Forever Sheltered (7 page)

“It’s good for your complexion,” I said. “Or is it your metabolism?”

Jenny chucked the second boot to the floor. “It’s good for what ails ya,” she said. “Unless you catch something that isn’t cured with a round of antibiotics.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t any better. One-and-done. This was something Jenny and I could agree on.

She propped her feet in little green socks on the coffee table. “So, what happened in the Land of Hot Docs? You got canned before I got a chance to be examined by any of your coworkers.”

I pulled my elastic bands from my skirt pocket and twisted my hair back into pigtails. “Turns out the paperwork mattered a lot. They want someone with an art degree AND a therapist license.”

“Gawd. They should have known that before they brought you here.” Jenny smoothed down the vinyl skirt. “What are you going to do now?”

“Find some other work. No reason to go back to that college town. And definitely not going home.” I shuddered. “I’ll manage.”

“I’ve been skipping shifts at Cool Beans, or I’d recommend you. But Corabelle can. That girl doesn’t make a mistake.”

The walls seemed to echo her words as we both realized that Corabelle had probably had the biggest life screw ups of us all. Punched a professor and got arrested. Then kicked out of her last college. Stripped of her scholarships.
 

Jenny seemed to know the direction both of our thoughts had gone. “Well, NOW she doesn’t,” she corrected. “Straight arrow, that girl.”

“I’ll take a look around,” I said. “There’s bound to be something.”

“Christmas is coming,” Jenny said. “Everybody starts hiring.”

“Some of the people at the hospital are going to be very upset that I left so suddenly,” I said.

Jenny leaned forward. “Would any of them be that doctor who asked you out for coffee?”

“He never showed up, remember?”

“Corabelle said he talked to you yesterday.”

I pulled the plant from the box and set it on the coffee table. “He and I sort of had…a moment.”

Jenny scooted to the end of the pink sofa, closer to me. “What kind of moment?”

“He got upset that I was talking to one of his patients in her room.” I could still see Darion’s angry scowl as he dragged me through the halls. “And we ended up in this empty surgery room.”

“Oh my God. Did you bone him?”

I had to laugh. “No, I didn’t bone him.” I plucked a dead leaf from the ivy.

“But something happened, or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”

I shrugged. “Maybe we got a little…involved.”

Jenny transferred from the fuzzy sofa to the old one to sit next to me. “You can’t leave out the details!”

“None of our clothes came off.” I crossed my arms over my belly. I could still feel the doctor’s hands on me.

“Not like that’s necessary,” Jenny said. She picked up the mermaid and turned it over. “Where did this come from?”

“One of my patients made it.” I resisted the urge to ask her to set it back down. The clay was so soft.

But she handled it carefully. “It’s beautiful.”

“I know. I wish I could get back in there and say good-bye to some of them. I can’t believe they just escorted me out.”

Jenny placed the mermaid back on the coffee table. “That’s not right. What’s the hot doctor going to say?”

“He saw me leaving. There’s nothing we can do. I’m just not qualified.”

Jenny flopped back on the sofa. “Uggh. That just sucks.” She lifted her wrist to examine a diamond-encrusted watch, probably another gift from her director. “It’s five o’clock somewhere. Let’s find something to drink.”

Chapter 12: Darion

I tried not to be distracted as I went on patient rounds. Everyone deserved my full attention. But I kept pausing between the rooms, picturing Tina with her box of belongings. I couldn’t believe I didn’t have something to do with this, despite what they said.

About an hour after my run-in with Tina, I spotted the custodian, Charles, mopping an empty room. I stepped inside and closed the door.

“Did you mention me and Tina to anyone?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual. “Because she just got fired.”

Charles leaned on his mop. “Not to nobody,” he said. “But her boss lady got the axe too.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why would they be firing people randomly?”

“Just sayin’ what I heard.”

I could believe that Charles, virtually invisible to people as he cleaned floors in his blue uniform, might hear things others didn’t. He’d probably seen hundreds of doctors and nurses come and go. Administrators too.

Charles straightened his ball cap. “Your Miss Tina has a lot of champions. I think she’ll be back.”

“What do you mean?”

Charles resumed his mopping. “Just saying that money talks around here. And there’s some money going to be flappin’ like a squawking bird when the word gets out that she’s gone.”

I had to get back to my rounds. If Charles was right, then something would happen. But that man was as vague as a fortune cookie. I couldn’t risk it. I knew who I had to talk to.

~*´`*~

My father’s office was a twenty-minute drive from St. Anthony’s Hospital, and he wasn’t expecting me.

I did take the precaution of calling his secretary to make sure he was in, but otherwise I felt it better to not announce my intent to see him in advance.

As I pulled into the parking garage, I girded myself for the visit. We did not have a good relationship. I rarely saw him, even on holidays, as he refused to allow me to bring Cynthia around him.

My main goal today, the same as any time we met, was to avoid an argument. He had made some terrible choices, and they had cost my mother and my sister dearly. But he wielded a lot of power, and sometimes I needed him for that.

He wasn’t someone to make your enemy, although I had tried my darnedest in the years after he left my mother and refused to acknowledge Cynthia as his.
 

The California Board of Medicine was housed eight hours away in Sacramento, but being on the board didn’t require being there. My father, and his father before him, had a lot of political influence that got them appointed to the right places.

My face reflected in the mirrored walls of the elevator looked stressed and haggard. It was hard to imagine that earlier that day I had been in the surgical suite with Tina. The last day as emotional as this had been the one when my sister was born and my father had refused to come, insisting the child wasn’t his.

He hadn’t attended my mother’s funeral either.

I had to strike these things from my mind, or the resentment would cause an emotional backlash that might hurt me while dealing with the issue at hand. Someone needed to exert some pressure on the hospital director regarding Tina’s job, and my father was the man to do it.

I had two ways to play it. I could start with self-righteous indignation over my patients’ suffering, but he’d see through that quickly. Still, applying a gloss of professional interest would grease the later conversation, which would be a lie built on truth.

My father’s weakness was his intense desire to continue a long family tradition of physicians. I was his only son. He wanted to see me comfortably set up with family and kids, whom he could also bully into becoming doctors.

So, to save Tina’s job, she would have to be exalted to the position of future mother of his grandchildren. She would never even know this behind-the-scenes action was taken on her behalf.

My father’s secretary, Martha, had been with him since I was a boy, first answering phones at the clinic where he practiced. Even when he left us for Oxford, the move that split our family apart, she had remained with him.

“Darion, so good to see you,” she said. “Let me buzz your father.”

“Thank you.”

I didn’t sit down, but stood by the windows overlooking San Diego. Winter had settled in, gray and dull. But California had its fans for a reason. Temperate weather. Beaches. I pictured Tina in other places in the city, sitting beneath the trees in Balboa Park, walking along the path by the lighthouse on Point Loma.

Good grief. I barely knew her. I remembered her angry tirade when I spoke to her yesterday. She’d probably just as soon whack me with a roll of art paper as go out on a date.

But then there was the way she’d stood on tiptoe, leaning toward me like it was a dare. And how she responded, as though we were two swimmers caught in a current.

“You can go see him now,” Martha said. “He cut his conference call short.”

I nodded curtly at her. She beamed like I was still the tyke who dug through her bottom drawer for the butterscotch candies she kept for me. She was a lovely woman who had aged well, spinsterly in a handsome way. I often wondered if there was something going on between her and my father, but even after his divorce from my mother, she never seemed to be anything more than an employee.

I turned the gold knob to my father’s office. He stood up from behind the polished mahogany desk and held out his hand for a solid shake. “To what do I owe this unexpected surprise?”

“Just wanted your opinion on an issue at St. Anthony’s.”

He settled back into his oversized leather chair and gestured for me to sit as well. “How is the new position suiting you?”

“Good. I see pediatric patients as well as the second-onset adults who were treated as children.”

“That’s a very good subspecialty. Not a lot of literature exists on the long-term
genotoxic effects of chemotherapeutic intervention in children. You could really make your mark there.”

His smile was genuine, a rare thing. I could see something of Cynthia in it, which is what always riled me when he insisted she was not his. It was obvious to anyone who looked, despite the paternity test.

“It’s a growing population.” I decided to indulge him in his fantasy that I would achieve some medical breakthrough that would give the family name a place in history.

“Has there been some resistance to your handling both adult and pediatric cases?”

“Some. But I’ve been approved for the alternate track to pediatrics.”

Another proud smile. I wanted to wipe it off his face. I hadn’t repeated all that work just to show off. He wasn’t aware that Cynthia was so ill, and that I needed the credentials to remain involved in her care. I wasn’t certified in pediatrics, but my oncology work had gotten me into St. Anthony’s specialized wing to manage both, even if Mayo had turned me down.

With Cynthia at the hospital, I was fine doing extra rounds, extra work, extra everything. My supervising doctor in pediatrics felt I would easily complete my pediatric hours inside a year if I chose to go that direction.

I could only hope Cynthia would be in remission well before then.

“I think it’s a good course. It will lend credibility to your papers on the adult second-onset work. Maybe you’ll find the treatments that prevent it.”

It was a good goal for someone else. Right now I felt in the thick of battle, and thinking about my own future was for later.

“But that’s not what you’re here for, is it?” he said. “Do you need someone to supervise this alternate track? I could contact Dr. Libson. He’s done work in that field.”

“No. It’s not that.” Here was the moment. After all that overblown talk about changing medical history, I couldn’t figure out a way to bring up saving the job of the girl I’d felt up in a dark surgical suite.

But this wasn’t about her. It was about Cynthia.

“St. Anthony’s has taken some bizarre stance on social workers and has fired several. One of them was making a huge difference with my patients.”

My father’s face was impassive and blank, a forced expression I knew well. He braced his elbows on his desk, his hands folded in front of a face that looked remarkably like mine, albeit with a hairline I was sure I could expect in twenty years.

His voice barely held back his disdain. “And you’re bringing this little staffing matter to me.”

“The director has a stick up his ass.”

“John Duffrey is a highly respected hospital director. I expect to see him on this board inside of five years.”

“He’s being shortsighted.”

“On social workers?” My father leaned back in his chair. “Leave that to HR.”

“The directive comes from him. He should be corrected.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Why are you taking on Duffrey over this?”

Time to break out the second salvo. “A woman.”

This brought out a smile. “Ah. Is the mighty bachelor finally settling down?”

“Not if she moves six states away.”
Nice touch
.

“Is she just a social worker?” He tried and failed to remove the disapproval from his voice.

Hell, I didn’t know what she was. “A therapist, actually.”

He touched his telephone, then pulled back. “She should be protected, then.”

Crap. I was talking out my ass. “Well, she’s more of a layman. The art therapy program.”

I realized my mistake immediately when his face darkened with disgust.

“I see you’re still hung up on your little drawings.”

We were back to that. He had swooped back into my life when I applied to art schools instead of going premed after high school.

“I went to medical school. I have two subspecialties. Let it rest.”

He held up his hands. “I’ll let it rest.”

But he wouldn’t. He knew my love of art came from my mother, and that the years he was gone meant that his family legacy of physicians was salvaged only by his monetary bullying.
 

“This art therapist got let go?”

I tried to salvage my argument. “Yes. Since it’s systemic and not just her, I thought it might need looking into.”

Now came the expression I knew well. Condemnation. “You realize you’re getting involved in something very serious over something very small.”

“Not small to me.” I managed to keep my voice straight and even, something he’d taught me well, but inside I knew I had lost.
 

“You’re not going to get very far in your career if you take every woman problem straight to the top. If you want this therapist to stay around, then get her to stand by your side.”

“Right, just like you did for Mom.”