Chapter 15

“Nicola Curran. This is it?”

I nodded as I took the seat right behind Grover, the shuttle bus driver. “This is it,” I agreed. It was my last day at Midtown General Medical Center. I’d given my notice, which had been a hard conversation with the manager whom I had previously told, “No, I’m not leaving this hospital.” I’d had to go back and say, “Yes, I apologize for what I claimed before earlier. In fact, I am leaving this hospital.” Presbyterian was paying more, for one thing, and they were also offering to let me work day shifts, which was something I wanted a lot. I’d spent many, many years living in the darkness and sleeping away most of the sunlight, but now I needed to be up and awake with everyone else, with Jude, Michael, Tamara, Eddie, and Shannon. And Sergio would be included in that group, because he’d been spending a lot of time around their house lately.

“I had a feeling you were going to make some changes in your life,” Grover noted as he slowed for a speed bump on our way to the employee lot. “You were a different person over these past few months. You worked at this place for all those years but Yolanda and I had never even talked to you before.”

It was true that Operation Fake Friend had led to me making new connections, but things hadn’t gone the way I’d planned. It had turned out that the other employees here and at Presbyterian weren’t only unwitting allies or sources of information. The friendships I’d started to form with them weren’t fake, and I was going to miss my colleagues at MGMC.

“I would say that I’ll see you around, but I’m guessing you won’t be coming to visit,” Grover mentioned as the penultimate passenger disembarked. I’d hung back.

“I won’t,” I agreed, which was honest but not meant to hurt anyone. I had a life to lead and it wouldn’t include returning to MGMC, but that didn’t mean that I was walking out of here as I had when I’d “resigned” at Detroit Saint Raphael. Back then, I’d been angry and scared and very alone. But today, Grover and I shook hands and he waved as he drove off, and then I hurried home to where people waited for me.

Monique, Eddie’s old neighbor and current partner, was finally evicting him from her house. He’d worn out his welcome a few weeks before, but her son had now stepped in and had said that by tomorrow, Eddie’s belongings would be on the lawn and so would he. He would be gone, one way or another, and fortunately he had agreed that living in Shannon’s house wouldn’t have been too bad.

“I’ll give it a shot,” he’d said, which had reminded me to tell him that he couldn’t bring any weapons with him. He’d agreed to that, too.

Jude, Shannon, and I had already put in a lot of work on her rental. We’d made enough improvements besides the accessibility changes that the landlord had given her a break on rent, and he’d also suggested that they could work out a deal that would let her buy the place after a few years.

“I don’t know,” she’d told me. “Tying myself to a house? A property owner? I’m not that kind of person.”

“Yes, you are,” I’d informed her, and after a while, she’d agreed. But what she wasn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination, was a neat and clean person. So before Eddie moved even more things into the house, we had to get it in order.

“It’s not like you have too much stuff,” I told her later that afternoon. “You don’t actually have many possessions, but they’re everywhere. Have you ever thought about putting things away?”

“Yeah, it’s something I’ve considered. Wait until you have a full-time job and two kids,” she threatened me, but then pursed her lips. “You’ll probably still be neat.”

“I have my moments,” I acknowledged. For example, Jude had gotten me to relax a little as I cooked because I had always found it to be such a stressful activity. Without having to clean up everything as I went, meal prep was messier, but also faster and more fun. But the real mess in the house, the bedroom with all my memorabilia boxes, was now empty and since we (he) had repaired the attic floor, they were stored up there. I hadn’t sorted through them but he had opened his own box. He’d taken out some framed pictures of a beautiful little girl, his daughter, and put them around the house. He liked to look up and see her face, to know that she was with him in his new life, he said.

“Oh, shit!” Shannon ducked as a large pile of what I hoped was clean clothing tumbled from a closet shelf, right down onto her head. “I forgot to put that load away. Don’t say a word!” We both picked up the miscellaneous items from the ground and started folding. “Are you going to be here forcing Eddie to keep his room neat when he moves in?” she asked.

“Probably.”

“I figured.” She mimicked my movements and patted a folded sweatshirt with satisfaction. “That way really does work better,” she commented, and I nodded. “How did you and Eddie get to be friends, anyway? He just says you met a long time ago.”

“Seven years,” I responded. “It’s getting to be eight, now.”

“The moment is ingrained in your mind?”

“It is. It was when he got injured and ended up in the wheelchair.”

She put down the jeans she’d been working on. “Shit! What happened? Was he a patient at one of your hospitals?”

“Yes, but that’s not how we met.” I kept folding as I spoke. “Seven years ago, I was new to the emergency department at Detroit Saint Raphael and I went out with some of the other nurses on my night off. We went to a bar and I had a few drinks but after a while, I got really tired. I was still trying to get used to night shifts back then.”

She waited, so I continued.

“I was walking to my car when a guy grabbed me. He hit me on the head with something, maybe the butt of a gun, and he pulled me into an alley. I was dazed but I woke up enough to fight, and he beat me up. Then he sexually assaulted me.”

“Oh,” Shannon said, and swallowed hard. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

I was, too. I wasn’t sure why I was telling her this now, but it seemed ok to say it. I kept going. “Eddie happened to be sleeping off a bender in that same alley,” I explained. “He’d been having a lot of problems in his life—he almost lost his house back then, and he was drinking and using. He heard the commotion and he saw what the guy was doing to me, and he jumped on him. They fought but it was over very quickly. The guy shot him and ran.” I gave up on folding, because my hands were shaking too much to make proper creases. “I crawled to Eddie and tried to help. I did CPR and got him breathing again but he was losing a lot of blood. Fortunately, someone responsible had heard the shot and called the police. They came and then an ambulance did take him to DSR. They saved him but the bullet had damaged his spinal cord and he was paralyzed.”

Shannon put her hands over her cheeks and shook her head. “Nicola, this is awful. Did they take you there, too? Were you ok?”

I remembered my racing thoughts that night. First and foremost, I hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital where I worked to let everyone see me in that condition, abused and bloody and victimized. I’d just wanted to go home. “There was a lot of commotion and I managed to walk away and get back to my car,” I explained. “I left and treated myself. I had a friend from school who had become a nurse practitioner and I texted her and said I’d had a one-night stand go wrong, so she wrote me some prescriptions. I took a few days off work. Luckily, it was winter so I wore turtlenecks to cover the bruises where the assailant had tried to strangle me—”

“He what?”

“I told people that the contusions on my face were due to a car accident,” I continued. “They were very similar to what I’d already seen in patients who hadn’t been wearing their seatbelts and had gone into the windshield.”

“Shit, this is awful,” she said again. “And you saved Eddie?”

“He saved me,” I corrected. “I owe him my life. If he hadn’t stepped in, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. He ended up as a paraplegic because of that night.”

“But not because of you. And then you saved him too, and you saved his house, and he’s not some guy sleeping in an alley anymore. He’s out fixing Michael’s stance before the boys play ball together, and Eddie says that he’ll sign up as a coach for their team if they need one.”

I looked through the window at where the two of them were practicing in the front yard, both of them intent and serious while Jude, Sergio, and Tamara worked on the portico on my house. I’d done my best to make it up to Eddie, while understanding that I wouldn’t ever be able to. “I don’t talk about this,” I mentioned. “I told him that he was never allowed to talk about it either. I thought I’d never get past it.”

“Never’s a long time. Lately, I’ve started believing that I can’t make any guesses about the future at all. Stuff keeps coming that I didn’t expect, positive and negative.” She paused. “But life feels pretty good to me.”

I nodded. “Me too.”

“You know what?” Shannon took the shirt from my hands. “I’m going to do the rest of the clean-up here, and I’m going to get Eddie moved in. Not you.”

“What?Why?”

“Because you’re not the only one who can be responsible. We’ll load up Serge’s truck with the rest of the shit at Monique’s house and get Eddie situated. He’ll be fine.” Now she took my elbow and started to lead me toward the door. “You go do something else. Go get your hair done.”

“I never do that.”

“I know,” she informed me. “Stop saying never and go for it.”

I ended up taking another nap, though, because saying all that had made me very tired. When I woke up later, the sounds of hammering on the fa?ade of the house had quieted. I wandered into the bathroom and then downstairs, where Jude was lying on the couch.

“Hi,” he said, and opened up his arms.

I sat down in the tiny space that remained on the cushion and leaned to rest against his chest. Since the night that I’d surprised him with oral sex, we’d been doing a lot of the cuddling he’d also enjoyed. We’d hugged and snuggled, and we’d definitely kissed, but we hadn’t slept in the same bed again. “When I work days, we can sleep together at night, every night. Like you were talking about before,” I said.

“Is that what you were dreaming of when you were napping just now? If I’d known, I would have come and joined you.”

“I was dreaming that you were building furniture for this house.”

“I could do that,” he agreed. “What were you thinking about?”

“A crib.”

I felt his muscles still; even his chest stopped rising for a moment. “A crib?” he echoed.

“I’ve been thinking about babies, even in my sleep,” I explained, and he made a sound like “hm.” It was noncommittal and I picked up my head. “Would you want to have more children?” I asked.

I watched his eyes move to the table beneath the window, the window that he had repaired. A framed picture of his daughter sat on the tabletop and he looked at it for a moment before answering.

“I’ve thought about it, too,” he told me.

“What have you thought?”

“When I was carrying out all the boxes from your third bedroom, I was considering that it would be a good room for a nursery. It faces north so it wouldn’t be too sunny during naptime and it’s so close to the main bedroom. We’d have to put a gate at the top of the stairs…” He trailed off.

“Then you’ve thought about it a lot. The question isn’t just if you would want more children, though,” I pointed out. “It’s also if you would want to have children with me.”

“Is this coming up because of your mom hounding you?”

“Not only because of her. She has Patrick’s baby to go crazy about, now,” I said. But then, despite how I felt about telling the truth, I couldn’t put all my reasons into words. I didn’t want only a baby with Jude; I wanted him. Forever.

“It’s something to contemplate,” he said slowly, as if he already was.

“I’ve been contemplating some other things, and I made a change. I talked to Shannon today about Eddie,” I said. “About how Eddie and I met.”

“Oh.” Now he was looking closely at me.

“If there’s anything you want to ask me about it, you can. I’m not going to make it forbidden anymore.” Not for him or for myself.

“I would like to know if you’re ok. From what Eddie told me, I don’t know how you would be.”

“I am,” I said. “For a long time, though, I wasn’t. Most of the boxes in that third bedroom were filled with journals I wrote, pages and pages and book after book, where I said things about not being able to do it anymore, not being able to keep going. I did keep going because I had Eddie depending on me. Or, at least, because I had a debt to him. And I was kind of fossilized,” I told Jude. “I wrote things and then I buried the journals in those boxes and let the boxes get covered with dust. I was thinking that I was like that. I was so stuck, just doing the same things as I always did and not knowing any other way to go. That’s one reason I’ve been thinking about a baby, because I do see new ways, now.”

“I worry about you a lot.” He pushed back my hair so that he could put his palm on my cheek. “I worry about you driving to work and being in those emergency rooms. I would worry about you being pregnant and giving birth.” I could see that worry on his face. “I love you so much.”

He said it like it was obvious and it was also obvious to me how I felt. “I love you, too.”

“I would worry about our kids. Nicola, if something happened…I don’t know. It scares the fuck out of me.”

“You know me,” I said. “I would do everything in my power to keep them safe. I would watch and be so careful. But all these years in the emergency room have also shown me that there are no guarantees. We would just—”

And then the scream broke through the quiet of the living room, and a sudden squeal of brakes.

Jude and I were both running outside, even before that sound ended. He threw open the front door and I saw a red car stopped diagonally in the street. I saw Tamara’s mouth open as she shrieked, Shannon running down her new ramp, and Michael on the asphalt.

“He jumped out in front of me,” I heard a man say. “Is he ok?”

“You need to slow the hell down when you’re driving on residential streets!” Jude shouted back as I reached Michael’s side. He was very pale and already crying but I didn’t see any visible signs of injury besides a small laceration on his forehead.

“Nicola,” he sobbed, and tried to get up. In the background, his mother wailed.

“Shannon, stop that. Tam, come hold your brother’s hand.” She did and I knelt next to Michael in the street. “Don’t move, stay how you are. Sugar, that was scary, wasn’t it? Does anything hurt?”

I got basic information from him—he told me that he didn’t think that he’d been struck by the car, but that he’d fallen as he got away from it. He didn’t think that he’d hit his head either and he hadn’t lost consciousness. His back felt fine but his ankle hurt. He was scared, too, and he held his sister’s hand very tightly.

“I didn’t look before I ran across,” he told me. “You always tell me to look but I forgot.”

“It’s ok,” I assured him. “Does it hurt when I press here? How about here?”

He shook his head, because he’d also forgotten how I’d told him not to move his neck. “I’m sorry,” he sniffled.

“I bet you were in a rush to see Jude,” I said. “You remembered that you were going to help him when you got home tonight, and he was going to let you make some cuts.” He did allow that, with the kids wearing ear and eye protection and with him holding the saw with them. “That makes sense but next time, I know you’ll look both ways.” Michael swore that he would.

“We need to call an ambulance. He has to go to the hospital!” Shannon said over my shoulder. She sounded hysterical and it made his eyes well up again. “We have to get help for him, Nicola!”

We did. Michael had the scrape on his head and Tamara wasn’t sure about what she’d seen, if the car had actually hit him or if he had slipped. I was pretty sure that he was all right but I also wanted him to be checked. Eddie and Jude stayed with the driver of the red car because Eddie, who hated the police, had already called them to report an attempted murder by an impaired felon. I left it to him to explain to the arriving officers what had really gone on, that a guy about Grace’s age had been looking at his phone and speeding, but hopefully he’d been scared straight. We went to the closest hospital, which was also one where I’d been an employee. Detroit Saint Raphael looked just the same as it had on the horrible day when I’d left with my head held high but then had to stop because I’d been too upset to drive.

“Nicola?” a nurse asked as we approached the triage desk. I knew her, because we’d worked together for years, and she stopped walking when she saw me. “Nicola Curran? What’s wrong? Is that your son?”

“No, but I love this kid so if Cleo is here working days now, she’s not touching him,” I announced. No way was my former nemesis, a true idiot with who didn’t deserve the “RN” after her name, getting anywhere near him.

“She got fired right after the nurse manager was,” my former colleague said. “I heard they tried to set up a medical spa but someone reported them for not having proper licenses.” She shrugged. “You weren’t the only one who didn’t get along with those two.”

And apparently I wasn’t the only person who informed on people to the authorities.

She looked at Shannon, totally distraught, and then at Michael, very frightened. “What happened, buddy?” she asked him. “You came to the right place and you don’t need to be scared.”

She was wonderful and everyone else at DSR was, too. They performed every test that I suggested and helped calm Michael and Shannon, which she needed more than he did. And as we waited for all his results, several of the nurses and techs stuck their heads around the curtain to say hello. They seemed genuinely happy to see me and wanted to talk and check in. It might have been only idle curiosity about the person who’d basically been fired, but it still felt nice that they cared enough to ask how I was doing.

“You seem really different, Nicola,” one of them told me. She seemed familiar and her badge identified her as Kera, and I thought we had worked together a few times. She looked me over and glanced at the kids before she asked softly, “Are you pregnant?”

Shannon’s head snapped around and she stopped crying for moment to listen.

“No, I’m not,” I said. There was still no physical way for that to have happened.

“You look…” Kera studied me again. “I guess you look relaxed. Also, ten years younger,” she added.

“Thanks,” I told her. “I’m a lot happier than when I left here.”

“This place will drag you down,” she sighed. “I’m thinking about looking for another job.”

“I had three different jobs and I wasn’t happy until…until I was,” I said, which made her sniff and say something about philosophy or whatever. It wasn’t supposed to be deep, though, because I only meant that I hadn’t been happy with anything until I started to see that I wasn’t stuck. I’d been imagining my life in only one way, but it was exactly as Shannon had said: so many things had happened, both positive and negative—even sitting here in this ED, the good far outweighed the bad.

All of Michael’s scans and labs came back as normal, but it was only after I insisted on a second opinion from another attending physician that I felt comfortable that he was really fine. I then allowed them to discharge him. He had calmed down completely and seemed slightly proud of the abrasion on his forehead, but Shannon had been crying buckets for the entire time we’d been there, crying and saying she loved him and promising that she would be a better mother, as if she’d been the one who’d pushed him out into the road.

Tamara had handled it differently. “You were great,” I said to her as we walked out. Michael was with his inconsolable mom and I found that now that it was over, I was also shaking a little and I did have to pat around my eyes. I had my arm around Tam’s shoulders and she leaned against me. “I’m impressed by how calm and cool you were.”

“You told me to stay calm. You said that if there’s an emergency, everyone has to try,” she reminded me, and maybe I remembered saying that. She had remembered, too? “Could I work in a hospital?”

“Sure,” I told her. “I think you’d be excellent.”

“I’ll either do that, or be an artist, or have a stable of mini horses,” she said, and I agreed that all those options sounded good to me.

Sergio had arrived by the time we got to our street and Shannon insisted that he carry Michael up to his bed, and then she hugged me, still crying, and hugged Jude and also Eddie. Their household went inside and Jude and I stood on the lawn, staring at each other.

“Holy Mary,” he said to me, and I went and hugged him, too. My eyes were really stinging as I buried my face against his shirt. I didn’t want to sniffle all over it, but I also didn’t want to be apart from him.

“That scared the shit out of me,” he said as he rubbed my back. “You too?”

“Me too.”

“Let’s go in,” he suggested.

We did and by unspoken agreement, we went right upstairs. Jude reached for my shirt and unbuttoned it, and he slid the jeans off my legs. I did the same for him and also insisted that he remove his socks, and then all our underwear followed. Everything went right into the hamper where it belonged.

“Can I touch you this time?” he asked me.

“Yes.” Yes, I really wanted him to. He was so gentle about it at first, just lightly stroking his fingers down my neck, then brushing his knuckles over my breasts, smoothing his palms around my back, and carefully pulling me against him.

His mouth meeting mine wasn’t gentle at all. It was another of the dizzying, all-encompassing, going-gooey kisses, and I had to wrap my arms around his neck to stay on my feet. Once we were in his bed, lying diagonally so that he fit better, both of us were doing the touching. I couldn’t keep my hands off him or my mouth, either, and I wanted to kiss and nuzzle every bit of skin that I saw. It included brushing my lips over his eyelids and nosing his ears, biting his neck a little, licking his nipples, twirling my tongue along the grooves of his abs.

“Ok, now it’s my turn,” he murmured. “I got an idea of what you might like.” And he did the same things to me, carefully kissing my eyelids, nudging against my ears, and softly nipping at my neck. He spent a lot of time with my breasts, where he did more with his lips, tongue, and teeth, and his hands rubbed and massaged. My respiration rate was definitely elevated and his was, too, and both of us were almost out of breath entirely when he opened my thighs with his palms.

It was—I closed my eyes when I felt his tongue because it was a lot. Wonderful, but also a little overwhelming, and it was hard to let go.

“Hey.” Jude kissed the inside of my thigh. “Do you want me to stop?”

Just for a minute. We did other things, touching each other and then when he put his mouth on me again, oh…

That hadn’t happened for a long, long time. My whole body filled with pleasure and then it exploded, and I arched my back and said his name in a long moan. Then I told him, “I think—you should—we should—” and he moved up my body and put his arms under me, flipping us like pancakes so that I was on top.

“Is this good?”

“Yes,” I said, and he reached to push my hair from my face. His hands cupped my breasts and I leaned against his palms.

“I think we should do this,” he said.

“I definitely think so, too,” I told him, and ground my body against his, reveling in the pleasure of it. “Right now.”

“I think we should try for a baby,” he said. “I think we should start our family.”

I nodded and I was overwhelmed again, by everything that I was physically feeling and with the emotion of us being together—and a baby, too? He shifted his hips and slid inside me, and it was exactly like when he’d kissed me: it was so good, so overpoweringly wonderful, and yes, I’d done it before but it hadn’t been like this. Especially not when he moved, thrusting up and I adjusted until everything was…if it wasn’t perfect, it was close. I was, too, and then I was over the edge and tipping into another orgasm and so was he.

After, I lay on his chest, my nose tucked under his chin. When I opened my eyes and looked up, Jude was watching me. “You ok?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “Better than ok.” I was in a haze of endorphins that made my whole body heavy with satisfaction.

He rolled to his side but brought me along with him so I was still nestled against his chest and our legs entwined. “Nicola Curran. You’re something.”

“Am I?” I asked, still hazy.

“You are,” he answered, and anchored us together with a firm grasp on my butt. “I’ve thought about us together. I’ve imagined how it would be to touch you and hold you, but reality is a lot better. This is so much better,” he echoed as he squeezed and I wiggled a little in pleasure. “I really love your ass.”

“Thank you.”

“Sometimes, I’ll see a cloud formation that reminds me of it.”

I opened my eyes and pulled back so I could see his face. “You see my butt in the clouds?”

“I do,” he assented. “I have a few sketches in my journal. Nature is full of beauty.”

I put my head back down, but I was laughing too hard to answer.

“Hey,” he said, and I calmed enough to look up again. “We might have just made a baby. Our baby.”

“It’s unlikely due to where I am in my cycle,” I answered, but I smiled. “Maybe. And I would like to keep trying.”

He kissed me, and we continued doing that until I sighed happily and cuddled up again.

“Michael’s ok,” he said suddenly, and I understood what he meant.

“Things don’t always go the bad way. Sometimes, but not always, and not today. And we’ll do our best to keep things safe and happy.” I knew that he would, and I had already filled several pages in my journal with lists of necessary changes to my diet, house, and car. I looked forward to implementing them.

“You know, my mind isn’t always in the gutter and I don’t spend all my time staring at suggestive cloud formations,” Jude said. “I’ve been thinking about other things besides sex. I’ve been thinking about one thing in particular.”

“What?”

He rolled slightly onto his back and reached under his bed, and his hand came back out with a box. It was a shoebox, which he offered to me.

“What is this?” I asked as I sat up. I put it on his stomach and I opened the lid to find a new pair of the same shoes that I’d worn almost two years ago in the emergency department at Detroit Saint Raphael Hospital, the ones I’d had on when we first met. “You didn’t have to replace these. The old ones cleaned up fine,” I told him.

“They’re a fresh start for your feet. But I wanted to give you something else, too,” he said. He took the box and put it on the floor, then took the shoes from me and shook them gently. A smaller box tumbled out onto his chest, a little velvet one.

I froze. “What is that?”

“I thought we could both have a fresh start, together,” he answered. “New shoes, a crib, fixing your house.”

“Our house,” I said. “It should be ours. We should both have our names on the deed.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” I answered immediately. It was something I’d been thinking about, because this was his home, too. “So what’s in that box?”

He opened it, and there was a narrow silver band. “You know that I’ve been saving for the future, for renovations here and for my business. Maybe you could consider this a starter ring.”

“No, this would be the starter and the finish ring, too,” I said. “This won’t come off my finger.”

“Damn, that’s good to hear.” He took a breath. “I love you and I hope you’ll agree to be my wife. Will you marry me, Nicola?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I love you and I want you to be my husband.” It was the most honest thing I’d ever said.

He slid the band onto my finger, and my smile was so big it that was hard to speak. Or maybe I couldn’t say anything because my throat had tightened, since my eyes were stinging so much. And then neither of us could talk, due to kissing.

“I didn’t think you liked surprises,” Jude said after a long while.

“This isn’t a surprise to me. I’ve loved you for a long time.”

“It surprised the hell out of me that I’d get to be so happy again,” he told me. “I didn’t think that it was in the cards. I guess you never know what’s next.” He kissed me more and his hands started to wander, which felt wonderful.

I knew one thing that was coming next, and it was us going for another round because he seemed more than ready, and so was I. Everything else? I was excited to find out. Before, I had been trapped in unhappiness, but now…

Now I was walking off into a different future with Jude, and I’d do in brand-new gym shoes.