Summer with the Single Dad, page 20
And thank god she didn’t have to, because before she could open her mouth—not that she knew what she would say—a soaking wet little boy, maybe ten or eleven, ran up to Naomi with a huge smile on his face. He looked an awful lot like Honor.
Naomi’s face split into a big grin. “You have fun?”
He beamed at her. “It took six people to finally get me in the water.”
She rubbed his wet head. “You remembered to take off your shoes first?”
He nodded, then shook himself like a dog, causing water to fly off in every direction.
“Austin, hey. No thank you,” Naomi said with motherly disapproval. “Not cool, dude.”
“I thought you might want to cool off,” he replied, undeterred by her chastising.
“Where’s your sister?”
“Over with Aya, Talia, and Emme at the bouncy castle.”
“Are you guys hungry for food more filling than snow cones?”
He nodded, still grinning from ear to ear. “Yeah. I want pizza. Have you seen the size of the slices they’re selling from Slice of Heaven?” His eyes expanded. “They’re, like, as wide as my face.”
Naomi snorted, squeezed Justine’s arm and smiled. “I want to know more when there’s time. You have a secret, Justine, and I want to know it.” She winked.
Dread coated the inside of Justine’s belly.
“Until then, I’m off for pizza the size of my face.” Then Naomi allowed her son to haul her off toward the bouncy castle.
Hanging her head in shame, Justine closed her eyes for a moment. But she couldn’t descend into too deep of a spiral before a familiar voice roused her from her free-fall. “Hey, everything okay?”
Opening her eyes, she found concern etched across Bennett’s face. “There was commotion. I was busy chatting with Carnation’s parents to discuss the incident of the girls fighting, and when I looked over, I saw you. What happened?”
Her bottom lip wobbled, so she bit it hard with her top teeth to keep her emotions in check.
Shove that down.
Surgeons. Doctors. Brazeaus didn’t let feelings control them.
With nausea in her belly and the taste of sick on the back of her tongue, she tossed on the fakest smile she’d ever mustered and nodded. “Yeah.”
“Bullshit.”
Well, that wasn’t the response she expected.
“What happened?” His brows narrowed beneath his black frame and lensed sunglasses.
“A … a kid choked.” And then I choked.
“So you helped him?”
She didn’t say, or do, anything. She just stared straight ahead until the trees lining the field melded into a deep green blur.
“Justine?” A firm, but gentle hand landed on her shoulder.
She flicked her gaze to him, and an angry heat filled her chest. “I’m. Fine. I need to go.” Then she shook him off and stormed away, not stopping until she reached her SUV—because she insisted on driving herself—and her heart threatened to punch a hole through her ribs.
Leaning against the driver’s door, which thankfully faced away from the funfair, she pressed her hand to her chest. Her breathing was ragged like she’d just sprinted the quarter-mile, but all she’d done was walk briskly.
Stupid emotions.
Stupid feelings.
They got in the way of everything.
She choked.
She freaking choked.
A kid nearly died, and she just stood there like an idiot, allowing it to happen.
It was the right choice to step away from medicine. Clearly, she wasn’t fit to be a doctor anymore. She couldn’t even step up and stop a child from choking.
Climbing into her SUV, she gripped the steering wheel like it threatened to fly away. She was in no state to drive, but she also couldn’t be around people anymore.
So she did what she could do, which was rest her forehead against the steering wheel and breathe.
Time stood still. She had no idea how long she sat there in that position, but when there was a gently rap at her window, she jumped a little in her seat and opened her eyes. The sun was behind the trees and her vehicle was encased in shadow.
She expected to find Bennett at her window, but it wasn’t him.
Rather, it was an older woman, probably mid-eighties. Her hair was snow-white and pinned up in a smooth, flawless knot on the top of her head. She wore turquoise earrings the size of quarters on her large, stretched-out lobes and her smile jostled a bit as she waited for Justine to roll down her window.
“H-hello,” Justine rasped past a still tight throat.
“You okay?” the woman asked, her voice equally as raspy.
Justine swallowed. “Just … not a huge fan of crowds.”
The older woman nodded. “Me either. Can I sit with you?”
Justine glanced at her empty passenger seat. “I was actually thinking I might head home.”
But the woman was already toddling around the front of the SUV and opened up the passenger side door. “Do you mind taking me home, dear? I’m done with the crowd too. My ride wants to stay longer.”
This was weird. A stranger just hopped into her vehicle and asked for a ride. Was this an island thing? Because never in a million years would Justine do this back in Seattle. Or anywhere else she’d lived, for that matter. Nowhere felt safe enough.
Except maybe here.
The woman buckled her seatbelt, looking pleased with herself. She knitted her gnarled and dirt-stained fingers in the lap of her flowy, tie-dyed dress. “I’m Keturah Katz.”
“Uh … Justine … Justine Brazeau.”
“Oh, I know who you are. You’re staying in one of the McEvoy Cabins. Or at least you were until it flooded. Now you’re staying in Bennett’s house until the trailer arrives.”
Justine’s mouth hung open, and she gaped at the woman. “Uh … yeah. How did you—?”
“Not a thing goes on, on this island that I don’t know about.” She said it with pride, then nodded her head at the push-start button. “Let’s go. I need to take my pills.”
Blinking for a few seconds at how direct this little woman was, Justine snapped back to reality, hit the “start” button and pulled out of her parallel parking spot.
“Mind you, I didn’t know about Brooke Barker staying with Clint McEvoy. That came as a shock to everyone. They really did a marvelous job keeping it a secret. I was a bit ashamed I didn’t know sooner.” Keturah glanced out the window. “But you know, with age not only comes wisdom, but also forgetfulness. It’s why I take gingko biloba and do sudoku every morning.”
They reached the stop sign. “Where am I going?” Justine asked.
“Left, dear.”
Justine turned left. She was still really confused about what had just transpired, but she also welcomed the distraction from her own feelings.
“You’re a doctor, right?” Keturah asked.
“How did you—?”
Keturah faced her and tapped her temple. “I know everything. Remember?”
“Right. Um … yeah. I mean, at least I was.”
“You can never stop being a doctor. You just stop practicing. So why’d you stop?”
“Long story.”
“I live on the far-north side of the island. We have time.”
“I … I don’t even know you.”
The older woman’s gray eyes twinkled between all the hard-earned wrinkles. “Who better to tell your secrets to than a stranger?”
“You just confessed to knowing everything that goes on, on the island. Doesn’t that mean you’re a gossip?”
Keturah’s barely-there pale brows shot up nearly to her hairline. “It certainly does not. People come to me with information. Doesn’t mean I give it away.”
“Fine. Fair point. But I’m still not comfortable airing my dirty laundry to a hitchhiker.”
That made Keturah snort. “All right. Then tell me why you froze when Barnacle was choking.”
“That is the kid’s name?”
Keturah waved her hand. “Terrible name. We all know. His parents are both idiots. Common sense was chasing them, but they were faster when it came to naming their child. But why’d you freeze when he started choking on the popcorn?”
Justine was quiet for a while.
“Turn right here,” Keturah said, pointing her crooked right index finger with the big, turquoise stone ring.
Justine did as she was told.
“Hmmm?” Keturah probed.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No. I don’t. I know what I was supposed to do. Now. But in the moment, all I heard was this voice in the back of my head telling me that the last patient I touched died. That I wasn’t fit to be a doctor and shouldn’t touch people, because my touch—my doctor’s touch—causes more harm than good.”
Fresh tears burned the back of her eyes, so she bit down hard on the inside of her cheeks to allow that pain to mask the pain in her chest. Her throat grew tight again.
“I can’t trust my own instincts anymore.”
Now it was Keturah’s turn to be quiet. She merely pointed which direction she wanted Justine to turn.
The silence pounded between them.
“So you lost a patient and now you think your touch is fatal?” Keturah finally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you lost a patient?”
“No. I did. I let my personal life and my emotions infiltrate the job, and I screwed up and a man—a man I really liked—died on my table.”
“How’d you screw up?”
Justine shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I was a coroner for twenty years, dear. It does matter.”
Justine’s mouth dropped open again, and she pivoted to face Keturah, but that caused the SUV to swerve and Keturah’s eyes widened.
“Uh, eyes on the road, please.”
“Shoot. Sorry.”
“How did you mess up?” Keturah pointed to a long gravel driveway lined by thick evergreen trees. “Here.”
Justine slid her gaze to Keturah for a moment. “This doesn’t leave this vehicle.”
Keturah had the decency to cross her boney finger over her heart. “Of course.”
“I was in the bathroom before surgery and I was in the stall. Two nurses walked in and started talking. I don’t know why I stayed in the stall to eavesdrop, but I did. A part of me wishes I hadn’t. But I did. They started talking about how one of them was pregnant and the other said she was going to start showing soon so people would wonder who the father was. The pregnant one said it was complicated because the father was engaged to another doctor here. That he was a doctor, and he’d been promising her that he would call off the engagement and end the thing with his fiancée for weeks, but he hadn’t.”
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you were the fiancée?”
Justine pressed her lips together.
“Go on, dear. It’s therapeutic to let it out.”
“Yes. I was the fiancée. They used their names while talking. I recognized the non-pregnant one, but not the pregnant one—apparently she was a scrub nurse, usually in the pediatric wing, but was picking up extra shifts in the cardio wing, which was why I didn’t recognize her name. But they used my fiancé’s name. There aren’t too many people with his name in the hospital either. It’s not that common.”
Keturah merely nodded. They’d reached her house now, a cute little shake sided bungalow covered in wisteria and flanked by wildflowers on all four sides.
“So, I waited until they left before I came out of the stall. I was …”
“Devastated.”
“Yeah. But I had surgery. So I needed to leave those feelings on the other side of the OR and do my job. I needed to save Mr. O’Malley like I promised him I would.”
“But something happened in the OR”
“She was my scrub nurse. I’d never had her before—because she was picking up shifts in the cardio wing—when my resident asked her for the bovie, using her name, this icy feeling filled me from the nape of my neck all the way down to my toes. It was like someone poured glacier water down the back of my shirt.”
“So now, your feelings weren’t on the other side of the OR. They were in your OR, because she was in your OR.”
Justine nodded. “And I couldn’t ask her to leave. That’s not professional. I’d be reprimanded for creating a hostile work environment. For putting my own personal needs ahead of my patient’s.”
Keturah nodded, causing the loose skin around her neck to wobble.
“My hand shook—and it never shakes. My nerves claimed me and … I froze. A man was open on my OR with his heart exposed and I froze. For the first time in my career, I didn’t know what to do. People looked at me like I was having a stroke. Several of them said, ‘Doctor, what do we do now?’ But I couldn’t answer. Then that stupid little pregnant nurse said, ‘Oh shit. You know.’ My eyes went to hers and rather than fear staring back at me. Rather than shame or embarrassment, I saw triumph. Like she was glad I finally knew. But she was too stupid to figure out that I only learned of her homewrecking status a moment ago. That I didn’t know sooner. I tried to rally. I tried to focus on the patient, but when she passed me a scalpel and handed it to me with the blade down and into my palm, cutting the glove and causing me to bleed, I lost it.”
Shame swept through Justine with the force of a thousand winter storms until her ribs became too tight around her lungs and she struggled for breath. She unclipped her seatbelt, opened the driver’s side door, leaned out, and vomited.
A warm, reassuring hand rubbed her back as she expelled the pizza from earlier. And it’d been such good pizza. A slice really was the size of your face.
“It’s okay,” came Keturah’s gravelly voice. “It’s okay.”
Justine reached into the side pocket of her door for a tissue and wiped her mouth. “After I re-scrubbed …” She sat up and faced Keturah again. “After I re-scrubbed and re-gloved, I thought she would have left the OR out of human decency. But she was still there. Still wearing that smug smile—or at least her eyes were smug. You can’t see a person’s mouth because of the—”
“I get what you’re saying.”
God, now Justine was rambling. She never rambled.
It did feel good to get it all out though.
“It felt like one mistake after the other after that. We couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. The tumor around his heart was connected by too many blood vessels. I thought I could—” She swallowed. “I thought I could excise the tumor and—”
“It’s okay.” Keturah rubbed her back, offering her an encouraging smile.
“I don’t even remember doing it, but I must have nicked the aorta, and he bled out on the table.”
Keturah’s mouth dipped into a frown so deep it seemed to pull the skin on her entire face downward. “That wasn’t because you brought your emotions into the OR. It was because he was gone before you opened him up. Admit it. It was a long shot saving him, wasn’t it?”
Justine shook her head and bit her lip as the tears fell with abandon. Oh, her mother would be so disappointed in her right now for getting emotional over a patient. Brazeaus didn’t do that. “I could have saved him. Or at least given him more time with his family.”
Pulling in a deep breath through her long nose, Keturah squeezed Justine’s shoulder. “As long as you keep telling yourself that, you’ll never move on. Until you forgive yourself, until you let that patient go, life will continue to feel like this. Your heart will continue to feel like this. You won’t be able to open it up to anyone or anything. Not properly anyway.”
Exhaling through thinly parted lips, Justine nodded. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”
“I bet I’m the oldest though. I bet I’m the only one who has seen more people die, unable to forgive themselves than you. And most of the people I met as a coroner were already dead.”
That made them both laugh.
“Are your parents in your life dear?”
Fresh guilt swirled in Justine’s belly enough to make her possibly vomit again. She swallowed down a bunch of saliva and told herself to be tough. “Yeah. They’re doctors, too.”
“Then talk to them. I’m sure they’ve experienced similar situations … at least regarding lost-cause patients and losing patients.”
Justine shook her head. “I’ve been avoiding their calls and text messages. I can’t face them. I can’t tell them … not yet anyway. I don’t know how. My mother is the queen of leaving her personal life outside the hospital.” That made a snicker of irony rumble in her nose. “She’s the queen of leaving her personal life outside of her personal life.” She glanced at Keturah. “She’s not the warmest woman. And I don’t think she’d understand how I’m feeling. My dad might. But not my mom. And they liked Tad. He’s from a good family and is a neurosurgeon. On paper, he’s the perfect son-in-law. I don’t know how to tell them about my patient, about my doubt in myself and my career, or about the end of my engagement. So … like a coward, I’ve just been avoiding them. Which just piles on more guilt, of course.”
“That’s a lot to carry around when you’re supposed to be on vacation and finding some clarity. How can you find any peace through all that pain and guilt?”
What a loaded question.
The truth was, Justine couldn’t find much of anything these days. Besides the joy that Bennett and his daughters brought her, anyway.
“I’m not an easy fix, I guess.”
“The good ones never are, dear.”
Justine huffed a humorless laugh.
“Come in for a drink?”
“Raincheck?” Justine asked. “I’m ready for bed.” The taste of vomit lingered in her mouth and embarrassment hit her hard. “Oh god. I just barfed in your driveway. Do you have a hose? Let me clean it up.” What was the proper protocol after you barfed in someone’s driveway?
Keturah shook her head. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ll spray it off when I water the garden once it’s a little cooler out.” She removed her hand. “Don’t be a stranger, dear. I have nothing to do but feed the birds, garden and talk. And the birds and flowers don’t really answer back.” Her warm smile eased some of that tension in Justine’s chest.
