Page 83 of Challenge
I look over at his mother’s face and see matching wide eyes tear up as she watches her four-year-old son clutch his arm protectively to his chest. It took a solid ten minutes for me to get him to stop crying and finally talk to me.
“It hurts,” he mumbles again.
An idea comes to mind. “Hey, Limerick, do you like football?”
“Yeah, my dad says, ‘Go Gunners.’” His voice wobbles as he sniffles.
I smile. “So you’re an Arsenal fan? That’s a great team. Do you want to know something really cool?”
“What?”
“I treated a professional footballer here in this hospital not very long ago.”
“Who was it?”
“He’s a striker. He’s very big and very strong and has scored lots of goals this season. But do you know what else?”
He looks at me with wide, puppy-dog eyes.
“He was scared, too.”
“He was?” A light turns on in his eyes.
“He was. And do you know how I got him to not be scared?”
“How?”
“I had him sing a song,” I lie. I can’t very well tell him that I snogged his face off. “Do you like singing?”
“Depends on the song.”
“Humpty Dumpty seems to make sense here.”
He grins and says, “I know that one.”
“Come on then, let’s hear it!”
I get him going on the nursery song before he lets me touch his arm. Eventually, around some giggles and some pitchy notes on my part, I’m able to do a full manual exam.
“Limerick,” I whisper and he stops singing. “You’re a better singer than that footballer.”
He beams and then drops his face to serious. “But he’s probably a better footballer.”
“Only until you get bigger.” I ruffle his hair and tell his mother that someone will be by to take him to X-ray. I suspect he does have a hairline fracture but, depending on the location, he could get by with a brace and not a full cast. She seems grateful, and I make a mental note to relay the singing bit to the radiologist.
“You know, that’s the third time you’ve brought him up in random conversation since we came back to work yesterday.” Belle pushes herself off the nurse’s station counter and jogs to catch up to me as I make my way to the on-call room.
“It is not,” I defend. “And don’t you have better things to do than watch me with a patient?”
Ignoring my last remark, she continues, “Yesterday you yelled at Stanley when he said footballers are all poofs who like to put on a show. And last night you ripped my head off when I asked you why you were reading a sports medicine textbook.”
“I just had to look something up,” I argue, still annoyed by my newly found interest. Ever since I saw Tower Park and felt the grandness of it all, my brain won’t shut up.
Thinking about Tower Park evokes a most unwelcome memory of how Camden held me on the dance floor as I cried the other night. How embarrassing and humiliating. For some odd reason, it’s always been easy to open up to him. I reveal things to him that I’ve never even told Belle.
The rest of my time off was very un-Tequila Sunrisey. Belle kept pestering me about why I was emotional when we left Old George that night. I lied and told her I was allergic to the ivy on the walls and had accidently touched some. She made me take medicine and spent the night with me to make sure I didn’t go into anaphylactic shock.
I’m grateful to be back at the hospital now, letting work consume my mind instead of thoughts of Camden.
