McManus leaned closer. He was squinting with an inquisitive look on his face.
“If I was a neurologist maybe I could guess what’s going on in there.” He pointed to her head.
“Dark thoughts, Dr. McManus, dark, dark thoughts,” she confessed.
“What could be so dark?” McManus asked. Sydney shrugged. “You’re young. You’re smart. You’re beautiful, you’re in great shape.”
“And you’re full of shit.”
“Not at all! If you need a dummy for your demonstration, I’m your guy,” McManus said, seemingly emboldened by his own words.
“A dummy? I doubt that.”
“But just to be clear, I’d be disappointed if you don’t include mouth-to-mouth.”
Sydney shook her head.
“Dr. McManus!” she said, pretending to be shocked. It had been a while since a man flirted with her this way. To be fair, she had put up a force field of professionalism to ward off any untoward thoughts. Now, though, she could almost see her defenses dropping. There was something attractive about this gangly, puffy-eyed doctor. What, exactly, she had no idea. He looked like he hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in a very long time. His skin was pale from far too many hours under fluorescent lights. His body was all oddball angles, and his hair apparently hadn’t seen a comb in days. She couldn’t explain what it was with Dr. Bill McManus, but she felt very safe with him. The feeling made her far bolder than she had been since she couldn’t remember when. Up to a point.
“Tell you what,” Sydney said. “You beat me today and you can be my dummy.”
“Really?” McManus had another idea. “If you win, will you make sure I haven’t collapsed on the course trying to beat you?” He paused for a moment. “And if you find me prone on the pavement, in respiratory distress…” Sydney saw where this was going and smiled despite herself. “Will you resuscitate me—you know—using mouth-to-mouth?”
She laughed. “You’re bad.”
The PA system interrupted them: “Runners, please make your way to the starting line.”
“Good luck,” Sydney said as they joined one of several streams of participants flowing together in front of a large starting banner.
“Hey, thanks.”
“Let me rephrase that. Moderate luck.”
McManus laughed.
A
cross town, Tina Ridgeway punched the gas on the family minivan as it strained uphill. Mark sat fuming in the passenger’s seat. He wore a sport coat and tie. The girls and Ashley were in the back, dressed in their Sunday best. Tina always thought of them that way: the girls and Ashley, as though cerebral palsy put her youngest daughter in a category by herself.
“Does going to church have to be a crisis?” Mark asked.
“I cannot leave the house a mess.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be on time?”
“It’s not either-or, Mark. How many children do I have? Jesus.”
“Nice talk on a Sunday.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Mom! Dad!” Madison called from the back.
“I’m glad you could find the time to read the paper while the house is a disaster,” Tina said.
Mackenzie started crying. Mark reached back and touched his daughter’s cheek.
Tina turned into the church’s driveway. She shook her head and said nothing. She pulled into a spot and slammed the car into park.
Mark hopped out and opened the sliding door as Tina opened the hatch to get Ashley’s chair. Madison and Mackenzie started walking toward the large brick church without them. Mark helped Ashley into her chair and strapped her in.
Mark began singing through gritted teeth: “I’ve got joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart.” Hearing a melody, Ashley started happily banging her tray.
“You’re a real prick sometimes,” Tina said quietly and walked ahead to catch up to Madison and Mackenzie. She didn’t look back. If she wasn’t so mad, she might have started crying herself, something she hadn’t done in a very long time.
T
y sat by the pool of the Delano Hotel, reading a paperback thriller, with a half-emptied bottle of SPF-30 sunscreen sitting next to him. The fate of the free world depended on a gruff loner who had been expelled from the CIA for insubordination. It was always the outsider who was the hero in the airport newsstand thrillers. The Miami sun and salt air had put Ty into a blissful, half-dazed soporific state.
He looked up from the book and enjoyed the undulating, curved lines of the pool’s edge, the geometric tile work on the deck, the flickering pattern beneath the water’s surface. The Delano was known for its whimsical art deco styling, including a round pool house with portholes, and Ty found the throwback design somehow soothing. Around him couples fringed the pool, their chairs arranged in pairs like dominoes. Younger couples reclined around the water, soaking up the sun facedown, arms across the other’s back, or partially reclined reading or drinking
mojitos
, another signature, brought out by mocha-skinned waiters in long white pants and white guayabera shirts. Older couples opted for tables shaded by umbrellas the blue-green of 1950s kitchen linoleum.
Some of the women were topless, and Ty marveled how he could fly to a place so foreign and exotic without ever leaving the United States. Seeing the nearly naked women and the intertwined couples made him long for companionship, a woman close by his side, sleek and available. His thoughts turned to Tina Ridgeway. She was married, of course, but Ty always felt a singular connection with her. And of course, there was no denying the stunning brunette possessed a classical beauty undiminished by age. Right now, Ty imagined he and Tina swimming in the pool, or the ocean beyond, and then heading up to the room for a shower before getting in bed, light streaming through the sheer curtains across the two of them in the small, sparsely furnished room.
The fantasy engaged Ty’s mind briefly, but then a wave of fatigue washed over him as the rays of the South Florida sun drained his nervous energy. Ty reclined his chair all the way. He put the book down on the pool deck, closed his eyes beneath his sunglasses, and began drifting off. For some reason, Monique Tran suddenly entered into his mind. She’d looked different somehow when he had seen her in the parking deck with her grandmother. A rosiness to her cheeks, and a slight fullness in her face.
Hmm…is she pregnant?
he thought as he finally fell completely asleep.
D
r. Sanford Williams stood at the front of the courtroom next to Monique Tran. He wore a suit. She wore a satin evening gown, even though it was eleven in the morning. The courtroom was empty except for the judge and their two witnesses.
Of course, Monique and Sanford didn’t have to dress up. There was no dress requirement for a courthouse wedding, but they still wanted the occasion to be festive.
“I don’t want to be the knocked-up chick in the T-shirt and the tattoo, getting married at the courthouse,” Monique had said a couple of weeks earlier.
“’Cause you already have the tattoo,” Sanford said, teasing. It was true. Monique had a small peace frog on her shoulder. She and her BFF from high school had gotten matching tattoos the summer after graduation. At the time, the peace frog somehow seemed the embodiment of what they were all about.
Sanford adjusted his navy-blue suit coat and took Monique’s small hands in his. He hadn’t worn the suit since the day he finished medical school. He was relieved it still fit, though barely. As a resident, he ate when he could, which sometimes meant Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. He also ate knowing he couldn’t predict when he might eat again, which meant he’d get the shortbread cookies to go with the Pop-Tarts, just in case. He’d gobble them down before his stomach knew what hit it. It was ironic that even Chelsea General offered fat-laden, high-sodium food in the cafeteria, which he and his cardiac patients often purchased. That his suit pants were only moderately snug was a break.
Monique’s sheer gown, the color of eggplant, strained at the midsection. Now in her second trimester, she had started showing in everything but scrubs.
Coming from a good Baptist family, this evidence of premarital intercourse embarrassed Sanford even though the modern courtroom was empty except for his bride-to-be; her cousin, a goth college student who called herself Marilyn and served as their photographer; his roommate and fellow doctor Carter Lawton, their second witness; and the judge.
Washtenaw County judge Ann Mattson, in her black robes and tennis shoes, stood between the couple. She was squeezing the wedding ceremony between a landlord-tenant dispute and a theft-by-kiting case.
The decision to get married at the courthouse in Ann Arbor took both Monique and Sanford some time to reach. Both were used to large family weddings presided over by a man of the cloth. Sanford, in Baptist churches. Monique, in the Catholic Church. But given the distinct possibilities that their families would approve neither of the union, nor of the pregnancy, the couple had weighed their options. The first option was to end the pregnancy and then worry about their future. Monique had considered this as a way to save face with her strict Vietnamese family. Sanford, though, had never been enthusiastic about that option. “How could
you
be?” he had asked Monique. But for a time, they didn’t know what else to do. Even though both were raised in households where abortion was morally wrong, they viewed the pregnancy as a mistake that needed to be addressed.
Adoption was an option, but Monique did not want to endure forty weeks of pregnancy only to hand over the baby to a stranger. She didn’t want to go through pregnancy, period. She was twenty-two, single, and working hard—on odd and always-changing shifts. She had never imagined spending her twenties saddled with a child. She simply never thought of herself as the young, single mother lugging a kid everywhere she went. Monique had always felt sorry for those twenty-something mothers.
All that changed when she watched the McDaniel boy die during surgery, the life draining out of him despite Ty Wilson’s frantic efforts. She was struck by the preciousness and fragility of existence. She almost felt obliged to have her baby. Monique had in some way participated in the death. She had worked alongside Dr. Wilson, assisting him as he did what he could to save the boy. And when he couldn’t, Monique began to think of the child in her belly as some sort of karmic balance. When she saw the McDaniel boy die during surgery, the picture of what she should do resolved itself in her mind. She would keep the baby. Her age, her schedule, the disapproval of her parents and extended family be damned. And if her child was a boy, she would name him Quinn. She knew it would sound corny and illogical if she tried to explain this reasoning to anyone—even Sanford—so she kept that part to herself.
As Ty was finally drifting off to sleep down in Miami, thinking of Monique, she was thinking of him. She had hardly ever spoken to him, except for the advice he had given her in the parking garage. She laughed to herself at the quirk of fate that had allowed Ty to have such an impact on her life. Sanford gave her a look and mouthed a
shush
.
“Monique Tran, Sanford Williams, under the law of the state of Michigan, I am authorized to solemnize the vows between you.”
Marilyn danced around them, clicking pictures with her large SLR camera.
Once Monique told Sanford she planned to keep the baby, something seemed to change in him, Monique thought. He took her more seriously. He was more solicitous of her needs as she endured morning sickness and started getting strange cravings. She’d never even liked cottage cheese before. Now she was eating it for breakfast.
Sanford had proposed on the roof of the hospital. He’d waited around for her to get off her graveyard shift and said he wanted to show her something. The ring was modest, less than a carat. Monique didn’t fault him. Sanford owed more than a hundred thousand dollars after medical school, and on his resident’s salary he was only able to make the minimum loan payments.
Once they’d decided to marry, they chose to make it official as soon as possible—without the headache of their families. The process was surprisingly easy. They’d paid a twenty-dollar fee to the county, observed the three-day waiting period to get their license, and then scheduled a time with the judge. The court got another ten bucks.
Now Sanford held her two hands in his. He looked in her eyes, and she looked in his. She had loved his blue-green eyes in the OR, shining brightly above his mask, before they even knew each other.
“Do you, Sanford, take Monique to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
“I do.”
“And do you, Monique, take Sanford to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
“Heck yeah.”
Sanford laughed and shook his head and then something surprising happened. He was suddenly choked up. He loved Monique, but if he was being completely honest with himself, he never would have proposed if she wasn’t pregnant. It was the right thing to do, and he approached the nuptials with his fingers crossed. Now, for the first time, he could see himself spending the rest of his life with this woman, could see his love for her growing, could see their lives together as an adventure. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and saw the steady stream of tears flowing down her cheek. He leaned over powerfully, and kissed the bride.
O
n Sunday evening, Ty was sitting at an outdoor restaurant on South Beach eating fish with black beans and rice when his pager went off.
311. 6
. Ty turned off the pager. He held a ticket for a flight later that night scheduled to get him back to Michigan around midnight. He wasn’t going to take it. They didn’t know it yet at Chelsea General, but Ty had other plans.
V
illanueva was on a toilet in the hospital when his cell phone rang. He didn’t hesitate for a second and answered. He always enjoyed multitasking, and for some reason got an extra kick out of talking on the phone when he was sitting on the toilet. He considered it a practical joke, of sorts.
If they could see me now
, he’d tell himself,
they’d be the ones shitting
. In this case, he saw the caller ID and knew instantly it wasn’t going to be a pleasant call.