Healing the Doctor's Heart

by Carolyne Aarsen

  “I understand your mother is a widow,” Shannon said as she put the lid back on the pot. “When did your father die?”

  Ben stirred his soup with his spoon, looking down at the bowl. “I was thirteen when he died.”

  “That’s young.”

  “Not much older than you were when your father left.” Ben looked over at her. “Though I’m sure your situation was different than mine in the aftermath.”

  Shannon acknowledged that with a nod of her head. “I don’t think my mother ever got over that betrayal.”

  “How about you?”

  Shannon shook some salt in the soup, then carefully set the shaker down. “I was old enough to know his leaving was wrong. Old enough to see how my mother reacted.” She glanced over at him and gave him a tight smile. “The women in our family don’t deal with disappointment very well.”

  Silence followed her comment, broken only by the clink of spoons on the bowls as they ate. They both knew exactly what she was talking about.

  As the silence stretched, she felt a tension building. She wanted to break the quiet, but wasn’t sure what to talk about.

  His ex-wife was off-limits for him, Arthur for her.

  “By the way, you don’t have to take me to the wedding,” he finally said. “I know it was an uncomfortable moment, but I wanted to give you an out.”

  Shannon swallowed a meatball, then gave him another quick look, trying to decipher what he meant. “Are you changing your mind about coming with me?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  Now they were at an impasse.

  Ben laid his spoon down, folded his arms on the table and leaned forward. “Okay. We’re acting like this is high school. May as well be up front about this all. I’d like to take you to your cousin’s wedding. You’re a beautiful girl that I think I could enjoy spending time with. Besides I’m kind of tired of feeling like a loser who doesn’t go out at night. At all.” He added a smile and as she held his earnest gaze she felt a burden slip off her shoulders. “So maybe I was impetuous in asking you, and maybe it seemed like I did it because I felt sorry for you. Or because I felt responsible for the fact that you were alone—”

  She held her hand up to stop him. “We keep going over this. What happened with Arthur was not your fault.”

  His expression grew serious. “Maybe not. But I still feel like it has been causing some tension.”

  “It isn’t. Arthur made his own decisions and unfortunately forced you to be part of that. Please, don’t take on what you don’t have to.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  “And for the record, I’m glad you asked to be my escort at the wedding. I know my family really enjoyed having you around on Saturday.” This was an understatement. On top of Emma’s innuendo when she’d walked Shannon to the truck, her own sister had called her Saturday night telling Shannon she thought Ben was a great guy and it shouldn’t matter that he was Arthur’s brother.

  Shannon had to explain that Ben had come because of Nana and Mrs. Brouwer’s clumsy attempt at matchmaking and there was nothing between them, but Hailey pooh-poohed that within seconds.

  Even Carter had commented on Sunday that he was surprised Ben wasn’t in church with her.

  Maybe bringing him to the wedding wasn’t the best idea, but she didn’t want to dwell on that. Ben had done a lot of work in the house and now on the roof. At the very least she owed him an evening out.

  “Good. Then that’s settled,” Ben said, leaning back in his chair, smiling. “You can also tell your nana this soup is almost as good as my mother’s. And that’s saying something.”

  Shannon laughed, thankful for the lightening of the atmosphere.

  “So I’m assuming you got the roof fixed,” she said as she finished off her soup.

  “I’m assuming so, too. When I’m done here, I’ll need to check to make sure no more water is coming through the attic.”

  “How did you notice the leak?”

  “When I was working on the kitchen, I noticed a drip coming down the wall so I followed it up to the attic. You’ll need to do more work on that roof once the rain stops. There are lots more shingles that need replacing.”

  Shannon sighed and shook her head once again at her grandmother’s hasty purchase. “I have a feeling this house is going to be one work project after another,” she said. “I feel bad for Dan and Carter. They’re the ones who will have to deal with it when I’m gone. Though if Garret comes back I’m sure he could help.”

  “So tell me a bit more about your family. I’m intrigued by the cabins at the ranch.”

  So Shannon did. She told him about the fun she and her cousins had had playing tag, riding horses and throwing sleepovers that involved precious little sleep.

  Then she asked him about Arthur, pleased that it didn’t bother her to mention his name. Pleased she could separate Arthur, Ben’s brother, from Arthur the ex-boyfriend.

  They finished dinner and as they cleaned up, the conversation moved from family to books they liked to read, movies they had watched. As the time slipped by Shannon found herself growing increasingly relaxed around Ben.

  The last dish was dried and, as Ben hung up the towel, he glanced at his watch.

  As he did Shannon looked at the clock, surprised to see over two hours had passed. She couldn’t remember time going by that quickly before.

  “I’d like to run upstairs again and have a look at the roof, then I should probably be getting back home. Busy day tomorrow.”

  “So what’s on your agenda tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I’d like to put another coat of paint on the walls here and then that’s done. If it’s not raining my mother has a few jobs for me to do in the yard.”

  “Any plans after you’ve got your mother’s place shipshape?”

  “Not sure. I had thought of heading down to the coast. Do some fishing. Maybe hike the West Coast Trail.” Ben scratched his cheek with one index finger, as if drawing his words out. “I have a friend in Portland I’d like to visit. He’s promised to take me kayaking.”

  “What? No golf?” she said with a light laugh. “What kind of doctor are you?”

  Ben’s smile looked strained and Shannon wished she could take her thoughtless comment back.

  “Never did like golf,” he said quietly. “So I don’t know what kind of doctor that makes me.”

  He looked up at her and again she caught it. That shadow of pain deep in his eyes.

  Leave it be. It’s none of your business.

  Blame it on a frustration at the return of the unwelcome awkwardness after they had spent such a pleasant few hours together. Blame it on being a big sister. Shannon decided to ignore her rational thoughts.

  “What happened, Ben?”

  She threw the question out before she could stop herself, plunging directly into the emotional quagmire surrounding any reference to Ben’s work as a doctor.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, his frown showing her that he had chosen to deliberately misunderstand her.

  But she simply leaned back against the counter, her arms folded over her chest. Her classic big-sister pose whenever she’d had to confront Hailey or Naomi about something they’d done. Something their mother would probably have chosen to ignore.

  He dragged his hand over his face, the calluses of his hands rasping over the stubble on his chin, the physical expression of his confusion.

  “I know how much time and how much money and how much devotion it takes to become a doctor,” Shannon said, keeping her voice pitched low and nonthreatening. “I work with them every day. They may complain about the hours. They may gripe about the patients. But every doctor I work with can’t imagine doing anything else.” She paused, part of her thinking she should stop t
here, but the glimpses she had caught of the haunted sorrow in his eyes pushed her onward. “I saw your face when you brought me to the hospital. I saw how you looked around, checking out the equipment, looking over the staff. I got the feeling you would have preferred to be on the other side of the curtain when they stitched up my knee.”

  She stopped herself there, knowing she had stepped way over the boundaries of their relationship, such as it was.

  Ben narrowed his eyes, his hands planted on his hips as he looked past her.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what you’re getting into here.”

  The icy anger in his voice almost made her back down. At the same time, the raw emotion pushed her on.

  “Why don’t you try me?” She spoke quietly, almost whispering to soften the challenging question.

  Ben drummed out a quick rhythm on his hip, then he spun around, facing her.

  “Tell me this. Why do you want to know?”

  His words battered her and again she was tempted to back down, but they had traveled too far down this path. She had to see this to the end.

  Please, Lord. Give me wisdom. Give me the right words. Give me strength.

  “I want to know because I think you are foundering right now and that bothers me. I want to know because I think you are Dr. Ben Brouwer even though you don’t want to be addressed as such. And I’m nosy.”

  Her lighthearted comment pulled a reluctant smile from him, alleviating the tension of the moment.

  Then, to her surprise, he sat down at the table, dropping his head in his hands as he blew out a heavy, heartrending sigh.

  She stayed where she was, waiting. Letting the strain of the moment ease.

  “All my life I wanted to be a doctor. Ask my mom. She’ll tell you how many times I would persuade Arthur to be a victim who I could sew up or resuscitate or operate on.” He eased out a smile as if remembering more innocent times in both his and Arthur’s lives. “It never left. And you’re right. I was completely dedicated to becoming the best doctor I could be. I didn’t graduate head of my class, but fairly close. Then I met Saskia and you know how that worked out.”

  “Actually, you didn’t want to talk about that, either.”

  He released a wry smile. “You’re right. I didn’t want to talk about that because it’s all tied together with me not working as a doctor anymore.” He paused, his eyes staring into the middle distance, drawing out the painful memories from another part of his life. “Saskia was unfaithful because she wasn’t getting enough time and money from me, though she sure spent enough.” This was followed by another humorless laugh. “Anyway, she filed for divorce and I didn’t bother contesting. Didn’t have the time or energy. It always bothered me that I couldn’t give her what she needed. That I wasn’t there for her. That I couldn’t be the husband she wanted me to be.”

  Shannon opened her mouth to protest his self-deprecation, but caught herself.

  Just listen. Stop being the big sister.

  “We had been divorced for about a year when she started calling me again,” he continued, leaning back in his chair, his arms folded over his chest. “I wasn’t sure what to do about it, but I knew I wasn’t getting pulled through that emotional wringer again. The last year of our marriage was one intense meltdown after another.” He fell silent and again Shannon had to force herself to keep quiet. To let his words flow out of him at his own pace.

  “The first time she called and left a message I called her back, then wished I hadn’t. She cried and told me if I had been a better husband she could have been a better wife. She called me every day after that.” This was followed by another deep, soul-piercing sigh.

  “The day she died, she called me five times before I left for work. I couldn’t take it anymore so I shut off my phone. Things were ridiculously busy in the E.R. that day. There had been some serious gang fighting going on and the casualties were flowing into our emergency department. Then Saskia called the hospital. Then she called the phone of one of the nurses working with me that night. Saskia was desperate, she told the nurse. Needed to talk to me right now. I was setting the arm of a man who had been in a fight. He was a drug dealer and a pimp and had been beat up by a man who claimed my patient had killed his brother.” Ben closed his eyes, and pressed his hands to his mouth. “Not exactly the cream of society. But I was his doctor. While I was busy with him, Saskia tried to come to the hospital to talk to me face to face. On the way she was hit by a car. She died because I wouldn’t leave a simple operation on a man who had done so much bad in the world.” He leaned forward, his hands hanging loosely between his legs, then looked up at her, his eyes echoing his sorrow. “That was the day I realized how much being a doctor had cost me.”

  Shannon listened to his story, her heart twisting at the anguish in his words and expressed on his face. She wanted to say something to take away that pain, but right now the best thing was to silently acknowledge what he had said.

  She sat in the chair across from him, took his hands in hers and waited.

  “I’ve paid too high a price for what I do,” Ben said finally, his grip tightening on her hands. “All the sacrifices I made, the death I’ve dealt with, the horrible parts of human life… I thought I was doing good. I thought I was making a difference. But when Saskia died because I couldn’t take time away from a man who had probably caused the deaths of some people who came into my E.R… . That’s when I took a leave of absence from my work. I couldn’t do it anymore. It seemed so pointless. My work as a doctor has cost me too much.”

  Please, Lord. Help me to say the right thing. Help me to give him what comfort I can.

  Shannon waited another moment, then gave his hands another squeeze. “I can’t imagine some of the things you’ve had to deal with,” she said, keeping her voice quiet. “I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for you to find out Saskia died while she was on her way to see you.” She stopped a moment, not sure if she should say anything more than to affirm what he might be feeling, but it seemed so empty to leave it at that.

  She chose her next words with care.

  “What I think you need to remember is Saskia also let you down. She made her own decisions in all of this. You weren’t married to her, she was no longer your responsibility. You didn’t encourage or ask her to come to see you. She made choices in the past that broke the ties of your relationship with her. It was her choices that led to her death, not yours. You were doing the job you had to do, regardless of the recipient.”

  The silence following her little speech felt weighted with the sorrow Ben had expressed and she wondered if she had gone too far.

  Then Ben looked up at her, and in his expression she caught a glimmer of hope. Then a tentative smile curved his lips and he squeezed her hands in return.

  “You sound like my counselor,” he said quietly.

  “Then your counselor is a very smart person,” Shannon replied.

  This netted her another light laugh. “I’ll tell him next time I see him.”

  Shannon weighed her next question. “Did you start seeing him after Saskia’s death?”

  To her surprise, Ben shook his head. “No. I was seeing him for a month before that. I was feeling so burnt-out by the job that I knew I needed help. The chaplain at the hospital recommended him so I went.”

  “Pretty brave of you,” she said.

  Ben frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

  She looked down at their joined hands, feeling the calluses on his palm. She saw a scar across the back of one hand, took in the broken and chipped fingernails. At one time she was sure the nails had been neatly clipped, his hands softer.

  Then and now.

  The thought created a twist of regret for what he had been and what he had become. Becoming a doctor was a lifelong comm
itment and he had proved equal to that task. To see him put that aside because of unwarranted guilt bothered her deeply.

  “Seeing a counselor voluntarily shows you are willing to acknowledge you can’t be everything to all people.” She gave him a droll smile. “I’ve worked with doctors for many years. While they are wonderful people and giving and kind, egos are still involved. The idea that everything should be fixable, treatable. To see a weakness in yourself takes a lot of courage. I applaud you for that.”

  “Don’t applaud too hard,” Ben returned, his thumb making small circles over her fingers. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Shannon swallowed down a flutter of excitement as each swirl of his thumb smoothed away the common sense and good judgment Shannon prided herself on. She doubted he was aware of what he was doing, but his touch brought out older feelings and emotions she’d thought had died with Arthur’s defection.

  She knew she should pull her hands away, but she didn’t want to break the fragile union expressed in their joined hands.

  “I know, as a Christian, you are going to tell me I should have gone to God,” he continued. “But I couldn’t.”

  “I heard an interesting quote,” she said, thankful her voice didn’t betray her increasing awareness of his hands holding hers. “I don’t know where it came from, but it says, sometimes we need Jesus with skin on. Maybe you needed to have someone real minister to you, to show you the way to God.”

  Just like, right now, she needed the comfort of his skin touching hers.

  “That’s a good way to put it,” Ben said quietly. “Then, I had a hard time seeing God in all the pain and death coming into the E.R. He seemed removed from me. When Saskia died, I couldn’t believe He was anywhere close anymore.”

  He looked up at Shannon and gave her a smile. “So my counselor advised me to take a leave of absence, which I’m doing. And I’m not sure what happens when that’s over.”