Thursday Afternoons

by Tracey Richardson

  Terrible, Amy thinks, but she shrugs and says it was okay.

  Ellen shakes her head. “Mine totally sucked.”

  Ellen’s candid answer makes Amy sit up a little straighter. “Oh? I’m sorry to hear that. Actually, mine wasn’t so great either.”

  Okay, now what? How far should they go with this little conversation? Amy wants to tell Ellen about all of it—her fellow surgeon, Atkinson, how’s he’s been unraveling and now the whole department is in chaos. And then there’s her young gunshot patient, Jeffrey, and how touch-and-go that situation was. He’s still recovering in ICU, too fragile to be transferred to hospital in London yet, but with luck he’ll be able to make the trip in a few days. Of course, his future is still bleak, and she worries for him. Underscoring everything is the constant concern for her elderly parents. Yesterday they rejected the idea—again—of trying out a retirement home. But she won’t say any of this to Ellen.

  “How about this?” Ellen says. “Tell me one thing that happened this week that made you smile or feel good.”

  You, Amy wants to say but is too chicken. “That’s easy. My best friend Kate, she’s, like, the DIY queen of everything. She made these fabulous CBD-infused bath bombs for me. Lavender and tangerine. I almost didn’t get out of the tub last night.”

  “Oh, God, I think I would die for one of those right now.”

  “I can bring you a couple next week.”

  “Really?” There’s a look of surprise in Ellen’s eyes, as though she’s amused that they’re talking about something as ordinary as bath bombs.

  Well, Amy thinks, I can’t quite believe it either. “Okay, your turn. Something that made you feel good this week.”

  “That’s easy because there was only one thing. The new book I started reading. It’s soooo good. So of course I had to go and order all the other books the author’s written.”

  Their drinks arrive and they clink glasses, engage in a little game of rapid-fire questions and answers. Favorite book, favorite author, favorite movie, favorite actor, favorite music, favorite city. They’re so caught up in the conversation that when their server presents them with a note from the desk clerk saying their room is ready, they don’t immediately act on it.

  “How did you get that scar?” Amy bravely asks. “The one over your left eyebrow.”

  “Field hockey. Got clipped by the ball. Bled like crazy. Hurt like crazy too.”

  “You played field hockey?”

  Ellen looks amused by Amy’s surprise. “Many years ago. In university. It happened in the provincial championship game. Had to sit out until they stitched it up because you’re not allowed on the field if you’re bleeding. Boy, I was some pissed off about that.”

  The vision of Ellen—tough, strong, athletic, competitive—is an epiphany that leaves Amy nearly blind with desire. And admiration. “Let’s go, shall we?”

  Ellen smiles, stands up, and there’s an instant charge in the air—the anticipation of shedding clothes, of skin sliding on skin, of lips and tongues dancing over soft, wet places. Amy knows that she’ll come the instant Ellen touches her.

  Ellis is so wrung out from pleasure that she doesn’t want to move. Sheets are tangled around them. The smell of sex lingers in the air. Abby is on her side, curled up against her. Ellis can’t see Abby’s eyes, but she can feel her looking at her.

  “That was so good,” Ellis murmurs, thinking Abby must be staring at her because she’s waiting for confirmation that the sex was, as usual, off the charts. Which it was.

  “You,” Abby says in a voice low and thick with wonder and want, “are so lovely.” She runs her fingers through Ellis’s hair in that unmistakable way that says she’s in full admiration mode. In awe of her. The urge to grab Abby’s hand and hold it nearly overwhelms Ellis, and she silently commands her thumping heart, which she is sure will betray her any minute, to settle down. Abby can’t possibly be in awe of her. Can’t possibly be falling for her. It’s the sex talking, she tells herself, because it’s impossible that this is becoming something more. Ellis isn’t so good at the something more with women.

  “And you know what else?” Abby says with a smile in her voice.

  Ellis turns her head to stare into those sex-hazed eyes that are as tender as a caress, the color of a cloudy sky post-storm. She can’t even remember the last time a woman looked at her like she was worthy of being worshipped. “What?”

  “You’re a nice person, you know that?”

  Ellis almost laughs. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? I’m a pretty good judge of character. And you are a lovely person. I can see it in your eyes and I can feel it in your touch. I’m glad to know you.”

  Ellis’s voice is harder-edged than she intends. “You don’t know anything about me.” You don’t know how I walked out on Nancy and Mia because I didn’t want to be tied down, because I valued my career more than I valued them. You’ve never seen me walk into a boardroom with a stack of severance checks as high as the ceiling.

  Oh, the things she’s done…if Abby knew, she wouldn’t be here right now, and she certainly wouldn’t be looking at her like she’s something special. The fact that Ellis is trying to make amends with Mia, that after the current contract she’s on, she’s going to look for something more stable, more noble, less transient, vicious…well, Abby doesn’t know about any of that. And even if she did, it wouldn’t undo the shameful things Ellis has done in her past. We’re all a product of our past, with no escape from it, she realizes. The question she’s never been able to answer is how much should she let her past define her. How much leverage she should let it have over her life now. Can she really change her future? Remake herself? Abby makes her think it’s possible.

  “I know enough.”

  “Abby…” How does she even address this when they can’t intimately talk about themselves? Ah, maybe that’s the whole point, she thinks, as a sense of foreboding begins to form a hard knot in her stomach. It’s because she doesn’t deserve a real relationship. Doesn’t deserve anything more than this superficial hookup with someone who will never know the real her. Who will probably grow tired of her soon. The gift of Abby is meant to be a cruel and temporary one.

  She thinks back to the months immediately after she left Nancy. The constant emails from Nancy, the texts, begging her for a proper explanation, imploring her to come back home. And yet Ellis so coldly ignored her. With the barest of explanations, she simply shut the door. Moved on. And now she can’t bear to think what a selfish bitch she’d been. Nancy’s death forever robbed her of the chance to redeem herself. Trying to help Mia is the only possible road to redemption, and even then… She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand and is surprised by the confirmation of tears. Why the hell do I always seem to be crying in this woman’s presence?

  “Hey.” Abby props herself up on an elbow, carefully touches Ellis’s wet cheek. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”

  “You’re not…thinking of ending this, are you?”

  She doesn’t want to, but maybe she should, before things get more complicated, more uncomfortable. “Abby, I think—”

  “No. Don’t.” Abby pulls her against her chest, strokes her head with infinite tenderness. “I don’t want this to end. I need this. I need you. Please.”

  Abby’s kisses are urgent, and Ellis feels her self-doubt slide off her like rain on leaves. Oh, yes, she needs this too. She doesn’t want it to stop any more than Abby does. A moan escapes her mouth, sending a streak of fire through her veins as Abby’s fingers glide over her breasts, linger over a nipple. She might not deserve a relationship, but she can at least allow herself the joy and beauty of what they have.

  After they make love, Abby slowly pulls on her clothes and shoots Ellis a grin brimming with mischief.

  “What?” Ellis says. She’s grinning too. Mostly because she understands now that Abby likes her. Really likes her.

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Hmm…
maybe.”

  Abby bites her bottom lip, the gesture so adorable that Ellis wants to scoot over to the end of the bed where she’s sitting and kiss the hell out of her. “Can I…keep your underwear?”

  Ellis laughs softly at the unexpected request. “You want a souvenir?”

  “Yes. To get me through until next time.”

  “I see. And you want me to go commando until I get home?”

  Abby blushes, but it’s obvious she’s not at all sorry. “Commando, huh? Now I have a whole new set of fantasies for my drive home.”

  Ellis picks up her burgundy, bikini-cut Victoria’s Secret panties and throws them at Abby, clipping her in the head.

  Chapter Eight

  “Come with me,” Amy says to Erin Kirkland, and opens the stairwell door so they can climb to the third floor, where Amy’s shoebox-sized office is located.

  Erin walks stiffly ahead of her, like she’s going to her own execution, and Amy has to stifle a smile. “Don’t worry, kid. You’re not in any trouble.”

  Erin’s shoulders visibly relax.

  Amy halts their progress in the hallway outside her office door and speaks quietly. “We’re about to tell the family of our patient, Oscar Flanagan, that there’s nothing more we can do for him, and I want you along.”

  A return to tense shoulders for Erin, but she nods gamely. Amy asks her to quickly summarize the case from memory, and she does. The man is eighty-three years old, resides in a nursing home, is wheelchair bound, and has a litany of health issues: severe arthritis, dementia, a blood clot in his leg. And three months ago he suffered a minor stroke. He’s frail and weak. A CT scan has confirmed that his colon cancer has returned, with several metastases present.

  Amy presses. “Knowing when not to operate is as important as knowing how to operate. Why would it be a bad idea for me to try to operate on the tumors?”

  “Because he likely wouldn’t survive surgery?”

  “Correct. And if he did survive, it would significantly set back his quality of life for many months, expose him to the risk of more blood clots and secondary infections like pneumonia or C. difficile, plus there’s little chance I’d get all the cancer anyway. Aggressive surgical treatment in a man his age and with his health complications isn’t the way to go here.” She’s saying it more as a rehearsal because she’s expecting resistance. Oscar Flanagan’s daughter has refused, twice, to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order for her father.

  “Got it,” Erin says, following Amy into the office, where Mr. Flanagan’s daughter, a nicely dressed, grey-haired woman in her fifties, sits waiting.

  Amy greets the woman, extends her hand to her. “I’m Dr. Spencer and this is Dr. Kirkland. Thank you for waiting.”

  “Maggie Harper.” She shakes hands with Amy and Erin. “So is our family doctor right? My dad’s cancer is back?” Mr. Flanagan’s doctor did his due diligence by referring his patient to Amy, but Amy knows for a fact that the doctor was only following protocol; his note made it clear he shares Amy’s view that there is no need for extraordinary measures.

  “I’m afraid so, yes.” Amy sits down behind her desk while Erin takes the remaining empty chair in the room. “He has several tumors throughout his small intestine. And there’s a small shadow on his liver.”

  “I want you to operate. I want the cancer out of there.”

  “Ms. Harper, I’m afraid that’s not advisable.”

  “Why, because he’s old? Because he might only have a couple more years to live?”

  “Age is not the obstacle here. Your father has several chronic health issues. In his weakened state, he most likely wouldn’t survive the operation. And frankly, the odds of excising all of the cancer from his abdomen are very slim. It would be a very painful procedure without much, if any, upside.”

  “Ah, I get it. You’re a surgeon and surgeons want the best success rate they can get. You don’t want to take on someone who’s going to bring your…your stats or whatever down.”

  “No, Ms. Harper, that’s not it at all. I’m a doctor first and a surgeon second, which means I’d love to be able to help your father. I want to be able to help your father. But your oncologist and your family doctor can do that best right now. They can keep him comfortable for as long as possible.”

  “But they can’t fix him! They can’t cure him.”

  “No, but chemo, if the oncologist thinks it’s advisable, might slow the progress.”

  “So you’re giving up on him!” Maggie Harper shakes her head, unwilling to be mollified. Amy’s had patients and family members of patients like this before. They want the impossible. They want herculean efforts, even when those efforts could kill the patient. “You don’t know what it’s like, Dr. Spencer. You can’t possibly understand.”

  Amy has to close her eyes for a second because she does, in fact, understand.

  Two months ago, in a lucid moment, her father began crying, saying he hated getting old, becoming forgetful, confused, waking up to a new ache or pain every day. “A little stiffness, a little fatigue, some forgetfulness, a few aches I can handle. But dammit, Ames, I’m losing who I am. Some days it’s like I’m playing a role in a movie or something, that I’m not me, that I don’t even know who I am anymore, like I’m watching somebody else live my life. I hate it. I hate this.”

  “Oh, Dad, I hate it too. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “But you will, Amy. You already are. Jesus, I never thought this would happen to me. Nobody does, I guess.”

  “No, you’re right. We think we’re going to stay exactly as we are until, I don’t know, we die in our sleep or something at a ripe old age.” She’s seen more than enough in her career to know that such an ending is rare.

  “It almost never happens that way,” her father confirms. “We both know that. This is what happens if we’re lucky enough to grow old—a slow, downward slide that begins to pick up speed, and there’s not a damned thing you can do except hold on for the goddamned ride and to hope to hell there’s a soft landing.”

  She’d never heard her dad swear so much. “But there’s things you still enjoy, right? Like your television shows, your garden, your monthly lunch with the other retired doctors in town, puttering in your workshop.”

  He nodded slowly, smiled eventually. “You’ve hit on the nail on the…what do you call it? The nail on the main thing. Joy. Enjoyment.” He took his hand in hers. “I’ve had a lot of joy in my life. I’ve had a good life, Ames. A great life. Never forget that, no matter how much I complain or no matter how much I…suffer later. It’s been worth it.”

  Recalling the conversation now, Amy is almost brought to tears, except crying in front of a patient or a patient’s family member is absolutely forbidden. You don’t bring your baggage into the patient’s room with you, an early mentor once told her, even though she would love to ask this woman if her father’s had a good life, if he would think it’s all been worth it.

  “I do understand,” she says. “I do want to see you and your dad have more time together. Which is exactly why I won’t do the surgery.” If it were her own father, she’d make the same decision.

  The woman looks at Erin, who covers her sudden panic well. “What do you think, Doctor…”

  “Kirkland.”

  “Are you a surgeon too?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m in family practice residency.”

  “Fine. What’s your non-surgical opinion of all this? What would you do?”

  Erin glances at Amy, who nods at her to go ahead and answer the question.

  “All right, well, I completely agree with Dr. Spencer. It—”

  “Because she’s your boss, right?”

  Erin squares her shoulders, sits up a little straighter. “No. I agree with Dr. Spencer for several reasons, Ms. Harper. Your father is almost completely unaware of his surroundings and of what’s happening to him.”

  “But that doesn’t—”

  “Hold on, please. What I was going to say is this. If he survived the surg
ery, he wouldn’t understand what was happening to him or why. The pain, remaining in the hospital instead of where he’s used to living, suffering from potential complications like pneumonia or hospital-acquired infections. All of these things would worsen his dementia as well as give him significant pain. I think surgery in this case might actually hasten his decline. So from a holistic point of view, taking all of your father’s other health issues into consideration, it’s my opinion that keeping him as comfortable as possible in the remaining time he has left is the way to go.”

  Maggie Harper’s shoulders slump. She stares at her hands in her lap. She’s weakening but not relenting.

  “Ms. Harper,” Amy says, “I know how hard it is to feel like you’re giving up or that you’re not helping your dad. But you are helping him. And nobody’s giving up on him. He deserves dignity and comfort, and that’s what we want to do for him.”

  The woman’s shoulders begin to shake. “But I can’t let him go.”

  Amy gets up and comes around her desk to pat the woman on the shoulder. “I know. Which is why I’m going to refer you to the psychologist who helps out at the hospital with grief counseling. Would you take a card if I give you one?”

  The woman closes her eyes, nods in resignation.

  “Well played, Dr. Kirkland,” Amy says minutes later on their way back downstairs. “Very well played. I’m impressed.”

  “No, it was all you, Dr. Spencer.”

  “You’re wrong. You were great. You gave that woman a perspective I couldn’t quite give her. It was exactly what I was hoping for and you nailed it. We made a good team in there, so don’t shortchange yourself on the credit.”

  Kate appears from around the corner, almost knocking into them both. “Who’s a good team? I thought you and I were the best team in this place, Doc. Have I been replaced?” She narrows playful eyes at Erin.

  “No, Hendy, you haven’t been replaced. But our Dr. Kirkland was my ace in the hole for a tricky discussion with a patient’s family member a few minutes ago. She’s a natural.”

  Erin’s face begins to turn about three shades of pink. Shades that grow darker when Kate begins to tease her that she should consider changing from family medicine to surgery.