“That’s your SUV I saw earlier with its blinkers on?” Noah asked with surprise. The idea hadn’t even occurred to him. The idea of having a driver wait an indeterminate amount of time seemed excessively extravagant.
“It’s the car that the NSC arranged to pick me up at the airport. As I said, I came directly here. We could have a snack or a glass of wine if you would like. I’m wide awake.”
“Four forty-five A.M. is going to come all too quickly for me,” Noah said. “I’ve been working like a dog. I’ll have to take a rain check.”
“Fine,” Ava said as she stood. “Maybe tomorrow evening you can come over when you get out of the hospital, and we can have a bite. I’ve missed you.”
“Maybe,” Noah said. The real reason he was reluctant to take her up on her offer to go directly back to her house was that he wasn’t sure how he felt emotionally. He didn’t know if he wanted to get right back into the saddle after falling off the horse. “Sometimes Mondays are very busy, and I don’t get out until late,” he added as an afterthought.
“Well, let’s see how it goes,” Ava said. “Anyway, the offer stands.”
He walked her down to the front door. Like the first evening they had spent together, she surprised Noah by initiating a double-cheek kiss. Then, with him holding the door open, she said: “I’m really glad to see you, but in the hospital I think we should still play it safe and ignore each other. Dr. Mason’s suspicions might not be common knowledge, and it would be best not to give them any sort of credence. Okay?”
“Okay,” Noah managed. As usual, she had him off balance. “I’ve missed you as well. Welcome home!”
He watched her run across the street and open the SUV door. Before she climbed in she turned and waved. Noah waved back, then closed and dead-bolted the door. In contrast to her seeming burst of energy, he felt mentally and physically exhausted.
16
THURSDAY, JULY 20, 7:48 P.M.
Noah entered Toscano and approached the hostess desk. He told Richard, the handsome owner/manager whom he had formally met two nights ago, that he was there once again to pick up a take-out order. As he waited, Noah glanced around at the busy scene. All the tables and the lengthy bar were filled and a buzz of happy conversation and laughter permeated the room. None of the diners were thinking of sickness, injury, or death, which consumed Noah’s world on a daily basis. Usually he would have felt jealous of their normal lives and their facility at easy conversation. But tonight he wasn’t jealous in the slightest, as he was anticipating another delightful evening of his own.
The past Monday had been busy for Noah, even more than he had expected. So was the rest of the week. But any reluctance he might have entertained on Sunday night, the night Ava unexpectedly appeared at his door, about restarting his secret, intense relationship with her had progressively lessened. Although Monday morning he’d awakened still feeling that the prudent course would be to go slowly, as the day wore on he found himself becoming more and more excited about the prospect of seeing her that evening. Passing her several times in the surgery corridor, where they both scrupulously avoided any recognition of the other, only served to fan the embers of his passion into a full blaze. The secrecy alone lent a delicious libidinousness to the whole situation.
By the time Noah got to her house well after 9:00 P.M. Monday night, he was wound up like an old-fashioned clock. Apparently, it had been the same for her, because they ended up making love on the floor in the foyer just inside the inner door. In the background, they could hear occasional chatter by passing pedestrians out on the sidewalk as they were that close, but it didn’t affect their ardor in the slightest. After they were spent they lay for a time on the carpet runner, staring up at the hallway chandelier. It was a tender time as they reaffirmed how much they had missed each other, an emotion augmented by guilt on her part for not having texted him and worry on his part for not having heard from her.
Later, over take-out food, Noah had learned how hard it had been for Ava to do her consulting work while she was in Washington, since it meant meeting with or having meals with senators and congressmen who were members of key committees. She told Noah that she had suffered from a mild form of PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, with persistent GI symptoms and recurrent nightmares about failing to get an endotracheal tube placed. She also confessed how close she’d come to calling Dr. Kumar to say that she was resigning.
Noah’s reaction to all this was similar to how he had responded the previous night in his apartment, reminding her of her board certification and that she had been hired by one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals. He told her that it had not been an accident that she had handled superbly more than three thousand anesthesia cases at BMH without a significant complication. He also reminded her that she had made several major contributions to the hospital. The first had been playing the key role behind the program of recapturing vast quantities of anesthetic gases rather than venting them into the atmosphere, which saved the hospital money and was also environmentally appropriate. The second had been that she had sat with him on the hybrid operating room committee, whose work resulted in the current remodel of the entire Stanhope Pavilion OR complex.
So far Noah had ended up staying overnight at Ava’s for the entire work week, arriving somewhere between 6:15 P.M. at the earliest, which happened on Tuesday, and 9:52 P.M. at the latest, which happened on Monday, and leaving each morning a tad before 5:00 A.M. Every night they had gotten take-out food from a Charles Street eatery and then spent hours talking while they ate and sipped a bit of wine.
In many ways, Noah found getting to know Ava like peeling an onion. Every time he learned something new, he found another layer, something he didn’t know or suspect, like the fact that she had a nearly photographic memory or that she was a talented computer coder, a skill she had picked up herself, mostly thanks to her love of computer gaming. Photographic memory and coding were aptitudes that Noah appreciated because he shared them.
Perhaps the most astounding new thing Noah learned about Ava was that she was fluent in Spanish, French, and German and spoke enough Italian to get along traveling the back roads in Italy. Why it surprised him was because language was not one of his fortes, and he had struggled through Latin and Spanish in high school courses. He also came to realize that, in contrast to himself, she had a sixth sense about reading people, something that came in particularly handy with her lobbying efforts. She explained to him how easy it was for her to discover a senator’s or a congressman’s opinion on a specific issue and then how to change it if it wasn’t in line with her NSC bosses’ desires.