“You’re investing in your mental and physical health,” I reminded her.
Even though it had been a long time coming, I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about Maya stepping away from her high-powered job in favor of a life of self-care. Somehow, it didn’t quite seem like the right fit.
“I trust the universe,” she said. “You’ll see him again. And Carrie, seriously—if he comes in to visit the old lady then you bloody well get his number, OK?”
The only part I hadn’t shared with her was the fact that Johan had quite literally handed me his number. And I had already memorized it.
Seven.
When my parents fought, which was often, Maya used to run out into the garden and bounce on the trampoline, a focused dot of energy pinging up and down under the toppling shadow of Bonehill Rocks. I used to go and read in my bed, covers over my head. Dad had given me a reading torch for my sixth birthday, after my teacher told him I was an uncommonly advanced reader for my age.
One of the books I loved most was a biography of a man who’d worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. He’d performed operations in all sorts of dangerous places, but my teacher said the content was too graphic for a child my age. Mum wrote the teacher an unnecessarily aggressive (in Dad’s opinion) letter to say that she wasn’t willing to censor my sociocultural development, and could the teacher please refrain from commenting on my reading choices.
By the age of eight, I was certain that it was my destiny to be a flying doctor. Mum loved going off and saving people who needed help;it made her much happier than being stuck at home. I would be like Mum, only I’d be happy all of the time, not just some of the time.
A few years later, after my parents had split up and Mum had moved to London, Maya had to have an emergency appendicectomy.
“How did it feel to save my sister’s life?” I asked the surgeon, when he came to brief us after the op. I was sitting between my parents, who hadn’t been in the same room in months. Dad was seething that Mum hadn’t arrived until near the end of Maya’s operation.
“I don’t have the right words to answer that,” the surgeon said. He sat down next to me. I remember the vinyl seats squelching under my hot legs as I shifted over. His name was Mr. Yo, which I liked. “All I can say is that there’s no feeling quite like it. It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.”
“I understand,” I told him. “I’m going to be a surgeon, too.”
When we were finally allowed to see Maya, I took my notebook in and recorded observations of the equipment I could see, the noises I could hear and the strange medical smell of my little sister, who mostly just grunted and was not open to my assessment of her pulse and breathing rate. It helped me ignore the terse whispered words between my parents, but really, I just wanted to understand all of it: every digital display, metal trolley, mysterious wall-mounted tech installation.
The surgeon popped in to speak to us. He told me this was the sort of proactive behavior that would take me far on my training journey. I didn’t forget that, and eight years later I was congratulated on my unusually comprehensive application and offered a place to study medicine at St. George’s in south London.
—
I was thriving at the Royal London when I met Johan. I loved the hospital, the staff, the sheer giddiness of Whitechapel in the morning:the sunrise call to prayer tumbling down from the East London Mosque; the market already doing brisk business in durian fruit, hijabs, giant sacks of rice; hospital workers migrating across Whitechapel Road in scrub-colored droves.
The famed Yanika Hatziz was my educational supervisor. My best friend, Dell, worked here, too. I was high on life.
But the pressure was on, now and always. Which made it all the more absurd that I spent the three days after Deniz’s accident doing no extra study or paperwork at all. I was mostly just dreaming about Johan.
—
I was in the theater coffee room between cases, on a very rare break with Dell.
We were updating our log books next to a giant urn full of disgusting coffee. A box of beige tea bags sat next to it. The room stank of the theater technician’s lunch, heated up in the spattered microwave in the corner.
“I’m going to email my cousin,” Dell was saying as I got up to make tea. “He’s a paralegal at the GMC. If anyone can find out if it’s acceptable for you to have a Thing with that man, it’s him.”
“You absolutely will not,” I told her. “I am not going after him. Even if he turned up here and asked me out, I’d have to say no.”
“Oh lookit, will you give yourself a break for a minute? I know you love a rule, but thereisno rule here.”
“But he—”
“He’s not the patient’s relative. Or even her friend. He’s just a random guy, and your meeting was pure coincidence. There’s no line of medical responsibility.”
“But it wasn’t a coincidence! I was on duty!”
“Irrelevant! Carrie, he was on fire for you. I won’t email my cousinif you don’t want me to, but I will say that you are cutting your nerdy little nose off to spite your face. He—you—thechemistry, it was raging.”
In Dell’s Derry accent, the wordragingwas velvety and potent. For a moment I allowed myself to dip back into the memory of Johan’s eyes smiling at me, knowing things they couldn’t possibly know.
I opened the disgusting fridge under the disgusting microwave. There was no milk, apart from one bottle of skimmed with a Post-it saying “UMAR’S MILK PLEASE DO NOT HELP YOURSELF.”
