Page 64 of Just One Look
Nyree told Marko, “What? I said you were better. And, Elizabeth, yes, on Luka at dinner? Or no? Too rough for you? Not everybody likes them rough. Oddly.”
“Darling …” her mother said.
“Uh …” Elizabeth stuck her hands in the pockets of her white coat and tried for some surgeon-cool. The pierced people were all looking extremely interested, and Nyree’s mother was looking pained. “That would be fine. We’ve, uh, seen each other a bit since, in fact. Luka and I.”
“Oh?” Nyree asked. “Tell me.” Perking up even more. A woman should not have this much vitality in a hospital bed four days post-Cesarean, let alone post-preeclampsia, but Nyree was clearly uncontainable.
“Another time,” Elizabeth said. “I’d better get back. I’m glad to see you doing so well.” And fled.
Now, she checked Nyree’s message. It had come yesterday evening, between the car crash and the aneurysm, and said,Ring me when you can will you? Issues.She stopped eating gluey oatmeal and hit the button.
“Hi,” Nyree said, sounding sleepy. “Who’s this?”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said. “Sorry. It’s, uh, early, isn’t it? It’s Elizabeth Wolcott. The surgeon,” she added. Who knew how many friends named “Elizabeth” Nyree had? Though they’d all seemed, the other day, to be named something like “Gem” or “Toko.” Luka hadn’t been kidding about the nicknames. “You sounded like there was a problem,” she went on.
A rumble of deep voice in the background, and Nyree said, “No idea if it’s early or not. It’s light outside, but that doesn’t mean much. Babies don’t have clocks, it turns out.Idon’t have a clock, but babiesreallydon’t. Cheers for ringing back.”
“What kind of issues are you having?” Elizabeth pressed. “If you’re concerned, please call your OB right away.”
“Not sure she can help me with this,” Nyree said. “It’s my mum.”
“Ah … your mum? Does she have a … neurological issue? I don’t really …”
Nyree laughed. “Marko, she asked if Mum has a neurological issue.” A moment, then, “Marko sayshehas a neurological issue, because she’s driving him mad. But then, he’s not easy to live with.” More rumbling, and Nyree said, “You’re not. You want your own way too much. I can only live with you because, fortunately for you, I enjoy the battle. He’s got to be polite to Mum,” she told Elizabeth, “but he’d rather chuck her out. She’s willing to stay for the next few weeks, though, so he can go on tour with the boys, and we can’t askhismum to stay and askmymum to leave, so … tricky.”
This was interesting, but it wasn’t getting Elizabeth’s oatmeal eaten. She said, “What can I help you with?” Any minute now, she was going to get paged.
“Come see me,” Nyree said, “and tell Marko hecango on tour with the boys.”
“Your OB …” Elizabeth began again.
“Yeh, but he trusts you,” Nyree said. “Also, I’mgoing a bit mad myself, honestly, and it’s going to be worse once Marko leaves, annoying as he is. He keeps reminding me that the OB said I can’t do stairs unless he’s there to help me up and down them. He wants tocarryme up and down them, though. You think I’m joking. I’m not. The first day, it was sweet, and honestly a tiny bit hot, but now? I’m just annoyed. I need somebody to come sit on the bed with me and laugh.”
Elizabeth couldn’t help it. She was laughing herself. “I’m nobody’s idea of a fun girl date,” she tried to explain. “I’m so not that. I’m aneurosurgeon.Absolutely terrible at girl talk. You should have heard me the other night, when I was out with Luka. It was awful. It was epic.”
“Really?” Nyree asked, and now, she was laughing, too. “Ouch. Laughing hurts so much. Tell.”
Elizabeth said, “Press a pillow against the stitches when you laugh or cough. Also when you get out of bed or off the couch. Surprisingly helpful.”
“More helpful to hear the epic fail on the date, though,” Nyree said. “Entertain me. I hurt.”
“All right. Here you go. The sexier he gets, the more I go all Rain Man. He’s spraying me with frighteningly expensive perfume—that heboughtme—and burying his face in my neck, and I’m telling him that you need exceptional fine-motor control to be a neurosurgeon. Ugh. Ugh. What I do—it’s awful.”
“Yeh?” Nyree asked. “So he said, bugger that, I’m off to date another model instead, did he?”
“No,” Elizabeth admitted. “He invited me to the game tonight. I told him I don’t keep dates, because I can get stuck at the hospital all evening. Allnight.Oh, I should tell you that, too. If you invite me, I probably won’t make it. And he said, no worries, the ticket will be there anyway, and to come down to the railing afterwards so he can find me. And—all right. Is that normal, the railing thing?”
Nyree sighed. “Iknewwe’d be friends. You’re exactly like my friend Victoria. You could be friends withherexcept, bugger it, I stupidly introduced her to my stepbrother and she married him and moved to the Crusaders. Well, to Christchurch, obviously, because she’s a prosecutor. Buthe’swith the Crusaders, and now I don’t have a serious person to bounce off. Except Marko, of course, but the hotness tends to be distracting. And, no, what Luka said isn’t normal. If he wants you to come down to see him after the game, he wants to kiss you there, at the railing. Probably get filmed doing it, too. It’s a bit of a possessive thing, a conquering-hero thing, especially if they win, and doing it this early? It’s definitely a possessive thing.”
A rumble of deep voice again, and Nyree said, “Marko didn’t realize I knew that. Reckon he knows better now.”
“Oh.” Elizabeth considered that. “That could be bad.”
“In what possible way,” Nyree said, “could it be bad?”
All right. She had to concede that it couldn’t be bad.
“Anyway,” Nyree went on, “come see me. Please. My mum’ll be here for weeks, and I need you. You’re a doctor. You took an oath, so you have to help. If you drove, we could get ice cream. I meanafterthe doctor says it’s all right, obviously,” she added, clearly to Marko. “We could go to the beach, take Arielle in her pushchair, and look at the sea. I’m meant to walk every day, and I’m not going to want to do it enough unless I get ice cream at the end of it. Marko will ask if I did it, too. The walking, not the ice cream. He’d better not ask about the ice cream. I deserve ice cream.”
“I told you,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t keep dates.” Thinking,Why would you be inviting me, when you have all those friends already?
“I’m a painter,” Nyree said. “I don’trememberdates. And I don’t care when you come. Come anytime. Didn’t I mention? I’ll be here. Constantly. Forever.”
