Читать книгу Healed Under The Mistletoe - Amalie Berlin - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSTICKING AROUND TO defend herself or make excuses would’ve taken valuable time away from the patient, so Belle did as McKeag growled at her, slipped quietly out of the room and found her way back to the nurses’ station.
Her central nervous system couldn’t decide how to react to that whole humiliating set-down. Her face alternated between burning at a temperature best measured in Kelvin and the stormfront of an approaching Ice Age any time she relived the joy of the actual rebuke, and the number of eyes on her, the team working as she failed her first patient.
Still, with the hospital in the throes of a large-scale emergency, standing there, observing the bustle and scurrying about without helping somehow could be nothing short of dereliction of duty.
She wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t trained for this type of medicine or level of emergency straight out of the gate and had truly only offered her best educated guess when prompted, but it still felt the same when an expert—a peer—immediately found her lacking. Even one she knew to be unpleasant in other circumstances already.
Something about it had felt like a teaching moment, but, in retrospect, she could see it had been a test. An unfair test, the kind of test only a real jerk would lob at a new colleague in the first five minutes on the floor, but still a test she’d failed.
It wasn’t just pride that never wanted to fail a patient. Not everyone went into medicine for the right reasons, but Belle had. Her main role models had been Dad and Nanna, a city cop and a former Army nurse. Belle wanted to help people, it was a core tenet of her personality. Seeing the nurses who’d taken care of not only her dad as he’d lingered in the days between when the bullets had wrecked his insides and when he’d actually died, but also the fourteen-year-old girls who couldn’t leave his side, had solidified that need to help into a calling.
And she was just standing around, while other people helped eased suffering.
If this was just how things went in a large, metropolitan emergency department, she had to either get out now and make this a one-day affair or find that steel Sabetta core and a way to help.
Like a gift from a higher power, the woman they’d initially followed passed by the nurses’ station, a light at the end of the tunnel. Belle stood and gave chase. She’d directed McKeag earlier; she’d have ideas on where Belle could be of use.
“Doctor?” Belle called.
The woman spun to face her as if she’d been expecting her call.
“Ysabelle?” Her smile and the soft southern cadence of her speech seemed to project sunshine from her pretty, freckled face and blazingly blue eyes.
For a moment, Belle even stopped mentally cursing McKeag to a lifetime of stubbing his right pinky toe any time he tried to go shoeless and enjoy the simple pleasure of the earth beneath his feet. This doctor was the exact opposite to McKeag’s surly presence—someone Belle could identify with.
“I’m Dr. Angel Conley, and we’re going to be working together today.” She offered a hand. “Do you prefer to be called Ysabelle or Sabetta? You can call me Angel.”
“Belle,” she managed to get out, then shook the offered hand. “Dr. McKeag wanted me to wait, but—”
“Yeah, Lyons is—Well, he doesn’t work and play well with others.” Angel added, “But I’m sure we can make the request for you to stay with him if you want. Between you and me? I’d rather shadow an angry mule than Lyons when he’s on a tear. Which is nearly always.”
The gentle teasing confidence gave a little shot of hope to counter the increasingly awful rot in her chest.
Belle squeezed Angel’s hand, needing exactly that connection in that moment—she’d have hugged this stranger if she could’ve—it seemed the only thing to go in her favor since she’d arrived in New York. But still. “I’m not sure he should receive all the blame here. I apparently went the entirely wrong direction with the patient.”
“We all have our specialties, and I’m sure we’ll find yours,” Angel said, gesturing for her to follow. “I’m a pediatric emergency specialist. Kids are my specialty, but I still need the help of trauma surgeons in unfortunate instances. Or cardiac specialists. We have a network. But we’ll talk more about this later. How are you with stitching?”
“I’m good at stitching,” Belle said and, with just the simple act of reminding herself that she did have strengths, amended, “I’m actually very good at stitching. If I had my education to do over again, I’d probably become a surgeon. I’m good with my hands.”
And with patients, she reminded herself. She’d become a nurse because she needed to take care of people, and she was good at connecting. She made mistakes, and she didn’t know everything, but she cared and connected, she tried. And would keep trying.
“Perfect. We have a heavy load today because of a subway derailment, which you probably heard, but not all the injuries are critical. Most of them are much more minor. Cuts. Sprains. Broken bones.”
Even with the little mental pep talk, she must’ve looked off still because Angel stepped closer, her voice lowering. “I know what it’s like to be new and feel disconnected from everyone. Don’t let Lyons scare you off. He’s—” She paused, obviously searching for some polite way to describe the arrogant doctor. “Christmas is hard for him. There are extenuating circumstances. Just take whatever he says with a grain of salt, and if you have trouble with anything, come see me. Do you have your comm yet?”
Christmas was hard for him. Even among the other things Angel said, that was what stood out.
The words resonated in Belle’s head, bouncing off her guilt centers and disrupting her presently cursing him to a month of upper lip and tongue burns from the morning’s first over-eager sip of too-hot coffee. It took effort to focus on the other important things Angel had said.
“I’m supposed to get it this afternoon. They said I wouldn’t need it since I’d be shadowing today,” Belle said, ceasing her ever ineffective but frequently cathartic cursing because it’d been useless at soothing her ruffled feathers.
Christmas was hard for him. Hard enough to affect his behavior. It hurt him.
He lashed out because he was suffering.
“Right. Well, you’re shadowing me. I’m just going to be in and out with a couple other patients while you stitch. But if you need anything, come to me. Really. I’ve almost been here a year, but I’ve pretty much sorted out the people to see to get things done. I also know all the best places to hide if you need a minute to practice a completely silent, faux primal scream because they might sedate you if you actually let your feelings out.”
“My locker.” Belle wanted to laugh at the image of her screaming soundlessly into some cabinet because she was stressing out, but facing Lyons again was right there in the front of her mind, taking the humor out of living. “My locker is stuck. The emergency call came, and McKeag tossed my things into his locker so we could get down here. It’d be really nice to have it working for tomorrow.”
It wouldn’t save her facing him this evening to get her stuff back, but it would allow her to start tomorrow with some distance.
“I can do that. What’s the number?”
A moment later, Angel was on her comm, walking off in the other direction, and Belle had a folder in hand, and slipped into the room of a man with a large leg gash to stitch.
“Hi, my name is Ysabelle Sabetta and I’m a nurse practitioner. I’m going to help you get that gash sorted out,” she said to the man sitting with his trouser leg ripped open and a bloody wad of gauze keeping it from bleeding too much. After confirming his identity, she got started.
“Please numb it.” Mr. Axler said three words to her, and then laid back on the table. No comments on her qualifications or ability to do the job, no doubts.
In that way, outside the jerky way he’d gone about it, McKeag had a point. People accepted you’d be able to help them when you came in wearing scrubs. They deserved that confidence.
Washing up, she gloved, got supplies—some of which had been laid out for her by nursing staff—and moved over to get a look at what was going on with the patient’s leg.
Christmas was hard for McKeag. It was still there in her head, behind her duties to her patient, but still there.
She didn’t want it.
She gingerly lifted the bloody gauze to see beneath, causing her patient to draw a sharp, pained breath. It hurt; she knew it hurt.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard, but I need you to be still for this. I’ll be as gentle as I can to make it as easy as possible, but it’ll go quicker and cleaner if you lock that leg in place as best you can.”
That was part of her job, even if it wasn’t technically codified in rules of conduct—to make the painful things easier for those who were suffering.
Christmas was hard for McKeag. She’d seen that. Anyone could see that. But hearing Angel put it into words—now she couldn’t hold his behavior against him. Couldn’t curse him to a lifetime of mushy pasta or underwear that snuck into uncomfortable arrangements at inopportune moments.
Before Angel, he’d just been someone who hated the holiday, now he was someone struggling with it.
An important difference. If she’d had any distance, she should’ve seen that on her own. Nanna had said it to her and Noelle so many times, it was practically a family mantra, even if it’d started out as a way to explain to two hurt little girls why their mother had left them.
Words said to make them understand it wasn’t their fault, because they didn’t remember her.
People who hurt others needed extra kindness to get better.
Their mother’s life had been too hard and her family too bad for her to know how to be a mother. Nanna made sure they understood Mama had become someone who didn’t really know how to love. That it was a tragedy she’d given up before all the love they and Dad had to give could transform her into the person she was always meant to be.
People who hurt others needed extra kindness.
Mama had been too far gone for quick fixes, and even now Belle couldn’t bring herself to consider looking for her. She wasn’t steady enough on her feet to take on that kind of damage. Besides, it felt like a betrayal to Noelle, who couldn’t make that choice anymore.
Was McKeag too far gone too?
The gash on her patient’s leg was deep but flayed open with remarkable precision. It barely grazed the muscle beneath; the only part that needed stitching was the cleanly sliced skin that now stood open.
She had a patient. This patient. The one with a wound she knew she could stitch.
She pulled a light down to see into the wound better, selecting one with a magnifying window so she could be certain the wound was cleaned out before she began stitching it.
Maybe the person who had included McKeag in that gift thing had been trying to be kind to him. Not a bad idea, but the execution was problematic. A gift exchange forced him to do something in exchange for his gift, which wasn’t what someone reticent to participate in the season needed.
She picked out a couple of little pieces of glass with tweezers. “I want to flush this with saline, Mr. Axler, to make sure it’s clean before I stitch it. I’m going to go ahead and numb it, so it’s easier on you when I work a towel underneath your leg.”
“Whatever you think. Just want to go through this once.”
“The shot will be the most painful part. A few quick sticks, and I apologize. I’ll make them as quickly as I can,” she said, prepping the needle and scoping out locations to numb.
“Were you by yourself on the subway this morning?” Distraction was a useful technique for dealing with pain, and she’d use anything to save patients from pain.
“I was on my way to work.”
She injected twice during his answer, his words only pausing or faltering a second for each injection.
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Have kids?”
“Two.”
She finished the last injection and stood up to look down at him. “Injections over, should be feeling better any second. Boys? Girls?”
“One of each,” he said a little more easily, his voice letting her know it was working. Not only did talking help by distracting, but it provided a connection that soothed fear.
She found a couple of towels in a cabinet, got them under his leg and had flushed the wound to her satisfaction by the time Angel came in.
“How’s it going?”
“There was a little glass in the wound, but it’s clean now. I’m about to stitch it up.”
“Great. I’ll go to my next patient and pop back over when I’m done.”
“Is this your first day?” Mr. Axler asked.
“It’s my first day at this facility, but I’ve been doing this for several years now,” Belle answered, smiling at him. “I was an RN before I went back to school. Even if I look like a kid.”
“You do look young.” He chuckled but relaxed back.
She kept him talking as she worked. How did he meet his wife? How old were their children? Was she coming to pick him up at the hospital after this?
It worked. It usually did, and by the time she had him stitched and bandaged, that horrible anxiety from earlier had stopped chewing up her insides.
She met Angel back at the monitoring station, where another nurse walked her through the hospital’s patient system, so the file could be updated. Then they were off to another patient.
The morning continued this way, interspersed with patients and thoughts of McKeag. What had happened to him? Was he grieving too? Or trying not to grieve, like her?
By the time lunch rolled around, the worst of the influx had been handled and Angel returned to seeing strictly children with Belle shadowing.
Being busy always kept her from dwelling too much on the stuff she didn’t need to dwell on. This morning’s failure. Her reasons for coming to New York. The way Christmas now had a mood more suited to Halloween, but instead of ghosts and goblins, it was Christmas trees with teeth and murderous tinsel.
Getting around the department meant she also saw McKeag growling at three other people before the day was up. Which helped shore up her resolve. It also helped negate her earlier estimation of his attractiveness. She might see and understand that he was wounded, and she might want to help him, but it did take the shine off his good looks and make his jaw seem less chiseled, more brutish.
He needed someone to be kind to him, maybe even more than she needed someone to be kind to, to give gifts to this Christmas in New York when she should’ve been buying for her twin.
Because she did need it and wanted to give to someone who might be a colleague for years to come. Someone she might be able to see change.
Whatever the true definition of the twelve days of Christmas, she’d learned last year that the lead-up to the holiday was the hardest to get through.
There were twelve more days left before Christmas Day. He might not be working that whole time, and she certainly wouldn’t be, but it had a kind of symmetry to it that appealed to her, even if she only managed to get him a few secret gifts before he took holiday.
She’d give to him, her stand-in Noelle, an act her family would’ve been proud of. After work and on weekends, she’d visit the quintessential New York Christmas sites to get the pictures she’d need to write to Noelle about, another unnecessary, yet wholly necessary, act.
That was how she’d survive Christmas this year. This second year alone had to be better than the first had been; she couldn’t do that again.
* * *
At the end of her shift, as soon as she could safely see to the handling of her last patient, Belle made her way back to the locker room.
Lyons, which she’d decided to think of him now in an effort to separate him from the feelings she had about McKeag, would be irritated if she made him wait for her.
Even with her new plan of action, the idea of facing him made her nerves tangle.
He’d still been with a patient when she’d exited Emergency so she could have time to test her locker door to be sure it had been fixed before he arrived.
Now all she had to do was get her things from Lyons and try to establish a new tone for their conversation, because his reformation couldn’t hinge entirely on gifts—he needed kind human interaction too. A friend. Or at least someone he had a less contentious relationship with than he seemed to have with all their colleagues. Earlier, she’d been nervous, which could’ve only come across as weakness. He was not a man who appreciated weakness, no question. She hoped that meant he’d be the kind of man who appreciated people trying to better themselves.
She didn’t have to go to medical school to learn more of what she might expect in a busy, big city emergency department and be better prepared. This wasn’t the same as an Urgent Care, and maybe her skills had gotten rusty in those gentle positions.
If she could inspire that in him, maybe it would trickle out to his interactions with everyone else and he’d stop yelling so much and make the department easier for everyone. Even if he wasn’t in charge, he still seemed to see everyone as an underling who continuously disappointed him.
Noelle would’ve told her to be bold, to confront him and tell him that she wouldn’t be pushed around. Noelle had always been the brave one, never afraid of confrontation. The first year she’d been a pilot, she’d had to suffer fools daily who hadn’t thought a woman could safely handle an airplane.
Belle was the introverted twin—which confused her really. The whole nature-or-nurture debate went nuclear when it came to the two of them, people who shared the same DNA and were raised in exactly the same way, but who were closer to two opposite halves of one complete person than identical twins.
Had been.
She was doing it again, dwelling on a subject that always stripped away shreds of her composure until she was a raw mass of emotional hamburger.
The door to the locker room squeaked, and she cleared her throat and swallowed down the unwelcome surge of grief, turning in time to see Lyons rounding the bank of lockers in the middle—in much the same fashion as he’d done this morning in HR: as if it never occurred to him that someone could be in his way. Or wouldn’t move once they saw him.
“Here you are.” His accent was a little more present, she noticed immediately. His words less clipped. Perhaps he’d shouted himself out? Or perhaps it was just her impression of him, and how she was trying to change it.
“You were still with a patient, and I wanted to come up and make certain Maintenance had unstuck my locker.” She crooked a thumb toward the now repaired thing. “So, you won’t have to deal with the clutter of extra clothing tomorrow. Thank you for the loan of your space today.”
He stopped and stared as soon as he saw her face, his brows slamming down above those icy eyes. No words came, he just scowled while searching her face.
Her lashes were damp, she realized. Must’ve not stopped the tears in time to keep him from seeing the piece her memories had freshly ripped out. She’d thought she’d gotten control of herself in time, but even with her tanned skin, her eyebrows and nose had a tendency to go red, even before the actual tears gathered. That was probably the tell.
What surprised her was how long he took deciding what to do, or maybe think, about it.
She willed him not to ask, and, although she had to draw the last ounce of today’s strength reserves, lifted her chin and held his gaze, daring him to bring it up.
It was only a second, and he didn’t so much back down as decide to move on. He opened his locker and began fishing out her belongings. “It was no trouble.”
She didn’t actually snort. At least on the outside.
“I suppose it was less trouble than I was otherwise.” She took the still-packaged scrubs and the tote bag her clothing had been stashed in and began sorting it out for her ride home. Before he answered, she added, “About that, I don’t know if I’ll see that exact situation again, but I’d like to prepare myself better for it. For all this. I was wondering if you had suggestions on texts to read.”
He pulled his top off, leaving the white tee shirt beneath it, and dropped the worn shirt onto the bench in front of his locker. Unfortunately, a snug cotton shirt only made his impressive torso more impressive. The material clung; she could mark the shape of each muscle across the top of his back and shoulders. “Any texts on emergency treatment. Field treatment texts are actually a good start. The Army has a good one available.”
He shook out a nice dress shirt, pulled it on and began buttoning it up.
It was weird to stand there talking while he changed, and she refused to—unlike he-of-the-impressive-shoulders, she didn’t have a tee shirt beneath her scrub top and having him see her in her bra once was plenty.
Without the scrubs, it was easier to see him as Lyons, not Dr. McKeag. It also made her earlier attempts to convince herself he wasn’t really attractive completely ridiculous. He was handsome, but his face was also interesting. A study in angles, juxtaposed with a generous, soft mouth. Noelle could’ve had a field day drawing him—because being a brave warrior for women’s rights hadn’t been enough, her sister had also been able to work magic with a pencil.
The burning returned.
She had to get out of there. Stay on task. This was supposed to be about improving his impression of her and doing whatever she needed to become better equipped at dealing with her new duties, not having an emotional breakdown. She dug her fingers into the side of her thigh to give focus, and asked, “Earlier, what did I miss?”
“His lungs, the crackling in his breath sounds. You were dazzled by the heart,” he answered immediately, finished buttoning his shirt, then turned more fully toward her. “The heart rate was a symptom of pulmonary contusion. They found an embolism that formed where the bruise had nearly collapsed it. So, he had both.”
Yeah, pulmonary contusion, she hadn’t ever seen that, but she couldn’t find fault with his critique. She had been dazzled by the excessively fast heart rate and blinded by her own idea of what internal bleeding would look like.
“Do you know how he’s doing?”
“He is in ICU, still unconscious.”
He’d kept up with the status of a patient who was no longer under his care. That was the sign she’d been hoping for—he was in the profession to help people. Whatever his unpleasant exterior—his demeanor and words—there was goodness there somewhere. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
“His head trauma?”
“That’s the reason he’s still unconscious.” He looked in his locker for a moment, took out a pair of trousers, then hung them on the corner of the locker door, apparently waiting until their conversation was over to finish changing. Bless him. She didn’t need to see more of his impressive parts.
“Diagnosis?”
“Diffuse brain injury,” Lyons answered, and still his voice remained even, almost gentle. This wasn’t just her reframing their interaction; he was more at ease now. “I don’t expect him to wake. He’s on steroids in the hopes of shrinking the swelling, but he’s also vented. We’ll know more in the next couple of days.”
She seemed to have done what she’d planned, now she should get out. The sooner she left, the sooner he could dress and leave, and the sooner she could return and commence Operation: Secret Santa.
“I’m glad he had you,” she said finally, swinging her coat on and hoisting the tote bag to her shoulder to go.
“Sabetta?”
She’d reached the bank of lockers when she heard her name and turned to look back at him. He still had that stoic, measuring manner, but with his arms uncrossed he didn’t look as forbidding. He looked almost open. And even with the strange scrubs-and-button-down-shirt combination, she could tell he could devastate half the female population by putting on a suit.
“If you have questions about diagnoses, you may ask them of me. Use the comm.”
She felt herself smile before she knew it was coming. “Thank you. I will. And I’ll go home and start reading. I don’t have anything on the schedule tonight in terms of sightseeing.”
“Sightseeing?”
Was he actually being polite? Even if the subject was hard, a glimpse of civility gave her hope.
“I’m taking pictures of Christmas in New York to send to my sister.”
“Not going home for the holidays?”
“No.” She shook her head, falling back into the usual way she spoke of Noelle—the only way that let her keep any control over her emotions: by using the present tense. “We usually go somewhere for Christmas, no other family. But not this year.”
“Perhaps next year.” Polite, but the words he’d said in kindness stuck in her chest. There would be no next year. No looking forward to things Noelle would never do. The trips they’d never take. The children she’d never have.
The polite thing for her to do would be to ask if he was going home for the holidays, but her throat had clogged with the boulders of everything that could never be and filled with the sands of regret and grief, feelings she always tried to keep shoved down. It would’ve also been polite to say goodnight now, but no sound could pass through the whole world blocking her dry throat.
All she could do, all she had been doing for more than a year, was try and put it out of her mind until later.
Besides, she had tasks to accomplish. Tonight, she’d start simple, visit the boutique coffee shop near the hospital’s gift shop for a gift card, and pray it fit through the vents on the front of his locker.
Then she’d have the weekend to come up with other gifts she could shove through the narrow openings.
