Temporary Doctor, Surprise Father

Jan finally had a chance to take her dinner break around eight p.m. She notified Carmen and headed for the nurses’ lounge. Unable to wait one more second to read the special letter, she dug it out of her pocket and ripped it open. This time every year, as promised, the updated letter arrived.

A shining smile from Meghan Jean greeted her inside the envelope. She’d be twelve and a half now, and in seventh grade. Long dark brown French braids rested on her bony shoulders. A handful of freckles were sprinkled across her nose, a nose very much like Jan’s. But the eyes were definitely placed and shaped like her father’s, except their color was blue…like hers.

Dear January,

We’re reporting in on this year’s progress with our daughter. Meghan has joined the track team and also loves to dance. She scored in the top ten percent for her annual scholastic testing and her teachers want to place her in some gifted classes. It seems that out of the blue she has discovered a love of art, and wants to take painting classes. She continues to be a warm and loving girl with a natural excitement and curiosity for life even though puberty is fast approaching. Meghan absolutely hates wearing braces, but we’ve discovered clear wires and sometimes she likes to have bright blue ones applied just for fun. As you know, she’s quite the ham and keeps Daryl and me laughing. We promised her a Disney World vacation this year and she can barely go to sleep each night from thinking about it.

On another note, something new has cropped up in school. Meghan’s science class is studying genetics and genealogy and she is suddenly bursting with questions about her birth parents. Would it be okay for us to tell her a bit more about you? We understand that you never named the father, but if there is any information whatsoever you can provide, we’d appreciate it.

As always, Daryl and I are so grateful to you for your unselfish act and want you to know we treat our daughter as the precious gift she is. We pray that life is treating you well.

All the best,

The Williams

The last part of the letter went blurry. Had it been an unselfish act? Could giving her daughter away to strangers in an open adoption be considered anything less than an easy way out for a frightened seventeen-year-old? Sure, they had been well screened, willing and anxious to become parents, but they’d solved her “problem” and life had never been the same since.

She glanced again at the school picture, and choked back her tears.

The door flew open behind her. “Apparently only the nurses keep fresh coffee in the pot,” Beck said.

Jan startled, dropping the letter, and the picture went flying through the air to the floor. She scrambled to reach it before Beck could see, but he was just as quick.

She leaned. He knelt. They almost bumped heads. They looked into each other’s eyes. Fear of being found out sent a rocket fueled with adrenaline through her chest. His hand rested on top of hers on the picture on the floor.

CHAPTER TWO

“SO HOW’VE you been, January?” Beck asked, glancing up from the overturned picture on the floor and staring deep into her eyes.

Jan glanced into Beck’s challenging glare and willed herself not to shake. She swallowed a hard lump and narrowed her gaze, then reverted to old, well-practiced techniques of evasion.

“I’ve been fantastical, Beck. And you?” She gingerly retrieved the photograph of her daughter from the floor and slipped it back inside her pocket before he had a chance to see it.

“Outstanding. I’ve been outstanding.”

Was his point to let her know how well he’d gotten along in life without her? To point out that leaving her behind and joining the army had made him “all that he could be” like the ad on the military poster said? Or was he lying through his teeth, like she was?

He seemed on the verge of saying something more.

Before Jan could begin to decipher the multitude of expressions in his eyes, Carmen appeared in the doorway.

“Here you are. I’ve got good news,” she said, looking toward Beck. “Gavin has arranged for you to scrub in with the gunshot wound. You’d better high-tail it up there before anyone changes their mind.”

“Fantastical,” he said, slanting a glance Jan’s way. A grim look that promised they hadn’t even begun to broach the subject foremost on their minds. Then Beck swept out of the tiny room without looking back, leaving a gust of air that seemed to strangle her instead of offer relief.

Carmen leaned against the door frame, cocking a brow. “Did he just say ‘fantastical’?”

Jan nodded solemnly.

“He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?” Carmen continued.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Then those glasses are the wrong prescription. Did I interrupt something?”

“Not at all. He was just looking for a decent cup of coffee, and, being a smart guy, knew to come to the nurses’ lounge.” She feigned a carefree smile, gathered her letter and lunch items and hustled back to work.

* * *

The next day, her guilty conscience wouldn’t let her call in sick to work. Sure, her nose was congested, but she wasn’t running a fever and she could sneeze into the crook of her elbow on the job if needed. If her condition warranted it, she’d don a mask. But knowing the glut of emergencies on weekends, not to mention the people without health insurance who used the ED as their doctor’s office on their days off, she couldn’t leave Carmen short a nurse for a shift.

She’d tried all night long not to recall the challenge in Beck’s glare when he’d asked how she’d been. Not answering his calls and letters when he’d shipped out for bootcamp had been the second-hardest thing she’d ever had to do. Even with her heart aching for the boy she’d loved since tenth grade, nothing had compared with the pain of giving up their child for adoption.

That was all in the past now. They were grown-ups with careers and personal commitments. She assumed Beck had responsibilities, being both a medic in the National Guard and on the SWAT team. She could only imagine the different countries he’d been sent to in the last thirteen years, and she’d never even ventured out of California.

She hadn’t noticed a wedding ring on his hand when he’d reached for the picture in the nurses’ lounge. Why did that somehow garner a feeling of relief?

Jan shook her head, popped a twelve-hour antihistamine, and dressed for work.

On the drive to Mercy Hospital, she turned on the radio and heard the two o’clock news. There had been a car chase which had turned into a hostage situation and from there escalated into a stand-off in an apartment building in the Wilshire area of Los Angeles. Her mind shot to Beck. Would he be called in with the SWAT team to handle this explosive situation? Anxiety welled up, as if a tight squeezing harness was wrapped around her chest, with the knowledge he could be in harm’s way. But that was the life he’d chosen for himself, and he was no longer her business.

When she arrived at work to an already hopping emergency department, there was no sign of Beck. She pondered the hostage situation and Beck’s possible involvement. The thought that he was otherwise engaged and that she might not have to face him in the ER that night didn’t soothe her mounted concern in the least.

* * *

A wild and crazy Saturday night in the emergency department had postponed Jan’s meal break until nine p.m. The inundated ER felt stifling and she went outside for fresh air. She found a secluded bench and was unwrapping her sandwich for dinner when the loud rumble of a motorcycle rolling into the parking lot broke the silence. The rider gave one last rev of the engine, parked, and threw his leg over the machine as if he were a wrangler, a helmet in place of a cowboy hat.

The leather jacket and the swagger unmistakably belonged to Beck. Apparently he still preferred motorcycles to cars. What was he doing here? She hadn’t had time to catch the news and didn’t know whether the earlier incident had been resolved or not but, even so, why would he report to the ED after such an intense afternoon and evening?

A quick flash of the undaunted guy she’d once dated appeared before her. He’d been pegged as a troublemaker since grammar school and had never lived his reputation down. He’d played along and acted the role of bad boy all through high school, but Jan had known the softer, more playful side of him. They’d laughed together just as much as they’d kissed or argued. She’d never understood why he’d let people think so little of him, expecting the worse and assuming when anything had gone wrong that he’d been at the core of it.

They’d met in an open-grade art class when she had been a sophomore and he a junior, and had bonded over painting delicate eggshells. He’d helped her pass algebra and walked her through her science experiments whenever she’d been confused. He’d been the guy to hold her until her tears had dried after her dog got hit by a car. No one else had seemed to see the noble and tender side of Beck but her…back then.

She sighed and suddenly lost her appetite. It had hurt like hell to break up with him all those years ago. And what must he have thought of her for the cowardly way she’d done it?

By the time her meal break was up, Beck had already donned scrubs and was tending to a laceration in one of the emergency exam rooms. She tiptoed by, only to be snagged by Carmen.

“We’ve got a DUI in transit. The guy wrapped his car around a telephone pole and partially scalped himself. Gavin wants Beck to stitch him up, so get a minor operations kit and meet him in the procedure room pronto.”

Jan nodded, wishing they’d assign Beck to someone else, but she needed to accept there’d be no getting away from the ex-love of her life for the next month.

In a world where justice had a way of weaseling its way in at the most inconvenient times, she knew this would be her punishment for lying to him.

Fifteen minutes later Jan cleaned the wound. She flushed the patient’s skin with copious amounts of saline followed by antiseptic solution then patted it dry with sterile towels. The majority of the patient’s hair was intact. A full head of brown hair had been partially severed from the forehead back, looking like a floppy, cheap toupee. She’d never seen anything like it before outside old cowboy and Indian movies.

Jan dabbed at the last few trickles of blood as Beck injected a local anesthetic along the forehead and waited for it to take effect. She avoided his eyes as much as possible after his initial raised brow and shake of the head when first examining the wound. But occasionally their gazes met. Each and every time small explosions of adrenaline made her tremble. She prayed he couldn’t tell.

Jan had to admit Beck was a skilled clinician. But even with his expert suturing, the patient would have a thin white scar along his hairline for the rest of his life to remind him of his bonehead decision to drive while drunk.