The Queen of Hearts(40)

The other thing that I loathed was the complete inability of most people to think critically. They accepted as gospel all kinds of things without ever objectively examining for themselves why they so fervently believed them. Take childhood vaccinations, for example. There was such tremendous bias against them among some groups that people are willing to seize on one or two dubious bits of pseudo-research that someone parroted to them, completely disregarding the thousands of well-designed studies analyzing the issue, oblivious to how many of their children would have died from infectious diseases in another era. I couldn’t fathom it. All you need to do to believe anything is surround yourself with a herd of like-minded reinforcers, and there’s no need for objective reality at all. My favorite quotation ever, from some senator from New York, went something like this: You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

All of this made it even more astonishing that I, Emma, had been the one to bring about a chain of events that ultimately tsunamied into tragedy, all because I had done something without thinking. I’d acted impulsively, based on my feelings, and ignored all the clanging warning bells. And I was forever enduring the shame of this, which was going to be even harder to forget now that Nick had joined my group.

Dwelling on this was unacceptable. I had to pull it together and get ready for my next case, an abdominal washout, right now. Where was all my self-control? What in the hell was wrong with me?

Trying not to break out into a flat-out sprint, I hurried to the women’s locker room off the lounge, flung myself into a toilet stall, and sat, burying my face in my hands, counting and recounting backward from one hundred.

Maybe this lasted a minute, or maybe five, but I jolted back to reality when I heard myself paged overhead by the OR front desk. I quickly splashed some water on my face, dabbed a slight mascara smear away, and hustled over to OR 4, where my next case was scheduled, rapping on the glass to let them know I was there.

Outside each OR was a steel, troughlike sink with foot pedals to control the water. I set up to scrub at mine. This was no half-assed swipe under some running water. Scrubbing up for surgery is an involved process. You start by using scrub brushes under the nails and alongside each finger, really working up a good lather, and then proceed up the arms to the elbows, carefully holding your hands aloft so that no contamination would run down onto your clean fingers, and then you rinse just as carefully, hands to elbows, with no extra pass-throughs under the water. The whole process ideally takes about five minutes, but this ritual gave me another respite to collect myself. It was unlike me to get carried away with emotion. Time to man up.

I bumped my way into the OR, holding out my hands in front of me like Frankenstein’s monster, and got gowned and gloved. I had to admit that my mind was not fully on the patient in front of me, but luckily, I could handle this kind of case in my sleep. It was Nick that had me tied in knots.

At first I figured that I’d ignore the message. Screw Nick. There was no need to be overly communicative with the bastard. I would engage in whatever discourse was needed from a work-related standpoint, when and if it came to that; I’d be cordial but frosty, so that he got the message that we weren’t going to be pals. Bygones were not bygones.

But then I had second thoughts. Curiosity was killing me; I wondered what he thought about my presence in the group and how he intended to handle it. He might not have known initially that Zadie lived in Charlotte too, but now he certainly did. Her last name might have been different, but there weren’t too many Zadies around, especially ones who were friends of mine. Knowing Nick, he probably thought she’d be thrilled to reunite with him. So maybe I should have called him back and discussed the situation under circumstances that I controlled, rather than waiting until I randomly bumped into him in the hospital.

All this musing proved to be academic, however, because when I finished the latest case and went back to the surgeons’ lounge to rest for a minute, the man sitting on the leather couch next to me turned out to be him. It was Nick.

—

“Emma!” he said, the corners of his mouth lifting in an ostensible smile. “It’s Nick, Nick Xenokostas. We obviously couldn’t chat last week.”

“I know who you are, Nick,” I said, feeling like my tongue had gained a massive amount of weight. “I got a message from you.”

“Yeah, sorry. I wanted to let you know our mutual patient is doing well—I hadn’t realized that you were in the group at first. What are the odds?” He shifted on the sofa to face me.

So that answered one question. He hadn’t known I was here at first. (But . . . really? “Dr. Emma Colley” was listed first under Meet Our Physicians on the practice website. But he sounded so believable.)

“. . . and before I moved, I didn’t even know you were a surgeon, let alone practicing in Charlotte. How do you like it here?”

“Fine,” I growled, looking around. So much for a controlled situation. The surgeons’ lounge, which was deserted half of the time, was all of a sudden chock-full. Sitting right next to us was old Dr. Dinsmore, who had been practicing since the dawn of time and who didn’t approve of women doctors, and on his left was an egomaniacal orthopedic surgeon named Chas Dunworthy, and across from him were two residents and my eager-beaver medical student. (Hopefully I had not been such a shameless kiss-ass as a student.) They all looked intrigued by the conversation.