by Emerson Rose
“Five and a half,” she says with a proud nod.
“Yeah, that’s right. I told her if she can’t keep up with a five-year-old, then maybe she should find a new job.”
“Then, she started to cry!” Tori adds obviously annoyed with the babysitter’s weakness.
“Yeah? She cried, huh? What a pussy,” I say, and Tori bursts out laughing. I can’t help but smile, she’s too damn cute, but I regret it right away when pain shoots through my face.
“Oh crap, you’re not supposed to smile, I forgot. Hey, Tori, we can’t be funny. Sash’s face hurts and stuff.”
“Daddy didn’t do a very good job, did he?” Tori says looking at me with worry.
“I did a fantastic job, what are you talking about?” Dr. Sullivan says opening the curtain.
“No, Daddy. She can’t smile, and her nose hurts,” Tori says.
“Bug, that’s what happens when you have surgery. It only lasts a week or so, and then Ms. Sasha will be back to her beautiful self again.”
I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard come out of his mouth. No arrogance, no annoyance, just a pure, sweet explanation with a compliment mixed in, I think.
“You said you make people pretty. That’s not pretty.” Tori points at my nose, and I’d do anything to be able to laugh. I love this kid and her honesty, she’s perfect.
“Now, that’s not a nice thing to say, Tori. Tell Sasha you’re sorry.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You’re right I’m sure it’s hideous today, but it’ll be better in a few days.”
“I wanna see you when you’re pretty again,” she says sliding off of Twyla’s lap.
“Princess, you can’t do that. Ms. Sasha is going home today. She can’t take the bandage off for a week.”
“Why? Zion’s sick, so I can come to work with you and see Ms. Sasha when she’s pretty.”
I wonder who Zion is, a relative, or a nanny, maybe?
“We will have to wait and see. Zion might be better next week.”
“Then she can bring me.”
I admire her spunk and determination. “I’m fine with it if she wants to, it’s no big deal,” I say, hoping to help her win this argument with her dad. But why?
Dr. Sullivan bends down to pick up his daughter. “We will have to see. I’m not making any promises, but you need to go hang out with Sophia again for a while so Sasha and Twyla can go home and rest. Say goodbye and thank you to Twyla for playing with you.”
Tori waves her little hand and kisses her daddy on the cheek. He opens the curtain and motions to someone on the other side. “Take her to Sophia and tell her not to lose her again,” he says in a stern voice.
“Yes, sir, right away,” the disembodied voice says, and Tori disappears.
“I apologize. We had a little run-in this morning, and she had to come into work with me.”
“Don’t apologize, she’s awesome. I’d love to have her here next week when we take off the bandages.”
“Her nanny is in the hospital so there is a chance you might get your wish.”
“Oh, I hope she’s going to be all right.”
“She will now that I know she’s a diabetic. It’ll take some time, though. So, do you have any questions about follow-up care? You have your appointment made for next week, correct?”
“Yes, it’s on Wednesday, and no, I don’t have any questions. I’m sure Twyla has the paperwork, and I’m off work all week or maybe forever if I don’t hurry up and get back.”
“Did you file for FMLA?”
“I couldn’t. I went part-time a year ago so I could help a friend at her flower shop. I didn’t qualify.”
“Well, it sounds like this is the time to look for another line of work like you said earlier.”
Another line of work? I never told him I want to quit selling shoes, did I? I mean I have wanted to for a long time, but I wouldn’t tell him that.
He looks at me narrowing his eyes. “Do you remember that conversation?”
“No, what did I say?” Oh God, I hope I didn’t say something stupid.
“Just that you’d like to explore other opportunities in life. Oh yeah, and you called me Daddy and asked me to make you pretty.” He bites his lip to keep from laughing, and I start to choke and cough but stop when it hurts.
“No way did I say that.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and smiles. “Yes way, you did. Right after you met Tori and had some anesthesia.”
I close my eyes. I can’t look at him, I’m so embarrassed. I unintentionally added fuel to his egotistical fire, and now he’s going to watch me burn.
“It’s no big deal. People say a lot of crazy things when they’re on medication. I’m used to it. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
“Maybe not, but I am. Did I say anything else stupid?”
He reaches out and gently places his hand on my upper arm nodding his head. “No, that’s it, pretty mild when you think about it.”
“What’s the worst thing anyone’s said?” I ask, curiosity taking over my embarrassment.
“Hmm, well there was the time a woman going in for breast augmentation asked me if I would suck on her nipple when she had larger breasts. She would have been mortified to know she said that, but I never mentioned it.”
“Holy shit, you’re sure you aren’t keeping anything from me?”
“Why? What do you think you might have said?”
“Nothing.”
“Another time a man who was having a nose job and facelift told me he was gay and asked me not to tell his wife. That was years ago, though. He’s now divorced and remarried to a very attractive man.”
“Wow, is it like truth serum or something?”
“It can be like that. Some people are more sensitive to it than others. Don’t worry, I would tell you if you said something else, promise.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh wait, you did mention that you love kids, but that’s it.”
I do? Okay, now I’m rethinking the truth serum thing. I like kids, but I’m not especially wild about them.
“Yeah, kids are all right, I guess.”
“You made it sound like they were a lot better than all right. Maybe it was your subconscious telling you to be a teacher?”
“Oh God, no. I’d be the worst teacher, no way.”
“I don’t know. You seemed pretty good with my daughter.”
“I didn’t teach her anything, and I was only in the same room with her for ten minutes.”
“I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Sasha. My Tori has an anxiety disorder that stems from a break-in at our house. She’s very particular about who she likes, and she likes you, no questions asked, no security checks, nothing. Now I know you don’t know her, but she’s an excellent judge of character. If she likes you right off the bat, and I don’t have to call the FBI for a background check, I can pretty much guarantee you’re a natural with kids.”
“Was she hurt?” I know that’s not the point he’s trying to make, but as soon as he said break-in, I stopped listening. Tori and I have something terrible in common.
“No, she was fine, but she’s never gotten over it. As a result, she’s extremely cautious and wary of strangers, and she has a special relationship with the security panel at our house.” He chuckles, and I look away. “Hey, are you okay? I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. How much longer before I can go home?” I’m exhausted, and I don’t want to think about Tori and her anxiety disorder anymore. It brings up too many of my painful memories.
“You should be good to go now if you want. I can have your nurse bring your discharge orders in and a wheelchair.”
“Yes, please. I’d like to go home.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a week then. Take it easy, stay down for the next couple of days, and call the clinic if you have any questions.”
“I will.” He turns to leave, and I watch him go thinkin
g how much more I like him today than I did yesterday.
I’m glad Twyla didn’t let me keep my avocado nose.
Sometimes life gives you a friend who knows best.
6
Xander
It’s been a long, strange day from calling an ambulance in the wee hours of the morning to taking my five-year-old to work to having a beautiful patient call me Daddy—weird, weirder, and weirdest.
And it’s not over yet. It’s 10:00 p.m., and I’m lying in my bed with Tori snuggled up under my arm watching Dallas reruns on Hulu. The show isn’t exactly appropriate material for a five-year-old but compared to the things on TV today, it’s tame.
“Daddy, Zion turns the channel a lot when we watch, but you don’t, how come?” she asks in a sleepy voice. I know Zion, and she’s probably been channel surfing during the inappropriate scenes. Maybe I should be paying better attention to what’s going on.
“I’m sorry, bug. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You thinkin’ bout my Zion?” I love that she calls her my Zion like she’s hers and hers alone. She’s right. I am thinking about her and also our situation. We went to the hospital tonight on our way home from the clinic. She is very sick, more so than I originally thought. I was right about the DKA, and she will be in the hospital for at least a week correcting her blood sugar. She looked weak and defeated. I wished we didn’t have to leave her there alone, but a hospital is no place for Tori.
Zion has no family in the U.S., but she has a few good friends, and they visited her yesterday along with us. I told her not to worry about her job or Tori. I lied and said I have it all worked out when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m screwed. I have no temporary sitter, no nanny, and Tori trusts no one. I have four brothers. David lives in Texas and is married and has a kid. Ethan lives in Seattle, he’s a lawyer and wouldn’t know the first thing about taking care of a kid. Jacob is a Marine, and he can do just about anything including taking care of a kid because he has one of his own, but he’s overseas right now. Last, but not least, is Dean who is also capable of caring for a child but after making a gazillion dollars with his cell phone business, he picked up and moved to an island in the Caribbean.
Star, Tori’s biological mom has relatives, but they are all trash like her, and no one from that family will ever get close to my girl again.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to break down and hire someone temporarily tomorrow. Tori is going to hate it, but I have no choice. I can’t keep dragging her with me to work—it’s disruptive for the patients, and it’s not a properly stimulating environment for a child. I can’t expect my nurses to watch her and do their work. I know after today, that’s just an accident waiting to happen.
“Bug, we need to talk about something. Daddy has to hire a nanny to come and help us until Zion gets home from the hospital. It isn’t permanent, just for a week or two until Z is feeling better. The new nanny might even be able to help Zion when she comes home from the hospital for a little bit, and then you’ll have two nannies. That’s cool, isn’t it?”
She doesn’t answer. I look down and find her eyes are closed, and I hear the sound of her soft breathing telling me my speech has fallen on deaf ears. Great, now I’m going to have to do that all over again tomorrow.
I gently move her over to the empty side of my bed and turn off the TV saying goodnight to J.R. and his brother, Bobby, under my breath. What a blast from the past it’s been watching this show. I was just a kid in the seventies when it started, and my parents never missed an episode. Tori must have inherited that from them somehow.
I wish my mom and dad could have known Tori. They would have loved her and spoiled her rotten. They died in a car accident when I was finishing my first year of college. It was a hit and run, and they were trapped for hours in their car upside down in a ditch. The doctors couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether or not they would have lived if the driver of the other car had stopped to call 911. I didn’t care, they were gone, and that’s all that mattered to me. Both of them on the same day, gone just like that—poof. One morning Mom was calling to tell me she loved me, and the next I was watching my grandma sob while she spoke with a funeral planner.
I felt alone. I had my brothers, but they had their own lives and were spread out all over the U.S. I wanted my mom to be waiting for me at the front door when I came home for holidays. And I needed my dad to remind me that I wasn’t the same kid who got beat up every day after school for being a nerd with a big nose anymore.
My love of plastic surgery started when I was a junior in high school. My parents had been saving, unbeknownst to me, so that I could have a nose job. Ever since I could remember, I was teased for my big nose. Dad said my great-grandpa Phillip had a nose like mine. I never met Grandpa Phillip, but I cursed him every morning when I looked in the mirror and again every afternoon after school when I was lying face down in the dirt of the playground getting beat up and teased mercilessly.
I went for my first appointment, and when I met Dr. Salisbury, I fell in love with the idea of being an all-powerful physician. Dr. Salisbury could mold and shape someone into a different person. He was a god, not to mention he looked like he stepped out of a fashion magazine, and he drove a Porsche.
I was hooked.
Over Christmas break during my junior year, life changed for me. I climbed into my old Monza listening to a jerk yell, “Don’t breathe up all the air, Sullivan!” followed by, “Hey, Sullivan, who mows your nose hairs?”
I was used to the taunting, and the beatings ended my sophomore year when I had a growth spurt ending the year taller than every guy in my class. I had come to terms with the fact that people only saw my nose when they looked at me, and that’s just how it was.
But it wasn’t. When I came back to school after Christmas break with a perfect nose, chiseled jawline, and contact lenses, everything changed. It was like magic. I stepped out of my car and girls were doing double takes, guys were frowning and whispering, and a few teachers questioned who I was. From that moment on, I wanted to do what Dr. Salisbury had done for me and others. I wanted to rescue the misfits, the discarded, and the freaks of nature and make them gorgeous so they could flip their middle finger to the cruel and judgmental world.
And that’s what I did.
Years later when I was in med school, I learned that being good looking could be a curse, too. Teachers didn’t take me seriously anymore, women wanted to sleep with me, men did, too, for that matter, and no one gave a shit about how smart I was.
For months, I kept my head down, stopped dressing nice, wore grungy jeans and hoodies, let my beard grow, quit working out, and stopped dating altogether. If you didn’t know me, you would have thought I had fallen into a deep depression. I wasn’t depressed, though. I wanted people to appreciate me for more than my appearance.
A year later, I realized it wasn’t making a difference when my advanced anatomy professor cornered me after class and offered herself to me for an A in the class. I remember looking down at her and thinking this stupid bitch doesn’t even know I’m already getting an A in her class—she just wants to sleep with me.
I fucked her out of spite and started dressing better again, took out a loan for a brand new Mercedes, and never looked back. I became a manwhore.
If that’s how the world was going to see me, then I figured I would give them what they wanted. Being a player in med school was challenging but not impossible—hook-ups in the sleep rooms at the hospital, study dates that turned into sex, one-night stands galore—it was great.
Then I graduated and started practicing medicine, and that’s when the women started knocking down my door. It turns out, making women feel more beautiful is quite the aphrodisiac. I never wanted for a sexy woman on my arm, sometimes two, for years, and that’s how I liked it.
Then there was Star. Star is a poor con woman from the wrong side of the tracks who saw me as her golden ticket out. Star came to see me originally for brea
st augmentation paid for by her pimp I later learned. I took her out as I did many of my patients, and after a couple of weeks, she got pregnant. She had been poking holes in my condoms. She set about worming her way into my life permanently, and I started dreaming of ways she might accidentally die after she gave birth to my daughter.
Star was not mother material, wife material, or even human material. She had more schemes up her sleeve than Houdini, and she tried them all. It didn’t take long for her to get sick of being a mother—like a week to be exact—and that was fine with me.
I gave her a wad of cash, she signed over her parental rights, and she promised to go away forever. But she didn’t go away forever. She showed up when Tori was three years old and tried to kidnap her which began Tori’s serious fight with anxiety.
Star is still out there running from the law. Tori and I are still in here waiting for her to get caught.
Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
7
Sasha
“You cool if I go back to work tomorrow?” Twyla asks handing me a cup of water and a pain pill.
“Yeah, I’m fine. You didn’t have to stick around this long anyway.”
“I wanted to. It was a good excuse to get out of work and relax for a few days.”
“I have to go to the store today and let them know I’m almost ready to come back. These few days off might have been relaxing for you, but I’m going nuts sitting around the apartment watching TV all day.”
“That’s because you don’t have to climb up and down a pole and flash your tits and your beaver at sleazy men for a living. I guarantee if you do what I do, you’d enjoy some time off.”