Page 10 of Just One Look
Reboot, Take One
Auckland,New Zealand
It was a long, long way from Atlanta to Auckland. Twenty-three hours, in fact. Elizabeth spent it one row behind the bulkhead of the Economy section, so close and yet so far from the good seats. No leg room back here, and when you were five foot ten, you needed leg room.
She was still close enough, though, to hear the bulkhead row’s requisite two crying babies, and her own row consisted of her in the middle seat, Old Person Number One on the aisle, with cane and limited mobility, making Elizabeth extremely reluctant to ask him to get up and let her out, since she could tell his back hurt, and Old Person Number Two, Number One’s wife, who’d been in the window seat and had some extra … spreadability.
Never mind. Could’ve been worse. They both had New Zealand accents and were cheerful. A New Zealand accent was fine, andshewas fine. She could sleep anywhere, babies or no, uncomfortable position or no, which was why she didn’t need to waste money on flight upgrades, and she also had much stronger bladder control than a normal person. If she could stand in surgery for seven hours without using the bathroom, while peering through magnifying glasses and teasing a tumor out from amongst brain tissue, she could sit on a plane and do nothing more taxing than read a medical journal. She was a little stiff when she trundled out to the curb with her single suitcase, blinking against the late-summer sunrise, and a little bleary-eyed, too, but she wasalsoused to being tired. She’d been tired forever.
See? Fine.
Oh, why was she in New Zealand, when it had been the one place shehadn’twanted to go? She still couldn’t quite believe it had happened, though she’d tried to explain when she’d met with her chief of surgery back in late January.
“It’s a little early for a midlife crisis, wouldn’t you say?” Darrell Godwin had said in his usual austere-but-benign, lord-of-the-manor way. “We want to keep you here.Iwant to keep you here. Tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll rip this letter up and see what I can do to fix it.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, acutely aware of how crazy and out of control this sounded. Of how crazy and out of control itfelt.She colored inside the lines! If she’d ever colored much at all, which she hadn’t. Coloring was good for fine-muscle control, so shehaddone it some when she was little, but that was it.
She’d had a book with numbers marked for the different colors, which had been useful for helping her recognize numbers and color words, and had also made for a more pleasing result. As long as you colored inside the lines.
The book had all been birds. In a flash of memory, she remembered coloring in the shiny green wings, taking extra care with the blue patch on the bird’s breast, while saying the words aloud to herself. “Ruby-throated hummingbird,” because humming sounded pretty, and the birdwaspretty. She’d given the picture to her dad when she was done. She’d thought he might put it on the refrigerator, the way other kindergarten kids’ parents did, but he hadn’t. Still, it had been nice, the bird looking tiny and fragile, hovering beside a pink flower. She’d colored the flowerreallywell.
She didn’t have any plants at her place, but she did have a hummingbird feeder, because she’d been so excited the first time she’d seen one of the tiny things and had heard thezip-zip-zipas it darted around, and she still liked to watch them. Didn’t hummingbird feeders count as proof of having a life? It felt like they should count.
She also couldn’t remember coloring since that book, but so what? Why was she even thinking about this, about hummingbirds and coloring? She didn’t have crises. Or memories, either, because what was the point? She looked forward. She focused. She was asurgeon.
Beautiful but severe. Like a statue.
Hard to love.
“If nothing’s wrong,” Darrell said, reasonably patiently, “why are you leaving the country for a year? That’s pretty extreme. I understand that New Zealand’s beautiful, but do you really think you’ll have time to enjoy that, if you’re doing this …”
“Locum,” she said. “Temporary fill-in. One year, that’s all. And I’m not going because it’s beautiful, or because I want to go to New Zealand, for that matter. I’ll be working, not … touring around, doing wine-tasting or lying on the … the beach, or whatever people do.”
“When they’re on vacation, you mean,” he said.
“Yes. That. I’m not doing that. I’m going because there are a limited number of countries that take doctors with U.S. credentials without any further testing required, and there are fewer that happened to have an opening for a short-term neurosurgeon within my time frame. It was this or the Northern Territory. Australia, that is. If I wanted to go now, and I did want to. It has to be now.”
“The Australia one sounds like more of an adventure, at least,” Darrell said.
“If by ‘adventure,’” she said, “you mean that the heat index tends to be well over a hundred degrees for most of the year, and that the place is full of killer crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, venomous snakes, great white sharks, and spiders the size of cats, then, yes. It’s extremely adventurous. Unfortunately, I’m not.”
“Then why?” Darrell asked. “Look, I know you’re the only female neurosurgeon on staff, and I imagine that’s difficult, but …”
“It’s not difficult,” she said. “I was the only female neurosurgical resident at Hopkins, too, and I did just fine. I still made chief resident, didn’t I? Also, if you imagine that any of my colleagues treats me as anything but a fellow surgeon, you haven’t been paying attention to my reputation. Know what my nickname is?”
Darrell cleared his throat. “No.”
“Oh come on,” she said. “You know you do. The Robot.”
A quizzical expression passed over his face, and she said, “That’s not why I’m going. I just need a … reboot. A temporary change of scene.”
To start over,she didn’t say,and maybe not be quite such a robot. Maybe even make mistakes. Not surgical mistakes, obviously. Personal mistakes. Where my father won’t hear about it, and neither will anybody else I know. Where I won’t have to shrivel in shame forever remembering those mistakes, because I’ll be gone.
And if the very thought paralyzed her and filled her with dread? That was the reason for the reboot.
“You realize we can’t hold the job for you,” Darrell said. “Much as I’d like to. Chances are, we won’t have a spot, not after a year.”
A shiver of fear right down her back. This was roller-skating downhill on cracked concrete. This was so out of control. “I realize it,” she said, keeping her voice level, fighting back the fear. “I’m an excellent surgeon, though. I’ll find a job. If it’s not here, that’s another adventure, that’s all.”
