I immediately pulled up my straps, crossed my arms, and leaned away from him. "What."
He tried to reach for me. "It's not that bad."
"Just tell me, Ryan."
He ran his hands through his hair. "Bad timing, I know."
I was the master (mistress?) of bad timing. I waited.
"I just wanted you to know I'm very..." He exhaled. "...interested in you. I didn't want to get carried away."
"Uh huh."
"Because I'm not—I mean, this time I really am waiting for marriage."
It took a second for my lust fog to dissipate, but from the look in his dark brown eyes, he meant it. I stopped to calculate what this meant.
He was saying no.
He was saving himself.
Holy crap.
"It's a decision I made in the last two years. It's not personal."
They say that when you do a guy and he turns gay, it has nothing to do with you. That's never happened to me. (Yet. With an n of two.)
So what does it mean if you do a guy and he swears off premarital sex? I couldn't see it as a compliment, but I struggled to act mature about it. I twisted my legs to the side, away from him, and said, "Thank you for telling me."
He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. "Should've kept my mouth shut, right?"
I sighed and shook my head. "I'd rather know."
He touched my hair. I tensed, but let him. He said, "The last thing I want to do is hurt you. I just couldn't figure out how to tell you before."
I exhaled. I couldn't fault him on that one. It seemed like I was always running off. Still, it's kind of presumptuous to tug on your ex's sleeve and say, Guess what? I'm a born-again virgin!
I tried to smile while I adjusted my top and repeated, "Thanks for telling me."
"Nah. I screwed the pooch on this one."
I had to laugh. Sometimes he surprised me.
"Because I really did want to see you and, uh..." His eyes flickered, but he didn't look it away. "Take it from there."
I nodded. In his own way, Ryan was as confused as I was.
"Do you want me to go?"
I thought about it and shook my head.
"We could just play Cranium or something."
I managed to laugh.
***
Two hours later, I awoke on the futon, my legs tangled with his, my head tucked under his shoulder, breathing his skin, with my contact lenses cemented to my eyeballs.
I blinked, trying to force tears into my eyes, and turned my chin to look at Ryan. We'd forgotten to pull the blind. The streetlamp light, filtered through the leaves of the trees in the front yard, spilled over both of us.
He wasn't sleeping. He was wide awake and looking back at me. He stroked my hair.
I kissed the tender skin under his arm and closed my eyes again.
***
The next morning, I was running late, but I stopped when I caught the eye of a patient smoking in the front circle outside the hospital. She waved at me, shaking out her long, dark hair.
Wait. That wasn't a patient. That was Reena Schuster's sister, Wendy.
"Hi," I said. "How are you doing?"
She shrugged. "Been better."
"Yeah." I held my breath against the smoke.
Her eyes laughed at me while she held her cigarette in the air. "You going to give me a lecture?"
I shook my head. "You know the drill. And now's not an easy time to quit. How's Reena doing?"
Her chin jerked away from me. She took a quick, angry puff. "They don't tell you anything."
Automatically, I reached for her arm, but stopped before I made contact. "I'll drop by and see if I can translate for you."
She sucked on the smoke and shrugged, but after a minute, she nodded. "Thanks."
So before lunch, instead of hitting the resident's lounge or the library, I hustled back to the ICU.
Good timing. Stan was clicking through an online an article from the New England Journal. I dropped in the chair beside him.
He barely glanced away from the screen. "Have you picked out your article for journal club? You're presenting soon."
"Um, no."
"This is a good one on hypertension in pregnancy. I suggest avoiding the one on horse-versus-rabbit antithymocyte globulin, unless you want to confuse everybody."
"Good call." I cleared my throat. "I was just wondering how Reena Schuster was doing."
He clicked on the print icon. "So what else is new."
Dr. Wharton passed behind Stan's left shoulder with an old chart tucked under his arm. Dr. Wharton said, "I've never seen such a dedicated envoy from psychiatry."
I forced a smile. Wendy and her mother were watching from Reena's bedside. "Just call me an army of one."
"Your timing is fortuitous," said Dr. Wharton, sitting down with his chart. His beeper went off.
I looked at Stan. He shrugged and said, "You're welcome to check her out yourself. Her vitals are almost normal. She doesn't have a fever anymore, her renal function is down to one-ninety, and her tone isn't as rigid."
"She has inconsistent tone, it seems," Dr. Wharton put in as he stabbed a number into the telephone.
I raised my eyebrows.
Stan said, "Check her neuro vitals. Sometimes the nurses still find her rigid, and sometimes they don't. Basically, if you sneak up on her and bend her ankle, it's flexible, but then it stiffens up, and so does the rest of her body."
"O-kay. I assume she's not in a coma anymore?" I craned my neck, but from where I sat, Reena was just a bundle under the blankets.
"I suspect her EEG will prove that her state is psychogenic," said Dr. Wharton, before turning to the phone. "Joe? Have you seen the patient on 5 South?"
I lowered my voice to Stan. "You think she's faking NMS?"
"No. She has it, or had it. But we think she's exaggerating the symptoms. She doesn't want to come out of the ICU." He rolled his eyes. "So, back to you, buckaroo."
"You're putting her on the ward anyway?"
"As soon as they free up a bed. Which better be soon, because there's a GI bleed in emerg."
"But you already got your a psych consult, right? What did they say?"
"Not a hell of a lot. You can read the consult."
Officially, Reena wasn't mine anymore. They keep the residents in the emerg and the medical students on the psych ward as well as the emerg. The staff psychiatrists do the consults on other services during the day. But I couldn't let this one pass. "Could you get her old psych charts?"
"Why would we do that?"
"Humor me. You've got a unit coordinator to help you, and I bet her mom would sign the consent."
Stan narrowed his eyes. "How far back do you want me to go?"
"Say, spring 2003?"
"And why would I do that for a patient who's about fifteen seconds away from leaving my service?"
I paused to think. "I'll bring you a bagel."
"A real one. Not one of those soft, puffy ones from the grocery store. We call those Christian bagels."
I laughed. We shook on it. And I went to see Reena.
Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing on her own. Her colour was better, in that she was pale, but not morbidly so. Her IV bag was half-full. No more O2 sat. She was even wearing socks, red argyle ones. Funny how real clothes or a bedspread from home makes a difference. She was definitely being suited-up for the ward.
"Hi," I said to Wendy and her foster mom.
Wendy nodded. Mrs. Schuster said, "Hello, Doctor."
"Hi, Reena." Did her eyelids tighten for a moment before deliberately smoothing out? Or was that just Stan and Dr. Wharton in my head? I decided to talk as if she could hear me. "You seem to be getting better."
Reena's breath hitched for a second. I didn't imagine that.
I turned to page through the chart at her bedside. As described, her vitals and creatinine had improved. Then I asked Wendy. "Could you tell me again what happened? How did she end up here?"
She looked at her mom. Mrs. Schuster said, "She took pills, doctor. I don't know why. Everything was going so well."
So well that she came to the emergency room twice before fleeing me? I eyeballed Wendy, who avoided my gaze. I asked, "Who called 911?"
"My daughter." Mrs. Schuster wrapped her arm around Wendy's waist. "Thank God. I don't know what I would have done otherwise. Losing one of my girls..."
"You're not going to lose us, Ma," Wendy muttered, her mouth now safely tucked into her mom's shoulder.
"Maybe not now. But you never know. She's not out of the woods yet." Mrs. Schuster released her and yanked some tissues out of her purse, carefully dabbing her eyes. She'd taken the time to apply mascara and eyeliner today.
"How did you find her?" I asked Wendy.
Another pause. I glanced at Reena. She appeared motionless, but Wendy drew back from her mother, followed my gaze and wrapped her arms around her waist without answering.
Mrs. Schuster said, "Thank goodness they were both home. I think Wendy heard her hit the floor. Isn't that right, love? I wish I'd been the one to find her. I'd rather walk through hell than put one of my girls through it. I've already been through hell so many times, what's one more?"
I smiled sympathetically and tried to steer the conversation back. "Yes, I can see how that—"
"You have no idea. I can see it from your face. You're young. Maybe even as young as Wendy, here, I don't know. It's hard to tell." She scanned my face. I braced myself for the "with you Orientals" part, but she managed to bite that back. "I hope you never have to go through what I've gone through. Reena, here, in and out of hospitals since she was thirteen. My husband died of a heart attack in my arms. Not one, but both my girls telling me they're gay! What are the chances! Is it contagious?"
"Ma." Wendy's fists bunched up.
Mrs. Schuster barely paused, but she turned her head and waved at her daughter's bed. "And now Reena here, on the brink of death. I tell you, sometimes I wonder how much I need to be tested."
"I think we all feel like that sometimes." I was thinking of Mrs. Lee. Two different mothers, two different women grieving.
Mrs. Schuster looked right at me. "Can you help my daughter?"
"I'd like to. She, ah, didn't feel comfortable seeing me." To my surprise, I saw Wendy's neck flush as she averted her eyes from me yet again. What did she have to be embarrassed about?
Maybe she knew why Reena hated me. That put me off my game for a second, but I steeled myself. Mrs. Schuster was asking me for help, even if her two daughters were not. "I'm only rotating through psychiatry. I wonder, though, if we could do some family counseling in one of my outpatient clinics." Even as I spoke, my brain was shrieking, what are you doing? Your plate is so full, it's already toppled to the floor! Reena hates you! Her foster sister hates you! Why would you counsel them?
Wendy's eyes widened, but Mrs. Schuster was already saying, "Thank you, doctor. I like you a lot better than that other head-shrinker. Give me your card."