Page 63 of Just One Look
Living in Color
It was almosteight o’clock on Saturday morning, and Elizabeth was in the hospital cafeteria, eating everything she could get her hands on.
She hadn’t made it home last night, because a car crash with an unrestrained passenger had been followed by a brain aneurysm, which had been followed by a stroke, which had been followed by a spinal fracture, and it had just gone on like that. She’d had nearly three hours’ sleep in the on-call room, though, around three in the morning, and now, she was eating. Dinner had been a protein bar wolfed down between procedures, not to mention too much coffee, and she couldn’t even remember lunch, if it had happened.
Hospital-cafeteria food in New Zealand, unfortunately, was much like hospital food everywhere, and her breakfast wasn’t anything like the best steak of her life, which was the one she’d eaten on Thursday night. Luka had called it an eye fillet, which probably meant a tenderloin, but it had been too lean to taste as good as it had. That steak had been so flavorful, in fact, that she almost thought she could still taste it, or maybe that was just the contrast between cafeteria scrambled eggs held warm too long and steakhouse beef. Or something about how cattle were raised here, maybe, because the vegetables she’d had with the steak were that good, too.
“We grow more for flavor and less for durability and yield, that’s why,” Luka had said when she’d asked. “It’s no good being able to get twice as much if it doesn’t taste good.”
She’d said, “Your family are farmers, so I guess you’d know.”
“I know a bit,” he’d said. “It’s a woman thing, though.” Which his sister had said, too, hadn’t she? What an odd thing to say, and a sore subject, apparently.
Time to stop thinking about him, especially since she’d had precisely zero chance to think about Piper and what she was going to do about that. She finished off her rubbery eggs and underripe chunks of melon, poked her spoon into some uninspiring, under-salted, and rapidly cooling oatmeal, took a bite, and checked her messages.
The top one was from Luka, which made her heart race way too much and didn’t help with the stop-thinking thing, but what could you do.
Ticket waiting for you at Will Call,he’d written. Game starts 7:45. Ends about 9:30 so come for last 15 if that’s all you can do. Come down to railing afterwards. I’ll find you.
Talk about your adolescent fantasies.
She hoped she’d have time to take Webster for a run before she went to the game. He’d been so excited the other night, when she’d come home from dinner with Luka, that she’d thought he’d have a heart attack. If she left him for another whole evening after being gone for two days straight, he might perish of unrequited love.
The text from Nyree was a welcome distraction. Good. She’d think about that.
Elizabeth had popped into Nyree’s hospital room a couple of days ago. Marko had been there, too, and so had a pretty, petite older lady who’d proved to be Nyree’s mother and who reminded Elizabeth of Piper, like she’d been born knowing how to wear the right clothes and say the right thing. Two very polished and extremely beautiful women as well, who might have been anything from rugby wives to urban professionals, but who looked more like actressesplayingurban professionals, and overlapping them, three people with crazy hair and so many piercings, Elizabeth longed to inquire about their infection history.
The polished women left when the pierced people arrived, so she never found out who they were. There wasn’t really room for this crowd at the window end of a four-bed ward, despite the fact that they’d pulled the curtain back to cram more visitors in, and the windowsill, on which they could have sat, held more floral arrangements than any hospital room Elizabeth had ever seen. The cubicle was bursting with color and scent, the pierced people had just pulled a bottle of champagne out of a paper bag, and Nyree, whose color looked more normal again and whose baby was with her now and sleeping unperturbed through the excitement, told Elizabeth, “The flowers are excellent, eh. Flowers are my thing. I’m a painter, like my friends here. Mostly, I paint flowers. Also a barista and server,alsolike my friends.”
“And a mother, darling,” her mother said with a silvery laugh. “The most important job in the world.”
Nyree made a gag-me face that had Elizabeth choking back a laugh, the champagne cork popped, the pierced painters started pouring the foamy liquid into plastic glasses and passing it around, and Marko, from his spot propped against the wide windowsill out of his mother-in-law’s line of sight, grinned back at his wife, looking more like a wicked pirate than ever.
Elizabeth said, “Looks like you’re coming along well. Do you have everything you need? Any concerns I can help with?” Sounding like a doctor, but then, she might as well sound that way, because she certainly didn’t fit into any of the social groups she’d seen here. A woman with an extremely asymmetrical haircut offered her a glass of champagne, and she shook her head.
“Got everything except being at home,” Nyree said promptly. “Everybody, this is Elizabeth, the doctor who saved Arielle and me. It was like something out of a film. Both of us naked in the locker room, drying our hair. She starts checking me out, and I’m thinking, ‘Right, everybody’s got their own fetishes, but I didn’t expect this one.’ Nek minnit …”
Marko laughed, Nyree’s mother looked shocked, and Elizabeth said, “Excuse me. We were wearing towels.” Possibly stiffly, though she was also laughing. “Also, what’s neck … whatever?”
“Nah,” Nyree said. “Naked’s funnier. And nek minnit is a joke. A Maorijoke. Means, next minute, before you know it, something completely unexpected has happened, like the ambos carting you away when you’d thought you were just having a peaceful swim at the gym. But here I am, bouncing back again instead of dead, thanks to you. Marko could be getting a white streak in his hair, but Arielle and I are all good.”
“That’s the cure for preeclampsia,” Elizabeth said. “Delivering the baby. That’s fine, then. I just stopped by because I had a minute. Glad to see you getting on so well.” Again, doctor mode.
“Hang on,” Nyree said. “Before you go back to fixing brains and saving lives, give me your mobile number, because Marko and I owe you a dinner. Not at home, even though he cooks like a dream. Someplace posh, I’m thinking,” she told her husband. “Where I can wear the nicest thing I’ve got that fits, eat too much, and drive the memory of hospital food and all that terror deep into the back of my brain, and we can embarrass Elizabeth by asking her to be godmother.”
“Too right,” he said. “We could ask Luka, too, since he was there as well. Reckon he wouldn’t mind coming along.”
Nyree looked between him and Elizabeth. “Really? What did I miss? I barely remember any of it.”
Elizabeth said, “We’d met before, that’s all. Luka and I, I mean.” Marko looked darkly amused, and she thought again that he made her nervous and wondered how much he knew.
“So what did you think?” Nyree asked. “Choice, I’d say. Got that bit of mongrel in him that gets the heart thumping. Not as much as Marko, but nobody’s as good as Marko. Luka’s not bad in general, though. Hard man, plus the body and all.”
Marko said, “Oi.” Mildly.
The asymmetrical-haircut woman said, “Not bad to me. Rugby’s a bit naff, of course, but he’s all right. Gives me some naughty thoughts, anyway.”
The pierced man said, “He’s more than all right.”
