“Are you kidding me? Prettiest girl you’ve ever seen rolls herself through a hospital desperately trying to find you? Made my week.”
“Well,” I say. “I . . . wanted to say a proper good-bye, I guess. I felt like we . . .”
Henry shakes his head. “You don’t need to explain anything to me. Are you free tonight for dinner? I want to take you on a date.”
“You do?” I say.
“Yes,” Henry says. “What do you say?”
I laugh. “I say yeah. That sounds lovely. Oh, but I can’t tonight. I have plans with Gabby. But tomorrow? Could you do tomorrow?”
“Yep,” he says. “I can do whenever you can do. What about now? What are you doing now?”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing.”
“Will you go for a walk with me?”
“I would love that,” I tell him. I wipe the sugar off my hands and grab my cane. “I hope you don’t mind that I have to use my cane.”
“Are you kidding me?” he says. “I’ve been going to bakeries for months hoping to find you. Something as small as a cane isn’t going to put me off.”
I smile. “Plus, if I didn’t need this cane, I probably would never have met you. Although, who knows, maybe we could have met another way.”
“As a man who has been trying to run into you for months, let me assure you how rare it is that two specific people’s paths will cross.”
He takes my hand in his, and I have waited for it for so long, have believed so strongly that it may never happen, that it proves as intimate a gesture as any I have ever experienced.
“To car accidents, then,” I say.
He laughs. “To car accidents. And to everything that has led up to this.”
He kisses me then, and I realize I was wrong about the hand holding. It now feels teenager-ish and quaint. This is what I’d been waiting for.
And as I stand there, in the middle of the city, kissing my night nurse, I know, for the first time in my life, that I have done everything right.
After all, he tastes like a cinnamon roll, and I’ve never kissed anyone who tasted like a cinnamon roll.
THREE YEARS LATER
Gabby hates surprises, but Carl and Tina insisted that it had to be a surprise party. I told them I would go along with their plan, and then I spilled the beans to Gabby last week so she’d know what to expect. I just knew that if it were me, I’d want the heads-up. So here we are, at her thirty-second birthday, me, Ethan, and fifty of her closest friends, huddled in her parents’ living room, completely in the dark, waiting to surprise someone who won’t be surprised.
We hear her parents’ car pull into the driveway. I give one last warning to everyone to be quiet when I see their headlights go out.
We hear them walk up to the door.
We see the door open.
I turn on the lights, and the entire room of us yells, “Surprise!” just as we are supposed to.
Gabby’s eyes go wide. She’s a good faker. She looks genuinely terrified. And then she turns immediately into Jesse’s chest. He laughs, holding her.
“Happy birthday!” he says, and then he spins her back around to look at all of us.
Tina decorated the room tastefully. Champagne and a dessert bar. White and silver balloons.
Gabby makes her way to me first. “Thank God you told me,” she whispers. “I don’t know if I could have handled all of this without a warning.”
I laugh. “Happy birthday!” I tell her. “Surprise!”
We laugh.
“Where’s Gabriella?”
“I left her with Paula,” I say. Paula is our go-to babysitter, maybe more of a nanny. She’s an older woman I worked with in Carl’s office. She retired and then found herself really bored, so she looks after Gabriella during the day when I am at work or anytime Gabby, Ethan, and I aren’t around. Gabriella loves her. Ethan and I have always jokingly called Gabby the third parent, so it was only natural that we started calling Paula the fourth. For a woman who felt as if her parents weren’t around, I’ve certainly given my kid a plethora of them.
“Did you tell Paula yet?” Gabby asks in a clandestine whisper. “About the thing?” I can only assume that she’s referring to the fact that Ethan and I have, just this month, started trying to have a second child.
“No,” I whisper. “You’re still the only one who knows.”
“Seems better just to let everyone know once we’ve succeeded,” Ethan says. “But Hannah has forgotten to tell you the best part about tonight.”
“I have?”
“Paula said she’d spend the night, so it’s party time, as far as I’m concerned!” Ethan says, standing beside me. “And happy birthday! That, too.” He hands Gabby a bottle of wine that we picked up for her.
“Thank you!” she says. She gives him a big hug. “I love you guys. Thank you so much for all of this.”
“We love you, too,” I say. “Have you seen the Flints? They’re in the back.” I point, but she’s already moving toward them. I watch her as she hugs her soon-to-be in-laws. You can tell they love her.
“Nice try, kiddo,” Carl says, coming up to me. “You two almost fooled me.”
I act mock-confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“She knew. I know my daughter, and she knew. And I know Jesse didn’t tell her, because he’s still too scared of me. You’re the only one brave enough to defy me.”
I laugh. “She hates surprises,” I say in my own defense.
Carl shakes his head and then looks at Ethan. “Is this what serves as an apology with your wife?”
Ethan laughs and puts his hands up in surrender. “I’m staying out of it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say to Carl sincerely.
He waves me off. “I’m teasing. As long as she’s happy, I don’t care. And it appears she is.”
Tina fights her way through the crowd to talk to us. She gives me a big hug and then goes straight for the kill. “When are you leaving the office to start school full-time?”
“Next month,” I say. “But I’m still not sure about this.”
I look to Carl. So far, I have put myself through school by working just under full-time for him and taking advantage of his practice’s tuition-reimbursement program. It’s been an amazing opportunity, but with Gabriella and the possibility of a second child, I want to finish my certification faster. Ethan and I discussed it, and I’m leaving my job to go to school full-time. But if Carl wants me to stay longer, I’ll stay longer. I’d do anything for him. Without him, without the Hudsons in general, I don’t know where I’d be.
“Would you stop? Get your certification. And when you’re done, at least give me the first option to hire you. That’s all I can ask.”
“But you two have done so much for me. I don’t know how I could ever repay you.”
“You don’t repay us,” Tina says. “We’re your family.”
I smile and put my head on Carl’s shoulder.
“I do need a favor of you tonight, though,” Carl says. “If you’ll oblige me.”
“Of course,” I say.
“Yates has been on me to hire someone from his old office. A nurse, I guess, who’s here with him. I swear, Yates is like a dog with a bone. He just will not let up when he wants something.”
Dr. Yates is a new doctor at the practice. Carl and Dr. Yates don’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, but he’s a good guy. I invited him to the party even though Carl thought it wasn’t necessary. But Carl also wanted to invite the entire office except Yates. So . . . I think I was right about this.
“And you know me,” Carl continues. “I’m not good talking business at a party. Or, rather, I hate talking business at a party.” Carl is perfectly fine talking business anywhere. He just doesn’t want to talk to Yates.
“I’ll do a quick screening for you if I run into them,” I say.
“I’m going to go check on Gabriella,” Ethan says. He steps in
to the kitchen, and I watch as he calls Paula. He always does this. He talks a big game about leaving her for a night, and then he calls every two hours. He has to know how she is, what she’s eaten. For someone who didn’t know if he was ready to be a parent, he is the most conscientious parent I’ve ever seen.
He officially adopted Gabriella last year. Ethan wanted us all to have the same name. “We’re a family,” he says. “A team.” She is now Gabriella Martin Hanover. We are the Martin Hanovers.
And sure, maybe Gabriella and Ethan aren’t related by blood, but you’d never know it to look at them, to hear them talk to each other. They are family as much as any two people can be. The other day at the grocery store, the cashier said Gabriella and Ethan had the same eyes. He smiled and said thank you.
“I know, sweetheart, but Daddy needs to talk to Paula,” I can hear him saying into the phone. “If you go to bed when Paula asks you to, Mama and I will come in and give you a kiss when we get home, OK?” Gabriella must have given the phone back to Paula, because the next thing I hear out of Ethan’s mouth is “OK, but you got the marble out of her nose?”
We are tired a lot of the time. We don’t go on dates as often as we’d like. But we love each other madly. I’m married to a man who became a father because he loved me and now loves me because I made him a father. And he makes me laugh. And he looks handsome when he dresses up, which he has done tonight.
He comes back into the room, and soon the place is so loud we can barely hear each other speak. Just when the party seems to hit its peak, someone asks Jesse to tell the story of how he and Gabby met. Slowly but surely, the entire house quiets down to listen. Jesse stands at the base of the fireplace so he can be seen and heard by everyone. He’s too short to be seen on his own.
“First day of geometry class. Tenth grade. I looked to the front of the classroom and saw the most interesting girl I’d ever laid eyes on.”
Jesse has told this story so many times I could tell it myself at this point.
“And, to my delight, she was shorter than me.”
Everyone laughs.
“But I didn’t ask her out. I was too nervous. Three weeks into school, another girl asked me out, and I said yes because I was fifteen and was going to take it wherever I could get it.”
The crowd laughs again.
“Jessica and I dated for a long time and then broke up senior year. And of course, when we broke up, I immediately found Gabby and asked her out. And we had this great date. And then, the next morning, my girlfriend called me, and she wanted to get back together. And . . . we did. Jessica and I spent college together, got married after, yada yada yada . . .”
He always says “yada yada yada.”
“Jessica and I split up after two years of marriage. It just wasn’t working. And then, a few years later, I get a Facebook request from Gabby Hudson. The Gabby Hudson.”
That’s my favorite part. The part where he calls her the Gabby Hudson.
“And I got really nervous and excited, and I started Facebook-stalking her and wondering if she was single and if she would ever date me. And the next thing I know, we’re out to dinner at some hip restaurant in Hollywood. And I just had this feeling. I didn’t tell her then, because I didn’t want to be creepy, but I felt like I finally understood why people get married a second time. When I got divorced, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be up for it again. But then it all clicked into place, and I understood that my marriage failed the first time because I picked the wrong person. And finally, the right person was standing in front of me. So I waited the appropriate amount of months of dating, and I told her how I felt. And then I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.”
That’s usually the end of his story, but he keeps talking.
“I was reading a book about the cosmos recently,” he says, and then he looks around and goes, “Hold on, trust me, this relates.”
The crowd laughs again.
“And I was reading about different theories about the universe. I was really taken with this one theory that states that everything that is possible happens. That means that when you flip a quarter, it doesn’t come down heads or tails. It comes up heads and tails. Every time you flip a coin and it comes up heads, you are merely in the universe where the coin came up heads. There is another version of you out there, created the second the quarter flipped, who saw it come up tails. This is happening every second of every day. The world is splitting further and further into an infinite number of parallel universes where everything that could happen is happening. This is completely plausible, by the way. It’s a legitimate interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s entirely possible that every time we make a decision, there is a version of us out there somewhere who made a different choice. An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility in our lives. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices that led me somewhere else, led me to someone else.”
He looks at Gabby. “And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”
I’m embarrassed to say that I start crying. Gabby catches my eye, and I can see she’s teary, too. Everyone is staring in rapt attention. Jesse is done speaking, but no one can turn away. I know that I should do something, but I’m not sure what to do.
“Way to make the rest of us look bad!” a guy shouts from the back of the room.
The crowd laughs and disperses. I turn and look behind me, trying to find the man who spoke, but I don’t see him. Instead, I see Dr. Yates. I turn to Ethan.
“Dr. Yates is back there,” I say. “I’m going to go say hi. I’ll be back in a second.”
He nods and walks over to the desserts. “I’ll get you some cheesecake,” he says. “Unless I see a cinnamon roll.”
I head over to Dr. Yates.
“Hannah,” he says. “Quite a party.”
I laugh. “So it is.”
“Listen, I want to introduce you to someone.” He gestures to the man standing next to him. The man has a large tattoo on his forearm. I can’t quite make out what it is. I think it’s some sort of cursive script. “This is Henry. I’m trying to persuade him to leave Angeles Presbyterian and come work with us.”
“Well, it’s a great place to work,” I say.
“And Henry is one of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with,” Dr. Yates says.
“Quite a recommendation!” I say to Henry.
“Well, I paid good money for him to say that,” he says.
I laugh.
“Would you two excuse me?” Dr. Yates says. “I want to say hello to Gabby.”
He walks off, and I am left with Henry, unsure what to say.
“Did you see the dessert bar?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I was gonna grab something, but honestly, I like breakfast sweets much better. Cheese danishes, for instance. Or cinnamon rolls.”
“I am obsessed with cinnamon rolls,” I say.
“Rightfully so,” he says. “They are delicious. I’d take a cinnamon roll over a brownie any day.”
I laugh. “It is like you are stealing the words right out of my mouth.”
He laughs, too. “Are you from around here?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I am. You?”
He shakes his head. “No, I moved out from Texas about eight years ago.”
“Oh, whereabouts in Texas?” I ask.
“Just outside of Austin.”
I smile. “I lived in Austin for a little while,” I say. “Great area.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Hot as hell, though.”
“Yes,” I say. “Amen to that.”
“So are you a nurse, too?” he asks me.
“Trying to be,” I say. “I’m about to leave the practice to go to school full-time. I’m eager to be done with school and start working.”
“I remember when I officially became an RN.” He laughs to himself. “Seems like ages ago.”
<
br /> “Well, I’m a little bit behind,” I say.
“Oh, no,” he says. “That’s not what I meant at all. I just meant I feel like eons have passed since I started.”
“Did you always want to work in health care?” I ask him. Since we’re on the subject, no sense in wasting the opportunity to find out more about him and see if he’s right for the office.
He nods. “Yeah, more or less. My sister died when I was young.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
He waves me off. “Not necessary, but thank you. I just remember being in the hospital as a kid and seeing how much the nurses were doing to take care of her, to make her comfortable, to make all of us comfortable, and, I don’t know, I guess I just always wanted to do that.” Aaaaaand there’s no way I would ever say no to this guy, with a story like that.
“For me, it was when I was pregnant with my daughter and I had just started working in the office,” I say. “I could see how scared some of the parents were sometimes and how much they needed someone who understood what they were going through, and I just really wanted to be that person. And then, once I had my daughter, I felt that fear. I felt how much you ache at the thought of anything happening to them. I just wanted to help soothe the anxiety, you know?”
He smiles. It’s a nice smile. There’s something very calming about it. “Yeah, I hear you,” he says.
If Jesse is right and there are other universes out there, I’ve probably met Henry before in one of them. We might work together somewhere. Or we would have met in Texas years ago. Maybe in line for a cinnamon roll.
“Well, I’m sure I’ll be seeing you,” I say. “Some way or another.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Or maybe in another life.”
I laugh and excuse myself as Ethan comes and finds me. He brings me a bite-sized cheesecake.
“What do you say we leave early?” he says.
“Early?” I say. “I thought we were partying all night. Paula will sleep at our place.”
“Yeah,” he says. “But what if we left the party and went . . . to a hotel?”
My eyebrows go up. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
“Let’s make a baby, baby.”
Maybe in Another Life Page 26
