He must be thinking the same thing, because his face shifts and crumples in on itself, and the collapse works its way down his spine until his whole body shakes. I bring my hand to his cheek. “Don’t cry. Please. . . .”
He shifts beneath my touch, his first voluntary movement since I’ve entered the truck, and I feel a prick beneath my left armpit. I freeze as his alien gaze catches mine again. The burn on my leg throbs so hard I see red.
Daniel’s not crying. He’s laughing.
His other hand tightens on my forearm, jerking me still when I try to shake my head. “No.”
Nononononono . . .
“Yes.”
Then his forehead is crashing down. The first strike just jars me, but the second one hits my temple, and in a flash I see it: that gap that pops up so readily and often out here in the Mojave. The divide between what you expect and what you really get. A rattle reaches up to me from the depths of that unexpected arroyo, and I know it’s the Coal Man shifting. Sitting up, attentive after more than a decade of lying in pieces at the bottom of a mineshaft.
He’s laughing too.
We are both panting hard.
The charge nurse at University is named Ann Roy, a no-nonsense name, though it’s downright fancy compared to her grim attitude. She doesn’t even look up when I duck behind her station for my files. I’ve been here an entire month and she hasn’t looked me in the eye yet. “So what color are you?”
I frown and glance down at my hands, the only part of my body visible in the coat draped over my scrubs. It’s borrowed and too big. The one with my name—Kristine Rush, PA-C—is still on order.
“No, honey. I mean, up here.” Ann waves her hand at the rotation board where the doctors on call are listed in handwriting so blocky it looks carved. The PAs, myself included, are lined up just as evenly below that. “You’re going to reveal your true colors soon enough, but in order to save us both some time, I figure I’d just ask. Which one are you?”
There are three colors: black, red, and blue. “What do they mean?”
“Black means you’ve got a god complex of the first degree. You think you’re better than us, twice as good as your peers, and your patients are only there to provide proof of that.” She eyes me as she says it, looking for signs of offense. I keep my face clear as slate. I’m not going to give her anything until I can see where this is going. But I read the onyx name topping the list and murmur, “Dr. Matthews.”
I’ve already assisted him in the OR, and he’s certainly earned his black mark. I tried to close an incision without being asked on my first assist with him, and he responded by throwing a retractor at my head. The woman we were operating on was open and bleeding out, CTD—circling the drain—yet he stopped to yell at me mid-clamp. He then saved the patient with as much skill and as neat a closure as I’ve ever seen, but the way his fingertips brushed her skin, the way he pushed inside her body without really touching her, that alone would have told me exactly how much he thought of himself.
Dr. Schiff and Dr. Rogan have also earned black marks.
“What’s red mean?”
“Moody. They’re hit-and-miss.” Ann shrugs a heavy shoulder. “But certainly not interested in the patients. Not unless they’re wrist-deep inside of them.”
There’s the same number of reds as blacks. I’m so new that I don’t yet know if the doctors on staff are really this thoughtless or if Ann just doesn’t think very much of them. I hope for the latter.
My gaze drops lower, pins on a name that pops in blue. “Hawthorne,” I say, and one corner of Ann’s mouth quirks up. She explains that blue means the physician holds a healthy dose of respect and acknowledgment for everyone he works with, and the way she says it, I’m surprised she hasn’t drawn little hearts around his name. Then there’s the way a twitch develops next to her left eye. I glance back at the blue, and a memory sizzles. A little solar flare behind my eyelids.
It’s two weeks earlier and I’m checking on a patient I closed up not an hour before: SWM, mid-twenties, inked up, with a stab wound to the abdomen. We learn later that his name is Torrey Thatcher, a guitarist who specialized in classic rock covers, and who happened to sidle up to the bar after his set right next to a patron who was feeling proprietary over a bowl of nearby pretzels.
Thatcher is last on my rounds before I can leave the windowless recovery room for my regular Sunday breakfast date with Maria and Abby, and I fling back the curtain in the observation room like the huevos are already frying in the pan. My eyes narrow into slits when I see this new-to-me physician looming over Thatcher, and when he whirls, my gaze falls to his name stitched across the right breast pocket of his jacket. DANIEL HAWTHORNE, MD. I don’t see the rest of him, not just then. All I see is him looming above my patient, oxygen mask in hand.
“What are you doing?”
I remember it now, the panic flashing before his ice-blue gaze resettles, a monster in a lake, diving back under. It must have been such a foreign emotion for him, that fear. Still, his answer was ready. “I heard the pulse ox monitor ringing. There seems to be some breathing difficulty, and it was reading an unstable eighty percent. His skin was blue-gray; he was desatting.”
It’s a solid reply. I think even Ann would have mumbled an apology and left. After all, Daniel’s name is written in blue.
Yet I stabilized this patient myself. Thatcher’s color had already pinked up when I left his bay not an hour earlier.
Daniel returns my stare with a heavy gaze. I feel it like a weight, and if I’d known of Ann’s system at the time, my gut would have told me his name belonged in black.
“What’s your name?”
“Kristine Rush,” I answer, though I’m the one who should be asking the questions. Was he dumping the oxygen flow rate? Why was he even here, instead of writing up notes in the lounge? “Why—”
“New,” he says, nodding, and so I find myself nodding too. Then to himself, “I’d have noticed.”
I frown, looking at him now, and I see the spark come into that cobalt gaze. I can’t hide my eye roll. I bet that line—along with those looks, the MD on his pocket, and probably some car that costs six figures in the staff parking lot—serve him well.
“Do you mind?” I ask, more rudely than if he hadn’t unnerved me. I sidestep him to reach the oxygen inlet, and adjust the flow up to five liters before checking the monitors for pulse and BP. Thatcher is stable, so I make a note on his chart to check his oxygen flow more frequently. The entire time, Daniel stands silent and unmoving across from me, and I force myself not to look at him as I finish the chart. He’s waiting for something, I can feel it, and I finally look up to see what it is.
It’s me.
“Kristine Rush,” he murmurs, as if memorizing it. “I’d like to take you out for a drink.”
“No.”
It’s knee-jerk, the pat answer of a woman who doesn’t date co-workers and has no intention of introducing a man into the life of her ten-year-old daughter. What isn’t pat is the shift I feel inside of me, like wax going hot to find a new shape. The altering flame comes less from those words than the way Daniel says them. They’re a command, same as in the OR, and God help me, I’m responding to it.
Later, I’ll think that this is how my father’s death really marked me. His weakness, his inability to see me standing there, right in front of him, or choose me over the demons in his own mind—this has made me a sitting duck for a decisive man. Especially one who decisively chooses me. One commanding sentence, and the rest of my nos fall trampled underfoot, unvoiced.
Daniel levels me with that ice-blue gaze, and I shift some more. “Go out with me.”
Insistence pulses behind every word, but it doesn’t make him sound unshakable or privileged. No god complex here, but something. It turns basic requests into non-refutable orders. “Scalpel . . . suction . . . dab . . . go out with me . . . on
your knees . . . marry me.”
I stare at Daniel and pretend I still have a choice. I know it’s not true, even though I do turn and leave, and I do go fill the rest of my day with huevos rancheros and green chiles and laughter with trilled Rs. It still takes another couple of weeks, but after seeing Ann’s chart, after assisting Daniel in the OR and watching the magic he can work with those talented hands, after he demands it of me again—go out with me—I finally say yes.
I don’t just have dinner with him; I let him buy me breakfast too. I let him reach in and upend my world from the inside. I fall so completely in love with Dr. Daniel Hawthorne that never once—never again—do I see the black mark of a man with a god complex on him.
But Daniel doesn’t fancy himself a god, does he? Daniel believes he’s something else entirely. Daniel is an evolutionist.
At that, the blue light pulsing in front of my eyes turns yellow and sharp. It bleeds through my lids, and then I’m back. World upended again.
“Torrey Thatcher.” The words emerge in a dehydrated croak, but I don’t care. I can feel Daniel’s gaze on me, as heavy as it was that first time, and I speak without looking at him. “You were about to asphyxiate him when I rounded.”
Fats Waller is blaring from the radio, his throat just as scratchy as mine, and from the corner of my eye I spot Daniel’s iPod hooked into the semi’s dashboard. The technology—along with the roar of the wheels over the road—makes the tinkling piano keys feel otherworldly and out of place.
“Yes.”
My head lolls as Fats continues to croon, my right cheek bumping against the window with each dip in the road. The sky outside is hot and blue, the hue so pale that it’s both a color and not. The night has been bleached away. My hands and ankles and knees are now tightly bound by the tape that I cut through in order to “save” Daniel. He also detached the semi’s load while I was out. I can see through the side mirror that we fly over the highway on stubby stunted wings.
“You’re a goddamn murderer.”
“At least look at me when you say it.” Daniel scoffs, the sound a slap. “I hate it when you pout.”
I don’t want to look at him. I have this image of him in my mind as a healer in a white coat, a hero, and as soon as I look at him I know it’s going to burst. I turn my head anyway . . . and have to blink twice. He is surprisingly normal.
He’s wearing different clothes—not Henry’s, as when I found him in the semi. Looking at his pink collar, his khakis, I wonder where the jumpsuit went. He probably soiled it while shoving Crystal into a closet, or while tearing out her uterus, or while fitting a living dog inside her core.
Wondering this makes me feel so lost, so stupid and blind, that I’m almost thankful for the pain this road trip has inflicted on my body. It almost blunts the edge of betrayal slicing through my heart. Almost.
The sloppy bandage slanting over his left eye is gone, replaced by a wide, neater one, a thin membrane of carefully cut mesh peeking out from underneath. My God, he really did carve away a piece of his perfect face. Even if he has a skin graft, he’ll bear a scar. I wonder what he’ll remember when he looks at it.
I stop wondering because of what that means for me.
He catches me frowning at him and rolls his eyes. “Ugh, I knew I should’ve shoved you inside the bench seat. But you hate enclosed spaces, right?”
He knows I do. I told him about the mines.
Oh God. I told him everything.
“I enjoy watching you sleep, though.” Daniel leans back and plucks a water bottle from behind him. He guides the steering wheel with his forearms, the same way Crystal did when offering me the drugged tea. “You’re very restless.”
He says this like I’ve been snoozing. As if we’ve resumed the roles we were playing when we left Vegas, back before he sent me on a deadly treasure hunt and he was still hiding who he really was.
“You almost threw me back there, though. The thing with the bike?” He rubs his chin as if contemplating a chess move, like he’d forgotten about my queen. “I mean, wow. You never told me you could ride.”
You never told me you could kill.
But Daniel is injured too. He is wincing with every other breath, unconsciously touching his rib cage where it aligns with the giant steering wheel. It’s not hard to imagine him pitching forward over it, all of his weight bearing down on one fragile rib as he rams into a police cruiser. It would also explain the redness around his nose. He has bled, courtesy of the dashboard and the officer he left splattered atop the asphalt behind us.
“I guess I should have known you’d put up a fight. Not because you’re anything special, but because of me. I seek challenge, yet invite provocation. I brought out the best in you.” He looks at me to make sure I understand, then shakes his head and sighs. “No? Well, Mother always said I had a tendency to make things harder on myself than they needed to be.”
Yeah, I can relate.
“Maybe I do.” Daniel is nodding to himself now, and his voice has turned low and soured. “Still, the harder I work for something, the more valuable it feels when I finally get it.”
And Daniel is nothing if not a hard worker. Graduate, magna cum laude, residency at Johns Hopkins, trauma surgery and critical care fellowship at Emory. A research fellowship at Tulane. His attentiveness to detail has helped him publish extensively, his ability to think on his feet makes him a fascinating lecturer.
Funny that those are the things that I used to admire about him most.
The highway bends, the morning sun slashes over my body, and the road burn on my raw left leg flares to life. I can feel Daniel staring at me again, studying me with that unfamiliar gaze and following my backward-reeling thoughts. “So, you figure it out yet?”
My nod comes out in an uncontrolled jerk. “You’re covering your tracks. You’re setting me up.”
“For?”
The road burn pulses along the left side of my body. I can’t even begin to guess. All I know is that there were never any wiretaps or cameras, no bugs in my house. Why would there be? I gave it all to him.
“I really was attracted to you, just so you know,” Daniel says now, eyes back on the road. “Your physique . . . speaks to me. Even the way we worked together in the OR was like a dance, and nobody even had to teach us the moves. We really do have fantastic chemistry.”
My stomach heaves, causing me to shudder. Daniel pretends not to notice.
“But then I started to crave your presence outside of the bedroom too. I’d be fine, sated and calm, all the buzzing inside of me momentarily silenced. Suddenly, it was, ‘What’s Kristine doing?’ Or worse, ‘I wish I could share this with her.’ ” He tilts his head. “Don’t you think that’s strange? I mean, what the hell was the matter with me?”
I look at his preppy pastels and still-pretty face. He thinks the normal is strange. That the strange is normal. This is the man I fell in love with. This is who I introduced to Abby.
Abby.
I close my eyes. All the time I spent trying to keep from mentioning my daughter to “Malthus” and it turns out he not only knows about her, but he lives with her. He knows her routine—and he could have injured or killed her a million times over. I wonder why he didn’t. Shifting, I try to think of her as Daniel might. Does he hear the lilt of her unformed soprano and think of her voice as redundant? Does he watch her bend over her homework, or cartwheel through the yard, and miss the meaning and beauty in it?
Does he see her as superfluous?
I don’t, and can’t, know. But she’s with Maria, far away, back in Vegas, and she’s safe as long as Daniel is with me. As long we’re on this road together, he can’t touch her.
“I hated it,” Daniel says suddenly, jerking my attention back to him. The wonder has fled his voice, and he is sullen again. “Why should I care what you think? Why should anyone? You’re nothing.”
> My gaze jerks to my engagement ring of its own accord. The solitaire winks at me, flashing falsely in the sun.
“Besides,” he goes on, “if you really loved me, loved me the way you always claimed you did, you would have seen, way sooner than now. Instead, I had to draw you a fucking map.”
“There’s no way I could have known what you really are.”
God. How could I not have known?
He points out: “Oh, come on. You were with me at work, at home, Kristine. Yet you only saw what you wanted me to be . . . for you.”
But that’s what people did when they fell in love, right? They superimposed their dreams on another person, and if they fit—if that person was willing to pretend they fit—they didn’t look any further. Why would they? Why would I?
His name was in blue.
“And what would you have done if I had finally seen?” I finally ask.
He shrugs. “Same thing.”
“Propose to me?”
“Pro—propose?” He fans his eyes wide in disbelief. His beautiful, ruined face stretches. “Oh, I was never going to marry you, Kristine. I just needed to keep you close. Marry you? No, no. You are broken. We both know that. Despite your physicality, which I truly will miss, you are faulty. Here.”
He pokes himself in the skull so hard it makes a dull thud, then gives a sad shake of his head.
“I can stabilize an entire ER overflowing with victims of a multiple vehicle accident, but there are limits even to my healing abilities. Yes, you’re pretty. Relatively intelligent. You’re certainly aspirational. But you are defective. You cannot be made better or fixed. A doctor,” he scoffs, remembering my dream. And then he shudders, remembering something else. “Besides, the last thing the world needs is two Mrs. Hawthornes.”
I look away. Outside, heat haze is already rising from the highway as it slices through the desert. Crusty hillocks lift and fall on each side of the road, undulating as if the desert is breathing. Larger mountains, the San Bernardinos, loom in the distance. For a moment, I think I’m going to cry. It’s a strange sensation, but outside of Abby, this relationship with Daniel is the truest thing I’ve ever known. The truest thing that has ever been false.
Swerve Page 14
