Blurred Lines

by Naughty Aphrodite

  He shook his head and ordered her to come in and take a seat. The woman turned then and the moment her eyes fell on her, she gasped aloud and held onto her chest. Aisha looked from Caleb to his mother, speechless as to what to do.

  “This is my mother,” he introduced sourly, and the woman gazed back at him like he was crazy. She began to retreat backward as though Aisha were a ghost, raising shaky hands to point directly at her.

  “Mom,” Caleb rose, and Aisha immediately retreated. “I’ll come back,” she blurted and shut the door behind her.

  Chapter 13

  “What the hell was that?” Caleb’s mother screamed, and for a second, he was worried that the shock would go to her heart. So he came around the table and held her.

  “Mom.”

  “A-i, Aisha?”

  “Mom, please sit down, I’ll explain,” he said, and managed to lower her into her seat. After a few more minutes, she was finally calmed and he was able to speak. “She’s not Aisha,” he said. “But she does bear a striking resemblance to her.”

  “What do you mean by she’s not Aisha?” she shrieked. “Are you blind?”

  “I would know more than anyone if she were her, Mom. I know the marks on her body and I performed the surgery on her.”

  “What are you saying?” she cried. “She is dressed as a doctor. How can there be such a coincidence in the world?”

  With a deep sigh, Caleb accepted his defeat and gazed at his mother. “You’re still such a terrible liar,” she said to him. “Who do you think you’re trying to fool?”

  Defeated, he looked away. “This is unheard of. Why doesn’t she recognize me?”

  “She doesn’t recognize me either,” he said. “She lost her memory.”

  “How?”

  “I have no idea,” he replied. “Her current name is Joan.”

  “How did she come here? How did you find her? Is that why you left the city and moved to this tiny town?”

  “Meeting her is pure coincidence, Mom. She was brought in as a traffic accident patient a few weeks ago.”

  “How can one girl be so much trouble?” she asked. “Her entire existence is an accident, even her connection to you. I wish you’d never met her. She has caused such damage to all of us.”

  “Mom…” he cautioned, and she heeded his warning.

  She remained with him for a bit longer until he had to leave to see a patient.

  “I’m not comfortable with her here,” she said to him as he escorted her to her car.

  “Everything will be fine,” he said to her, repeating the assurance so many times that he lost count. Eventually, she took her leave.

  When she was gone, he turned around to look at the building and sighed deeply. He was still so unable to lie to others, but perhaps the only person he was able to lie was to himself. Would anything ever be alright? Perhaps it was time for him to accept this fact, or were his hopes still worth clinging to?

  He reentered the building, and waiting for him in the reception was the woman who kept turning his life upside down. She held up a CT scan for him. “I need your consult,” she said, and he nodded. They headed quietly up the grand stairs and toward the Oncology Room where she shut the door behind them.

  She placed the CT scan against the monitor and began to speak. “The patient just came in with a blade wedged between his two ribs,” she said. “He has tears to the pericardium and his lungs, but I’m afraid that he has also damaged a major artery. I should be able to take the blade out and quickly stop the bleeding but… look here.”

  “Is that a tumor?” Caleb asked.

  “It is. And the blade is too close, the tumor might be malignant. The tumor is also too close to this artery.”

  He sucked in his breath. “This is a difficult one.”

  “It is.”

  “Let’s ignore the glass for a while and focus on taking out the tumor first. We can then send it for a quick lab test. If it’s malignant, then we perform a lobectomy.”

  “It might be too difficult to keep the blade in place as you remove the tumor,” she said. “Any slight movement and the bleeding can become uncontrollable.”

  “Well, it has to be done. Are you up for the challenge?”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, he is your patient.”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t- I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I’ve been in an OR before.”

  Her response broke his heart. “When will you stop lying?” he asked. “Both to me and yourself? Perhaps you have forgotten the complexity of the procedure you carried out this morning. Even I cannot convince myself that I would be brave enough to make such a call if I’d been in your position. You literally cut open a man’s abdomen in the ER but yet you do not think you’ve ever been in an OR before?”

  She shut her eyes and sighed deeply. “Why won’t you let me be?” she asked, her voice low and as tormented as he was.

  “What bothers me the most is that you can actually let me go. I see this truth in front of my eyes, and yet, I refuse to believe it and it’s driving me insane. But I need to know why otherwise there will remain this sliver of hope in my heart that will eventually end me. I don’t believe that it was because you didn’t love me that you disappeared without a word. It has to be something else, something so scary that it could overpower everything. Even if I wasn’t as important as I had thought, you would have never just given up your career to live this way. You loved it way too much… you were too dedicated. So, since I truly love you like I claim, I cannot just let you be. But you can relax. I’m not begging you to come back to me, but I will give you back your life, and your career. I will find the answers that you are too afraid to reveal.” He stood up to leave, but then she caught his hand.

  “Don’t turn around,” she begged and he did as she asked.

  He waited, but she didn’t say a word and he knew that she was fighting with herself. Eventually, she spoke, “I’ll join you in surgery.” He nodded in response.

  To him, it was far from a satisfactory answer, but for the first time, he had received hope. She had been called out already... but she was still too scared to own up to it. He had to applaud her either way, for if she had not caved in with those moments of silence, then he would still have been doubtful. But in those few seconds, she had said all that he needed to hear, without her speaking a word.

  She wanted him to help her search for the answers that she could not find, but at the same time, she didn’t want him to. However, she didn’t have the courage to outrightly deny him, because perhaps that would be her only chance to regain her life. That was all he needed to know.

  He headed over to the locker room, got changed and prepared for the surgery.

  Chapter 14

  As Aisha watched him work, she felt chills run through her body. It was a sort of euphoria that she was familiar with but had not experienced in a long time.

  In the heat of the emergency procedure she had done earlier, she had been so panicked out of her mind that she had failed to recognize it, but now that someone else had the reigns and all she did was assist, her eyes welled up with tears.

  She watched as he succeeded in safely removing the tumor and then placed it on a tray to be immediately sent for a test.

  Before she became a surgeon, she had already been awed at how humans had gone past the barrier of the flesh when it came to saving lives and into the territory of cutting the human body open to get to the source of an illness. When she had been gifted the chance to lead her first surgery, she had been terrified but so full of joy that at the end she had not wanted to leave the OR.

  Her patient’s surgery had been successful, and she had watched an almost dead mother of three leave the OR with renewed chance at life, all because of the surgery that she had performed. Now seeing it all again, she was stunned at how she could have forgotten this.

  How she could have allowed her fear and grief to overwhelm her so, that she had
given up on the one thing that gave meaning to her life.

  The door to the OR swung open and a nurse came in to announce the results. “Dr. Pace, the tumor is benign.”

  “Alright then. Prolene suture. Forceps.”

  She watched, perhaps too attentively as he began to repair the artery. His hands moving so purposefully, as though he were playing a musical instrument, the notes engraved into his heart. His technique was pure magic and it reminded her that it was one of the things that had first attracted him to her. As an intern, and when they were not slaving away with work, they would sit in their break room and gossip about their superiors.

  She raised her head to gaze at him and recalled in awe, the first time she had heard of him.

  “Did you hear of the artificial heart replacement surgery that Dr. Pace performed today?”

  “I did,” came the response. “That was a surgery scheduled for nine hours, but he would have lost the patient if it had taken that long. The bastard completed the entire thing under six freaking hours.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “It should be, but the guy is a wizard,” another lamented. “Which of us here even after years of slaving away would ever be able to carry out such a feat?”

  One of her colleagues had run in then with excitement. “I got the tape! I got Dr. Pace’s surgery procedure.”

  They had all gathered like vultures to a carcass. Those that were too hungry to let their food go held onto it as they watched, while others boiling with ambition dumped their meals and grabbed their notepads. Hours later they had all collapsed back in exhaustion, the entire room of almost seven interns struck with awe.

  “I can’t believe we’re also wearing a white coat like he is,” someone said, and she couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Dr. Graves!” she heard the bark, and it jerked her back to the present.

  “I’m so sorry,” she immediately apologized and cut the string of the suture that he had just completed. However, she couldn’t help the smile on her face.

  “Are you smiling?” he asked, and she wiped it away before lifting up her head. “Of course not, I mean... no, I’m not.”

  He stared with eyes that had never ceased to unsettle her. “Can you close him up?”

  Her eyes widened slightly. “Um, sure, I would love to.”

  “Have at it,” he said, and she went over to his side of the table. She picked up her needle and laced the string through the flesh, drawing out the thread with precision. It took her a few moments to get used to it once again, but before she knew it, everything came back to her. She was done in no time, and the operation was declared a success.

  They stood side by side to wash their hands, and her nervousness came rushing back. “You were smiling in the OR?” he asked.

  “I apologize.”

  She quickly rinsed her hands, grabbed a paper towel, and hurried off before he could say anything else. A few minutes later, she was updating charts at the nurse’s station in the ER when one of the residents came over to her. He was a slim, red-haired guy with a good mustache and friendly eyes.

  “Hey,” he greeted, and she smiled back politely.

  “Hello.”

  “I’m Jeremy Reed.”

  “I’m Aisha Graves.”

  “I missed your introduction to the team, but I heard what you did today in the ER. You sounded pretty amazing. I am a wimp, there is no way I would have taken such a risk.”

  She blushed at the compliment. “That’s probably because you have common sense, unlike me. I’m a ticking time bomb.”

  “Incoming patient!” someone suddenly yelled, and they both looked up to see some paramedic officials rolling in a bloodied patient.

  “Duty calls,” he said, and they both headed over.

  A few hours later, he came back to her and said, “We’re about to head out for a quick drink. Are you down?”

  She gazed at the clock on the wall. “Our shift is not over yet.”

  “It’ll be over in an hour,” he said. “Since some of the bars are still open, we want to catch a drink and perhaps something to eat before we head home. You should come along, it’ll be a chance to get to know the rest of the team better.”

  “Who will tend to the patients?”

  “Dr. Pace will remain on call, probably even until the afternoon. He never leaves the hospital. This is literally his home; I could never live like that. I feel sorry for him sometimes.”

  “Um, alright then,” she said.

  “We’ll wait for you in the reception.”

  “Alright,” she agreed.

  A few minutes later, she was changed and heading for the reception when she decided to stop by Caleb’s office. She could see that the lights were on so she knew that he was in, but then she hesitated when it came time to knock. Eventually, her courage failed her so she turned away to leave. However, in that moment the door was pulled open, bringing her face to face with Caleb Pace.

  She took a step back so that she could breathe. “Some of the staff are heading out for drinks, and then going home.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Their call is not over.”

  She didn’t know how to respond.

  “Did you need something? Some money?”

  He instantly started to reach into his pocket, but she stopped him with a hand on his. “Oh God, no. I mean, I can afford to buy a bottle of beer, or two.”

  “You shouldn’t be drinking,” he said.

  “What do you mean? I’m already healed from my surgery. I’ve been working all day.”

  “That’s not what I’m referring to. You cannot hold down your alcohol. You start talking gibberish and then you fall asleep as though you’ve been drugged.”

  She didn’t know how to respond, so she just turned around and began to walk away.

  “Hold up,” he called out. “I’ll come with you.”

  “What?” she shrieked, but he had already disappeared into his office.

  She waited awkwardly and nervously in the dim corridor until he emerged a few minutes later, wearing a long, dark trench coat over his equally dark jumper and jeans.

  “Let’s go,” he said to her, and for a few moments, she was confused on what to do.

  “You don’t have to be there,” she hurried after him, and when he stopped, she almost ran into his back.

  “You don’t want me there?” he asked.

  “No, it’s just that, who’s going to stay here?”

  “Dr. Spencer is on call. He can handle two usually quiet hours. Moreover, he can always page us if there is an emergency, and we will be here in an instant.”

  Caleb continued on his way, and they headed out into the reception to meet a handful of their co-workers.

  The Head Nurse was surprisingly among them, and when she saw Caleb dressed up and by Aisha’s side, her eyes widened.

  Everyone turned quiet at his presence.

  “Dr. Pace, you’re going home now?” The Head Nurse asked, unbelief in her voice.

  “No, I’m going to the bar with you all. Since no one thought to invite me, I invited myself. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “We don’t!” came the chorus from the surprised staff. Aisha watched as he gave them all a solemn look and then went past them to exit the reception. Even the manager kept staring from his post behind the receptionist’s desk.

  “Who invited him?” Jeremy cried. And they all turned to Aisha.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I swear it. He just saw me passing and made the decision to come.”

  The groans that ensued as they all filed out from the reception made her smile. “It’s not such a bad thing for him to come, is it?” she casually asked and they all turned on her.

  “It is!”

  “Everyone will be forced to remain collected, and stiff… and nervous.”

  “How do you expect us to have any fun with Mr. Ice King watching us all?”

  “We’ll
manage,” she said under her breath. “I want him there.”

  Chapter 15

  Caleb watched the Norton County team of medical practitioners as they raised full jugs of sparkling, golden beer up in the air and clinked their glasses loudly against each other.

  “Cheers…” they roared to the annoyance of the half asleep bar owner, twitching in excitement as some of it spilled on the table and splashed on their clothes. They chugged down their beer, while Caleb calmly sipped on a glass of red wine, as he shot glances toward the restroom door where Aisha had disappeared into a few moments earlier.