The Light Before Us

by Stephanie Vercier

  “Sometimes I just like to make sure it’s real,” she says, turning to me with one of those looks that says she’s telling the whole truth. “To have something like this in Meadow Brook? I figured I’d have to move to Portland or San Francisco if I ever wanted to work somewhere like this.”

  I don’t say anything, just look up at the sign and let it sink in.

  The Southern Oregon Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Center.

  The center had outgrown Meadow Brook’s small hospital in the first couple years of its existence, so with some fundraising efforts and careful planning, the new wing was built. It opened six months ago, and we’ve already served hundreds of patients in it from all over Oregon and California and beyond. We’re a boon for this hospital and for Meadow Brook, and the profits from the surgery center allow us to take on some complex, life altering surgeries pro-bono for people who’d been turned away everywhere else, who had lousy insurance and no extra funds to pay for their care.

  But something I’d learned over the last few years was that procedures I’d once snubbed my nose at for being vain and unnecessary were in fact life changing for the people who underwent them. While there were certainly those people who couldn’t stop themselves until they had more collagen in their bodies than actual normal tissue—the type of people we’d politely decline and send elsewhere—a nose job for someone who hated their nose or a breast augmentation for someone who’d always felt either too flat or too endowed could bring them a comfort they’d not known before.

  It wasn’t—and it isn’t—about perfection. It’s a choice, and it’s about feeling good in your own skin.

  “The guy in room 246,” Parker says, turning her attention away from the sign and back to me. “You know that over sixty percent of his body was burned?”

  “Yes, I do,” I say, thinking of how brave he was to have already endured several surgeries in Colorado where he was from, along with the two extra ones he’d had here with another planned for the end of the week.

  “Your husband is a miracle worker,” she says, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. That guy might actually resemble himself before his accident, and it’s all because of Jack.”

  Jack.

  I close my eyes for a moment and breathe in the compliment I’ll tell Jack about later, even though he says he’d rather not hear them.

  “A happy patient is the only compliment I need,” he likes to say.

  There’s nothing like a humble man to turn you on.

  “Well, there’s my girl.”

  I open my eyes and turn around to see him coming down the hallway, a giant smile on his face, changed out of this scrubs and wearing street clothes, a pair of jeans, a snug white T and his duffel bag probably full of dirty clothes over his shoulder.

  “Jack.” It’s like a dream seeing him, always like a dream since I’d come so close to losing him.

  That night in the woods, I believed I’d seen him take his last breath. But I’d been so full of hope for Jack, and I couldn’t let it end that way, not without doing everything I possibly could. With the dome light of the SUV on, I did my best to find and cover his wound, to at least slow, if not staunch the flow of blood soaking his shirt. I placed my hands at his lower chest then and pressed, beginning the CPR I’d learned in school but had never used. Then I’d close his nose with my fingers and breathe into his mouth, then go back to the chest compressions that were difficult to do in the tightness of the SUV cab. I’d begged him to stay alive and didn’t stop trying until one of the officers took over. He promised an ambulance was on its way, and I didn’t leave Jack’s side. Never once did I leave.

  “You’re still in your scrubs,” he tells me as he pulls me into his arms, dropping his bag to his side.

  “It’s my fault,” Parker says from behind us. “I asked her to cover for me while I ran back home and blew out the candle I know I left lit in the living room. She pretty much saved me from burning down my house.”

  “And then I went down to get some tea when she got back,” I say while Jack smiles at me.

  “Oh, gotta run,” Parker says, responding to one of the patient call lights.

  “See you tomorrow afternoon!” I call out.

  “Morning sickness in the afternoon, huh?” Jack asks me. “I would have gotten you your tea.”

  “It’s okay. Michael was down there, so I sat with him for a few minutes. He’s coming over for the card game tonight.”

  Jack laughs, deep and heartily. “I feel bad taking that kids money. He’s not very good at poker.”

  “Well, he’ll be heading back to Seattle in a month, so you can only take him for so much.”

  “And here I thought I could retire off those winnings.”

  I lift my lips into a grin and shake my head. “On a more serious note, it was really nice of you to let him do some of his real world training here. You didn’t have to, and he knows that. He knows how lucky he is to be training with the illustrious Dr. Jack Pierce.”

  Jack shrugs. “He applied, and I didn’t see any reason to deny him with the accolades his professors had for him. He’s a talented kid, and he’ll make a great doctor.”

  “It says a lot about you that he wanted to work with you and not my father.” I know Jack doesn’t need the flattering remark, but I give it to him anyway.

  “Seems to be a trend. Still no hope for a reconciliation?”

  I hadn’t meant to turn the conversation back to me or to highlight my fragile relationship with my father, but I’d gone and done it anyway. “Michael asked me about that too. Asked me if I missed him. Honestly, I just don’t want to think about it.”

  It wasn’t as though my father and I had the best relationship to begin with, but when he’d chosen not to attend my wedding to Jack, it was clear our kinship had sunk to new lows. You’d think a father who had nearly lost his daughter to a serial killer would want to work harder to salvage the relationship with his only child, but when I’d recently tried to get in touch with him again, he shot me down. He still can’t get over me veering so very far away from the plan he had for my life. Maybe it will get better one day—or maybe it won’t as long as his pride remains in the way.

  “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Don’t be. Not every daughter has to have a good relationship with her father. At least Mom and Cynthia want to be in our lives.”

  “Which is a good thing,” Jack says. “They both love our little girl.”

  “Yeah, they do. I’m just going to change, okay?” I give him a quick kiss on the lips, then pry myself away from his insistent grip on my waist.

  “Hurry back,” he tells me, and I assure him I will.

  “I think I like this whole nine to five schedule you’ve got going, Dr. Pierce.” We’re back at home, having just picked up Leona from daycare. She’s already run right up to her room to feed the first pet that is all her own, a goldfish we’d gotten her this past weekend that she’s named Owen.

  “I promised you I wasn’t going to be working eighty hours a week when I married you,” he says, leaning against the kitchen counter in our new house and pulling me close to him. “I’m not going to miss any more time with you or Leona or this little one we’ve got growing than is absolutely necessary.”

  “And I love you for it.” The kiss I give him is deep and needy, one that would probably have been better placed after the poker game we’re hosting tonight, but Jack makes it really difficult to behave myself.

  “Phew,” he says once our lips part. “You realize what you just did to me, don’t you?” He drops his eyes to his waist, then looks at me with wide, puppy dog eyes.

  I should tell him no, be the responsible adult reminding him we only have so much time to get ready for this evening and that our nearly three-year-old daughter really should be fed and bathed sooner rather than later. But the look in his eyes makes me want what he does just as badly.

  “You’ve got five minutes, Dr. Pierce,” I tell him, leading him toward our
small laundry room.

  “That’s all I need,” he says with that confident, sexy smile that nearly drops my panties for me.

  “I’m really surprised it took me this long to get pregnant again,” I tell Jack after we’ve showered off our late afternoon tryst, gotten Leona fed, bathed and in bed, and are getting dressed for the evening in our very normal sized walk-in closet.

  “You were on birth control after Leona,” he reminds me, buttoning up his crisp, white button up shirt, the sight of his chest underneath making me wish he’d just keep it open.

  “But still. We go at it like rabbits. I kept thinking I’d wake up one day and just know you’d managed to get me pregnant anyway.”

  I’m just sliding into my dress when he pulls me toward him and holds me close to his hard, muscled body. “You know, you keep on talking about sex. So, by my estimation, we’ve got ten minutes until our first guests arrive.”

  I really want to tell him that ten minutes is all I need, but I know he’d take me up on it.

  “How about I promise you something extra special tonight?” I slide my hand over his chest, biting at my lip, already thinking of just what that might be.

  “I’m going to hold you to it,” he says with a deep, needy sigh.

  “I don’t ever break my promises, Jack, especially not to you.”

  Melissa and Barbara are the first to arrive, along with Dwight Eller who went from being Melissa’s boyfriend to her husband.

  “Well, look at this place,” Barbara says, tossing her bag on the couch and looking around our cozy living room. “A definite step up from the cabin.”

  “It is lovely,” Melissa says of the house we’d had built on the west side of town, having decided a long time ago we wanted something all our own. Jack had said we could keep the cabin as a place to go on weekends, but in the end we’d found a much better use for it.

  “We actually drove past the cabin last Saturday,” Dwight says, pressing the middle of his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Looked like it was a full house. Nice way to tie it in with the foundation.”

  “It was her idea.” Jack eyes me with pride, and I’m sure he’s glad to take any and all focus off of himself.

  “It was both of us,” I say, not letting him get away without taking any of the credit. “We figured it would be a great spot for the recipients of the Marjorie Pierce Scholarship to spend part of their summer before going off to college.”

  It was also a place for Marjorie’s artwork—both finished and unfinished—to hang, art she’d made for the love of it, never having tried to get it into any galleries, though it was more than good enough. We kept a few pieces that both Jack and I liked in our home—a painting of the waters and islands to the west of Seattle, one of wildflowers growing in the backyard of their now sold house in Seattle, and finally one of a meadow with long, green grass swaying in a breeze you could almost feel, thick trees full of hidden possibilities beyond.

  “Along with winter breaks and spring breaks,” Jack adds in. “And we make sure all of the past recipients get a chance to stay there as well.”

  One of those past recipients is Enrique Alonzo. He was the boy—now a man—who had been one of the first recipients of Marjorie’s scholarship before being hit on his bicycle and left in a coma. Jack had gone up to support his family, and in his absence, I’d been kidnapped by Will and then rescued by Jack.

  Sometimes it’s hard to imagine all of that really happened, but it did.

  It’s only because of the happy ending that I can think about that time without breaking down into tears. Will had been killed when we’d run him down, and as much as I hated the weight of another person’s death on my conscious, I was glad he was gone. He’d killed two other women, and his death brought both answers and closure to their families. There had been others, not murders, but several rapes by a once unknown attacker who was finally identified as Will through DNA evidence. There wasn’t a word strong enough to explain just how thankful I was to have been spared.

  Jack takes Barbara and Dwight into the kitchen to get them started on drinks. It will likely be a scotch for Dwight and something virgin for Barbara—Melissa doesn’t like her to mix alcohol with the medications she’s on. She’s more than three years post-stroke now and has recovered the majority of her function, and I couldn’t be more proud of her.

  “I wanted to tell you we saw Camille,” Melissa says to me, the two of us having hung back in the living room.

  “How’s she doing?” I ask out of politeness, but the truth is that, if not for her connection to Barbara and Melissa, I’d rather never hear her name again.

  “She’s doing better now that she’s living with her father and his new wife in Redding. All these years, he’s lived so close but wouldn’t let me tell our own daughter, even the times I’d driven down and begged him in person. Said he was ashamed for leaving us. Now he’s trying to make up for that. I’d say it’s a little late, but to my shock, something has finally clicked with her. Makes me feel like a failure for all I did and none of it working.”

  “I’m sorry.” I put my hand on her arm. I’d seen how hard she’d tried and how Camille had treated her in response.

  She puts her hand over mine. “Don’t be. I guess sometimes a girl just needs a father or a different perspective, and for as much as me and Mom and my dad gave her, it just wasn’t enough, at least not for her. She did tell me she was sorry. And part of that apology was for you, Natalie. I don’t expect you to even begin to forgive her for how she treated you, but I wanted to tell you regardless.”

  “Thank you,” I say, giving Melissa a hug. It’s her—not her daughter’s apology—I care about. And I make sure to hug the people I love and care about as much as I can.

  The doorbell rings, Michael and the nurse he’s been dating during his time in Meadow Brook arriving. I’m glad he and I have put our differences behind us and found a small but satisfying friendship. I don’t imagine I’ll be in touch with him much when he goes back to Seattle, but that’s okay. At least we’ve had this time to get to know one another in a different setting, as people, not as the chess pieces our parents treated us like when they decided we should marry one another.

  And Michael is a changed man. He no longer has any interest in politics, and he’s not the entitled elitist he was when we were dating. I think he may have even learned how to date one woman at a time. Now his full interest is in medicine, in helping people, in becoming a surgeon like Jack. This change in attitude—as well as his aptitude for learning—is why my husband took him on. And while Jack once recounted to me how he’d nearly strangled Michael when he thought he was behind my disappearance, Michael seems to have forgiven that.

  More people turn up from work, as well as a few of the customers from the diner who’d helped in my search all those years ago, big boisterous men who had since found a way into our hearts.

  The last to materialize is Enrique Alonzo—Jack said he might come—and he’s more than pleased when he does.

  We all squeeze around the dining room table in chairs that are mismatched because our numbers exceed the eight that came with the set. Barbara, myself, and the hospital employees who have to work bright and early tomorrow are the only ones drinking non-alcoholic beverages. Everyone else, including my husband, are able to enjoy their libations as they bet quarters and dimes in our poker game. Jack likes to slowly drink whatever he has in front of him, never going for more than one or two glasses because, even though he takes every half Wednesday off and will be able to sleep until noon if he wants, he’s not a fan of hangovers.

  I’m actually good at poker or maybe just better at a poker face. In the three years I’ve been in Meadow Brook, I’ve found myself to be proficient in lots of things. I don’t count the laundry I learned to do in college or my professional nursing skills. It’s more the things my parents would have never imagined me doing, like planting and harvesting our small garden or cooking the majority of a Thanksgiving meal without giving up an
d calling a caterer. I’ve learned to knit scarves and hats for the fun of it, even if I drop more than my fair share of stitches. And I revel in the outdoors, spending so many of my weekends with our little family hiking and biking, kayaking and fishing. But what I take most pride in is being a mother to Leona and feeling like I’m actually not half bad at it.

  During our final game, I use that poker face to my advantage. Jack, Michael and one of the more competitive guys from the diner all decide I’m bluffing. They end up being wrong as I set out a full house and smugly gather up the pile of quarters and dimes in the center of the table. There are moans and groans of unfairness, people taking their last sips of alcohol before switching over to water and designating sober drivers before the night starts to wind down. Out of nowhere, a black shape hurtles through the air and lands smack dab in the middle of the dining room table, knocking over several empty glasses and sending some cards flying.

  “Blue!” I lovingly scold the cat I’d been willing to enter a fire zone for and shake my head while Jack gets up and reaches for him.

  “You sure as hell know how to make an entrance,” he says, cradling our cat in his arms. “Where have you been all day, buddy?”

  There is laughter in the room at the display of man and cat, real and joyous. I take a moment and commit this to memory, being surrounded by some very good friends and new acquaintances, being in a home that I love. Our beloved daughter sleeps upstairs, her pet fish Owen swimming close to her in an aquarium big enough for a hundred fish, while a new life grows inside of me, a future sibling for Leona, a future child Jack and I will love with all of our hearts. And my husband, my gorgeous, strong, kind and giving husband who I’d almost lost stands holding Blue who is an irreplaceable part of our family.

  My love for Jack is overpowering and immense. There is a tie between us that can’t be broken, and even if I might be accused of staring, I can’t take my eyes off of him.

  Epilogue - Part Two