The Queen of Hearts(102)

She sucked in her breath with a whistling sound, then puffed out her cheeks and blew it out. “Oh hell,” she said. Sadness curdled the characteristic lilt in her voice, dampening it down into something almost unrecognizable. I waited, counting the upstrokes of my pulse in my neck, focusing on the swishy sound of my blood in my ears so I would not have to think.

“I’m sorry, Em,” she said. “I truly forgive you. But I don’t know if I can like you anymore.”

“I understand,” I whispered.

“I don’t know how to go forward after this.”

So, yes, that was it.

Or maybe this was the first step: after all, she would need time to adjust to the revelation that the Emma of the past was a stranger. How disconcerting, to find your memories—your reality—infiltrated by a cipher. I understood. I got it. I’d give anything to go back in time and alter my decisions, to change direction on those seemingly inconsequential little paths leading to my road of ruin. I’d be such a better person if I could do it again.

I stared down into the swirly depths of my drink and then half rose in my seat, overcome by my inability to give voice to my remorse. “So I’ll go.”

The irony dawned on me: I was walking away from the catastrophe of Eleanor Packard’s death with my professional reputation intact, even as I began to realize what a hollow victory I’d won. For so many years, my identity was inextricably bound to the idea that I was a surgeon. Surely, it was understandable if, over the years, I’d romanticized my accomplishments. Yes, I’d kept a monstrous secret for years, but I’d battled the mighty forces of death! That had to balance out, right?

Now, too late, I saw that somewhere inside me, the power of that secret had metastasized into something I couldn’t control. I thought I was changing it, chipping away at it by doing good things, but all the while, it was changing me.

—

Zadie didn’t stop me as I walked away. The bankers still laughed, their open mouths morphing into ravenous, dark-throated maws as I passed them, everything in my sight turning sinister. I fumbled my way down the open-air staircase, concentrating on not colliding with anyone.

Footsteps on the metal treads banged above and below me, one set echoing faster than the others. Moments later, a cold hand clutched my forearm, dragging me backward.

Zadie’s eyes met mine. She grabbed my waist and hugged me, hard, almost knocking me off-balance. I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t need to; she clutched my hand and pulled me after her, one step at a time, past the jazz band, past the drunk bankers, back to our chairs under the brightly lit night sky.

She faced me. “I love you,” she said. “Maybe we can’t go back to the way we were, but we can find a way to go on from here.”

I smiled, feeling something indescribably light break free in my chest.

Zadie shifted so we were once again seated side by side, our hands still clasped. Her hand felt warm in mine, the fragile bones of her fingers imbued with unlikely strength. We sat, still and quiet, our heads tilted together in wordless relief.

I’ll always wonder: if our positions had been reversed, would I have forgiven her? My own heart is a mystery to me at times, pulsing in an odd, contradictory landscape of fire and ice. But it’s easy for me to understand Zadie’s heart: it’s warm and sweet and full of grace.





Author’s Note


People have been fascinated with medical dramas since the dawn of written language. I can say with absolute certainty that every physician, at one time or another, has thought of writing a book; after all, the story of the weird thing we extracted from somebody’s southernmost orifice never fails to delight people at dinner parties. (That’s where your mind goes when you ask your ER friend if anything interesting happened at work today. Admit it.)

Medicine is a consuming field. We spend years of our lives training—forgoing meals and bathroom breaks and desirable ski trips and the wedding of our childhood best friend and every other thing you might reasonably want to do. But it is also a career without equal in its reward. We are there when you come into the world and we are there when you leave it. We try our damnedest to ease your pain, to fix your brokenness, to diminish your sorrow. As one of my colleagues says, we have the immeasurable blessing of seeing life in all its anguish and glory.

This remarkable privilege—of witnessing life from its first breath to its last—leaves its mark on every doctor. More times than I’d like to admit, I’ve slipped into my car after a shift and cried. I’ve stayed late, making calls for people who’ve lost their jobs, begging for free specialty help. I’ve given my lunch to a woman who obviously hadn’t eaten in days. I’ve revived private school kids with bags of heroin in their mouths. I’ve demonstrated to teenage couples how to swaddle and rock crying babies, and I’ve explained to irate housewives what chlamydia is. Once I held the hand of a dying old man from a nursing home who cried out for his boy over and over during his last minutes until I bundled up my hair and pretended to be his son. Every physician could tell these stories; we keep thousands of them in our heads.

I don’t have the skill to write the sweeping epic all this raging humanity deserves. But a few years ago, I got it into my head that I could at least write an entertaining story. Following the ubiquitous advice hurled at all novice writers—write what you know—I plunged into a manuscript about a group of med school friends. Eventually I figured the story would be better if we could see the lives of the characters after their training, and then I decided there should be some romantic shenanigans, and then I was advised that someone needed to die. And of course, in addition to the anguish and the glory of life, I wanted to reflect some of the hilarity. I’m a member of a giant Facebook group of women doctors who are also mothers (Hi, PMG!), and not a day goes by that I’m not cracking up at the photo of the penis-shaped sculpture someone’s preschooler proudly presented, or the tale of how the entire first grade at someone’s daughter’s school can now describe a hysterectomy in detail. So naturally I had to work some children into the book too. After I’d written approximately two hundred thousand words—half of which would later be cut—this book emerged.