If seeing her face struck a match, hearing her voice sets me ablaze. I feel my pulse and respiration pick up.
“How are you?” Her eyes widen, sharp and sudden, as if she’s just realized I’m me. They dash up and down my body, not just once, but twice. “You— you look well. And…you’re a doctor.” She laughs. It’s not a real laugh, but some sort of fill-in, covering for her while her face bends into shock. “I can’t believe we’re both doctors.”
I see her right hand flutter, and her startled face makes it apparent that she wants to cover her mouth. She looks alarmed—that she referenced our shared past—but then she straightens her shoulders and schools her face. The look she gives me is all surgeon. Confident and caring, warm and distant.
Even as I nod and flash another polite smile, I’m searching Evie’s blue eyes for the girl I loved. I tell myself she’s not the same, just as I’m not. Evie is a stranger now—no matter how familiar she feels.
“We are,” I reply, to her comment about us being doctors. My voice sounds more curt than I intend.
In the wake of it, I can see her close a door I didn’t even know was open. Something changes in her eyes, and she’s on lockdown. She holds out her hand and says, “It’s really good to see you, Landon.”
I stand there in my clean, unblemished coat, and shake Evie’s cool hand.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I tell her.
The charade begins.
Evie
Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Less than twenty-four hours after I see Landon Jones for the first time in ten years, I arrive at Alpine University Hospital for my first day as a neurosurgery resident.
It’s 4:00 a.m. The air is dewy damp but crisp, as only Colorado air can be in June. The sky is still an inky black, with thin clouds drifting past the glassy walls of the sprawling hospital complex.
My hair is in a ponytail, and I’m wearing sleek gray pants, a pink blouse, sneakers, and a small purse strapped diagonally under my coat. The purse holds a bottle of water, several protein bars, and hydrating lip gloss. Plus Advil. Dad told me I’ll need it for my feet.
I know from the steady stream of information to my phone’s AUH employee app that the chief resident working right now is Dr. Russell Kraft, a 32-year-old with thinning blond hair, brown eyes, and a soft Canadian accent. I don’t know him as well as I know Dorothy—my mentor, Dr. Eilert—but I know she says he’s good-natured. “Nicer than I am,” she told me when we met for brunch a few weeks back.
I feel less nervous than I thought I would as I walk in through the yawning lobby, down an obscure hall off the room’s right side, and up the staircase I prefer to the crowded elevators. Neurosurgery is on floor three.
I get into the unit with my ID tag, and as I step through the doors, I feel my first cold shot of nerves. Landon’s standing by the nurse’s desk, wearing his own white coat and holding a tablet as he talks to a short, curly-haired nurse in royal blue scrubs.
As my shoes smack the wax-shined floor, he turns and I stop breathing, even as I keep moving and give a smile. He doesn’t smile back, just blinks, and I’m thrown back through time, into another morning as he walks into my homeroom and I first see those sharp eyes.
By the time I reach him, he’s got his fa?ade in place. He gives me a curt smile and resumes looking at his tablet, while the curly-haired nurse introduces herself as Cindy and hands me my own tablet.
“I’ve seen you when you were in school here,” she says, referencing the few times I stepped foot on this floor as an AU med student. “You’ve encountered one of these before, I’m thinking.”
“Yep.” I look down at the tablet’s screen and turn it on, and find myself already logged in. She points to it. “Everybody’s got a different colored case. Jones here is green. Yours is red. Kim is yellow. You’ll be seeing lots of Kim because she’s inpatient this round, and not as much of Prinz, Mr. Blue, because he’s NCCU and will spend most of his days over there.” She waves in the direction of the neurosurgery critical care unit, telling me things that I already know. “But you three, you’ll be crossing paths a lot. It’s Dr. Kraft for you this morning. He’s around here somewhere. Also Bettie and Stern.”
I recognize those names as older residents: a third year and a second year, if I’m correct.
“We’ve had a busy night, so I’ll just let you get on to your lists. You can do that in the donut room. That’s what we call your space up here on the floor. There’s almost always donuts. Do you need a tour? You know where the cots are, where everything else is?”
I laugh—“I do”—and, in my periphery, I see Landon nod.
After the brief re-introduction, in which Cindy tells me she’s the charge nurse, I head to the donut room, which is basically the doctors’ locker room. As I’m going through the door, I feel Landon on my heels.
Thank God, Kara Bettie is already in there, actually eating a donut. She and I say a quick hello, and I sit at one of two round tables as Landon comes in. I don’t look up, but I can hear her voice rise as she greets him animatedly, and in a tone I’d recognize anywhere.
Woman interested in man.
About the time she heads out the door, something buzzes, and still without looking at Landon, I get up and follow the sound to a basket on the other table. In the basket are six pagers. Two of them bear stickers with my name on them. In fact, one of mine is buzzing.
I murmur to myself as Landon takes his from the basket, “That was fast.”
He doesn’t reply—and I can’t look up at him. I look at my pager, and I fumble through my memory for the mental database I have of phone numbers and codes.
If I’m correct about the message I just got, someone wants me in an operating room? That can’t be right, though. Not on the first day, and definitely not before I work my way through my list and help the other residents round on our unit’s patients.
“What does it say?” Landon’s voice sends an electric charge through me; I have to look at him now, and I do, which makes me zing again.
I hold it out to him and watch him laugh. “You’re wanted in the OR, Evie. That’s some luck.” I blink, and he says, “You better run or I’ll go do it for you.”
As I hustle there, I feel the echo of his rich, low voice swim through my limbs.
You can’t, I tell myself, and I push it aside.
When I get to the OR, Dr. Kraft is scrubbing in. “You’ve been in on an external ventricular drain before,” he says, and I can’t tell if it’s a question, so I nod.
“Bettie was on with Dr. Saul and me, but she got called to ER. Six-car pile-up incoming. Saul and I are down two hands, I figured why not make your day?”