Thursday Afternoons

by Tracey Richardson

  “Really?”

  “Really. You have a home with me any time.”

  The relief on Mia’s face melts Ellis’s heart. It’s all been worth it, these crazy last few months, for this moment right here, Ellis thinks.

  * * *

  Amy is on her way to a private meeting with Janice Harrison, the hospital’s CEO, when she rounds a corner and smacks square, chest to chest, into Ellis. A folder of papers goes flying. Papers from Ellis. Amy’s folder of papers is intact, and she squeezes it tighter to her body before helping Ellis retrieve her scattered papers.

  “Thanks,” Ellis murmurs, averting her eyes.

  “Sorry, my fault.” Their fingers brush for a moment, and the memories of every time she’s ever touched Ellis come bubbling to the surface. There’s so much she wants to say since their parting more than a week ago, and no amount of cursory touching can convey all she feels. She wants to know exactly how long they’re supposed to cool things down. And how much cooling, because this feels more like the Ice Age than a cooling down. “Are you…doing okay?”

  “Yes, thank you. How about you?”

  Not good at all, Amy wants to say, but that’s not a conversation for a hallway in the hospital. “I’m okay. Hey, I hear Mia is staying with you permanently now. That’s fantastic. I’m really happy for you both.”

  “Thanks. She’s really turned a corner over the summer, you know? And I want her to keep with that momentum. I want her to keep doing all the right things. She’s happy here.”

  “Funny that you never planned on being a parent and, well, here you are.” Amy is smiling as she says it, and Ellis smiles back.

  “It’s…interesting, to say the least. But, ah, I don’t know how permanent things are yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She can stay with me as long as she likes but…I’m not sure how much past Christmas we’ll continue to live here. Once my…work here is done.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment, regret, sadness all fight for supremacy in Amy’s heart. And then panic decimates all of it as she considers that right when she’s found someone worth falling for, right when she’s on the brink of happiness, it’s being snatched away. Her throat tightens; she clears it roughly. “Can we talk more about this?”

  “Yes. But not here, not now.”

  “I know.” She whispers, “I miss you.”

  Ellis’s smile teeters, breaks. Her voice is equally strained. “I miss you too.”

  “I have to go. But…we will talk, right?” Amy is already moving away from Ellis because she’s a minute, maybe seconds, away from blubbering like the scared, heartbroken fool she is.

  “We will,” Ellis says before turning and continuing down the hall.

  Minutes later, when Amy is sitting in front of Janice Harrison, she scrambles to pull herself together. She can’t think about losing Ellis, and yet it’s the outcome with the highest probability and one that is completely predictable. And yet I went and fell for her anyway, goddammit.

  Harrison takes a few minutes to scan the twenty-page, confidential report Amy has handed her. It’s the report of her observations and conclusions from her three days in Collinsworth. With Ellis. The memory of tasting Ellis again, of being inside her, assails Amy, nearly sucking the air from her lungs. Their lovemaking had been exquisite, beyond exciting. One minute frantic, as if they were unable to get enough of one another, the next tender and sensual, like they had all the time in the world. She wonders, not for the first time, if they will ever enjoy each other that way again, but it’s too sad to think too long about. Amy is not optimistic, and Ellis has done nothing to prove her pessimism wrong.

  Harrison pulls off her reading glasses, sets the report down. “Very thorough, Amy. Thank you for this.”

  “For background only, correct?” She wants to make sure the report is for Harrison’s eyes alone, exactly as they agreed.

  “Of course. You paint a pretty dismal picture of the changes their hospital has undergone. But nice job of explaining exactly where the gaps are and how each change only benefits a portion of the population. We want to do everything we can to avoid the same cookie cutter approach here. As your report points out, our demographics, our community needs here, are completely different.”

  “I hope it will be enough to convince the mother ship that those same changes would be a disaster here. Even one of those changes, like losing obstetrics, would be devastating. Especially for all our migrant workers.”

  “Losing our emergency department, or cutting back on it, would be equally terrible. I’m very glad to have your earlier report on that, too.” She referred to the report Amy had given Ellis awhile back, outlining all the emergency cases and surgical cases that would have had poor outcomes, even morbidity, had this hospital not had a full-time, fully functioning emergency department and a staff of surgeons. “Your work certainly gives us a lot of ammunition. Thank you.”

  “Any time.” Amy rises from her chair, but Harrison motions for her to wait.

  “One more thing. It’s about Dr. Atkinson. He’s been confirmed as having Parkinson’s.”

  “Oh no.” It explains a lot, but the diagnosis also means the man’s career as a surgeon is over.

  “I’m going to submit a request to take on another general surgeon. But I have to warn you, I don’t think we’ll be granted permission from the board until we know which way this review is going. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too. Mostly for Dr. Atkinson.” Also for herself and the other surgeon, Dr. Warren, because it means they’ll have to continue to be on call every other weekend and there will be no respite from long days. Taking a vacation is folly. On the upside, the more she works, the less time she has to stew about her situation with Ellis.

  “Thank you, Amy. That’ll be all.”

  Amy takes her time heading back downstairs, hoping to run into Ellis again. No such luck. I should just tell her that I’m in love with her and that I’ll do whatever it takes, whatever she needs, for this to work between us. It would mean abandoning her concern for the hospital’s future and resigning herself to letting whatever happens, happen. She could work anywhere, follow Ellis anywhere. Maybe it’s time to grow up, move away from home, she thinks with a sick feeling in her stomach.

  She sags against the stairwell wall. No matter how much her heart bleeds for Ellis, it’s an impossible situation. She knows she can’t, won’t, abandon the hospital, her colleagues, her patients, her elderly parents. She simply can’t let go of all the things that matter to her, not without a fight.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ellis opens her laptop and clicks on the minutes from last night’s board meeting. She didn’t attend because it was a meeting of the Erie Shores Hospital board, and she’s not a member of the board nor was she invited to attend as a guest. She answers to the CEO of the Essex County Regional Hospital Services and its board, but she likes to go over the monthly reports from Erie Shore’s board to keep tabs on what’s happening at the hospital.

  It takes her several minutes to click through the various reports attached to the minutes, and the board actions resulting from the reports. She stalls over a report by Dr. Amy Spencer, titled “Observations from Service Changes at Collinsworth Soldiers Hospital.” She clicks on it, opens it, begins reading it. Several pages into it, she can’t disagree with anything Amy’s reported on. Mostly it’s statistics and summaries about the hospital’s services, the demographics there. Then the report lays out the services and demographics at Erie Shores for a comparison. Again, Ellis sees nothing amiss. It’s all the same information she’s obtained as well. But then Amy lists her conclusions. Conclusions that are damning toward the changes at the Collinsworth hospital. Amy states that almost none of the service changes at Soldiers Hospital would work here and explains why (younger population, lots of migrant workers, much more blue collar, a massive provincial highway nearby that sees serious crashes on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis). She’s laid out her case that any chan
ges at Erie Shores should be little more than minor tweaks (though of course she doesn’t say what those are).

  Ellis throws her reading glasses down in disgust. Minor tweaks aren’t going to cut it. Hasn’t Amy looked at the budget lately? Doesn’t she know there’s a deficit and that provincial funding for hospitals is decreasing? Who’s going to pay for the services Amy so dearly wants to maintain in this universal health care system? Staff salaries go up each year, in accordance with strict contracts; diagnostics get more and more expensive as technology continues to evolve; procedures too. Taxpayers won’t stand for a gigantic tax hike in order to pay for hospitals ballooning budgets. Goddammit! Amy’s gone and done an end run to try to state her case, on the record, before Ellis’s report is complete.

  Ellis slams her laptop shut, grabs her sweater, and heads up to Amy’s office. She has no idea if she’s there, but she’ll be around somewhere. Ellis is pretty sure Amy works a minimum of ten hours a day, probably more like twelve, not to mention that she’s in almost every weekend, either on call or checking on her post-op patients.

  Amy’s office door is half open; she’s at her desk, working on her computer, probably patient reports, if Ellis has to guess. Ellis knocks twice. When Amy looks up to see who’s there, her face lights up before she rearranges her expression into something neutral.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “All right.” Amy stands up, yawns, tosses her lab coat onto her chair, then pulls a windbreaker from a hook on the wall. She seems to be taking no notice of Ellis’s mood. “Let’s go for a walk. I need some fresh air.”

  Ellis isn’t pleased with the suggestion; she has work to do, and unloading on Amy shouldn’t take long. She huffs her displeasure, but Amy ignores her. “Fine.”

  It’s late September now, the time of year Ellis always thinks about school. Because while autumn represents the slowing down, the ending of many things, school is a new beginning, and she wants to hold onto that feeling of new things, of fresh starts. A chill has begun to creep into the air, a trace of color edging into the leaves, and Ellis is reminded of the first line of the “To Autumn” poem by Keats: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Autumn is so much more than about the end of summer; it’s about bounty and harvests too—fruitfulness. Her spirits lift. Amy is beside her and they’re alone, away from the ears and eyes of the hospital, and it’s a little bit glorious. She almost forgets her annoyance with Amy.

  “You’re upset with me,” Amy states plainly.

  “Yes.” Ellis dredges up her anger, though it’s like pulling something hard by the roots to extract it from the ground. “I don’t appreciate your end run to the board with that report you did from Collinsworth.”

  Amy curses but doesn’t deny anything. “That was supposed to be confidential, for Janice Harrison only. Her admin assistant screwed up and accidentally included it in the board report. Believe me, I was not happy when I found out this morning. It was not intended to be an end run. It was background only. For my boss.”

  Ellis is used to her outsider status when she conducts hospital reviews. The territorial, suspicious, uncooperative behavior from staffers and others, well, it’s to be expected. But Amy is supposed to be different. Amy is not supposed to be an adversary, but someone who, Ellis has hoped, can see both sides. She’s smart and she’s a realist, traits that should allow her to eventually come to the same conclusions as Ellis. But Amy is blinded by how much the community means to her, and Ellis simply can’t compete with that.

  “First off, it makes it look like you’re setting the table for some kind of uprising later on when my report comes out. And secondly, it shows bad faith. It shows you and this hospital have zero confidence in me to make the right decisions, to come to the proper conclusions. It shows an irrefutable level of suspicion and lack of cooperation.”

  They’ve walked around the block and start a second lap.

  “Whoa. Ellis, I think you’re reading too much into this.”

  “How can I not?”

  “Look, why do you think Janice Harrison sent me with you to Collinsworth?”

  A sick feeling descends on Ellis. “I see. It was to keep an eye on me.”

  “Not exactly. She wanted someone there seeing and hearing everything you saw and heard, in case you…skewed your findings. She wanted more information to help refute conclusions of yours that my hospital might not agree with. It’s…a second opinion, that’s all. A second opinion based on the same evidence you’re seeing.”

  “And did your assignment from your CEO include sleeping with me? Was that part of the deal to keep an eye on me?” It’s an outrageous allegation, but goddammit. Doesn’t Amy have any loyalty to me at all? Doesn’t what we have mean anything to her? Doesn’t it mean something? Or is there nothing more important to her than this hospital?

  Amy halts their momentum by softly touching Ellis’s wrist. As always, her touch is electrifying, and Ellis wonders if it will always be so. This time, the thrill of her touch feels like punishment for not being able to let her go.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just accuse me of sleeping with you for any reason other than that I’m insanely attracted to you and I…” Amy’s emotions pinball from anger to disbelief to desperation. “How dare you, Ellis? How fucking dare you?”

  Ellis pales. “I’m sorry, Amy. I didn’t mean it the way it came out. I’m frustrated. And I’m sad, because I don’t like being…at odds with you or whatever the hell this is. I hate all of this. I hate not seeing you smile, and I hate not spending time with you, talking with you, being with you. And…other things.”

  Her words are like darts that sting, because Amy feels the same way. Is it ego that’s keeping them apart? Fear? Pride? Whatever it is, it sucks.

  “I miss all of those things too. I miss you, Ellis. God, why can’t we get past this? It’s not like they’re going to close the hospital.” Amy’s emotions are as erratic as a stone skipping across water. “Are they?”

  “No, absolutely not. That’s not in the cards, Amy. Not if I have anything to say about it, and I’ve never heard a whiff of that kind of talk.”

  “That’s some comfort, I guess. So what can we do to align our views? Or to put our views aside and pretend…oh hell, I can’t pretend this isn’t important to me. But you’re important to me, too.” An understatement, but Amy doesn’t want to risk too much.

  Ellis steps closer. It would be so easy to kiss her right now. A mere tilting down of her head and her lips would be on Ellis’s. They’ve got to find a way to stop being adversaries, because this tangle of feelings is a daily torture.

  “Mia is away at her grandparents this weekend. She spends a weekend a month with them now. Why don’t I cook us dinner and we’ll talk some more? See if we can’t figure a few things out.”

  Amy jumps at the life ring Ellis has tossed her. “All right. Thank you.” She doesn’t want to think about what it might lead to, in case it doesn’t. But there’s a new spring in her step as they walk back to the hospital.

  Kate is waiting outside the main doors, frantically waving her arms at Amy. Aw shit. But they didn’t page her, so what can possibly be so urgent?

  “Oh, good, there you are! Hurry, there’s someone here to see you.” She’s beaming but no more forthcoming about what’s going on.

  “All right.” Amy’s discovered from experience not to fight Kate when she’s excited about something, and clearly she is.

  In the front lobby are a man and a woman, and between them a young boy in a wheelchair. Amy looks closer. “Jeffrey?”

  The boy smiles and so do his parents. Amy produces her hand for a handshake, but instead the couple instantly wraps her in a hug. Jeffrey’s mom and dad are both crying as they thank Amy over and over again for all she did to help Jeffrey back in late spring, when he’d been brought in unconscious and suffering a grave head wound from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound. She’d never performed brain surgery before, but without it, the seven-year-old woul
d surely have died. He wasn’t stable enough, nor was there time, to transport him to University Hospital in London and put its neuro team to work on him. Ten days after her life-saving surgery on the boy and while he was still in an induced coma, he was transported to London. But Amy never expected to see him again and certainly never expected to see him functioning to this level. Once she makes a decision to operate on someone, there’s no room for pessimism, but in her heart, she was truly doubtful the kid would survive. When he did survive, she grew doubtful he would ever recover much physically and cognitively. But this! This is the best surprise she’s ever had.

  “Wow, Jeffrey!” She bends over the wheelchair to examine him more closely. Barely a scar visible now on his head. He’s smiling and his eyes are alert. “You’re doing so well. It’s so wonderful to see you.”

  “Th-thank you,” he says haltingly.

  “You’re welcome, but the only thanks I need is seeing you doing so well.”

  She feels Ellis next to her, taking it all in, probably bursting with questions. Amy explains to her that Jeffrey suffered a grievous head injury and that she was pressed into doing “a little brain surgery” to help him out.

  “She’s a magician,” Jeffrey’s father cuts in. “She is the miracle that saved our son. He wouldn’t be here now if not for Dr. Spencer.” His eyes begin to tear up.

  Amy lets herself enjoy the praise, but only for a moment. It does help her forget the patients she couldn’t save, helps remind her of why she went into this business in the first place, but she doesn’t want to get too hung up on the past. Doesn’t want to drown in her own ego, either. “Your son is a strong little boy. A real fighter, and I’m so glad things have worked out. How are you feeling, Jeffrey?”

  “I…I can walk. Kind of.” With his mother’s help he pushes himself slowly out of the small wheelchair. He takes a gingerly step, then another and another. He’s limping, but he’s on both feet.