“Look, it wasn’t my intention to turn this evening into a battle. How about we get off the subject and talk about something else? Because the cherry cheesecake here is the best in the whole state, and I don’t want you missing out because I’ve said something to get your gut roiling. So...” He tried coaxing her with a smile, and only succeeded in getting the scowl off her face.
“Maybe the weather? Or the fact that I’m backpedaling on my opinion of what kinds of responsibility I think the children at Camp Hope can handle?”
No luck moving back to neutral territory yet. He tried again. “Medical school? We could talk about that. Like what made you decide you wanted to be a doctor?” He watched, saw her face soften a bit. Let out a sigh of relief. “I’ll start off by telling you mine then you can tell me yours.”
“Mine isn’t much to tell,” she said, relaxing a little.
“Neither is mine. I came from a large family, three sisters, two brothers. I was the oldest, always in charge of looking after the younger ones. My parents are both doctors, by the way. Dad’s a surgeon, Mom’s an anesthesiologist. So I grew up in the life. As it turned out, they produced a family of doctors. I have a brother and two sisters still in med school, one brother in his surgical residency, and a sister who’s a full-fledged obstetrician.”
“Which means your parents were good role models,” Keera commented.
“They were. Still are. But it was a hectic life growing up, never being able to plan anything when they were on call. Never being able to count on them coming to school events.”
“Don’t tell me. You played clarinet in the band.”
“Almost. I was the quarterback on the high-school football team. It got me a scholarship to college, so I played in college, too.”
“Sounds like a charmed life,” she said.
Her face was so impassive he didn’t know what to make of it. “Not charmed. We were like any other family, with our ups and downs.”
“Which is why you know how to be a good father now. Because you understand all that.”
“Some of it. Although I’ll admit my girls present me with challenges I could never anticipate. The thing is, when I ask my mom for advice, she usually smiles and tells me to go with my instincts. Like that helps.”
“But she’s right. At the end of the day, all the parenting books in the world are only words when you have two little flesh-and-blood human beings to deal with. Children, I might add, who haven’t read the parenting books and don’t know the proper way you’re supposed to be parenting them.”
“Good insight for a non-parenting type.”
Finally, she smiled. “I grew up poor. Good insight was about all I had to get me through.”
“You mentioned that your mother worked a lot?”
“Sometimes days in a row.”
“And no father, so what about brothers and sisters?”
She shook her head. “It was only the two of us.”
“But you got to medical school. How did that happen?”
“Getting an education wasn’t easy because we moved around a lot for my mother’s work. Anyway, I liked knowledge, so when I wasn’t able to go to school I’d find a library and read. Anything, everything.
“I really liked the sciences and found out, early on, that I loved biological sciences. From there it was reading about human anatomy, and the next logical jump was medical articles and textbooks. I practically memorized Gray’s Anatomy, and by the time I was fourteen or fifteen there probably wasn’t an advanced physiology book I hadn’t devoured. Knowledge was my...everything. And all that reading got me a college scholarship.”
“I’ll bet you passed your med-school exams without batting an eyelid.”
“I did,” she admitted. “I was told I was one of the top scorers in the country. And the rest, as they say, is history. I made it through, found my job, secured my future.”
“And your mother. Is she proud?”
Keera shrugged as she picked up her coffee cup. “I haven’t seen her since I was thirteen. The state took me away from her, put me in foster-care, except I was too old for most foster-homes. I went to a few, but they didn’t work out so I spent the remainder of my formative years in the guardian home as a ward of the state.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not at all. “I...I don’t know what to say.”
“There really is nothing to say. My mother was a prostitute, and by the time I was thirteen she was expecting the same from me. We lived in cardboard boxes in alleys and in the backseats of abandoned cars. Sometimes we’d find a vacant house, or rent a room where the roaches and bed bugs were thicker than the nicotine stains on the ceilings. Sometimes she’d be gone for days, and I’d have to scrounge for food in garbage cans.
“That was my life, Reid, until the authorities caught up to us and took me away. Something I don’t talk about because it’s in the past.”
“I’m so, so sorry.” Now he understood her need for independence. “But you’ve done an amazing thing. Most people—”
“Most people would have let it beat them down, but I didn’t. It’s no big deal. In fact, the only big deal I want to talk about now is that cheesecake. And if it’s as good as you say, I want two pieces. One for now, one to share with Megan tomorrow.”
For once he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to respond to her indifference. But maybe he didn’t have to. Keera had given him insight into the strongest woman...no, make that the strongest person...he’d ever known. But she wanted to take cheesecake back to Megan, which meant that maybe he’d be able to help her find an even deeper insight into that same person—the softer side of her. Because whether or not she wanted to admit it, it was there.
And whether or not he wanted to admit this to himself, he thought he might be a little in love. Or at the very least head-over-heels infatuated. “Waiter, seven pieces of cherry cheesecake, please. Two for here, five to go.” He glanced over at Keera, who once again wore her typical impassive expression. “One for you and me tomorrow when we give the girls their cheesecake.”
“Cheesecake two days in a row. Sounds decadent.”
“Decadent but good.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “And for what it’s worth, I like your strength. But you do have a gentler side, Keera. You just don’t let it out.”
“Because I don’t want it to get out. Softer sides are what get you hurt.”
“Or what make you human.”
She shrugged. “Softer sides aren’t all what they’re cracked up to be. Personally, I like being tough around the edges and all the way through.”
“But I see you, Keera Murphy. And I know better.”
“Then quit looking so close, Reid, because if you think there’s anything more there, you’re only seeing what you want to see.”
“Or what you want to project.”
She pulled her hand from his. “What I want to project is who I am. You know, what you see is what you get.”
“And what I see is someone who isn’t comfortable with her softer, gentler side.”
“What you’re seeing is someone who doesn’t have a softer, gentler side.”
“Is that a challenge?” he asked, smiling
“It’s a fact.”
“We’ll see,” Reid warned, as the waiter placed the cheesecake on the table. “We’ll just see.” Truly, he was looking forward to what he would see.
CHAPTER FIVE
“OK, YOU’RE LOOKING at it upside down,” Keera said. “Turn it over, take a look at the numbers, then tell me what you’re seeing.”
Gregory studied the digital thermometer for a moment, frowning at first as he pondered it, then finally smiled and pronounced, “Ninety-eight point six.”
“Good! Now, tell me what that means.” Megan was inside asleep, with
in earshot, and Keera was teaching today’s class outside, on the infirmary’s front steps. Her hospital without walls. Or, in this case, her classroom without walls. When she’d been homeless as a child, she’d loathed being outside. Now she couldn’t get enough of it.
“It means perfect,” Gregory said, smiling. “I don’t have a fever.”
“Excellent! So, what do you do next?”
“I write it down in my journal?”
“That’s right. But how?” she asked him.
“I write the date first, then the time, then the temperature.”
“Very good!” she exclaimed, actually feeling pride in his accomplishment. “I’m proud of you for learning so quickly. So now I think that tomorrow you’ll be ready to move on to taking your pulse. Remember what I said about that? That it’s the number of times your heart beats per minute.”
“And normal is from sixty to one hundred. I read that on the Internet last night.” Gregory beamed from ear to ear. “I texted my mom, told her I want to be a doctor like you and Doc Reid. Do you think I can do that, Doc Keera? Do you think I can be a doctor when I grow up?”
“I think you can be anything you want to be, Gregory. And if that’s a doctor, you’ll be a very good one.”
He stood up from the chair he’d brought outside and crossed over to Keera, who was sitting on a step, and gave her a great big hug. “That’s from my mom,” he said when he backed away. “When she texted me back she said she was happy, and to give you a hug for her.”
Surprisingly, Keera was touched by the simple gesture. She’d taught a little boy to take his temperature and it was like she’d taught him a valuable life skill that opened up a whole new world of possibilities for him. Who knew? Maybe it had.
Simple accomplishments and small steps to a child were life-changers, she suddenly realized. Too bad she hadn’t had an adult in her life to show her how that was...how anything was when she’d been Gregory’s age.
Somehow, fighting to survive took precedence over just about everything else because, back in the day, her small step had been a full belly and her simple accomplishment a place where she could take an honest-to-goodness bath. Of course, those life skills had taught her how to survive, hadn’t they? And they’d made her as tough as nails. All in all, not bad skills to have in the life she lived now. At least, that’s how she chose to look at it. But she was still very proud of Gregory.
“His mom called me a little while ago,” she told Reid a couple of hours later. “She was actually crying, she was so elated over a silly little thing like taking a temperature. It was...”
“Gratifying?” Reid asked her.
“I was going more for embarrassing. But I suppose it was gratifying.” She was sitting at the front work station in the infirmary. Reid had made coffee and he’d poured two cups for them. Megan was awake, sitting on the side of the bed, playing dolls with Sally and intermittently watching a video cartoon.
“When you wake up in the morning and don’t know if your child will survive the day, even the silly little things, like taking a temperature, can make you grateful.” Sitting down across from her, he took a sip of his coffee. “I had some pretty rough days one time when Emmie was having a particularly bad crisis. She’d been on chemo for a while, it was her second time, and she’d lost her hair. That, plus she didn’t have enough weight on her body to sustain her. She was always so cold. Nothing made her warm up, and she’d lie in bed, under the covers, and shiver so hard...”
He paused and swallowed hard, and Keera reached across to lay a comforting hand on his arm. But said nothing, because her words would only intrude on a moment that required nothing more from her than compassionate support.
Their eyes met for a moment, stayed locked on each other until Reid finally broke the silence. “Do you know how beautiful your eyes are?” he asked, totally out of the blue.
“My eyes?” she asked, keeping her hand in place.
“Beautiful eyes. Like Emmie’s are. But when she was sick...the only way I can describe them is hollow,” he continued after a moment. “They were hollow and so distant. It was like my little girl was slipping away from me, Keera. She was getting further and further away every time I looked into her eyes, and there was nothing I could do to get her back. I think that was the first time I really, truly thought I m-might lose her.” He pulled his arm away from her hand, and reached up and stroked her cheek.
“But I remember sitting there at her bedside one afternoon, watching her look out the window at a little bluebird that had landed on the ledge. It was looking in at her, and she laughed. Her eyes were bright again, so full of life just for that single moment—a moment that froze in time for me. And her laugh—I hadn’t heard it in months, but when she laughed, well, I can’t begin to describe how grateful I was to hear it. It gave me hope.
“For the first time in I don’t know how long I finally let myself think about a future, about how things were going to get better for her. A simple laugh from Emmie or making plans to be a doctor from Gregory, it’s the same thing. It’s about hope.
“And for a kid like Gregory it’s everything because he’s never made plans for the future, like most kids do. You know, things like when I grow up I want to be a firefighter or an astronaut. This was the first time his mother has ever heard that from him, and it’s because you gave him a different kind of hope for his life. With that one simple accomplishment. You showed him he can have a life.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured, quite touched. “In surgery I know I make a difference, like save a life, but it’s never quite so...I guess the word is profound. They thank me, I wish them well, and it’s all well and good. It’s what I’m supposed to do because I’m good at what I do. But it doesn’t affect me one way or the other.”
“Because you won’t let it affect you.”
“Because I don’t want it to affect me. If I were to get involved on the kind of personal level you seem to be involved with your kids on, I would lose objectivity. Become too vulnerable to things that could, ultimately, diminish my work as a surgeon. And I can’t afford to lose that objectivity because, for me, that’s what saves the lives of my patients.”
“It’s not your objectivity that saves lives, Keera. It’s you. Who you are.”
“Who I am is what I do, and I’m fine with where I am in that equation. You know, one equals the other. It’s good. I’m used to it, and it works for me like your life works for you.” She smiled as she gripped her cup. It was a sad, reflective smile, though. “But you really don’t like the way I live my life, do you?”
“I’m not judging you, Keera. Please don’t think I am. But I think the bigger question is: do you like the way you live your life? Because I’m not sure you do.”
“What I like is the result I get at the end of the day when my surgeries are over with and my patients are stable.”
“But isn’t there some loneliness in that result? Because without my girls, no matter what I’ve done for my patients, that’s all I’d have if Emmie and Allie weren’t there to remind me that I have a purpose outside being a doctor.”
“Being a doctor is my purpose, though. The only one I want. And the result I get doesn’t come with loneliness. More like...well, to use your word, I experience gratification because I enjoy my work, and I also enjoy the ability to make things turn out the way they should.”
“You’re talking about results, though, not people. Do you ever see your work in terms of the people involved? Or having something more than work-related gratification? Maybe being happy? See, for me, being a pediatrician makes me happy. Sure, it’s gratifying, but I want more than that. And being a pediatrician, working with kids the way I do, I find it.”
“Isn’t enjoyment the same as being happy, though?”
He shook his head. “I enjoy a good ice-cream cone, and maybe for the mom
ent or two I’m eating it I feel a certain sense of happiness. But that’s not the deep, abiding kind of happiness I want, or need, in my life.”
She paused, thought about his question for a moment, then shook her head. “Then if I don’t have the same kind of happiness in my life that you have in yours, does that make me shallow? Because in terms of my patients, good results do make me happy. I want all my patients to have a good result.
“But as personal involvements outside my professional life...if I did get involved personally then my objectivity would fly out the window, and I can’t afford that in order to go after that elusive happiness you’re talking about. People trust me for a certain outcome and it gets right back to how I’m gratified I can make that happen. Like it or not, that’s who I am.”
Reid reached across the table and laced his fingers through hers. “That’s who you think you are. But there’s more to you, Keera. There’s a genuine quality I don’t think you recognize, but I can see it and when you’re ready to see it, you will.”
“Or maybe I won’t. You’re the real deal, not me, and we can’t all be you, Reid.” She wanted to be offended by his comments and presumptions and especially by his intrusion, but there was nothing about Reid she could be offended by because she was right. He was the real deal. Genuine, caring. And she liked his touch, liked the way his friendly gestures toward her seemed so natural.
In fact, they seemed so natural she feared they could be become habit-forming. But she wasn’t reading anything into them other than friendship because that’s the kind of man he was—the kind who made friendly gestures, squeezed an arm, held a hand, without pretense or thought.
“You have a good life. Probably a great life. One most people would want. But that’s not me, Reid. If anything, I’m probably the most self-aware person you’ve ever met, and the one thing I’m most aware of is me. I am who I am, and I accept that, even for the things you see as limitations. Or character flaws.”
“Yet you must have had a romantic notion once, because you got married. And marriage is all about seeking happiness. You know, happily-ever-after.”
A Child to Heal Their Hearts Page 8