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“Do you think he feels the same?”

I almost told her about our kiss, but decided against it at the last minute. It was personal, private, for us only, something only we would understand. Anyone else would make it something it wasn’t.

She was waiting for my answer. “I think he knows me so well and cares about me so much, that there’s hardly any room left for a romance to blossom between us. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, sort of.” She looked down and reached her hand across the table. “Let’s see what Confucius says about it!” And she handed me one of the two fortune cookies. “Here’s mine,” she said, cracking the cookie and taking out the white slip of paper. “Never overlook what’s right in front of…”

And that’s when I saw him. I glanced up and there he was in the cafeteria getting some food.

He walked behind a food kiosk, out of my line of sight.

“Liz. Liz, stop talking,” I said.

She stopped immediately, tracing the path of my eyes to the food area. “What?”

“Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I couldn’t let him get away that easy. At least I wanted…What did I want? To say hi? To talk to him? To let him see me? Yes and no to all of the above. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen, I only knew that it wasn’t my brain leading me across the room.

I stood a ways back, pretending not to see him, pretending to decide on which dessert to choose from the bakery shelf in front of me. I glanced his way, watching him pick up his food and carry it to the register.

This is so stupid
, I told myself.
Are you ten years old? In the lunch line tailing the guy you have a crush on? Too scared to say hello? Grow up and meet reality.

After the pep talk, I walked confidently toward him—with some chocolate mini donuts in my hand—ready to say hi.

“Grab some chips for me, babe?” I heard him say over his shoulder.

I stopped cold in my tracks. Had he seen me?

“I got them,” I heard from my left.

Realizing his words weren’t meant for me, I turned to see the girl who haunted my dreams.

Of course they weren’t meant for you! So, you went on a date, made out with him, he kissed your scar. That doesn’t change anything. You told him to choose whoever would make him happiest. Obviously that was her.

My sudden antagonism must have nudged her attention because she turned her head right then. If I hadn’t paused for my mind to chuck the package of donuts in her face and then grab another package to hurl at him, I could have made a clean get-away. Too late.

She grinned at the way the endearment affected me; I never was great at masking emotion. What’s more, it shouldn’t have affected me the way it did. Just last night I’d told him to be with her. So why was I standing there?
Leave them alone, Heather.

Before I could turn my head away, she put her hands on his chest and lifted to kiss him. Weird, he didn’t seem to want to kiss her back. In fact, he practically turned away. When his head shifted sideways, I thought he might have seen me. But abruptly, she compelled him back into her, and in that instant something changed. His entire demeanor altered. He kissed her back this time, really kissed her, right in front of me, in the cafeteria line, his hand at the small of her back, pulling her closer as if he wanted more.

Like an idiot, I sat there and watched their public display.

“Oh hey, Heather,” Paige turned to me and said when the kiss ended.

Like a dead fish, I didn’t move. I let her stare me down. Just then, I felt a small arm hook around mine. Liz reeled me out of the water and stood beside me, staring at Paige as if she were the worm.

I hugged her arm, both in silent thanks and to keep me upright. I couldn’t look at him. He’d made his choice. There was no point in looking anymore.

“Good to see you guys,” Paige had the gall to say.

“Not so much,” Liz piped back, pulling on my arm. “Come on, Heather.” She gave Nick a sidelong glare and said under her breath, “You both can go choke on your food.” She yanked me away as I watched Nick eye Liz, sharing the beginnings of a grin. He was amused by someone who had just told him to go choke on his food?

“There she is,” someone said from my side. “’Tis the beautiful Scottish Heather of summer.”

“Hey Bart,” I replied, not having to look to my right to know it was my skater friend from Communications class who’d joined the pleasant little cafeteria powwow. But I looked anyway just to be nice.

“We still on for tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay. See you at seven,” he said.

When we were almost out of the building, Liz whispered,
“That was good. Nick thinks you have a date now. He thinks your moving on. Let him chew on that.”

“Yeah,” I answered with zero enthusiasm.

“You know, it’s probably just a habit for Nick to call her that,” I heard her say after a while of silence.

“It’s a good habit,” I responded, my face placid. “It makes a girl feel special to be called a babe.”

Liz sighed.

“I really need to learn how to turn off my heart before it implodes. There’s got to be a switch somewhere in my body.”

“No. There’s no switch.”

“Then please don’t ever let me run into them again.”

“Okay.”

*******

Crunching numbers was one of my favorite pastimes, so Statistics class wasn’t as bad as everyone said. I actually looked forward to going, which might have had more to do with the dynamics of the class than my love for balancing budgets.

With over a hundred students, most of us were no more than a face and a student number. But in the auditorium-style room there were two steady hand raiser guys who always sat in front—there’s always at least one in every class—whose comments were pretty witty.

It was Monday morning and I was still recovering from Thursday night’s date and Friday afternoon’s kiss in the cafeteria. What bothered me most was that the harder I tried to forget, the more I thought about it. Their kiss haunted me. He haunted me. Distraction was the only sure tool.

So I tuned into the microphone and the statistic’s-laden story being told.

The instruction continued, “The chart on the overhead shows the distribution on the cost of a one night’s hospital stay, for different types of medical conditions. For overnight surgery, what’s the probability…”

I tuned out pretty fast; the numbers on the chart floored me. A one night’s hospital stay was between two and three thousand dollars?!

Because my mind was thinking mathematics, an equation formed in my head. There were three hundred sixty five days in a year, round that to three hundred for ease, at two thousand dollars minimum to be on life support each day, not to mention the cost of surgeries and the extra care I received, that’s almost a million dollars a year. Grandma V could never have afforded that. And she was gone the last year of my coma.

Who paid my medical bills?

*******

“Who paid for my coma?” I asked Doc at my appointment the following day. “I know Grandma V’s money ran out. It had to. There’s no way she could have paid all those medical expenses.”

“No, you’re right. She couldn’t. She kept on top of your bills for a year, then made arrangements with the hospital to pay monthly. We didn’t tell her, but it wasn’t near enough. And since she wasn’t your legal guardian, we weren’t obligated to follow her instructions to keep you on life support.”

“Then how did I stay on the machines for so long?”

“It was a miracle, really. The hospital was up for some medical research grants. A short proposal was submitted to the board on your behalf, with analysis on your brain and heart readings. Because we suspected you a PRS coma patient, we thought the board would grant the funds to keep sustaining your life. We were right.

“To answer your question, the government paid.”

The government paid to save my life. I owed the government? I could make a good joke out of that one, I teased with myself. But on to more important questions. “Who wrote the proposal?”

One of my colleagues. You met him while in the hospital, when you came to from your coma. His name is Bruce Westwood. He’s a brain surgeon, a darn good one, performed your surgery after the accident and then monitored your brain activity for the length of your coma.”

“I think I remember him. He was in the hospital room when I first woke up.”

“Taking your brain readings, yes.”

“So, he wrote the proposal?”

“His research was included in the proposal.” Doc rushed through his next comment. “I gathered all the findings and sent them off to the board. But if I hadn’t, he would have.”

My first thought was: So Nick was right when he’d said we needed each other sometimes and that life would suck if we didn’t. It definitely would have sucked had Doc not “gathered all the findings”.

My second thought was: “Doc, do you realize you saved my life?” I left the couch to hug him, something I’d wanted to do for a long time, but had refrained since I knew it would make him uncomfortable. I didn’t care anymore.

“You don’t need to thank me,” he said, waiting until I was done hugging him to finish talking. “I save people’s lives all the time. It’s what I went to school for. And in all honesty, you owe your life to Dr. Westwood, not me. He saved you. And he was extremely faithful in his follow-up with you. I’d say if you’re going to thank someone, it should be him.”

“Both of you saved me.” I loved doctors. “Do you think it would be too much to ask to see him? I’d like to thank him too, in person.”

“Not at all. In fact, I was with him not a half hour ago, seeing to another one of his surgery patients. I’ll walk you to his office. If we’re lucky, we’ll catch him there.”

I recognized him not by face, but by the large distinguished portrait painting on the far wall of his office, lit by a small spotlight. While his head was down seeing to the papers on his large mahogany desk, I studied the rest of his office. Two standing lamps with leather shades stood in each corner, giving off the only light in the room, and the dark brown walls added to the dimness. Behind the desk, shelves were lined with books, hundreds of large volumes, some bound in leather, others bound in more modern materials. His desk was mostly bare save two or three opened manila folders and a digital picture frame. The green hospital scrubs he wore clashed against his surroundings, but that didn’t take away from the affluent, VIP feel of the room.

Doc knocked on the open door and Dr. Westwood’s eyes rose.

“Excuse me, Bruce, I have someone who would like to talk to you.”

“Mark,” he said, “Come in.”

It was his voice that I remembered most from a few months ago, the first real voice that woke me from my coma: somber and serious, and conflicted with his gentler words. Doc waved me in and nodded his head in an encouraging, invisible shove. Then he mentioned something about seeing me next month, said his goodbye, and closed the office door behind him.

The office was uncomfortably quiet. Too quiet.

“Hi,” I said.

“Have a seat.” He folded a file closed and carefully slid it to the side of his desk. “How may I help you?”

How stressful to perform brain surgery each day. No wonder he carried himself slowly and meticulously, people’s lives were at stake. Instant admiration was one of my few feelings toward him. Another was respect. A third was how handsome he was for an older man, even with his pepper colored hair and pronounced nose and chin. And a fourth was spoken aloud.

“I wanted to thank you for saving my life. Doc told me…” I cleared my throat, “Doctor Adams told me that you performed my brain surgery three years ago.” I didn’t know why my voice shook; I wasn’t the type to be easily intimidated. “Doctor Adams also told me you monitored my brain while I was in my coma. And then helped write the proposal to fund my life support.”

His eyebrows lifted a fraction. “Ms. Robbins, yes. We referred to you as the miracle girl.”

A small laugh came out. “Yeah, Doctor Adams calls me that all the time.” My head bent down to gather my thoughts and I watched a few of the pictures flash on and off the screen of his digital picture frame; family pictures, I noticed absently. “I’m not really sure what to say.” I kept my eyes on the digital picture screen to gather my thoughts, finally looking up to make eye contact. “How do you thank someone for saving your life?”

“I appreciate that, sweetheart. I take my work very seriously…”

I wanted to hear him, but the pictures from the digital frame kept tugging on my eyes, embarrassingly enough.

And then his words drowned out as a cold, prickly feeling crept down my spine.

Automatically, my eyes centered on the frame, and the pictures inside it. One after another, pictures and people digitized in and out of the screen, scenes that left me speechless. The frame made its way to my hands and I found my voice. “How do you know them?” I turned the screen toward him.

“That’s my daughter. And her fiancé.”

His words tweaked my heart as I stared forward and saw Paige and Nick, the cop that pulled us over, her upscale family.