Full Package(23)

“Then she started pushing, and when the baby came out, her first words were, ‘It’s not mine. It needs to go back to its mama. Send it back to its real mom.’”

Josie frowns. “Awww. Poor baby.”

I nod. “Yup.”

She tilts her head. “Do you think she just didn’t want to be pregnant and was trying to deny it, or was she mentally unstable?”

“Hard to say. The girl’s not the first one to come into the ER saying she didn’t know she was pregnant.”

“But if she doesn’t want the kid, what happens to the baby?”

I shrug as I grab a grape from a glass bowl on the counter and pop it into my mouth. “Don’t know. That’s for the hospital social worker to figure out.”

“I wish there was something we could do for the baby,” she says softly.

“It’s going to be fine. The baby is healthy,” I say, since that’s really all I know.

Worry is etched onto her features as her brow furrows. “But how do you know it’s going to be fine?”

Her question gives me pause. Makes me think. “I don’t entirely know, but I trust that the appropriate people will help both of them.”

She sighs heavily and shakes her head. “But for a second, just think about what happens next. What is life going to be like for either one of them?”

I shrug, half wishing I could give her the answer she wants, and half wishing she’d stop asking. I don’t always like to contemplate what happens next to my patients. Next isn’t always pretty. Next isn’t always good. I do all I can do in the exam room. I can’t start marinating on the pieces of everyone’s life that I have zero control over.

She peers at the clock on the stove. “I can’t help it. I feel bad for both of them.”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “She’s going to be fine.”

She shoots me a skeptical stare. “Who? The baby? The mother?”

I stare at her back. “Both, I presume.”

Her voice escalates in a mix of sadness and irritation. “You can’t just presume that.”

I nod. “Yes. I can. It’s part of the job.”

She shakes her head and knits her brow. “I don’t get it. How can you separate everything so easily? How can you say she’ll be fine when you don’t actually know?”

I take a breath and call upon my best cool demeanor. Josie’s getting emotional. She’s becoming attached to patients that aren’t even hers. I need to talk down the Florence Nightingale in her. “Hey,” I say calmly, setting a hand on her arm. “We have people at the hospital who can help. We have a great social worker. We’ll do everything we can. The only way I could assist her medically was to focus on the physical. Now there are others who will help her, okay?”

She draws a huge breath, like she’s gulping up oxygen after being deprived. When she nods as if she’s settled, I’m ready to write this off as done, but then she slides past me. “Excuse me,” she mumbles, her voice hitching, then she’s off and seconds later the bathroom door slams closed.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

And I wait. And I wait. And I wait.

When the timer beeps on the oven, I half figure that Josie’s internal baker clock will ding and summon her from the bathroom. But after sixty seconds, she’s still MIA, so I grab a potholder, pull out the lasagna, and set it on a cooling rack. Staring at it for a minute, I decide on a game plan. I don’t know what Josie’s upset about, but I can only fix what I can fix.

The rest of dinner.

I hunt around for a bottle of wine, grab a merlot, and unscrew the cork. When I find two glasses, I set them on the coffee table in the living room that doubles as our dining room table. I add cloth napkins—the only kind we use, since Josie’s taught me that paper ones are wasteful to the environment. When I return to the kitchen, I grab two sunshine-yellow plates, then a spatula. I serve a chunk of lasagna for her, then one for me.

As I set the plates on the table along with forks, she rounds the corner, a wad of tissue in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice thin with tears. Her expression is soft now and apologetic. “I didn’t mean to push so hard about a patient of yours.”

“Don’t think twice about it. But . . . are you okay?” I step closer to her.

“It’s not you. I just . . .” She swipes at her cheeks with the tissues. “I just had a long day, and we ran out of seven-layer bars earlier than we’d advertised for the Tuesday special, and this customer came in and threw a complete fit that we were out, and said she was going to”—she stops to adopt a bitchy voice—“‘rip us a new one’ on Yelp. And I know it’s a little thing in the scheme of all the big things, but I’ve worked so hard to build a good business after I took over for my mom, and sometimes all it takes is one bad review to shred you. So I’ve been waiting all day for the other shoe to drop, and on top of that my friend Lily’s boyfriend is acting like a total dick, and I feel bad for her because she still likes him, but he’s so not worth her time and I want her to realize it. And so I was making lasagna to try to get my mind off it all.” Her words are tumbling out like she’s in a confessional. “And then you come home, and you’re so good at separating everything, and I just can’t do that. I’m terrible at that.” Another tear slips down her cheek.