by Madelyn Alt
“Ready?” he asked. I nodded, and he leaned in, lifting me up against him as he might a child. “Watch your ankle,” he told me. “It’s kind of hard to see here in the stairwell. I don’t want to bump it.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I really didn’t want Mount Maggie-manjaro to erupt again anytime soon. Especially not with witnesses.
You know, for a lean and lanky guy, he was deceptively strong. I put my arms around his neck to help him along and looked up at him adoringly. “Dr. Dan, you are officially my hero today. Steff is a lucky girl, you know that?”
He laughed, a rosy blush making him look all of fifteen. “Keep telling her that, would you?”
“I think I’ll do that.” At the bottom of the stairs he had propped the door open with a wheelchair. I eyed it with suspicion. “Oh, I don’t have to ride in that thing, do I?”
His eyebrows rose. “You want me to carry you all the way to the ER?”
“The ER? Why would I have to go there? Can’t you just wrap my ankle with an Ace bandage or two and be done with it?”
He set me down in the chair and squatted before me again to skillfully guide my feet, injured and all, onto the foot paddles. “Not if you want it to heal properly.” He looked up at me and met my eye. “I’m fairly positive you’ve broken it, Maggie.”
“What?” I stuttered out a nervous laugh. “No. That’s impossible. I just stepped down wrong, that’s all. It’s just a sprain.” I nodded and smiled up at him, as though doing that would seal the deal and make it so.
“Heyyyyy!” Steff put her hands on my shoulders and leaned over the back of the wheelchair, peering down at me, upside down. “I just got here. How’s the patient?”
“I’m fine!” I told her.
“She’s going to need X-rays,” Dan countered.
“Really, it hardly even hurts,” I insisted, crossing my arms. “Honestly.”
“She burst into tears when I rotated it,” Dan told her.
I made a face at him. “Traitor. And besides, that was . . . that was just . . .” I searched for the right word. “Stress.”
“Well,” Steff said, smiling back and forth between the two of us, “I think Dan is right, Maggie. What’s it going to hurt? If you’re right and it’s not broken, it still needs tending to. The ER is the best place for that. So let’s go, huh?” To Dan she said, “I’ll take her. I’m off today and you’re not.”
He hesitated. “If you’re sure . . . I do have a meeting to go to first thing.”
She nodded, her sprightly auburn curls bouncing, meeting his eyes for the briefest of moments and then dancing away. “Thanks for doing that for me, Dan.”
“You’re welcome. Anytime.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Was that tension I sensed bouncing back and forth between them? That was as impossible as me having a broken ankle from a teeny-tiny misstep on the stairs. But there was a slight edge of formality in their last exchange that I didn’t understand. I felt guilty all of a sudden. I’d been so busy with Marcus. Had I missed something that happened between the two of them?
Looked like I had some girlfriend-to-girlfriend digging to do.
“Will I see you later?” she asked quietly.
I watched his response closely. He glanced sideways, away from her, opened his mouth, closed it, flicked his glance her way once more, then cleared his throat and said, “Well, as I said, meeting. I’ll call you?”
And Steff, true to modern woman form, straightened her shoulders and made her face a mask of neutrality as she nodded. “Okay. Talk to you later.”
I waited until she had wheeled me down the hall, away from Dan, before I spoke again. “Okay, you can let me go now.”
Steff laughed behind me. “Don’t think so.”
“Honestly, it will be fine. It is most definitely a sprain.”
“Doctor’s orders, Maggie. You’re going to the ER.”
I flopped back in the chair, wincing when it made the ankle pain flare, and mutinously crossed my arms. “It is so not broken,” I grumbled.
Chapter 10
It was most definitely broken, and I was most definitely screwed.
“Look on the bright side,” Steff chirped in her perkiest voice while I watched glumly as the ER crew prepared to outfit me with a splendiferous fiberglass cast. “You get to rest as much as you want without feeling guilty for it. What color do you want?”
“Color?”
“For the cast. I mean you can go with the plain cast, which is white. Ish. But if I were you I’d go for the gusto. I mean, you’re going to have to wear this thing for at least six weeks. Have some fun with it. Besides, the colored fiberglass won’t show dirt as quickly.”
A dirty cast. In the full heat of summer.
Sigh.
The ER nurse smiled and rummaged in a cart, pulling out a tray of fiberglass tapes in every color of the rainbow as well as some well beyond the rainbow. “Take your pick.”
Well, if I couldn’t be mobile, at least I could be vibrant. “That one.”
“Neon yellow?” Steff raised her brows. “You never wear yellow.”
“Sunshine yellow. It’s a happy color,” I said in my defense. “I think I need happy right now.”
“Yellow it is.”
When they were done, I admired their handiwork. Well, admired is probably too strong a word. Surveyed is probably more like it.
“All happied up?” Steff asked me, smiling.
“It’ll do.” We sat quietly a moment while the nurses finished filling out the paperwork. I slapped my forehead. “Oh my gosh.”
“What?”
“I forgot to call Liss. She’s going to be beside herself, wondering why I haven’t come in. My phone died after I talked to you, and—”
“No worries, I called her for you,” Steff said, a little smugly.
I gaped at her. “You did? When?”
“When I got off the phone with Danny. I figured you’d be a little too busy to think of it. I did not, however, call your mother. You’re on your own with that.”
And Marcus. I needed to call Marcus to check on Minnie and to let him know what had happened.
My face fell a little.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Steff asked, taking my hand. “You look sad all of a sudden.”
“Last night . . . with Marcus . . .”
Steff gasped, looking thrilled. “You didn’t!”
“No. I didn’t. And that would be the problem.” I explained the events of the evening to her. “And now, with this thing? He’s going to want to stay far, far away from me. Just look at it.” I knocked on the cast for good measure. “I mean, leave it to me to luck into something like this.
Steff shook her head, her gaze stern. “Now you listen here, Maggie O’Neill. Don’t you sell yourself short. Bad luck is bad luck is bad luck. It’s coincidence. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I guess.” But I wasn’t convinced. Sometimes bad luck was more than coincidence. What if I had been unconsciously inviting it into my life? Not in a biblical sense, although I’m sure my mother would be more than happy to blame it all on my boss, my friends, and my forays into “the Dark Side.” (Cue very scary music.) More in a cumulative, unwitting sense brought on by years of shoving my awareness of the truth about the world surrounding me into the broom closet. Deny, deny, deny . . . and close your eyes when it comes knocking. That’s what I had done for far too long. Did I accidentally leave open cosmic doorways or portals that I should have been learning how to close, and now I was paying the price?
After handing me a prescription for painkillers, notations for care, and a recommendation that I obtain crutches to get around with ASAP, the nurses were done with me, so Steff wheeled me out into the hall.
“Speaking of man trouble . . .” I said as soon as I could be certain no one who might know Steff or Dr. Dan could overhear.
“Were we?”
“Well, I was. What’s up with you and Dr. Danny?”
“What makes you
think something’s up?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said dryly, “you never answer questions with more questions. Stop using my own perfected avoidance technique on me.”
Steff laughed. “I’ll have to work on perfecting a technique of my own, is that it?”
“Preferably. My techniques never work anyway, so I don’t know why you would want to try them on for size.”
She paused as we waited for the elevator. “Do you feel up to going and chatting somewhere? There’s a nice bench or two outside.”
“Sure. Sounds good, and I’m not going anywhere right away anyway with this thing.”
The difference between the air-conditioning inside the hospital and the sultry air outside was enough to knock you over, but I kept telling myself I just had to adjust. And maybe there would be shade. I hoped. Steff pushed my chair over to a little garden area complete with benches and perennials waving in the dappled shade, then sat down on a bench beside me.
“So.”
“So,” she echoed, then paused, catching her lower lip between her teeth. It was a rare day that I had seen Steff up in arms over a guy, and yet she obviously was. She had always been so confident in herself when it came to men, and Danny obviously worshipped her. I couldn’t help wondering what was up.
“Stephanie Marie Evans, spill it. You know you want to.” She smoothed her hands down her legs and over her trim knees. She looked cute as could be today in a gauzy sundress and bejeweled thong sandals, her curly hair pulled back away from her delicate face and drawn up in a high ponytail that dropped in a mass of ringlets made tighter by the steamy air. Danny had thought so, too—I saw the glint of appreciation in his eye. So why the angst and tension?
“Well,” she hedged, “Danny’s been acting so strangely lately.”
Surprise made me frown. “Strangely?”
Steff nodded. “He’s been avoiding me. We usually make plans for him to come over, but he’s been too busy lately, and when we talk, I can tell that he’s holding something back from me. He’s never been like that, which is why this was such a surprise, and . . . and he’s been distant. Oh, Maggie. What if he’s seeing someone else?”
I reached for her hand. “First of all, let’s not jump to conclusions. You have no real reason to believe that, so don’t even go there. And second of all, are you nuts? Have you seen the way that he looks at you?”
“He’s hiding something, Maggie. I know he is.”
Now, all women have at times felt that their man was hiding something from them. You get to the point where you have spent enough time with them that you know the inner workings of their minds, the everyday sense of them, and when their behavior is at odds with what you know, it raises your intuitive antennae. So when Steff said that something was up with Dan, I tended to believe her. The question was, what was that something?
“Maybe he likes me but doesn’t think that his family will approve,” she continued. “I mean, think about it. What if he knows his family—his mother!—won’t like me? That would have to weigh heavily on his mind. Maybe he just can’t think of a way to tell me.”
There was no way that anyone could not like Steff. Absolutely zero chance. “Has he given you any indication of that?”
“Well . . . no.”
“And he’s not going to!” I told her firmly. “Because it’s not going to happen.”
“But . . . it has to be something big, Maggie. Something important. Danny is never like this.”
“Maybe he is worried about something but doesn’t want you to know he’s worrying,” I offered, grasping for explanations.
“Other than whether his family would like me or not, what could he be worried about? He’s almost done with his residency. Then all he has to do is be licensed and certified . . .”
“Does he have to take a test in order to do that?”
“Well, of course he has to take a test for that to happen.”
“Well, that’s it, then,” I said. “It makes sense.”
“It makes sense if you’re anyone other than Danny. He’s a brilliant doctor, Maggie. Smart, knowledgeable, and he has his fingertips on everything he needs when making a diagnosis. I swear the man has a photographic memory when it comes to medicine. When it comes to his keys? Not so much.” She laughed at her own joke, and in that moment I saw her absolute devotion to him. It gave me the shivers, in a good way. “Anyway, there’s no way he needs to be nervous about the test.”
“But that doesn’t mean he’s not.”
“Maybe.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
I watched as she sank back into an uncertainty-driven funk. It wasn’t her usual style, that’s for sure. “You really love him, don’t you?”
She glanced up at me, mouth open and ready to deny it. But at the last minute, she squeezed her eyelids shut and pressed her lips together and just nodded.
“Aw, Steff. Honey.” I reached out and touched her hand, joggling it from side to side for good measure just to try to get her to smile. “That’s a good thing. Isn’t it?”
She actually had tears glinting in the inner corners of her pretty green eyes. “Well, I thought so. I did. It’s been coming on so long, you know, little by little, and keeps getting stronger. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to keep it from him.” She lifted her gaze to mine, searching for wisdom, hoping for insight. Anything that could help her find her way through this. “How do you keep something so big inside?”
Her fear was rolling off of her in waves. This was new to her, uncharted waters, and she didn’t even have a star to sail ’er by. I let the fear come into me, using my own energies to filter it and soothe it, in hopes that that would help give her a measure of peace and a chance at perspective. “Maybe you’re not supposed to keep it from him?” I suggested.
“Maybe you’re not meant to hold it inside. Maybe you’re not meant to be in control of it at all.”
Her lower lip trembled, and she wailed, “But I don’t want to not be in control!”
“I know, hon. But sometimes these things are decided for us.”
She sighed, her brow troubled.
“Does he love you?” I asked her. “I mean, he does, obviously—it’s written all over him. Has he ever told you?”
She shook her head. “We’ve come close to saying it, so close that I almost feel that we have sometimes. Without words.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“How can I, when I have this weird . . . feeling hanging over my head? What if he’s just trying to come up with a way to let me down easy?”
There was obviously no reasoning with her. Poor Steff. She had it, and she had it bad. I had never seen her like this before. Not ever. Which meant one thing and one thing only.
Danny was The One.
And because he was The One, I knew that I would do anything to see my BFF happy and content, forever and always.
I patted her on the knee. “Leave this to me.”
“Wait.” She squinted suspiciously at me. “What are you going to do?”
I shook my head and gave her my most mysterious smile.
But I would say Not. One. Word. Mostly because I really had no idea what I was going to do yet. No worries, though—I would come up with something.
To keep her from asking any more questions that I wouldn’t yet have answers to, I decided it was time to distract her with a little problem of my own. But how to approach it? I turned my face up to the sun, blinking through the tree leaves above the little bricked courtyard, searching for inspiration.
“Forgive me, Mags, but I think the popular phrase of the moment is, ‘spill it,’” Steff quipped.
So I told her. I told her about the conversation I had overheard while stuck in the elevator with the power outage, and how much what I’d heard had bothered me. How much it was still bothering me, despite everything else that had been going on. “I know it was all very random. I know it could have been anything. Anyone. Believe me, I know that.
But there was just something about it. I don’t know. It’s hard to even explain. There was just something about it that . . . I can’t let it go.” I made a wry face. “Marcus thinks I’m making too much of things.”
“Maybe,” Steff said, frowning. “Maybe.”
“And the truth is, there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. Maybe Marcus is right. I have more important things to worry about right now. It’s just that, with everything that’s happened in town . . .”
“It’s a little worrisome?” Steff nodded sagely. “Understandable.”
“So you don’t think I’m just jumping to conclusions?”
“Oh, Maggie. Who can tell? The voices weren’t muffled? I mean, you could hear clearly?”
I nodded. “It was kind of hollow sounding, but yes, what I heard, I heard pretty plainly.”
She considered this a moment. “Then I guess we hope that it has a perfectly reasonable explanation. What else can we do but wait and see whether anything happens?”
I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. But I didn’t like it.
Steff had errands to run, and I had taken up enough of her free time on her day off already, so I had her wheel me back up to Mel’s hospital room after trying to reach Marcus using Steff’s cell and failing miserably. I couldn’t go back to my apartment—living in the basement was guaranteed to make life with a casted ankle, shall we say, interesting—so for the time being, it was better for me to be with people I loved.
In other words, it was time to face the music.
“Maggie! What on earth! I thought you had gone into work!”
My mother was the first to catch sight of me as Steff pushed the wheelchair through the door, carefully maneuvering through the doorway and around furniture.
“She had a little bit of an accident,” Steff said to the room at large. “Nothing to worry about. Just a little bit of a break.”
From her regal throne on the hospital bed, Mel was peering around the furniture that separated the room. Her mouth fell open as I was wheeled around the second bed, but then closed in a pout. “You broke your ankle? Jeez, Maggie. What were you thinking?”
