by Jolie Moore
“Stop, Lucas. Please stop. If you hadn’t sent the Kauai guy away—”
“His name was Colin—”
“Or the young one from tonight.”
“I didn’t get his name—”
“Forrest. What did you say to make them go away?” she asked matter-of-factly.
“I told them we’d fought and you were trying to make me jealous.”
“Oh, God.” She hit her forehead with a fist once, then again, then again. “Why?”
“You were going to sleep with him, right?”
She shook her head. For a long moment, I thought maybe I’d gotten it all wrong. “Sleep isn’t quite what I was planning to do.” A rare small smile escaped. Odd that I was awash in vindication.
“It seemed like a bad idea,” I said. “I didn’t want a stranger to take advantage of you.”
“So it was okay if you took advantage?” she asked.
“No.” This was going all wrong. I’d done the honorable thing, right? “I was trying to keep you safe from randy doctors and possible mass murderers,” I justified.
“You achieved one of those.”
I cursed my fair skin that was no doubt becoming ruddier by the minute. “I like you, Nari.” There. I’d put it out there. No more beating around the bush. Half of my brain had been thinking that I didn’t want her to get hurt shagging random guys. But the other half of me had taken advantage of the opportunity that I was sure was down the dating road a ways.
“Okay.”
She wasn’t going to make this easy. I was starting to think that nothing about this woman was easy. “Will you go out to dinner with me next Friday?”
“No,” she said without hesitation, almost without thought.
Caught up short, I scratched at the hair on my chest. “No for next Friday, or never?”
“Never, Lucas. I don’t think I led you on.”
“So you were going to have two one-night stands?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t an idiot. Objectively I’d known that. But I’d wanted to think she’d slept with me for a reason other than being horny. “Are you going to…I don’t know…go out to a bar next week?” Why did I think she’d only done this twice? I was so naïve. The rules were clearly different in California. New England felt like a completely different planet.
“No Lucas, not next week. Please don’t worry about me.” She raised her hands as if she were swearing out an oath. “I promise I’ll be celibate for the next nine months.”
I should have listened when she’d told me to go home. “I’m going to get my stuff,” I said, lifting myself from the couch and heading back to the bedroom. Shoving my hiking crap in my pockets, I pulled on my cargo shorts, shirt, wool socks, hiking boots. When I emerged from her very white bedroom, Nari hadn’t moved an inch.
I jingled the keys in my pocket. “Do you need a ride to your car?”
“I walked to the bar. Drinking and driving is a big no-no for me,” she said.
Something wasn’t quite right about this picture. She was clearly comfortable with her sexuality, and confident in her ability to land a guy. But why was it a different guy every time? Didn’t most women want relationships? To nest? Except for the white lab coat she wore at work, she wasn’t any different than most women, right?
“Is it just me, or do you date anyone?” I wanted to kill myself right then. I’d emasculated myself with that needy question. She didn’t want me. Why didn’t I pick up my car keys and get the hell home?
I was an Ivy League-educated doctor. The list of women willing to give me a shot wasn’t short, by any means. My medical school classmates certainly had their pick of mates even if they didn’t have the time to date. But my parents had always focused on the importance of leisure and a life outside of work. So I’d picked a nearly nine to five specialty. I’d always wanted to have a serious relationship. And foolishly I’d thought Nari a candidate.
Her sigh was long, drawn out. “I don’t date.”
My hand was on the door, but I didn’t want to go home with this mystery unsolved. “Why?”
Nari’s head snapped up. The way she smiled then, it was as if a light were coming from inside her. It was the most beautiful I’d ever seen her. “Oh,” she started as if she were answering a question as easy as what a patient’s vitals were on rounds. “I’m in love with someone.”
Chapter 7
Nari
I had a single kimbap slice at my lips when a knock came at the office door. Without waiting for an invitation, Lucas entered, brown bag in hand. I put down my chopsticks when my hand shook a little with a quick surge of heart-pumping adrenaline.
“Can I join you?” he asked from the doorway.
I looked right, then left dramatically. “I don’t think there are any men you need to save me from in here.”
A small smile ticked up both sides of his mouth. He leaned back toward the hall and looked both ways. “I promise to stay the hell out of your sex life,” he said. “Seriously, though. It’s been awkward the last few days around here. I’d really like everything to go back to the way it used to be. Can we be at least amicable colleagues, maybe friends?” He lifted a single shoulder in question.
For a reason I couldn’t quite pinpoint, that amicable friends idea bothered me. I mentally brushed away the feeling. “Sure,” I said. “Friends.” I extended my hand. He came in and shook solemnly.
After closing the door behind him, he sat in one of the chairs I usually reserved for patients in imminent receipt of bad news, and pulled out his lunch. From the looks of it, he had a large ham and cheese sub, an apple and a brownie. It was so all-American I had to laugh.
“What so funny?” he asked, opening his bottled water and taking a swig.
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “The brown paper bag and the food is just so you.”
His brow furrowed, but he unwrapped and took a bite of his sandwich anyway. “What do you have there?” he asked after chewing and swallowing a few bites.
“Kimbap, kimchi, chapchae,” I answered.
Lucas looked uncomfortable for a long second. “Is it okay if I ask you what all that is?” His naïveté was kind of endearing. It was a far cry from the know-it-all Los Angeles guys I was used to. Single guys in this town loved to lecture me on the history of Japan or Korea as if being born in New Jersey made me ignorant about Asia. I could never tell if it was supposed to be some kind of pickup maneuver or if I were being condescended to. I didn’t really care to figure it out.
“Kimbap are the rolls. It’s like Korean sushi,” I said, cringing inwardly. My mom would have smacked the back of my hand if she’d heard that answer. My parents hated being compared to the Japanese as if Korea didn’t have a distinct and arguably more influential culture. “The kimchi is cabbage fermented with red peppers, and chapchae is vegetables and rice noodles.”
After taking and swallowing two more bites of his sub, he looked longingly at her plate. “Can I—”
I swiveled in my seat and pulled a small paper plate from my desk drawer. I gave him a bit of everything and an extra pair of disposable chopsticks. Game face on, he did the best he could with the chopsticks, and tried everything. “This is good,” he said, rapidly cleaning the plate despite nearly dropping his utensils more than once. “Wanna switch lunches?”
“Nope, I had my fair share of mayonnaise heavy sandwiches in high school.”
“You didn’t eat like that in school?” he asked, gesturing toward her container. “That had to be better than school lunches any day.”
“I went through a phase where I was kind of embarrassed at how Korean my family was,” I said matter-of-factly.
“I kind of had a phase like that,” he said.
“Seriously? Or are you just trying to empathize?” I asked.
“No, seriously. I told you how I was adopted, right?”
I put down my chopsticks for the second time since he’d breached my inner sanctum. My stomach churned a little.
Appetite, gone. “Sure,” I said, the word almost sticking in my throat.
“I went to the high school my mom taught at,” he said. “It was really cool when I was in nursery, kindergarten, even the lower grades. But by the time I got to middle school, kids’ powers of observation were much better. Or they’d paid attention through Mendelian genetics. At one time or another, every single person asked me how a tall curly-haired kid had come from such short brown-haired parents.”
“You were a tall kid?”
“I eclipsed my mother by the time I was ten, my dad by fifteen.”
“How big was this school?”
“Probably three hundred kids.”
“In how many grades?”
“Nursery through high school.”
“Jesus, no anonymity there. Was it a religious school or something?”
“No, Waldorf.”
“Is that the guy who doesn’t believe in children reading?”
“Rudolf Steiner? Not exactly. I was literate enough to make it through college and medical school.”
“Ah, yeah. Sorry about that. My high school probably had sixteen hundred kids, easy.”
“I really liked the school, otherwise,” he said. “Once I told them I was adopted, the subject was dropped.”
There it was again, that word. Adopted. I quickly searched my mind for a way to change the subject. I was about to launch into gossip about the pharmaceutical rep, a dead ringer for a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, when Lucas started talking again.
“I’m thinking about looking for my birth mother,” he said.
Okay. Wow. There was no way to back out of this. I lifted my gaze from the chopsticks I’d been fiddling with. He was looking at me, waiting for a reaction. I’d hidden the real one long ago. What should I put on my face?
Even though I wasn’t hungry, I picked up some kimchi and stuffed it in my mouth. I washed it down with a long drink of green tea. After all that, he was back to eating, but still looking at me. Lucas reminded her of a cocker spaniel, from the curly golden hair to the look of open neediness dogs had a knack for. Looked like he didn’t have anyone to talk to about this.
“Thinking about or actually doing?” I finally managed.
“A little bit of both. I met with a lawyer in Hawaii who was able to get me a copy of my birth certificate,” he said.
I made a huge effort to control my inhalation, exhalation. “What about privacy laws? The state just handed over your birth parents’ names?” Please let him say that they couldn’t do that.
“No, I wasn’t that lucky,” he said. My breathing eased just a little. “Their names and identifying information were blacked out.” Normal, my breathing was almost normal again. Some secrets were meant to stay that way.
“What’s your next step?” I asked. My voice was nearly conversational. He didn’t know me well enough to tell the difference.
“I’ll have to talk to my parents. I need to find out where I was adopted.”
“That seems easy enough,” I said cautiously.
“Well, yeah, sort of.”
“Did you tell them you’re looking for your parents?”
“Birth parents, and yeah, I mentioned it at Christmas. They said they supported me, but seemed nervous all the same. And my brother and sister have each asked me not to bring it up again.”
“Brother and sister? They’re not adopted as well?” I paused. “Sorry if that’s too intrusive.” I was used to asking intimate and personal questions about fifteen times a day. Sometimes I forgot that a person couldn’t do it in casual conversation.
“It’s okay. I brought it up,” he said. Big sigh. “After they adopted me, Mom got pregnant with my sister then brother in rapid succession.” Lucas fished his phone from his pocket, flicked at the screen and leaned forward.
I peered at the tiny faces. Damn, he was right. It was like a game of What Doesn’t Belong from Sesame Street.
Panic nearly closed my throat a second time. Taking as deep a breath as I could without appearing to do so, I pushed out the question burning in my brain. “So why do you want to find your birth parents? Your mom sounds awesome. You probably had all sorts of craft projects in your kitchen.” Because craft projects made up for a mom leaving a swaddled baby on a church doorstep.
“My family is awesome. They love me. I don’t doubt that. It’s hard to explain, but it’s just, something’s missing. I want to see the people who look like me. Find out why they gave me up.”
“If they didn’t do an open adoption, maybe they don’t want to be found.”
“There was a statistic in this book the lawyer gave me that said ninety-five percent of birth mothers would like to reunite with their children.”
What about that five percent, I wanted to shout. Weren’t they worthy of consideration? Instead my question was calm. “Can I give you some unsolicited advice?”
“I’ve doled out my share. Shoot.”
I thought carefully before I spoke, trying to get the phrasing just right. “Women’s lives are complicated. Pregnancies only happen to them. Be careful. It could be a Pandora’s box you’re opening up.”
Lucas nodded, but didn’t look dissuaded. I handed the rest of my lunch over to him, my appetite long gone. He quickly abandoned his food for mine. “You want my apple? Brownie?” he asked between bites and a lot of sips of water.
“No, I’m good,” I said, shifting the patient files around on my desk. I thought he’d taken the hint when he packed away his lunch remains in the paper bag. But he made no move to leave. He sat forward, his hands hanging loosely between his legs. I closed my eyes for a long moment trying not to think about what else lay between those thighs.
“What?” I asked finally. Damned open book his face was. They were on their way back to her unorthodox sex life.
“How does your, um, boyfriend feel about your, um, bar hopping?” he whispered, leaning forward. The walls in the clinic were thin, but at his volume no one would hear the question. I was oddly grateful for his discretion.
“Boyfriend?” I asked in reply. I’d never told him I had a boyfriend. I was as single as a mateless sock fresh from the dryer.
“Oh, I get it. I’m sorry. It was a brush-off.” He started to rise then. The open face closed with hurt and disappointment. I didn’t want him to think I’d lied. That I didn’t do with people I cared about. Not that I cared about him more than a friend, of course. I rose and tugged at his free hand, making him face me again.
“Oh, you mean Andrew. No, no, no. That wasn’t a brush-off. I wouldn’t lie about that.”
Disappointment and hurt turned to confusion. “So where’s Andrew?”
I dropped his hand and looked toward my window, blinking back tears. “He’s dead.”
Chapter 8
Lucas
I closed my laptop browser. The book Vida had given me suggested several high trafficked websites where I could register my particulars and seek out my birth parents. But I hit a wall every single time I scrolled down the past the box that asked for my current name and e-mail.
I had my date of birth and location, but beyond that, I was in the dark. I felt stupid when I realized I didn’t even know what state I was adopted in. My dad had worked in New Hampshire for as long as I could remember. But my parents had always lived in Vermont—probably. Slamming down the metal lid in frustration, I cracked my knuckles. I didn’t have half of the information I needed.
I rolled the chair away from the desk and looked out the modern government edifices and helipads that surrounded my place. The apartment in the 1899 building had been a rare find. I loved the living quarters, if not the location.
The ”heart of downtown” had seemed brilliant when I’d made the weeklong trip to find a place to live. I’d lived in the heart of downtown Brooklyn during my residency and had loved it. In Los Angeles, though, I may as well have been in no man’s land. Spring Street was not a happening place for a single doctor.
Putting aside the mystery of my birth
for a moment, I thought about my love life, such as it was. I flipped open the laptop again and went to the clinic’s website. I typed in Nari’s name, and there was her picture. My heart sped up a little faster. She was smiling at the camera in her white lab coat, the clinic’s logo emblazoned above her left breast. I tried not to think of her left breast, or the right one for that matter. She was pining for someone who died, who she still loved? There was no way I could compete with that. I rolled back and forth on the chair’s casters for a solid fifteen minutes of indecision.
If my life was full of roadblocks, it was time to knock one down. I rolled back to the desk and lifted the handset of the cordless phone from its base.
“Hey, Dad,” I said when I heard my father’s voice come on the line.
“You want to talk to your mom?”
I almost said yes then thought better of it. Maybe this would go down easier with my dad. Matthew Tucker had always been the more dispassionate of my parents. The horrors of human history had probably done that to him.
“I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. No need to bring Mom to the phone.”
“Oh, okay.” My dad’s voice was hesitant, something that was unusual. Professor Tucker hadn’t been a yeller or a rager like other dads I’d met. But as a long-tenured history professor at Dartmouth, he had a way of getting his point across.
“I need to know about my birth and adoption.”
My dad’s sigh was long. I could hear the springs of the old wooden desk chair creak. “Let me close the door,” he said, placing the phone down. I could practically see my dad gently laying the old corded phone down and rising to close the office door of his wood-paneled study.
The pool table green carpet would be muffling the sound of his preferred footwear, top-siders if he’d been outside today or moccasin slippers if he’d been working in his office. The clunk of wood as door hit jamb, then the sound of my dad’s wedding ring clicked against the plastic receiver. “I don’t want your mom to hear this if she doesn’t have to. She’s having a hard enough time as it is.”
