The Doctor's Forever Family

by Marie Ferrarella

  He appreciated the fact that she’d absolved him of any blame.

  Trouble was, he wasn’t sorry. Not deep down where it counted. Oh, he hadn’t wanted to cause her any discomfort or embarrassment, but at the same time, the unintentional intimate contact had stirred something within him. Whispered to him that he was still alive, still able to react to outside stimuli.

  But, by the same token, feeling that way fed his guilt. Here Tina was, half out of her mind with worry about her convulsing infant and what he’d done, intentionally or not, was tantamount to copping a feel.

  There had to be a very special seat in hell reserved just for him, Dan thought as yet another salvo of guilt ambushed him.

  He had no idea why he was even reacting this way. After all, at thirty-two, he wasn’t some kind of wet-behind-the-ears sheltered novice when it came to women. The exact opposite was true. Ever since Rachel Carrow had seduced him when he was fifteen and she a worldly woman of seventeen, he’d enjoyed the company of beautiful, willing women.

  So why did accidentally touching this one set off alarms in his head and make it feel as if he’d singed the back of his hand?

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Trying to pull his very scattered thoughts together, Dan managed to say, “You’re right.” When she looked at him sharply, he realized that she probably thought he was agreeing with the very last thing she’d said, that touching her hadn’t been his fault. He spoke quickly to clear up the misunderstanding.

  “Bobby’s fever does seem to be going down. I would have thought it would take at least thirty minutes, if not longer. I’ve never seen anyone react to Tylenol that quickly before.”

  “I don’t care why or how,” Tina confessed. “I’m just glad that he’s not burning up anymore.” She tried not to think about how scared she’d been. All that mattered was that Bobby was going to be all right. “Doc, about the convulsion—”

  “That was because of the very high fever. It happens a lot more frequently with small children than you think. But the shot will keep the fever down to a manageable level until it’s gone.”

  She closed her eyes, savoring his words. “Thank God.” Opening them again, she said, “Before I forget, how much do I owe you?”

  He was not up to talking about money right now. He’d never been involved in anything as mundane as rates and fees and right now, had no idea where to begin or what was reasonable and customary around this area.

  Dan shrugged. “Beats me. I haven’t had time to come up with any rates yet.” He had intended to leave billing to the office manager. But that obviously was not the setup around here. This lone-town-doctor role that he’d had to assume was a whole different ball game. “Let’s just say it’s on the house,” Dan told her.

  That smacked of charity, Tina thought, and she didn’t need charity. But arguing about that now didn’t seem right, either.

  She hit on a solution. One professional good deed traded for another. “How about, once you’re set up, I’ll get your accounts in order?” He looked at her, a shade of confusion in his eyes. They were pretty eyes, she thought. As big and blue as Bobby’s were. She could feel herself being easily spellbound by them if she wasn’t careful. “I’m an accountant,” she told him. “Or at least, I will be once I pass my last class.”

  If he couldn’t have an office manager, he supposed that an accountant was the next best thing. “I might take you up on that,” he replied.

  She’d taken up more than enough of his time. Not to mention that he’d earned her undying thanks and loyalty, helping Bobby tonight. Holding the boy against her, she rose to her feet.

  “Well, you’re probably dead on your feet,” she speculated. “Bobby and I’ll just go—”

  He put a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back down into her seat. “No need to leave just yet. I’m still monitoring him, remember? Besides, we’ve got coffee coming. Might as well drink it. I’ve got a feeling that Miss Joan doesn’t take well to having people pass up her coffee after she’s gone through all the trouble of making it.”

  Tina smiled, relaxing a bit. “You’re a pretty good judge of character,” she acknowledged.

  No, he wasn’t. But he had a feeling that he would have to learn how to be. A place like Forever required it.

  Chapter Seven

  After Miss Joan took Tina and Bobby back home, Dan thought he would get some much needed sleep and even possibly sleep in the following morning. He was mistaken.

  It didn’t exactly come as a total surprise. Because even as he lay down, he had the unsettling feeling that he was on borrowed time.

  And he was.

  Approximately two and a half hours after he’d fallen back asleep, it happened. Someone knocked on his door. Again. At first it was lightly, then with a little more force. It was by no means the kind of pounding that the door had been subjected to when Tina and company had appeared earlier, but just as persistent.

  Added to that was the fact that the sleep he’d fallen into, despite his exhaustion, was not nearly as deep this time as it had been initially. Consequently he became aware of the knocking quite possibly even at the moment it began. And lastly, the knocking was accompanied by daylight, the appearance of which officially declared that any hope of getting more sleep was utterly futile.

  Still dressed in the same shirt and jeans he’d been wearing for the past twenty-four hours, Dan promised himself a quick shower and change of clothing as soon as he saw to the person at the door.

  He assumed it was Tina, back to report on her son’s condition. Hopefully the boy was improving, Dan thought, hence the reason she wasn’t pounding on the door but just knocking.

  After pausing to throw some water in his face, Dan padded down the stairs, realizing belatedly that he’d left his shoes standing beside his bed. He’d get them when he went back to change.

  He arrived at the front door, took a breath to help him focus better and turned the doorknob.

  The greeting he was about to utter froze on his lips the moment he’d opened the door. Tina, for whom the greeting was intended, was not standing on his doorstep. But it looked as if almost everyone else in Forever was. Or at least a very large portion. Had they come back to finish the work they’d started yesterday?

  If so, they were undoubtedly standing at the back of the serpentine line that extended from the porch through the unkempt front yard, all the way down to the curb because he recognized no one up front.

  Dan didn’t bother craning his neck to see, but he had his suspicions that the line continued down the dusty block.

  At the very front of the line was a heavyset, burly man who looked passingly familiar now that Dan had a chance to really focus on him.

  “Um, Miss Joan said you were open for business, Doc. That you’ve already seen your first patient so it was okay to come.” He paused, waiting for either a confirmation or a denial.

  Dan was forced to admit that Miss Joan was accurate in her second statement since he’d treated Tina’s son. But before he could say that the clinic wasn’t actually officially open yet—and that it wouldn’t be for at least several hours—the burly man, who introduced himself as John Sullivan, proclaimed his relief the second he heard the doctor give him a tentative “yes.”

  “’Cause I’ve got this pain that’s been eating away at my gut for mebbe two weeks now. Mebbe three,” John confided, dropping his voice several decibels. “I don’t have time to drive all the way over to Pine Ridge and kill half a day or more waiting on a sawbones to have a look-see. But with you being right here…” His voice trailed off but there was no reason for him to complete his statement. They both knew what he was driving at. John Sullivan wanted an appointment. Now. “Can you help me, Doc?” he asked hopefully.

  “I can certainly try,” Dan responded, surprising himself as his own words registered.

  He’d been schooled to answer conservatively, to make no promises unless he was certain of the outcome. Better yet, to make no promises at all, just
a few vague sounds that could be left to the patient to interpret. More than likely, he should have replied with some evasive phrase like “We’ll see,” and assessed the situation before anything vaguely resembling a positive answer was tendered to the patient.

  But apparently, twenty-four hours in this place of few traffic lights was enough to soften his resolve—and his brain.

  Maybe there was something in the water, Dan silently guessed.

  And so it began.

  One by one, patient after patient marched through his unorganized office, stating his or her problem and waiting for the doctor from New York to fix it.

  Since part of his disorganization meant he had no charts or files prepared, Dan was forced to take notes about each patient’s complaint on the various scraps of paper he managed to unearth.

  Because of that, with each and every stroke of the pencil he made, Dan sank further and further into a quagmire that deep in his heart he knew he hadn’t a prayer of extricating himself from. At least, not without some major help.

  Miracles, as far as he was concerned, had been pulled off the shelves. No major help would be coming his way, possibly ever.

  BY ELEVEN DAN HAD TREATED approximately sixteen patients, had twice that number of pieces of paper scattered on his desk, all of which related to the various ailments that had paraded through the clinic—and was convinced that he was going down for the third time.

  When he heard the tinkling sound that the front door bell made for the umpteenth time—whose bright idea was it to hang a bell on the front door, anyway?—he thought that he had been officially sentenced to reside in hell.

  He hadn’t come up for air once. His only “breaks” occurred when he stopped to wash his hands in between patients. The only good thing was that, so far, all the patients, miraculously, had left the clinic satisfied that they would be getting better from that moment forward.

  He didn’t need medicine, he thought cynically. All he needed was an endless supply of fairy dust since obviously the power of suggestion with these people was able to move mountains. Tell them they would be all right and they took the remark to heart, convinced that it would be so.

  Of course, he mused, having patients who were running a spate of remarkably run-of-the-mill ailments didn’t hurt matters, either.

  Less than thirty seconds after the sound of the last annoying tinkling bell had emanated from the front door, Tina Blayne stuck her head into his office.

  Surprised and pleased to see her face, Dan temporarily suspended what he was saying to Mrs. Allen about the red rash on her son’s neck in order to acknowledge Tina’s presence.

  “Hi. Is everything all right with Bobby?” he asked, guessing the reason for her sudden invasion of an occupied exam room.

  The wide, content grin on Tina’s face went straight to his gut, knocking the air out of him for a moment. In another venue, it might have been referred to as a sucker punch. In any case, he was unprepared for it or its effect.

  “Everything’s perfect,” Tina told him happily. “He’s bouncing back as if he was never sick in the first place.” Currently, her sister, who’d taken the day off from her work, was watching the boy, which in turn allowed her to pop by the clinic. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  He’d always been naturally suspicious and now was no different. Had Tina come down with some kind of an ailment herself?

  Before he could ask Tina exactly why she was here, she showed him.

  “Miss Joan figured you’d probably be very busy this morning and might need this.”

  “This” turned out to be a huge container of coffee and a foil covered dish. Both of which she placed on the desk in front of him. “Breakfast,” she announced with a flair.

  Mrs. Allen rose to her feet, picking up the prescription he’d just written for an antihistamine salve for her son’s rash with one hand as she held on to her five-year-old’s hand with the other.

  “We’ll let you eat in peace, Doctor. Thank you again so much!”

  Dan could only nod in response. He did, however, make another note on yet another scrap of paper.

  It took him a second to realize that Tina watched him closely. When he raised his eyes quizzically to hers, she had her own question for him. “Is that how you’re keeping records?”

  This was definitely not business as usual as far as he was concerned. Dan was accustomed to dictating his notes into a recorder which in turn would then be transcribed by someone the office manager would assign to the task.

  “I thought I’d just jot some things down now and input them into my laptop later.” Once he remembered where it was packed, he added silently.

  Coming closer to his desk, Tina turned one of the pieces of paper around and glanced down at it. She saw what amounted to several sets of wavy lines. Nothing on the paper remotely resembled words as she knew them.

  Humor quirked her mouth when she looked up at him. “Boy, it really is true what they say about a doctor’s handwriting.” Her eyebrows drew together in a quizzical line. “Can you actually read any of this?”

  “Sure,” he answered defensively. But when he turned the paper around so he could look at it, he couldn’t make out any of the words, either. Frowning, he was forced to admit, “Most of the time.”

  “Hey, Doc, are you ready to see me yet?” A redheaded, bearded man asked as he stuck his head in through the doorway.

  Feeling somewhat protective of him, Tina took it upon herself to answer for the doctor.

  “He’s having breakfast right now, Howard. But he’ll be with you in a minute.” She thought for a second, then added, “Why don’t you come back in, say, about five minutes?”

  “Sure thing.” He eyed Dan sheepishly. “Sorry to interrupt your meal, Doc,” Howard apologized as he withdrew.

  Dan glanced in Tina’s direction and smiled his gratitude. “Thanks.”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t mention it. Wouldn’t want you suddenly fainting from hunger on us,” she told him.

  With that, she slipped out of the office before he had a chance to protest. Dan turned his attention to the breakfast before him. He ate slowly, enjoying his first moments of solitude in more than four hours.

  It was short-lived.

  Five minutes to the second—that had been the deal—the door opened again. Howard was back, looking like an errant, overgrown choirboy as he cocked his head and asked, “Now okay, Doc?”

  There was no sense stalling and putting off the inevitable. He was here to treat these people in Warren’s name and they weren’t about to go away until he did.

  Dan beckoned for him to enter the office. “Now’s fine.”

  Coming in, Howard thrust a file folder at him and took a seat facing him. “She said to give you this.”

  “She?” Dan repeated quizzically, taking the folder from the man. Who was he talking about and what did it have to do with this folder?

  “Yeah. Tina,” Howard replied. “She said you’d want to look at it first—before we talk about my, um, problem.”

  Now he was really curious. Opening the folder he found a single yellow sheet of paper—not a piece of paper but a whole sheet—inside. He skimmed it and found what was presumably a brief summary of his present patient’s personal information as well as the complaint that had brought him to the clinic in the first place.

  Scanning the neatly written information quickly, Dan set the folder down on the side of his desk.

  “She was right,” he acknowledged. “I did need to see that first. Okay, Howard, let’s go to the exam room and get started,” Dan said. Getting up, he led the way out of the office. “So how long have you noticed this ‘squeezing feeling’ in your lungs,” he asked, using the exact words that were written down in the folder.

  “About a month or maybe a little bit longer,” Howard said after a moment’s reflection.

  As they walked into the exam room, Dan glanced over his shoulder toward the reception area. He tried to get a handle on just how many m
ore people waited to see him.

  To his surprise, Tina was now sitting at the scarred desk he’d briefly debated sleeping on last night. Oblivious to being observed, she was busy taking information from another one of the people in the room.

  To his dismay, he noted, albeit belatedly, that it was still standing room only within the reception area. He would be here all afternoon. Maybe even part of the night.

  Resigned, Dan closed the exam room door behind him and got to work.

  SOMEWHERE AROUND THREE O’CLOCK or so, he’d stopped glancing at his watch. There didn’t seem to be any point. Eventually, he completely lost all track of time. One by one, on occasion by two, the patients just kept on coming, bringing him everything from colds, to indigestion, to what sounded like colitis, to simple requests for dieting instructions.

  The latter had come from a severely obese sixteen-year-old boy who’d cut school to come see him without his mother’s knowledge.

  “She keeps calling it baby fat, Doc,” the boy, Chad Barth, lamented. “And says I’ll outgrow it. How can I outgrow it if she keeps putting these heaping plates of food in front of me?” he asked. To him, the dilemma he found himself in was serious. “And if I don’t eat whatever she puts in front of me, she cries and tells me I don’t appreciate how much she slaves over the meals so that I would grow up strong. Look at me, Doc,” Chad groaned, a look of disgust and loathing entering his expression as he gestured at his wide body. “How much ‘stronger’ am I supposed to grow?”

  This, Dan remembered thinking, needed a psychiatrist’s input far more than it needed his. But, per force, he did what he could for Chad, outlining a general diet designed to make the strapping teenager leaner and, by that very fact, healthier—as long as he stuck to it. At least for the most part.

  His voice quivering with emotion, Chad left the office, promising to stick to the diet or die.

  Dan didn’t remember that much drama being in his life when he was sixteen, but by then, there had been no doting mother, no father to look to as a role model. There was just himself to lean on and Uncle Jason to turn to for the finer creature comforts since it was Jason who was left to be the executor of his late parents’ will. He’d been almost rail-thin at the time, with the family doctor after him to gain weight, not lose it.