Xander

It’s been a long, strange day from calling an ambulance in the wee hours of the morning to taking my five-year-old to work to having a beautiful patient call me Daddy—weird, weirder, and weirdest.

And it’s not over yet. It’s 10:00 p.m., and I’m lying in my bed with Tori snuggled up under my arm watching Dallas reruns on Hulu. The show isn’t exactly appropriate material for a five-year-old but compared to the things on TV today, it’s tame.

“Daddy, Zion turns the channel a lot when we watch, but you don’t, how come?” she asks in a sleepy voice. I know Zion, and she’s probably been channel surfing during the inappropriate scenes. Maybe I should be paying better attention to what’s going on.

“I’m sorry, bug. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You thinkin’ bout my Zion?” I love that she calls her my Zion like she’s hers and hers alone. She’s right. I am thinking about her and also our situation. We went to the hospital tonight on our way home from the clinic. She is very sick, more so than I originally thought. I was right about the DKA, and she will be in the hospital for at least a week correcting her blood sugar. She looked weak and defeated. I wished we didn’t have to leave her there alone, but a hospital is no place for Tori.

Zion has no family in the U.S., but she has a few good friends, and they visited her yesterday along with us. I told her not to worry about her job or Tori. I lied and said I have it all worked out when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’m screwed. I have no temporary sitter, no nanny, and Tori trusts no one. I have four brothers. David lives in Texas and is married and has a kid. Ethan lives in Seattle, he’s a lawyer and wouldn’t know the first thing about taking care of a kid. Jacob is a Marine, and he can do just about anything including taking care of a kid because he has one of his own, but he’s overseas right now. Last, but not least, is Dean who is also capable of caring for a child but after making a gazillion dollars with his cell phone business, he picked up and moved to an island in the Caribbean.

Star, Tori’s biological mom has relatives, but they are all trash like her, and no one from that family will ever get close to my girl again.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to break down and hire someone temporarily tomorrow. Tori is going to hate it, but I have no choice. I can’t keep dragging her with me to work—it’s disruptive for the patients, and it’s not a properly stimulating environment for a child. I can’t expect my nurses to watch her and do their work. I know after today, that’s just an accident waiting to happen.

“Bug, we need to talk about something. Daddy has to hire a nanny to come and help us until Zion gets home from the hospital. It isn’t permanent, just for a week or two until Z is feeling better. The new nanny might even be able to help Zion when she comes home from the hospital for a little bit, and then you’ll have two nannies. That’s cool, isn’t it?”

She doesn’t answer. I look down and find her eyes are closed, and I hear the sound of her soft breathing telling me my speech has fallen on deaf ears. Great, now I’m going to have to do that all over again tomorrow.

I gently move her over to the empty side of my bed and turn off the TV saying goodnight to J.R. and his brother, Bobby, under my breath. What a blast from the past it’s been watching this show. I was just a kid in the seventies when it started, and my parents never missed an episode. Tori must have inherited that from them somehow.

I wish my mom and dad could have known Tori. They would have loved her and spoiled her rotten. They died in a car accident when I was finishing my first year of college. It was a hit and run, and they were trapped for hours in their car upside down in a ditch. The doctors couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say whether or not they would have lived if the driver of the other car had stopped to call 911. I didn’t care, they were gone, and that’s all that mattered to me. Both of them on the same day, gone just like that—poof. One morning Mom was calling to tell me she loved me, and the next I was watching my grandma sob while she spoke with a funeral planner.

I felt alone. I had my brothers, but they had their own lives and were spread out all over the U.S. I wanted my mom to be waiting for me at the front door when I came home for holidays. And I needed my dad to remind me that I wasn’t the same kid who got beat up every day after school for being a nerd with a big nose anymore.

My love of plastic surgery started when I was a junior in high school. My parents had been saving, unbeknownst to me, so that I could have a nose job. Ever since I could remember, I was teased for my big nose. Dad said my great-grandpa Phillip had a nose like mine. I never met Grandpa Phillip, but I cursed him every morning when I looked in the mirror and again every afternoon after school when I was lying face down in the dirt of the playground getting beat up and teased mercilessly.

I went for my first appointment, and when I met Dr. Salisbury, I fell in love with the idea of being an all-powerful physician. Dr. Salisbury could mold and shape someone into a different person. He was a god, not to mention he looked like he stepped out of a fashion magazine, and he drove a Porsche.

I was hooked.

Over Christmas break during my junior year, life changed for me. I climbed into my old Monza listening to a jerk yell, “Don’t breathe up all the air, Sullivan!” followed by, “Hey, Sullivan, who mows your nose hairs?”

I was used to the taunting, and the beatings ended my sophomore year when I had a growth spurt ending the year taller than every guy in my class. I had come to terms with the fact that people only saw my nose when they looked at me, and that’s just how it was.

But it wasn’t. When I came back to school after Christmas break with a perfect nose, chiseled jawline, and contact lenses, everything changed. It was like magic. I stepped out of my car and girls were doing double takes, guys were frowning and whispering, and a few teachers questioned who I was. From that moment on, I wanted to do what Dr. Salisbury had done for me and others. I wanted to rescue the misfits, the discarded, and the freaks of nature and make them gorgeous so they could flip their middle finger to the cruel and judgmental world.

And that’s what I did.

Years later when I was in med school, I learned that being good looking could be a curse, too. Teachers didn’t take me seriously anymore, women wanted to sleep with me, men did, too, for that matter, and no one gave a shit about how smart I was.

For months, I kept my head down, stopped dressing nice, wore grungy jeans and hoodies, let my beard grow, quit working out, and stopped dating altogether. If you didn’t know me, you would have thought I had fallen into a deep depression. I wasn’t depressed, though. I wanted people to appreciate me for more than my appearance.

A year later, I realized it wasn’t making a difference when my advanced anatomy professor cornered me after class and offered herself to me for an A in the class. I remember looking down at her and thinking this stupid bitch doesn’t even know I’m already getting an A in her class—she just wants to sleep with me.

I fucked her out of spite and started dressing better again, took out a loan for a brand new Mercedes, and never looked back. I became a manwhore.

If that’s how the world was going to see me, then I figured I would give them what they wanted. Being a player in med school was challenging but not impossible—hook-ups in the sleep rooms at the hospital, study dates that turned into sex, one-night stands galore—it was great.

Then I graduated and started practicing medicine, and that’s when the women started knocking down my door. It turns out, making women feel more beautiful is quite the aphrodisiac. I never wanted for a sexy woman on my arm, sometimes two, for years, and that’s how I liked it.

Then there was Star. Star is a poor con woman from the wrong side of the tracks who saw me as her golden ticket out. Star came to see me originally for breast augmentation paid for by her pimp I later learned. I took her out as I did many of my patients, and after a couple of weeks, she got pregnant. She had been poking holes in my condoms. She set about worming her way into my life permanently, and I started dreaming of ways she might accidentally die after she gave birth to my daughter.

Star was not mother material, wife material, or even human material. She had more schemes up her sleeve than Houdini, and she tried them all. It didn’t take long for her to get sick of being a mother—like a week to be exact—and that was fine with me.

I gave her a wad of cash, she signed over her parental rights, and she promised to go away forever. But she didn’t go away forever. She showed up when Tori was three years old and tried to kidnap her which began Tori’s serious fight with anxiety.

Star is still out there running from the law. Tori and I are still in here waiting for her to get caught.

Sometimes life just isn’t fair.