Chapter Twelve

Carlos

Jade grabbed onto my arm. She had come out of nowhere. Before I had had the chance to properly register what was going on, she had dragged me down one of the hospital hallways and into one of the storage rooms. The strong, clinical smell of medication surrounded me.

“What are you doing?” I hissed softly at her. It was dark and I could not see where she was. My hands held onto the clipboard in my hands for dear life.

“Wait,” Jade whispered. I heard her footsteps to my left, the rustle of her scrubs, followed by the click of a switch. The fluorescent lights turned on and I was faced with a room full of steel shelves, lined with medication, and an incredibly sheepish nurse.

“What do you think you are doing? I was paged. I’m on my way to the ward.”

Jade shook her head at me, shrugging her shoulders. “I did not know what else to do. I needed to talk to you. You have been avoiding everyone for weeks, Carlos.”

“Did it ever cross your mind that there was probably a reason for that?”

Jade sighed. “I know that there is a reason. That does not make it any better or easier. I’m trying to help you.”

This was the trouble with befriending colleagues. They noticed things that they would not have otherwise noticed. In our profession, it was even more prominent. We worked in an industry that cared about people. It was impossible not to notice, friends or not, when something was wrong.

She was watching me expectantly, her fingers fidgeting with her sleeve. I knew what she wanted. It was the same as everyone else around me. They were all worried about me because I had been behaving differently ever since the man that I had been seeing had turned up in my ward. It was hard to miss in the whispered conversations that stopped as I approached and the tentative way that people spoke to me and the gentle touches that Jade placed on my shoulder every so often when she caught me zoning out.

“Look,” Jade started again. “I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. You have not been yourself and everyone knows it. If you ever need someone to talk to or whatever, I volunteer, okay?”

I arched an eyebrow. That was unexpected. “Thank you, Jade,” I said.

“I mean it, okay?”

“I have to get to that page.”

Jade giggled nervously, running a hand through her hair. She wore it in a pixie cut so there was not much of it, but the gesture spoke for itself. Before I could ask the question, she answered it. “The page was actually me. I kind of stole Janet’s. She is the only one who only pages in emergencies so I knew that you would be there in time.”

I should have been angry. Most people would have been. Instead, I chuckled. “Well, all right then. Good on you for taking initiative, Jade.”

Her face brightened through the wide-eyed surprise written on it. I returned the smile that she gave me. I had always considered Jade to be more of a friend than a colleague. We generally worked in close proximity to one another. It was because of this that I did not feel out of place in pulling her in for a hug. I know that I must have shocked her. It took her a moment before she returned the hug, wrapping her arms around my waist and squeezing gently.

As I pulled away from Jade’s embrace, I realized how much I had actually been in need of a hug. I needed any sort of comfort at all, to be fair. I felt the sadness threaten to engulf me once more as she watched me.

“What is wrong?” Jade said.

She had always been observant. We had done our residency together. I recalled the first child that we had had to treat. It was one of those odd cases where no one could figure out what exactly the problem was. More often than not, that would be because people were not being completely honest with us. In order to make an accurate diagnosis, practitioners need all the information. In our profession, we are seldom surprised or embarrassed. Our patients, on the other hand, are often not used to being frank and candid.

After a consultation with the head of our medical training and the patient, Jade had pulled me aside. She had inclined her head in the direction of two women sitting in the waiting room. I did not know it then, although Jade did, but those two women were the parents of our patient and they knew exactly why she was in the hospital – they simply were not being forthright. Jade had asked me if I would go and speak to them, having noticed the way that they reacted to certain questions. Somehow, she had known that something was amiss. Impressing me and the rest, she also managed to draw that information out of the two women.

I had let Jade do all of the talking that day. I was there for some kind of moral support. She was brilliant. She did not really need me at all. Still, for some reason, one which I still did not know, she had instantly trusted me. It was enough for her to confide her suspicions to me that first case and enough to turn to me with any questions or thoughts for the four years that followed. It was no surprise to anyone that we chose to work alongside one another at every opportunity. We were best friends without ever having formed an actual friendship outside of the hospital halls.

“The patient that we tended to with the grand mal,” I began. I needed someone to talk to, I realized. I had isolated myself for the past few weeks and it was killing me slowly. Honestly, I could not recall ever being so miserable before. “I know you know. I know that everyone knows. I had to withdraw from the case.”

“You were seeing him,” Jade said softly. She had taken a step back from me and she was watching me, concern etched into her forgiving features. I found a random box of antibiotics on the silver shelf behind her head and concentrated on it, avoiding her face for fear that I might get more emotional than I already was.

“Yeah, I was seeing him. I loved him. I love him.” I corrected my tense. “Anyway, the thing is, I had treated him way before I ever loved him. I just sort of forgot.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met Nate at a bar months ago. The night that we met, there was this weird feeling of recognition but I could not place it. In the end, I chalked it up to coincidence.” I shrugged. “I figured he probably had one of those faces, you know?”

Jade nodded, encouraging me to continue speaking.

“It turns out; I actually treated Nate a long time ago. We both did. He was a patient that had been admitted during our residency.”

“Wait, what?” The crinkle in her forehead almost made me smile.

“I realized it when I walked in that night. I had been on-call and only seeing him in such a state had cleared everything up for me. I had only seen Nate like that once before – the night that I had to deliver the bad news that he would not make it through the night.”

“Oh, my god,” Jade said. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth as it fell open. “Oh, Carlos, I remember that kid!”

“Well, Nate made it through the night. I wasn’t the first doctor to tell him as much, even though I wasn’t yet a doctor, and I would not be the last to tell him that. Somehow, he has beaten the odds so far.”

“Have you…” She paused, sighing heavily. “I mean, have you seen him since he had the attack?”

“I have seen him in passing but we have not actively seen each other, no.”

“Carlos, don’t do this. You are hurting yourself and you are hurting him. Why?”

“I broke the rules, Jade. We are not meant to get involved with our patients. Worse than that, still, do you know that I did not know that he was sick? I had no idea that he was suffering from this or that he took the amount of medication that he did or anything at all. He hid that from me all this time.”

I was hurt at the amount of information that Nate had kept hidden away from me. I had not gotten over that. I did not think that I ever would. He had been the first person that I had let in, the first person that I had truly opened myself up to. I had wanted him to know everything that there was about me. How could we ever have that when he had kept something so massive a secret from me?

It stung like a bitch.

“Did you ever think that maybe there was a reason for that?” Jade echoed my question from before.

“What reason could he possibly have to keep such things from me?”

“Perhaps for the very thing that has ended up happening. I think that Nate was scared that if you knew about this, that you would leave him. Can you blame him for being scared when that is exactly what has happened?

“You have some serious thinking to do, Carlos. I think that you are making a huge mistake and people who don’t even know you think so, too. Why can you not see it?”

I sighed. “It isn’t like that.”

“Isn’t it?” She shook her head. “I have some things to look up and research. I’ll contact you about them as soon as I have found them and I implore you to hope that I find good things. Any good energy will help me right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the meantime,” she continued without answering me. “I want you to think about everything I said to you today. And about what you said. Isn’t it like that?”

Jade did not let me answer her question. She seemed angry with me. I had never angered her before then. She shook her head and walked past me, her shoulder brushing my arm as she walked. She was a tiny woman. She had opened the door and walked out, shutting it behind her, before I could say anything to stop her.

“Well, that is fucking great.” I muttered into the empty room.

I took a deep breath to clear my head, running my hands through my curly hair. I shut my eyes as I thought about it all. It was ridiculous. I could not stay in there all day so, taking in one last shuddering breath; I turned and opened the door. I flicked the light switch off and closed it behind me.

The rest of the day was filled with thoughts of what Jade had said and the feeling that had been haunting me for the past few weeks. It had been a month since I had seen Nate. I missed him terribly.