Third Degree (7 page)

My feet are glued to the hallway carpet, my brain digging for answers. Then finally, after
coming up empty, I flip the lights off, head back downstairs, and walk out the front door.

Because my day has been so full of bad luck, the first person I spot at the hospital who may be of help to me is Justin. And he’s got four eager and completely green interns at his heels.

“Have you seen my dad?” I’m not in the mood for any brand of small talk.

Justin stops, glances over his shoulder at the fledglings behind him, then turns back to me. “This is Isabel Jenkins,” he explains. “We did our internship together.”

All four of them go simultaneously wide-eyed. Great. Damn hospital gossip.

“My dad. Have you seen him?” I repeat with more urgency.

Justin leans against the nurses’ station counter and grins. “How’s the University of Wherever the Hell You’re at Now? Are you making friends? Meeting any cute boys?”

“Screw you,” I say before stomping away from him and heading for the surgical board. I scan the list and search for Dr. Jenkins. He’s in OR four doing an aortic valve repair. I pace outside the operating room door for thirty minutes. I’m still in my clothes from this morning’s boot camp class, my hair a mess from getting all sweaty and then drying up with no shower. The second Dad exits the OR, he takes one look at me and knows something is wrong.

“I went home,” I tell him before he can ask.

Dad draws in a breath, his eyes already pained. He pulls the mask off his face and tosses it into a nearby garbage can. Two third-year residents I recognize exit the OR, and Dad quickly turns to them, saying, “Can you speak with the family and take them into recovery when the patient wakes up?”

Both nod, and Dad leads me to an empty stairwell, sitting down on the steps. I can’t sit, but I attempt to lean against the railing and push off seconds later, resuming my pacing.

“I was going to tell you soon,” he says, lifting his eyes from his lap and meeting my gaze. “Everything got all messed up when you didn’t get the residency at Johns Hopkins.”

“What does Johns Hopkins have to do with the
FOR SALE
sign in our yard?” Had they been planning on following me to Baltimore and then gotten in a bind because they’d already secretly committed to selling the house? I bet that’s it. It has to be.

Dad rakes a hand through his hair. “You mom and I … we’re …” He stops and swallows, his Adam’s apple popping out, and my heart speeds up, sweat forming in my palms. “We’re getting a divorce.”

“What?” My mouth is literally hanging open. My eyes dart around the stairwell. It’s like the walls are caving in slowly and soon I’ll be buried alive in this hospital. The place where all
my failures are laid out in front of me. I rub at the front of my shirt, my chest tightening again. “You can’t get divorced.… I don’t—why?”

I don’t even know if hearing why will help the crushing, world-flipping feeling I’m experiencing right now. I lean back against the wall, closing my eyes and attempting to force out the claustrophobic vibe this confined windowless space is now giving off.

“We thought you’d be in Baltimore living in your own place, creating a new life for yourself, so your mother suggested we wait,” Dad explains. “You didn’t get into the program, but then you were off to school, and we thought it was time …”

I lift my head, narrowing my eyes at him. “You were gonna let me move across the country and then what? Call me up to tell me my parents now have two addresses for holiday cards to be sent? Or were you planning to simply change your Facebook status from married to single and consider me informed?”

“Isabel,” Dad says, the rare warning tone emerging, “this isn’t about you. We all have our lives to live. You’re an adult now. It’s not like we’re putting you in the middle of a custody dispute.”

My hands are shaking. My legs, too.

He’s right. I’m an adult. I shouldn’t be freaking out like this. But it’s different for me. My parents didn’t become my parents until I was five years old. And while I know that logically it’s false, it feels like if they’re not together, then I don’t belong to them. And that means I don’t belong to anyone, considering my birth mother died when I was three months old.

This is not something I want to relive today.

There’s a huge lump in my throat, making it difficult to swallow or speak. Crying would make the lump go away, but I’m too shocked to cry. Maybe tomorrow they’ll change their minds. Maybe tomorrow Johns Hopkins will change its decision, too, and realize that it was a huge mistake to reject me.

I’ll be able to keep going if even one of those things happens.

I look at my dad again, my eyes probably pleading for help. “What now? What are your plans?”

His plans, Mom’s plans … I want him or my mom to answer ridiculous questions that shouldn’t even be crossing my mind, like
Is Mom going to change her last name back to her maiden name? If she does, will I still be Jenkins? Will I have a room at your place or Mom’s? Where are you going to live? Where am I going to live?

It’s like I’m four years old again, sitting alone in the corner of my foster family’s living room while they all squeeze onto the couch, posing for a holiday card photo—a mom, a dad, a brother, and a sister. And me, the weird little girl in the corner who has a battered copy of
A Wrinkle in Time
spread across her lap. She pretends to be completely fine with her isolation, and
if she’d said something, the family probably would have taken the photo in secret, but she doesn’t say anything. She’s learned that the quieter she is, the more independent, the longer she gets to stay in one house.

Internalizing everything is not something I’ve had to do in years, but I think I’m headed down that road again. If I don’t go back to NIU and face Marshall’s babysitting and my shared room with Kelsey, I’ll be sentencing myself to sit around for six months and contemplate how weird I am, how different, how alone in my world I am, and how I have no genetic connection to my parents. Or anyone else that’s alive, at least that I know of. And now my parents are about to sever the one connection they have—marriage. Unless I count as another binding ingredient, bridging them together?

I release a shaky breath and pull myself together before saying to my dad, “I’m gonna go see Mom at work and then head back to DeKalb and you can continue all your secret divorce plans. It’ll be much easier with me out of the way.”

Jesus Christ, I don’t want to go back. But if it’s a choice between facing Kelsey and a great deal of resident advisor humiliation or having a front-row seat to watch my family fall apart … this is the easiest decision I’ve had to make in a long time.

“Isabel,” Dad says, reaching for me before I can take off.

I shake out of his grip and turn my back to him. “Just let me deal with this my own way, okay?”

Luckily, he doesn’t argue, and I escape before I’m forced to explain my childish views on this divorce. But choosing to go back to the humiliation and failure I literally fled from this morning, rather than stay here and watch more rooms in my house become empty, is like being asked to choose which disease I’d rather have. Smallpox or whooping cough? TB or hepatitis C? Cancer or heart disease?

I could come up with lists of pros and cons and conclude with a preference, but that doesn’t change the fact that all the options suck.

Chapter 7

@IsabelJenkinsMD:
There are many things they don’t teach in medical school.

The chat with my mom went a lot like the one with my dad—me asking why but not really asking. Not really wanting to know whose fault this is, who hates whom. Logically someone has to be more wrong than the other, right?

Either way, I returned to school before dinnertime and cleaned myself up, all the while avoiding running into Kelsey or Marshall. Now Kelsey’s studying in our room and I’ve taken up residence in the common room, throwing darts for the last two hours. I’m hitting the board every time now, but nowhere near the bull’s-eye. Dr. O’Reilly, the chief of surgery, had a point when he claimed that my practical surgical skills were lacking the superiority of my textbook knowledge and rote memory.

I reposition my hips and feet, hoping the adjustment in angle will help me get closer to the center of the target. If I can’t get a dart to hit a red and yellow circle only fifteen feet away, how can I expect to accurately perform a heart transplant?

“I can help you hit the bull’s-eye.”

My aim falters at the sound of a familiar voice, and the dart goes wild, sticking itself into the white wall three feet away from the board. Marshall walks over and plucks it from the wall.

“Is that part of your RA duties?” I keep my eyes on the board, preparing to throw again. “Helping freshmen learn proper dart usage?”

“Safety
is
important.” He walks up beside me and places the loose dart into my free hand. “You get wild with these things and you could put an eye out.”

“That expression is extremely inaccurate.” I miss again, hitting the top corner of the board, outside the point zone. “Are you here to babysit me some more? Make sure I don’t create any more drama for floor two?”

He ignores my questions and drills me with one of his own. “Where were you all day? Did you go off campus?”

I hesitate, keeping my eyes on the dartboard. Part of me wants to tell him I left and then came back because the dorm sucks about two percent less than my house, but I’m not ready to say it out loud. “Shopping,” I respond without further detail.

“Well, my help has nothing to do with RA duties. Just a friendly bet between classmates.”

My arm falls to my side. “A bet?”

He shakes his head. “It’s more of an exchange. I’ll get you to hit the bull’s-eye, and you have to answer one very important question for me.”

I snort back a laugh. “Deal.”

Questions I can handle. But bull’s-eyes, not so much.

I’m a little startled when Marshall’s hands grasp my hips, turning me so that my side and not my front faces the board. “Turn your head but not your shoulders or hips.”

His breath lands on my neck, causing a shiver to run down my spine. I shake it off and pretend to roll my shoulders. This is beginning to feel a lot like Becca’s ridiculous orientation game. I feel his front brushing up against my back. His blue flip-flops slide between my feet.

Okay, talk about crossing the RA/resident line
. I think those words first and then let them spill from my lips before I have a chance to stop myself. Marshall laughs but doesn’t move away or reposition himself. He raises my left hand, the one gripping the dart, and holds my wrist. “Shoulder height, no higher, got it?”

“Uh-huh.”

He releases my wrist and allows me to throw in this new position. The dart barely makes it onto the board. “I said not to move your hips or shoulders.” His hand snakes around my waist, his fingers splayed across my stomach, holding my midsection in place. I try not to let myself get distracted by our proximity and how nice his fingers feel against my shirt. “Now try again.”

This time I get closer to the bull’s-eye, but not any closer than I’ve already gotten in the past couple of hours.

Marshall places a new dart in my hand. “Stop thinking so hard.”

Loose strands of brown hair fall from my bun into my eyes. I blow them off my forehead. “How can I do this right without thinking? I’m trying to improve my surgical skills. Thinking is kind of a must.”

“Muscle memory,” he says. “Rely on muscle memory. Thinking is for when something goes wrong.”

I glance over my shoulder at him, surprised. I’ve never really analyzed surgical skills that way before, but I’ve watched my dad perform numerous surgeries from the hospital gallery and every movement is precise, almost rhythmic. “But how can I rely on muscle memory if my muscles have never experienced hitting the bull’s-eye?”

“You’ve been training them to do something for the past two hours, so now we need to clear your head and find out what that is. Might be good muscle training, but it could also be bad training. Only one way to find out.”

How does he know that I’ve been in here for two hours?

“Practice makes permanent,” I recite. That’s Dr. Rinehart’s favorite saying.

“Exactly.” Marshall nods. “
Perfect
practice makes
perfect
.”

I stand there for a long moment, still not sure how to change the course of my actions and create the results I want. Marshall lifts my hand again, aiming the dart. “Close your eyes.” I follow directions and squeeze my eyes shut. “Take a deep breath and release it slowly.”

My lungs fill and then I let the air out, counting to five in my head. “Now open your eyes and aim.”

His fingers are still wrapped around my wrist when the dart leaves my hand and zooms across the empty space, landing not squarely in the center of the bull’s-eye but still within the tiny middle ring.

My entire body relaxes with relief as I gape at the red-winged dart, plopped into the exact place I’d wanted it to go. Finally, something has gone my way today. “That’s amazing. Thank you.”