reply, so that appeared to be the end of it. I was no better off than I was before our little talk, and I dreaded seeing Tom again after that.
Sure enough, he was now turning up the pressure and making more and more of his snarky remarks as we continued to work side by side.
“Why don’t you come right out and say everything instead of these cowardly little hints and messages?” I said after he had been on my case again.
He must’ve been upset about me calling him a coward, as he fired back right away. “Why don’t you ask your little boyfriend about Linda?”
“Who the hell is Linda, and what has she got to do with this?”
“Ask Doctor Logan about Linda. He will tell you all about her or perhaps not. Guess we’ll see very soon who the real coward is.”
I didn’t want to do it, but I was left with no choice. If Tom’s whole suggestion was a ruse, then Logan could easily deny it, and I would simply believe him. But if there was something to it, I needed to know before it became a cancer that eventually destroyed us.
I chose the beach bar again, the upper deck this time, secluded from the faces I knew, out on the balcony where the wind caught Logan’s hair and tousled it across his face.
“Who is Linda?” I asked. “And please don’t tell me we’ll get to it someday.”
He leaned on the rail, checked over the side as if Tom might be holding up, dangling nearby to eavesdrop. When he turned back to me, I kept any smile far away, and he ran his hands through his hair.
“I was hoping we’d be able to build a relationship based on trust, on the here and now, and maybe even the future. Not on digging up the past.” He took a deep breath. “But seeing as you are not willing to do it that way, fine.” He returned his gaze to the ocean, seemingly his default position for difficult conversations. “Linda was my girlfriend. She died from a prescription of bad drugs. People blamed
me for it.”
I didn’t know how to reply. When he said “people” blamed him for it, the intimation appeared to include himself.
“What do you mean by ‘bad drugs’?” I asked.
“Bad drugs, as in drugs that were properly prescribed, but the pharmacist who dispensed it gave her a cheap knock-off that contained penicillin, which she was allergic to. She went into anaphylactic shock.” He swallowed. “And she died.”
“Did they ban you from being a doctor after the whole thing?”
“I feel like I am on trial here, and to be perfectly honest, I expected better from you.”
“So that’s it? Are you going to leave me here to figure it out all by myself? To face Tom’s smug half-truths and accusations?”
“I was hoping you’d be the one person who’d stick up for me and stand by me, without demanding I defend myself. Guess I was wrong.”
Logan left his beer and walked out. I was too upset to follow and hated to be the sort of girl who ran tearfully through a bar chasing a man. But that’s what I did. Only I took too long to think it through, and as I dashed with tears streaming down my face, nurses and doctors, builders, tourists, and local people, all watching on, I pulled up short at the exit as Logan was nowhere to be seen.
I hadn’t meant to, but I’d pushed him way over the edge, and despite my best intentions, all I’d achieved with the little talk was to drive the wedge between us in a lot deeper.
16
Tom was smug as a bug when he saw me the next morning, and although he didn’t say anything about Logan that day, I knew someone must have told him. You can’t keep a scene like I caused secret. Everyone guessed it was a fight I had with Logan, and Tom must have concluded he’d made significant progress, and it was time for the next stage of his plan. He changed his entire approach and stopped talking about Logan altogether. He now started giving me the gentleman act and opened doors for me, smiling approvingly at every little thing I said and did.
“I hope you will see one day that I have changed and that I only have your best interests at heart,” he said to me after our shift was over.
He sounded so convincing, I almost believed him. He’d been courteous to the staff, and all the other doctors in the hospital seemed to like him from day one. It was only me and Logan who’d seen through him. And Stacy, but only because I explained everything.
“I’ll never trust you again, Tom,” I replied calmly as we strolled toward the humid street. “You hurt me when we were together, and it took me a long time to recover. I’m past you. No matter what happens with Logan.”
“I know I was a terrible person back then, but I would so love to make it all up to you. Even if we never see each other again after I leave Sri Lanka, I would like you to know that I’ve learned from my mistakes. And although you might not like how you learned about Doctor Surf-God, all I did was make you see the truth. I have come out the other side a better man.”
This all sounded sweet and beautiful, but also rather rehearsed. I was reminded of Tom’s many speeches in the past where he’d said similar things which all turned out to be lies, so I managed not to burst out in tears of joy at his seemingly repentant words.
There was a sliver of truth to them, and that made me angrier than the lies.
Over the next week or so, Logan and I still saw one another, but the physical side of our relationship had vanished. Despite my repeated efforts to seduce him, he would not give in at all, and I felt like an idiot for having confronted him with Tom’s “truths.”
In a final attempt to save what little relationship we had left, to recover that spark between Logan and me, and I decided to start my investigation into Logan’s past. A betrayal, yes, but he need never know. And I genuinely, guiltily, had no choice. He was not prepared to tell me any more about Linda, and despite his kind words, Tom was keeping his final cards closed over his chest.
I’d never done snooping on this level before, so I called in Stacy to help and made her swear on her unborn babies’ graves that she wouldn’t tell a soul.
“Don’t worry, I’ll do everything I can to help you solve this mystery,” she said formally, “and my middle name is Discretion.”
We got ready to start our investigation with a pot of strong coffee, with which Stacy and I sat down on my couch, and started off by opening up a laptop and searching for everything we could find on “Logan Storm.”
The problem was that there were many different people with this name, and they were scattered all across the globe. When we finally located the right Logan Storm and confirmed it was the same guy who’d been banging my brains out and giving me surfing lessons, we tried to find out some more about his past by looking at his Facebook page and other social media.
He had absolutely no social media presence—no Facebook page, no Instagram, no Twitter account. That in and of itself was already an indication he was perhaps hiding something, although it didn’t bring us much closer to an answer concerning the specific details of what it was.
He occasionally appeared on other people’s feeds, though, tagged in a way that suggested he used to be active on social media, meaning he closed everything down at some point.
It was odd to be looking at pictures of Logan on the internet and not to find these pictures linking to anything else at all.
“This is going nowhere,” Stacy said. “Why don’t we try something outside the internet for answers?”
We closed the laptop to rack our brains to figure out the next step.
“If Logan is a doctor, or if he used to be one, he should have some academic records or records of the hospitals where he’s worked before,” she suggested.
“That’s right, but where would we start looking for this kind of information?”
“Wouldn’t there be some professional institution that has a list of all the qualified doctors in America? He is from America, right?”
“Absolutely. There should be such a list, and judging from Logan’s accent, he is definitely from the States.”
We researched a list of professional medical institutions in the United States and found some different options we could pursue. All of our options involved long distance phone calls, so I would have to utilize one of my mother’s little thousand dollar deposits real soon.
The first institutions put us on hold forever, and it was super frustrating to sit there and wait for answers with nothing forthcoming. Finally, we reached someone who seemed to have the information we needed on a screen in front of her, and she quickly found a Logan Storm who had been registered as a consultant in the United States.
“Is there a photograph of him next to his details?” I asked.
“Yes, there is, but I’m not allowed to send out that kind of information,” the friendly lady at the other end of the line said.
“Okay, I understand. Just tell me, is he blond with clear blue eyes?”
“Please don’t tell anyone I gave you this information, but yes, the man on this picture fits the description you gave me.”
“Is there any way you can tell me all the hospitals where he has worked in the United States?”
“I don’t have any information on that, and I would never be able to give you it over the phone, anyway,” the lady said, “but you can try this number and see if they can help you.”
I scribbled down the number she gave me on a piece of paper, so quickly I had to force myself to write neatly.
“Bingo!” I shouted after ending the phone call.
“Cool,” Stacy said. “At least we know now that your boyfriend is a real doctor, not some student who scammed his way in.”
“Or he was a real doctor,” I added rather soberly after we’d calmed down a bit. “He’s working as a nurse now. That’s a whole different discipline.”
“Why don’t you call that number and find out the rest?” she suggested.
For some reason, I was not keen on making the next phone call. Suddenly, I didn’t want to know what had happened in Logan’s pa
st. Like what I was doing was something I should know better about.
“Can’t I just wait for Logan to tell me himself when the time is right?” I tried half-heartedly.
But Stacy was not going to let me get away so easily.
“If you don’t get some answers and get them quick, there might not be another opportunity to set the record straight.”
“Okay, I guess you’re right,” I said and dialed the number I’d scribbled down.
It was a public information service with fewer rules about the disclosure of personal details (for a hefty fee), and the person on the other end asked me to hold while she looked up what I’d given her. The information wasn’t necessarily fact-checked, she warned me but attained through public records, such as license applications and legally required documentation in the public domain. This search, she said after rescuing me from the holding Muzak, might take a little longer.
Disclaimer over with, she called us back two hours later. “Doctor Storm has never worked at any registered medical institution in the United States, except for a handful of places in California where he did his residency. He’s with Doctor Without Borders, and the last place he was stationed was as a surgeon was Rwanda.”
“Can you tell me where he is currently stationed? And is he still a registered doctor?
“I don’t see any information about his current whereabouts or service on my computer, but I can confirm he is still registered as a doctor.”
I thanked her and tried to digest everything I now knew about Logan.
He was a doctor, yet he worked as a nurse. Was that even possible? Not in the States or Western Europe, but perhaps in places where they didn’t necessarily have the facility to check every detail.
Apparently, he had been blamed for the death of his girlfriend after possibly prescribing drugs to her, but he was still allowed to practice medicine, still registered with Doctors Without Borders.
It was as if there was still one piece of the puzzle missing, the last bit of information that would provide me with a full understanding of what had happened.
My Doctor Without Borders Page 6