Four Chambers: Power of the Matchmaker Read online

  I was surprised Everett knew so much about the kids—even the ones outside of cardiology.

  Hazel frowned as we left the room of a little boy with leukemia. “What are the chances of him getting well?”

  Everett was the one who answered. “It would be better if he believed in himself a little more—if he felt hope in his circumstances, instead of fear.”

  I felt a little frustration with his words. We provided comfort and reassurance as often as we provided real medical care. “I just wish that hope was something you could wrap up in shiny paper and tie off with a bow. I wish hope was as easy to give as a stuffed bear.”

  Everett jumped for a balloon string that belonged to a blue escapee balloon. He reeled it in and then tried to hand it off to me. When I refused to take it, he bit into the bottom of the latex and sucked in the helium. “Andra gives away hope all the time. She is the queen hope fairy! All hail, Queen Hope Fairy!”

  Hazel and I both laughed at his high-pitched helium voice.

  “Seriously, though,” he said, his helium all spent and his voice normal again. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could hand the kids a magic mirror that showed them a picture of themselves all grown up and doing the thing they want most to do with their lives and then we could tell them, ‘See! This is who you get to be when you grow up. You have stuff to live for, so stop wallowing and start living!’”

  I halted and put my hand on the wall to steady the sudden dizziness of excitement. “Everett! You’re brilliant!”

  Both he and Hazel also stopped. They stared at me.

  “Don’t you see? We can do that! Well . . . we can’t, but Hazel can! What if Hazel made awesome heirloom hand mirrors, the kind that look like something out of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast? And what if the face of the mirror is a canvas of some sort? We could hire an artist to come in and paint each child as a grown up doing what they want most to do with their lives? Any time they felt worried or nervous or whatever, they could just look in their magic mirror and see their futures.”

  Hazel picked up the excited vibe immediately. “That is a great idea! And it has a marketable potential too . . . granted, a little more generic and less personalized. Obviously we couldn’t do hand-done original paintings, but we could do a digital sort of version that would be personalized enough to make parents want it!”

  Everett had his one eyebrow raised. “Do you have any idea how much money it would cost to have hand painted originals on wooden mirrors?”

  “Everett, stop being practical.” Hazel hushed him with a wave of her hand. “We’re brainstorming here. And we already said we’d do a digital version.”

  “Besides, Everest without an S. The Grandmother Foundation is financially secure for a while. I think we could do it.”

  Hazel grabbed my hand. “Want me to get started in research and development to see about costs and financial feasibility?”

  “Yes!” I squeezed her hand and we started jumping and making hushed squeals in the hallway.

  Everett clapped. “And this works out perfectly! Andra can go into business with you as a co-creator of toys, and I can take the surgeon job.”

  I stopped jumping, my stomach falling into my toes with the anger that took its place in my midsection. Hazel stopped jumping as well. She looked like she might throw a punch at him for messing up the moment.

  I turned and smiled sweetly. “Aw, Everett . . . screw you very much for that vote of confidence. I am absolutely not backing out of the surgeon position, so don’t you dare go getting comfortable. I fully plan on being a surgeon in this hospital.”

  I turned and gave Hazel a hug. “Thanks for the nice day.” I walked off down the hall the opposite way without saying goodbye to Everett.

  I heard a loud “Ow! Hazel!” from Everett so I figured she must have let that punch fly. I didn’t care. How dare he say that to me? How dare he minimize me in that way so he could scoot me conveniently to the side and take the job I’d worked my whole life for?

  I hoped Hazel left a bruise on him.

  And I had the answer to my earlier question. Everett’s mother was the sort of woman to hire the hit man and remove her competition once and for all. My mom was the sort of woman to flirt her way into marriage by giving up the competition. And me?

  I was the sort of woman who fought to win.

  Chapter Twenty

  He tried to apologize, following me around all the next day with phrases like, “I was only kidding around” and “You know I think you’ve got a better chance than I do; I was just blowing off steam” and “Haven’t you ever said something stupid you wish you hadn’t said before?”

  To the last question, I said, “Yes,” and shut my office door in his face. I frowned once inside the privacy of my office. The truth was that I had a pretty good chance at the job, probably better than he did, and a lot of that chance stemmed from the fact that Everett had called his sister and given me a day to show off for admin.

  The race had been pretty neck and neck until yesterday, but now I swelled with a confidence I didn’t really deserve because I hadn’t really earned it. Everett had earned it for me.

  That fact really bothered me.

  Because I was mad at Everett. Because I didn’t like him very much at the moment. Because I actually did care about him even while not liking him. Because he had really hurt my feelings.

  Again.

  “How many times am I going to have to forgive this guy for being a mess?” I asked myself while washing my hands in the ladies room.

  “As many times as he is a mess.”

  I jumped and ended up splashing water all over the mirror. “Miss Pearl! You scared me!”

  “So the mirror would indicate. Having trouble with Dr. Covington?”

  “No,” I lied and pulled paper towels from the dispenser to wipe the mirror down.

  “Go easy on the boy. It's a hard thing for him too.” She watched me scrub streaks into the mirrors. “I’ve heard it said you should love someone when they least deserve it, because that’s when they need your love the most.”

  “Chinese proverb?”

  “No. Swedish.”

  The unexpected comment made me laugh outright. For being in an uptight admin position, Miss Pearl was okay. Complaining about the guy she could very well choose over me would be like kissing a viper and expecting not to get bitten. Complaining to anyone in management always made the complainer look bad and never solved anything. So I dropped the subject of Everett entirely.

  “You did very well yesterday with the TV and cameras and interviews. And your ideas to make the lives of these children emotionally better are good ideas. I’m glad you’ve worked so hard to be a doctor. This hospital is so obviously a place where you belong. But don’t belong so well that you give up the other place where you belong even more.”

  Some other women entered the bathroom and Miss Pearl slipped out while I greeted them. I scowled at my streaked reflection in the mirror. I understood why she wanted her doctors to get along. Grumbling physicians made a bad environment for everyone, including their patients.

  But understanding why she wanted us to get along and wanting to actually get along were not the same thing.

  Everett and I became cool acquaintances after I refused to accept his apology. He apparently didn’t like getting a door slammed in his face, but I didn’t like him acting like a tool with me, so we were even. The fact remains that he wouldn’t have said he wanted me out of the way so he could be promoted if he hadn’t been really thinking it.

  And sure, I wanted the position too, but at least I had the decency to feel conflicted about it. At least, I had felt conflicted. From the point I shut the door in his face, all the conflict disappeared. He was my competition only. And he was toast.

  Whereas we’d previously sat together at staff meetings, we now chose places opposite each other. Whereas we’d often eaten lunch together before, I’d taken to picking my food up and eating it in my office while I studied up on problems
my patients dealt with so I could better help them. Whereas, we before had joked and bantered, we were now civil to the point of frostbite.

  If one of the surgeons praised Everett for working such long hours, I stayed even longer the next day, even if I had nothing to actually do. If they mentioned he was patient with the nurses, I smiled until my cheeks hurt and until Becca finally told me I looked like a creeper. If his patients left smiling, mine left with the entire sucker bowl and the whole roll of Disney stickers. If Everett was doing it, I was right there working to do it better.

  Everett’s actions were mirrors of my own. Praise showered on me for any little thing would be the thing Everett worked on next. Anytime the surgeons said anything, Everett and I dashed to outmaneuver the other.

  Someone—probably Miss Pearl—put us on opposing schedules to relieve some of the tension in the building. Everett ended up working more nights and I ended up working more weekends.

  Admin couldn’t be blamed for the schedule shifts, but the new adjustments made it more time consuming to keep up with Everett because then I had to sleuth around to find out all the great things he did, so I could do them better.

  The whole process had grown quite tedious.

  Becca didn’t even bother to hide her amusement over the whole thing. After returning from one such circus event where I was helping with some new medical students who sang praises to Everett’s name any time he was mentioned, she shook her blonde curly head at me. “You are some kind of pathetic, you know that?”

  “I am horribly aware of that fact, yes.” I sat in her chair and rested my forehead on her desk. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this kind of pace up.”

  “Hmph. While I love how efficiently everything runs with the two of you one-upping each other, I’m not really interested in watching you break, honey. Why not call it a truce?”

  “With Everett? No. Never. Not happening. You know our history.”

  “History schmistory. You told me he was your best kiss.”

  “He also was involved in me losing my scholarship.”

  “You know that was your fault.”

  I stared at the ground with the swirly patterns in the carpeted area under her desk and considered the whole situation. “Actually, no. It’s his fault. He was the one who got the paint can from my friend who was trying to keep me from painting Greg’s truck. If he hadn’t done that, I would have gone home and forgotten the whole thing.”

  I heard her blow a raspberry. “But who bought the paint can?”

  Curse her logic.

  “Well,” I said, knowing I had ammunition to play the everything-is-Everett’s-fault game all day. “He stole the apartment I’d been waiting for over a year to move into. That was totally him.”

  “Did he know you wanted it?” She tugged at a paper that was on her desk and also under my head so that it jerked out from under my forehead. “You’re getting my paperwork oily from your moisturizer.” Her voice had a scowl to it.

  “Sorry.” I thought about my situation with Everett and tried one last time to prove to Becca that he was my nemesis. “He never called after my grandma died.”

  She hesitated before she said, “Okay, I’ll give you that one. But only that one. I just don’t like seeing you like this. You were happier when you liked him. You guys went from good friends to claws and teeth and all for what? A job?”

  “It’s not just a job. It’s the job. The thing I’ve worked for from the beginning, and he’s trying to take it away from me!”

  Becca smirked. “You do realize that the whole world is not all about you, right? This job is also the thing he’s worked for from the beginning. Only for him, you’re the one stealing the prize.”

  I tilted my head so I could look at her without lifting my forehead from her desk. “Careful. Or I won’t like you anymore either.”

  She laughed. “I’m just saying a little perspective might help you here with Hot-Doc.”

  That was Everett’s nickname throughout most of the female staff. I tried not to be irritated by the blatant sighing that followed him through the halls.

  “I just think you should let this whole dispute go. You’re too competitive for your own good. I get ambition, I really do, but you and Hot-Doc are taking it all to an unhealthy level.”

  “Are we talking about Hot-Doc?”

  I lifted my head to see the newcomer. Camille blinked in surprise at me. “Oh . . . hi, Dr. Stone. I didn’t know you were back there.”

  She shot a look of alarm to Becca, who rolled her eyes. “You’re not in trouble, Camille. Dr. Stone knows everyone calls him that.”

  Camille looked suspicious. “And you’re okay with that?”

  I shrugged. “Why would I care?”

  Camille shrugged as well, her tiny shoulders shifting under the thin cloth of her scrubs. “I thought you two were . . .”

  With serious effort, I did not growl at the girl. “We’re not.”

  She brightened considerably. “Oh! Then maybe you won’t mind if I ask him to go clubbing with me. I hadn’t asked because I really thought you two were . . . but you’re not. That’s awesome.”

  She scampered away looking altogether too pleased with life.

  I leaned back in Becca’s chair and glared at Camille’s retreating back. “If he accepts her offer, it will prove he is beyond stupid and will justify me killing him in his sleep.”

  Becca smirked at me and tucked her pen in her hair behind her ear. “You wouldn’t say that if you didn’t like him.”

  “Yes, I would. Because I don’t like him, and I did say it, so clearly you’re wrong. I guess I should just be glad it wasn’t Miss Pearl catching me diss on Everett. She would not like that one bit.”

  “Where has that woman been lately anyway?” Becca asked, looking around as if Miss Pearl would pop up out from under her desk, which, with Miss Pearl, the possibility existed.

  “She said she had other people to take care of since business here was taking so much longer than she’d expected.”

  “No thanks to you and your cold war with Hot-Doc.”

  I shoved out of the chair. “I’m going to go check in on Max. Someone said he’s not doing so well.”

  “Or you’re checking on him because you’re trying to escape hearing the truth from me.”

  I didn’t respond, so Becca smirked at me as I rounded the desk to the front counter, and as I rolled my eyes at her, and probably as I walked away.

  I really despised that girl’s smirk.

  Visiting Max turned out to be my best idea of the day. His dark hair stuck out in all directions from his head since he was stuck in a hospital bed, but the mussy hair managed to make him look cute instead of orphaned like it did some of the kids staying with us.

  “I hear you’re having a birthday soon,” I said to him when he looked up from the Lego set spread out over the sheets in front of him.

  His demeanor shifted from focused to excited. “I do! I’ll be eight! In just six days!”

  “Eight is so old.” I pulled up his chart on my iPad. “I’m going to have to buy you a cane and a set of false teeth.”

  “Better get you some old lady diapers while you’re at it, cause I’m not as old as you!” he shot back with a grin so wide that it revealed the gap of his last missing tooth in the back.

  I laughed. “But you will be. Someday, you will be as old as me and you’ll need diapers, too.”

  “If I live forever and you live forever, then I will never be as old as you because you were born first.” The kid was born with a quick tongue and a sharp wit. He was seriously the highlight of my day every day. He was on the donor list. The VADs had worked for him for a while so he could stay home and live his life like normal, but they’d become less effective as time went on, and now he was back in the hospital.

  Max wasn’t my patient, but we interacted enough to know we were good buddies. He was among the first kids who got a Second Childhood toy. When he’d been readmitted to the hospital, I was
gratified to see he’d brought his big stuffed dinosaur with him, and it never left his side.

  Max was Dr. Mendenhall’s patient. But Dr. Mendenhall included both Everett and me in the details of the boy’s progress, keeping us trained on the tough cases—the ones that were rare and much more complicated.

  “What are your plans for your big birthday?”

  “I’m gonna have a party here in my room. My mom’s bringing my friends over and we’ll have cake and ice cream and stuff.”

  I nodded and tried not to frown at his information on my screen. “Sounds great, buddy, but only if I’m invited.”

  He scrunched his face up in what I was sure he meant to look like extreme skepticism. “Are you cool enough to come to my party?”

  I sat on his bed, picked up some Legos, and built a little tower of blue and red. “I dunno. Are you cool enough to invite me?”

  “I guess you’re invited, but don’t go wearing any lame party hats. I already told my mom, no lame party hats.” He nodded emphatically as if to convince me.

  Which meant I was totally going to wear a lame party hat. I’d have to go to a party store to find the lamest one available. I’d get one for Max as well. Maybe I’d get him a feather boa too—just for laughs. I stuck the tower I’d made on top of what look like a landing pad for the space ships he’d been building. “Control tower,” I explained as I stood.

  He didn’t remove the tower, which had to mean he didn’t think the addition to his creation to be completely unworthy.

  “Do you need anything?” I asked him, looking around the room and his shelf filled with books and games and his walls with posters featuring characters from an X Box game I wasn’t familiar with. “I can sneak you some extra Jell-O or pudding or some green beans since I know they’re your favorite.”

  “I’ll get you some shrimp on a stick since that’s your favorite,” he shot back.