Baby Doctors

by Janice Macdonald

“Have you spoken to Matthew yet?” Rose asked.

  “He was in surgery. But I called him. Actually,” she tried for a casual tone, “we’re going out for a Frugals tonight.”

  Rose smiled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She drank some coffee, set her mug down. “You should look at your face. You look like Queen of the Hop.”

  Sarah laughed. “You need to update your terminoogy, Mom.” Through the window behind Rose, she watched a flock of seagulls circle, their cries faintly audible above the sound of traffic going down Front Street. “It was funny talking to him. All these years and it was as if we’d just seen each other the day before.”

  JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, Matthew woke to the sound of his beeper. Fumbling in the dark, he picked up the phone from the bedside table. “I’m not the one on call tonight,” he told the page operator. “I changed with Dr. Adams. You need to call him.”

  “Then there’s been some kind of mix-up,” the operator said. “I have you down, Dr. Cameron.”

  “Call Dr. Adams,” Matthew said. “I’ll come in if I have to, but try him first.” He hung up the phone, rolled over and closed his eyes. Just as he drifted off, the phone rang again. Adams couldn’t be reached. He sat up, switched on the light. The operator put him through to the E.R. The patient was a child with intestinal problems.

  “Give me ten minutes,” Matthew said. He dressed then, shoes in hand, padded silently across the hall.

  From his room, he heard his pager go again. He sprinted downstairs, scribbled a note to Lucy and went out in the dark cool night.

  Something had to give, he thought, as he drove through the deserted streets. As stubborn as he knew himself to be—and as Elizabeth was always quick to confirm—he understood the mess the system was in. If it was a business other than Compassionate Medical Systems coming to the rescue, he could go along with it, but Olympic Memorial, like a desperate spinster, attracted few suitors.

  Sure, he could rhapsodize about the joys of a small-town practice, the majesty of the Olympic Mountains, the achingly beautiful coastal trails. But none of the major players he’d hoped would offer their hand had shown much interest in what was also a debt-ridden, rural, blue-collar town with an aging population.

  The truth was, you had to know Port Hamilton to love it. He did. And Sarah did. Sarah. Who he used to think he knew better than anyone in the world and then realized he didn’t really know her at all. Still, it made him feel good to think of Sarah being back. If you were lucky, you had one, maybe two friendships that lasted a lifetime. Like a plant. A few leaves might fall off through lack of nurturing, but the roots never died. That was how it was with Sarah.

  He pulled into the parking lot and switched off the ignition. Through the glass doors of the E.R., he watched a nurse in blue scrubs. His beeper went off again.

  “Hey, Debbi.” The mother looked young enough to have been the patient. “What’s up with Alli tonight?”

  “She’s been throwing up and pooping all day.” Her face pale in the harsh overhead lighting, Debbi soothed the child lying on the examining table.

  “Well, let’s take a look at her.” The toddler, listless and pale, eyed Matthew as he examined her but didn’t make a sound: That didn’t reassure him. Healthier children tended not to submit so easily to being poked and prodded. “Haven’t seen you around for a while.”

  She bit her lip. “We moved out to the end of the peninsula. I met this guy and we bought some property together. He’s into a naturopathy, which worked pretty good on my asthma. Really good, in fact. But nothing was working with Alli and I got scared. He went to Olympia to some workshop and I decided I’d bring her in, just in case.”

  Matthew said nothing. Mainstream medicine clearly didn’t have all the answers, but there was an almost evangelical zeal about some so-called natural medicine proponents that he found alarming. He’d suspected kidney disease the last time he saw the child and suggested testing. He hadn’t seen her since.

  Now he reminded her again. “If it is kidney disease, it can be controlled with medication or even cured. But if it isn’t treated, it’ll just get worse until she ends up needing dialysis or a transplant.”

  Debbi’s face clouded. “How much would that cost?”

  He looked at the child. He didn’t know exactly what Debbi’s financial situation was, but he had an idea she was one of a number of patients in the practice who paid on a sliding scale according to what they could afford, which in almost all cases wasn’t very much.

  “We’ll work something out,” he said. “The important thing is that you shouldn’t delay it. Call my office tomorrow, okay, and set up an appointment.”

  But as he scribbled a couple of prescriptions and handed them to her, he doubted that she would follow through.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ELIZABETH WANTED to scream. Walking through Safeway with her mother and her daughter was more irritation than anyone should have to tolerate. Lucy was acting like the princess she thought she was. And Pearl, her mother, was the snoopy old Queen Mother.

  Which would make her, Elizabeth, the queen, except that no one ever treated her like one. She set a bottle of champagne in the cart.

  “I thought you weren’t drinking anymore,” Pearl said. “You fallen off the wagon?”

  “Champagne doesn’t count.”

  “Booze is booze,” Pearl pronounced.

  Lucy, who had gone off in her own direction as soon as they walked through the door, reappeared with a six-pack of socks. “Can I buy these?”

  “Do you mean, can I buy them?” Elizabeth asked.

  “If you can afford champagne,” Pearl said mildly, “I would think you could afford socks.”

  “That’s not the point.” Elizabeth said, but no one was listening.

  “Thank you, Grandma,” Lucy said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  There were days Elizabeth reflected, when everything Pearl said seemed like some sort of attack. Matt always said she was overly sensitive when it came to her mother. But Matt had always idealized Pearl. Once she’d asked him, only half joking, if Pearl was the real reason they got married. Pearl was the mother he’d never had. Pearl wasn’t weird and eccentric like Sarah’s mother. Pearl was sweet and kind and baked cookies. Right. Sweet and kind to everyone but me. Pearl would have preferred a daughter like Sarah. Pearl would have loved to talk about her daughter the doctor.

  “Who’s Sarah?” Lucy asked as though she’d just read Elizabeth’s mind.

  “Sarah who?” Elizabeth picked up a heart-shaped box of candy and stuck it in the cart for George, the guy she’d been seeing lately. Giving was as good as receiving. Kind of.

  “Those will all be on sale next week,” Pearl said. “Fifty percent off.”

  “Next week’s too late for Valentine’s,” Elizabeth said. George treated her like a queen. The way Matt used to. Before they were married.

  “Dad was talking on the phone to some woman called Sarah,” Lucy said. “Who is she?”

  “Lucy, I don’t know every woman your father talks to. Maybe it was a patient.”

  “He said she was an old friend.”

  Elizabeth looked at her daughter. “Sarah Benedict?”

  “How would I know?” Lucy said irritably. “They were talking for ages. And Dad was laughing.”

  “Sarah Benedict’s back,” Pearl said. “I had to see her mother for this little thing on my nose.” She turned her face to Elizabeth. “See? That little rough patch. Precancerous legion.”

  “Lesion,” Lucy said.

  Pearl beamed. “How did I get to have such a smart granddaughter?”

  “I take after my dad,” Lucy said.

  Elizabeth eyed the champagne. Typical of Sarah to breeze into town and not call. “Sarah and your dad grew up together,” she told Lucy. “Then she went off to medical school and married this doctor and they traveled all over the place. Then he got killed.”

  “Your mother broke them up,” Pearl told Lucy. �
�Your dad and Sarah.”

  “I did not.” Elizabeth glared at Pearl. “What kind of thing is that to say to your granddaughter?”

  “I’m not a child,” Lucy said.

  “I’m just stating the truth,” Pearl said. “Your dad and Sarah were joined at the hip.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mom.” She followed Pearl, wearing a snappy red pantsuit and a heart-shaped broach, down the paper-goods aisle, waited while her mother debated between Angel Soft and Dream Puff. “Lucy, go pick up some milk and let’s get out of here.”

  “He’s taking her out for a Frugals,” Lucy said.

  “Good for him,” Elizabeth said, although the idea of Matt and Sarah being a twosome again made her feel weird. Still, maybe it would be good for Matt to get a life instead of working all the time. He looked like hell these days. Like he hadn’t seen sunshine for ten years or something.

  When she told George that her ex-husband was a doctor, George figured she must have all kinds of money. A doctor’s wife, he kept saying. And then she had to explain Matt didn’t make a whole bunch of money, not that he couldn’t, just that he chose to work at the ends of the earth. What she hadn’t told George was that Matt also drove a truck. An old truck that didn’t even have a decent stereo system.

  They continued their procession down the aisles. Next stop: jams and jellies. Lucy had disappeared again and Pearl was holding a jar in each hand and studying them as though she was about to take a test. Elizabeth couldn’t help resenting how Pearl always took Lucy’s side and Lucy always took Matthew’s side and Matthew acted as though she, Elizabeth, never had an important thought in her life. That was the good thing about George. He made her feel interesting. And smart.

  Unlike Pearl, who was now yammering on about Sarah Benedict and how smart she’d always been and what was she doing back in Port Hamilton when she could live anywhere in the world and wasn’t it rude of Elizabeth not to even give her a call to welcome her home?

  Elizabeth ignored her. Sarah didn’t need a welcome-home party. She had Matt. Sarah had always had Matt. One night after they’d been making out down at the spit, steaming up the windows of Matt’s old truck, she’d asked him about Sarah.

  “You’re not two-timing with her, or anything?” And he’d laughed. “Oh, Sarah’s my friend,” he’d said. “We tell each other everything.”

  “So you’ll tell her about us?” she’d asked.

  “Of course,” he’d said.

  And maybe he had. But you certainly couldn’t tell from the way Sarah acted. Still, she and Sarah had never been close. Sarah always made her feel dumb. And it felt uncomfortable being around Matt and Sarah, the way they were always laughing and joking, finishing each other’s sentences. It was like they had their own secret world and nobody else knew their special language.

  Overhead the music turned into a Rod Stewart song. Suddenly tears started flowing down Elizabeth’s face. That’s what I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  AS SARAH WALKED OUT of Ming Dynasty with a container of mu shu pork, she ran into Curt Hudelson.

  “Loaded with chemicals.” Curt tapped his finger against the take-out carton and slowly shook his head. “You need to toss it.”

  “No way,” Sarah said. “My philosophy allows me a few guilty pleasures.”

  “Sorry if I annoyed your mother the other day,” he said. “Medical establishment and all that. It’s rather like trying to move a dinosaur.”

  “I wouldn’t call Rose a dinosaur,” Sarah said, slightly offended on her mother’s behalf. “Set in her ways about some things, but then she hasn’t had much exposure to alternative forms of practice.”

  Curt smiled. “Yes, well, I encounter that resistance all the time. Even with my own family. Debbi knows quite well what works, yet if I’m not constantly reinforcing it, she’ll slip right back into going to the doctor for every little thing. Her asthma is a case in point. She knows how to control it but insists on carrying that bloody inhaler.”

  “Well, I’m against taking unnecessary drugs,” Sarah said, “but asthma can be dangerous if it spins out of control.”

  “Exactly. Which is why I teach her self-hypnosis.”

  Sarah said nothing. Maybe it was the eyes, but there was something about him that made her vaguely uneasy. It was that whole balance thing, not swinging too far in either direction. She made a mental note to see if Matthew knew him.

  FORTUNATELY, Curt Hudelson’s disapproval of her mu shu pork didn’t interfere with her enjoyment of it. Later, sitting on the living-room floor, cushions piled up around her, the take-out carton in easy reach and John Coltrane on the stereo, she started unpacking the boxes she’d brought over from her mother’s house. The first one contained half-a-dozen photograph albums documenting the first sixteen years or so of her life. The earlier photos were on black paper, stuck into tiny gilt paper corners that she used to buy in small plastic bags from the Bay Variety store on Lincoln. They predated the sticky white boards with plastic sheets that she’d discovered by the time she was twelve. Taking on the role of family archivist had been an act of desperation. After a stack of the shoe boxes Rose always dumped pictures in fell from the closet shelf, spilling all over the floor. Sarah had decided to impose order.

  She speared a piece of pork with her chopstick and savored the taste.

  A storm had blown in during the night and stuck around. Wind rattled the windows, and rain lashed against the glass. Northwest weather. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. Missed everything from her past. Ted, who had left his native England as a child, seemed to have spent much of his adult life looking for a sense of place. She set the chopsticks back in the carton and carried it into the kitchen.

  “I want to feel that kind of connection,” Ted used to say when she would talk about growing up in Port Hamilton, about the generations of Benedicts who had practiced medicine there. “I want to know, deep inside me, that this is where I belong. I want to feel a part of the community, of the land. I want to know the people, I want them to matter to me personally. I want the kind of life you had.”

  As an adult, she had a less rose-tinted view of what that had been, but until she was fifteen, she really had thought everything about her life was perfect. The big red barnlike house on the bluffs above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Her attic bedroom, with the window seat where she’d watch the Olympic Princess carry passengers and their vehicles back and forth between Port Hamilton and Victoria, British Columbia. Curling up under blankets at night, gazing at the lights across the water, imagining a Canadian girl just like her staring at the lights from Port Hamilton.

  Rose would label it nostalgic yearning, but she had always felt so safe back then. Happy. Long golden summer days, perfumed by the red and pink roses that filled the backyard. Fourth of July parades and picnics on the beach. Time in endless supply, it had seemed. At Christmas, bundled up in coats and scarves, she would hold her parents’ hands as they walked into town for the Christmas-tree lighting on Main Street. Snowshoeing and skiing in the winter, bonfires on the beach in the summer and fireworks to light the dark sky.

  Best of all, there was Matthew, the boy down the street. Matthew the star of her childhood memories. Racing their bikes along the jetty that protected Port Hamilton’s deep harbor from the choppy waters of the straits, screeching and whooping, the wind in their faces. Walking home from the beach together, wet hair and sandy feet.

  On her thirteenth birthday, she’d scrambled over huge boulders to the rocky beach, Matt right behind her. With their backs against a rock, they’d watched the shorebirds and he’d told her the Latin name of the Black-bellied Plover.

  “Pluvialis squatarola,” he’d said, and she’d burst out laughing because she thought he was making it up. She’d looked it up later, of course, and he’d been right.

  If there was a time when Sarah hadn’t been in love with Matthew Cameron, she couldn’t remember it. It wasn’t puppy love or a crush or anything like that. She’d never carved their initials
into tree trunks or scribbled intertwined hearts on her schoolbooks. They’d never talked about it, this bond between them, never even held hands. She could hardly even explain it to herself, the deep, certain knowledge she’d had that she loved Matthew with every fiber of her being and that they would always be together.

  At least, she’d felt that way until Elizabeth moved into the house next door. Elizabeth, with her almond-shaped eyes and naturally rosy lips. Elizabeth, who knew how to talk and laugh with boys but still act like a girl. Her family was from Los Angeles and she wasn’t happy about moving to Port Hamilton, which she considered a hick town that she intended to leave as soon as she could. Elizabeth was always talking about how things were in Los Angeles: the way the girls dressed, the cool places kids hung out, the movie stars all over the place. And when Elizabeth talked, everyone listened, boys and girls.

  Before Elizabeth, Sarah had never given a moment’s thought to her appearance, but Elizabeth’s long silky hair made her painfully self-conscious about her own unruly curls, about the freckles that spattered her cheeks and nose and her skinny, boyish frame. More than that, Elizabeth forced her to acknowledge there really was a difference between the way boys and girls behaved.

  It was also while watching Elizabeth that Sarah first realized she lacked the ability to do what others girls seemed to do naturally. Elizabeth danced with her head at just the right angle to look up into a boy’s eyes. Elizabeth could walk into the Parrot Cage, where the kids hung out after school, and all the boys crowded round her, falling over themselves to get her attention. Matthew included.

  Before Sarah realized what was happening, it was no longer just Matthew and Sarah, the way it had always been. It was Matthew, Sarah and Elizabeth. And then Matthew and Elizabeth. One night he’d started telling her about Elizabeth. “She’s sweet and pretty and…” He’d shaken his head as though words alone weren’t adequate to sum up Elizabeth.

  “Wow,” Sarah had said, “sounds serious. Like you’re in love with her.”