FRIDAY NIGHT AND LIBBY was trying to grab some sleep on a cot in the hospital’s residence room. The sheets smelled like sweat, exhaustion, and despair; the room, like stale coffee. But she was used to it. She was supposed to rest, but she kept thinking about Stella. Doctors weren’t supposed to treat family, and Libby considered Stella that. There was a code of ethics, and Libby was blurring the lines, but how could she not be one of Stella’s doctors?
Stella would get well. Libby would try to do everything she could to make sure of it. Still, she couldn’t help sometimes feeling afraid, because what if Stella didn’t recover? What if she stayed in coma for years?
Libby sat up. Stop, she told herself. Don’t go there.
Libby was fierce. She knew some of the other doctors called her Doctor No behind her back because she could be so insistent. Well, she had studied harder than anyone to be an internist, to make sure she was the most excellent doctor she could be. Back then, she had always positioned herself in front during rounds, so she could make herself noticed. So she could take in everything that she needed to learn. And when she had finally become a doctor, when she had taken this job, she still faced obstacles, even though you’d think that people would be over that by now. Patients thought that because she was a woman, she must be a nurse. “I want a real doctor,” they told her, and Libby bristled. One patient actually waved her away, and even when a male doctor came in and explained that Libby was a respected physician, the patient frowned and refused Libby’s help. Once, on a plane, she had seen a man crumple from an asthma attack. She unbuckled her seatbelt and rushed to his side, calling out to the flight attendants to get the inhaler she knew they kept on hand. A man jumped up. “I’m a paramedic!” he said.
“Yeah, well, I’m a doctor,” Libby snapped, but the flight attendant, a lean young woman with a face like a wolf, had taken her arm and pulled her away. “Let him do his work,” she said.
Him. That was always the pronoun. Always he, his, him. She felt tolerated by the male doctors at the hospital, double-checked when she was on call for their patients, flirted with or ignored when she wasn’t, and it pissed her off and she let people know it.
She knew that all the nurses were afraid of her. She had one nurse fired for giving the wrong dose of meds to a patient, who went into cardiac arrest. Everyone had acted fast, and the patient was fine, but Libby couldn’t forget it. She chewed out other nurses for not flushing an IV line quickly enough, for not checking a catheter, and even for not changing the linens quickly enough when a patient was lying in her own sick. Everyone had to be as careful, methodical, and quick as Libby was.
Years ago, Stella had been among the new crop of nurses, all of them anxious, eager to please, terrified they would make a mistake that might cost a life. But when Stella was on rounds with her, she kept asking questions. Why did Libby think that patient had diabetes? Why did she put in a line that way? Stella kept prodding her until one day Stella demanded to know why Libby gave a patient a Valium to relax instead of a Xanax, and Libby suddenly wasn’t so happy. “Are you questioning my judgment?” Libby said in a steely voice. Stella gazed at her calmly, not backing down. “I want to learn,” Stella said. “And I want to learn from you because you’re the best.”
Libby had been taken aback by the declaration. Stella walked away and instantly Libby felt guilty. Most of the nurses were so busy that it was all they could do to make their rounds, let alone learn more. That evening, she spotted Stella eating alone in the cafeteria, looking so tired that she was barely managing to hold up her fork, so Libby got a tray and approached her table and sat down. Stella looked at her, blinking. “You go ahead and keep asking questions,” Libby said. “And I’ll keep answering them.”
Stella gave her a sleepy smile, letting her fork clatter to the table. “Deal,” she said.
Libby began to depend on Stella. Stella’s was the call she was glad to get in the middle of the night because Stella knew what to ask her about a patient, what to recommend. She could count on Stella to follow her orders, to know the signs of a problem. Gradually they began to eat together whenever they could. They began to talk about medicine and then, slowly, about their lives.
It was a huge relief for Libby to have a friend. Doctors didn’t have much of a social life. And how could they? There was too much to do, too much to worry about. She had canceled plans on her friends so often that they knew when she accepted an invitation to some event or dinner, she might or might not show up. Dates were often a disaster because just when things were getting interesting, Libby was called back to the hospital. But Stella was at the hospital almost as much as Libby was, even though Stella had a longtime partner.
Libby liked Stella, but she couldn’t understand Stella’s choice of Simon. She listened to Stella talk about him, his rock-star aspirations, how tired she was of his irregular schedule, and how much she wanted a baby, a home, maybe even some time for herself. “Maybe you both need to rethink this,” Libby said. She worried about Stella more and more. She didn’t think it was wise when Stella took off two years to tour with him, but she was thrilled when Stella came back to work. Unfortunately, though, Stella was still with Simon, and she was besotted. Libby wanted to make her see all the reasons why she shouldn’t be with Simon, but Stella’s love for this guy was palpable. Stella told her that Simon was sweet and funny. He was creative and wrote songs for her. He loved her and told her so. They had marathon conversations. But why, Libby wanted to ask. Why, why, why? Why not a guy who kept regular hours and could be depended on more? Why not a guy who wasn’t hung up on something as transient as fame? Libby felt protective of Stella. She didn’t want her wasting her time with someone who wasn’t worth her.
“You’ll meet him,” Stella said. “You’ll see.”
But the first time Libby had met Simon—a meeting he hadn’t even remembered, and what did that say about him that he didn’t recall being introduced to Stella’s best friend—she hadn’t liked him on sight. He swaggered in, a denim jacket slung open, his jeans artfully ripped at the knees. All that black, too—T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, hair—like a uniform. She didn’t like that he came in eating a sandwich and didn’t have an extra one for Stella. Didn’t even offer her a bite. And she didn’t like how he had interrupted Stella’s stories to showcase his own. Rude, she thought. Just plain rude.
When Stella tried to get them all together for dinner, or invited Libby over to their apartment, Libby found excuses. It was Stella she wanted to see, alone at a coffee shop or in the hospital. She was polite to Simon only because Stella was her friend and Libby loved her.
She knew she wasn’t one to talk, not with her own sorry romantic history. Her love life was pathetic when you thought about it, made up mostly of quick, unsatisfying trysts in a laundry closet or a few dates that never went anywhere because she was always on call, always thinking about her patients’ well-being over her own.
Getting up from the cot, she shucked off her scrubs and pulled on her street clothes. After work, she was supposed to meet Ben, the guy she had been seeing for the past two months. And she liked him, so that made her more stressed.
Ben was an elementary-school teacher who rode a motorcycle. She had met him when he was visiting one of his former students in the hospital, a seventeen-year-old boy who had a kidney infection. She liked that he visited, that he made jokes with the kid, who was jokey back. Being in a good mood made patients get better faster. She liked his pale blue eyes, and when he last visited the teen, the day before he was discharged, Ben turned to her and said, “Come to dinner with me.”
“Okay, I will,” she told him.
She liked, too, that he didn’t push her. He didn’t ask her to come to his place right away or to go to hers. Instead, they went out to eat or sat in cafes after seeing movies. When she finally decided he could come to her apartment, he did nothing more than kiss her good night. The less he moved toward her, the more she wanted him. It was another week before they slept together, at his place, a one-bedroom on the Lower East Side. He made her dinner, salmon and green beans. He insisted on doing all the cleanup, and then he took her by the hand and led her into his bedroom. He was so gentle with her, so careful, that she found herself falling for him.
Leaving the hospital, she grabbed a cab to shoot downtown to a cafe they liked. She knew Ben would be there ahead of her because he was always early, and sure enough, there he was in the corner. She felt herself glowing with happiness.
But when she got to the table, she could tell something was off. Ben looked doped up. He was sweating, and his pupils were unnaturally large. She sat down opposite him and took his hands, startled at how clammy they were. “What’s going on?” she said.
He turned his head away from her. “Nothing,” he said, but she could sense he was lying.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“No, of course not. Stop looking at me like a doctor.”
“But that’s what I am.” She studied him. “Are you on something?” she asked.
He narrowed his eyes. “Really? You’re asking me that seriously?”
She grabbed both his hands and rubbed them. “I care about you,” she said.
He took his hand from her. “Look,” he said, “my principal’s been up my ass at work. Some parents complained that I was getting too political in class, said that wasn’t my mission. I got a warning, an actual warning, in my file, too. I was so nervous about that, I went to a doctor to get something to relax.”
Libby let go of his hands.
“I’m stressed, okay?”
She kept quiet, knowing that sometimes people revealed things if you gave them room. She’d seen it with patients, like diabetics who insisted they watched their diet and then would gradually admit they had eaten half of a cake the day before.
“The doctor said the pill was mild, that it would just calm me down, make me feel more like myself.”
Libby didn’t like the way doctors handed out tranquilizers like paper clips, something to hold you together for just a while. “What something did he give you?” she said.
“Just a little Klonopin.”
“Klonopin,” she said carefully. People got addicted to that. It could take months to get off it. “How little?” she said.
“Come on, Libby. A baby dose, .05 milligram. And I’m not abusing it. Believe me.”
She wanted to believe him. She knew that .05 milligram wasn’t a high dose, but still. She had seen patients who thought that their small doses worked pretty well, but why not just boost it up a notch, see if that worked a little better? Then they got used to that little more, and then a little more, and they got addicted. She didn’t want that happening with Ben. She wouldn’t let it.
She yearned for their relationship to turn into something solid and lasting, and she knew that drugs couldn’t be a part of it. Maybe, she told herself, it was because of all the junkies she saw in the hospital, all the people who came in with fake stories, because they wanted drugs. Too, there were all the stories Stella had told her about Simon’s drug days. “You’re sure?” she said.
“Will you stop?’ he snapped. “You want to call my doctor and talk to him?”
She did, but she knew he’d get angrier if she asked for the doctor’s name.
“I’m tired and overworked and that’s all. Don’t do this,” he warned. “Don’t muck things up for us,” and then he took her hand and kissed it, and things seemed fine again.
That night, she took him home. As soon as they got in the door, he was undoing her buttons, sliding her out of her skirt, guiding her to the bed. She kissed him, shutting her eyes, trying to be more in the moment, but she kept thinking about whether or not Ben was hooked on drugs. She would talk to him about it again, she thought, later, when they bathed in afterglow. Or maybe she’d ask one of his friends whom she’d met, friends who all seemed straight as rulers, if they thought Ben had a drug problem. She’d be so subtle. She’d make them promise not to tell Ben a thing. I’m just trying to help. I’m just concerned. It’s all done totally out of love.
“Kiss me harder,” Ben said, drawing her closer, and she did. He slammed his body closer to hers.
She did what he said. Move here. Do this. Do that. Then he made a cry and rolled over, and she lay on her back, blinking back tears, still rigid with desire.
There she was, the perfect doctor. The perfect girlfriend.
She heard his soft snore. She had to face it. She had never been good with love. Ever since she was a child, when she had learned that the heart was a lying little faucet and any minute it could shut off, and there she’d be, bereft.