One Good Friend Deserves Another

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Were it any other patient making comments on her looks, Dhara might have made a diplomatic but pointed remark before launching into a discussion of the patient’s medical situation. But the man lying in the bed with a sweat-stained fedora on his belly was old Mr. Rivers. Those words, spoken in his whiskey-roughened voice, came across as echoes of a courtlier past.

  “Glad to see you in good humor, Mr. Rivers.” Dhara picked up the chart hooked at the end of the bed. “You’re feeling better today?”

  “Dewey, girl. Just call me Dewey. Everyone else does.” He lifted the fedora off his stomach and gestured to the man seated at his bedside. “Ain’t that right, Curtis?”

  The grizzled saxophone player—a fixture in the room since Dewey had been brought here to recover from the week’s multiple procedures—lifted his face from fiddling with his sax. “Dewey it is,” he said, as he glanced at Dhara over his Coke-bottle glasses, “to everyone but them who owe him money.”

  Dewey laughed, a deep chuckle that weakened into a choking cough. “Now it’s me who owes everyone else money and that won’t work out so well for them, now will it, Dr. Pitalia?”

  “There’s still some juice in your motor.” She scanned the chart for the latest EKG results, electrolyte levels, and vitals. “We’ll just have to see. You may be up and playing the trumpet before you know it.”

  “Yup,” he said, nodding against the pillow. “Surely I will, in a choir of angels.”

  Curtis waved a finger at him. “Maybe you should brush up on the fiddle, boy, just in case the devil’s coming your way.”

  “Ain’t no devil coming my way.”

  “Sure about that? I was with you in Juárez, you remember.”

  Dewey’s face split in a grin, showing a full set of strong, tobacco-yellowed teeth, a grin that squeezed his eyes into merry crescents and made his chest bob with quiet laughter. Curtis laughed too, a deep-chested rumble. Dhara gazed at both of them with affection, the power of their friendship a palpable thing.

  She laid the chart at the end of the bed and slipped the buds of her stethoscope in her ears. “Well, let’s hear what’s going on in there, shall we?”

  “Oh,” Dewey said, “here comes my favorite part of the whoooole day.”

  “You’re a dog, Dewey.”

  “Mm-hmm, maybe I am, but you’d be thinking the same thing if you had this sweet-smelling child with the glossy, black hair leaning over you.”

  “Maybe I ought to have a heart attack myself then. You always did hog the stage.”

  Dhara listened more to their banter than she did to the murmuring rumble, whooshing hisses, and telltale pitches of Dewey’s straining heart. This sort of examination wasn’t really necessary—she already knew what was going on inside him from the sheaf of lab tests attached to his chart—but patients, especially the older ones, expected it. And there was no gauging the power of simple human touch.

  Dewey had an old-tobacco scent, though he claimed he hadn’t had a cigar in years. It was as if the lazy blue smoke of too many late-night jazz clubs had cured his skin. During the weeks he’d been in the hospital, she’d learned that he, Curtis, and a variety of other aging musicians now living in a brownstone on 136th Street had once played in all the best clubs in New York. Dewey liked to boast that he’d learned the trumpet at the knee of Satchmo, though Curtis called him on it, saying that seeing the great man play one night at the Apollo didn’t count for nothing.

  She took the opportunity while listening to his heart to compare what she’d read on the chart to what she heard—noting the gurgle of a chamber not completely emptying, the shhhhh of backflow from problems with a valve, the odd and slightly off-beat, scrambled electrical signals. His heart was managing all right, but mostly by improvisation.

  Dhara straightened and pulled the stethoscope from her ears. “I’m going to scale back on your meds a bit, Dewey.” She picked up the chart and clicked her pen. “I’ll send the nurse in a little later.”

  “Fine, fine, Doctor.” His attention had already drifted to the shining brass instrument in Curtis’s hands. “Curtis, why don’t you play the lady something bluesy? Something slow, something real Yardbird. That’s ol’ Charlie Parker, Dr. Pitalia.”

  Curtis swung his sax around and fixed his lips on the mouthpiece. The plaintive sound of a soulful riff filled the room. Dhara bowed her head to the chart, trying to find some hope in the numbers blurring before her. No matter how many times she scanned the test results, she could see only one conclusion. When a heart labored through so many hard playing, hard working years, the options for treatment become fewer and fewer.

  Dhara hooked the chart at the end of the bed and lingered a moment, watching the two men. This kind of devotion was a lovely gift. She mostly saw it among elderly spouses—a husband joking about his attempts to cook for himself, or a wife teasing her ailing husband about how she was going to employ a brawny young man to change the lightbulbs once he was gone. All the while, thrumming beneath their banter, shimmered a gentle, loving vibration, the same sort of devotion she sensed in this very room.

  It might be a few days, it might be a few weeks, but with Curtis playing the saxophone at his side, Dewey would probably have a gentle passing.

  And for reasons she couldn’t completely understand, the thought of Desh drifted through her mind. She remembered the way he lobbed the ball to the end of the bocce court in one fluid, graceful motion. She thought of the way he offered his arm when she hopped about, trying to get gravel out of her sandal. She thought about when she looked up and found his deep, kind gaze resting upon her.

  Her beeper went off, startling her. Curtis didn’t flinch in his playing. Dhara glanced at the device hooked onto the pocket of her lab coat and saw that a patient in distress had come into the emergency room. With a nod to both men, she made a silent exit.

  She took the elevator to the lower floor and walked briskly to the nurses’ desk.

  “Dhara!”

  She turned to find a woman leaping out of a chair. The redhead, wearing pink fluffy slippers and an oversize Spock T-shirt, charged across the hall to meet her.

  “Kelly.” Dhara’s mind shifted into emergency mode and sifted swiftly through the possibilities. “Is it Wendy—Marta?”

  “No, no—”

  “Someone you work with?”

  Kelly seized Dhara’s arms, her face stricken. “No, it’s not any of them.”

  And Dhara stared into Kelly’s wild blue eyes, watching her expression as Kelly’s mouth opened and closed with indecision.

  And in an instant of terror, Dhara knew.

  Cole.

  Dhara strode into the flurry of activity, slipping into professional mode to keep herself from trembling. Surrounded by nurses, residents, and the attending ER doctor, Cole lay on a hospital bed. His appearance was just as Kelly had described it—as gray as an old flounder gasping for air at the bottom of a boat.

  Dhara let instinct guide her as she took her place among the staff swarming around his bed. She ran her fingers over his brow to get his attention—and tried not to think about how many times she’d done that before, in different circumstances, loving the way his hair resisted her efforts to straighten between her knuckles.

  His panicked eyes rolled to her, and she imagined she saw recognition in the hazel depths.

  The attending doctor presented her with rapid-fire particulars, dragging her attention away from his face. “Patient came in complaining of shortness of breath, palpitations, pains in his chest, in obvious distress. EKG presented with atrial arrhythmia and heart rate at 210 bpm. Administered Versed and cardioverted…”

  She listened, her fingers still in his hair.

  Our children will have your curls and my color—little urchins with curly black hair.

  “…blood gas level, complete blood panel, chest X-ray being developed right now. We’ll be taking him to ICU to wait for the tests.”

  Dhara glanced back at Cole. His eyes were still fluttering. He’d just woken
up from the Versed, confused at the activity. She considered what she knew. Considered whether it was within ethical bounds to use her personal knowledge of the patient to order a few tests beyond the ordinary. And then, with one eye on the jagged pattern of his EKG, she beckoned to the nurse gripping a chart and a fistful of blood vials destined for the lab.

  Dhara wrote an order for one more test.

  Cole rested peacefully in the ICU. Dhara had taken the opportunity to return to the waiting room to reassure Kelly that he’d come through the crisis. She’d promised to tell her more when the test results came in. Now Dhara slipped her way back quietly, needing a moment now that the crisis had passed, to look at him not as a doctor but as a woman.

  The first moment she’d ever laid eyes upon Cole Jackson it was fall of her junior year, and the enormous sycamore in front of the library had just begun to drop its yellow leaves. She’d been distracted by a physics problem, mulling it over as she kicked her way home. She probably would have walked right by the students playing Frisbee had a Frisbee not careened its way across the grass and scraped to a stop at her feet.

  She’d looked up to see Cole loping toward her, wearing a pair of jeans that sagged on his hips and sporting a faded T-shirt from some Portland bluegrass festival. The breeze had smelled like apple cider as it caught under his hair. Only then could she see him clearly—a lean face, a wispy beard darkening the line of his jaw. His smile had widened as he bent over and retrieved the Frisbee. Then he’d straightened, revealing a pair of laughing hazel eyes.

  Now he lay gray against the pillow, his hair flattened with sweat, looking older than his thirty-seven years. He was still hooked up to an IV and an EKG, and the machine whirred quietly beside him. As she’d focused on working on his body today, one part of her mind had noted the familiar landmarks—the tight constellation of freckles on his chest, the little mole that marked him just to the northwest of his navel—but they’d paled in comparison to how he’d changed. It had been nearly a year and a half since they’d broken up, and Cole was a man profoundly altered.

  He shifted his head on the pillow. His lids fluttered open, and he fixed his eyes on her. Though woozy from the sedative, Cole started, and something bright passed through his eyes—something hopeful and exuberant.

  He said, “Can’t resist me, can you?”

  She pushed away from the door frame and wandered deeper into the room, drawn by his raspy voice. “I thought I’d see how you’re feeling.”

  “Oh, you can’t hide behind your medical degree. I know you too well.” His shoulders tensed as he tried to push himself higher in the bed. “I know exactly why you’re here.”

  “I’m here,” she said, crossing the space that separated them to place a gentle hand on his shoulder, “to make sure you don’t overexert yourself.”

  “It’s my classic good looks.” Lines from the oxygen mask still lingered around his mouth. “My raw, animal magnetism. Admit it, I’m irresistible.”

  She noted that sweat glistened on his skin and smeared remnants of gel remained on his chest where they’d cardioverted his heart back into rhythm. She looked into his bloodshot eyes, rimmed with purple shadows, and felt a rush of admiration. It was just like Cole—even in a situation such as this—to act devil-may-care. She could tell that it took all of his energy to maintain the teasing expression on his face.

  She reached behind him to adjust his pillow. “You’re right, of course,” she said, playing along. “I’d best alert the nursing staff to be on guard.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about those naughty nurses.”

  “Might not be necessary.” She pressed the lever to elevate the top part of the bed. “Your magnetism may be confined solely to cardiologists.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, there’s nothing sexier to a cardiologist, you know, than seeing a patient stumble in clutching his chest.”

  He made a little grimace as he clutched the bed rails to shift upright. “I suppose there are better ways to get a woman’s attention.”

  “You think?”

  “Like throwing a Frisbee at her feet.”

  She turned her attention blindly to the lever, trying not to be distracted by the memory of an apple-cider wind.

  “Or,” he added, “tugging on that glorious hair of yours.”

  She stilled. She met his assessing eyes. Among the beeping of the monitor and the whirr of the machinery, the memory shimmered in the small space that separated them. The memory of when he’d wrapped her long braid about his forearm as they made love.

  His shoulder flexed as if he were about to reach up and touch her, but Dhara reacted instinctively, and she shuffled back a fraction. Embarrassed by the reflex, she toggled the lever a little more, and then, satisfied with the height, took a full step away from the bed.

  Cole dropped his hand back to the covers, and his smile turned wistful. “I have a confession.”

  She shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat, bracing herself for what he might say.

  “On that table, in the ER,” he said, “I thought that you were an angel.”

  “Oh.” She could hear the relief in her own voice and then tried to gloss over it with a shrug. “Funny, I get that all the time.”

  “But then you ripped those electrodes off me.”

  Below the low edge of his hospital gown, a few welts glowed an angry red. “Sorry. We move fast in the ER.”

  “It got me worried that I might be going to a different place. Someplace where there are no angels.”

  “Don’t.” Dhara paused to gather her scattered wits. She really had to be more professional in front of her patient, even if the patient used to be her lover. “You’re going to be fine, Cole.” Even speaking the words, she knew they might be lies, for a quick glance at his EKG showed that all was not yet in perfect order. “You’re in good hands in this hospital. The best of hands.”

  “Clearly.”

  “It’s very important,” she added, “that you get some rest. Your heart has been under a terrible strain.”

  “I love when you go all doctor on me.”

  “Please don’t do this. This wasn’t your finest moment.”

  “Can’t knock it. It did get me here, with you standing beside me. While I lie in bed practically naked.”

  A slow, creeping heat rose up her throat. He shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t remind her of the many times she’d crawled naked into bed beside him after a long weary shift, brushed full-length against his hard body, and gave herself up to him. It wasn’t fair to remind her of the good times they’d had and then blithely ignore all the bad stuff that had pulled them apart. The bad stuff that had landed him in her ER.

  “Here’s the real question, Cole.” She drew in a shaky breath. “This drama certainly got my attention. Did it finally get yours?”

  And there it was, the eight-hundred-pound beast in the room, the roaring monster that had destroyed their relationship. She saw the struggle in the spastic twitch at the corner of his eye, in the swift dimming of his self-​deprecating amusement, in the way he suddenly took excessive interest in the fraying hem of the hospital linens. She saw it, too, in the unhealthy tone of his skin, and the fragility of him—​in part because of her own failure to stop this from happening.

  And then that monster, in all its thrashing, flicked its sharp tail back at her, lashing her with the usual hefty dose of guilt. Maybe she should have stuck around longer. Maybe she gave up on him too soon. Maybe she took the easy way out, shucking him and his boatload of issues behind.

  She remembered it hadn’t seemed easy at the time.

  “You know,” he said, his voice gravelly and rough. “I didn’t plan this.”

  “I know.” She resisted the urge to fix the covers sliding down his chest. “Nobody gives himself such a serious arrhythmia on purpose.”

  “I mean, of all the hospital emergency rooms in all the towns in all the world, I didn’t mean to walk into yours.”

  “Ye
ah, well.” Her voice was doing a strange, breathy thing, as she remembered when they’d watched Casablanca one late night when the heat had gone off in her building, burrowed on the couch under a mountain of blankets. “I guess you didn’t have much choice.”

  “Hey, our little redheaded friend can bark orders like a general when she wants to. Very colorfully. She wasn’t going to bring me anywhere but here.”

  A stray thought wandered through her mind, of why he was with Kelly, and why Kelly hadn’t mentioned that she’d still been in touch with Cole. Especially in light of all that was going on with Dhara’s marriage.

  “Can’t say I’m not glad,” he added. “Glad that you were on call. Glad to see you again.” His chest rose as he took a deep breath. “Damn, Dhara. It’s always like this with you. I don’t see you for a while, and then I do…and I’m dreaming of angels.”

  She looked away to the scuffmarks on the tips of her sensible shoes, while the heat that warmed her cheeks now burned all the way to her brow. Thank God her skin didn’t betray her, as Kelly’s or Wendy’s might. Surely Cole couldn’t see how his words were affecting her, digging up a whole heap of emotions she’d tried to bury.

  “I was starting to wonder,” he said softly, “if I’d ever get the chance to see you again.”

  “Of course, you would have. College reunions. Wendy’s wedding. We have too many mutual friends. Too much history. We’d cross paths eventually.”

  She’d been bracing herself for that. The awkwardness of the inevitable first postbreakup encounter. What was she going to say? What was she going to do? How was she going to introduce him to Desh? How was she going to handle it, blithely, calmly, and with sincere hope that he’d found someone else, someone better for him, someone with more patience, more backbone, someone not so woven in to a wild tapestry of a family?

  She hadn’t planned on seeing him struggling for breath on a hospital gurney.

  “Yeah, well, after this tumble into the light, there may be no more college reunions or weddings for me—”

  “There you go again, Mr. Theater Minor.”

  “Hey, it’s true. Which is why I can’t think of a better time than now to say I’m sorry.”