Chapter 4

4

MAYA

T he crowded surgery room began filling up with the scent of sweat, overshadowing even the usual synthetic smell of chemicals and surgical equipment. Why is there such a crowd here? Maya couldn't help the thought bouncing about her mind even in the middle of performing surgery.

She was having a hard time adjusting to the new work environment, especially after the recent dispatching mistake.

She remembered her encounter with Elle Rodriguez and sighed. A leopard never changes their spots. And sometimes, when someone had caused you enough hurt, you couldn't just forgive and forget.

However goddamned attractive Elle still was, dirty and distressed from the fire.

Either way, with the chest stabilization finished. Maya was desperate to get out of the OR and finally eat something. Her stomach rumbled without mercy. The sweat-filled rubber gloves landed gracelessly in the trashcan full of identical pairs, blood stained and disgusting.

On her way, Maya passed a nurse she'd made friends with. Both of them were new to Phoenix Ridge hospital, though Fleur came from abroad.

"Hi." Maya waved. "Up for lunch together?"

"Sure." Fleur smiled. "Cafeteria, or do you have your own?"

"You know I do," Maya laughed, and they headed for the lockers.

Another reason for her finding it difficult to socialize was that she suffered from celiac disease and could never eat anything from the hospital cafeteria where the majority of doctors and nurses found time to make conversation during their scarce breaks. Fortunately, Fleur also brought her own vegan lunches.

"How is it going?" Fleur asked, taking out her box of pasta from the staff microwave.

"Wanna know the truth?" Maya sighed. Her salmon didn't look particularly appetizing.

Fleur nodded, encouraging. She was thirsty for any drop of drama, not having many friends in the city.

"Three days ago, I had a very unpleasant encounter. with an ex of mine." Maya thought about disclosing Elle's identity but decided that would stir too much drama, knowing the hospital often got called to assist Elle's department. Rumors fly round fast in this town, that's for sure. She scoffed. "She thinks she still could have a chance."

Fleur smiled. "Could she?"

Maya immediately flushed. "No. What? She made an idiot out of me. She may have impressed me when I was twenty, but I'm too old and wise for women like her now."

"What kind of a person is she?"

Maya opened her mouth to answer, but an ER medic burst in.

"Dr. Monroe? We have a major incident, we need all trauma surgeons on board right now. We're sending you out to the scene." And he was gone.

Maya immediately rose to her feet and ran to the ambulances being dispatched. The paramedics and surgeons swarmed around the cars, getting in as fast as humanly possible.

A MAJOR CAR PILE UP ON HIGHWAY 65A, 15 MILES IN welcomed her as she quickly got ready to depart. The driver adjusted her seat, and at once they were on their way.

The usual adrenaline rush while speeding through the city with sirens ringing around her head caused Maya's thoughts to run at three times the speed as fast as usual. Images and fragments of conversations marched onto the fast beating of her heart, and she couldn't stop herself from wondering whether she'd see Elle on the scene. The thought grew so itchy that she couldn't even tell whether she'd like the idea or not. Elle's charming smile and seductive dark green eyes like a dark and mysterious forest flashed into her mind. I wouldn ' t, she kept telling herself while feeling it wasn't entirely true. Her stomach twisted and tied knots around her confidence, shaking the belief held for years that she was entirely over Elle.

"Hey, Maya." The surgeon in charge of her team patted her shoulder. "I don't know what you're thinking about, but remember not to bring it to the scene, all right? We have a lot of shit to do there." he nodded, seeking a yes .

"Yes, of course." Maya straightened up on her seat, prepared to cast aside any personal feelings and plunge straight into action. They were approaching the scene.

The massacred cars piling up on the asphalt made Maya's blood run cold. The ambulances already in action had nothing to spare in time or staff. Crowds of firefighters lifted cars up and pulled people crashed beneath them in terrifying numbers.

The team got out, running up to the nearest firefighter chief as they sought to coordinate efforts. They positioned themselves nearby a cluster of cars and received the first victims.

Maya quickly received a victim of blunt force trauma and began working on saving his life. Whenever she laid her hands on an injured person, everything around her quieted down. She became completely engrossed in the task at hand no matter how loud or chaotic the surroundings. When the victim's condition was stabilized and he'd been driven off to the hospital, she received another one, and in the brief moment in between, she watched all her colleagues doing the same — fighting the widely spread threat of death amidst the wreckage of cars. She felt the familiar sense of flow and dove right back to work.

Maya thrived in these situations, calm in a crisis, talented with her hands, highly skilled, and a natural problem solver.

It was a shame she seemed unable to apply any of her talents to her love life.

After a few more patients, she received instructions to collaborate more closely with the firefighters who were working on freeing a large group from a crashed van. She and her colleague took their medical bags and ran up to the team.

The firefighter standing at the forefront of the efforts to leverage the van wore a jacket that clearly read RODRIGUEZ, but Maya had no time to think about her grudges with Elle. There were lives to save beneath that van, and she stood ready to give the best assistance she could to save the stuck people. With a deep groan, Elle and her colleagues managed to lift the van and remove the family from the treacherous metal grasp.

Maya's heart sank, seeing two little children covered in blood. They quickly placed everyone on stretchers and the group of medics ran back close to the ambulance, ready to operate. She had to call a pediatric surgeon for support. The boys couldn't be older than three years old, and the anatomy and physiology of a small child was wildly out of Maya's field.

They managed to send everyone to the hospital still breathing. Maya went around the ambulances to check whether they needed help, and of course, they did. A few victims died and had to be removed from the stretchers to make space for the living.

The groups of firefighters and medical teams pulsed around the scene in a harmonized effort resembling that of a living organism. Maya knew her place and responsibility within it just as well as Elle, and they kept the rescue going like a pair of blood cells travelling within veins to and from the beating heart. Sometimes, their respective efforts would bring them closer to each other as if on a tidal wave, and Maya, seeing the jacket RODRIGUEZ somewhere in her peripheral view, grew more secure. Whatever Elle was in her romantic life had no impact on her skills as a firefighter. She remained stone-calm under any amount of pressure and took care to infect her entire team with it, engaging whatever hell they were facing with a collected and sharp mind.

After an exhausting fight with death, Maya was replaced by another surgeon as her shift came to an end. She'd been on the scene for more than ten hours, and her mind felt like a buzzing swarm of needles ready to tear apart her skull.

Her colleagues drove her and a bunch of other nearly passing out doctors back to the hospital so they could collect their cars and get home. Maya was desperate for a shower and some food.

In the parking lot, Maya realized she was in no state to drive home. She approached one of the taxis waiting next to the hospital and requested a ride home. On the passenger seat, watching the city's landscape blur with the car's increasing speed, her mind drifted toward the solid work she'd done. Elle's presence hadn't impacted her own work, at least, but her mind still felt so screwed up by the day as a whole.

For Maya, it took more time to get used to the constant hurricane of tragedy. She'd become a surgeon because she cared deeply about helping people, and her precise memory coupled with razor-sharp focus made her a truly perfect surgeon. Whenever she had a human body under her scalpel, she stopped seeing them as a human being, and she became a surgeon. She was only the pair of hands steadily wielding the tools and her knowledge of anatomy, whatever she was operating was just that, a tangle of nerve endings, bones, joints, skin, something she knew how to fix, how to make functional again, or at least prevent from collapsing.

But especially at the beginning, as soon as she looked around, she saw the true face of tragedy. Bodies dragged around on the pavement, patients dying on her hands, buildings burning, and cars crashed to pieces with entire families inside of them. Emergency workers grow used to it, but never entirely. Otherwise they'd lose their humanity.

Elle was made to be an emergency worker, and Maya had always admired her mental strength. Or at least, what she saw as mental strength. Ever since high, school Elle had been fearless. Nonchalant and slightly distant in her daily life, during emergencies she behaved as if no amount of emotional charge could deter her from seeing things crystal clear.

Despite that, she never patronized Maya for her emotions at the beginning of their professional journeys. She was the most supportive person in Maya's surroundings. In fact, on her free days, she'd stayed up until late hours to welcome her home, listen to her stories, and hear about the pain she'd witnessed. Elle's training rarely required her to witness real disasters. At first she'd been called to minor incidents and mainly stayed at the station training. For Maya, as a surgeon, it had been very different. She saw death and the threat of it day in, day out, and nearing the end of her second year of practice, she was as close as ever to burning out.

She remembered particularly vividly one night from that period?—

A patient she'd been tasked to operate on called her in, seemingly to consult something regarding the surgery. She'd come in alone. The patient was an elderly woman, though younger than Maya's grandma. Maya quickly recognized the woman was in a state of delirium, progressing rapidly. She called a nurse and another doctor. Before she'd managed to do anything herself, the woman began violently gasping for air and reaching to hold on to something, her heartbeat thudding like crazy. Maya knew the woman was experiencing a heart attack, but before she'd managed to take a hold of her, the patient had fallen from the bed and had hit her head hard against the rim of her nightstand. She'd suffered a fatal bleed on the brain.

The experience had left Maya in shock. The fellow doctors had sent her for a consultation with a psychologist, the first one in her life. Her family came from too poor a background to afford any mental health services. Sitting in a wide leather chair, he announced her unable to continue practice until she got proper therapeutic help. She went home shattered, unable even to cry. There was nothing that could help her afford therapy.

That night, Elle had been on duty until two in the morning, and Maya sat on the couch unable to move. The sight of the blood on the floor replayed continuously in her mind to the point of complete numbness. She was afraid she'd lose her senses.

Elle finally came home, her sweat-soaked tank top and defined muscles constantly in movement, bringing such a strong wave of life into the room that Maya's eyes welled with tears. Elle came up to her with her casual what ' s the matter? expression. She'd been a great partner to lean on in those situations because she never made an unnecessarily big deal out of anything, providing sober and stable support.

"What's up?" She took Maya in her arms, enveloping her in the familiar scent of her skin, the sweet familiarity of her sweat, and the faint odor of fire that always clung to her.

For a long time, no answer emerged from Maya's lips. They simply stood in the middle of their shabby flat, Elle gently rocking them both side to side. After a while, Maya started crying.

"A woman died today right in front of me," she said, sobbing. Elle only nodded in response.

Maya gestured for them to sit down, exhausted both mentally and physically. For a long time they sat glued to each other while Elle kept stroking Maya's hair. Elle's chest's steady rhythm reassured Maya in some subtle but vital way.

"I broke down. I've never seen anything so bad before. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't save her. There was blood. So much blood," she finally found the words to say.

Elle's chest kept rising and falling, the eternal rhythm of life against Maya's cheek. They both knew there wasn't much to say to that, no words that could remedy something so very innately human.

"They said," Maya continued after a while, "that I need psychological support if I want to continue practice." She looked at Elle. "I can't afford that."

"But you want to continue?"

"Of course."

"Even if it keeps being like this? It will keep being like this, you know."

"I know." Maya inhaled deeply. "But it's worth it. Because I'll get better at what I do. And I'll save people."

In the weeks following that night, Maya had contacted every single friend who specialized in mental health she could think of, only to learn that she couldn't have an acquaintance as her therapist. Miraculously, it turned out that one of Elle's old friends had switched careers and was a practicing psychologist. After a few meetings, he couldn't refuse – no one could refuse Elle's charisma, after all, especially at that time.

Maya could still remember the smug smile on Elle's face when she broke the news to her.

"Your therapy sessions start at 7 p.m. Wednesday, the same time each week, so you'd better break it to your superiors that they need to clear your schedule for the time slot," she casually mentioned while frying eggs on their crusty old pan.

"What? That's not funny, Elle, I--"

"I'm serious, Maya. You've got this," she grinned. "Remember Albert?"

"No?" She crossed her arms, sure this would turn into a joke, and into an unfunny one at that.

"Sure you do. He was it high school math classes with me." Elle made fake glasses out of her fingers, "the really geeky one who was in love with me, remember?"

And it had indeed turned out not to be a joke. On said Wednesday, Maya started her mandated therapy for free, thanks to some long-forgotten high school admirer of Elle's. Or so she'd believed, until she found out that Elle was secretly paying for it (although at half the price), and the information infuriated Maya.

A hand gently touched her shoulder, and Maya realized she'd been thinking with her eyes closed, in a state of half-sleep. The driver kindly pointed to her house.

"Here we are, ma'am."

She dragged herself out of the low-set car and climbed the steps to her temporary apartment like a person who's half-alive. The vivid memories still popped up in her thoughts from time to time, and she almost expected to open the door to her old studio flat she'd shared with Elle in their early twenties.

She knew she should be calling her agent to check the state of the paperwork before his office closed for the day, but nothing seemed less appealing to her at the moment, so she decided to finally shower, eat something, and simply go to sleep.

Upon opening the fridge, she realized she hadn't gone shopping. The carton of half a dozen eggs, zucchini, and a bottle of ketchup constituted such a sad image that she closed the fridge. In the freezer she found a pack of ravioli and settled the matter.

While waiting for the ravioli to cook, she remembered what a great cook she'd once been. On the rare occasions when both she and Elle had been free from work, she could sit for hours in the kitchen accompanied by Elle and often some other friend or two. She'd revived her old family recipes, experimented, and had, overall, had incredible fun.

After moving to Forest Vale, she'd gotten so sucked into work that she could barely find time for any semblance of a social life, much less sitting for hours to stir sauces and watch pastries grow in the oven. Sometimes, Sylvia would bring her university friends over for baking parties, or at least to drunkenly try making pizza from scratch.

Maya hated the mess they'd always make, but undeniably, she also felt a pang of jealousy that those days were long gone. And, piled together with the feeling of an irreversible loss of the chance for a slower life lay the uncomfortable fact that she had not been in love since Elle. No torture method could make Maya admit that to anyone, especially not to Elle herself.

She'd dated other women, sure, but it had never gotten to the point where she could say they were in love.

After splitting up with Elle, she was so full of rage and hurt pride that she'd quickly plunged into a "glow-up phase," at least as much as her job allowed her to. She got a Jane Birkin inspired hairstyle (which, she learned, was entirely impractical for a surgeon due to the fringe and had to painfully wait for it to grow out), a new wardrobe, and new friends. She felt hot, she felt daring, she felt as if she'd wasted her whole youth dating one person.

But that phase had quickly passed. Maya had learned that most people her age were looking for quick hookups or non-committal relationships, and she really wasn't made for that. Her enthusiasm quickly burnt out, and once again she became completely engrossed in her career. She took on additional hours and limited her outings to a small bunch of friends. In Forest Vale she dated a few women, but the relationships alway dissolved quickly, and she realized how limited the lesbian dating circle was in a smaller town.

The sound of her kitchen timer rang out, pulling her out of the stream of thought.

Enough reminiscing, she declared, digging a fork into the sauce-covered squares.