“You’re not leaving,” she noted, getting her own things together for a second time.
“We’re having dinner together, remember? Before this little tetanus shot confrontation of yours, you said ‘okay,’ that you’d have dinner with me,” he reminded her.
She’d thought that since she’d refused to back off about the infection, she’d gotten him too annoyed to want to go out for a meal with her.
“You still want to do that?” she questioned in surprise.
“I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t,” he pointed out. “Any place in particular you’d like to go?” he asked as he escorted her out of the exam room. He locked the door behind him.
“Some place where they serve food would be nice,” she deadpanned.
He watched her warily, waiting for some sort of coda to follow, some condition she wanted him to fulfill, like a damsel asking a knight to slay a dragon for her before he came over to the castle.
“Uh-huh. And...?” he asked, waiting for a shoe to drop.
“And nothing,” she answered cheerfully. That seemed to be enough to her. “I’m easy.”
Mitch stared at her, and then he laughed shortly. “Not hardly. But you go right on telling yourself that and maybe someday that’ll almost be true.”
With that, he finally got her out the front door and heading in the direction of his car.
* * *
“So, how long did you box?” she asked him half an hour later over a plate of Yankee pot roast, mashed potatoes and green beans.
He didn’t even have to pause and try to remember. “Not long.”
“Afraid someone was going to ruin your pretty face?” she asked, amused. Since all his features appeared to be perfect, she assumed his high school boxing venture was over before it ever got started.
“Afraid someone was going to ruin my pretty hands,” he corrected. “I was still in high school when I decided I was going to be a surgeon.” Or rather, when his father had made that decision for him, he recalled. “And that meant not risking breaking anything useful, like my fingers, or my wrist, or anything else in that vicinity.”
When his father had found out that he was on the boxing team, he’d read him the riot act and made him quit that very afternoon. He remembered entertaining the idea of just rebelling, then, ever logical, he decided that his father was right and quit the team on his own.
“Makes sense,” Melanie agreed. She could feel his eyes on her, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. She made it easy for him and asked, “What?”
“What was that crack about my ‘pretty face’?” he asked.
Her grin was utterly guileless in its delight. “I overheard some of the little girls talking. Seems that more than a few of them have a crush on you. The consensus is that you’re even, and I quote, ‘cuter than Ricky Harris.’ That assessment, by the way, was followed by a chorus of squeals.”
Mitch frowned as he tried to place the name. It meant nothing to him. “Who’s Ricky Harris?”
Melanie feigned surprise. “You don’t know?” And then she took pity on him and told him. “Ricky Harris is the preteen giant heartthrob of the moment. He has a couple of songs out right now and is the current big deal—until the next one comes along,” she added, leaving the fact that it was a cutthroat business unsaid but completely understood.
The fact that she actually knew these miscellaneous details boggled his mind. “How do you keep up on all this?” he asked.
“I keep up on the kids and this is important to them, so I make it a point to keep up on who the current teen prince is.”
Everything he had witnessed ever since he’d started volunteering at the shelter painted her to be good at what she was doing—in every aspect.
“Makes sense,” he commented, then, before he could think his question through, he asked, “Why is it that you don’t have any kids of your own?”
The light seemed to leave her face then. It took her another moment to pull herself together enough to answer his unintentionally hurtful question.
“Things just didn’t arrange themselves that way,” she told him quietly.
He heard the pain in every syllable. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I should have remembered,” he could have kicked himself for that. “Or I shouldn’t have asked at all. Or—”
He appeared genuinely miserable over upsetting her this way and that in itself helped her rally back to being her usual self, or at least the “self” she allowed the others to see. Otherwise, she was certain that all she would be doing all day was crying.
Melanie placed her hand on his and pressed it lightly. She was silently asking him to stop berating himself.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “You didn’t mean anything by it. It was an honest mistake. And I do love kids.” A very fond smile curved her lips. “Had things gone a different route, I might have one day wound up giving the old woman in a shoe a run for her money.”
Mitch looked at her blankly, and then shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he told her honestly, “I don’t get the reference.”
“The nursery rhyme,” she prompted. “You never heard that nursery rhyme?” she asked in disbelief.
“I never heard any nursery rhyme,” he told her. “My father believed that everything that was part of my upbringing should be goal oriented and my ‘goal’ was to be a doctor, a surgeon.”
“Was that his idea, or yours?”
He thought of lying, but then he didn’t see that there was anything to be gained by that. It didn’t even buy him time because he wasn’t in the market for it.
“His,” he told her honestly.
That explained a lot, she thought. Still, that didn’t begin to explain the gap in his knowledge. “Doctors know nursery rhymes.”
Mitch shook his head. “Not in my father’s world they don’t.”
Melanie thought of something else, something that her own childhood had been very rich in. She couldn’t begin to imagine childhood without it.
“What about cartoons?” she asked.
“What about them?”
“Did you watch any?” she asked patiently.
He thought back for a moment. Some of his fondest memories were rooted in what she was asking about. “My mother snuck me out a few times when my father was away, attending conferences—he was always the main speaker when he attended,” he added. “Don’t get me wrong, I was proud to be his son. He was an excellent surgeon.”
That alone didn’t qualify to make the man a nominee for Father of the Year, Melanie couldn’t help thinking. “Just not a warm and fuzzy father,” she guessed.
“No,” he admitted. To say otherwise would have been lying. “But he just wanted me to reach my full potential,” he told her.
“Reading a few nursery rhymes wouldn’t have prevented you from attaining that,” she pointed out.
Mitch laughed, shaking his head. “I don’t think he saw it quite that way. To him, watching cartoons or playing games was all pointless downtime.”
Everyone needed to have a way to unwind, to be something outside the student, or the lawyer or the engineer.
“He must have been thrilled when he found out that you were on the boxing team,” she guessed.
Mitch laughed drily before he could prevent it. “Who do you think pointed out how many different ways I could break my hand—not to mention that I could sustain some kind of brain damage from a blow to the head—which,” he said, going back to her initial question, “would do a lot more damage than ruining my ‘pretty face.’”
Melanie was quick to offer him a sympathetic smile. “We have a lot more in common than I thought,” she commented.
He hadn’t been aware that they were discussing their pasts. “What do you mean?”
She spelled it out for him without trying to sound preachy. “Sounds like you had a rough childhood in your own way, too.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘rough.’ If anything I’d call it...isolated,” he finall
y said, settling on a word.
“That’s okay,” she told him. “I’d call it rough for you.” As she picked up her soda to take the last sip, she glanced at her watch. The time on it surprised her. “How did it get to be so late? You probably feel like I talked your ears off,” she guessed ruefully.
Still looking at her, Mitch touched each of his ears one at a time.
“Nope, they’re both still there,” he informed her as if he’d just taken inventory of an actual shipment. “Better luck next time.”
“Next time?” she repeated, confused. And maybe just a little bit nervous as well.
“Yes, I thought that since we’re still both breathing and no mortal wounds have been delivered—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, or even to ask her out for a formal date. Anything he had to say on any subject was temporarily tabled as his cell phone began to ring.
The odd thing about that was hers did, as well. She had hers out first.
“It’s the shelter,” she told him, looking down at her phone’s caller ID.
The caller ID on his cell phone was the same as hers. The shelter was calling both of them.
Chapter Eleven
Mitch had never believed in coincidences. Something was definitely wrong here.
Pressing Accept on his phone, Mitch said, “Dr. Stewart,” at the same time that Melanie took her call and identified herself to her caller.
“Dr. Stewart, there’s just been a horrific accident. I know this is a huge imposition, but are you anywhere close by and able to return to the shelter?”
The question throbbed with emotion. He barely recognized the shelter director’s voice. He’d never heard her sound this beside herself or upset. Ordinarily, the woman seemed unflappable.
His first thought was that the man who had threatened to storm the homeless shelter earlier searching for his missing ex-wife and child had managed to make bail and was back.
Rather than speculate, Mitch asked. “Miss French, what happened?”
The director didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, she was disjointedly rattling things off, giving him a summary of peripheral events rather than the main action.
“There’s an ambulance on its way, but I know everyone here would feel a lot better if you could just please come back.” She was literally begging now.
Mitch had a feeling that he wasn’t going to have the blanks filled in by talking to the director. He would have to come back to the shelter and see what was going on for himself.
But what really made up his mind for him was the stricken expression on Melanie’s face.
“On my way,” he promised, closing his phone.
Melanie was doing the same. She forgot where she had put the phone the moment she had tucked it away. Her call had come from Theresa, who, it turned out, had decided to linger a while longer at the shelter tonight. The woman had just been on her way to her catering van when she saw the whole accident unfold.
It was the classic case of a speeding vehicle versus pedestrians.
Mitch immediately noticed that Melanie appeared very unsteady on her feet. He grabbed hold of her arm in case she passed out. He didn’t want her possibly hitting her head. He didn’t need another patient right now.
Taking out his wallet, he left two fifty-dollar bills on the table. He knew roughly what the meals had cost and he made sure that what he left behind more than covered the costs plus a generous tip. He absolutely didn’t want to waste any time waiting for his credit card to be processed and returned for his signature. From the breathless way the director had begged him to come, he had a feeling that minutes might very well be of tantamount importance.
He looked at Melanie now as he ushered her out of the restaurant. The woman hadn’t said a word since they had both terminated their calls, nor had she answered his question about the incident.
Had she gone into shock?
“Melanie?”
He stopped just short of where he’d parked his vehicle. Still holding on to her, this time with his hands bracketing both sides of her shoulders, he peered into her face.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The sound of his voice managed to penetrate the deep fog around her brain. Coming to, she remembered the last thing he’d asked her. He wanted to know about the accident.
“A car hit them,” she cried. “They were crossing the street, coming back from the playground and a hit-and-run driver plowed right into them and just kept going.” Tears fell as she told him.
“Into who, Melanie?” he asked, repeating, “Into who?”
“April and her family,” she answered in a stunned, stilted voice that didn’t even sound real to her own ears. The very words tasted bitter.
“Let’s go” was all she heard Mitch say.
The next moment, he was pushing her into the passenger seat of his car and closed the door. Rounding the hood, he threw himself into the driver’s seat.
“Buckle up!” he ordered in a gruff voice, trying his best to snap her out of this downward spiral she seemed to be slipping into. “C’mon, Melanie. Snap out of it. If it is them, that little girl is going to need you,” he shouted at her.
This wasn’t real. None of it seemed real. “What if...what if she’s...dead?”
The word felt like a lead brick on her throat, threatening to choke her just the way it had when she’d stood there, listening to the kind-faced chaplain telling her life was over because Jeremy’s life had been cut short.
“She’s not dead,” Mitch bit off angrily, revving up his engine. “Do you hear me? She’s not dead.”
Melanie looked at him as if seeing him for the first time since she’d taken the call. “You can’t know that,” she cried, fighting panic.
He made no answer because she was right. He couldn’t know that.
He’d gotten even less information from the shelter’s director than Melanie had gotten from whoever had called her, but for whatever reason—and he had no real answer—he just wasn’t going to allow his mind to go there. And he wasn’t going to allow her mind to go there, either—not unless it was absolutely unavoidable.
“We’re not going to make any conclusions until all the information is in,” he told her. “Anything less than that and you’re not going to be any good to anyone—least of all yourself. Now, if the ambulance hasn’t gotten there, I’m going to need you to help, not to fall apart. Do you understand?” he asked, his voice sharp. It was almost a demand.
“I understand,” she answered, trying her very best not to allow any horrific extraneous thoughts to enter her mind.
She needed to steel herself off for whatever lay ahead.
* * *
They got back to the shelter in record time. Mitch ran two lights, something he had never done before in his entire life, not even when he was young. But an urgency had seized him and he couldn’t shake the feeling that every single moment counted.
Feeling like a spinning top, he tried to look everywhere at once. The last thing he needed was to be involved in a collision himself.
His heart pounding, he came to a screeching halt in the same parking lot he’d left just a little while earlier. Pausing only to grab his medical bag from the backseat, he ran into the shelter. Melanie was right beside him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mitch noted that the ambulance he had expected to already be here hadn’t arrived yet. Where the hell was it?
Haunted faces clustered around him as he and Melanie raced into the building.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
One of the residents who worked at the shelter as a janitor pointed to the rear of the building. “Out back,” he cried. “They’re still in the street.”
A confluence of voices, all speaking over one another, tried to tell him what was happening. For now, he tuned them all out.
“Blankets!” Melanie cried, yelling the order to no one in particular. “Bring out blankets!” It was all she could think to do. There was a chill in
the air and the family needed to be kept warm.
She’d only felt this utterly helpless once before in her life and she fought against the feeling, afraid that it would overwhelm her.
She ran out in front of Mitch, fearful of what she was going to see, just as fearful of hanging back and not getting there in time.
The three bodies looked mangled and broken as they lay on the cracked asphalt, frozen in a grotesque, bloody dance.
Scanning the trio, Mitch tried to decide where he would do the most good. None of them appeared to be breathing.
“Where the hell is the ambulance?” Mitch demanded angrily, straining to hear the sounds of a siren.
There were none.
Dropping to his knees beside the closest body, he quickly assessed April’s brother, Jimmy, then Brenda, her mother, and finally, with an increasingly heavier heart, April herself.
The expression on his face grew grimmer with each passing moment.
Melanie felt as if her heart was strangling.
“Mitch?” she cried, distraught and silently begging him for some sort of reassurance.
But he just shook his head. “The mother’s gone,” he told her.
Checking over the little boy again, he looked up, frustrated beyond words. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t right, he couldn’t help thinking. He felt as if someone had just hollowed out his insides with a dull knife. He thought he was immune to this, that he’d managed to distance himself from feeling anything when he lost a patient, but damn these people and damn Melanie, they had cut through the insulating wall he’d built up around himself.
Grief threatened to undo him.
“I can’t get a heartbeat,” he told Melanie, each word felt as if he was carving it letter by letter into his own flesh. He began giving the little girl CPR, but it was no use. He wasn’t getting a response.
Melanie dropped to her knees beside the little girl, tears flowing fast and furiously, almost blinding her. “April?”
It wasn’t a question, it was a plea.
He shook his head. “I’m not getting anything,” he told her, feeling sick to his stomach.
All around them, other residents had come out of the shelter and gathered to watch the doctor unsuccessfully try to bring back these three people.
Dr. Forget-Me-Not (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 11