The Queen of Hearts(87)

We trudged along, mute, until finally she broke the silence. “Please let me tell you I’m sorry.”

This seemed insufficient for the depth of her betrayal.

“I don’t want to talk about it here,” I said, abstractly noting some scene playing out in the hospital lobby, with a big family group wailing and gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, metaphorically speaking. We moved past them, silent again.

“You’re right,” Emma said, once we’d cleared the drama in the lobby. “Meet me for dinner tonight. Let me tell you the truth.” She looked me directly in the eyes. “Please.”

“Oh,” I said, softening.

She continued: “I don’t know if I can do anything to save my job, but I know this: if I had to pick between saving my job and saving my friendship with you, it wouldn’t even be close. I’d pick you.”

I stopped walking. Emma had never wanted to be anything other than a surgeon.

“Did something else happen with the Packards?” I asked. I’d deliberately avoided the thought of the meeting scheduled with them this weekend.

“Not directly,” said Emma. “But I just met with Nestor Connolly and the hospital’s attorneys. They’re advising me to take a leave of absence. Starting tomorrow.”

I looked at her: usually ramrod-straight, her spine slumped, and her clear skin held the grayish cast of fatigue. Against my will, I felt some sympathy. It was ridiculous for the hospital to side against Emma; this was not a clear-cut case of medical malpractice. “Look,” I said slowly, “I’ll meet you tonight. But you agree right now: you’re going to tell me the entire story. Everything.”

“I will,” said Emma, her voice low.

The implications had dawned on me slowly, despite Nick’s admission of why he carried the photo. Human nature being what it is, my first reaction was shamefully self-centered: a sharp knife thrust puncturing my core when I recognized their faces. I ached for myself. They did this to me, to me, to me.

But they hurt someone else, too.

“You have to tell me what happened with Graham,” I said. We’d reached the physicians’ parking lot, and I stopped, leaning against my dust-speckled car.

A whispered response: “I know.”

“And how it started with Nick and how it ended. All of it.”

I could hear her breathing: measured, slow inhalations, a little jagged at the end. “I will.”

“Okay, then.” I took a belated sip of my coffee. “I’ll see y—”

“I used to see him for years,” she said hoarsely.

A small dart in my chest. After all these years, how could Nick still have the power to wound me?

“For years?” I managed.

“I’d look up in the grocery, or at the gym, and he’d be standing there like a dumbstruck giant, with his hair ruffled, in his flannel shirt, looking right into my eyes. I’d blink and look again, and it would be someone else, of course, but for one heart-stopping second, I’d think . . .” She trailed off. When she spoke again, I could barely hear her. “I wanted it to be him so badly.”

Graham. She meant Graham. “Oh, Em—”

“When you think back on our trauma rotation,” she said, her voice stronger, “it was the hardest part of medical school, right? Working hundred-ten-hour weeks, staying awake for forty hours at a time?”

I agreed. “Agonizing hours of standing still. Withering barrages of questioning, daily public humiliation. Foul odors.”

Now Emma’s voice became clearer. “Right. And people dying. But the irony of trauma was, I emerged from that rotation unscathed. Every day on that service dealt some stranger a life-altering—or life-ending—blow, but I was too dumb to let it touch me. People’s lives were disintegrating all around me, but the trauma that finally unglued me was all self-generated. I watched people break apart and I was fine. I watched people die and I was fine. I gave you a sanctimonious little speech on understanding the consequences of our actions when your pregnant trauma patient died, and I was fine. Then I broke me, and I broke our friendship, and I broke Graham. And finally I understood what it means. Trauma.”

A gaggle of young nurses passed us on their way in: tailored pastel scrubs, ponytails, boisterous bright lips and cheeks. “Emma,” I said. I thought back to the person I’d been as a young adult, and it was like she had been someone else: a drifting, formless human shape, missing some elemental piece, until finally enough experience stuck to her to fill in the gaps. Could I not forgive Emma for something that had happened so long ago? “I’ll see you tonight.”





Chapter Thirty-eight


    YOU MEAN THERE’S MORE?


   Zadie, Present Day


A lighter mood gripped me that evening as I waved goodbye to Drew. Driving through uptown, I felt zippy, lighthearted, relieved of a burden. Anger was such a debilitating emotion; why couldn’t people see that? Over the course of the day, I’d resolved to forgive Emma, and it felt good. I tend to follow the same pattern when somebody wrongs me: I stew over it obsessively, my mind churning through all the variables as I replay the incident, thinking of what I should say. I catalog their offenses. I verbally dissect them. Zingy rejoinders fly from my lips until my enemy folds into supplicating apology, humbled by her absolute wrongness. After I’ve done this several hundred times in my own head, there’s seldom a need to confront anyone in real life. I’m over my anger.