“Secret lover?” I say through stifled laughter.
He shrugs, as if to say, Why not? She is a beautiful woman if you can look past her tough exterior. Of course, more than a few people have said the same thing about me.
“It could explain where she’s always hiding.” He waggles his eyebrows mischievously.
We reach the labor and delivery wing and Enrique leans on the entrance button. When the nurse on the other end of the line picks up, he rattles off something in Spanish. The doors swing open as if of their own volition. Our patient, Mrs. Forrest, is on the bed, her feet in the stirrups, her brown hair splayed around her head like a mermaid underwater. The woman standing next to her is clearly her sister—they both have dark freckles smattered across their noses and catlike green eyes. I smile at the two other nurses in the room and walk over to Mrs. Forrest. Her eyes are closed in concentration, the epidural taking away most, but not all, of the pain. She’s focusing in on it. Meditating. I place my hand lightly on her hair to let her know I’m there.
“Mr. Forrest still deployed?” I ask her sister softly.
“Three more weeks,” she says.
Fingers curl around mine, and I look down to see Mrs. Forrest staring up at me with tears in her eyes. I squeeze.
“We’ve got this,” I say.
She nods, and I run my fingers over her hair one more time before I make my way to my seat.
“How are we doing?” I ask the nurse monitoring her dilation.
“Ten centimeters,” she says. “She’s ready.”
Enrique appears at my shoulder with a gown, and I take off my jacket to feed my arms through. He snaps gloves on my hands as the nurses flutter around me, unpacking instruments, setting the lights and preparing for the new life about to take over the room. I sit down and confirm Mrs. Forrest’s progress for myself. When the shuffling stops and everyone is in position, I look up with a smile and say, “It’s time.”
Mrs. Forrest nods, and with an ear-shattering screech, she begins to push.
An hour later, once I’ve helped deliver a healthy, red-haired baby girl, Enrique brings me a cup of the strongest hospital coffee he can find, and I drink it around the corner from the emergency entrance as Enrique smokes a cigarette—our celebratory routine.
“You’re always so cool in there,” Enrique says between drags. “Cool. Calm. Collected,” he muses, almost to himself.
I swallow down the dregs of my coffee and toss the cup into a nearby trash can.
“I have to be,” I say. “It’s when emotions get involved that things get messy. I follow procedure, do what needs to be done, and everyone comes out safely.” I trained under a few doctors during my residency who were scattered in the delivery room, and I could sense that their patients didn’t fully trust them. Since practicing solo, I’ve been able to approach deliveries with my own style, and even in that short time, I’ve noticed the difference in patient rapport.
“Literally.”
I snort a laugh.
Afterward, I walk the halls back to the clinic, with an unapologetic smile on my face, high on another successful delivery. I can’t imagine it ever getting old.
When I walk through the doors of the clinic, Vanessa is standing with her arms hugged around a chart, waiting for me. My breath hitches, as it does every time she asks to speak to me privately these days, wondering if today I find out that everything I’ve been working for is finally coming to fruition.
“A word?” she asks.
I nod.
When we enter Vanessa’s office, she closes the door behind me and breezes around her desk. She perches on the edge of her chair but doesn’t offer me a seat. She’s succinct enough to have rendered the visitors’ chairs useless.
“You got it,” she says. “You’re on the clinic schedule.”
I got it. A chance at absolution.
After a long moment of anticipatory silence, I remind myself to breathe. I cover my mouth with my fingers, unsure of which emotion might be displaying itself there. I’m not sure, myself, which emotion is tugging at the center of my chest like the string of a puppeteer, trying to pull me in the direction I’m supposed to go. My rooted feet keep me planted.
“Really?” I say, unable to believe it’s actually happening. I’ve waited for this moment for so long, but some part of me always thought the day would never come.
“Yes. I need your application complete and on my desk in two weeks, so I can review it before you submit it.”
“Of course,” I say, not expecting the tight timeline, but what choice do I have? This is what I asked her for, and I won’t let her down now. I’ll work through the nights if I have to.
Vanessa squints her tapered eyes at me, like she can see my mind calculating the hours in a day, hours in the clinic, hours in the office, and in Labor and Delivery. She must be in her midforties but there’s not a single line on her face, a result of either good genes or preserving herself inside these four walls. I glance at the curtains she always keeps drawn, blocking out the light and the world. When I started my residency here, I used to wonder how she could spend so much of her days confined in here. Now that I’m a doctor myself, I understand completely.
“Dylan,” she says, “what you’re trying to do is important. Don’t forget that. I don’t put my name on things unless I believe in them.” Vanessa has spent enough time in obstetrics to have seen her fair share of pregnancy complications—many more than me. She wants the proof that we need better early pregnancy monitoring practices as much as I do. Right now, the first ultrasound doesn’t take place until the eighteenth week of gestation in most cases. But so many life-threatening things can happen in those eighteen weeks, for the fetus and the mother. So many broken families. With my research, I hope to prove that the first ultrasound should be done as early as six weeks.
I take a deep breath and nod. Vanessa doesn’t need to tell me how important this research is—I’ve seen the damage personally. “Yes, ma’am. I hope you know how seriously I take this opportunity.”
Being the chief, Vanessa gets a lot of requests each year to mentor doctors with dreams of making medical breakthroughs. She can’t say yes to all of them.
“I do.” Vanessa almost smiles, then picks up her phone by way of dismissing me.
I close the door behind me as I leave and lean against it, close my eyes, breathe deeply.
It’s time, I tell myself.
* * *
Home—a minimalist house thirty minutes outside the city with large, open windows, unobscured views of the forest, a creek that runs behind the property and my sorely underused side of the bed.
And Cooper.
I feel the day melt off me every time I turn down our street, though most nights I don’t get home before it’s shrouded in darkness. I don’t think I’ll find much refuge there tonight either with the stack of grant application paperwork on the passenger seat next to me.
When I pull into our circular driveway, I discover a familiar red truck parked diagonally across the gravel. One of the tires is elevated by a rock that lines the empty planter in the center of the drive. I shake my head, but I’m glad Stephen’s here. The three of us have shared every milestone—career and otherwise—since I met him and Cooper that first week of med school almost ten years ago.
I