The Doctor's Courageous Bride

by Dianne Drake

  Solange didn’t look at that precious life Paul cupped in his hands as Gigon applied a couple of clamps to the cord and snipped between them. She kept her attention focused squarely on her patient until Isabella Mordecai ran into the room, tying a fresh mask around her face. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner but Clarence Didier was having a bout with hemoptysis—” coughing up blood “—and I didn’t want to leave him alone.”

  “How’s he doing?” Paul asked, finally stepping back from the operating table.

  “Fine now. It wasn’t serious, but he was scared. Want me to close up for you?” she asked. “I’m all scrubbed up and ready to go. And I’m pretty good at stitches.”

  “I’d love for you to close up for me,” Solange said, “because I’m terrible at stitches.” Isabella was a big woman. Large frame, robust, long brown hair pulled back into a braid. If there was one word that could be used to describe Isabella Mordecai, it was jovial. Which was a trait in high demand. “Can’t even sew on a button.”

  “Good thing our patient doesn’t need a button, then. You go on and get out of here now. Everybody’s in good hands.”

  Solange didn’t doubt that for a minute, and everyone in the room heaved a collective sigh while Isabella put in the first stitch. After which Paul staggered to a chair out in the hallway and collapsed. “Damn,” he gasped, shutting his eyes. “I can’t believe I just did that.”

  “What? Deliver a baby?” Solange avoided the chair next to him and slid down the wall until she was sprawled out on the floor.

  “Believe me, I’m much better at delivering money,” he said, holding out two very shaky hands for Solange to see. “Too long past patient care and too long with the ledger, and this is what you get.” He tucked his shaking hands up under his arms.

  “But you did a brilliant job, Paul.”

  “I delivered a baby, Solange.”

  “Brilliantly.” She laughed. “And the only one complaining was the baby. I’d say that makes for a smashing success.”

  “And I need an antacid, and some tranquilizers.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, I think. You were a very good doctor in there. Good instincts, good reactions.”

  “I haven’t done any kind of significant patient care in years, Solange. And what I just did in there was more than significant. But that’s just not the kind of doctor I am any more, and I’m glad you were here to do the hard part.”

  He sounded melancholy, she thought. Steady, but a bit sad? “Would you rather practice medicine than raise funds?” she asked, on a hunch.

  “I’ve always wanted to practice medicine, and I expect that at some point in my career I’ll get back to it. And there was a time I thought myself good at it. But when I get into a situation like what just happened, I realize how much I don’t belong in there any longer. Even in two years I’ve become very out of practice.”

  “Raising money is important, though. What you do makes it possible for someone like Brigitte to have her baby delivered safely. That baby would have died, you know, if the hospital wasn’t here.”

  “Well, what I do may be just as important, but not nearly so noble, is it?” He stood, then smiled down at her. A sad smile, she thought. Certainly one that gave her an honest look into his heart. He was a noble man, even if he didn’t recognize it. A very noble man, and she admired him for that.

  “I’ll be ready to leave with you in about an hour,” he said, as he walked away. “Got a little paperwork to take care of, then I’ll be good to go.”

  Paul did an amazing thing at this hospital. She could see it everywhere…an amazing, and a very needed, thing. Perhaps it was selfish of her to think this, but she was so glad he’d been the one to stay here when his marriage had broken up. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine this little hospital thriving under anyone but Paul.

  Professional opinion, of course. Strictly professional.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE first half-hour on the way to the mountain was bumpy and slow, with the emphasis on slow. Pitted, rutted dirt roads took over from the smooth dirt roads leading from Abbeville, and the farther from Abbeville Solange and Paul drove into the rural reaches, the more pitted and rutted those dirt roads became. In kilometers, the drive was fairly short, but in endurance it was a long-distance marathon, and the winner was the one who, instead of arriving at the finish line first, arrived there without sore muscles and a bruised backside.

  “I think you’re just too soft, spending so much time in padded office chairs and airplane seats.” Solange laughed, swerving to avoid yet another pothole. They’d pulled in behind a tap-tap twenty minutes before, which she’d refused to pass, even though the exhaust fumes from Kijé’s infamous public transportation heaved from the old bus in a cloud of dense smoke, making a mad dash straight into the front seat of her truck. Of course, rolling down the windows to get some fresh air wasn’t a problem, because there were no windows in her truck. No windshield either.

  “Trust me,” Paul said, switching positions in the front seat next to her for the thirtieth time in thirty minutes, “I’ve been in some cushioned office chairs bumpier than this. At least in the figurative sense. And sometimes the figurative bruises hurt a lot more than the literal ones, especially when you’ve poured out your heart and soul in the hope of a donation and all you get is a scowl.”

  “We had a hard time getting funds into our clinic in Miami. A couple of the hospitals helped us, and we had some neighborhood organizations. But we operated on a very thin line, not always sure if we could even pay the light bill. It was a good practice, though. In spite of the hardships, it was satisfying because in the end people who had nowhere else to turn were getting help.”

  “And you loved that, didn’t you?”

  “Totally. That’s what medicine should be about, you know? At least, my version of it. But you’re the same way, aren’t you? Always looking out for the humanitarian obligations.”

  “I am now, but in the beginning, when I came here with Joanna, it was more about appeasing her until she got over the notion, which I truly believed she would in a month or two. And me…well, I was counting the days until I could get myself into a Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five position, taking on-call once a week and golfing every Saturday morning.”

  “So let me guess. You found yourself here on Kijé. And you found your cause, something that you wanted more than a condo and a Mercedes in your garage.”

  “Two,” he corrected. “In my vision, there were always two of them in the garage. And you’re correct about discovering myself here. After about a month I realized that I loved the work and the cause. I was needed here in a way I would never be needed in a cushy practice anywhere else, and that need became my need, because, as much as they needed me, I needed them even more. The root of being a good doctor, I think. Talk about a turnaround. You plan a life around one thing then find out it’s not the life you want.”

  “Mauricio,” Solange murmured. “My turnaround. Three years with him then he made a mad dash for all the things you thought you wanted and found out you didn’t.” Of course, the timing had had everything to do with his decision. He might have stayed around a while longer, but in the end the result would have been the same. Mauricio would have gone because she couldn’t fulfill his entire dream. When she’d left, she’d only beaten him to it.

  “Three years. Ouch. That’s a big bite out of a life.”

  “It really is,” she agreed. “But it wasn’t bad. Not all of it. And I truly think that being with Mauricio was where I found myself. Otherwise, if my father had gotten his way, I might have ended up across the hall from you in the cushy practice. It happened to my sister, going along with my father in a sense, and she’s had some amazing administrative jobs.”

  “She’s a doctor?”

  “Doctor of nursing.”

  “And she succumbed to Bertrand’s indomitable will?”

  “He’s been a big force in our lives. He has a strong sense of what’s right for everybod
y around him, and he doesn’t back down from it too easily. As you probably know. But for Solaina, he was a huge force behind the kinds of jobs she has taken. At least, until she met her husband; traded in administrative budgets for everyday bedpans and became ecstatic about her new life. Naturally, Papa isn’t too happy about it.” A melancholy smiled touched Solange’s lips, disappearing almost instantly. “I’m the rebellious one, though. I’ve always leaned toward doing just the opposite of what he wanted right from the start, and one of the things he wanted most was to have me in a respectable medical practice. So, if I’d given in, who knows…?”

  “You went the public health route to spite him?”

  “No. I went the public health route in spite of him because I fell in love with it while I was doing my residency. It has been the bane of my father’s existence ever since.” She laughed. “But he sends care packages to the mission—drugs, supplies, medical journal classified ads of major job openings around the world. I think he’s a humanitarian at heart, something he got from my mother. But his way of acting like a humanitarian is a little overbearing. It’s part of that whole vision of his…what’s right, what’s wrong.”

  “And Bertrand Léandre’s way is always right.”

  “No matter what,” Solange added. “My mother tempered him, though. She was amazing about that. And I think the way he is now is more of a reaction to not having her with him any more. She was the part that completed him.”

  “I would have liked your mother,” Paul said gently.

  “You would have loved my mother,” Solange whispered reverently. She didn’t cry now about her mother, but thinking about her still brought a lump to her throat. Everything Solange was, she credited to her mother, and she only wished she might have the chance someday to be the kind of mother her mother had been.

  Paul opened his mouth to respond, then choked on a puff of smoke from the tap-tap. “Maybe we could pull over and let it go on ahead?” he sputtered, trying to fan the fumes away with his hands.

  “And deprive ourselves of an awesome familiarity of an island icon?” She laughed as she slowed down to back away from the exhaust fumes.

  “Love the icon, hate its souvenir.” He took in a deep breath, then coughed again.

  “I’ve got some masks in the glove box,” she said. “Never leave home without them.”

  “I’m fine,” he replied, wiping his eyes. “The tap-tap only got one of my lungs, and I’m not permanently blinded from the smoke.”

  “City boy,” she teased, slowing down even more.

  A tap-tap was a bus usually, or sometimes a truck, used for public transportation. The way to spot a tap-tap was by its decoration—every color of the rainbow painted into every design known to artists around the world. The one they were following was red, orange, yellow, green and purple-striped, with large red apples in a border around the top and larger white swans floating on blue ponds spaced in sporadic locations over the striping. Replicas of the red and yellow Kijé flag, surrounded by gold-painted fringe, waved majestically over the swans.

  This tap-tap was full of noisy people, and at least a dozen adult men sat on the top of it, waving at the people they passed. They’d waved at Paul and Solange off and on now for forty minutes in traditional Kijé manner—raising the hand and wiggling the fingers. “I’ve always loved the tap-tap,” Solange said, her voice almost wistful. “When I was a little girl I always wanted to ride in one. All those pretty colors and decorations…what little girl wouldn’t want to?”

  “Let me guess. Your father wouldn’t allow you to.”

  “I never asked him because I was afraid he would say no, then I’d have go behind his back and take a ride. So instead I used to sneak out and ride whenever I could. It was always such a great adventure.

  “Oh, we’ll be turning off the main highway pretty soon, and after that you may wish you were on a road where a tap-tap could get through ahead of you.”

  “That bad?” Paul returned another friendly wave to toothy, grinning man on top of the tap-tap who was being rather persistent about eliciting a wave from him.

  “I wouldn’t call it bad so much as adventurous, like my tap-tap rides.” He was so good-natured about this, she thought. Running off into places unknown with a virtual stranger. She liked his company, whatever his real reason for coming.

  “You’re not allergic to donkeys, are you?”

  Paul twisted around in his seat and cast her a dubious glance. “I don’t think I’m even going to ask what that’s about,” he said. “I’ve always believed that some things are better left unsaid, especially when they have anything to do with me and a donkey.”

  The trip behind the tap-tap lasted another half hour until finally Solange turned off the road onto something that didn’t even resemble a road. They were definitely well on the way into the jungle. This wasn’t a road used by many, Paul noted, and he was forced to set his jaw to keep it from jarring so hard his teeth would break. “I don’t suppose the donkey’s saddle is padded, is it?” he asked.

  “City boy,” Solange teased.

  “Does it show that much?”

  “Only a city boy would ask that question!” She laughed, pointing down at his feet. “And only a city boy would wear nice white shoes where we’re going.”

  He glanced down, wincing. Brand-new. “So what you’re telling me here is that—”

  “City boy,” she broke in. “That’s all I’m saying. You’re a city boy, and it shows.”

  “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

  “Out here, it can be. Especially in white shoes.” She shook her head skeptically. “You’ll stand out, Paul. They’ll see you coming and I’m afraid there’s nothing I’ll be able to do to help you.” She bit back a smile, keeping her eyes straight ahead on the road.

  He could see the taunting turn of her lips. Lips he would much rather kiss than watch. That was a dangerous notion, one he needed to put right out of his head. “Why is it that I’ve never heard about your infirmary?” he asked, trying to get his mind off what he was seeing. And feeling.

  She gave him a quick, sideways glance, arching her eyebrows in faint surprise. “I think that part of the reason is because we’re in the mountains. We’re isolated. The villagers are farmers and craftsmen, and their way of life is somewhere between modern and old-fashioned. Some of the people live in huts with thatched banana-frond roofs, some in houses much like you see in Abbeville, and there are no facilities to speak of—no convenient little grocery stores, no apothecaries, no stores to buy yard goods, not even any street vendors like in Abbeville. Put it all together, and the whole region is easy to overlook.”

  Solange swerved off the road onto one that was even worse. “And sometimes it’s easier to not see, because seeing brings responsibility.” She pointed to a clump of houses off to the side of the road where barefooted children were lugging gourds and buckets full of water back from the stream. “That’s Ambrose,” she said. “We’ll be stopping there for a few minutes while I make a house call and organize our next mode of transportation.”

  It was a nice clean little settlement, all lined up along a central road, with weathered wood-frame houses evenly spaced along both sides. The road wasn’t paved. The houses weren’t painted like in Abbeville, and there weren’t sidewalks or yard statuary. But Ambrose looked friendly, Paul decided as they drove along the one and only road that divided a field of sugar cane in two. A thin man in a straw hat stepped up to the side of the road, waving the traditional Kijé wave at them. “Maman Solange,” he called, cheerfully. “We been waiting for you to come back.”

  “They call you mother?” Paul asked.

  Solange nodded. “Everybody needs one sometimes, I suppose. And it’s an honor, because it means they trust me. Look, I’ll just be a few minutes. I’ve got to see a man about his écrouelles.”

  Paul noticed Solange looking back at him, smiling coyly. Probably because it was that obvious he had no idea what she was talking about. Écrouelles?<
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  “Want to come with me, Paul?” she asked, her face a canvas of innocent enticement—head tilted down, playfully widened eyes looking up at him, just the hint of a smile touching her lips.

  Solange was playing with him now. She was good at it, and he was, oh, so willing. But did it show? he wondered. “And just what would you expect from me if I did go with you to your rendezvous with écrouelles?”

  “Maybe offer a second opinion?”

  “Only a second opinion?”

  “Perhaps a first opinion, if that’s what you like. The order of these things really doesn’t matter. You first, me first. How about I let you choose who goes first?” She brushed a few strands of straying hair from her face, nodding toward her destination. “Are you coming?”

  “Only if you tell me, first, what écrouelles is. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? A nice pastry? One of those would be awfully good just about now. Something with a custard filling, perhaps?”

  “I’m not sure about the custard, but I can guarantee that you’ll find scrofula.”

  Scrofula—a tubercular infection of the skin of the neck, most often caused by inhaling air contaminated with the organisms causing tuberculosis. After the bacteria spread through the body the result was normally a rubbery enlargement of the lymph nodes, in the neck most commonly. Every once in a while, a case presented at the hospital, but in rural areas like this, scrofula was more common. “You just ruined quite the fantasy for me, you know. I could almost taste the custard.” And almost see her licking it from her fingers…one finger at a time, slowly, seductively. Paul blinked hard, twice, to rid himself of the images seeping in.

  Solange laughed. “Don’t think I can find any custard for you, but would goat’s milk do?” She pointed at a nanny goat wandering down the street, the bell dangling from a collar around her neck jingling away with each and every step.

  “Just not the same. Custard…goat’s milk.” He cringed, shaking his head. “So I guess you’ll have to tell me about the scrofula.”