The Love Doctors

by Fontaine, Bella

  I was glad she had enough faith for me because I was having a hard time here.

  “I appreciate your words. I just don’t want to get my hopes up. Anyway, I guess the wheelchair isn’t half bad. There’re some seriously cool people in wheelchairs, like Professor X in X-Men.” I attempted to laugh a laugh I didn’t feel.

  She did. “You’re funny. You are right though; there are some seriously cool people in wheelchairs. I look up to them, and I’ve been to the Paralympics three times. But… I know what I see in you. For you to see it too, I really need you to keep an open mind, Ivan.

  An open mind…

  It was very difficult for me to even contemplate having anything of the sort. Not when I was so bitter about what happened to me.

  This year was the worst year I’d ever lived. The absolute worst. It was difficult to believe in something that realistically might not happen.

  I was a realist. Always that, and I didn’t know any other way.

  “You seem to be thinking an awful lot,” she pointed out and straightened. Her beautiful black hair glistened in the bright sunlight.

  “Catherine, can I be real with you?”

  “Yes, I would love that.”

  “I know you’re supposed to be this positive person for us as patients and you’re supposed to make us believe that we can do whatever it is we want to do, but I can’t see me doing those things ever again. People say ‘Have an open mind,’ and that could mean anything. Open to what? Open for what? It’s about accepting different possibilities. Some good and some bad. I just don’t want you to give me hope when there’s none.” I would have preferred it if she was just frank with me and my situation.

  Right now, it felt like planting a tree on barren grounds and expecting it to grow.

  “I hear you, Ivan, and part of what you said is true. It is my job to be positive and instill hope in people. That is definitely true, but what’s not true is giving hope where there is none. That would be incredibly unfair, disrespectful, and just plain wrong for me to do that. It would be against me as a person to give false hope.” She shuffled and crossed one leg over the other.

  “I appreciate you saying that, and I love that you can be so positive.”

  “Ivan, let me be real with you. If someone told me I had a thirty-percent chance at doing anything, I’d go for it. The first thing I’d think was, there’s a chance. The next thing I’d go with is the perception of numbers. In most cases, if there’s roughly a close enough figure to fifty percent, we opt for the lower number, depending on how close it is. That’s because of that probability that your hypothesis might not give the results you need. It’s erring on the side of caution. That’s all. So, you do your best to present the best conditions for what you want to work. A thirty-percent chance for me is the middle ground. It’s the gray area. It’s not twenty, where it actually might not happen. It’s thirty, and that tells me if I put serious work into something, I could raise my chances big time.”

  I was listening to her. I decided that I would because she seemed to have invested a lot of time in her analysis.

  I also figured that she had to be a person to believe in chance if she were told she’d be dead in six months and was still alive. It didn’t escape me that another year had gone by, and here she was. Still here. Still with me, despite my abrasive behavior toward her in the time I’d known her.

  “That’s some analysis,” I stated and looked over to a little boy running across the main garden with a frisbee. There was a family over there with a guy in a wheelchair. His head was drooped to the side, and all he did was stare at the boy.

  The boy looked like him, and I guessed the woman who sat next to him holding his hand must be his wife or partner. The boy looked like her too. Next to them were some older people.

  “Hey, it is some analysis, but it’s right,” she bubbled.

  I looked back to her. “Yeah, sure.”

  “When you have an open mind, it isn’t about accepting different possibilities per se. I believe it’s about seeing something that could be. You don’t know how it will happen, but you have to see the end result and believe it can be a reality.”

  I’d never thought of it like that before. “It’s difficult to do that. Right now, that could be me seeing myself with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “What I’m proposing is not myth or fairy tales. You did it before with football, so I’m just asking you to do it with something else.”

  I smirked. “When did I do it with football? And how would you know?” She’d never mentioned watching me play.

  “I approach my work in a different way. Very different, and I don’t take on too many patients because I want to be able to give my time to the areas in my patients’ lives where I’m needed the most. Right now, I have two patients. You and another guy. Anyway. For you, I knew I wasn’t going to get to know the person you are by talking and sharing experiences. So, I realized very quickly that I had to get to know the person you were. I watched over fifty recordings of games you’ve played over the years.” She looked proud of herself.

  She looked proud, and I was completely impressed. “You did all of that?”

  She nodded. “Yes, of course. I can’t go telling you what to do with your life if I don’t know you and know what you love. I saw your love for the game, but what I also saw was that you knew your part in every game you played, whether you lost or won. So, it was like personally you would always win. You took on every single game the same because you saw the end goal and went for it. That is what I’m talking about. With each game, you didn’t know if your team was going to win or lose, but you did your job. You can’t affect how other people behave around you, but you can be responsible for your own behavior and accomplishments. It was very clear that you were going for gold.”

  My damn…

  She was right. She was absolutely right, and I was…

  I was starting to see her point and her belief in me walking.

  “That’s exactly me. I didn’t play a game I wasn’t intent on winning. I was lucky to play for three seasons with the Rams, and I played … Well, I’ve played all my life, and I’ve always had the same attitude,” I expressed.

  “I need that attitude now. I need that guy to see himself walking. I need you to approach this with that belief that you can do this. In life, we can either succeed or fail at the things we want. It’s the decision and the choices we make that affect the outcome.”

  I looked at her, and again my curiosity piqued.

  What condition did she have? What could have killed her?

  How did she come back from being told something so final to being this person before me giving me such an inspirational talk?

  It wasn’t appropriate for me to ask though. It would have been out of line, and I would have crossed a line I didn’t think was appropriate for me to cross.

  “Okay. I think… I can do that. I know how to be Ivan St. James, the Pitbull who was crazy on the field.”

  “Great.” She stood up, and her eyes sparkled like she’d just got some idea. “Do you want to meet my family? They’re gonna be here to join me for a late lunch in about an hour. I thought until then we could go for a walk by the river. Then I can answer the questions you’re dying to ask me about myself.”

  “Oh.” God, I hoped I didn’t seem that obvious, but I guessed I must have. “Questions?”

  She nodded. “There’s one I wished you would have asked a long time ago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What was wrong with me.” She smiled and started walking.

  I joined her and took advantage of the offer to ask. “What was wrong with you?”

  “Adrenocortical carcinoma,” she replied.

  I’d never even heard of that. “What is that?”

  “It’s a rare cancer that forms on the outer layer of the adrenal gland. At the time mine was discovered, it was in advanced stages. Normally, people have a fifty-percent chan
ce of a five-year life-span after diagnosis, but that could decrease to a thirty-five-percent chance after surgery. Mine was so bad I had to have surgery just to stay alive. I didn’t want the surgery because there was a chance I wouldn’t have made it through, and that wasn’t how I wanted to go.”

  “I’m so sorry. What happened after?” To me that sounded like she was knocking on death’s door.

  “Well, the doctors at first gave me a ten-percent chance of living for another two years, maybe. Then I got worse, and they gave me six months. I refused to believe that because I wanted to be well enough to go to Norway and see the fjords and the northern lights in the height of December when it’s super cold.”

  I chuckled. “That sounds nice.”

  “Yes, that was my mission, and I’d previously had this goal of being well enough within a year to do it. So, I believed I could and did everything I could to make myself as well as I could. It got to a point where I didn’t even remember my illness. I just kept going and going until one day, I started getting better. Tests were done, and the doctors found I was improving and my body was healing and regenerating from the treatment. I’ve continued to do so ever since. I know deep in my heart that the cancer could come back, but I’ll worry about that then.”

  “Wow, that’s truly inspiring.”

  She laughed. “It runs in the family. Wait until you meet my dad. I get it from him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, hot stuff.” She winked.

  “You know, if you keep calling me that, I’m gonna get the wrong idea and start thinking you actually like me, like me.” I gazed up at her.

  “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I do?” She smiled, and hope sparked in my heart.

  Hope and that positivity she gave me.

  Chapter 18

  Jada

  Present day …

  I was so nervous.

  Completely nervous and anxious because I didn’t know what to expect from today.

  We pulled up at the gates to a beautiful manor home twenty minutes later. The land surrounding it was vast, and in the background I could see what looked like a vineyard.

  The scenery matched the beautiful day, and it had the exotic presence that came with the Mediterranean or somewhere in the Caribbean.

  “Welcome to the Gutiérrez residence.” Ivan smiled.

  Gutiérrez. “They’re Spanish?”

  “Brazilian. They speak both Spanish and Portuguese though, and English, but sometimes they swap between languages. Sometimes they do that on purpose to throw me.”

  “How many languages do you speak?”

  “Six.”

  I bit the inside of my lip. “Really?”

  “Yeah. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Japanese. Of course, there’s English, but I don’t tend to count that as that’s my native tongue and I didn’t exactly have to work hard to learn it.” He chuckled.

  “Ivan, you’re a man of mystery. Okay. We’re here, and I have to say I’m super nervous.” I looked back out to the house and the grand wrought iron gates before us.

  “Don’t be.”

  “You’re being super secretive, and that’s not fair because I don’t know what to expect.”

  “Jada, I appreciate that you like knowing what you’re heading into. I do too, but part of learning something is experiencing it. There are some things that you can’t be told. You have to go through it yourself or see it for yourself.”

  I leaned my head to the side and regarded him. Pulling in a breath, I decided I’d try this. It was true; I knew completely what he meant.

  “Okay.”

  He smiled, rolled down the window, and pressed the button on the intercom at the side of the gate.

  He didn’t even need to speak into it; the gates opened for us to drive in.

  We did and proceeded up the drive to the house.

  Seeing the house up close showed off its beauty. It had that Victorian feel to it but carried modern features that made it look more contemporary.

  I went to open the door when Ivan rolled the car to a stop, but he stopped me and made an exaggerated show of getting out and opening the door for me.

  “Milady, the ground looks like it’s perfect for walking on.” He put out his hand to take mine.

  “You are so crazy.” I chuckled.

  He helped me out and bowed his head. “Just showing Milady that chivalry isn’t dead, and I continue to not be a dog, like the claim you made over my entire species.”

  “I said most men are dogs. Emphasis on the word ‘most.’ Not all,” I tried to defend.

  “I think you said that to cover yourself so you wouldn’t upset the men in your family. As far as the rest of us are concerned, we could all go out back in the supersize dog house you have for us.”

  I started laughing. “It’s not like that.”

  “It is. I’m just making sure you at least give me a blanket and not allow me to sleep in the dirt. I don’t like dirt in my hair.”

  I couldn’t stop laughing. I tried to take my hand from his, but he did that thing where he held on to it and brought it up to his lips to kiss. “Open mind, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Good, so the first thing I need to address is that claim of yours. Most men aren’t dogs, and most of us believe in love at first sight and putting our women first because they’re the most important things in our lives.” He released my hand.

  “Okay, if you say so.” Best to just agree with him.

  I turned my attention to the front door as it opened and an older woman rushed out smiling from ear to ear.

  Ivan met her and gave her a hug.

  “You made it,” she bubbled. She spoke with the hint of an accent.

  “Of course.” Ivan nodded.

  “And you’re just in time for breakfast.”

  “Traffic wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Not like Christmas.” Ivan laughed.

  She laughed too, then they both looked to me.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, Ivan looked a little nervous to introduce me. An emotion I hadn’t seen in him so far.

  “Who is this beautiful lady?” the woman asked.

  “Elizabeth, this is Dr. Jada Dane. A special friend of mine,” Ivan answered.

  I walked over to them and put out my hand to shake hers. She gave me a strong handshake and a smile.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  “The same to you. I’m Elizabeth. Come on in.”

  She led us up the steps leading to the porch. Ivan stayed close.

  We walked inside the house, which was beautifully decorated and just as striking as the outside.

  She led us out to the terrace, where there were more people. Ten more sitting around a long table, and seven kids playing in the garden at the entrance to the vineyard, which seemed to go on for acres.

  The table was covered with delicious-looking food and all manner of pastries I could have admired forever, but that vineyard took my breath away. It really did have that exotic feel to it. I’d only ever seen vineyards like this in Tuscany, Italy, and I made a point of going back every year just to see it.

  The people around the table greeted us warmly, the same way Elizabeth had. Ivan introduced me to them.

  “Where’s Jake?” Ivan asked Elizabeth.

  In answer to his question, she got this cautious look on her face that dimmed her smile.

  “Around the corner. He’s not the same as he was at Christmas, I’m afraid. His memory is worse. He gets a little antsy when there’s a lot of excitement around him.”

  “Can we see him? It’s important.”

  When Ivan glanced at me, I knew that Jake had some part to play in why I was here today.

  “Of course, you can.” Elizabeth smiled. “Be warned though; the conversation will just be like last time.”

  “That’s perfect.” Ivan chuckled.

  Now I wanted to know what happened last time, but it looked like I’d find out soon.


  Elizabeth took us around the corner where the terrace winded to a veranda-type area.

  There was an elderly man out there painting. He was tall with white hair that curled up at the ends.

  Next to him sat a stack of paintings already completed, but they were the same thing. All of them were of a woman. A woman who looked like a younger version of Elizabeth.

  Maybe it was their daughter.

  Elizabeth tensed when she looked over at another stack of paintings on the ground next to a tray of food that hadn’t been touched. I didn’t see those at first, but they too seemed to be the same.

  “Jake,” Elizabeth said to him.

  He looked at her and smiled. “There you are. Where did you go?”

  She walked over to him, and he gave her a kiss on her forehead.

  “I was here the whole time my love.” She smiled up at him. “Look who came to see us.” She pointed at Ivan and me.

  The man looked confused. “I don’t know them… Is this my son and his wife?”

  “No…” Sadness filled her eyes. “Not exactly.”

  It distracted me from the assumption that I was Ivan’s wife.

  I could see too that there was a sadness in Ivan because the man couldn’t remember him.

  Ivan stepped forward. “How about we make things simple and just say yes.”

  I snapped my gaze to Ivan. The normal me would have shaken him up about that, but I could see his reason for it. Definitely when the man’s face brightened.

  I guessed he must have had Alzheimer’s, or at least the onset of dementia.

  I didn’t even choose it as a minor back in college because of this reason. I didn’t know how I would deal with people who couldn’t remember their loved ones. Instead, I’d opted for studying thought and language processes. It didn’t help me in any way for my career, but I didn’t want to go near the neuropsychology modules.

  “Oh wow, it’s great to see you both,” Jake said, then looked back to Elizabeth. “Happy birthday. Look, I did the painting. It’s just as I remember. This was how you looked that day in the woods. You still look the same to me. Always the same, and I managed to capture the sparkle in your eyes. Striking against the color, like the chocolate your father used to make.”