I? “Yes,” I said. “I know you’re sad. Beyond sad.” I looked at him again. He’d lost his false smile. His fake cheer.
“Yes, I’m sad,” he said. “I’m as brokenhearted as you are. But I want to take care of you today. Today and tomorrow, bare minimum. Let me do that, okay? After that, you can worry about me.”
” ’Kay,” I said. What woman wouldn’t kill for my husband?
“I’m going to find out when I can spring you,” he said, getting to his feet.
I nodded and once he’d walked away, I closed my eyes again, hoping sleep would return to me quickly.
I’d first met Adam in the hospital room of one of my patients. The girl was tiny for eight, dwarfed by the mechanical bed. I could tell she hadn’t yet received her presurgical medication, because she was shivering with anxiety when I walked into her room. Sitting at her bedside, her mother held the little girl’s hand, and the anxiety was like a ribbon running from mother to daughter and back again.
I had seen them only once before, when I evaluated the girl, Lani, in my office and discussed the surgery I’d perform to lengthen her leg. Lani’d been playful and talkative then. Now, though, reality had set in.
“Good morning, Lani,” I said. “Mrs. Roland.” I sat down next to the bed. I liked doing that, taking the time to sit, to be at my patient’s level. To act as though I had all the time in the world to give them although the truth was, I had three long surgeries that day and really no time at all.
“Will the surgery be at nine, like they said?” Mrs. Roland glanced at her watch. Her hand shook a little.
“I think we’re on schedule this morning,” I said. “That’s a good thing. Waiting around is no fun at all, is it?” I smiled at Lani, who shook her head. Her eyes were riveted to my face as though she were trying to see her future there.
“Do you have any questions?” I asked her.
“Will I feel anything?” she asked.
“Not a thing.” I gave her knee a squeeze through the blanket. “That’s a promise.” I looked up as a man walked into the room.
“Hey.” He grinned at Lani, and his entrance into the room was so casual and genial that I assumed he was the girl’s father or another relative. “I’m Dr. Pollard, Lani,” he said. “I’ll be your anesthesiologist during the surgery today.”
The new guy, I registered. He’d been working at Duke for only a week, but I’d heard about him. He was in his late thirties and he wore khakis, a pale blue shirt and a confident air.
“What’s an anesthesiologist?” Lani pronounced the word perfectly.
I opened my mouth to respond, but he beat me to it. “I’ll make you comfortable during your surgery,” he said, one hand resting on the foot of her bed. With the other, he pointed toward the pole holding her saline solution. “I’ll give you medication in that IV there that will let you go into a sleep so nice and deep, it’ll feel like magic. You’ll close your eyes and count backwards from ten. The next thing you know, you’ll wake up and the surgery will be over. Then I’ll make sure you don’t have a lot of pain.”
Lani’s mother visibly relaxed. I watched it happen, her shoulders softening as she broke into a smile. “I told you, Lani,” she said. “You won’t know anything’s happening, and you won’t remember it when you wake up.”
“What if I want to remember it?” Lani asked.
“Well then,” Dr. Pollard said, “Dr. Ward and I can tell you all about it afterward. We love it when patients want to be informed about their health, don’t we?” He looked at me.
“Absolutely.” I smiled. I liked the way he made it sound as though we’d been working together for years.
“Good,” Lani said. “I can’t wait to hear about it.”
“I’ve heard great things about you,” Adam said once we’d left Lani’s room and were walking down the hall. “Glad I’ll be working with you.”
What I’d heard about him had little to do with his work. Instead, it had to do with his personality, and now I understood why his arrival had started people talking. He was charismatic, filled with a buoyant good cheer. He spoke in incomplete sentences, as though he had so much he wanted to say that he needed to leave out some of the words to save time. That truncated delivery was rare for someone with a North Carolina accent. I remembered, though, that he’d lived most recently in Boston.
“So, you moved here from Massachusetts?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. But I missed North Carolina—I grew up near Greensboro—and I wanted to do some clinical trials, so I’m here now. Glad to be back.”
I felt myself smiling as I listened to him. What was that about? He was not particularly attractive. Well, he actually was, though not in the conventional sense. He was slender, with brown hair and warm dark eyes, but his features were overpowered by the energy that bubbled out of him. I looked forward to working with him, to seeing him get that energy under control enough to do what needed to be done in the O. R.
“So what exactly did you hear about me?” I sounded flirtatious. Not like myself at all. I was usually all business in the hospital. I was thirty years old and in the last year of a grueling residency, and most of my life had been focused on learning, not on men. Not on dating. I couldn’t believe the gooey, girlish feelings I was having. The raw, splayed-open sensation low in my belly. I was not only thinking about how he’d be in the O. R. I was thinking about how he’d be in bed. I’d had exactly two lovers in my adult life and I wondered what it would be like to have him as my third.
“You’re well respected,” he said. “Very young. How old are you? Never mind. Inappropriate question. Quiet. Calm. Still waters run deep, of course. Unbearably self-confident.”
“Unbearably?”
“Well, maybe that’s not the exact word I heard. Just. you know, the kind of self-confidence people envy. It comes naturally to you.”
“I think you’re making this all up,” I said. He’d been there less than a week. Surely he hadn’t heard all this about me. Yet most of it was true. I was quiet. Calm most of the time—unless something scared me. I wasn’t afraid of the usual things. Not anything in the hospital. Not what other people thought of me. My fears were more the primitive variety. A rapist hiding in the backseat of my car. Aggressive dogs. A fire in my condo. A guy with a gun. I had nightmares sometimes, though no one I worked with would ever guess.
“I’ve heard all that and plenty more,” he said.
“Well, I’m at home here,” I said.
We rode the elevator to the operating suites. The doors opened on the third floor and Adam and I moved to opposite sides of the car to make room for one of the housekeepers and her cart.
“Hey, Charles!” Adam said, as if greeting a long-lost friend.
The woman laughed. “Doc, you crazy!” she said.
“Charles?” I was lost. I looked at the woman’s badge. Charlene,
