“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, her name was. A short, middle-aged woman with streaks of gray in her black hair.
“He calls me Charles.” The woman pushed the button for the ground floor and grinned, a blush forming beneath her brown skin. She was under his spell. “Man’s crazy.”
I had worked in the hospital for several years and had seen this woman nearly every day. I’d never once read her name tag. I’d never greeted her with more than a nod. Adam Pollard had been there less than a week and was already on a teasing basis with her.
“How’s the ladies’ man doin’?” Adam asked her.
Charlene rolled her eyes. “Goin’ be the death of me, Doc,” she said.
The doors slid open. “Don’t let that happen, Charles.” He touched the woman’s shoulder as we walked out of the elevator. “Can’t do without you ’round here.”
“Do you know…did you know her before you came here?” I asked as we started walking toward the O.R.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “Works her butt off. Did you ever notice? She’s everywhere at once. She’s raising her daughter’s kids, too. Daughter’s got a monkey on her back.”
“Who’s the ladies’ man?”
“Her ten-year-old grandson. She’s worried about him. Can’t remember his name, though. I’m crap with names.”
“How have you been able to learn all that in a week?”
“I talk to people,” he said with a shrug. “How else?”
After Lani Roland’s uneventful surgery, Adam caught up with me in the hallway outside the O.R.
“Dinner tonight,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He said it as if I couldn’t possibly have other plans.
“All right,” I answered, since that was true.
“Casual or fancy?”
“Casual. Definitely.”
“Mama Dip’s okay? I’ve missed that place.”
I nodded. “I’ll meet you there,” I said. “I should be able to get out by six-thirty.”
“Cool.” He gave my arm a playful punch as if I were a teenage boy. It made me laugh.
He was sitting at a table near the windows when I walked into Mama Dip’s a few hours later, and he was already joking with a waitress. He stood as I walked toward them.
“Hey, Maya.” He sounded as though we’d known each other for years. He leaned over and bussed my cheek. “Dr. Ward, this is our server tonight, KiKi. KiKi, this is an amazing surgeon, Maya Ward. She knits together teeny little bones.” He pulled out a chair for me, touching my arm as I sank into it.
KiKi smiled at us both. “What can I get you to drink, sweetie?” she asked me.
“Lemonade,”
I said, unwrapping the napkin from around my silverware.
Adam chuckled to himself as KiKi walked away. “I introduce you as a surgeon, she calls you sweetie,” he said. “Gotta love the South. Does that bug you? The sweetie bit?” I loved the way his smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.
“Not at all,” I said. I knew plenty of professional women who bristled at the familiarity, but I’d lived in North Carolina long enough that I didn’t even notice it.
“I love it,” he said. “Boston was great, don’t get me wrong, but nobody there ever called me sweetie or darlin’ or dear. And you can’t get enough kind words. Know what I mean?”
“I do,” I said.
KiKi was back with our drinks and I popped a straw into my lemonade.
“You’re obviously not a native,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“Virginia. Outside D.C.”
“How’d you end up here?”
“I followed my sister. She went to medical school at Duke and loved it, so when it was my turn, I followed her lead.”
He sat back, eyes wide. “Wow!” he said. “There’s two Dr. Wards? Where does she practice?”
“She works full-time with Doctors International Disaster Aid, so she’s here, there and everywhere.”
“DIDA!” he said.
“You know it?”
“I thought of applying to do a stint with them, but never got around to it. Maybe one of these days. It’d be so cool to do that sort of work.” He sipped his iced tea. “She’s a do-gooder? Your sis?”
“She’s…” I hadn’t thought of Rebecca that way. Gutsy was the word I usually used when describing my sister. But she was a do-gooder, and not only with DIDA. Rebecca was my hero. “Yes, she is actually,” I said. “I haven’t seen her in a couple of months, though we talk all the time when she’s someplace with cell coverage. Right now she’s working in China at an earthquake site. She’s unreachable.”
KiKi returned with my bowl of Brunswick stew and Adam’s barbecue platter.
“Anything else for y’all?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“We’re good,” Adam said, though his gaze never left my face. “So, you’re really close to your sister,” he said once KiKi’d walked back to the kitchen.
I felt like telling him everything. About my life. About Rebecca and the complicated bond we shared. Everything. I never felt that way. I kept things locked tight inside me, never wanting to show any dent in my professional demeanor. I knew how to hide my flaws. Rebecca hated my wimpiness, and I’d learned early to erect a brave facade. I needed to work with Adam. Better that he saw me as a competent physician than a woman who could still be unnerved by the past.
“Yes,” I said simply. “We are.”
“You’re so lucky to have a sib.”
“You don’t?” I finally got around to picking up my spoon, but I was so intent on our conversation that I didn’t even consider dipping it into the stew.
He shook his head, swallowing a mouthful of barbecued pork. “No family,” he said. “Lost my parents when I was fifteen.”
I drew in a breath of surprise. The urge to tell him my own story expanded in my chest, but it was a story I never told. “Both at once?” I asked. “An accident?”
“Exactly. They were coming back from a party. Drunk driver.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “Did you live with relatives then?”
“Didn’t have any of them, either. Just grandparents who were too frail to take me. So I did the foster home thing.”
“Was it hard?” I’d been spared foster care. I ate a spoonful of the stew. I loved Mama Dip’s Brunswick stew, but now I barely tasted it.
“I got into a good one,” he said, blotting his lips with his napkin. “Unusual to be able to stay in one foster home for years, but I did. I’m still in touch with them. Good people.”
“You’re so—” I smiled “—upbeat.”
“Just born that way.” He shrugged. “Extra serotonin or something. It got me through.”
I ate another spoonful of stew, still not tasting it. “I was fourteen,” I said.
“Fourteen?”
“When my parents died.”
He set his fork down and leaned back in his chair. “You’re kidding,” he said. “You, too? An accident?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to go there, much as I longed to tell him every detail of my life. “Yes,” I lied.
“Did you end up in foster care, too?”
“No.” I looked down at the stew. “Rebecca—my sister—was eighteen, and she wouldn’t let it happen. She took care of me. She made it work.”
“You were lucky.”
“Incredibly.”
“Where does your sis—Rebecca—live when she’s not on assignment?”
“Here. Well, in Durham. She lives with Dorothea Ludlow. Do you know who she—”
“The DIDA founder,” he said. “Cool lady. Your sister lives with her? She’s her—” He raised his eyebrows. Clearly he did know about Dorothea.
“No. Dorothea’s in a committed relationship with an artist named Louisa Golden. They have this beautiful Victorian, and Rebecca rents the upstairs.”
“What’s your relationship status?”
“You are so blunt.” I smiled. “You just…you think of a question and it pops out of your mouth.”
“Does that bother you?”
I thought about it. “I like it, actually,” I said, “and I’m not in a relationship.”
“Amazing,” he said. “You’re pretty and smart and a catch. You’ve been working too hard, huh?”
People always said I was pretty, which meant average looking, which was good enough. Rebecca was beautiful though, and a force of nature. There were pictures of her on the DIDA Web site working in the field. No makeup, her short brown hair messy and unkempt, a sick child in her arms. The image of her could take your breath away. Even though I was the blonde, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned sister, I seemed to disappear next to her. It had sometimes been hard growing up in her shadow.
“How about you?” I asked.
“Divorced. Two years ago. Super woman, but she changed her mind about wanting kids.”
“You mean…changed her mind which way?”
“We went into it—we were married four years—we went into it talking about having a couple of kids. Several, really. Had the names picked out. All that rose-colored kind of fantasizing. I crave family, for obvious reasons.”
I nodded. I understood completely.
“Frannie was a reporter for one of the TV stations in Boston. She got caught up in her career and just totally changed her mind. It was bad. Hard when you still love each other and get along well and all, but can’t agree on that basic, really important issue. Not something you can really compromise on, you know? Either you want kids or you don’t.”
“I do,” I said, blushing suddenly. It sounded as though I was offering myself to him for something more than dinner. “I mean—” I laughed, embarrassed “—I feel the way you do. I have no family except for my sister. It’ll be a challenge balancing kids and work, but it’s a priority.”
For the first time that evening, he seemed at a loss for words. He chewed his lower lip, gazing at his nearly empty plate, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. My embarrassment had vanished, and I felt something happening between us in that silence. A shift. A knowing. When he looked up again, it was clear he felt it, too.
“You said I’m blunt.” He was smiling.
“Well, I didn’t mean—”
“I’m going to be even more blunt right now,” he said. “I fell in love with you in the O.R. today.”
I laughed. He was crazy. “You don’t know me,” I said.
“So true. So true. I sound like an idiotic kid, huh? But I fell in love with what I did know. What I witnessed. Your skill and caring.”
“Maybe you’re one of those men who can’t stand to be without a partner,” I said, but I knew where this was goi
ng. Where I wanted it to go.
“I’ve been without a partner for two years,” he said. “I’ve had opportunities. I haven’t been interested. Till right now. Today. But I don’t want to freak you out, okay? I won’t stalk you. Won’t call and bug you. I’ll leave the ball in your court.”
“Maybe you connect to people too quickly,” I said, thinking of the housekeeper in the elevator. “You assign them a personality before you get to know what they’re really like.”
“See?” He grinned. “You’re already finding fault with me, just like in a real relationship.”
I laughed. Could he be anymore likable? But then I sobered. I looked at him across the table.
“I lied to you earlier,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “What about?”
“I just…you’ve been so open. And this is a big part of who I am, so—”
“You don’t need to tell me.”
“I want to,” I said, knowing it was only a half-truth I was about to reveal. “Because I’m not…I’m a complicated person, and you should know that before you sign on.”
He laughed. “It’s not like I’m buying a house here and you need to disclose all its flaws.”
“Don’t make this hard,” I said, and I must have sounded very serious, because his smile disappeared.
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“My parents didn’t die in an accident.” I looked down at the table. Pushed the handle of my knife back and forth. “They were murdered.”
“Ah, no.”
I couldn’t look at him. “I don’t like to talk about it, okay?” I said. “Just…they were. And it shook me up. Made me afraid of…certain situations where I don’t feel safe.” If Rebecca had been sitting with us, she’d be kicking me under the table. Never let them see you sweat. That was her motto.
“Of course it did.” He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. “Did they catch the guy? I assume it was a guy?”
I nodded. “They caught him and killed him in a shootout.”
“What was his motive?”
“He was a disgruntled student of my father’s.” How often I’d heard those words, disgruntled student. I could rarely hear one without adding the other in my mind. “My father taught philosophy at American University.” I wrinkled my nose. “Can we not talk about this anymore?”