The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  I felt a surge of relief course through me: despite everything, I guess I still craved Nick’s professional approval.

  Zadie kept going: “Also, I knew he’d been in a golfing foursome with Boyd, Dirk Wynne, and Buzzy Cooper—Buzzy put in a word for you too, by the way—and I figured Nick would have more pull with Boyd than I would.”

  I faced her. “Why did you do it? Get Nick to help me, after what I did to you both?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. I’m not built for holding on to anger, for one thing. It seemed like it was destroying me. I was so miserable. Then, the other day, I was falling asleep, and I prayed to know what to do, and all of a sudden there was this easing-up sensation in my chest. I felt like I’d been inhaling fire for days, and then, out of nowhere, the soot and the smoke and the pain were gone, and I was breathing clean air again. I felt an overwhelming forgiveness. A real forgiveness this time.”

  She paused, apparently collecting her thoughts. Or maybe she wanted to cushion the blow I felt certain was coming, because she graced me with a gentle smile and added, “In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know all this before. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without you in it over the past ten years. I love my other friends, but they all fit into a unidimensional slot in my life. They’re my mom friends or my doctor friends or my friends from school. You’re the only person who connects all the dots.”

  I nodded, trying not to wince at the term “my other friends.”

  Zadie continued. “It’s like—everyone needs one person who gets all their quirks and their history.” She cocked her head and a shimmering tear appeared at the corner of her eye. “I want to punch you in the face for messing this up.”

  “You will never know how sorry I am.”

  “Well, you obviously lost your mind. Everyone involved lost their mind. Graham loved you. You loved Nick. Nick loved me. If I’d only fallen for Graham, we’d have had a perfect love quadrangle.”

  I didn’t know how to phrase it, what I was thinking. But Zadie and I had always had a kind of sisterly telepathy. “It worked out the way it was supposed to,” she said, suddenly fierce.

  “You don’t wish—”

  She held up a hand. “I can’t let myself think that way.” I risked a quick look at her: she was staring straight ahead. “I love Drew. I love my children. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

  “Zadie,” I said. “What happens now?”

  “Oh, Boyd will call off Macon Bradford. And Nestor Connolly never wanted to fire you in the first place. You’ll be—”

  “I meant, what happens with us? Can we go back to the way we were?”

  She didn’t answer. Behind her, lolling test notes from a saxophone floated out from a band setting up by the stairs. The young bankers near us exploded in a raucous bout of head-thrown-back hilarity, and I shivered. Graham and Nick and Zadie and even Eleanor tangled up in my brain in a huge knot of remorse.

  This was it: of all the pivotal moments in my life, this was the one I cared about the most.

  A cheerful tattooed guy deposited my drink and departed. I ignored it. “Zadie?” I prompted gently.

  She sucked in her breath with a whistling sound, then puffed out her cheeks and blew it out. “Oh hell,” she said. Sadness curdled the characteristic lilt in her voice, dampening it down into something almost unrecognizable. I waited, counting the upstrokes of my pulse in my neck, focusing on the swishy sound of my blood in my ears so I would not have to think.

  “I’m sorry, Em,” she said. “I truly forgive you. But I don’t know if I can like you anymore.”

  “I understand,” I whispered.

  “I don’t know how to go forward after this.”

  So, yes, that was it.

  Or maybe this was the first step: after all, she would need time to adjust to the revelation that the Emma of the past was a stranger. How disconcerting, to find your memories—your reality—infiltrated by a cipher. I understood. I got it. I’d give anything to go back in time and alter my decisions, to change direction on those seemingly inconsequential little paths leading to my road of ruin. I’d be such a better person if I could do it again.

  I stared down into the swirly depths of my drink and then half rose in my seat, overcome by my inability to give voice to my remorse. “So I’ll go.”

  The irony dawned on me: I was walking away from the catastrophe of Eleanor Packard’s death with my professional reputation intact, even as I began to realize what a hollow victory I’d won. For so many years, my identity was inextricably bound to the idea that I was a surgeon. Surely, it was understandable if, over the years, I’d romanticized my accomplishments. Yes, I’d kept a monstrous secret for years, but I’d battled the mighty forces of death! That had to balance out, right?

  Now, too late, I saw that somewhere inside me, the power of that secret had metastasized into something I couldn’t control. I thought I was changing it, chipping away at it by doing good things, but all the while, it was changing me.

  —

  Zadie didn’t stop me as I walked away. The bankers still laughed, their open mouths morphing into ravenous, dark-throated maws as I passed them, everything in my sight turning sinister. I fumbled my way down the open-air staircase, concentrating on not colliding with anyone.

  Footsteps on the metal treads banged above and below me, one set echoing faster than the others. Moments later, a cold hand clutched my forearm, dragging me backward.

  Zadie’s eyes met mine. She grabbed my waist and hugged me, hard, almost knocking me off-balance. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t need to; she clutched my hand and pulled me after her, one step at a time, past the jazz band, past the drunk bankers, back to our chairs under the brightly lit night sky.

  She faced me. “I love you,” she said. “Maybe we can’t go back to the way we were, but we can find a way to go on from here.”

  I smiled, feeling something indescribably light break free in my chest.

  Zadie shifted so we were once again seated side by side, our hands still clasped. Her hand felt warm in mine, the fragile bones of her fingers imbued with unlikely strength. We sat, still and quiet, our heads tilted together in wordless relief.

  I’ll always wonder: if our positions had been reversed, would I have forgiven her? My own heart is a mystery to me at times, pulsing in an odd, contradictory landscape of fire and ice. But it’s easy for me to understand Zadie’s heart: it’s warm and sweet and full of grace.

  Author’s Note

  People have been fascinated with medical dramas since the dawn of written language. I can say with absolute certainty that every physician, at one time or another, has thought of writing a book; after all, the story of the weird thing we extracted from somebody’s southernmost orifice never fails to delight people at dinner parties. (That’s where your mind goes when you ask your ER friend if anything interesting happened at work today. Admit it.)

  Medicine is a consuming field. We spend years of our lives training—forgoing meals and bathroom breaks and desirable ski trips and the wedding of our childhood best friend and every other thing you might reasonably want to do. But it is also a career without equal in its reward. We are there when you come into the world and we are there when you leave it. We try our damnedest to ease your pain, to fix your brokenness, to diminish your sorrow. As one of my colleagues says, we have the immeasurable blessing of seeing life in all its anguish and glory.

  This remarkable privilege—of witnessing life from its first breath to its last—leaves its mark on every doctor. More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve slipped into my car after a shift and cried. I’ve stayed late, making calls for people who’ve lost their jobs, begging for free specialty help. I’ve given my lunch to a woman who obviously hadn’t eaten in days. I’ve revived private school kids with bags of heroin in their mouths. I’ve demonstrated to teenag
e couples how to swaddle and rock crying babies, and I’ve explained to irate housewives what chlamydia is. Once I held the hand of a dying old man from a nursing home who cried out for his boy over and over during his last minutes until I bundled up my hair and pretended to be his son. Every physician could tell these stories; we keep thousands of them in our heads.

  I don’t have the skill to write the sweeping epic all this raging humanity deserves. But a few years ago, I got it into my head that I could at least write an entertaining story. Following the ubiquitous advice hurled at all novice writers—write what you know—I plunged into a manuscript about a group of med school friends. Eventually I figured the story would be better if we could see the lives of the characters after their training, and then I decided there should be some romantic shenanigans, and then I was advised that someone needed to die. And of course, in addition to the anguish and the glory of life, I wanted to reflect some of the hilarity. I’m a member of a giant Facebook group of women doctors who are also mothers (Hi, PMG!), and not a day goes by that I’m not cracking up at the photo of the penis-shaped sculpture someone’s preschooler proudly presented, or the tale of how the entire first grade at someone’s daughter’s school can now describe a hysterectomy in detail. So naturally I had to work some children into the book too. After I’d written approximately two hundred thousand words—half of which would later be cut—this book emerged.

  To put this in context, I am a huge book nerd: I read in the bathtub, in bed, while eating, and instead of cleaning the house. (If you’re looking for a great read, check out kimmerymartin.com, which is chock-full of book recommendations). Sometimes I read instead of remembering meetings and carpools, which means I’m constantly yelping in dismay as I rush out the door with my clothes on inside out. A lifelong information junkie, I read all genres, from women’s fiction to thrillers to biographies to dense science texts. But I’d never written anything, aside from the occasional medical research paper. It turns out that authoring a book is just as consuming as medicine. Sometimes I’d have to screech over to the side of the road to write something down before I forgot it, or I’d solve (or create) problems for Zadie and Emma in my dreams. They never left me alone. And as my characters became more real and more compelling to me, I began to realize how incredibly lucky I am to have stumbled into the two fields—literature and medicine—that perhaps more than any others bear witness to life in all its anguish and glory.

  Kimmery

  Acknowledgments

  To address the most urgent question of my early readers: nobody in this book is real. Well, maybe one character was a tiny bit inspired by a real person but, as of today, this person is a forty-pound illiterate, so any fallout should be in the distant future. Along the same lines, if you are one of those people who insist all fiction is autobiographical, please skip chapters nine, fourteen, and eighteen. Also skip these chapters if you are my mother.

  The publication of this book is a testament to many supportive friends, especially Jodi Frazier, Sameena Evers, and Nicole Carrig; thanks also to Billy Cohen, who is a living confirmation of the powers of CPR. My earliest beta readers displayed grace beyond all reason in making it through to the end, especially Katherine Vest, Melanie Piasecki, Rawles Kelly, Ainslie Wall, RaeAnn Doran, and Beverly Edens. The same goes for Jennifer Freno and Heather Burkhart—my beloveds—upon whom the burden of listening to me babble about my book fell most heavily. And no acknowledgment in a book about med school friends would be complete without loving on these people: Jill Howell Berg, Christina Terrell, Whitney Arnette Jamie, Kelli Miller, Kristin Rager, and Casey Dutton-Triplett. I will cherish you for all eternity.

  To the trauma surgeons and cardiologists of the world, especially Jamie Coleman, Jennifer Co-Vu, Cindy Wright, Amanda Cook, and the incomparable Will Miles: the rest of us owe you our fervent gratitude. I took some creative license with medical facts here and there; beyond that, any mistakes are my own. Also, of course, physicians in real life are not quite as dramatic and amorous as I’ve portrayed them, but that would have made for a boring book. Apologies to all my doctor friends.

  I’m indebted to many literary people: the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Foundation, WFWA, PMG Writers, Kim Wright, Marybeth Whalen, my dazzling online writer group (Lisa Duffy, Lisa Roe, Kristin Contino, and Leah Collum), and my equally dazzling in-person writer group (Lisa Kline, Emily Pearce, and Betsy Thorpe), and all my marvelous author friends. A million thanks to Betsy for being the finest independent editor ever. And as for my third writing group—Trish Rohr, Bess Kercher, Tracy Curtis—words can’t express what you mean to me.

  Thanks so much to Miriam Goderich for fishing me out of the slush pile, and to my fascinating, feisty, brilliant agent, Jane Dystel. And to Kerry Donovan, my editor at Berkley, who is both excellent and endearing. Thank you to the entire team at Berkley, especially Colleen Reinhart for her stunning cover art and Lauren Burnstein and Tara O’Connor in publicity and Fareeda Bullert in marketing.

  I enjoyed the immeasurable blessing of a childhood home infused with love, integrity, and a staggering number of books, and for this, I thank my mom and dad. To my sister, Shannan Rome, I’m grateful for your sharp but delightfully uncritical eye. To my children, Katie, Alex, and Annie: you motivate me daily with your irrepressible joie de vivre. Both my book and my life would be bleak without you.

  And finally, I should amend the disclaimer I made earlier to acknowledge my real-life chief resident—my husband—who might have been the inspiration for the desirable features of a certain character. Jim, I love you.

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