I’ll take the other ones any day, she had wanted so to say to him, I’ll take them with their ego and their rambunctiousness, and their ignorance and their rollicking sense of humor; I’ll take their roughness, their heated and simple love of women and fear of women, I’ll even take their talk, yes, their endless talk, and thank God that, unlike the neurosurgeons, they don’t want me to say anything back to them, they don’t even want to know who I am or what I am, might as well say rocket scientist, master spy, magician, as say neurosurgeon. “You don’t mean you operate on people’s brains!”
What did it matter, all this?
The fact is, Rowan understood “the man question” a little better now than in those days when Graham argued with her. She understood the connection between herself and her uniformed heroes-that going into the Operating Room, and slipping on those sterile gloves, and lifting the microcoagulator and the microscalpel, was like going into a burning building, was like going into a family fight with a gun to save the wife and the child.
How many times had she heard neurosurgeons compared to fire fighters? And then the slick criticism, but it’s different because your life is not at stake. The hell it isn’t. Because if you failed in there, if you failed horribly enough and often enough, you’d be destroyed as surely as if the burning roof had come down on you. You survived by being brilliant and courageous and perfect, because there was simply no other way to survive, and every moment in the Operating Room was a mortal test.
Yes, the same courage, the same love of stress and love of danger for a good reason that she saw in the crude men she loved to kiss and stroke and suckle; the men she liked to have on top of her; the men who didn’t need for her to talk.
But what was the use of understanding, when it had been months-almost half a year-since she’d invited anyone into her bed. What did the Sweet Christine think about it? she sometimes wondered. Was it whispering to her in the dark: “Rowan, where are our men?”
Chase, the yellow-haired olive-skinned palomino cop from Marin, still left messages for her on the answering machine. But she had no time to call him. And he was such a sweet guy, and he did read books, too, and they had talked once, a real conversation, in fact, when she’d made some offhand remark about the Emergency Room, and the woman who’d been shot by her husband. He’d latched onto that at once with his string of shootings and stabbings and pretty soon they were going at them all from two sides. Maybe that was why she hadn’t called him back? A possibility.
But on the face of it, the neurosurgeon had for the moment subsumed the woman quite completely, so much so that she wasn’t sure why she was even thinking about those men tonight. Unless it was because she wasn’t all that tired, or because the last beautiful male she’d lusted after had been Michael Curry, the gorgeous drowned man, gorgeous even when he lay there, wet and pale, black hair plastered to his head, on the deck of her boat.
Yes. He was, in the old school-girl parlance, to die for, a hunk-just an out-and-out adorable guy and her kind of adorable guy completely. His had not been one of those California gymnasium bodies with overdeveloped muscles and phony tans, topped off with dyed hair, but a powerful proletarian specimen, rendered all the more irresistible by the blue eyes and the freckles across his cheeks which made her, in retrospect, want to kiss them.
What an irony to fish from the sea, in a state of tragic helplessness, such a perfect example of the only kind of man she had ever desired.
She stopped. She had reached the doors of the Intensive Care Unit. Entering quietly, she stood still for a moment, surveying this strange, icy-still world of fish tank rooms with emaciated sleepers on display beneath oxygen tent plastic, their fragile limbs and torsos hooked to beeping monitors, amid endless cables and dials.
A switch was suddenly thrown in Rowan’s head. Nothing existed outside this ward any more than anything existed outside of an Operating Room.
She approached the desk, her hand out to very lightly touch the shoulder of the nurse who sat hunched over a mass of papers beneath the low fluorescent light.
“Good evening, Laurel,” Rowan whispered.
The woman was startled. Then recognizing Rowan, she brightened. “Dr. Mayfair, you’re still here.”
“Just another look around.”
Rowan’s manner with nurses was far gentler than ever it was with doctors. She had from the very beginning of her internship courted nurses, going out of her way to alleviate their proverbial resentment of women doctors, and to elicit from them as much enthusiasm as she could. It was a science with her, calculated and refined to the point of ruthlessness, yet as profoundly sincere as any incision made into the tissues of a patient’s brain.
As she entered the first room now, pausing beside the high gleaming metal bed-a monstrous rack on wheels, it seemed-she heard the nurse coming behind her, waiting on her, so to speak. The nurse moved to lift the chart from its place at the foot of the bed. Rowan shook her head, no.
Blanched, seemingly lifeless, lay the day’s last car crash victim, head enormous in a turban of white bandages, a thin colorless tube running into her nose. The machines evinced the only vitality with their tiny monotonous beeps and jagged neon lines. The glucose flowed through the tiny needle fixed into the pinioned wrist.
Like a corpse coming back to life on an embalming table, the woman beneath the layers of bleached bed linen slowly opened her eyes. “Dr. Mayfair,” she whispered.
A lovely ripple of relief passed through Rowan. Again she and the nurse exchanged glances. Rowan smiled. “I’m here, Mrs. Trent,” she said softly. “You’re doing well.” Gently, she folded her fingers around the woman’s right hand. Yes, very well.
The woman’s eyes closed so slowly they were like flowers closing. No change in the faint song of the machines that surrounded them. Rowan retreated as soundlessly as she had come.
Through the windows of the second room, she gazed at another seemingly unconscious figure, that of an olive-skinned boy, a weed of a kid, actually, who had gone blind suddenly, staggering off the platform into the path of a commuter train.
For four hours she had worked on this one, suturing with the tiny needle the hemorrhaging vessel that had caused his blindness, then repairing the damaged skull. In Recovery he had joked with the circle of doctors around him.
Now, her eyes narrow, her body still, Rowan studied his subtle movements in sleep, the way that his right knee shifted under the covers, the way his hand curled, palm up, as he moved his head to the side. His tongue darted over his dry lips, and he whispered to himself like a man talking to someone in his dreams.
“Doing just fine, Doctor,” the nurse whispered beside her.
Rowan nodded. But she knew that within weeks, he would suffer seizures. They would use Dilantin to control it, but he would be an epileptic for the rest of his life. Better than death and blindness surely. She would wait and watch before predicting or explaining. After all, there was always the chance she was wrong.
“And Mrs. Kelly?” she asked. She turned to look into the nurse’s eyes, forcing herself to see the woman clearly and completely. This was an efficient and compassionate nurse, a woman she rather liked.
“Mrs. Kelly thinks it’s funny that she still has two bullets in her head. ‘I feel like a loaded gun,’ she told me. She won’t let her daughter leave. She wants to know what happened to that ‘street punk’ that shot her. She wants another pillow. She wants a television and a phone.”
Rowan gave the obligatory soft appreciative laugh. Barely a sound in the humming silence. “Well, tomorrow, perhaps,” she said.