Page 42 of The Heir Apparent
“We’re understaffed. It’s a shallow puncture wound. We can’t let patients sit around all day while you enforce arbitrary rules.”
He clicked his pen the way he did when he was annoyed. A man in a hospital gown staggered past us, clutching a bucket. At work, I was Ben’s student. At night, I was in his bed. Life’s other joys and complications—birthday dinners that needed planning, airport runs, grocery bills, camping trips—all of it happened in another world that had nothing to do with him. For three years, this arrangement suited Ben fine. But I was newly aware of a certain impatience in him that was spiralling towards exasperation. Suddenly, he wanted my weekends and my early mornings. Jack and Finn, who held dominion over those parts of my life, were becoming the subject of many furtive arguments. Any mention of Jack in particular could lead to days of silence.
“Also,” I said, now on a roll with my grievances, “you didn’t want to add any more details to that text? Or were you trying to make me think the worst had happened?”
He smirked, looked up and down the hallway to make sure no one was around and then leaned towards me. “That’s the whole point of a text. It’s light on details. Enjoy your patient.”
I went back behind the curtain. Jack eyed me warily as I snapped on gloves and took his pierced hand in mine. The hospital murmured and beeped around us.
“I’ll need to do an ultrasound,” I said, keeping my eyes on the wound, “so I can locate the shards. Then I’ll make an incision to remove them. We won’t need to put you under—local anaesthetic will do it. Then we’ll clean the wound, and you’ll probably need a stitch or two in these parts where it’s deepest. When was the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
When I looked up, I found that he had been watching my face while I worked. He smiled. “I’m sorry about the saw. You’re right. We were rushing and I was stupid.”
I peeled off my gloves, softening. “Sorry I scolded you.”
He looked meaningfully in the direction of the curtain. “Everything okay there?”
I rolled my eyes and shrugged. The Ben situation was not something we discussed. “Need me to call anyone? I can get Paula down here. You’ll probably be here for hours.”
He shook his head. “You’re here.”
In reality, I wasn’t around much. I booked him in for an ultrasound and left him there while I attended to two new admissions in the ED. I came back with a chocolate bar, and he ate it while I examined his ultrasound results. No wooden shards had reached the bone. It was another hour before I could inject his hand with local anaesthetic and send his nerve endings into a deep slumber. When he was numb, I carefully made my cut into the heel of his palm while Rachel, my favourite nurse, watched on. Jack had taken a photo of me looking stony-faced with a scalpel in my hand and put it in the vineyard group chat. Now both our phones were buzzing with responses.
“How’s your pain level there?” I asked, bent over his hand in scrubs and a mask. “It’s probably better if you don’t look.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
I started picking the pieces with my forceps. It was strange to cut into flesh that I knew. I removed the slivers of wood from his curled hand as gently as I could.
“Is Lexi the best doctor at the hospital?” Jack asked Rachel and she snorted. She was holding his good hand while I worked. She was the toughest nurse on the ward, terrifying to everyone as she marched down the halls with her cropped pink hair and fierce eyes. She’d been at the hospital for thirty years and refused to retire, even as her shoes wore down and her back gave out. She always took a patient’s fingers in hers when there might be pain.
“Lexi cares too much, if you ask me,” Rachel said. “Most of the doctors forget a patient as soon as they walk out of here. Lexi’s still worried about them days later.”
I glanced at Jack’s face over my magnifying lenses. He was smiling. “That sounds about right.”
“Is Lexi a terrible flatmate?” Rachel asked and barked her wheezing laugh.
“No, she’s the best,” he said. “She lines up all the workers at the vineyard and gives them flu shots every year. And every time someone’s got a sick relative, she’s on the phone to them asking about their symptoms. Last year, my grandma needed a hip replacement, and she went with her to meet the surgeon.”
I was grateful for the mask that obscured my pink cheeks. The last wood fragment slipped from his skin and blood beaded in its place.
“Too soft for this world.” Rachel smiled.
By the time Jack was sutured, bandaged, shot up with tetanus, and lectured about the importance of staying off work for a few days, my shift was over. I drove him back to the vineyard. Ignoring a text from Ben asking if I was coming over, I made us dinner and we collapsed on the couch. Finn was out with a new guy and we had the house to ourselves. It was a warm night, so we left the door open to hear the humming of insects. Ragu lay across the threshold to get the evening breeze on his belly.
“It’s kind of incredible what you can do,” he murmured. We were both sleepy as we stared into the TV. A respectable distance remained between us on the couch. “I mean, I know what you can do, but it’s something else to see you doing it.”
I shrugged, even as I felt myself folding up his words and tucking them into my tender heart. “It’s not brain surgery or anything.”
“I mean it,” he said and looked at me. “I know it’s complicated with your family, and they didn’t really… give you credit for it. But I think you’re amazing.”
I turned to look at his face in the television’s aquarium glow. He was smiling at me, a drowsy pile on the couch, his bandaged hand on his chest. The sound of the TV seemed to drown to nothing as our eyes met, and I wondered, as I often did in those last days, what was going to happen next. My phone rang. We both started as Ben’s name lit up the screen. We watched passively as it ground along the coffee table. When it finally went black, we turned our eyes back to the television in silence, only the cicadas filling the space.
Two nights later, I was lying on Ben’s bed, reading one of the medical journals he kept on the bedside table. He came out of the bathroom brushing his teeth, a towel slung low on his waist. He prowled around his gleaming apartment, shutting off lights.
“What are you reading?” he asked around the toothbrush in his mouth.
“Hmm?”
