Third Degree

  “Your mom hated that you were sick. She hated seeing you suffer, the idea that you’d have to live the rest of your life with this potentially deadly disease … but Justin’s right, she screwed up. Big-time. But maybe she was in denial, like you were. Maybe this mistake will make her fix five more just like it. Maybe this mistake is going to save us from world destruction in fifty years, like some kind of bizarre butterfly effect.” I grip the railing of the bed so hard my knuckles turn white. My face is completely wet with tears, and my nose is running. “I’m going to be a surgeon, just like I planned, and I’m gonna remember this. I’m gonna remember you lying in this bed, your brain completely fried from oxygen deprivation, and I’m going to envision every patient I treat or operate on in their own diabetic coma, with their girlfriends and moms upset, and I’ll figure out how to make sure that doesn’t happen. So this sucks for you, but you’re going to have to be that person for me.”

  I lift my shirt up to my face and wipe the tears away, then walk out of Clay Culver’s room and head for the chief’s office.

  Chapter 27

  Izzy,

  I’ve sent too many texts to count and since you haven’t replied, I’m trying email instead. I’m sorry for everything I said over Thanksgiving break. I don’t think you’re warped or twisted. I don’t think you’re anything but amazing. I was scared and hurt and angry and I needed to hurt you back and that was wrong. No matter what happens between us, I need you to know that I was wrong. I understand if you don’t want to reply, but I do hope you read this and that you believe me.

  Happy New Year,

  Marsh

  P.S. My final grade in Anatomy was a B-.

  P.P.S. I still miss you.

  “Clay Culver’s funeral was this morning, correct?”

  I nod to Dr. James from my seat on the window ledge in her office. “Who has a funeral on New Year’s Eve?”

  “I doubt the family had any other plans for the holiday,” she says wryly. “How was it?”

  I shrug. “Weird. Kind of idealistic and melodramatic. I’ve never been to a funeral before, so I guess I don’t have anything to compare it to. But personally, I don’t get why people put themselves through it.”

  “Routine and closure,” she recites, and then, like always, she shifts subjects on me so abruptly I can hardly keep up. “You’re training three interns now. Are you enjoying that?”

  “They talk about me.” I bring my knees up to my chest, hugging them. “The resident they were with before was nearly thirty. I’ve walked up behind them in the break room and overheard all kinds of things, like how their new resident can’t buy alcohol and how I was probably still in a training bra when they went to college.”

  “Those are all true statements.”

  “I guess.”

  “But you wanted something different from the experience?” she suggests. “You had expectations?”

  My eyes drift from the traffic below to Dr. James. “Yeah, I did. I kind of hoped it would be more of a peer relationship. They’re basically me a year ago, right? I know what it feels like to have that honeymoon excitement coupled with the complete terror of screwing up and pissing off an attending or resident.”

  “Sometimes we don’t form bonds with people like us. Sometimes those bonds come about from unexpected sources.”

  I lean my cheek against the ice-cold window, feeling the weight of how true that statement is. My mind drifts to the email I read this morning. The email I still haven’t replied to. “I could talk to him, you know?”

  “Marshall?” she guesses. Damn therapist powers.

  “Yeah, and even before things got—”

  “Romantic?” Instead of leaving long, gaping silences between her questions and my answers, like she does most of the time, she’s finishing my sentences. This only seems to happen whenever we discuss Marshall.

  “After I’d known him for only a week, I explained my need for answers, and he got it. He really got it. He wasn’t just pretending to understand me. And then we really worked hard for the next step, and now it seems like it was all for nothing.”

  “Every relationship serves an important purpose even if it doesn’t last forever,” she says, “Even your relationships with your college professor and with Dr. Martin, though failed and unhealthy. Because of those, you knew what you didn’t want when you were with Marshall. And you knew why.”

  We’ve talked a ton about Sam and Justin over the past few weeks. Next to Marshall, these are her favorite topics. I’m not sure at what point in the therapeutic process we’ll begin talking about actual patients. Well, besides Clay Culver. He’s up there among the top five most-discussed topics during Izzy Jenkins’s therapy sessions.

  “I guess that’s true, but why am I not happy?” I ask.

  “Because whether you were romantically involved or not, Marshall was your friend. And no offense to you, but I don’t think you’ve had many of those in your life.” She scribbles something on a blank sheet of paper on top of the folder in her lap. “So what I’m really trying to say is that you’re not happy because you miss him.”

  “He sent me an email this morning,” I admit, though before the session began I had told myself not to mention this.

  She glances up from her paper, eyebrows lifted. “And did you reply?”

  My lungs deflate. “No.”

  She scribbles something else on her paper. “But you miss him.”

  My chest tightens, and I rub it with the heel of my hand. “I miss him.”

  There, I said it.

  Dr. James hands me the paper she’s just written on. I glance at the sentence she wrote:

  Assignment: Reopen the line of communication with Marshall.

  Since Thanksgiving she’s given me many one-sentence assignments: Express a personal story to a patient that relates to the patient’s fear or diagnosis. Or Have lunch with a colleague and discuss anything but medicine. Tell your parents one of your fears and how you wished they’d helped you with it. I’m expecting to see something like Join the circus any day now. Actually, I expected her to ask me to confront my parents about what I read in my mother’s medical history—a confession I recently made to Dr. James after she assured me of full confidentiality during our sessions. But so far, that topic has stayed out of my parental conversations.

  “It isn’t fair to Marshall if I just show up at his house and declare my love.”

  “Do you love him?” She’s now scooted to the edge of her chair. God, her job must be boring.

  I roll my eyes, trying to brush it off casually. How am I supposed to know if I love him or not? I’ve never loved anyone in that way before.

  “Okay, forget that question. Forget love or a relationship. You need closure, and so does he, most likely.”

  “You said open the lines, not close them,” I point out.

  But she might be right. Based on Marshall’s email, it does seem like that’s what he needs. And that idea makes my chest ache even more. Maybe I’ve been denying myself closure because I subconsciously want to deny that we’re over.

  Dr. James shrugs. “You might only be opening them for a short time, but it’s still important. And I’m not saying you have to prepare a speech and PowerPoint presentation. I’m saying to take one tiny step. Something. Maybe he needed your friendship as much as you need his.”

  “I don’t know.” Contacting him feels wrong and complicated. Not to mention the fact that his family has probably made dartboards with my picture on them, and if any of his family members have Marshall’s aim, my face is probably covered with holes. They just want him to be happy, and so do I. I was as wrong as Marshall, probably more so, for projecting my anger and fears on him. The last thing I want to do is open those wounds again and cause him more problems.

  “A text,” she suggests. “Send him a text that says, Can we talk? That’s all. Nothing about a future relationship implied in that. Just Can we talk?”

  I take a breath and glance at the clock. “I have rounds
with my interns in five minutes.”

  “Izzy … it’s an assignment, and I expect it done by the next time we meet, understood?”

  “I’ll think about it.” I’m sure I’ll obsess over it like I’ve been obsessing over that email and the idea of replying to it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll go through with it. Everything else she’s made me do thus far has been way easier than this.

  But all I can think about, as I exit her office and head out into the hall to find my fledglings, is Thanksgiving night. Before everything got all fucked up. Marshall came over to my house while Mom was out shopping the early Black Friday sales with one of her work friends. We were trying to be good, and we even sat in the living room watching a movie—I mean, we’d already gotten completely naked in the on-call room earlier that day.

  My eyes kept fluttering and I worked hard to keep them open during the movie. I was exhausted from being up early and cooking at the hospital all day. Marshall eventually turned the volume down on the TV and stretched us both out across the couch.

  “You can close your eyes,” he whispered, pulling me against his chest. “I don’t mind.”

  My nose rested against his sweater, allowing me to inhale all the familiar Marshall smells with each breath I took. “See, this is the problem with on-call rooms,” I mumbled sleepily. “You don’t get this part.”

  He tightened his arms around me and pressed his lips against my temple. “Yeah, I like this part.”

  We were both asleep by the time my mom got home a little after midnight, but I woke up after hearing the floors creak beneath her feet while she attempted to sneak past us. I lifted my head and then stared at Marshall, wanting nothing more than to fall back asleep with him.

  His eyes opened and he leaned in, kissing me and then kissing me again until I was breathless and hot and feeling safer than I’d ever felt in my entire life. “I could do this all night,” Marshall whispered, nibbling on the end of my ear.

  My hand slid under the back of his T-shirt and sweater. “Even with all these clothes between us?”

  “Yes, even with our clothes on.” He tangled our limbs together and then our tongues, and I could actually feel his patience in that kiss, feel that he wasn’t planning to go anywhere, that holding me could be enough.

  Thinking about that now hurts so much. I mean, I loved being with him right then, but I hadn’t realized how special that moment was. How much it represented the kind of person Marshall Collins really is, and how we’d both been brave and exposed ourselves to each other with our clothes on—which is much scarier than getting naked, I’ve learned. Do we still have that bravery, or has it gone to waste?

  Two paramedics wheel a gurney into the unusually quiet ER, and after getting a glimpse of the patient, I jump up from my seat on the counter of the nurses’ station, tossing my half-eaten sandwich into the garbage.

  “Let’s go.” I nod in the direction of the rolling gurney, indicating to my interns that they should follow me. “You guys wanted something interesting, right?”

  “I knew it!” the guy says. “Nine at night on New Year’s Eve, and the drunks are out crashing into things.”

  All of us reach for gloves and pull them over our hands. My dad must have been paged in advance, because he appears behind me. “What have we got?” he asks the paramedics.

  “Forty-year-old male, crashed into a median near Lakeshore Drive, multiple chest wounds …”

  I press my stethoscope to his chest and listen. “Decreased breath sounds on the left side.”

  The middle-aged man stirs awake, twisting his head back and forth.

  “Sir?” I lean in close “What’s his name?” I ask the paramedic.

  “Larry Waltrip.”

  “Mr. Waltrip?” Dad says. “Have you been drinking?”

  He continues to shake his head. “I have … I have … reservations.”

  “You were in a car accident,” I say. “Is there anyone we should call to let them know you’re here?”

  Every muscle in his face is squeezed tight in pain, but he manages to say, “No. There’s no one to call.”

  “We’ve got another victim on the way,” one of the paramedics says to me. “A woman with abdominal injuries.”

  Dad looks at me. “Go—I got this one. Give me two of your interns. And page Dr. Rinehart for the new victim.”

  I point to two of the interns and then grab the sleeve of the third, Dave, tugging him toward the ER doors, where our next patient will be entering at any moment. We stand outside, hopping up and down to keep warm, while we wait for the ambulance.

  “God, that would suck,” my intern says. “Being forty years old, crashing your car, probably needing surgery, and having no one to call.”

  “He was pretty out of it. Maybe he didn’t understand the question.” But I do understand the question. A chill that has nothing to do with the cold outside runs through me. And I don’t want to crash my car in twenty years and have no one to call.

  Damn Dr. Winifred James, Ph.D., and her fucking assignments.

  I hear the sirens from the approaching ambulance grow louder. I reach into my pocket, remove my phone, and bring up Marshall’s number. The ambulance backs up toward us, and before I can chicken out, I take a deep breath and type a three-word text: Can we talk?

  Chapter 28

  Literally sixty seconds later, my phone vibrates in my pocket. Dr. Rinehart meets us in the trauma room, sees me, and says, “Dr. Jenkins, weren’t you off two hours ago?”

  I shrug. “It’s fine. I can stay.”

  She shakes her head. “I’ve got this. You’ve been on sixteen hours. Leave your fledgling and go home. Or go out and do something fun.”

  Right. That’s exactly what I plan to do. Not. I walk away, tossing my gloves into a hazardous waste bin and removing my phone to check the message I’ve just gotten.

  R u working tonight?

  My heart pounds, and beads of sweat pop up across my forehead. Marshall replied in, like, one minute. Is this a good sign? Does he still miss me? Or is he pissed off and wants to swear at me a lot in my place of employment? Whatever, I’ll take it.

  Yes, in the ER. But leaving soon.

  Stay there. We’ll see you in 10.

  I stop after practically ramming into an old woman being wheeled in a wheelchair.

  We?

  I wait for another reply, but there’s nothing. Did he mean ten minutes or at ten o’clock? It’s nine-thirty, so I guess there’s not that much difference. I sniff under my armpits and then hurry off to my locker to put on deodorant and quickly brush my teeth. Not that I’m planning on making out with him after weeks of abrupt silence. I just need to feel confident in my appearance or I’ll be distracted by the conversation.

  As I’m heading back to the ER, my hands shaking from both nerves and anticipation, it occurs to me how much I’m aching to hear his voice again. To brush my thumbs across his cheek and feel the sexy stubble that always seems to be there. I’m dying to tell him about the man with no one to call and make sure he knows that no matter what, when he’s forty and injured in the ER, he can call me. He can always call me.

  Is this what love is?

  “Hey, honey, what happened to your patient?” Dad is standing near the ER doors, wearing his street clothes.

  “Rinehart cut me. She caught me past fourteen hours,” I explain. “What happened to your patient? He needs surgery, right?”

  “Same as you. O’Reilly cut me off. I’ve been here nineteen hours.”

  We both stand there in an awkward silence, and then Dad finally says, “You want to go get dinner or something? It’s New Year’s Eve, after all.”

  “I can’t.” My eyes stay focused on the doors. It’s been eleven minutes. “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Oh.” Surprise fills his voice. “Anyone I know?”

  I bite my lower lip. “Marshall. I told him I wanted to talk, and he said he’d be here in ten minutes.”

  “Okay, well … that’s good, I gues
s,” he says tentatively. He’s probably being careful not to cause another emotional breakdown. “But how is he getting here in ten minutes?” I shrug. “Maybe he’s in the neighborhood.”

  The doors finally slide open, and the first person I spot is Marshall’s brother, Jesse, who appears to be supporting Marshall’s weight. Or at least half of it. On his other side is Shirtless Carson. Kelsey runs in front of them, her phone pressed to her ear. “Izzy! Thank God!”

  I’m frozen for what feels like an hour, but it’s probably one or two seconds, as I process what’s going on: (1) the fact that “we” meant Jesse, Kelsey, and Carson, and (2) the fact that something is very wrong with Marshall.

  “Need help here?” one of my interns asks … Bridget. I need to call her by her name. “Dr. Jenkins?” she asks again.

  Of course both Dad and I reply, but it pulls me out of my haze and I rush forward in time to see Marshall try to shake off Jesse and Carson.

  “What happened?” I ask them.

  “He was fine,” Jesse says. “Not perfect, but good enough to go out tonight.”

  “And then he started puking and couldn’t stop for like an hour,” Kelsey breaks in, her face flushed, her eyes wide with fear.

  Dad snaps his magic attending-physician fingers and gets a gurney wheeled up almost instantly.

  “This isn’t a military hospital,” Carson says. “Is he allowed to be here?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Kelsey snaps at him. “We keep telling you it’s a fucking hour away. What if he’s fucking dying?”

  We’ve just wheeled him into an available trauma room and Marshall is on his side, clutching his stomach, his eyes squeezed shut. I take a deep breath and tune out the panicked escorts, then rest a shaking hand on Marsh’s back. “Was there blood when you vomited?”