Lake needed to find ways to play that fact up without turning off younger patients. In a week and a half she would present her first round of ideas to the two partners.
As much as she enjoyed her work so far at the clinic, she always felt a moment’s hesitation when she first walked through the door. The reception area had been nicely decorated with minty green walls and plush carpeting, but to Lake the room seemed so melancholy. Though the women who sat there—some with husbands and partners, some without—hardly looked morose, Lake could sense how sad and tortured they felt underneath.
In a small way, she could relate to their anguish. Though she’d never grappled with infertility, her birthmark had created a deep sense of despair and hopelessness in her, starting in childhood. By eleven she’d become an egghead in school, caught up in endless art and history projects and pretending nothing else mattered, when all she really wanted was to be normal, to be pretty, to never again have to see that double beat of surprise and pity in people’s eyes. A doctor had saved her with his laser. She knew it didn’t take a psychiatrist to see why she found herself drawn to clients in the health field.
For the past two and a half weeks she had worked in the small conference room at the very back of the clinic office. Today, as usual, she made her way there through the crazy warren of short corridors—past the doctors’ private offices, the nurses’ station, the hushed exam rooms, the futuristic-looking embryology lab, with its sliding window to the OR, where the egg and embryo transfers were done. As she was getting started, spreading open a folder on the conference room table, one of the nurses, a dark-haired Irish girl named Maggie, passed by the open door and smiled hello. About fifteen people worked at the clinic, and Maggie had been one of the warmest to her. Along with Dr. Harry Kline, the consulting psychologist.
Alone in the conference room, Lake read through the last articles in the batch she’d collected as soon as she was hired for the job. She’d been consuming anything that had to do with the clinic: journal articles the doctors had written, press stories that featured the practice. It was often in these kinds of materials that she found nuggets that she could begin to work with and leverage as part of a marketing plan.
While she worked, she tried to keep yesterday’s meeting with Hotchkiss out of her mind, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. The strange phone call from last night also gnawed at her. Before she’d gotten very far with her reading, she called the camp director again. He’d checked on Will that morning, he said, and everything was fine.
About an hour later, Rory, the clinical medical assistant, poked her blond head in the door. She was about thirty, tall and pretty in an athletic way, the kind of girl who looked like she’d led her high school basketball team into the state tournament. And she was five months pregnant, which Lake realized must be tough for some of the patients to see. Rory’s blue eyes were rimmed with black liner today and her blond hair was scooped up on her head in a loose bun.
“Brie hasn’t been by here, has she?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t seen her,” Lake said. Brie, the no-nonsense, tightly wound office manager, normally ignored her. Lake assumed it was because until Lake’s arrival, Brie had handled any so-called marketing for the clinic.
“Dr. Levin wanted her to give you a bio.”
“I think I’ve got everybody’s,” Lake said, glancing down at one of the folders.
“Dr. Keaton’s?”
“But he’s just a consultant, right? Why—”
“He’s decided to join the group,” Rory said, smiling. “He’s leaving his West Coast practice and coming in with us.”
“Oh, um—okay,” Lake said. To her surprise, the news flustered her.
“Is something the matter, Lake?”
“No, I just hadn’t heard the news yet.”
“Oh well, Brie should have mentioned it to you. You should be kept in the loop about these things.”
“Not a problem,” Lake said. She appreciated that Rory seemed to have picked up on Brie’s passive-aggressive streak.
Rory turned to go. Lake wondered if she should try to engage her in some kind of small talk, but it often seemed that Rory preferred to focus on the next thing on her list.
“You look very nice today, by the way,” Lake said. “Do you have a special night planned?”