Celeste, a stocky Latina with the biceps of a Rumanian weight lifter, is at the nurses’ station. “Cute top,” Celeste trills. “You got a hot date after work?”
“If you consider Martin coming over to replace the hot-water heater a date, then yes, I have a date.”
“I do!”
Like Janis, like the rest of my coworkers, like Dori, Celeste wants more “details” about Martin and me. They want to know what it means that I am “dating” my ex-husband, the father of my child, a man who once palled around with movie stars and who now spends his evenings repairing my hot-water heater and his days counseling a growing list of ex-Nextarians who, like Martin, hate the organization but still believe in “the tech.” He makes a living working with some of them in person, many more around the country by phone, on Skype. Apparently in this underground railroad of “neXters,” Martin has become Sojourner Truth.
I don’t pry. I accept his life the way I’ve learned to accept Aubrey’s. The way I accept the walks we take around the reservoir; the dinners we make together and eat in the great room at the long dining table; the trip he’s planning because he wants to show me Sanibel Island in Florida; the sex—I accept it all. I can’t recall consciously deciding to trick time, but that is what has happened. Somehow Martin and I, instead of being leashed for all eternity to what happened sixteen years ago, instead of that being the huge Before and After defining my life, have been set free. Sometimes he’s the boy I met on the train. Mostly, though, he’s a man I like being with who took a different route than I did to arrive back at us together.
None of this can be boiled down into a coworker-ready sound bite. Celeste’s eagerness to move me from the perplexing limbo of a friend who may or may not be sleeping with her ex-husband into a known state of couplehood makes me understand how Aubrey felt when I grilled her about Tyler: It’s too soon. I don’t know. I might never know. And since I can’t not be with him, it doesn’t matter.
Dori, meanwhile, acts like she predicted the whole thing. “I told you,” she reminds me regularly. “Didn’t I tell you about the rekindled romance? Plus, remember: They’re incredibly successful, these reunited relationships.”
“Yeah, the mutual-delusion thing,” I tell her, not adding what a big fan of delusion I’ve become.
Celeste, seeing that no “details” will be forthcoming, chirps, “Cute top. I love flutter sleeves. My shoulders are too broad for tops like that.”
“Not true. Look at Michelle Obama. Show off the big guns.”
“Well, some of us have to wear scrubs.”
I gauge how much of a barbed edge there is in Celeste’s comment. When I stopped wearing scrubs to work some of the nurses became grumpy about my defection from the ranks. I was called in to human resources and “counseled” that street clothes were “unprofessional.” I had responded that “professional” was the last thing that a brand-new mom oozing colostrum and amniotic fluid and tears needed. If they were unhappy about my performance, I’d talk about that; otherwise, I had patients to see.
I guess I was feeling sassy because Martin was doing the same kinds of magical things on the Web for me and my practice that he had done for Aubrey and FalaFellows and I had more new patients than I could handle. If the hospital wanted to fire me, fine. But I was through wearing scrubs.
As I leave the nurses’ station, I flap my arms so that my sleeves become tiny wings, rising and falling against my shoulders, carrying me away. Celeste can laugh or not, as she chooses. She laughs.
The first patient on my list is Ruth Lange. Outside Ruth’s room, I study the notes left by the labor-and-delivery nurse. Ruth, twenty-six years old, had a baby boy, Levi, her first child, last night at 9:23. Levi was forty-one weeks at delivery and a brawny nine pounds, six ounces. I check Ruth’s height and weight, five-four, 118 pounds, and wince: big baby, little mom. I note the number of poops, pees, minutes spent nursing, drop what’s left of the cookie in the trash, hit the hand sanitizer, and shoulder the door open.
“I love that positioning,” I announce the instant I step in the room and see Ruth holding Levi in a nice, comfy cross-cradle. Ruth is propped up in bed, her surgical gown open, exposing both