The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  Emma snorted. “I get the drift.”

  “Well, did you answer him when he asked you?”

  “No. I ignored him.” Emma sounded hesitant.

  “Well, are you going to?”

  “No! I mean, no? Should I?”

  “Oh gosh.” I was conflicted. Did I want Emma meeting with Nick? “I don’t know. I would have said no—I just want to ignore him—but there is something I’m curious about.”

  “What’s that?”

  I was embarrassed. “Well, I googled him the other day, and I read that . . . he namedhisdogZadie.”

  “What did you say? He named something Zadie?”

  “His . . . dog. A black Lab.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know! Is it a compliment, or . . . does he think of me as a dog?”

  Emma was apparently trying to reason this out. “Hmm. Black Labs are notoriously berserk.”

  “Are you saying his dog reminds him of me because it’s such a spaz? Thanks a lot.”

  “That came out wrong.”

  I decided to take the high road. “Listen. Emma. My preference would probably be to repress all thought of him, but you do whatever you think is best, I guess; he’s your partner. Meanwhile, I am going to hibernate until everyone gets over this . . . event. My bottom is famous, by the way.”

  “Yeah, someone posted a blown-up picture of it in the hospital lounge.” I sent up a quick prayer that this was a joke as Emma went on. “Listen, Z, we keep getting interrupted when we try to talk about this, so I don’t want to assume anything about how you want me to act with him.”

  “Okaay . . .”

  “Why don’t we have dinner? It will have to be in a couple weeks; I’m on this week and then I’m traveling to Finland for a conference. Is that okay?” More quietly: “I know I’ve never really talked with you about what happened that year.”

  This was extraordinary. I had long ago made peace with Emma’s reticent nature.

  “Well, yes,” I said hesitantly. “All these years . . . I have wondered what happened with you and Graham . . .”

  “I know, Zadie.” Emma’s voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I never tell you how grateful I am to still have you as my friend. I’ll text you about a date and we’ll talk.”

  “Okay. Try not to stab anyone in the neck in the meantime.”

  “How can I promise that?” asked Emma, and hung up.

  Chapter Sixteen

  FILTERLESS FRONTAL-LOBE DISASTER

  Emma, Present Day

  I hung up with Zadie, tenderness engulfing me. I’d teased her, but in truth I admired her endearing ability to simultaneously project both sunniness and anger. I don’t know how to do that. Example: in the middle of my last case, the circulator had given me the message from Dr. Zeenacost. At first it didn’t even register. Dr. Zeenacost? Who? Then it dawned on me who that must be. “Is he here?” I’d snapped. Everyone looked at me.

  “Now, how you reckon I’m gon’ know something like that, Dr. Colley?” the circulator answered, unfazed. “He just say he got something he need to discuss with you.” She was an older African-American woman named Meeka, whom I secretly appreciated for her ability to come right out and say whatever she thought without the slightest concern that someone might take offense. It wasn’t like she was one of those filterless frontal-lobe disasters who blurt out things without thinking; rather, she simply said what needed to be said without tolerating any nonsense from highfalutin surgeons. They could take it or leave it. I respected this kind of person mightily, especially since I had always been a little too aware of how socially awkward I was to be able to say what I really thought.

  I made a conscious effort to clear my mind of the conversation I’d just had with Zadie and all the dissonant memories it triggered. Usually I was good at this. The mind was an entity subject to control just like everything else in the world, and I was a firm believer that you could skew your environment toward a desired result if you were thoughtful and disciplined enough. Most people seemed to slog through life with perpetual bewilderment at their fates, no matter how self-inflicted those were. They were quick to denounce anyone else’s carelessness, but never seemed to acknowledge that whatever idiotic thing they themselves had done had contributed to their circumstances. Sometimes you’re the victim of random bad luck, but sometimes—and the trauma service was the prime example of this—you brought it on yourself.

  The other thing that I loathed was the complete inability of most people to think critically. They accepted as gospel all kinds of things without ever objectively examining for themselves why they so fervently believed them. Take childhood vaccinations, for example. There was such tremendous bias against them among some groups that people are willing to seize on one or two dubious bits of pseudo-research that someone parroted to them, completely disregarding the thousands of well-designed studies analyzing the issue, oblivious to how many of their children would have died from infectious diseases in another era. I couldn’t fathom it. All you need to do to believe anything is surround yourself with a herd of like-minded reinforcers, and there’s no need for objective reality at all. My favorite quotation ever, from some senator from New York, went something like this: You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

  All of this made it even more astonishing that I, Emma, had been the one to bring about a chain of events that ultimately tsunamied into tragedy, all because I had done something without thinking. I’d acted impulsively, based on my feelings, and ignored all the clanging warning bells. And I was forever enduring the shame of this, which was going to be even harder to forget now that Nick had joined my group.

  Dwelling on this was unacceptable. I had to pull it together and get ready for my next case, an abdominal washout, right now. Where was all my self-control? What in the hell was wrong with me?

  Trying not to break out into a flat-out sprint, I hurried to the women’s locker room off the lounge, flung myself into a toilet stall, and sat, burying my face in my hands, counting and recounting backward from one hundred.

  Maybe this lasted a minute, or maybe five, but I jolted back to reality when I heard myself paged overhead by the OR front desk. I quickly splashed some water on my face, dabbed a slight mascara smear away, and hustled over to OR 4, where my next case was scheduled, rapping on the glass to let them know I was there.

  Outside each OR was a steel, troughlike sink with foot pedals to control the water. I set up to scrub at mine. This was no half-assed swipe under some running water. Scrubbing up for surgery is an involved process. You start by using scrub brushes under the nails and alongside each finger, really working up a good lather, and then proceed up the arms to the elbows, carefully holding your hands aloft so that no contamination would run down onto your clean fingers, and then you rinse just as carefully, hands to elbows, with no extra pass-throughs under the water. The whole process ideally takes about five minutes, but this ritual gave me another respite to collect myself. It was unlike me to get carried away with emotion. Time to man up.

  I bumped my way into the OR, holding out my hands in front of me like Frankenstein’s monster, and got gowned and gloved. I had to admit that my mind was not fully on the patient in front of me, but luckily, I could handle this kind of case in my sleep. It was Nick that had me tied in knots.

  At first I figured that I’d ignore the message. Screw Nick. There was no need to be overly communicative with the bastard. I would engage in whatever discourse was needed from a work-related standpoint, when and if it came to that; I’d be cordial but frosty, so that he got the message that we weren’t going to be pals. Bygones were not bygones.

  But then I had second thoughts. Curiosity was killing me; I wondered what he thought about my presence in the group and how he intended to handle it. He might not have known initially that Zadie lived in Charlotte too, but
now he certainly did. Her last name might have been different, but there weren’t too many Zadies around, especially ones who were friends of mine. Knowing Nick, he probably thought she’d be thrilled to reunite with him. So maybe I should have called him back and discussed the situation under circumstances that I controlled, rather than waiting until I randomly bumped into him in the hospital.

  All this musing proved to be academic, however, because when I finished the latest case and went back to the surgeons’ lounge to rest for a minute, the man sitting on the leather couch next to me turned out to be him. It was Nick.

  —

  “Emma!” he said, the corners of his mouth lifting in an ostensible smile. “It’s Nick, Nick Xenokostas. We obviously couldn’t chat last week.”

  “I know who you are, Nick,” I said, feeling like my tongue had gained a massive amount of weight. “I got a message from you.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I wanted to let you know our mutual patient is doing well—I hadn’t realized that you were in the group at first. What are the odds?” He shifted on the sofa to face me.

  So that answered one question. He hadn’t known I was here at first. (But . . . really? “Dr. Emma Colley” was listed first under Meet Our Physicians on the practice website. But he sounded so believable.)

  “. . . and before I moved, I didn’t even know you were a surgeon, let alone practicing in Charlotte. How do you like it here?”

  “Fine,” I growled, looking around. So much for a controlled situation. The surgeons’ lounge, which was deserted half of the time, was all of a sudden chock-full. Sitting right next to us was old Dr. Dinsmore, who had been practicing since the dawn of time and who didn’t approve of women doctors, and on his left was an egomaniacal orthopedic surgeon named Chas Dunworthy, and across from him were two residents and my eager-beaver medical student. (Hopefully I had not been such a shameless kiss-ass as a student.) They all looked intrigued by the conversation.

  “Yeah? It’s a good group? How do you—”

  “Excuse me, Nick,” I said, abruptly standing. “I need to stretch my legs for a minute. Nice to see you.” I headed toward the door.

  “Actually, I could use a walk too,” said Nick, following me. “Been in the OR all day. You know how—”

  I spun around as soon as the door had shut behind us, looking right at him for the first time. Naturally, he’d aged well. He was what, six, seven years older than me? But he looked as vital and commanding as ever at six foot two, with strong, broad shoulders, a head of thick dark blond hair, and a chiseled jaw like he was made to order from a catalog of TV surgeons. His handsome face reflected some concern, probably because I was glowering at him like he’d whipped out his penis and waggled it at me.

  “What are you doing here, Nick? This is not exactly welcome news,” I exploded.

  His expression progressed to full-blown alarm.

  “Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t . . . I thought . . . I mean, I didn’t know this would happen. I’m getting a divorce. I needed a fresh start, and there was a job opening up here, and it’s hard—harder than you would think—to find a job in a decent city right now.” He raised his eyebrows but then quickly lowered them, chastened by my stony look. “Emma, this can work out. We have to work together.”

  This didn’t merit a response. “Are you definitely staying in Charlotte?”

  He grinned a little, a return to the Nick I recognized. “Well, your group gave me a very attractive package. So, yes. I want to move past . . . the past. I know you think I’m an ogre, and maybe that’s true.”

  I tried not to snarl.

  “Emma,” he said, his expression shifting into something harder. “You should give it some thought.”

  I ignored this too. “I heard you know Zadie’s here.”

  “I do, yes. I saw her name on TV that night.”

  “And?”

  “I take it the two of you repaired your friendship?”

  My lips parted, but nothing came out.

  Nick stiffened. I could almost hear the cerebral cogs start churning as he realized what I wasn’t saying. An undefinable expression crossed his face.

  “She still doesn’t know what you did,” he said. He began blinking, hard and fast. “Oh my God.”

  Fury filled me. “How about what you did?” I spun around and started away from him, but his voice stopped me dead.

  “What I did,” he said, “didn’t kill anyone.”

  A drumbeat of poisonous air filled the hall. I tried to inhale but began to choke, the crystallized cruelty of his words shredding my lungs. I turned my head aside and forced myself to breathe anyway, until a cold rage accumulated in my brain. I whirled back around.

  “If you stay here,” I said, “I will find a way to ruin you.”

  “Emma,” he said.

  “I swear it. I swear it. I will find a way, so help me God.”

  “I only—”

  “Get away from me.”

  There was a throat-clearing sound next to us, and a familiar voice said, “Ahem.”

  I pivoted. Wyatt stood a bit forlornly, holding a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “I bought a treat for your call night,” he said. “Have I blundered into something?”

  “Not at all,” I said. I strode away, forcing a calm tone into my voice as I walked. “I’m heading back to the lounge in a second,” I told Wyatt, careful not to look behind me. “Let me walk you out.”

  As soon as we were a suitable distance down the corridor, Wyatt said, “Darling. Why were you having a heated discussion in the hall with that man?”

  I sighed. “Wyatt. Why are you bringing me doughnuts? You know I don’t eat those.”

  “A little sugar won’t kill you, beloved. I happened to find myself near the hospital and had to come up with an excuse to barge in on you, which turned out to be quite interesting. I ask again: why were you and that man so intense?”

  Wyatt said this without the slightest trace of jealousy. It never seemed to occur to him that other men might be a threat, even though the hospital was fully stocked with alpha-male surgeons. But Wyatt blazed confidence.

  I sighed again, giving my husband a look of fond exasperation. “I’ve got another case, Wy. I’ll call you this evening if there’s a lull. I really can’t get into it right now, but you’re right—it is interesting, in a grim sort of way. Okay?”

  “All right,” Wyatt said, thrusting the box of doughnuts at me. “But eat the damn sugar bombs. Otherwise I’m going to.”

  I accepted the box reluctantly, gave Wyatt a quick kiss, and headed back toward the OR.

  The lull didn’t present itself until after evening rounds.

  I decided to get in TICU afternoon rounds while we could, offering my beleaguered team of residents a doughnut in return for a day’s hard work. Evening rounds were informal. The team that had been on last night with me was long gone, since the Graduate Medical Education Council had limited the hours of the resident work week back in 2003. This meant that a lot of the information on the day’s events was coming from the nurses, so afternoon rounds were something I took seriously. I didn’t want to miss something vital on my watch.

  Finally, around four o’clock, I was free. Who to call first, Zadie or Wyatt? I owed Zadie a call. But even though I hadn’t shown it, I felt grateful to Wyatt for visiting me. He generally had a predictable schedule: he went in to the office every morning at eight; worked there until noon; had a nice, tax-deductible business lunch at a downtown restaurant, which he enjoyed mightily and refused to give up despite some cholesterol issues; and then spent the afternoon at one of his five dealerships, bestowing his presence on favored salesmen and an occasional flattered customer. He rarely deviated from this schedule; he was a creature of habit. In fact, I could not recall him ever having shown up at my work before, at least not unannounced. Wyatt sometimes seemed to possess a supernatura
l awareness of when things were going badly for me.

  Still, he would want to talk my ear off, and Zadie would likely be getting clobbered by the demands of afternoon in the Anson house, so she was a better bet for a brief call. I texted her.

  Have time to chat?

  I got an instant reply.

  Filled up car with diesel instead of regular gas on way home today—v. bad. 10K damage to engine and stranded all kids and D. barfed on neighbor who was helping. Gonna have Xanax or nice glass wine, but . . . sure. For you.

  I had to smile. For someone so intelligent, Zadie was always managing to shoot first and ask questions later. She was a loving mother, a doting wife, an ethical, thoughtful cardiologist, a loyal friend, a concerned and energetic citizen, and an all-around stellar representative of the human race, but she was also kind of a lovable dingbat.

  “That’s horrible about the car,” I said when she answered. “Does Drew know?”

  “Oh yes,” said Zadie. “Yes, he does. He figured it out when he had to leave some vitally important conference call and pick up our vomiting three-year-old preschool dropout from Jean Anne’s.”

  “What do you mean, ‘preschool dropout’?” I asked. “I thought she was back in.”

  “Ohhh, that’s a story for later.” Zadie sounded a little unhinged. Probably she wasn’t kidding about the Xanax and wine. “I can only relate one disaster at a time. It wasn’t exactly a voluntary dropout, though. Let me just say it’s a mistake in a preschool classroom to allow easy access to a bag containing twenty-two birthday cupcakes.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Drew actually took it well. The car, I mean. He could have gotten really pissed, but when I finally saw him, he took one look at me and then held me. I’ve never been so grateful in my life.”

  “Well, at least that’s good. You could be married to a pig who would hold things like that against you,” I said, assailed for the thousandth time by the thought of how much men loved Zadie.