“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Wake up.”
Fingers pried open my right eyelid. A small round light waved back and forth, blinding me with its brightness.
I squeezed my eyes shut, groaned again, and tried to turn away. I tried to sit up.
“Not so fast.”
Strong hands grabbed me by my shoulders and forced me back down. My stomach lurched at the sudden movement. I swung wildly at the hands that sought to restrain me.
“I will tie you down if I have to, Syd, so don’t try me.”
The authoritative voice was as familiar to me as my own. “Jennifer?”
I opened my eyes and her face filled my vision. She looked worried. About me? So she did care.
“There you are,” she whispered as her thumb caressed my cheek. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Her touch was gentle, her voice soothing. I closed my eyes again, wanting her to sing me to sleep.
“No,” she chided, smacking me in the face again. “Stay with me.”
I opened my eyes again. “Stop hitting me,” I said, my voice raspy.
“I will if you stay awake long enough for me to examine you.”
When she hit me again, I hit her back.
“What was that for?” she asked, rubbing her arm.
“You were enjoying it too much.”
We were in a large canvas tent, military issue from the size of it. Boxes of medical supplies lined one wall, boxes of canned goods another. Outside, a gas-powered generator coughed and spluttered to life. The thick exhaust it emitted made my nausea even worse. Several people crowded in the tent’s open doorway, cutting off my access to fresh air.
“Is she all right?” Alex asked.
“That’s what I’m about to find out,” Jennifer replied. “Thanks again for getting her here. I owe you a beer—or twelve. Now I need some privacy so I can examine her. Give us some room, okay, guys?”
A little girl stood in front of the group. She had copper-colored skin, short black hair, and the biggest, brownest eyes I had ever seen. The soccer ball in her arms was almost bigger than she was. Perched on her head, cinched as tight as its adjustable strap would allow, was Jennifer’s prize possession, her Cubs hat. I could see the faint remnants of Greg Maddux’s and Ryne Sandberg’s signatures on the bill.
“See you tomorrow, Dr. Jen?” the little girl asked in heavily accented English.
“Sure thing,” Jennifer said with a broad smile. “I’ll bet you won’t score on me tomorrow, though.”
The little girl’s eyes sparkled at the challenge. “I bet I will. I can bend it like Beckham.”
Alex and the rest of the adults ushered everyone out, leaving me and Jennifer alone.
Jennifer closed the tent flap and returned to the stainless steel table where I lay. She regarded me before beginning her examination. I didn’t know how I looked, but if I looked as good as I felt, I looked like shit. It wasn’t how I wanted our reunion to kick off, that’s for sure.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked as she pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
“It looks like I’m in the middle of nowhere, but I hope I’m in Mocoron. If I’m not, this will have to do because I am not getting on another plane, boat, or bus today.”
Jennifer blew on the metal part of her stethoscope to warm it. She pressed the stethoscope against my chest and listened to my heart. “I always knew you were crazy. You didn’t have to prove it to me. Deep breath in.” She moved the stethoscope to my back. “Again.”
I obliged as best I could. I felt as if I had a boulder sitting on my chest.
“You owe me a T-shirt,” I said. The one I had been wearing lay in tatters on the floor.
“In order for me to be able to rule out the possibility of an allergic reaction, I had to check your skin for insect bites. The shirt was collateral damage.”
I lifted one foot, then the other as Jennifer removed my boots and dropped them on the floor. My wet socks soon joined them.
“But I loved that shirt,” I whined. “We bought it at the Bruce Springsteen concert at Soldier Field. Remember how we camped out for a week outside the stadium to get tickets because they weren’t available online?”
Jennifer stopped examining my feet and put her hands on her hips.
“Sydney, I’ll buy you another shirt. I’ll even get Springsteen to sign it for you. Are you happy now?”
“I’m getting there.”
I had gotten a rise out of her. I had penetrated the professional demeanor she was using as armor and, for a split second, she had treated me like her friend, not her patient. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
“Does anyone know where you are?” she asked as she resumed her inspection. Her hands slid up my legs, looking for—I assumed—breaks in the skin or little creatures that had decided to hitch a ride.
“Everyone does. They also know why I’m here.”
Her eyes flicked toward my face, then she looked away. “Why are you here?”
“Because anywhere you are, that’s where I want to be.”
The silence stretched on for several seconds as I waited in vain for her to respond to what I had said.
“You let someone score on you?” I asked, soldiering on by changing the subject. “You used to be a much better goalie than that.” She still held school records—both high school and college—for most career shutouts.
“I used to be much better at a lot of things. Judging a person’s character, for example.” She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my left arm and slid the stethoscope underneath it while the cuff inflated.
I always panicked when I got my blood pressure checked. I had an irrational fear that the cuff would malfunction, growing tighter and tighter until, finally, it ripped off my arm.
Jennifer frowned when she saw the reading. “Your blood pressure’s low; your pulse is rapid—”
“That’s from seeing you,” I said. She didn’t laugh at the joke, stretching my already-frayed nerves nearly to their breaking point. “Could I have a Tic Tac or something? My mouth tastes like a cow crawled in it and died.”
Refusing to be distracted, she stuck a thermometer in my mouth to shut me up. Then she shined her pen light into my eyes again. “Your pupils are dilated and your skin is clammy,” she said, continuing her clinical recitation of my symptoms. I flinched when she pinched the skin on my forearm. “When is the last time you had something to drink?”
I pressed down on the thermometer with my tongue to keep it from falling out of my mouth. “Yesterday, I think.”
“Thought so.” She pressed a cold bottle of Gatorade into my hand, then took the thermometer out of my mouth and checked the reading. “Your temperature’s slightly elevated, but it isn’t high enough to worry about. I’ll check it again in an hour to be sure.”
She tossed me a box of breath mints. I let three of them slide into my mouth while she jotted some notes on my chart.
“What’s the verdict, Doc?”
She lifted the bottle of Gatorade toward my mouth, reminding me to drink. “As I suspected, you’re dehydrated, but you’ll be fine. I’m going to give you some fluids. Between the IV and the Gatorade, you should be up and around in no time. Lie down.” She said it so forcefully I wished we were in bed instead of an examination room.
After disinfecting the inside of my left arm with an alcohol wipe, she reached into a cabinet behind the examination table, pulled out a bag of glucose, and prepared an IV drip. Not fond of needles, I turned away when she headed toward me with one big enough to euthanize a horse. She thumped a vein in the crook of my elbow until it rose up in protest. Then she slid the IV in and taped it in place.
“This should take about an hour, so make yourself comfortable.” She took the half-empty bottle of Gatorade from me and drank the rest of it in one long swallow. “Now you can try to get some sleep. I’m sure you need it. If you have trouble nodding off, there’s a five-year-old copy of Ladies’ Home Journal floatingaround here somewhere
. It should put you right out.”
She dropped her gloves and the empty bottle in the trash and turned to leave.
“Your bedside manner could use a little work,” I told her retreating form. She stopped but didn’t turn around. “I’ll bet that’s something you’ve never heard before.” She picked up stride again. “I know you love me so don’t act like you don’t.” Another pause. “If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have sounded so frightened when you couldn’t get me to regain consciousness.”
“You’re my patient. You’re entitled to the highest possible standard of care.”
She sounded so serious I almost believed her. Then I saw the small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Still, I wasn’t quite forgiven. She made that clear when she pulled up a chair and sat next to my makeshift bed.
“I won’t deny that I love you,” she said after heaving a heavy sigh. “I couldn’t do that if I tried. And, believe me, I’ve tried. My life would be so much easier if I’d never met you. Unfortunately, it also wouldn’t be nearly as rich.”
I could feel her hesitate.
“But?” I prompted.
“I don’t know if I can trust you. How do I know you won’t run away and hide the first time our relationship stops being fun and begins to feel like work?”
“You mean like you did?”
She tilted her head as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. I gladly filled her in.
“You’re blaming me for the distance between us, but this time it’s not my fault. You’re the one who ran and hid, not me. I told Jack just like I said I would. Yes, you were right. There was no perfect time. Yes, it hurt and, yes, I felt terrible doing it, but I did it.”
I held up my left hand so she could see that I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring.
“I left him, Jen. I’m free.”
I expected some kind of reaction from her, but she didn’t give me anything. Undaunted, I kept going.
“The way I feel about you is out in the open now. Everyone knows.”
“Who’s everyone?” She leaned back, moving farther away from me when what I wanted was for her to move closer.
“Jack, Mom, Dad, Patrick, Kristin, and, since the only secrets Marcus has ever been able to keep are yours, probably half of Chicago by now. Everyone I know knows that I’m a lesbian and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me or to them. What matters is you can’t bring yourself to trust me. Yes, I hurt you once. More than once. But you hurt me, too. You kept telling me all the reasons you couldn’t fall for me—straight, married, best friend—but you never told me any of the reasons you could. If you had given me some encouragement—if we had talked to each other instead of hiding from our feelings—”
She extended her hand as if she meant to shake hands.
“What?” I asked.
“Just take my hand.” When I did as she asked, she introduced herself as if we were meeting for the first time. “Hi, I’m Jennifer Rekowski. You are?”
“Sydney,” I replied, feeling patently silly.
“Do you have a last name, Sydney?”
“Paulsen.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sydney Paulsen.” She shook my hand and didn’t let go. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“I’m not sure. I’d like to be.” She let go of my hand, putting me on the defensive. The best defense is a good offense, so I brought out my big guns. “I love you, Jen, and I want to spend the rest of my life proving it to you. I don’t trek through the rainforest for just anyone, you know.”
“Technically, you didn’t trek. You were carried.”
“Details.”
As I looked into her eyes, I thought I saw the ice begin to melt. Instead of going through the wall she had erected, I tried to go around it.
“What would you have me do?” I asked. “What penance would you have me pay? Tell me and I’ll do it. As long as it means that when I’ve paid it, you and I will be okay. I love you, Jen. You know that as well as I do. I can’t promise you that life with me will be perfect. I can’t promise you that there won’t be subjects on which we agree to disagree, but I can promise you that I will never again deny who I am and what you mean to me. Think about it. Do you honestly believe that I’d come all this way just to blow smoke up your ass?”
She smiled. “I wouldn’t put it past you. If I remember correctly, you once drove five hundred miles just to short sheet my bed.”
“Well, that was different. You shouldn’t have prank called me at three in the morning.”
“Should I have waited until four?” We laughed into each other’s eyes for a moment and I felt our once-tenuous bond regain strength. “God,” she said, burying her hands in her hair as if she wanted to pull it out by the roots, “what am I going to do with you?”
“Love me?” I asked.
“I already do.” I held out my hand to her. The one without the IV attached to it. She kissed the back of my hand and held it in both of hers. “What do you want? The house in the suburbs with the white picket fence and the two-car garage? I can’t give that to you. Not from here. And I can’t not be here. Or places like it. I love this work. This is what I do. I would go crazy if I opened a cushy private practice on Lakeshore Drive and sat around twiddling my thumbs all day. I’m not built that way.”
“I want your face to be the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. Whether that’s in Chicago or here, that’s enough for me. I know how much being here means to you. I wouldn’t dare ask you not to come. Not as long as I can come with you.”
Her eyes widened as if she had never received a similar offer. “Do you mean that?”
“I’m here now, aren’t I? Overlooking, of course, the fact that I’m flat on my back at the moment.”
She caressed my cheek. “You’ll be up and around in no time. You’ve got the best doctor in Honduras taking care of you.” She took her hand away. “But I can’t ask you to stay here. The generator’s on its last legs, the well’s falling apart—”
I held up a hand to stop her.
“You’re not asking. I’m offering. It was my idea, remember? Don’t you dare ask me to leave.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” She, more than anyone, knew how stubborn I could be. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Even though the question came out of the blue, I didn’t need time to formulate a response.
“Living with you in an apartment in Andersonville with one hyperactive boxer and maybe a cat or two to even things out. You’ve been offered tenure at the hospital. You accept it on the condition that you can spend half the year volunteering—three months in the field, three in the women’s clinic you’ve helped establish. I’m practicing law again. On my own terms this time, not someone else’s. You and I host family dinners once a week. Everyone comes—Mom, Dad, Patrick and Kristin and the boys, your parents, Marcus, Trevor, and all our friends. Life is good.”
“Sounds like you’ve thought this out,” she said, her eyes warm and inviting.
“Not really,” I teased her. “Do you like my vision of the future or would you rather change it?”
I expected her to call me on the carpet for my presumptuousness, but she didn’t.
“Syd,” she said, welcoming me back into her arms as well as her heart, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Chapter Twenty-two
I was in the middle of the ocean when it happened.
I was drifting aimlessly with the tide when I realized that I didn’t know where the past two years had gone. So much had happened—and so fast—that I hadn’t been able to keep up.
Jennifer and I had moved in together well ahead of our five-year plan. Two months after I had tracked her down in order to beg her forgiveness, we had returned to Chicago and gone apartment hunting. After three weeks of looking, we had been able to move her out of the apartment she shared with Marcus and into a gorgeous two-story townhouse in Andersonville, one of Chicago’s historic (and most Sapphic) neighbo
rhoods. The same day we had closed on the apartment, I had inked another contract—one that had made me a member of the district attorney’s office. It’s hard work, but a job I enjoy immensely.
When our friends had discovered that Jennifer and I were an item, we had been inundated not with “I told you so” but “What took you so long?”
Even Natalie had said she was happy for us. When she told us she was glad we had finally found each other, I believed she actually meant it. Thankfully, Jack had been able to move on as well.
He hadn’t offered any resistance when I initiated divorce proceedings. In fact, he had even wished me well. It sounds strange to say, but the two of us are much better friends now than we were at any point of our romantic relationship. He had begun dating one of the psych counselors at the hospital about four months after our divorce was final. They had run off to Las Vegas one weekend and gotten married in a drive-through chapel owned and operated by an Elvis impersonator (skinny Elvis, not fat Elvis). Surprisingly, they’re still together. Our paths don’t often cross, but I hear they’re happy.
Good for him. He wasn’t a bad guy. He simply wasn’t the right person for me.
Shortly after I had become a free woman, my parents had moved to a retirement community in Mesa, Arizona, picking a spot just a stone’s throw from the Cubs’ spring training facilities. After hearing Mom and Dad wax rhapsodic about the city, the climate, and the great seats at the spring training games (yeah, that and a cable package that included WGN was what had sold my father on the idea in the first place), Jennifer’s parents had followed suit a few months later.
That Christmas had been special in more ways than one. Besides being my first Christmas with Jennifer—and the first time our parents had been home since they’d moved—it was also when my niece Kelly had decided to make her grand entrance. With just a look, the cute little seven-pounder had brought her father to his knees.
“I’ve got a daughter,” Patrick had said, tears streaming down his face as he’d held his third child for the first time. “Syd, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
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