Dr. Dad

by Judith Arnold

  She needed Amanda and Meredith to believe her. If she could get Susannah outside—or better yet, get her to come over and maybe even meet them—they would be her devoted friends for life.

  She was sure she could come up with a way to lure Susannah out of her house. Maybe she could buy a present for MacKenzie, a cat toy or something, and ask if Susannah could bring MacKenzie outside so she could give it to him, and Amanda and Meredith could watch through the window. Or Lindsey could pretend there was a problem in the house—a funny smell, a leaky toilet—and ask Susannah if she could come over and solve the problem.

  “I’ll think of something,” she promised, deciding she wouldn’t really be tricking Susannah. She’d just be getting her to show her face for a minute or two.

  “I’ll try to come up with a plan by the time we have our next meeting.”

  “That would be cool,” Meredith said, her eyes glowing with esteem for Lindsey.

  “And I’ll get hold of that magazine,” Amanda promised. Bringing over a magazine with details of Susannah’s love life with Stephen Yates would be great. But not as great as Lindsey’s getting Susannah to come outside while the society was in session.

  Lindsey would do it for the sake of the club. She’d do it because she wanted Amanda and Meredith to recognize how cool she was. Meredith seemed to sort of understand, but Lindsey wanted people to realize how important it was that Susannah Dawson liked her. No matter how her father treated her, Susannah didn’t think she was a baby. She talked to Lindsey like an equal.

  They were friends. Amanda and Meredith would never be more than Susannah’s fans, but Lindsey was truly Susannah’s friend, and you couldn’t get much cooler than that.

  “HEY, ANDY, how are you doing?” Toby asked, peering into Andy Lowenthal’s room.

  The boy was pale and drawn, his eyes nestled deep into pockets of shadow, and his hair was beginning to thin from his chemotherapy. But when he lifted his gaze from the Game Boy he was playing, he greeted Toby with a huge grin. “Hey, Dr. Cole,” he said.

  Toby entered the room and smiled at Andy’s mother, who sat in a chair near the window with a magazine spread open on her lap. Then he turned back to Andy. “Here’s something you might like,” he said, presenting the boy with the New York Yankees cap he’d brought. Andy had told him he was a Yankees fan.

  “Oh, wow. Cool.” Andy sat the hat carefully on his scalp. “Dr. Weiss says I can go home this weekend.”

  “Really?” Toby glanced at Andy’s mother, who confirmed with a nod. “That’s great!”

  “She says I have to come back for more treatments, but I can at least go home for a while, and see my friends.”

  “Did she tell you to be very careful with friends who might have a cold or a cough?”

  “Yeah, or chicken pox. She said my something was low. What was it, Mommy?”

  “Your resistance,” his mother supplied.

  “Yeah, that was it.” He settled back on the pillows. He looked thin, his pajamas swimming on him.

  “How’s your appetite?” Toby asked.

  “I don’t like the food here. My mom brought me cookies.”

  “That’s fine. Is your mouth okay? Any sores?”

  “Nope.”

  “Even better.” Toby gave Andy’s shoulder a squeeze. “You’re doing great, Andy. Dr. Weiss is terrific. She really knows how to lick this disease. It looks like the chemo’s doing what it has to do.”

  “If I go home, my mom says I’m going to have to do homework.”

  “Well, you don’t want to fall too far behind the rest of your class. If you continue to do this well, you might be able to return to school before the end of the term.”

  “You know what?” Andy tipped his head toward Toby, as if to reveal a deep secret. “I miss school.”

  “I see your class misses you, too,” Toby said, waving toward the poster hanging on the wall across from his bed. Andy: Get Well Soon! it said, with classmates’ personal messages scribbled all across it in a hodgepodge of third-grade penmanship. “Well, I’ve got to go check on some other patients. I just wanted to say hi and give you the hat.”

  “It’s cool, Dr. Cole.”

  “Enjoy it.” He nodded to Andy’s mother, then strolled out of the room, pleased by the boy’s progress.

  At least one thing was going right, he thought as he continued down the hall from the pediatrics wing to the neonatal unit. Andy was responding well to his treatment, and his prognosis was excellent. That was no small victory.

  Actually, Toby acknowledged, no victory was ever small. He still hadn’t achieved a victory with Lindsey, but they’d worked out a truce of sorts; he’d allowed her to invite a couple of friends over to the house in an effort to prove his trust in her. But even though he was going through the motions of trusting her, he wasn’t sure he actually did.

  The Daddy School teacher had said fathers had to give their children responsibility, let their children make their own mistakes and allow their children to develop competency and independence. So Toby hadn’t checked Lindsey’s homework in a week—he had only her word that it was getting done—and now he was letting her have friends over after school, when he wasn’t present.

  He couldn’t silence the niggling worry inside him that maybe he was giving trust that hadn’t been earned. But his relationship with Lindsey, as rocky as it was, seemed more auspicious than his relationship with the other woman in his life.

  He could scarcely claim that Susannah was the other woman in his life, because she seemed to have dropped out of his life the instant she’d escaped from his kiss last week. She’d said she wanted to spend a day observing him at work, but she hadn’t gotten in touch with him to set it up. She hadn’t contacted him at all.

  Had kissing her really been so out of line? She hadn’t fought him off; she hadn’t said no. They were two healthy adults. And before she’d run away, she’d kissed him back. Enthusiastically. Passionately.

  He hadn’t stopped thinking about that night, that kiss. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wondered whether his willingness to lighten up with Lindsey was a result of being too distracted by Susannah to give his daughter his full attention. That made him feel guilty. And he knew the drawbacks of becoming involved with his neighbor, which made him wary.

  But he couldn’t banish Susannah from his mind. When he drove past her house each morning and again on his way home each evening, he glanced at her windows, hoping for a glimpse of her. He’d see the flowering pink impatiens hanging on the porch, and sometimes even her cat sitting on a windowsill, gazing out. But never Susannah.

  He ought to forget about her and concentrate on Lindsey. There would be time later for romance in his life—if he could get Lindsey safely through middle school and high school and college….

  He swore softly. At Jane, for having died on him, abandoning him to struggle alone with their daughter. At the medical profession, for having failed to save Jane. At himself, for being so damned selfish, wanting sex and love and a woman when he ought to be taking care of business. But hell, he was a human being. He had needs. And kissing Susannah had made him acutely aware of what needs of his weren’t being met.

  Sighing, he turned the corner and entered Arlington Memorial’s neonatal unit. Down the corridor he spotted Allison Winslow at the nurses’ station, talking to a familiar-looking man while a toddler hugged her knee. Drawing closer, Toby recognized the man as Allison’s husband, whom he’d met at the hospital’s Fourth of July barbecue last year. The little girl wrapped around Allison’s leg was their daughter.

  He slowed his pace, not wanting to interrupt them. Allison’s husband said something and she tossed back her head and laughed. Then she saw him and waved. “Hi, Toby.”

  He guessed he wasn’t interrupting after all. He strode over, right hand outstretched, and tried to recollect her husband’s name.

  “Toby, you remember my husband Jamie, don’t you? Jamie this is Toby Cole, one of the pediatricians affiliated with the de
partment. I think I introduced you at the barbecue last summer.”

  Jamie shook his hand. “Sure I remember you. As I recall, we faced each other on opposite sides of the net during a cutthroat volleyball game.”

  Toby nodded. “As I recall, your side trounced my side.”

  “I like this guy,” Jamie confided to Allison. “I like his memory.” Grinning, he peeled the child off Allison’s leg and hoisted her into the air. “Come on, Samantha—let’s let Mommy get back to work,” he said, straining slightly under her heft.

  “I go Mommy,” she demanded, reaching for Allison.

  “No, sweetheart,” Allison said, cuddling in to give her a big kiss. “You’re going with Daddy. He’s going to take you downtown to buy you new shoes. You want new shoes, don’t you?”

  “I get chooz!” the girl exclaimed, wriggling in her father’s arms until she could grab hold of one of her brightly colored sneakers. “Chooz!”

  “That’s right. I’ll see you at home for dinner.” Allison gave the girl another kiss, then signaled Jamie with her eyes and muttered, “Take her while she’s still happy.”

  Jamie winked and heaved the child higher in his arms. “Nice seeing you,” he said to Toby before hurrying down the hall to the elevator.

  Allison watched them go with a wistful gaze. Toby had known her for a while, and she’d never struck him as particularly sentimental. Yet once the elevator doors slid shut around them and she turned back to Toby, she appeared to be oddly dazed, as if still in a maternal state of mind.

  In less than a second, she snapped back, the loving glow fading and her eyes sharp. “So, you picked up a new patient at around two o’clock this morning,” she said.

  “I’m on my way to meet her. I heard the birth went well.”

  “Piece of cake. I wasn’t here, but it was textbook all the way.”

  “She did fine on the Apgar, too.” He noticed Allison’s gaze drifting toward the elevator for a moment and smiled. “You’d rather be taking your daughter shoe shopping, huh.”

  Allison grinned. “Not a chance. She’s horrible in stores. She wants everything, everything, everything. Jamie can handle that better than I can.”

  “Really? What does he do?”

  “He buys her everything, everything, everything.” Allison laughed and pulled a strand of hair free from the collar of her white coat. “Not really. I’ve trained them both.”

  “How old is she? Around two years?”

  “She’ll be two in June,” Allison confirmed. She must have noticed Toby frowning as he did a mental calculation and the numbers failed to add up. “She was Jamie’s baby. I adopted her when I married him.”

  “Ah.” Unbidden, an image of Susannah sprang up in his mind. He recalled asking her to help him with Lindsey. Did she feel he was asking her to step into the role of Lindsey’s mother? Was he asking her that?

  Allison hadn’t become her daughter’s mother until she’d married Jamie, though. She’d loved Jamie, and adopting his daughter had only been the final step in fulfilling their love.

  Toby didn’t love Susannah. He liked talking to her, being with her…and he wanted to kiss her again, to feel her hair spill like silk through his fingers, to feel her body pressed tight to his. He wanted to feel her beneath him in that big brass bed of hers—or to have her on top of him, to take her weight as he locked his body to hers.

  But that wasn’t love. He wasn’t sure what it was.

  “Who is she?” Allison asked.

  Embarrassed, he glanced down. No, his body hadn’t given him away. “Who is who?”

  “You’re thinking about someone.”

  “Just a friend,” he fibbed, and then decided it wasn’t a lie. They were friends. Or they would be, if she ever called him again, if he ever saw her again. “A new neighbor.”

  “You deserve a romance,” Allison said, obviously not believing that Susannah was “just a friend.” “I hope she’s good enough for you.”

  Toby dismissed her hunch with a grin. “It’s not that way,” he insisted. “There’s nothing going on between us. My baggage isn’t an adorable baby girl. It’s a mouthy, sarcastic ten-year-old.”

  “Your mouthy, sarcastic ten-year-old is going through a stage, Toby. You aren’t under any obligation to shut down your life until she grows out of it.” Crossing her arms, she appraised him thoughtfully.

  “Did you go to Molly’s Daddy School class last week?”

  “Yeah. There’s another class tonight. I’ll be there.”

  “You found it worthwhile?”

  “Very. But it’s one thing to sit in a class and learn the theory, and quite another to put it into practice. Like med school,” he recalled with a wry laugh. “Listening to lectures on anatomy was a breeze. Dissecting a cadaver was a whole different thing.”

  “But with practice, you got good at dissecting cadavers. If you didn’t have the talent to apply theory to practice, you’d be doing research in some lab right now instead of healing children. Speaking of which—” she glanced at her watch “—I’ve got newborns to bathe, and you’ve got a newborn to introduce yourself to. She’s in room 523.”

  “Right.” With a farewell wave, he abandoned the nurses’ station for his new patient’s room. He knocked lightly on the door, then inched it open. Anne Brewer, the new mother, was sitting up in bed, her baby in her arms.

  Anne beamed at Toby. “She’s perfect, Dr. Cole,” she announced, hugging her swaddled infant to her and bowing to kiss a downy cheek.

  Toby recalled when Lindsey had been perfect…and then he decided she still was perfect, in her own exasperating way. Nowhere had it ever been promised that raising a child would be easy. Anyone who wanted easy ought to pass on becoming a parent.

  But Toby was a parent, and he loved his daughter, and she was perfect, even when she was perfectly awful. He loved her, and every day, in some symbolic fashion, he felt himself cradling her in his protective arms just as Anne cradled her new daughter.

  Children outgrew their parents’ arms, but the arms were always there. When a father loved his daughter, his arms were always open, always strong, always ready for her.

  LINDSEY HAD LEFT a message for him on his voice mail back at Arlington Pediatrics: “We’re out of milk. And also popcorn.” He guessed she and her friends had been snacking that afternoon.

  Because he had a Daddy School class that evening, he had planned his schedule so he could leave for home by four-thirty. He had time for a quick detour to the supermarket to buy some milk—and popcorn, since Lindsey had specifically requested it.

  The sky was bright with sunlight as he cruised down Dudley Road toward the store. Rush-hour traffic hadn’t built up yet, and the air held the flavor of spring. A few boys not much older than Lindsey skateboarded along the sidewalk, flexing their legs to steer their boards around hydrants and lampposts. He recalled what Susannah had said about how girls Lindsey’s age were already well aware of boys, ranking them on a scale from cute to creepy. Were these boys in Lindsey’s school? Did she know them? Did she think they were cute?

  They all looked creepy to him. Then again, any boy Lindsey considered cute Toby would hate on principle.

  He reached the supermarket and steered into the sprawling parking lot. If Lindsey were with him, she’d demand to be let off in front of the CD store, but he cruised past it, past the drugstore and the dress boutique, and eased into a parking space near the supermarket. Leaving his blazer and briefcase on the back seat, he sprinted across the asphalt to the store and up the dairy aisle. When he’d first taken on the responsibility of grocery shopping, during Jane’s final months, he’d been mystified by the supermarket, in awe of all those efficient women who strolled up and down the aisles, buying items in order, sorting their coupons and scanning their lists and always knowing exactly where everything they needed could be found. Now he was as adept as they were. He knew where the milk was, the popcorn, and just about everything else the store had for sale.

  He paid for his p
urchases at the express checkout, then hoisted the bag into the crook of his elbow and headed back outside. A small crowd had gathered near the row of shopping carts. Curious, he wandered toward them, wondering what had drawn them.

  “Please give me your autograph!” someone shouted.

  “Just sign this bag!”

  “Sign my hand, Susannah!”

  And then he saw her, standing in the center of the mob, being swarmed as if by bees. She wore sunglasses and a duck-billed cap; her hair was pulled into a ponytail. In old jeans and a white cotton sweater, she looked more like a harried suburban mom than a glamorous actress. She also looked peeved and slightly alarmed.

  Without having to think, he elbowed his way through the crowd until he reached her. “We have to go now,” he said authoritatively, taking her arm and guiding her through the clinging crowd. Some instinct told him she wanted to be away from these fans, as far away as possible. “Sorry, everyone,” he murmured, forging a path through the yammering fans, brushing away a pen-waving hand, a proffered pad. “Sorry, no time now…”

  They broke free of the crowd and sprinted across the parking lot toward Toby’s car. He released her arm to press the remote button on his key, unlocking the doors before they reached the car. Susannah dove inside and slammed the passenger door. As he circled the car to the driver’s side, he glanced behind him. The crowd had followed but halted within a few feet of the car, somehow sensing that to come any closer wouldn’t be right.

  After wedging his bag of groceries on the floor behind his seat, Toby got in and locked all the doors. He glared at a few stragglers still ogling Susannah through the car’s windows, then started the engine. The crowd dispersed as he backed out of the spot and drove away.

  He kept going for a few blocks, then turned onto a side street, stopped the car and faced Susannah. She was slouching in the contoured seat, her forehead twisted into a taut scowl. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she muttered.

  It occurred to him that maybe he’d presumed too much, rushing in to rescue her when she might not have wanted to be rescued. “You looked like you needed a little help back there,” he explained. “I’m sorry if I—”