Good Medicine
Good Medicine
Bobby Hutchinson
Jordan had tried to love and support her husbandEven after he'd cleaned out the apartment and sold many of their belongings for drug money. But when, as the doctor on call in the E.R., she'd been forced to treat Garry's overdose, it had nearly killed her, too. Knowing she couldn't survive much more, she left him and Vancouver behind. She hoped only to find peace as the new resident G.P. in the remote First Nations village of Ahousaht.She never expected to meet someone as gentle and nurturing as native healer Silas Keefer, a man who understands Jordan's need to escape her past. He'd done the same thing himself years earlier.Their love is unexpected and right, but can Jordan and Silas have a future if they cannot heal the past?
“Resident G.P. wanted for isolated First Nations village, Vancouver Island’s West Coast. Ahousaht, Clayoquot Sound, Flores Island.”
The salary wasn’t what Jordan earned in the E.R., but at least there wouldn’t be shift work. And housing was included. And it was somewhere Garry wasn’t.
Impulsively Jordan took out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d copied down. The phone rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Hello?” There was a note of impatience in the man’s deep and resonant tone.
“Oh, um, yes, hello.” Damn, her hands were sweating and she could hear the strain in her voice. “My, um, my name is Jordan Burke, Dr. Burke, and I’m calling about the medical position. Is it still available?”
There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know. You need to speak to Bennie. Call back another time.”
“Bennie? Bennie who?” Jordan was over feeling nervous and well on the way to being annoyed. Surely he could be more helpful?
“Just Bennie will do. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“And you are?”
“Silas Keefer. And I’m hanging up now, Jordan Burke.”
“But first can you—”
The line clicked and she heard a dial tone. The bloody man had hung up on her.
Dear Reader,
There’s a motto I try to live by. It is Whatever is happening now is right for me. It embodies acceptance and trust, and applying that concept every day is my greatest personal challenge. When life is filled with joy and excitement, it’s easy to say, “Yup, things are progressing exactly as they should—lucky me.” But when huge challenges seem insurmountable—that’s when it’s tough to let go of outcome and simply trust.
As a writer, I hand challenges to characters and then watch how they manage to surmount them. In Good Medicine, as in life, family became a central theme. And a trip to Ahousaht on Vancouver Island’s wild west coast made me realize that no matter how far we travel in distance and culture, the problems we encounter in life are universal. Not only that, they obligingly come right along with us.
This book taught me invaluable lessons about the different ways culture affects our attitudes toward the science of medicine and the gift of healing. The paths may vary, but the final answer is always the same—true healing begins in the heart. Love is the most powerful medicine. And yes, whatever is happening now is absolutely right for me!
With love, and gratitude to all of you who read my books.
Bobby Hutchinson
Good Medicine
Bobby Hutchinson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Marie Donahue and the other Nuu-chah-nulth women who greeted me in the Ahousaht Health Centre one rainy morning. Truly, the Ancestors were there.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER ONE
DOCTOR JORDAN BURKE walked over to the automatic sliding glass doors and peered out at the wet April night, not really seeing the eerie fluorescent glare or the deserted cement apron that led to St. Joseph’s Emergency entrance.
It was her birthday. A glance at her watch told her it was 12:40 a.m. She had no idea the exact hour she’d been born, so she might as well make it midnight on the nose. Which meant she was now thirty-two.
Spending the first six hours of her birthday working the graveyard shift in Emerg suited her fine. John Frankel, one of the other doctors, had the flu, and since Jordan was on her long break from day shift, she’d eagerly volunteered to fill in.
It wasn’t as if she’d be sleeping much, anyway. She might as well be working tonight as lying in bed tossing and turning, wide-awake and worrying.
She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold, and crossed her arms, hugging the front of her white lab coat.
Where the hell are all the patients? On most nights, the E.R. was so busy there wasn’t time to do anything except concentrate on the stream of desperate, frightened people needing medical assistance. But it had been nearly an hour since Jordan’s last patient was treated and released, and she was restless. Anxious.
She ought to be used to the anxiety. It never really went away these days.
“Quiet tonight, eh? Downtown Vancouver must be closed for spring break or something.” The tiny Asian nurse was new, and she laughed at her own joke.
“It is quiet.” Jordan nodded and attempted a smile. When did smiling become such an effort? “Calm before the hurricane,” she commented, aware of how callous it was to long for patients. It was just that she needed action, needed the degree of intensity that drove everything else out of her head.
“At least it gives us time to think,” the young woman replied.
“Yeah.” Jordan forced herself to nod, even though time to think was the very last thing she wanted. She glanced at the ident tag pinned to the nurse’s shirt. Jordan had been introduced when they came on shift, but now she couldn’t remember the woman’s name.
Lola. Her name’s Lola, numskull.
Forgetting things had become the norm. She’d lost her keys today, she’d misplaced her cell phone yesterday, she hadn’t remembered what she needed when she got to the grocery the day before last. Thirty-two was nowhere near menopause, but she knew that constant low-level anxiety could cause memory lapses. Eight months of anxiety. Ever since her husband’s accident.
She thought of Garry now, and her gut heaved as an all too familiar mixture of emotions coursed through her: anger, sadness, guilt, longing and an overwhelming sense of frustration and futility.
Two years, is that all it had been? She felt as if she’d been Garry’s wife for at least two long, painful lifetimes. She wanted desperately to help him, she longed for an end to the problems they were having, she—
Stop. Stop.
She would not obsess over her personal problems here, not while she was on shift. She turned away from the doors and walked over to the admitting desk. So there were no patients, okay, she could catch up on patient files. That tedious task was every doctor’s least favorite activity.
“No point getting your blood pressure up doing paperwork, Jordan.” Eddie, the desk clerk, grinned at her, revealing crooked teeth. “There’s an 18-year-old female on her way, severe headache, vomiting, recent history of stomach pain. Her dad called, he’s bringing her.”
A few moments later the patient arrived, a college student named Ardyth Malone, slender and very fit looking, but obviously in severe distress. Jordan escorted the girl to a cubicle and began taking a history.
Ardyth responded with negative answers to questions about drugs, alcohol, allergies, blows to the head. A careful physical examination ruled out appendicitis, inflamed ovaries, gallbladder problems. Each successive test was normal, until Jordan examined Ardyth’s eyes with the ophthalmoscope. There was a slight papillidema, a swelling of the optic nerve.
By now Jordan was beginning to feel really concerned, wondering if this was a brain tumor, but there were a few questions she still needed to ask.
“Ardyth, has there been any change in your diet recently?”
The girl shook her head. “I’m a vegetarian. I’m very health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body.” Her expression was virtuous. “I take tons of vitamins and I don’t eat sugar or saturated fat. Oww! Oh my God, do something! It hurts.” Bent double, she cradled her stomach, moaning.
A warning bell went off in Jordan’s brain. Taking iron tablets on an empty stomach could lead to excruciating cramps.
“Exactly what vitamins do you take, and how many?”
As the pain eased, the girl rattled off a dozen or more names, adding that she swallowed massive quantities.
“Have you taken any new ones recently?”
“Only more vitamin A.”
“How much more?”
“Seven extra pills. My skin’s been breaking out—vitamin A cures acne.”
“How long have you been taking that dose?”
Ardyth shrugged. “A couple of months now, I guess.”
“How many international units per pill?”
“Five thousand.”
“And when did you take your last mega dose?”
“A few hours ago.”
Thirty-five thousand units of A, ten to twenty times a normal dose, taken daily for sixty days. Jordan was pretty sure she had the answer to Ardyth’s symptoms, and it gave her a feeling of satisfaction. At least her personal problems weren’t interfering with her diagnostic ability. Yet.
“My guess is you have acute vitamin A intoxication, Ardyth,” she said gently. “I think if you stop taking it, your symptoms will disappear. We’ll run some tests, though, just to be absolutely certain we’re not missing anything here.”
Jordan was jotting down orders for a CAT scan and an upper GI series when Lola stuck her head into the cubicle.
“Jordan, a guy’s just been dumped outside Emerg. He’s unconscious—whoever brought him sped off in a car. They’re bringing him in now. Billy says he’s got track marks, so it’s probably an overdose. Can you come?”
“Be right there.” Jordan handed orders to an aide and then sprinted after Lola. There’d been a series of drug overdoses in the past two weeks, a result of exceptionally strong heroin having hit the downtown Vancouver streets. Usually the Emergency Response Team brought the victims in, but sometimes bodies were dumped at the door by people who didn’t want to get involved.
Orderlies and nurses were lifting the limp male figure onto a stretcher when Jordan arrived. The patient’s face was obscured by a nurse’s arm, but Jordan saw at a glance that this wasn’t the usual skid-row addict.
Caucasian, well-dressed, charcoal sports jacket, black trousers, blue silk shirt—
She struggled to get her breath as a wave of dizziness swept over her. She recognized that shirt. Reaching past the nurse, Jordan took hold of the man’s jaw and turned his slack face toward her, and her worst fears were confirmed.
Garry. It was her husband. She’d bought him the shirt for Christmas.
Someone on the medical team was calling out his vitals, but Jordan barely heard it. One of the nurses was holding Garry’s wallet, going through it to determine his identity.
“Hughes, Garry M., DOB 1968, March 13.” As the woman read out the information on his driver’s license, for one shameful instant Jordan was relieved she’d retained her maiden name.
“I’ll see if he’s listed in the book,” the nurse said. “We may need next of kin.”
The number was listed, but Jordan knew there was no one home in their Kitsilano apartment. The nurse would get the message Garry had recorded for the answering service.
“Jordan? Hey, Jordan, what’s up? You okay?”
She suddenly realized everyone was waiting for her, looking at her—puzzled, impatient.
She should tell them about Garry and have someone else take over. It was against policy to treat a relative. Instead, like an automaton, she began the necessary assessment, even though she knew beyond a doubt what was wrong. Of course he’d taken an overdose. Her husband was a junkie.
“Pulse forty, respiration down to eight,” Lola reported. “We’re not getting a BP, Jordan. This guy’s on his way out…. He’s flat! Now we’re not getting much of a pulse at all.”
“Establish a line. Let’s give him Narcan.” She felt cold and detached and far away as she picked up the syringe with numb fingers and inserted naloxone hydrochloride into the IV valve.
In cases of overdose, the drug’s effect was miraculous. It instantly reversed the action of narcotics, and a patient who’d been on the verge of death only seconds before suddenly became awake and alert, just as if nothing had happened. In the E.R., they called it the Lazarus Effect. Except Lazarus had probably been grateful.
Everybody watched and waited. It only took a few seconds.
“Brace yourself, boys and girls,” someone murmured.
The instant the powerful drug reached Garry’s bloodstream, his sky-blue eyes flew open. A frown flickered across his smooth forehead as he stared up at the faces of the medical team grouped around the stretcher.
Inevitably his gaze came to rest on Jordan. As recognition dawned, his features contorted with rage. He grasped the sides of the gurney and pulled himself up as staff members struggled to control him. He was a big man, and it looked as if they were going to lose the battle.
“Call a code white,” someone yelled. “He’s freaking on us.”
Code white was an emergency call to security.
“Jordan?” Garry spat her name out. “What the hell have you done to me?”
Her mouth felt numb, her throat dry. She cleared it, amazed that her voice still worked. “You overdosed. I used Narcan to bring you out of it.”
It took a moment for Garry to react to that, and when he did Jordan wanted to turn her back and run from the room.
“You bitch!” he screamed at her. “You filthy bitch, you ruined my high, what the hell’s wrong with you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you stupid fool?” He tried to shake off the hands restraining him so he could climb off the table.
Jordan couldn’t move. She saw shock on the faces of her co-workers. They were staring at her, some of them open mouthed.
She was surprised when her voice burst out loud and strong. “Call a code white and get him out of here,” she ordered.
“You know this guy, Jordan?”
“Yes.” Her voice was unnaturally calm now. It seemed to come from a long distance away and belong to someone else. “I know him. Of course I know him. He’s my—he’s my husband. Get the equipment off him, I’m discharging him.”
She saw the glances that passed among the staff. They knew she could have committed him to the psych ward for treatment. They probably figured that’s what she ought to do, and maybe it was, but she just wanted him gone.
She had no energy left to deal with Garry and his problems. Over the past weeks she’d made appointments with the best drug treatment clinics in the city, appointments that she pulled strings to arrange and Garry hadn’t bothered to keep. She’d spent hours talking to him, trying to understand, to reason with him. She’d tried every way she knew to help him make the decision to stop. Nothing had worked.
Now, she was worn out. She’d done her best to keep her work and her personal problems separate, and look where that got her. She hadn’t wanted her co-workers to know how desperate and degrading her personal life had become. Garry had managed to take away even that last tiny shred of dignity.
Two security guards hurried in, and between them they restrained Garry as the staff quickly removed the IV apparatus from his body.
“Escort him to the exit and see that he gets a cab,” Jordan instructed the men.
The guards flanked him, and Garry’s broad shoulders sagged as they started to hustle him out of the treatment room. Over his shoulder he gave her the look she’d come to despise in the past months, the contrite, little-boy-lost look from under long, curling blond lashes. Those baby blues had charmed her when she first fell in love with him. At this moment they made her stomach churn with nausea.
Yesterday morning he’d begged her to write him yet another prescription for morphine. She’d refused, and he’d sworn at her, just as he had a moment ago. For a man with an expensive education, he had a limited vocabulary.
“Hey. Hey, Jordie,” he called over his shoulder as the guards hustled him out. “I’m sorry, babe, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it, it was just, you know, the shock of coming to in this place.” He dragged his feet, going limp.
“Jordie, tell these goons to back off me, okay? Please, honey?”
She didn’t reply. The security guards had stopped, holding him upright. They turned and looked at her, questioning. Her co-workers were all pretending hard to be busy with other things. By morning the whole episode would be all over the hospital, probably posted on some Web site.
“Jordie, talk to me here, okay?” Garry’s voice dropped, and he assumed the wheedling tone she’d come to despise. “See, the thing is, I’ve got no money for a cab. I shot the whole wad on that fix. Could you maybe—? Please, honey?”
Amazed that her legs worked, she hurried to the staff locker room and got twenty dollars from her handbag. She had to keep swallowing, and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly get her handbag opened or the door to her locker closed.
Security had escorted Garry to the exit by the time she got back, and Jordan marched into the rain and wordlessly held the money out to him.
He glanced at it and his mouth turned down petulantly before he snatched it, jamming the single bill into his pocket. “Twenty isn’t enough, not when I’m really in pain like this. I told you how bad it hurt this morning, Jordie, you could have given me something then and this wouldn’t have happened.” In one lithe motion, he twisted out of the guard’s grip.
“C’mon, babe, don’t be chippy with me, surely you can spare another couple twenties?”
She jerked her head from side to side and then turned her back on him, fleeing through the doors that led into Emerg. Inside, not one person looked at her, but their curiosity was like a scent in the air.
She couldn’t remember anything about the rest of that shift except that the trembling and nausea grew more and more difficult to control. She felt disoriented, far away, watching herself go through the motions of treating one patient after the other, amazed that she looked and sounded so normal.
When morning finally came, she had trouble driving home to the apartment. Fortunately the morning rush hour hadn’t really started yet, because she drove through a red light and sat through a green one. She scraped the side of her red Toyota against a cement beam when she tried to park it in the underground lot, and when she got out she didn’t even bother to check the extent of the damage.
She took the elevator to the second floor and after three tries, unlocked the door. The apartment was empty; Garry wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected him home. She’d hoped he wouldn’t be.
She knew he wasn’t at work, he hadn’t been all week. It was Thursday, and his secretary had left increasingly desperate messages for him every day. Up until this week, he’d managed to keep up a relatively professional facade at his law office. The partners had been lenient with him, blaming his erratic behavior on the accident. They’d covered for him the same way Jordan had, she mused as she walked through the rooms she’d painted and decorated with such care.
It felt as if she were seeing her home clearly for the first time in weeks. A great many things had disappeared lately, and she’d tried to believe it had nothing to do with Garry, but now she forced herself to face the truth.
In the living room, an empty CD holder stood beside the equally empty space where the expensive audio system had been. They’d bought it on their first anniversary. Several weeks ago, the apartment had been broken into while they were both supposedly at work. Her few good pieces of jewelry had been taken as well as all the electronic equipment—even the damned microwave.
Garry had taken them. She’d known it even then, but hadn’t been able to face the fact that her husband was an addict who’d steal and lie and cheat to get drugs.
Slowly and painfully as though she were old and brittle-boned, Jordan lowered herself to the dove-gray sofa and forced herself to look at what her life had become.
It had started with that damned car accident. Garry had been driving home late, undoubtedly going too fast. The expensive little sports car he’d insisted on owning had been struck by a pickup truck at an intersection. Garry had come away with a compound fracture of the left arm and a concussion. He’d also complained of excruciating pain from torn muscles in his back, pain that nothing seemed to alleviate.
Garry’s physician, Albert Mayborn, had finally prescribed morphine.
Jordan blamed herself for not recognizing that Garry was becoming addicted. She ought to have known, the signs were all there. Garry complained of pain long past the time when any muscle strain should have healed. She’d finally seen the physical signs of drug abuse in her husband’s bloodshot eyes, his jumpiness, his inability to sleep, his hair-trigger temper.
At last she’d confronted him about it, and of course he’d denied it. Until tonight, she’d managed to deny the extent of the problem herself.
The awful scene in the E.R. kept replaying in her head, and Jordan’s humiliation and shame grew. She drew her knees up to her chest, trying by sheer force of will to impose control over her shaking arms and legs.
She couldn’t get a deep breath. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She began to cry, deep, tearing sobs that scared her. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop them. Soon her stomach and chest hurt, her lungs felt as if they were on fire, and still the wrenching sobs went on and on. She was completely alone.
Hours passed. The phone rang, and she couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t move. She was thirty-two today, and she didn’t want to live. She began to think of the many ways there were to die.
And then the physician in her recognized that she needed help.
She forced herself up off the sofa, dialed the telephone and ordered a cab.
Sweating and shaking, still gulping back sobs, she found her handbag and made her way outside.
The Native driver gave her a concerned and wary look. “You okay, lady? Where you want to go?”
“St. Joseph’s Medical Center,” she gasped.
St. Joseph’s was an old building, and she knew every inch of it, having interned there. She dragged herself up a set of stairs at the back of the building to the third floor. It was the only place she could think of to get help.
The psych ward.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INTAKE NURSE WAS both intuitive and gentle. Jordan managed to choke out her name, adding that she was an Emerg physician, and without even asking her to fill in any forms, the nurse guided Jordan to a tiny private room with a cot and a chair. She helped her lie down, covering her with a blanket.
Jordan curled into a ball, too exhausted and spent to resist the emotions coursing through her. After a time, the door opened and Helen Moore, the resident psychiatrist, came in. Jordan knew her slightly, and had always liked her kind smile and forthright manner.
“Hi, Jordan.” Helen sat down beside the cot and reached for one of Jordan’s hands. She took it gently, cradling it between both of hers. “Can you tell me what’s made you so upset?”
Jordan tried, but it was impossible to talk through the tears. Helen reached for a box of tissues and handed over a fistful. “Try to take deep breaths.”
After a few moments, Jordan was able to put words together. “My hus-husband is—is a drug addict,” she began. Once she’d said the words aloud, it became easier to tell the rest of the story. She began with the car accident, the morphine, the prescriptions she’d written him and, when she’d refused to supply him, how the apartment was ransacked. Amid fresh bouts of weeping, she managed to recount what had occurred the previous night in the E.R.
“What—what about—about—Garry? What am I going to do about him? How—how can I—help him?”
“This is not about him,” Helen said firmly. “This is about you, Jordan. What are you going to do about you?”
Helen’s words shocked Jordan out of her tears. For so long, she’d exhausted herself worrying about Garry and his problems, believing that if only she could help him stop taking drugs, their life together might work.
“Garry is an adult, making choices about the way he lives his life,” Helen continued. “Do you want to go on allowing him to make those same choices for your life? You’re an exceptional physician with a great reputation at this hospital, Jordan, and I know you to be a good and caring person.” Her kind face broke into a mischievous smile. “Lord knows you’re good to look at. I’ve seen men fall over their feet like schoolboys when you’re around.”
Jordan started to cry again. It had been so long since anyone had complimented her. When she’d first met Garry, she’d felt confident and even pretty. Now she felt gray and old. And ashamed, so ashamed of not being able to control herself.
Helen gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “I think you need to value your own worth, Jordan, and go from there. The scene last night in the E.R. was hard, but sometimes it takes a hard lesson for us to see we’re on a path that isn’t the most beneficial for us.” Helen smiled again and released Jordan’s hand. “I’ve had my share of those tough lessons, I know how much they hurt. But they also help us heal. Right now I’m going to give you a sedative because you need to rest. We’ll talk again.”
“I feel so—so stupid,” Jordan admitted, her voice trembling. “You’d think I could cope with this on my own. It’s humiliating to admit that I can’t.”
“We—all of us—are only human, Jordan. Being doctors means we start out with a higher level of daily stress, and then we have our own personal stuff on top of it. As a profession, medicine carries the highest rate of alcohol dependency, drug addiction, divorce and suicide. Coming here shows good judgment and common sense. And no one needs to know you’re here.”
Jordan blew her nose. “Thank you. That would make things easier.”
“I’ll have a word with the staff. Now, I think rest is the best restorative at the moment.” She gave Jordan a sedative and gently tucked the blanket around her. “I’ll be in this evening to see how you’re doing. Relax now.”
As the medication gradually took the edge off her panic and her muscles loosened, Jordan was able to think more clearly than she had for weeks.
Garry was a junkie.
As an E.R. doctor, she’d seen enough junkies to know that no one could help them unless they chose to help themselves.
He wasn’t making the slightest effort.
Her eyelids were heavy, and she knew that within a few moments, she’d be asleep.
What are you going to do about you, Jordan?
The answer floated to the surface. It made her terribly sad, and it frightened her as well, but it was the right thing for her. The only thing.
As soon as she felt able, she was going to see a lawyer about a divorce.
“THE VERY LEAST you could have done was tell me you wanted a divorce before you saw this—this scumbag of a lawyer.” Garry’s face was scarlet with rage and disbelief. “How could you do this to me, Jordan?” He threw the copy of the proposed separation agreement she’d just handed him to the floor and stood glaring at her, hands knotted into fists. The pages scattered, landing at her feet.
His voice rose. “You know I’m not well. I’m not over the accident yet! You could help but you won’t. What about the marriage vows you made?” Sarcasm dripped from every word. “I could swear there was something in there about in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Have you thought about my parents? They’ve treated you like one of the family, and now you’re doing this to me—to them.”
Jordan’s heart was hammering. It was true, Meg and Edward had been good to her. She hated the thought of hurting them. She kept her expression impassive and did her best to convince herself that the problems Garry was throwing at her weren’t hers to solve.
This was all his stuff, as Helen would phrase it. And Meg and Edward had witnessed Garry’s recent tantrums. Surely they would understand her decision when they accepted the reality of their son’s addiction….
It was helpful to remember Helen’s advice. Jordan now viewed the two days she’d spent in psych as an intensive training seminar.
Right now she noticed that everything Garry said related only to himself. Lordy, how could she have missed how self-centered he was? She’d known him two and a half years, and yet she felt that during the past week, since she’d come home from the psych ward, she was seeing him as if he were a stranger.
And it surprised her to realize she didn’t even like him anymore. His addiction had turned him into a bully and a whiner, not exactly a sexy combination. There hadn’t been any sex for months now, anyway.
He was hollering at her again. “What kind of bull-shit is that dyke of a doctor pumping you full of, Jordie? You never acted like this before. What’s between us should stay between us. I don’t like you dumping your guts to some stranger.” His voice grew softer, and he tried to reach out and take her into his arms. “You’re my wife, babe. Shouldn’t you be talking to me about stuff that bothers you?”
Jordan held up both hands, palms out, and moved away.
He swore a long stream of curses, and then she could see him consciously turning on the charm again. “C’mon, Jordie. Honey, baby, don’t be this way,” he wheedled. “I said I was sorry for what happened in the E.R. I just couldn’t take the pain in my back anymore, and you wouldn’t give me anything for it, remember? I’m not good with pain, honey, you know that.”
She moved farther back, out of his reach. She remembered everything. He sickened her.
The second day of her stay in psych, Jordan had called home and left a message for Garry, telling him where she was. Hours later, he’d come to the ward, and on Jordan’s instructions, Helen and the staff had conveyed the message that she didn’t want to see him. High, he’d become verbally abusive. Helen had threatened to call security, and finally he left.
Now Jordan looked at him, and she couldn’t even summon pity.
“I won’t prescribe drugs for you ever again, Garry. So don’t bother asking.”
He tightened his mouth and narrowed his eyes. Taking a step closer, he shook his trembling finger under her nose. His breath was foul.
“You go ahead with this divorce shit and I promise you I’ll ruin you financially. I am a lawyer, in case it’s slipped your mind. Any judge would award me ongoing support when they hear about the accident. And I’ve got the firm behind me—it isn’t going to cost me anything.”
He’d already tested his firm to the limit, but she resisted the urge to tell him that. She was grateful that Helen had given her the name of an attorney she liked and trusted, Marcy Davis. Marcy had handled Helen’s own complex divorce several years ago. It made it easier to withstand Garry’s bullying, knowing Marcy would deal with all the legal issues.
“And I’m not moving out of this apartment, either,” he said. “You want a separation, you move out, lady.”
“I already have.” He hadn’t even noticed that her clothes, some of the furniture and the few personal things she cherished were gone. She’d packed up that morning, called a moving company to put the furniture in storage, and rented a housekeeping room at a motel across the street from St. Joe’s.
“You’re welcome to everything that’s left here. But I’d like to put the apartment on the market as soon as possible, Garry.” Her lawyer was well aware that Jordan had been making the mortgage payments since Garry’s accident.
She could tell by his expression that he hadn’t expected any of this.
“My lawyer will handle the details,” she said in a quiet voice. “Call her if you have any questions.” Exactly what Marcy had told her to say. She’d practiced so that now it came out smoothly, without revealing the effort it took her to speak.
“Where the hell are you going? You come back here!” She heard the panic in his voice as she headed for the door. “We haven’t finished talking yet. What if I need you for something? You could at least give me your new address, Jordan.”
It was tragic to recognize that the only thing he’d need her for was money. Prescriptions and money were all he’d needed from her for months.
“You have my cell number.” And Marcy had already suggested she get that changed if his calls became too frequent or abusive. “And I’d rather you didn’t come to St. Joe’s again, Garry.”
“Last I heard it was a free country,” he snarled. “I can go wherever the hell I choose.”
“Okay, then I’ll alert security.” She prayed she wouldn’t have to carry out the threat. She opened the apartment door. “Goodbye, Garry.”
“You’re making a big mistake, you dumb bitch!”
She closed the door and hurried to the elevator. Her legs were shaking as she made her way down and out of the building. She was crying when she climbed in her car. Some of the tears were for the dreams she’d forfeited, but mostly they were tears of relief.
She’d taken a first and much-needed step toward finding out who Jordan Burke really was, and she was learning fast what she didn’t want in her life anymore. If that was a negative positive, so what? She’d take what she could get.
She blew her nose hard and for the first time in days, she smiled wryly. But the smile went just as quickly as it came.
Now she had to figure out what it was she did want.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING WEEK when the notice on St. Joe’s computer bulletin board caught Jordan’s eye.
Resident GP wanted for isolated First Nations village, Vancouver Island’s west coast. Ahousaht, Clayoquot Sound, Flores Island. Applicants must be willing to work with Tribal Community Services. Access by boat or floatplane only.
There was a Web address and a phone number, and Jordan scribbled them down. She wasn’t sure why. She knew nothing about native villages, and not much about First Nations people. The ones she was most familiar with were the ones who ended up in the E.R., most of them unfortunate residents of Vancouver’s troubled Lower East Side.
She was on the early shift, and when she was finished work she had an appointment with Helen, who once again asked the question that was becoming a mantra between them.
“What is it you really want, Jordan?”
“I want to move away.” The words came of their own volition, surprising her. “I’ve always lived in Vancouver. I grew up here, went to university here, trained at St. Joe’s. This is the only hospital I’ve ever worked at. I think I’d like to leave the city, go somewhere where no one knows me, maybe give general practice a shot. Make a fresh start.”
Somewhere Garry isn’t. She didn’t say the words aloud. She didn’t have to. Helen understood.
“Maybe that’s what you need to do, then. Just keep in mind that you take all your emotional baggage with you, along with your underwear, no matter where you travel,” Helen reminded her. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she quoted with her teasing smile. “Any idea where you want to go?”
Jordan shook her head. “I’ll have to find a job before I make any changes. There’s the legal bills to think about.” It was too soon to speculate.
But later that afternoon, she explored the Web for Ahousaht. Photos showed a wild and windswept village surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. She learned that until now medical care had been provided by the nurse at the local clinic and a doctor who flew in twice a week. Emergency cases were transported by medevac to the hospital in Tofino on nearby Vancouver Island. But the community’s requirements had changed, and now the Tribal Council needed a full-time doctor. The salary wasn’t what Jordan earned in the E.R., but neither would there be shift work. And housing was included.
Impulsively, Jordan took out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d copied down.
The number rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Hello?” There was a note of impatience in the man’s deep and resonant tone.
“Oh, um, yes, hello.” Damn, now she was losing her confidence. Her hands were sweating and she could hear the strain in her voice. “My, um, my name is Jordan Burke, Doctor Burke, and I’m calling about the medical position. Is it still available, or have you found someone?”
There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know for sure. Call back another time. The office is closed for the day.” His tone was brusque, bordering on rude.
“Well, can you just tell me—”
“Nope, I can’t. You need to speak to Bennie, he’s the rep from Tribal Council.”
“Bennie? Bennie who? Does he have a last name?” Jordan was over feeling nervous and well on the way to being annoyed. Surely he could be more helpful?
“Just Bennie will do fine. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“And you are—?” This person should never be answering a business phone. She’d say so, in the nicest possible way, when she talked to this Bennie, Jordan decided.
“Silas Keefer. And I’m hanging up now, Jordan Burke. There’s a celebration I need to attend.”
“Oh. Sure. But first can you just tell me—”
The line clicked and a dial tone sounded. The bloody man had hung up on her.
Jordan pushed End and shoved the phone into her bag with more force than was necessary. Whoever, whatever Silas Keefer was, he’d succeeded in discouraging her from applying for the position.
SILAS HAD FORGOTTEN about the call by the time he took his place in the welcoming circle. When his turn came to hold the fragile baby, he cradled him against his heart. The tiny boy seemed too small to bear the weight of his sturdy name.
Hello, Cameron Michael John. Welcome, Nuu-chah-nulth warrior.
Cameron was barely a week old. Silas gazed down into the little face. The baby’s skin was golden and downy, and he looked up at Silas through big dark eyes. One minute fist, curled into itself like a seashell, flailed and then came to rest on the front of Silas’s flannel shirt, and his man’s heart swelled in his chest. He never got used to the miracle of new life. He hoped he never would.
You, young Cameron, have plenty of time to grow into your name—and you’ll be growing up right alongside your parents.
Alice Pettigrew, Cameron’s mother, was barely sixteen, hardly more than a child herself. And his father, Hogan John, had two full years to go before his twentieth birthday.
Children, raising children. At least here in Ahousaht, Cameron and his parents were surrounded by family, mothers and aunts and fathers and grandfathers. Most of them were here today and Silas knew all of them were willing to help in any way they could.
The shy young parents sat side by side holding hands as the members of the welcoming circle cradled the newborn to their hearts and hummed the traditional ahhhh nook, ahhhhh nook deep in their chests. Conveying love and welcome and support. Then they sang the welcoming songs, the dancers up and moving to the beat of the drums. Silas said a prayer, and as soon as the blessing was complete, got to his feet and headed toward the door.
His half sister, Christina Crow, caught him just before he escaped.
She gave him her wicked wide grin. “Hey, Silas, you’re coming to Mom’s birthday party tomorrow night, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there.” They both knew he wouldn’t stay, but he’d put in an appearance. He was, after all, Rose Marie’s firstborn. After her divorce from Silas’s father, Angus Keefer, Rose Marie had married Peter Crow and five years later she’d had Christina. Twelve years after that, Patwin, her third child, was born, but Christina was the half sibling Silas really knew well. Patwin hadn’t been home much since Silas had moved back to Ahousaht. And Silas was profoundly solitary.
But who could help loving Christina? She’d been born smiling. Tiny and slender, his half sister had thick black hair permed into a curly, electric frizz. Her dramatic, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and glorious copper skin drew the hungry glances of men. But it was her sunny nature that captivated people as much as her beauty. She had a streak of mischief that made her fun to be around, and her smart mouth brought shocked smiles to even the most dour of the elders.
Over the six years he’d lived in Ahousaht, Christina had somehow wormed her way through all the protective barriers Silas had erected.
And just like all the women in the family, she was nosy as hell.
“So what’d you get Mom for her birthday?”
“That marble pastry board and lazy Susan she’s been eyeing in the new kitchenware store in Tofino.”
“Super.” Christina beamed up at him, dark eyes sparkling. “That’s gonna get you brownie points, big brother. Dad and I each got her another one of those copper-bottomed pots she’s nuts about.” She shook her head and her curls lifted and settled. “Mom’s the only woman I know who actually wants kitchen stuff for her birthday. I’d flatten anyone who gave me pots instead of perfume.”
“How’s it going with Andy?” She’d been dating Andy Makinna for a couple of months now.
“It’s over.” Christina shrugged and wrinkled her nose. “Him and Eli didn’t get along.”
“That kid’s got a good shit detector.” Silas hadn’t been particularly fond of her latest admirer, either. Good for his nephew for putting the run on the guy.
“Yeah, well, Eli’s gonna end up supporting me in my old age unless he takes a shine to one of these guys pretty soon.”
“He’s only eight. He’s got lots of time to dig up a stepfather before that.”
Christina rolled her eyes. “I’d just as soon have a man who’s breathing.”
“I’ll pass that on to Eli, but a woman with a personality problem like you have can’t be too fussy.”
She grinned and thumped him on the shoulder. “Take your own advice, older brother.”
“I’ll give it my best shot.” Silas gave her a quick hug and eased past her, toward freedom.
Christina grabbed a handful of his shirt and held on. “Why not stay for coffee?”
“Can’t. I’ve got a deadline on an article, and I’m trying to improve the Ahousaht Web site.”
She knew it was an excuse, but she didn’t challenge him. “Okay. See you tomorrow morning at the meeting, then. No applicants yet for the medical posting, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever find a doctor who wants to come and live here.” Christina was nursing supervisor for the medical center. She was the one who’d convinced the Council about the advantages of having a resident M.D.
“You know, somebody did call about that posting.” He’d forgotten all about it till now. Silas was one of the band’s healers, but he was the first to admit the need for both healing modalities. “Just before the ceremony, I dropped by the band office to get some stuff Bennie left for me, and the phone rang. It was a woman. She asked if the position was still open. I told her I didn’t know.”
“Did you get her name and number?”
“Her name was Jordan, Jordan Brick or Bruk or something.” Silas shook his head. “I was late for the welcoming ceremony. But I did tell her to call back and talk to Bennie before I hung up on her.”
Christina gave him a look. “Probably the only person who’ll ever even think of applying, and you pissed her off right up front, eh?”
Silas shrugged. “You know me, I’m not exactly Mr. Congeniality.”
“Mr. Porcupine is more like it.” Christina shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You need a crash course in human relations, big brother.”
He smiled down at her, not in the least offended. “I’m way too old to change my wicked ways.”
“Thirty-six going on ninety-seven?”
“If that woman really wants the job, she’ll call back. And she’ll have to really want it or she’ll never stick it out through the first few weeks of culture shock. She’ll find out—” he ticked them off on his fingers “—there’s no sushi bar, no movie theater, no health club and it’s a forty-five minute trip by water taxi to the nearest pizza joint, which for some strange reason won’t deliver. And then there’s the rain. Mustn’t forget we have an annual rainfall of a hundred and ninety-six inches. So if I was a little abrupt on the phone, it’s a good thing—a test. We’ll see how determined she is to live on an island populated by wild Indians.”
Christina blew a raspberry. “The elders hear you call us that and they’ll revive scalping. You make it sound so bad anybody would turn tail and run. If by some fluke she phones back and even comes for a look-see, maybe you oughta lay low while I convince her there actually are advantages to living in Ahousaht.”
“If she comes, I’ll stay out of the way. Promise.”
Christina shot him a mischievous look. “Come to think about it, that’s not the best idea, either, big brother. If she’s single, the sight of you might entice her to remain in spite of the rain and the lack of a mall. You’re not half-bad to look at, although your manners leave a lot to be desired.”
Laughing, Silas made his escape when someone else came by to talk to Christina. He took the path that would lead him out of the village, along the forested path to where he’d built his compact cabin.
The rain that had been falling all day had stopped. The rising wind, chill and brisk, blew the clouds away, and overhead the late-afternoon sunset streaked the sky crimson and gold. Boats rocked at anchor in the bay, and kids in T-shirts raced up and down the gravel road on their bikes, impervious to the chill air. He was thinking about what he’d said, about there being no pizza joint in Ahousaht.
Personally, he’d settle for a faster and more reliable connection to the Internet.
CHAPTER FOUR
A CAB DROPPED Jordan and her two gigantic suitcases on the end of the pier just after ten on Monday morning, June 26. As well as her sizeable medical bag, she also had two shopping bags stuffed with groceries. The small convenience store in Ahousaht reputedly carried only the most basic essentials, so she’d just visited a large grocery in Tofino.
“She leaves at ten-thirty or thereabouts,” the cabdriver said, waving a hand at a decent-size boat bobbing in the water at the bottom of a walkway. “You got lotsa time.” He eyed the suitcases with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “I’ll get these on board for ya.”
He was a small, older man, and he walked with a limp. He’d struggled with the bags at the small airstrip the evening before, when Jordan arrived from Vancouver. He’d carried them into the inn where she’d spent the night and then lifted them back into his cab this morning. Envisioning herniated disks and heart attacks, Jordan tipped him lavishly and shook her head.
“Nope, not again. You’ve been great, and I thank you for the offer. But I’ll get someone on the boat to help me. You’ve wrestled with these long enough.”
He looked relieved. Thanking her profusely, he hurried away through the rain before she could change her mind.
Unsure what to do next, Jordan hefted her medical bag, abandoning the suitcases and groceries on the dock. By now quite wet, she clung to the railing, gingerly making her way down the slippery wooden ramp to the tiny floating pier. Moored to the dock, the aluminum boat the cabdriver had pointed out rocked as she scrambled aboard.
There was no one on the small deck. Feeling awkward, hoping she wouldn’t slip and catapult straight down into the cabin, Jordan gingerly climbed down the narrow ladder, surprised by how large the interior was.
There was space for about twenty-four passengers, and so far, she was the only one. Two tall, heavy native men were seated in the cockpit, talking as they drank from gigantic mugs of coffee. They turned and looked at her, dark, weather-beaten faces devoid of expression.
“I want to go to Ahousaht,” she began. “I’ve left a couple of heavy suitcases and a bunch of groceries up on the pier. Could someone help me carry them on board?”
Without a word, the younger man got up. When Jordan turned to follow him, the older man shook his head and motioned at a seat.
“Billy’ll get them.”
Jordan set her medical bag down and slid into a seat. “Thanks, that’s very kind.” She reached into her handbag for her wallet. “How much is the fare?”
“You’re the new doctor.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, I’m Jordan Burke. Hi.” She got up and they shook hands, hers swallowed by his rough paw. His scarred face softened into a smile.
“Charlie Tidian. No charge this time, Doctor Jordan Burke.”
“Thank you, skipper.” Jordan smiled at him. “You make the trip back and forth from Ahousaht every day?”
“Twice a day. The boat’s also used as an ambulance, if anybody needs to get to the hospital and it’s not urgent enough for the medevac.”
“How long does the trip take?”
“Forty-five minutes in good seas.”
Billy heaved her suitcases to the deck and then stowed them and the groceries at the back of the cabin, and soon people began trickling aboard, most of them First Nations. A young, pretty girl with a toddler and a huge backpack, an older woman, four young men. A middle-aged couple, obviously tourists, outfitted head to toe in Tilley gear, took the seat across from Jordan. The man whipped out a digital camera and began filming the boat and its occupants, concentrating on the mother and toddler and the older woman. Jordan figured he was being rude as hell, but the three ignored him.
At ten-thirty, the captain started the engines and the boat slipped away from the dock, heading at ever-increasing speed out over the gray-green expanse of water.
As the mainland disappeared, Jordan thought back to her first and only visit to Ahousaht three weeks earlier. She’d taken her car that time, driving from Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and catching the Nanaimo ferry across the Inlet. It had taken three hours to navigate the twisting and terrifying Island Highway to reach the village of Tofino. There, feeling more and more as if she’d reached the end of the world, she’d chartered a floatplane to Ahousaht.
The isolated island village had both appalled and appealed to her. Sunshine shimmered on the water, blue-gray mountains rose in the distance and thick forest surrounded the sprawling frame buildings. The only road was a rutted dirt track that snaked its way up island. If she’d wanted isolation, it didn’t get any more remote than this.
The chief, council members and the nursing supervisor, Christina Crow, had greeted her warmly. They’d asked a lot of questions, including why she wanted to come to Ahousaht.
Without going into details, she’d told them her marriage had ended and that she wanted a complete change of scene. Her résumé spoke for itself, graduation at the top of her class and several years at St. Joseph’s E.R.
They’d been touchingly honest about their community: the isolation, the lack of amenities, the unique customs of the First Nations people.
She’d admitted little knowledge of their culture, and giving her two books, they’d left her alone with coffee and a plate of brownies. By the time they decided to hire her, the plate was almost empty, she knew a little about the history of the Nuu-chah-nulth people—and she was on a sugar high.
Jordan had accepted their offer on the spot.
Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. She tried to suppress her apprehension as the distance from Tofino increased, but finally gave in and let her emotions run. Aware that the Tilley couple were watching her bawl, she turned her face to the window, pretending to be intent on the small islands rushing by.
“Be aware of what you’re feeling. Don’t censor it, don’t struggle to subdue it,” Helen had advised. “Allow the emotions to come and just watch them. Darkness can’t survive when you let light in.”
Back in Vancouver, Jordan had been certain that this drastic life change was right and good for her. But as the minutes ticked by, she began to wonder.
She’d sold her car and many of her belongings, making the trip from Vancouver to Tofino by plane this time. There really was no point in having a car on an island where the majority of the community was within walking distance. And they did have a rusted-out ambulance for emergencies.
The boat chugged along, rising up high and then slapping heavily down on the waves. The noise of its props and powerful twin-engine motor finally soothed her. Whatever lay ahead was out of her control.
The tension in her neck and arms gradually subsided and she relaxed. For these brief few moments, she could just be.
Half an hour passed. Ahead, the clouds began to dissipate, revealing blue sky in patches overhead.
The water taxi skirted a long finger of land and several crab boats before turning into an inside channel, bordered by a wild, rocky shoreline. A few houses came into view, gray and weathered against the thick evergreens.
The boat glided past a fish farm and then more houses on the left and a long brown building with the sign Motel and Restaurant.
They finally arrived at the ramshackle dock, where a purse seiner and a cluster of fishing boats bobbed in the waves. And just as Jordan was wondering what to do with her unwieldy suitcases and grocery bags, Billy hoisted them out of the boat.
“They’re fine here,” he told her. “You go ahead, we’ll bring them up for you. You’re living at the back of the medical center, right?”
“I am. Thank you so much.” Carrying her medical bag and her purse, Jordan climbed out of the boat and walked slowly down the long pier and up the dirt road. A large sign nailed to a building read, Welcome to Ahousaht. Jordan looked around for Christina. The nursing supervisor had said she’d meet her, but she wasn’t there.
Two small boys on bikes came ripping past. One of them did an elaborate wheelie for her benefit and then hopped off the bike. He was wearing a billed cap backward over unruly black hair, and he gave Jordan an enchanting, gap-toothed grin. His face was still round with baby fat.
“Hi,” he said. “You’re our new doctor, right?”
She smiled back at him and nodded. “And who are you, sir?”
“I’m Eli Crow—Christina’s my mom. She told us to watch for you. She had to go see Auntie Elsie—she fell yesterday and hurt her foot, all the toes on the right foot are bruised.”
“Hi, Eli.” Jordan set her bag down and shook hands with Eli. She remembered Christina saying that she was the single parent of an eight-year-old. “Who’s your friend?”
“He’s Michael Nitsch. His mom is gonna make movies.”
“Hi, Michael.” Jordan held out her hand to the other boy. “So are you going into the movie business, too, when you grow up?”
“Nope. I’m gonna be a fireman.” Michael took his time shaking her hand. “Should we call you Mrs. Doctor?”
“You can call me Doctor Jordan, how’s that? I’m pleased to meet you both. You came along at exactly the right moment, too. The last time I was here somebody met me, and now I’m sort of lost. Could you guys get me to the medical center? And maybe help me carry those grocery bags?”
“Sure. We’re really, really strong.” One on each side of her, they hefted her plastic carryalls over their handlebars. Taking the job as guides seriously, they talked nonstop, pointing out the band office, the school and where they lived.
They informed the smiling drivers of two pickup trucks and a man out chopping wood that they were taking Doc Jordan to her new house. They told Jordan that the man chopping wood had a wife with six fingers, and that she’d let Jordan see them if Eli asked her and said please. Jordan quickly declined the offer.
“Maybe another time.”
“Okay, whenever you like,” Eli replied expansively.
Everyone called out a friendly hello. A woman pegging flowered sheets and diapers on a clothesline smiled and waved.
“That’s Audrey. She’s got a new baby,” Michael confided.
“Yeah, and her daddy went to live with his other wife,” Eli said with a nod. “Audrey won’t let him in the door now.”
Fascinating. This had a motorcycle escort beat all to hell, and Jordan felt pretty much like an informed VIP by the time her young heroes had delivered her safely to the apartment. She gave each of them two dollars and their dark eyes lit up.
“Thanks a lot, Doctor Jordan,” said Michael.
“You need anything, just call us,” Eli added. They sped off on their bikes to spend their reward money.
Jordan’s apartment was at the back of the medical center. Using the key she’d been given, she tried to open the door, only to find it was unlocked. Inside, it smelled of fresh paint, and Jordan had to smile.
Christina had made good on her promise. The walls were a warm, light color somewhere between lemon and cream, and the apartment had improved drastically since Jordan had last seen it on her first visit.
That day, these walls had been a nauseous institutional green.
“Can you tell this was where the cops stayed overnight before they got their trailer?” Christina had groaned. “They must get this paint free from the government. I think a nice warm lamb’s wool shade for these walls, don’t you?”
“What color’s lamb’s wool?”
“I dunno.” Christina had shrugged and shot Jordan a wicked grin. “I’m just trying my damnedest to impress you. I saw it in a Martha Stewart magazine.”
Jordan smiled now, remembering. There was an exuberance about Christina that made her irresistible, and obviously Eli had inherited it.
The paint made the small area welcoming, but the place was still strange to her, and she was suddenly achingly homesick for the familiarity of the Kitsilano apartment she and Garry had shared.
But not homesick for Garry. She shivered. Over the past few weeks she’d had to alert security at St. Joe’s, and she’d called the police and threatened to get a restraining order when he had turned up at the door of the motel one night.
Cancel, cancel. No more depressing thoughts. So she had no idea how to make a fire in the iron cookstove. She’d learn. The hot plate she’d ordered in Tofino wouldn’t be delivered for a couple days, but she’d brought a lot of cereal and apples. It wouldn’t do any harm to fast a little.
She walked around, taking stock of her new home. It was clean, sparsely furnished but adequate, with mismatched furniture and an odd but generous assortment of dishes in the kitchen area. A distinctive and colorful native painting hung on one wall, and someone had obviously hand-carved the two beautiful wooden bowls on the counter.
She opened the door wide to get rid of the smell of paint, hung up her jacket on a wooden peg and began unloading the groceries. When Billy arrived with her suitcases, she’d unpack and add her own small touches to the decor, like the soft turquoise silk shawl her brother Toby had sent for her birthday.
She’d use that as a table cover. And she had an old black-and-white photo of her and Toby when they were little to put on the bedside table. One of her mother, as well.
It would soon feel like home, she reassured herself. This wasn’t the same as when she was a child, shuffled from one home to the next, sharing bedrooms and sometimes even beds with other foster kids.
This apartment was hers alone. It had been her choice to come here, and she’d do her best to turn this little place into a sanctuary.
FROM A WINDOW in the band office, Silas watched the new doctor walk past with Eli and Michael. He’d honored his promise to Christina; although he was a member of the council, he’d deliberately been absent for the initial meeting with the doctor. Instead, he’d hiked up island to visit an elderly couple recovering from a severe bout of the flu, but he couldn’t deny he was curious. Ahousaht was a small, close-knit community. The addition of someone from Away always had repercussions.
Jordan Burke was tall, maybe five-nine or ten—or maybe she only looked that tall because she was long-legged and very slender. Her thick chestnut hair, down past her shoulder blades and silky straight, was parted in the middle and tied simply at the base of her neck with a blue scarf. She was wearing faded jeans, brown boots and a hooded blue sweatshirt. She carried a navy rain jacket slung over one long, slim arm.
Eli and Michael were hoisting her grocery bags and talking a mile a minute, and he saw her smile at them. Her smile transformed her narrow face with its aristocratic long nose and full lips from almost plain to—he thought pretty and then changed his mind to beautiful. But only when she smiled.
She looked foreign. Pale, exotic, fragile. Silas made a dismissive sound in his throat and turned away from the window.
She wouldn’t last long. He’d bet the council would be hiring another doctor within six weeks. Strength and endurance were essential in this wild, remote location. Fragile flowers didn’t thrive in Ahousaht.
JORDAN HAD JUST FINISHED hanging her jacket in the small closet and was assessing how much space the drawers of the rickety chest gave her when she heard a knock at the door. She hurried to open it, hoping it was Billy with her suitcases, but Christina stood there, navy shirt accentuating the dramatic angles of her high cheekbones.
“Welcome, Jordan,” she said with a wide smile. She handed her a bouquet of wild roses in a glass canning jar.
“Hey, Christina, thank you so much. Come in. I met your adorable son and his friend. Thanks for sending them to escort me from the boat.”
Jordan put the flowers in the middle of the table.
“I wanted to be there myself, but there was a minor emergency. Did the boys give you the rundown on the entire population?”
“Only their immediate families and everyone we passed. I can’t wait to pump them for more.”
“They’re nosy little demons. I just hope they never find out about blackmail.”
Jordan waved an arm at the walls. “Thanks for the paint job, I love the color.”
“Lambskin duvet, just like I promised.” Christina glanced at the grocery bags. “I hope you didn’t make lunch yet. Mom wondered if you’d like to come and eat with us?”
Jordan glanced at her watch, suddenly aware that it was past noon and nerves had kept her from having anything but coffee that morning.
“Thanks, Christina. I’d love to, but I’m waiting for Billy to bring my suitcases. He should be here any minute. Can you wait?”
“Sure. No rush. Mom’s serving stew, it’ll keep.”
“Please, sit.” Jordan gestured at the brown tweed couch. “Do you want to call her? I have my cell phone—”
Christina grinned and shook her head. “Mom’s pretty easygoing. She’ll expect us when we get there.”
Jordan sank into a stuffed armchair across from the couch and then gave a startled squeak when her bottom almost hit the floor. The springs were gone.
“Oops.” Christina put a hand over her mouth and giggled. After a moment of stunned silence, Jordan began to laugh too, and then she couldn’t stop. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she pressed her fists against her mouth, willing herself to regain control, losing it more with each passing moment.
CHAPTER FIVE
CHRISTINA GOT UP after a moment and knelt in front of Jordan.
“Let it come,” she said in her soft, slow voice. “Let it out, it needs to escape now.” She laid a small hand gently on Jordan’s head and stroked her hair.
Ashamed, but too far out of control to do anything about it, Jordan wailed, gulping out strange guttural noises.
“That’s the way,” Christina encouraged her. “Let ’er out.”
It took what felt like forever before Jordan regained control.
Christina went to the bathroom for a tissue, then pressed it into Jordan’s hand.
“Oh, dammit, I’m so sorry,” Jordan said when she could speak again. “What an idiot, having a meltdown like that.” She blew her nose hard and tried for a smile. “And I’m supposed to be the doctor. It’s enough to scare you, huh?”
Christina shook her head. “You’re a woman first. Women need to cry, it keeps us healthy.”
A knock at the door signaled the arrival of the suitcases.
“Oh, no, I’m a wreck.” Jordan hated the idea of anyone else witnessing her breakdown.
“Go in the bathroom and run some cool water. I’ll tell Billy to put the suitcases in the bedroom, okay?”
“Thanks.” Jordan hurried into the bathroom and locked the door. She was shaking.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she whispered to her bleary image in the mirror over the sink. “You’ll need to go back on medication if you keep this up.”
She washed her face and held a cold washcloth over her swollen eyes. She could hear Christina’s calm voice directing Billy, and then the sound of the door closing behind him. Grateful that she’d already put the small cache of cosmetics she carried in her purse on the shelf above the sink, Jordan used eye drops and touches of concealer, then an eyelash curler. A critical glance told her that no one with normal eyesight would be fooled; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still bloodshot, her face puffy.
She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.
Christina studied her. “Well, it looks like you either have one hell of a hangover or you’ve been on a major crying jag,” she said.
“Let’s be optimistic and think hangover.”
Christina grinned. “Okay, let’s go eat. Food fixes damned near anything. I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” That in itself was amazing. Jordan’s appetite had been on sabbatical for weeks, but at this moment she was voraciously hungry.
“That’s gonna make my mother one happy woman. She loves feeding people. It’s a wonder I’m not three hundred pounds.” Christina waited while Jordan locked the door, and then they set off down the gravel road.
The wind was up—it smelled of the sea—and it cooled Jordan’s burning cheeks and smarting eyes.
“Where’d you train, Christina?” She liked the other woman a lot. She’d only ever had a handful of women friends, and she’d lost touch with them since marrying Garry. He’d taken all her attention.
“Edmonton, nine years ago,” Christina said. “I followed my high school sweetheart there. David got a job in the oil fields and I enrolled in nursing. But he was killed when a generator blew up. I was two months from graduating and four months pregnant. We were getting married the day after graduation.”
Lordy. All of a sudden, Jordan’s life didn’t seem so desperate.
Christina was matter-of-fact about it all. “I got my degree and came back here so Eli could grow up with family and friends.”
Family. Friends. The words left a hollow space in Jordan’s heart. She’d grown up in foster homes, struggling to make top grades, too busy to have time for friendship. And then somewhere along the line, she’d learned not to trust other women. And yet here was a woman, on an island in what at this moment felt like the outer edge of the known world, who made Jordan think friendship was not only possible, but likely.
They left the road and headed up a slight hill to a wooden frame house indistinguishable from every other they’d passed. Each had a stack of firewood outside, and many of the yards were cluttered with discarded bathtubs, broken high chairs, rusted motors, old tires—even bed frames.
Some had electrical lines leading to them, but many didn’t. The one Christina headed for was tidy and well kept. The pile of firewood was neatly stacked, and wooden tubs of flowers flanked the walkway. Christina led Jordan up the sturdy stairs and opened the front door.
“Mom, hey, we’re here!”
Mouthwatering cooking smells greeted them, along with Elvis singing gospel on a boom box. A plump, very pretty woman hurried down the hall to greet them, wiping her hands on a striped apron tied around her ample waist. She was smiling, and her dark eyes were almost buried in her round apple cheeks.
“About time. I was about to send out a scouting party.”
“This is Jordan Burke, Ma. Jordan, my mother, Rose Marie Crow.”
Rose Marie took both of Jordan’s hands in a warm, welcoming clasp.
“You’re a pretty one,” she commented. “But way too skinny, we’ll have to feed you up, eh?”
Jordan’s smile took effort. Her skin felt shrunken from crying, and she was suddenly shy. “It smells wonderful in here,” she managed to say. “Thank you so much for inviting me.”
“We’re not fancy, come and sit in the kitchen and I’ll serve the stew. Christina, Eli came by and said he’s eating at Michael’s house. Wanda’s making them KD.”
“Kraft Dinner,” Christina interpreted. “They’d live on the stuff if we let them.”
Rose Marie led the two women to the large kitchen at the back of the house. Sliding doors opened on to a deck, where the yard below was mostly garden. Green plants in a variety of pots lined the deep windowsills.
The kitchen was warm and inviting, counters lined with baskets of food and a wood-burning cookstove in the corner like the one in Jordan’s apartment. Except this one sent out waves of warmth. Its gleaming surface was crowded with pots, and a large, sturdy basket beside the stove held a good supply of firewood.
Rose Marie deftly lifted the lid with an iron utensil and thrust another log into the firebox, slamming the lid back in place. The big square wooden table in the middle of the room was set for four with sea-green place mats and colorful Fiestaware.
Christina indicated a chair, and Jordan sat.
“Where’s Grandmother, Mom?”
“She went back home to get something but told us not to wait for her.”
Rose Marie began filling huge bowls with stew. Slicing up a loaf of freshly baked bread, Christina filled a wooden platter, and set it on the table along with a wooden bowl of glistening salad greens.
“Dig in,” Rose Marie ordered, taking her place beside Christina.
Jordan, suddenly ravenous, did as she was told. Her first bite confirmed that Rose Marie was an exceptional cook who knew her way around a seafood stew.
“This is sooo good,” she sighed.
Just as Jordan was sampling the crusty bread—irresistibly still warm—the deck door slid open and a short, very old woman with long black braids came in. Almost as wide as she was tall, she moved with an assured dignity and grace that belied her years.
Christina got up and gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. “Hey, Grandmother Alice, this is Jordan Burke, the new doctor. Jordan, this is Alice Sam.”
“How do you do.” Alice set down the plastic bag she was carrying and came over to take Jordan’s hand. Her gaze seemed to penetrate beneath the skin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jordan Burke.”
“And you, Mrs. Sam.”
“Grandmother, everyone calls me Grandmother.”
“Sit,” Rose Marie ordered. “I’ll get you some stew. Help yourself to salad and bread.”
While Elvis sang “Amazing Grace,” they ate the food, simple and delicious.
After a long silence, the women began to discuss the weather and the garden and someone’s new baby. Jordan didn’t feel excluded, but rather, relived they didn’t make her the focus of the gathering.
She sensed they were giving her a chance to get to know them, to feel at home with them—and to recover from whatever had made her eyes red and bloodshot.
She felt relaxed and peaceful, sitting in the bright kitchen with these kind and tactful women.
“I made Nanaimo bars,” Rose Marie said when everyone was finished eating. “You drink coffee, Doctor? Or I can make tea, herbal or regular, whatever you want.”
“Coffee’s fine.” A jolt of caffeine would help get her through the afternoon.
The Nanaimo bars were decadent—layers of sweet custard, coconut and smooth dark chocolate. Between the sugar and caffeine, Jordan was soon wide-awake again.
“I read that now they think chocolate is actually good for you,” Christina said. “What’s your professional opinion, Jordan? You can lie—we’ll all be grateful.”
They all turned to look at her.
“Women have always known chocolate’s good for them,” she said, munching a second slice. “We didn’t need scientists to prove it.”
The others smiled and nodded, and then fell silent. Waiting politely for her to tell them something about herself. But she couldn’t. She’d learned to talk to Helen, but she still couldn’t let others into her private space. “You’re an amazing cook, Rose Marie,” she said. “I’ll have to learn to cook, too. I’ve gotten way too used to eating out and ordering in.”
“Here, we don’t have much choice,” Alice said. “And most of us don’t have the money, even if there was somewhere to go besides Mabel’s.”
“Working in Emerg, you probably came home too tired to do much cooking,” Christina said in her defense. “You’re gonna find life a lot slower here.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
“You got family on the mainland?” Alice asked.
“No.” Jordan hesitated. “An ex-husband.” The ex part was stretching the truth somewhat. “No kids,” she added with a sense of regret. “I have one brother, but he’s in Seattle. I don’t see him very often.”
“Your folks passed on?” Alice obviously believed family was very important.
It would be rude to avoid a direct answer. “My mother died when I was four,” Jordan managed to say. “My father figured he couldn’t take care of us on his own so he put my brother and me into foster care. He’s still alive, but I don’t have any contact with him.”
“Too bad,” Alice said shaking her head. “We all need family.”
The women nodded.
“We have a saying,” Grandmother Alice said, murmuring in her own language. “It means we are all related.”
“Most of us, my generation anyways, we got separated from our folks, too,” Rose Marie said. “They took the kids from the reserves and put us either with foster families in the city or in residential schools.”
“I’ve read about that,” Jordan said. “That had to be one of the most destructive things politicians ever did.”
“Yeah.” All three women agreed, but without any show of emotion.
“It was bad, getting taken away,” Alice said, matter-of-fact. “And then it was real hard, comin’ back.”
“Culture shock comin’ and goin’,” Rose Marie agreed, and they all laughed.
“But now we got our own school, our kids stay here in Ahousaht.”
Jordan recognized the pride in her tone. “When I saw the school the first time I came here, I was impressed. It’s beautiful.”
Rose Marie nodded. “And we got some really good teachers.”
“Did any of them grow up here?”
“Three.” Alice poured Jordan another cup of coffee. “There’s two from Away, but they’ve been here two years now. Looks like they might just stay.”
“Is that a problem?” Jordan asked. “Teachers leaving?”
“Oh, yeah, big-time,” Christina said. “Last year we had some leave before September was even over. That young couple who came from the Interior—”
She was interrupted by a man in rough work clothes and rubber boots who opened the sliding door wide and stepped inside.
Rose Marie got up fast. “Peter, what’s happened?”
“Louie’s cut his leg damned near off with the power saw,” he said, breathing hard. “I knew the new doc was comin’ here for lunch—we called for the ambulance but it’s got a flat tire.”
“This is my husband, Peter Crow,” Rose Marie said.
“We’d better hurry, Peter.” Jordan got up quickly, adrenaline pumping. “I’ll have to get my medical bag from the apartment.”
“You go with Dad,” Christina said. “Give me your key, I’ll bring your bag.” She turned to her father. “Where’s Louie?”
“Down by the old wharf, he’s bleedin’ pretty bad, but Silas is there. He’ll get it stopped. C’mon, Doc.”
Jordan had to run to keep up with him. He’d left a battered green half ton running, and she climbed into the passenger seat, barely getting the door shut before Peter stepped hard on the accelerator.
A medical emergency. For the first time all day, Jordan felt confident that she was doing exactly what she was meant to do.
CHAPTER SIX
HER PATIENT WAS LYING FLAT on an old dock in a pool of coagulating blood. His right thigh, halfway between knee and groin, had been torn open in a crosswise cut. Someone had been smart enough to elevate the wound and apply a pressure bandage.
Jordan knelt and looked into the man’s eyes, at the same time taking his wrist, gauging his pulse.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Burke. Can you tell me your name?” She knew it, but needed to ascertain his level of shock.
“Louie Adams.” His voice was thin and reedy, but he was conscious and responding. Rapid pulse, dilated pupils. Shock, but not bad. Considering.
Louie was stoically silent, and an equally silent crowd had collected around him. Someone had draped a jacket over his chest and shoulders, possibly the lean man who knelt beside him. He was talking to Louie in a low tone, his shoulder-length black hair partially hiding his face.
The man’s hair had a dramatic white streak, although he looked young. His black leather jacket was well-worn, open to reveal a white T-shirt with a picture of an eagle in full flight. His jeans fit like a second skin, molding to his long, strong thighs. He looked up, meeting Jordan’s eyes. His were clear and cool, a surprising pale green with specks of gold, and for an instant she had the disconcerting feeling that he could see into her mind.
“I’m Silas Keefer,” he said in a deep, soft voice. He didn’t smile.
“Jordan Burke. Hi.” She’d heard that voice before, she thought, turning back to her patient. “Okay, Louie, we’ll get some fluids into you and then take you up to the medical center.”
Although just how she was going to accomplish that without any medical supplies or an ambulance—
“It’s slowing down now, Silas. I’ll have it stopped in a minute.” Louie’s glazed eyes looked to the man beside her.
Obviously he was in shock. Silas leaned over her patient and murmured something close to his ear. Jordan couldn’t make it out.
From somewhere nearby, she heard Christina. “I’ve got your bag here, Jordan, and the medical pack from the ambulance. The first-aid guys are bringing a stretcher. We’ll have to use a pickup to get him to the center—it’ll take too long to fix the damned tire. You want me to establish a line?”
Christina crouched beside Jordan, proving herself first-rate at finding a vein.
The flow of blood from the wound was much less than Jordan had expected, and there didn’t appear to be a severed artery or nerve damage. The saw had bit deeply into the muscle, the fleshy part of the thigh.
Jordan supervised Louie’s transfer first to a stretcher and then to the back of the pickup truck that had backed in close. Through it all, Silas Keefer helped without once getting in the way. Jordan was aware of him the whole time, as she was sometimes aware of electricity in the air before a thunderstorm.
In the back of the truck, she crouched beside her patient, feeling a little like a pioneer doctor as she steadied the drip and kept tabs on Louie’s pulse and breathing. Christina and Silas Keefer rode in front beside the driver.
At the medical center, Jordan had to argue with Louie, who refused to be airlifted to Tofino.
“What good’s having a doctor here if you’re gonna send me to the hospital over there? Can’t you sew me up right here, Doc?”
Jordan considered it. It would have been impossible if there was major nerve damage or arterial bleeding, but Louie had lucked out.
“I’d have to give you a brief general anesthetic,” she warned. Christina had said she was qualified at anesthesia, but they’d never worked together. “Wouldn’t you feel safer having this procedure done in hospital?”
“Hell, no,” Louie insisted. “You’ve sewed people up before, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Jordan grinned. “One or two.” She’d done more than her share of minor surgery in the E.R.
“Then do it, Doc. I want you to patch me up here, that way I can be home in a couple days, keep an eye on the kids for the wife. She works at the RCMP office.”
Jordan hoped she was making the right decision. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do.”
As she and Christina scrubbed, Jordan said, “That tall guy, Silas Keefer, who is he? He knew a lot about first aid, but he left before I could talk to him.”
“Oh, that’s my older brother.”
“Your brother?” Jordan shot Christina a surprised look. Different surnames and no family resemblance. Even Silas’s speech patterns were unlike Christina’s slow, measured delivery.
“He’s my half brother,” Christina amended. “From Mom’s first marriage.”
“I see. Has he had medical training? He seemed to know exactly what to do.”
“Not really.” Christina concentrated on soaping her hands. “Silas does a lot of things. He’s a writer, he’s published a few books and he writes articles for various journals. He lives in the bush outside of town. He’s not very social. I keep telling him thirty-six is too young to be eccentric, but he’s determined to play the part.”
“So he’s your big brother.” Jordan felt a familiar jolt of homesickness, thinking of her own big brother. “Is he married?” There was no real reason for the question—except that she very much wanted to know.
“Nope. He came close a couple years back, a nurse from Edmonton who spent a year up here. But she couldn’t stand the isolation. She went home, Silas didn’t follow, so that was that.”
Jordan filed that information away and forcefully evicted Silas Keefer from her mind. She had work to do.
The surgery on Louie’s leg took every ounce of Jordan’s concentration. She was accustomed to an entire crew of nurses and aides, and far more sophisticated equipment. The clinic had the basics, but it was a strange experience to work with only Christina and an ambulance attendant standing by. Jordan was acutely conscious of being totally responsible for her patient’s well-being, in a way she never had been at St. Joe’s.
The wound was jagged and dirty, the flesh ripped by the teeth of the saw. Splinters of wood needed careful extraction, and there was heightened danger of infection from the dirt and oil off the blade of the saw. She heaved a sigh of relief when the procedure was finally over, shocked to learn that the afternoon had faded into evening.
She talked to Louie’s wife, Roberta, and then to his mother, Angie. A long string of concerned relatives and friends dropped by the clinic, and Christina was kept busy reassuring them.
Louie came out of the anesthetic in record time, and within an hour was asking for something to eat, which astonished Jordan.
He had to be in severe pain. She’d ordered five milligrams of morphine every hour to keep him comfortable, and she couldn’t believe he was actually hungry. “Food’s not a good idea,” she warned. “You may be nauseous, I’d recommend only liquids until tomorrow.”
“C’mon, Doc,” Louie wheedled. “I cut my leg, not my stomach. Can’t I at least have some soup?”
“Okay, then. I’ll see if I can find a tin of clear broth,” Jordan offered doubtfully, thinking of the woodstove she had no idea how to light. She felt more than a little nostalgic about St. Joe’s, where one call to housekeeping took care of these kind of details.
“Oh, you won’t have to make anything. I think somebody left a pot of soup back there in your kitchen,” Christina said with a mischievous grin. “I unlocked your door so the donor could get in. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? What are you, nuts?”
Jordan went through the connecting door into her apartment, and stopped dead at the kitchen. The cookstove was giving off waves of heat. Not only was there a pot of soup simmering, but on the table someone had laid out three kinds of salad, a tray of sliced beef, what looked like a meat pie, along with jars of pickles, relish and berries. On the counter, she saw another pie, chocolate cake, oatmeal cookies—and homemade bread.
Jordan studied the bounty, and for the second time that day, tears burned at the back of her eyes. For several long moments she couldn’t contain them.
Get a grip, for God’s sake. It’s only way too much food. But there was something about women welcoming her by bringing gifts of food that touched her deeply.
“Louie’s hungry,” she said aloud to no one, blowing her nose and studying the feast. She filled a small bowl with broth from the potato chowder, poured a glass of apple juice and, folding paper towel into a napkin, used a battered cookie sheet as a tray. Then she took it all to the room where Louie was stretched out, his heavily bandaged leg elevated and IV firmly in place.
Roberta was there with him and she took over, putting the tray on a bedside stand, spooning the soup into her husband’s mouth.
“You and Christina go have some supper,” she suggested. “I’ll take care of Louie. Nothin’ to it, I been doin’ it for ten years already. He’s an awful baby when something goes wrong.” But the glance she and Louie exchanged was tender.
“I dunno about you, Jordan, but I’m starving,” Christina said.
“Have I got a dinner for you.” Jordan took her back to the kitchen, and together they filled plates and sat on the rump-sprung couch to eat.
“I’ll have to give some of this away or it’ll go bad. There’s enough here for twenty people,” Jordan said.
“We can put some of it out in the clinic for a free lunch tomorrow. There’ll be a crowd around—everybody will want to size up the new doc.”
That should have unnerved her, but Jordan was far too tired. By the time she’d finished a slice of blueberry pie, she was yawning.
“Excuse me,” she apologized, and then yawned again.
“Why not go to bed?” Christina gathered up their dishes and stacked them in the plastic dishpan in the sink. “These’ll keep till morning, dirty dishes always do. We’ll just stow the meat and salad in the fridge— I’ll take Roberta a plateful. I’m gonna set up a cot for her beside Louie’s bed. That way she can keep an eye on him for us during the night. I’ll check the drip and make sure there’s no bleeding.”
“Bless you. I’m absolutely wiped out. It must be the sea air.”
“Or it could have something to do with a major emergency your first day on the job. I meant to ask, are you planning on having office hours every day? A couple of Roberta’s relatives were asking.”
“Every day except Sunday. I didn’t come here to laze around, I’m used to the pace in the E.R. I’ll put a sign on the door with the hours. What do you think is reasonable? Eight to twelve, and then two to five?”
“You can try that.” Christina laughed. “People here don’t go much by the clock, we run on what we call Indian time. That means people will turn up when it suits them. But they also don’t mind waiting, so it evens out. There’s also a lot of extra stuff that won’t fit into rigid office hours. Like the well-baby clinic once a week and Community Care where we go out to whoever needs us. There’s also a drug education program for teens and a prenatal group. You sure don’t have to attend all those things all the time, but it would be great if you’d come once in a while.”
“I wish now I’d gone into general practice. Until I get the hang of it, I’m going to have to rely on you to keep me on track.”
“It shouldn’t take that long, you strike me as a reasonably bright woman.”
“Gee, thanks.”
They both grinned. Today they’d worked together as a smooth, efficient unit. As if they’d done it for years.
“We’ll grab time tomorrow to work out a sort of timetable,” Christina said. “You go on to bed. If anybody needs you, they know where to come.”
“Thanks, Christina. For everything. And tell your mom thanks for the lunch, I sort of ate and ran.”
“No kidding, I wonder why? I’ll tell her.”
After Christina went back into the clinic, Jordan covered the remaining food, turned out the lights, and made her way into the bedroom. Groaning when she realized her suitcase had been flopped onto the double bed, she wrestled it to the floor so there’d be room for her to sleep. She put on the worn flannel nightgown she’d had since her intern days, and after a quick wash in the bathroom, tumbled into bed. She’d unpack in the morning.
The mattress was firm, the sheets soft, and Jordan burrowed into the fluffy comforter. The window she’d opened let in the smell of the sea with a distinct tinge of pine, mingling with wood smoke, maybe from her own kitchen stove.
She really had to learn how to light that thing—she’d probably even have to learn how to use the oven. Unless the women took pity on her and kept bringing food, she’d also have to learn to cook. There was so much for her to learn here. It felt as if she’d been catapulted to a different planet. One where Garry couldn’t find her.
But it wasn’t Garry’s face that came to mind as she began to relax. It was the lean, hard-edged features of Silas Keefer.
You’re out of it, Burke. You’re so tired you’re hallucinating.
With a sigh of exhaustion and something closer to contentment than she’d felt in a long while, she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
LESS THAN A MILE AWAY, Silas slumped in front of his laptop, struggling with the lengthy article he’d agreed to write on ideological differences toward healing between native and white culture. It was for the University Press, to be included in a book on many diverse healing modalities. It had been assigned by a professor he’d come to respect during his student days, and Silas was being well paid for it—the main reason he’d taken on the contract.
Living in Ahousaht was definitely a low-rent proposition, but even the simplest lifestyle required an income.
He ran a hand through his hair. This wasn’t going well at all, and it should be a piece of cake. He knew the material, he lived the material.
He deleted a couple of paragraphs, scowling at the screen. Why couldn’t he keep his mind on what he was doing?
Because I’m thinking about the blue-eyed doctor. The answer surprised him. He hadn’t been consciously thinking about her, but she was definitely there, just under the surface, distracting him.
His body had reacted to her today. He’d tried to pretend it hadn’t, because he liked to believe he was in control of himself, his thoughts, his responses.
He’d been celibate for a long time—by choice. Several attractive women in the village had made it plain they’d welcome him in their bed. And he’d been tempted. It would be a lie to say he hadn’t.
But he wanted someone to share his ideas with, a woman he could trust enough to open up to, dream with, laugh with—and, yeah, take to his bed. He was strong and healthy, with a hale and hearty libido. He was also solitary, preferring to watch people rather than engage with them. It wasn’t a trait that endeared him to women when the lovemaking was over, and there hadn’t been many who intrigued him enough to risk sharing more than sex with them.
The problem was there were no secrets on this island. Everyone would know before noon who he’d bedded. Not that there was anything wrong with that, either. But as a healer, he had a certain status. He wasn’t obliged to embrace celibacy, except during the periods of purification necessary for certain ceremonies. But there was a personal moral code he felt obliged to sustain.
“And now you’re laughing at me, Grandmother,” he whispered. He could almost see Sandrine in the corner of the room, as she used to be, sitting in the rocking chair she’d given him long ago. “You’re right, I’m a stuffed shirt. I take myself way too seriously. You always told me I needed to laugh at myself more.”
“Love more, too. The opposite of man is woman, and we all need to know our opposite and embrace it. You will only find the other half of yourself in another person, Grandson. It’s the only way we ever really see ourselves.”
He turned and looked directly at the chair.
“Help me, Grandmother.” He wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly. He only knew that he suddenly felt vulnerable.
But Sandrine wasn’t there.
He had to escape outside. He saved his document and got to his feet, grabbing his jacket from the wooden peg by the door.
Outside, the woods were alive with night sounds. Silas stood and listened, separating them, naming them. Owl. Coyote. The scurrying of a small animal, maybe a marmot. The twittering of birds, settling in for the night. The faint scent of skunk, somewhere off to the west. The tang of the evergreens, the salt of the sea.
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Bobby Hutchinson
Jordan had tried to love and support her husbandEven after he'd cleaned out the apartment and sold many of their belongings for drug money. But when, as the doctor on call in the E.R., she'd been forced to treat Garry's overdose, it had nearly killed her, too. Knowing she couldn't survive much more, she left him and Vancouver behind. She hoped only to find peace as the new resident G.P. in the remote First Nations village of Ahousaht.She never expected to meet someone as gentle and nurturing as native healer Silas Keefer, a man who understands Jordan's need to escape her past. He'd done the same thing himself years earlier.Their love is unexpected and right, but can Jordan and Silas have a future if they cannot heal the past?
“Resident G.P. wanted for isolated First Nations village, Vancouver Island’s West Coast. Ahousaht, Clayoquot Sound, Flores Island.”
The salary wasn’t what Jordan earned in the E.R., but at least there wouldn’t be shift work. And housing was included. And it was somewhere Garry wasn’t.
Impulsively Jordan took out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d copied down. The phone rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Hello?” There was a note of impatience in the man’s deep and resonant tone.
“Oh, um, yes, hello.” Damn, her hands were sweating and she could hear the strain in her voice. “My, um, my name is Jordan Burke, Dr. Burke, and I’m calling about the medical position. Is it still available?”
There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know. You need to speak to Bennie. Call back another time.”
“Bennie? Bennie who?” Jordan was over feeling nervous and well on the way to being annoyed. Surely he could be more helpful?
“Just Bennie will do. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“And you are?”
“Silas Keefer. And I’m hanging up now, Jordan Burke.”
“But first can you—”
The line clicked and she heard a dial tone. The bloody man had hung up on her.
Dear Reader,
There’s a motto I try to live by. It is Whatever is happening now is right for me. It embodies acceptance and trust, and applying that concept every day is my greatest personal challenge. When life is filled with joy and excitement, it’s easy to say, “Yup, things are progressing exactly as they should—lucky me.” But when huge challenges seem insurmountable—that’s when it’s tough to let go of outcome and simply trust.
As a writer, I hand challenges to characters and then watch how they manage to surmount them. In Good Medicine, as in life, family became a central theme. And a trip to Ahousaht on Vancouver Island’s wild west coast made me realize that no matter how far we travel in distance and culture, the problems we encounter in life are universal. Not only that, they obligingly come right along with us.
This book taught me invaluable lessons about the different ways culture affects our attitudes toward the science of medicine and the gift of healing. The paths may vary, but the final answer is always the same—true healing begins in the heart. Love is the most powerful medicine. And yes, whatever is happening now is absolutely right for me!
With love, and gratitude to all of you who read my books.
Bobby Hutchinson
Good Medicine
Bobby Hutchinson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Marie Donahue and the other Nuu-chah-nulth women who greeted me in the Ahousaht Health Centre one rainy morning. Truly, the Ancestors were there.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER ONE
DOCTOR JORDAN BURKE walked over to the automatic sliding glass doors and peered out at the wet April night, not really seeing the eerie fluorescent glare or the deserted cement apron that led to St. Joseph’s Emergency entrance.
It was her birthday. A glance at her watch told her it was 12:40 a.m. She had no idea the exact hour she’d been born, so she might as well make it midnight on the nose. Which meant she was now thirty-two.
Spending the first six hours of her birthday working the graveyard shift in Emerg suited her fine. John Frankel, one of the other doctors, had the flu, and since Jordan was on her long break from day shift, she’d eagerly volunteered to fill in.
It wasn’t as if she’d be sleeping much, anyway. She might as well be working tonight as lying in bed tossing and turning, wide-awake and worrying.
She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold, and crossed her arms, hugging the front of her white lab coat.
Where the hell are all the patients? On most nights, the E.R. was so busy there wasn’t time to do anything except concentrate on the stream of desperate, frightened people needing medical assistance. But it had been nearly an hour since Jordan’s last patient was treated and released, and she was restless. Anxious.
She ought to be used to the anxiety. It never really went away these days.
“Quiet tonight, eh? Downtown Vancouver must be closed for spring break or something.” The tiny Asian nurse was new, and she laughed at her own joke.
“It is quiet.” Jordan nodded and attempted a smile. When did smiling become such an effort? “Calm before the hurricane,” she commented, aware of how callous it was to long for patients. It was just that she needed action, needed the degree of intensity that drove everything else out of her head.
“At least it gives us time to think,” the young woman replied.
“Yeah.” Jordan forced herself to nod, even though time to think was the very last thing she wanted. She glanced at the ident tag pinned to the nurse’s shirt. Jordan had been introduced when they came on shift, but now she couldn’t remember the woman’s name.
Lola. Her name’s Lola, numskull.
Forgetting things had become the norm. She’d lost her keys today, she’d misplaced her cell phone yesterday, she hadn’t remembered what she needed when she got to the grocery the day before last. Thirty-two was nowhere near menopause, but she knew that constant low-level anxiety could cause memory lapses. Eight months of anxiety. Ever since her husband’s accident.
She thought of Garry now, and her gut heaved as an all too familiar mixture of emotions coursed through her: anger, sadness, guilt, longing and an overwhelming sense of frustration and futility.
Two years, is that all it had been? She felt as if she’d been Garry’s wife for at least two long, painful lifetimes. She wanted desperately to help him, she longed for an end to the problems they were having, she—
Stop. Stop.
She would not obsess over her personal problems here, not while she was on shift. She turned away from the doors and walked over to the admitting desk. So there were no patients, okay, she could catch up on patient files. That tedious task was every doctor’s least favorite activity.
“No point getting your blood pressure up doing paperwork, Jordan.” Eddie, the desk clerk, grinned at her, revealing crooked teeth. “There’s an 18-year-old female on her way, severe headache, vomiting, recent history of stomach pain. Her dad called, he’s bringing her.”
A few moments later the patient arrived, a college student named Ardyth Malone, slender and very fit looking, but obviously in severe distress. Jordan escorted the girl to a cubicle and began taking a history.
Ardyth responded with negative answers to questions about drugs, alcohol, allergies, blows to the head. A careful physical examination ruled out appendicitis, inflamed ovaries, gallbladder problems. Each successive test was normal, until Jordan examined Ardyth’s eyes with the ophthalmoscope. There was a slight papillidema, a swelling of the optic nerve.
By now Jordan was beginning to feel really concerned, wondering if this was a brain tumor, but there were a few questions she still needed to ask.
“Ardyth, has there been any change in your diet recently?”
The girl shook her head. “I’m a vegetarian. I’m very health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body.” Her expression was virtuous. “I take tons of vitamins and I don’t eat sugar or saturated fat. Oww! Oh my God, do something! It hurts.” Bent double, she cradled her stomach, moaning.
A warning bell went off in Jordan’s brain. Taking iron tablets on an empty stomach could lead to excruciating cramps.
“Exactly what vitamins do you take, and how many?”
As the pain eased, the girl rattled off a dozen or more names, adding that she swallowed massive quantities.
“Have you taken any new ones recently?”
“Only more vitamin A.”
“How much more?”
“Seven extra pills. My skin’s been breaking out—vitamin A cures acne.”
“How long have you been taking that dose?”
Ardyth shrugged. “A couple of months now, I guess.”
“How many international units per pill?”
“Five thousand.”
“And when did you take your last mega dose?”
“A few hours ago.”
Thirty-five thousand units of A, ten to twenty times a normal dose, taken daily for sixty days. Jordan was pretty sure she had the answer to Ardyth’s symptoms, and it gave her a feeling of satisfaction. At least her personal problems weren’t interfering with her diagnostic ability. Yet.
“My guess is you have acute vitamin A intoxication, Ardyth,” she said gently. “I think if you stop taking it, your symptoms will disappear. We’ll run some tests, though, just to be absolutely certain we’re not missing anything here.”
Jordan was jotting down orders for a CAT scan and an upper GI series when Lola stuck her head into the cubicle.
“Jordan, a guy’s just been dumped outside Emerg. He’s unconscious—whoever brought him sped off in a car. They’re bringing him in now. Billy says he’s got track marks, so it’s probably an overdose. Can you come?”
“Be right there.” Jordan handed orders to an aide and then sprinted after Lola. There’d been a series of drug overdoses in the past two weeks, a result of exceptionally strong heroin having hit the downtown Vancouver streets. Usually the Emergency Response Team brought the victims in, but sometimes bodies were dumped at the door by people who didn’t want to get involved.
Orderlies and nurses were lifting the limp male figure onto a stretcher when Jordan arrived. The patient’s face was obscured by a nurse’s arm, but Jordan saw at a glance that this wasn’t the usual skid-row addict.
Caucasian, well-dressed, charcoal sports jacket, black trousers, blue silk shirt—
She struggled to get her breath as a wave of dizziness swept over her. She recognized that shirt. Reaching past the nurse, Jordan took hold of the man’s jaw and turned his slack face toward her, and her worst fears were confirmed.
Garry. It was her husband. She’d bought him the shirt for Christmas.
Someone on the medical team was calling out his vitals, but Jordan barely heard it. One of the nurses was holding Garry’s wallet, going through it to determine his identity.
“Hughes, Garry M., DOB 1968, March 13.” As the woman read out the information on his driver’s license, for one shameful instant Jordan was relieved she’d retained her maiden name.
“I’ll see if he’s listed in the book,” the nurse said. “We may need next of kin.”
The number was listed, but Jordan knew there was no one home in their Kitsilano apartment. The nurse would get the message Garry had recorded for the answering service.
“Jordan? Hey, Jordan, what’s up? You okay?”
She suddenly realized everyone was waiting for her, looking at her—puzzled, impatient.
She should tell them about Garry and have someone else take over. It was against policy to treat a relative. Instead, like an automaton, she began the necessary assessment, even though she knew beyond a doubt what was wrong. Of course he’d taken an overdose. Her husband was a junkie.
“Pulse forty, respiration down to eight,” Lola reported. “We’re not getting a BP, Jordan. This guy’s on his way out…. He’s flat! Now we’re not getting much of a pulse at all.”
“Establish a line. Let’s give him Narcan.” She felt cold and detached and far away as she picked up the syringe with numb fingers and inserted naloxone hydrochloride into the IV valve.
In cases of overdose, the drug’s effect was miraculous. It instantly reversed the action of narcotics, and a patient who’d been on the verge of death only seconds before suddenly became awake and alert, just as if nothing had happened. In the E.R., they called it the Lazarus Effect. Except Lazarus had probably been grateful.
Everybody watched and waited. It only took a few seconds.
“Brace yourself, boys and girls,” someone murmured.
The instant the powerful drug reached Garry’s bloodstream, his sky-blue eyes flew open. A frown flickered across his smooth forehead as he stared up at the faces of the medical team grouped around the stretcher.
Inevitably his gaze came to rest on Jordan. As recognition dawned, his features contorted with rage. He grasped the sides of the gurney and pulled himself up as staff members struggled to control him. He was a big man, and it looked as if they were going to lose the battle.
“Call a code white,” someone yelled. “He’s freaking on us.”
Code white was an emergency call to security.
“Jordan?” Garry spat her name out. “What the hell have you done to me?”
Her mouth felt numb, her throat dry. She cleared it, amazed that her voice still worked. “You overdosed. I used Narcan to bring you out of it.”
It took a moment for Garry to react to that, and when he did Jordan wanted to turn her back and run from the room.
“You bitch!” he screamed at her. “You filthy bitch, you ruined my high, what the hell’s wrong with you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you stupid fool?” He tried to shake off the hands restraining him so he could climb off the table.
Jordan couldn’t move. She saw shock on the faces of her co-workers. They were staring at her, some of them open mouthed.
She was surprised when her voice burst out loud and strong. “Call a code white and get him out of here,” she ordered.
“You know this guy, Jordan?”
“Yes.” Her voice was unnaturally calm now. It seemed to come from a long distance away and belong to someone else. “I know him. Of course I know him. He’s my—he’s my husband. Get the equipment off him, I’m discharging him.”
She saw the glances that passed among the staff. They knew she could have committed him to the psych ward for treatment. They probably figured that’s what she ought to do, and maybe it was, but she just wanted him gone.
She had no energy left to deal with Garry and his problems. Over the past weeks she’d made appointments with the best drug treatment clinics in the city, appointments that she pulled strings to arrange and Garry hadn’t bothered to keep. She’d spent hours talking to him, trying to understand, to reason with him. She’d tried every way she knew to help him make the decision to stop. Nothing had worked.
Now, she was worn out. She’d done her best to keep her work and her personal problems separate, and look where that got her. She hadn’t wanted her co-workers to know how desperate and degrading her personal life had become. Garry had managed to take away even that last tiny shred of dignity.
Two security guards hurried in, and between them they restrained Garry as the staff quickly removed the IV apparatus from his body.
“Escort him to the exit and see that he gets a cab,” Jordan instructed the men.
The guards flanked him, and Garry’s broad shoulders sagged as they started to hustle him out of the treatment room. Over his shoulder he gave her the look she’d come to despise in the past months, the contrite, little-boy-lost look from under long, curling blond lashes. Those baby blues had charmed her when she first fell in love with him. At this moment they made her stomach churn with nausea.
Yesterday morning he’d begged her to write him yet another prescription for morphine. She’d refused, and he’d sworn at her, just as he had a moment ago. For a man with an expensive education, he had a limited vocabulary.
“Hey. Hey, Jordie,” he called over his shoulder as the guards hustled him out. “I’m sorry, babe, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it, it was just, you know, the shock of coming to in this place.” He dragged his feet, going limp.
“Jordie, tell these goons to back off me, okay? Please, honey?”
She didn’t reply. The security guards had stopped, holding him upright. They turned and looked at her, questioning. Her co-workers were all pretending hard to be busy with other things. By morning the whole episode would be all over the hospital, probably posted on some Web site.
“Jordie, talk to me here, okay?” Garry’s voice dropped, and he assumed the wheedling tone she’d come to despise. “See, the thing is, I’ve got no money for a cab. I shot the whole wad on that fix. Could you maybe—? Please, honey?”
Amazed that her legs worked, she hurried to the staff locker room and got twenty dollars from her handbag. She had to keep swallowing, and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly get her handbag opened or the door to her locker closed.
Security had escorted Garry to the exit by the time she got back, and Jordan marched into the rain and wordlessly held the money out to him.
He glanced at it and his mouth turned down petulantly before he snatched it, jamming the single bill into his pocket. “Twenty isn’t enough, not when I’m really in pain like this. I told you how bad it hurt this morning, Jordie, you could have given me something then and this wouldn’t have happened.” In one lithe motion, he twisted out of the guard’s grip.
“C’mon, babe, don’t be chippy with me, surely you can spare another couple twenties?”
She jerked her head from side to side and then turned her back on him, fleeing through the doors that led into Emerg. Inside, not one person looked at her, but their curiosity was like a scent in the air.
She couldn’t remember anything about the rest of that shift except that the trembling and nausea grew more and more difficult to control. She felt disoriented, far away, watching herself go through the motions of treating one patient after the other, amazed that she looked and sounded so normal.
When morning finally came, she had trouble driving home to the apartment. Fortunately the morning rush hour hadn’t really started yet, because she drove through a red light and sat through a green one. She scraped the side of her red Toyota against a cement beam when she tried to park it in the underground lot, and when she got out she didn’t even bother to check the extent of the damage.
She took the elevator to the second floor and after three tries, unlocked the door. The apartment was empty; Garry wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected him home. She’d hoped he wouldn’t be.
She knew he wasn’t at work, he hadn’t been all week. It was Thursday, and his secretary had left increasingly desperate messages for him every day. Up until this week, he’d managed to keep up a relatively professional facade at his law office. The partners had been lenient with him, blaming his erratic behavior on the accident. They’d covered for him the same way Jordan had, she mused as she walked through the rooms she’d painted and decorated with such care.
It felt as if she were seeing her home clearly for the first time in weeks. A great many things had disappeared lately, and she’d tried to believe it had nothing to do with Garry, but now she forced herself to face the truth.
In the living room, an empty CD holder stood beside the equally empty space where the expensive audio system had been. They’d bought it on their first anniversary. Several weeks ago, the apartment had been broken into while they were both supposedly at work. Her few good pieces of jewelry had been taken as well as all the electronic equipment—even the damned microwave.
Garry had taken them. She’d known it even then, but hadn’t been able to face the fact that her husband was an addict who’d steal and lie and cheat to get drugs.
Slowly and painfully as though she were old and brittle-boned, Jordan lowered herself to the dove-gray sofa and forced herself to look at what her life had become.
It had started with that damned car accident. Garry had been driving home late, undoubtedly going too fast. The expensive little sports car he’d insisted on owning had been struck by a pickup truck at an intersection. Garry had come away with a compound fracture of the left arm and a concussion. He’d also complained of excruciating pain from torn muscles in his back, pain that nothing seemed to alleviate.
Garry’s physician, Albert Mayborn, had finally prescribed morphine.
Jordan blamed herself for not recognizing that Garry was becoming addicted. She ought to have known, the signs were all there. Garry complained of pain long past the time when any muscle strain should have healed. She’d finally seen the physical signs of drug abuse in her husband’s bloodshot eyes, his jumpiness, his inability to sleep, his hair-trigger temper.
At last she’d confronted him about it, and of course he’d denied it. Until tonight, she’d managed to deny the extent of the problem herself.
The awful scene in the E.R. kept replaying in her head, and Jordan’s humiliation and shame grew. She drew her knees up to her chest, trying by sheer force of will to impose control over her shaking arms and legs.
She couldn’t get a deep breath. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She began to cry, deep, tearing sobs that scared her. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop them. Soon her stomach and chest hurt, her lungs felt as if they were on fire, and still the wrenching sobs went on and on. She was completely alone.
Hours passed. The phone rang, and she couldn’t answer it. She couldn’t move. She was thirty-two today, and she didn’t want to live. She began to think of the many ways there were to die.
And then the physician in her recognized that she needed help.
She forced herself up off the sofa, dialed the telephone and ordered a cab.
Sweating and shaking, still gulping back sobs, she found her handbag and made her way outside.
The Native driver gave her a concerned and wary look. “You okay, lady? Where you want to go?”
“St. Joseph’s Medical Center,” she gasped.
St. Joseph’s was an old building, and she knew every inch of it, having interned there. She dragged herself up a set of stairs at the back of the building to the third floor. It was the only place she could think of to get help.
The psych ward.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INTAKE NURSE WAS both intuitive and gentle. Jordan managed to choke out her name, adding that she was an Emerg physician, and without even asking her to fill in any forms, the nurse guided Jordan to a tiny private room with a cot and a chair. She helped her lie down, covering her with a blanket.
Jordan curled into a ball, too exhausted and spent to resist the emotions coursing through her. After a time, the door opened and Helen Moore, the resident psychiatrist, came in. Jordan knew her slightly, and had always liked her kind smile and forthright manner.
“Hi, Jordan.” Helen sat down beside the cot and reached for one of Jordan’s hands. She took it gently, cradling it between both of hers. “Can you tell me what’s made you so upset?”
Jordan tried, but it was impossible to talk through the tears. Helen reached for a box of tissues and handed over a fistful. “Try to take deep breaths.”
After a few moments, Jordan was able to put words together. “My hus-husband is—is a drug addict,” she began. Once she’d said the words aloud, it became easier to tell the rest of the story. She began with the car accident, the morphine, the prescriptions she’d written him and, when she’d refused to supply him, how the apartment was ransacked. Amid fresh bouts of weeping, she managed to recount what had occurred the previous night in the E.R.
“What—what about—about—Garry? What am I going to do about him? How—how can I—help him?”
“This is not about him,” Helen said firmly. “This is about you, Jordan. What are you going to do about you?”
Helen’s words shocked Jordan out of her tears. For so long, she’d exhausted herself worrying about Garry and his problems, believing that if only she could help him stop taking drugs, their life together might work.
“Garry is an adult, making choices about the way he lives his life,” Helen continued. “Do you want to go on allowing him to make those same choices for your life? You’re an exceptional physician with a great reputation at this hospital, Jordan, and I know you to be a good and caring person.” Her kind face broke into a mischievous smile. “Lord knows you’re good to look at. I’ve seen men fall over their feet like schoolboys when you’re around.”
Jordan started to cry again. It had been so long since anyone had complimented her. When she’d first met Garry, she’d felt confident and even pretty. Now she felt gray and old. And ashamed, so ashamed of not being able to control herself.
Helen gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “I think you need to value your own worth, Jordan, and go from there. The scene last night in the E.R. was hard, but sometimes it takes a hard lesson for us to see we’re on a path that isn’t the most beneficial for us.” Helen smiled again and released Jordan’s hand. “I’ve had my share of those tough lessons, I know how much they hurt. But they also help us heal. Right now I’m going to give you a sedative because you need to rest. We’ll talk again.”
“I feel so—so stupid,” Jordan admitted, her voice trembling. “You’d think I could cope with this on my own. It’s humiliating to admit that I can’t.”
“We—all of us—are only human, Jordan. Being doctors means we start out with a higher level of daily stress, and then we have our own personal stuff on top of it. As a profession, medicine carries the highest rate of alcohol dependency, drug addiction, divorce and suicide. Coming here shows good judgment and common sense. And no one needs to know you’re here.”
Jordan blew her nose. “Thank you. That would make things easier.”
“I’ll have a word with the staff. Now, I think rest is the best restorative at the moment.” She gave Jordan a sedative and gently tucked the blanket around her. “I’ll be in this evening to see how you’re doing. Relax now.”
As the medication gradually took the edge off her panic and her muscles loosened, Jordan was able to think more clearly than she had for weeks.
Garry was a junkie.
As an E.R. doctor, she’d seen enough junkies to know that no one could help them unless they chose to help themselves.
He wasn’t making the slightest effort.
Her eyelids were heavy, and she knew that within a few moments, she’d be asleep.
What are you going to do about you, Jordan?
The answer floated to the surface. It made her terribly sad, and it frightened her as well, but it was the right thing for her. The only thing.
As soon as she felt able, she was going to see a lawyer about a divorce.
“THE VERY LEAST you could have done was tell me you wanted a divorce before you saw this—this scumbag of a lawyer.” Garry’s face was scarlet with rage and disbelief. “How could you do this to me, Jordan?” He threw the copy of the proposed separation agreement she’d just handed him to the floor and stood glaring at her, hands knotted into fists. The pages scattered, landing at her feet.
His voice rose. “You know I’m not well. I’m not over the accident yet! You could help but you won’t. What about the marriage vows you made?” Sarcasm dripped from every word. “I could swear there was something in there about in sickness and in health, till death do us part. Have you thought about my parents? They’ve treated you like one of the family, and now you’re doing this to me—to them.”
Jordan’s heart was hammering. It was true, Meg and Edward had been good to her. She hated the thought of hurting them. She kept her expression impassive and did her best to convince herself that the problems Garry was throwing at her weren’t hers to solve.
This was all his stuff, as Helen would phrase it. And Meg and Edward had witnessed Garry’s recent tantrums. Surely they would understand her decision when they accepted the reality of their son’s addiction….
It was helpful to remember Helen’s advice. Jordan now viewed the two days she’d spent in psych as an intensive training seminar.
Right now she noticed that everything Garry said related only to himself. Lordy, how could she have missed how self-centered he was? She’d known him two and a half years, and yet she felt that during the past week, since she’d come home from the psych ward, she was seeing him as if he were a stranger.
And it surprised her to realize she didn’t even like him anymore. His addiction had turned him into a bully and a whiner, not exactly a sexy combination. There hadn’t been any sex for months now, anyway.
He was hollering at her again. “What kind of bull-shit is that dyke of a doctor pumping you full of, Jordie? You never acted like this before. What’s between us should stay between us. I don’t like you dumping your guts to some stranger.” His voice grew softer, and he tried to reach out and take her into his arms. “You’re my wife, babe. Shouldn’t you be talking to me about stuff that bothers you?”
Jordan held up both hands, palms out, and moved away.
He swore a long stream of curses, and then she could see him consciously turning on the charm again. “C’mon, Jordie. Honey, baby, don’t be this way,” he wheedled. “I said I was sorry for what happened in the E.R. I just couldn’t take the pain in my back anymore, and you wouldn’t give me anything for it, remember? I’m not good with pain, honey, you know that.”
She moved farther back, out of his reach. She remembered everything. He sickened her.
The second day of her stay in psych, Jordan had called home and left a message for Garry, telling him where she was. Hours later, he’d come to the ward, and on Jordan’s instructions, Helen and the staff had conveyed the message that she didn’t want to see him. High, he’d become verbally abusive. Helen had threatened to call security, and finally he left.
Now Jordan looked at him, and she couldn’t even summon pity.
“I won’t prescribe drugs for you ever again, Garry. So don’t bother asking.”
He tightened his mouth and narrowed his eyes. Taking a step closer, he shook his trembling finger under her nose. His breath was foul.
“You go ahead with this divorce shit and I promise you I’ll ruin you financially. I am a lawyer, in case it’s slipped your mind. Any judge would award me ongoing support when they hear about the accident. And I’ve got the firm behind me—it isn’t going to cost me anything.”
He’d already tested his firm to the limit, but she resisted the urge to tell him that. She was grateful that Helen had given her the name of an attorney she liked and trusted, Marcy Davis. Marcy had handled Helen’s own complex divorce several years ago. It made it easier to withstand Garry’s bullying, knowing Marcy would deal with all the legal issues.
“And I’m not moving out of this apartment, either,” he said. “You want a separation, you move out, lady.”
“I already have.” He hadn’t even noticed that her clothes, some of the furniture and the few personal things she cherished were gone. She’d packed up that morning, called a moving company to put the furniture in storage, and rented a housekeeping room at a motel across the street from St. Joe’s.
“You’re welcome to everything that’s left here. But I’d like to put the apartment on the market as soon as possible, Garry.” Her lawyer was well aware that Jordan had been making the mortgage payments since Garry’s accident.
She could tell by his expression that he hadn’t expected any of this.
“My lawyer will handle the details,” she said in a quiet voice. “Call her if you have any questions.” Exactly what Marcy had told her to say. She’d practiced so that now it came out smoothly, without revealing the effort it took her to speak.
“Where the hell are you going? You come back here!” She heard the panic in his voice as she headed for the door. “We haven’t finished talking yet. What if I need you for something? You could at least give me your new address, Jordan.”
It was tragic to recognize that the only thing he’d need her for was money. Prescriptions and money were all he’d needed from her for months.
“You have my cell number.” And Marcy had already suggested she get that changed if his calls became too frequent or abusive. “And I’d rather you didn’t come to St. Joe’s again, Garry.”
“Last I heard it was a free country,” he snarled. “I can go wherever the hell I choose.”
“Okay, then I’ll alert security.” She prayed she wouldn’t have to carry out the threat. She opened the apartment door. “Goodbye, Garry.”
“You’re making a big mistake, you dumb bitch!”
She closed the door and hurried to the elevator. Her legs were shaking as she made her way down and out of the building. She was crying when she climbed in her car. Some of the tears were for the dreams she’d forfeited, but mostly they were tears of relief.
She’d taken a first and much-needed step toward finding out who Jordan Burke really was, and she was learning fast what she didn’t want in her life anymore. If that was a negative positive, so what? She’d take what she could get.
She blew her nose hard and for the first time in days, she smiled wryly. But the smile went just as quickly as it came.
Now she had to figure out what it was she did want.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING WEEK when the notice on St. Joe’s computer bulletin board caught Jordan’s eye.
Resident GP wanted for isolated First Nations village, Vancouver Island’s west coast. Ahousaht, Clayoquot Sound, Flores Island. Applicants must be willing to work with Tribal Community Services. Access by boat or floatplane only.
There was a Web address and a phone number, and Jordan scribbled them down. She wasn’t sure why. She knew nothing about native villages, and not much about First Nations people. The ones she was most familiar with were the ones who ended up in the E.R., most of them unfortunate residents of Vancouver’s troubled Lower East Side.
She was on the early shift, and when she was finished work she had an appointment with Helen, who once again asked the question that was becoming a mantra between them.
“What is it you really want, Jordan?”
“I want to move away.” The words came of their own volition, surprising her. “I’ve always lived in Vancouver. I grew up here, went to university here, trained at St. Joe’s. This is the only hospital I’ve ever worked at. I think I’d like to leave the city, go somewhere where no one knows me, maybe give general practice a shot. Make a fresh start.”
Somewhere Garry isn’t. She didn’t say the words aloud. She didn’t have to. Helen understood.
“Maybe that’s what you need to do, then. Just keep in mind that you take all your emotional baggage with you, along with your underwear, no matter where you travel,” Helen reminded her. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she quoted with her teasing smile. “Any idea where you want to go?”
Jordan shook her head. “I’ll have to find a job before I make any changes. There’s the legal bills to think about.” It was too soon to speculate.
But later that afternoon, she explored the Web for Ahousaht. Photos showed a wild and windswept village surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. She learned that until now medical care had been provided by the nurse at the local clinic and a doctor who flew in twice a week. Emergency cases were transported by medevac to the hospital in Tofino on nearby Vancouver Island. But the community’s requirements had changed, and now the Tribal Council needed a full-time doctor. The salary wasn’t what Jordan earned in the E.R., but neither would there be shift work. And housing was included.
Impulsively, Jordan took out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d copied down.
The number rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Hello?” There was a note of impatience in the man’s deep and resonant tone.
“Oh, um, yes, hello.” Damn, now she was losing her confidence. Her hands were sweating and she could hear the strain in her voice. “My, um, my name is Jordan Burke, Doctor Burke, and I’m calling about the medical position. Is it still available, or have you found someone?”
There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know for sure. Call back another time. The office is closed for the day.” His tone was brusque, bordering on rude.
“Well, can you just tell me—”
“Nope, I can’t. You need to speak to Bennie, he’s the rep from Tribal Council.”
“Bennie? Bennie who? Does he have a last name?” Jordan was over feeling nervous and well on the way to being annoyed. Surely he could be more helpful?
“Just Bennie will do fine. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“And you are—?” This person should never be answering a business phone. She’d say so, in the nicest possible way, when she talked to this Bennie, Jordan decided.
“Silas Keefer. And I’m hanging up now, Jordan Burke. There’s a celebration I need to attend.”
“Oh. Sure. But first can you just tell me—”
The line clicked and a dial tone sounded. The bloody man had hung up on her.
Jordan pushed End and shoved the phone into her bag with more force than was necessary. Whoever, whatever Silas Keefer was, he’d succeeded in discouraging her from applying for the position.
SILAS HAD FORGOTTEN about the call by the time he took his place in the welcoming circle. When his turn came to hold the fragile baby, he cradled him against his heart. The tiny boy seemed too small to bear the weight of his sturdy name.
Hello, Cameron Michael John. Welcome, Nuu-chah-nulth warrior.
Cameron was barely a week old. Silas gazed down into the little face. The baby’s skin was golden and downy, and he looked up at Silas through big dark eyes. One minute fist, curled into itself like a seashell, flailed and then came to rest on the front of Silas’s flannel shirt, and his man’s heart swelled in his chest. He never got used to the miracle of new life. He hoped he never would.
You, young Cameron, have plenty of time to grow into your name—and you’ll be growing up right alongside your parents.
Alice Pettigrew, Cameron’s mother, was barely sixteen, hardly more than a child herself. And his father, Hogan John, had two full years to go before his twentieth birthday.
Children, raising children. At least here in Ahousaht, Cameron and his parents were surrounded by family, mothers and aunts and fathers and grandfathers. Most of them were here today and Silas knew all of them were willing to help in any way they could.
The shy young parents sat side by side holding hands as the members of the welcoming circle cradled the newborn to their hearts and hummed the traditional ahhhh nook, ahhhhh nook deep in their chests. Conveying love and welcome and support. Then they sang the welcoming songs, the dancers up and moving to the beat of the drums. Silas said a prayer, and as soon as the blessing was complete, got to his feet and headed toward the door.
His half sister, Christina Crow, caught him just before he escaped.
She gave him her wicked wide grin. “Hey, Silas, you’re coming to Mom’s birthday party tomorrow night, right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there.” They both knew he wouldn’t stay, but he’d put in an appearance. He was, after all, Rose Marie’s firstborn. After her divorce from Silas’s father, Angus Keefer, Rose Marie had married Peter Crow and five years later she’d had Christina. Twelve years after that, Patwin, her third child, was born, but Christina was the half sibling Silas really knew well. Patwin hadn’t been home much since Silas had moved back to Ahousaht. And Silas was profoundly solitary.
But who could help loving Christina? She’d been born smiling. Tiny and slender, his half sister had thick black hair permed into a curly, electric frizz. Her dramatic, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and glorious copper skin drew the hungry glances of men. But it was her sunny nature that captivated people as much as her beauty. She had a streak of mischief that made her fun to be around, and her smart mouth brought shocked smiles to even the most dour of the elders.
Over the six years he’d lived in Ahousaht, Christina had somehow wormed her way through all the protective barriers Silas had erected.
And just like all the women in the family, she was nosy as hell.
“So what’d you get Mom for her birthday?”
“That marble pastry board and lazy Susan she’s been eyeing in the new kitchenware store in Tofino.”
“Super.” Christina beamed up at him, dark eyes sparkling. “That’s gonna get you brownie points, big brother. Dad and I each got her another one of those copper-bottomed pots she’s nuts about.” She shook her head and her curls lifted and settled. “Mom’s the only woman I know who actually wants kitchen stuff for her birthday. I’d flatten anyone who gave me pots instead of perfume.”
“How’s it going with Andy?” She’d been dating Andy Makinna for a couple of months now.
“It’s over.” Christina shrugged and wrinkled her nose. “Him and Eli didn’t get along.”
“That kid’s got a good shit detector.” Silas hadn’t been particularly fond of her latest admirer, either. Good for his nephew for putting the run on the guy.
“Yeah, well, Eli’s gonna end up supporting me in my old age unless he takes a shine to one of these guys pretty soon.”
“He’s only eight. He’s got lots of time to dig up a stepfather before that.”
Christina rolled her eyes. “I’d just as soon have a man who’s breathing.”
“I’ll pass that on to Eli, but a woman with a personality problem like you have can’t be too fussy.”
She grinned and thumped him on the shoulder. “Take your own advice, older brother.”
“I’ll give it my best shot.” Silas gave her a quick hug and eased past her, toward freedom.
Christina grabbed a handful of his shirt and held on. “Why not stay for coffee?”
“Can’t. I’ve got a deadline on an article, and I’m trying to improve the Ahousaht Web site.”
She knew it was an excuse, but she didn’t challenge him. “Okay. See you tomorrow morning at the meeting, then. No applicants yet for the medical posting, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever find a doctor who wants to come and live here.” Christina was nursing supervisor for the medical center. She was the one who’d convinced the Council about the advantages of having a resident M.D.
“You know, somebody did call about that posting.” He’d forgotten all about it till now. Silas was one of the band’s healers, but he was the first to admit the need for both healing modalities. “Just before the ceremony, I dropped by the band office to get some stuff Bennie left for me, and the phone rang. It was a woman. She asked if the position was still open. I told her I didn’t know.”
“Did you get her name and number?”
“Her name was Jordan, Jordan Brick or Bruk or something.” Silas shook his head. “I was late for the welcoming ceremony. But I did tell her to call back and talk to Bennie before I hung up on her.”
Christina gave him a look. “Probably the only person who’ll ever even think of applying, and you pissed her off right up front, eh?”
Silas shrugged. “You know me, I’m not exactly Mr. Congeniality.”
“Mr. Porcupine is more like it.” Christina shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You need a crash course in human relations, big brother.”
He smiled down at her, not in the least offended. “I’m way too old to change my wicked ways.”
“Thirty-six going on ninety-seven?”
“If that woman really wants the job, she’ll call back. And she’ll have to really want it or she’ll never stick it out through the first few weeks of culture shock. She’ll find out—” he ticked them off on his fingers “—there’s no sushi bar, no movie theater, no health club and it’s a forty-five minute trip by water taxi to the nearest pizza joint, which for some strange reason won’t deliver. And then there’s the rain. Mustn’t forget we have an annual rainfall of a hundred and ninety-six inches. So if I was a little abrupt on the phone, it’s a good thing—a test. We’ll see how determined she is to live on an island populated by wild Indians.”
Christina blew a raspberry. “The elders hear you call us that and they’ll revive scalping. You make it sound so bad anybody would turn tail and run. If by some fluke she phones back and even comes for a look-see, maybe you oughta lay low while I convince her there actually are advantages to living in Ahousaht.”
“If she comes, I’ll stay out of the way. Promise.”
Christina shot him a mischievous look. “Come to think about it, that’s not the best idea, either, big brother. If she’s single, the sight of you might entice her to remain in spite of the rain and the lack of a mall. You’re not half-bad to look at, although your manners leave a lot to be desired.”
Laughing, Silas made his escape when someone else came by to talk to Christina. He took the path that would lead him out of the village, along the forested path to where he’d built his compact cabin.
The rain that had been falling all day had stopped. The rising wind, chill and brisk, blew the clouds away, and overhead the late-afternoon sunset streaked the sky crimson and gold. Boats rocked at anchor in the bay, and kids in T-shirts raced up and down the gravel road on their bikes, impervious to the chill air. He was thinking about what he’d said, about there being no pizza joint in Ahousaht.
Personally, he’d settle for a faster and more reliable connection to the Internet.
CHAPTER FOUR
A CAB DROPPED Jordan and her two gigantic suitcases on the end of the pier just after ten on Monday morning, June 26. As well as her sizeable medical bag, she also had two shopping bags stuffed with groceries. The small convenience store in Ahousaht reputedly carried only the most basic essentials, so she’d just visited a large grocery in Tofino.
“She leaves at ten-thirty or thereabouts,” the cabdriver said, waving a hand at a decent-size boat bobbing in the water at the bottom of a walkway. “You got lotsa time.” He eyed the suitcases with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “I’ll get these on board for ya.”
He was a small, older man, and he walked with a limp. He’d struggled with the bags at the small airstrip the evening before, when Jordan arrived from Vancouver. He’d carried them into the inn where she’d spent the night and then lifted them back into his cab this morning. Envisioning herniated disks and heart attacks, Jordan tipped him lavishly and shook her head.
“Nope, not again. You’ve been great, and I thank you for the offer. But I’ll get someone on the boat to help me. You’ve wrestled with these long enough.”
He looked relieved. Thanking her profusely, he hurried away through the rain before she could change her mind.
Unsure what to do next, Jordan hefted her medical bag, abandoning the suitcases and groceries on the dock. By now quite wet, she clung to the railing, gingerly making her way down the slippery wooden ramp to the tiny floating pier. Moored to the dock, the aluminum boat the cabdriver had pointed out rocked as she scrambled aboard.
There was no one on the small deck. Feeling awkward, hoping she wouldn’t slip and catapult straight down into the cabin, Jordan gingerly climbed down the narrow ladder, surprised by how large the interior was.
There was space for about twenty-four passengers, and so far, she was the only one. Two tall, heavy native men were seated in the cockpit, talking as they drank from gigantic mugs of coffee. They turned and looked at her, dark, weather-beaten faces devoid of expression.
“I want to go to Ahousaht,” she began. “I’ve left a couple of heavy suitcases and a bunch of groceries up on the pier. Could someone help me carry them on board?”
Without a word, the younger man got up. When Jordan turned to follow him, the older man shook his head and motioned at a seat.
“Billy’ll get them.”
Jordan set her medical bag down and slid into a seat. “Thanks, that’s very kind.” She reached into her handbag for her wallet. “How much is the fare?”
“You’re the new doctor.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, I’m Jordan Burke. Hi.” She got up and they shook hands, hers swallowed by his rough paw. His scarred face softened into a smile.
“Charlie Tidian. No charge this time, Doctor Jordan Burke.”
“Thank you, skipper.” Jordan smiled at him. “You make the trip back and forth from Ahousaht every day?”
“Twice a day. The boat’s also used as an ambulance, if anybody needs to get to the hospital and it’s not urgent enough for the medevac.”
“How long does the trip take?”
“Forty-five minutes in good seas.”
Billy heaved her suitcases to the deck and then stowed them and the groceries at the back of the cabin, and soon people began trickling aboard, most of them First Nations. A young, pretty girl with a toddler and a huge backpack, an older woman, four young men. A middle-aged couple, obviously tourists, outfitted head to toe in Tilley gear, took the seat across from Jordan. The man whipped out a digital camera and began filming the boat and its occupants, concentrating on the mother and toddler and the older woman. Jordan figured he was being rude as hell, but the three ignored him.
At ten-thirty, the captain started the engines and the boat slipped away from the dock, heading at ever-increasing speed out over the gray-green expanse of water.
As the mainland disappeared, Jordan thought back to her first and only visit to Ahousaht three weeks earlier. She’d taken her car that time, driving from Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay and catching the Nanaimo ferry across the Inlet. It had taken three hours to navigate the twisting and terrifying Island Highway to reach the village of Tofino. There, feeling more and more as if she’d reached the end of the world, she’d chartered a floatplane to Ahousaht.
The isolated island village had both appalled and appealed to her. Sunshine shimmered on the water, blue-gray mountains rose in the distance and thick forest surrounded the sprawling frame buildings. The only road was a rutted dirt track that snaked its way up island. If she’d wanted isolation, it didn’t get any more remote than this.
The chief, council members and the nursing supervisor, Christina Crow, had greeted her warmly. They’d asked a lot of questions, including why she wanted to come to Ahousaht.
Without going into details, she’d told them her marriage had ended and that she wanted a complete change of scene. Her résumé spoke for itself, graduation at the top of her class and several years at St. Joseph’s E.R.
They’d been touchingly honest about their community: the isolation, the lack of amenities, the unique customs of the First Nations people.
She’d admitted little knowledge of their culture, and giving her two books, they’d left her alone with coffee and a plate of brownies. By the time they decided to hire her, the plate was almost empty, she knew a little about the history of the Nuu-chah-nulth people—and she was on a sugar high.
Jordan had accepted their offer on the spot.
Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. She tried to suppress her apprehension as the distance from Tofino increased, but finally gave in and let her emotions run. Aware that the Tilley couple were watching her bawl, she turned her face to the window, pretending to be intent on the small islands rushing by.
“Be aware of what you’re feeling. Don’t censor it, don’t struggle to subdue it,” Helen had advised. “Allow the emotions to come and just watch them. Darkness can’t survive when you let light in.”
Back in Vancouver, Jordan had been certain that this drastic life change was right and good for her. But as the minutes ticked by, she began to wonder.
She’d sold her car and many of her belongings, making the trip from Vancouver to Tofino by plane this time. There really was no point in having a car on an island where the majority of the community was within walking distance. And they did have a rusted-out ambulance for emergencies.
The boat chugged along, rising up high and then slapping heavily down on the waves. The noise of its props and powerful twin-engine motor finally soothed her. Whatever lay ahead was out of her control.
The tension in her neck and arms gradually subsided and she relaxed. For these brief few moments, she could just be.
Half an hour passed. Ahead, the clouds began to dissipate, revealing blue sky in patches overhead.
The water taxi skirted a long finger of land and several crab boats before turning into an inside channel, bordered by a wild, rocky shoreline. A few houses came into view, gray and weathered against the thick evergreens.
The boat glided past a fish farm and then more houses on the left and a long brown building with the sign Motel and Restaurant.
They finally arrived at the ramshackle dock, where a purse seiner and a cluster of fishing boats bobbed in the waves. And just as Jordan was wondering what to do with her unwieldy suitcases and grocery bags, Billy hoisted them out of the boat.
“They’re fine here,” he told her. “You go ahead, we’ll bring them up for you. You’re living at the back of the medical center, right?”
“I am. Thank you so much.” Carrying her medical bag and her purse, Jordan climbed out of the boat and walked slowly down the long pier and up the dirt road. A large sign nailed to a building read, Welcome to Ahousaht. Jordan looked around for Christina. The nursing supervisor had said she’d meet her, but she wasn’t there.
Two small boys on bikes came ripping past. One of them did an elaborate wheelie for her benefit and then hopped off the bike. He was wearing a billed cap backward over unruly black hair, and he gave Jordan an enchanting, gap-toothed grin. His face was still round with baby fat.
“Hi,” he said. “You’re our new doctor, right?”
She smiled back at him and nodded. “And who are you, sir?”
“I’m Eli Crow—Christina’s my mom. She told us to watch for you. She had to go see Auntie Elsie—she fell yesterday and hurt her foot, all the toes on the right foot are bruised.”
“Hi, Eli.” Jordan set her bag down and shook hands with Eli. She remembered Christina saying that she was the single parent of an eight-year-old. “Who’s your friend?”
“He’s Michael Nitsch. His mom is gonna make movies.”
“Hi, Michael.” Jordan held out her hand to the other boy. “So are you going into the movie business, too, when you grow up?”
“Nope. I’m gonna be a fireman.” Michael took his time shaking her hand. “Should we call you Mrs. Doctor?”
“You can call me Doctor Jordan, how’s that? I’m pleased to meet you both. You came along at exactly the right moment, too. The last time I was here somebody met me, and now I’m sort of lost. Could you guys get me to the medical center? And maybe help me carry those grocery bags?”
“Sure. We’re really, really strong.” One on each side of her, they hefted her plastic carryalls over their handlebars. Taking the job as guides seriously, they talked nonstop, pointing out the band office, the school and where they lived.
They informed the smiling drivers of two pickup trucks and a man out chopping wood that they were taking Doc Jordan to her new house. They told Jordan that the man chopping wood had a wife with six fingers, and that she’d let Jordan see them if Eli asked her and said please. Jordan quickly declined the offer.
“Maybe another time.”
“Okay, whenever you like,” Eli replied expansively.
Everyone called out a friendly hello. A woman pegging flowered sheets and diapers on a clothesline smiled and waved.
“That’s Audrey. She’s got a new baby,” Michael confided.
“Yeah, and her daddy went to live with his other wife,” Eli said with a nod. “Audrey won’t let him in the door now.”
Fascinating. This had a motorcycle escort beat all to hell, and Jordan felt pretty much like an informed VIP by the time her young heroes had delivered her safely to the apartment. She gave each of them two dollars and their dark eyes lit up.
“Thanks a lot, Doctor Jordan,” said Michael.
“You need anything, just call us,” Eli added. They sped off on their bikes to spend their reward money.
Jordan’s apartment was at the back of the medical center. Using the key she’d been given, she tried to open the door, only to find it was unlocked. Inside, it smelled of fresh paint, and Jordan had to smile.
Christina had made good on her promise. The walls were a warm, light color somewhere between lemon and cream, and the apartment had improved drastically since Jordan had last seen it on her first visit.
That day, these walls had been a nauseous institutional green.
“Can you tell this was where the cops stayed overnight before they got their trailer?” Christina had groaned. “They must get this paint free from the government. I think a nice warm lamb’s wool shade for these walls, don’t you?”
“What color’s lamb’s wool?”
“I dunno.” Christina had shrugged and shot Jordan a wicked grin. “I’m just trying my damnedest to impress you. I saw it in a Martha Stewart magazine.”
Jordan smiled now, remembering. There was an exuberance about Christina that made her irresistible, and obviously Eli had inherited it.
The paint made the small area welcoming, but the place was still strange to her, and she was suddenly achingly homesick for the familiarity of the Kitsilano apartment she and Garry had shared.
But not homesick for Garry. She shivered. Over the past few weeks she’d had to alert security at St. Joe’s, and she’d called the police and threatened to get a restraining order when he had turned up at the door of the motel one night.
Cancel, cancel. No more depressing thoughts. So she had no idea how to make a fire in the iron cookstove. She’d learn. The hot plate she’d ordered in Tofino wouldn’t be delivered for a couple days, but she’d brought a lot of cereal and apples. It wouldn’t do any harm to fast a little.
She walked around, taking stock of her new home. It was clean, sparsely furnished but adequate, with mismatched furniture and an odd but generous assortment of dishes in the kitchen area. A distinctive and colorful native painting hung on one wall, and someone had obviously hand-carved the two beautiful wooden bowls on the counter.
She opened the door wide to get rid of the smell of paint, hung up her jacket on a wooden peg and began unloading the groceries. When Billy arrived with her suitcases, she’d unpack and add her own small touches to the decor, like the soft turquoise silk shawl her brother Toby had sent for her birthday.
She’d use that as a table cover. And she had an old black-and-white photo of her and Toby when they were little to put on the bedside table. One of her mother, as well.
It would soon feel like home, she reassured herself. This wasn’t the same as when she was a child, shuffled from one home to the next, sharing bedrooms and sometimes even beds with other foster kids.
This apartment was hers alone. It had been her choice to come here, and she’d do her best to turn this little place into a sanctuary.
FROM A WINDOW in the band office, Silas watched the new doctor walk past with Eli and Michael. He’d honored his promise to Christina; although he was a member of the council, he’d deliberately been absent for the initial meeting with the doctor. Instead, he’d hiked up island to visit an elderly couple recovering from a severe bout of the flu, but he couldn’t deny he was curious. Ahousaht was a small, close-knit community. The addition of someone from Away always had repercussions.
Jordan Burke was tall, maybe five-nine or ten—or maybe she only looked that tall because she was long-legged and very slender. Her thick chestnut hair, down past her shoulder blades and silky straight, was parted in the middle and tied simply at the base of her neck with a blue scarf. She was wearing faded jeans, brown boots and a hooded blue sweatshirt. She carried a navy rain jacket slung over one long, slim arm.
Eli and Michael were hoisting her grocery bags and talking a mile a minute, and he saw her smile at them. Her smile transformed her narrow face with its aristocratic long nose and full lips from almost plain to—he thought pretty and then changed his mind to beautiful. But only when she smiled.
She looked foreign. Pale, exotic, fragile. Silas made a dismissive sound in his throat and turned away from the window.
She wouldn’t last long. He’d bet the council would be hiring another doctor within six weeks. Strength and endurance were essential in this wild, remote location. Fragile flowers didn’t thrive in Ahousaht.
JORDAN HAD JUST FINISHED hanging her jacket in the small closet and was assessing how much space the drawers of the rickety chest gave her when she heard a knock at the door. She hurried to open it, hoping it was Billy with her suitcases, but Christina stood there, navy shirt accentuating the dramatic angles of her high cheekbones.
“Welcome, Jordan,” she said with a wide smile. She handed her a bouquet of wild roses in a glass canning jar.
“Hey, Christina, thank you so much. Come in. I met your adorable son and his friend. Thanks for sending them to escort me from the boat.”
Jordan put the flowers in the middle of the table.
“I wanted to be there myself, but there was a minor emergency. Did the boys give you the rundown on the entire population?”
“Only their immediate families and everyone we passed. I can’t wait to pump them for more.”
“They’re nosy little demons. I just hope they never find out about blackmail.”
Jordan waved an arm at the walls. “Thanks for the paint job, I love the color.”
“Lambskin duvet, just like I promised.” Christina glanced at the grocery bags. “I hope you didn’t make lunch yet. Mom wondered if you’d like to come and eat with us?”
Jordan glanced at her watch, suddenly aware that it was past noon and nerves had kept her from having anything but coffee that morning.
“Thanks, Christina. I’d love to, but I’m waiting for Billy to bring my suitcases. He should be here any minute. Can you wait?”
“Sure. No rush. Mom’s serving stew, it’ll keep.”
“Please, sit.” Jordan gestured at the brown tweed couch. “Do you want to call her? I have my cell phone—”
Christina grinned and shook her head. “Mom’s pretty easygoing. She’ll expect us when we get there.”
Jordan sank into a stuffed armchair across from the couch and then gave a startled squeak when her bottom almost hit the floor. The springs were gone.
“Oops.” Christina put a hand over her mouth and giggled. After a moment of stunned silence, Jordan began to laugh too, and then she couldn’t stop. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she pressed her fists against her mouth, willing herself to regain control, losing it more with each passing moment.
CHAPTER FIVE
CHRISTINA GOT UP after a moment and knelt in front of Jordan.
“Let it come,” she said in her soft, slow voice. “Let it out, it needs to escape now.” She laid a small hand gently on Jordan’s head and stroked her hair.
Ashamed, but too far out of control to do anything about it, Jordan wailed, gulping out strange guttural noises.
“That’s the way,” Christina encouraged her. “Let ’er out.”
It took what felt like forever before Jordan regained control.
Christina went to the bathroom for a tissue, then pressed it into Jordan’s hand.
“Oh, dammit, I’m so sorry,” Jordan said when she could speak again. “What an idiot, having a meltdown like that.” She blew her nose hard and tried for a smile. “And I’m supposed to be the doctor. It’s enough to scare you, huh?”
Christina shook her head. “You’re a woman first. Women need to cry, it keeps us healthy.”
A knock at the door signaled the arrival of the suitcases.
“Oh, no, I’m a wreck.” Jordan hated the idea of anyone else witnessing her breakdown.
“Go in the bathroom and run some cool water. I’ll tell Billy to put the suitcases in the bedroom, okay?”
“Thanks.” Jordan hurried into the bathroom and locked the door. She was shaking.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she whispered to her bleary image in the mirror over the sink. “You’ll need to go back on medication if you keep this up.”
She washed her face and held a cold washcloth over her swollen eyes. She could hear Christina’s calm voice directing Billy, and then the sound of the door closing behind him. Grateful that she’d already put the small cache of cosmetics she carried in her purse on the shelf above the sink, Jordan used eye drops and touches of concealer, then an eyelash curler. A critical glance told her that no one with normal eyesight would be fooled; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still bloodshot, her face puffy.
She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.
Christina studied her. “Well, it looks like you either have one hell of a hangover or you’ve been on a major crying jag,” she said.
“Let’s be optimistic and think hangover.”
Christina grinned. “Okay, let’s go eat. Food fixes damned near anything. I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” That in itself was amazing. Jordan’s appetite had been on sabbatical for weeks, but at this moment she was voraciously hungry.
“That’s gonna make my mother one happy woman. She loves feeding people. It’s a wonder I’m not three hundred pounds.” Christina waited while Jordan locked the door, and then they set off down the gravel road.
The wind was up—it smelled of the sea—and it cooled Jordan’s burning cheeks and smarting eyes.
“Where’d you train, Christina?” She liked the other woman a lot. She’d only ever had a handful of women friends, and she’d lost touch with them since marrying Garry. He’d taken all her attention.
“Edmonton, nine years ago,” Christina said. “I followed my high school sweetheart there. David got a job in the oil fields and I enrolled in nursing. But he was killed when a generator blew up. I was two months from graduating and four months pregnant. We were getting married the day after graduation.”
Lordy. All of a sudden, Jordan’s life didn’t seem so desperate.
Christina was matter-of-fact about it all. “I got my degree and came back here so Eli could grow up with family and friends.”
Family. Friends. The words left a hollow space in Jordan’s heart. She’d grown up in foster homes, struggling to make top grades, too busy to have time for friendship. And then somewhere along the line, she’d learned not to trust other women. And yet here was a woman, on an island in what at this moment felt like the outer edge of the known world, who made Jordan think friendship was not only possible, but likely.
They left the road and headed up a slight hill to a wooden frame house indistinguishable from every other they’d passed. Each had a stack of firewood outside, and many of the yards were cluttered with discarded bathtubs, broken high chairs, rusted motors, old tires—even bed frames.
Some had electrical lines leading to them, but many didn’t. The one Christina headed for was tidy and well kept. The pile of firewood was neatly stacked, and wooden tubs of flowers flanked the walkway. Christina led Jordan up the sturdy stairs and opened the front door.
“Mom, hey, we’re here!”
Mouthwatering cooking smells greeted them, along with Elvis singing gospel on a boom box. A plump, very pretty woman hurried down the hall to greet them, wiping her hands on a striped apron tied around her ample waist. She was smiling, and her dark eyes were almost buried in her round apple cheeks.
“About time. I was about to send out a scouting party.”
“This is Jordan Burke, Ma. Jordan, my mother, Rose Marie Crow.”
Rose Marie took both of Jordan’s hands in a warm, welcoming clasp.
“You’re a pretty one,” she commented. “But way too skinny, we’ll have to feed you up, eh?”
Jordan’s smile took effort. Her skin felt shrunken from crying, and she was suddenly shy. “It smells wonderful in here,” she managed to say. “Thank you so much for inviting me.”
“We’re not fancy, come and sit in the kitchen and I’ll serve the stew. Christina, Eli came by and said he’s eating at Michael’s house. Wanda’s making them KD.”
“Kraft Dinner,” Christina interpreted. “They’d live on the stuff if we let them.”
Rose Marie led the two women to the large kitchen at the back of the house. Sliding doors opened on to a deck, where the yard below was mostly garden. Green plants in a variety of pots lined the deep windowsills.
The kitchen was warm and inviting, counters lined with baskets of food and a wood-burning cookstove in the corner like the one in Jordan’s apartment. Except this one sent out waves of warmth. Its gleaming surface was crowded with pots, and a large, sturdy basket beside the stove held a good supply of firewood.
Rose Marie deftly lifted the lid with an iron utensil and thrust another log into the firebox, slamming the lid back in place. The big square wooden table in the middle of the room was set for four with sea-green place mats and colorful Fiestaware.
Christina indicated a chair, and Jordan sat.
“Where’s Grandmother, Mom?”
“She went back home to get something but told us not to wait for her.”
Rose Marie began filling huge bowls with stew. Slicing up a loaf of freshly baked bread, Christina filled a wooden platter, and set it on the table along with a wooden bowl of glistening salad greens.
“Dig in,” Rose Marie ordered, taking her place beside Christina.
Jordan, suddenly ravenous, did as she was told. Her first bite confirmed that Rose Marie was an exceptional cook who knew her way around a seafood stew.
“This is sooo good,” she sighed.
Just as Jordan was sampling the crusty bread—irresistibly still warm—the deck door slid open and a short, very old woman with long black braids came in. Almost as wide as she was tall, she moved with an assured dignity and grace that belied her years.
Christina got up and gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. “Hey, Grandmother Alice, this is Jordan Burke, the new doctor. Jordan, this is Alice Sam.”
“How do you do.” Alice set down the plastic bag she was carrying and came over to take Jordan’s hand. Her gaze seemed to penetrate beneath the skin. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jordan Burke.”
“And you, Mrs. Sam.”
“Grandmother, everyone calls me Grandmother.”
“Sit,” Rose Marie ordered. “I’ll get you some stew. Help yourself to salad and bread.”
While Elvis sang “Amazing Grace,” they ate the food, simple and delicious.
After a long silence, the women began to discuss the weather and the garden and someone’s new baby. Jordan didn’t feel excluded, but rather, relived they didn’t make her the focus of the gathering.
She sensed they were giving her a chance to get to know them, to feel at home with them—and to recover from whatever had made her eyes red and bloodshot.
She felt relaxed and peaceful, sitting in the bright kitchen with these kind and tactful women.
“I made Nanaimo bars,” Rose Marie said when everyone was finished eating. “You drink coffee, Doctor? Or I can make tea, herbal or regular, whatever you want.”
“Coffee’s fine.” A jolt of caffeine would help get her through the afternoon.
The Nanaimo bars were decadent—layers of sweet custard, coconut and smooth dark chocolate. Between the sugar and caffeine, Jordan was soon wide-awake again.
“I read that now they think chocolate is actually good for you,” Christina said. “What’s your professional opinion, Jordan? You can lie—we’ll all be grateful.”
They all turned to look at her.
“Women have always known chocolate’s good for them,” she said, munching a second slice. “We didn’t need scientists to prove it.”
The others smiled and nodded, and then fell silent. Waiting politely for her to tell them something about herself. But she couldn’t. She’d learned to talk to Helen, but she still couldn’t let others into her private space. “You’re an amazing cook, Rose Marie,” she said. “I’ll have to learn to cook, too. I’ve gotten way too used to eating out and ordering in.”
“Here, we don’t have much choice,” Alice said. “And most of us don’t have the money, even if there was somewhere to go besides Mabel’s.”
“Working in Emerg, you probably came home too tired to do much cooking,” Christina said in her defense. “You’re gonna find life a lot slower here.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
“You got family on the mainland?” Alice asked.
“No.” Jordan hesitated. “An ex-husband.” The ex part was stretching the truth somewhat. “No kids,” she added with a sense of regret. “I have one brother, but he’s in Seattle. I don’t see him very often.”
“Your folks passed on?” Alice obviously believed family was very important.
It would be rude to avoid a direct answer. “My mother died when I was four,” Jordan managed to say. “My father figured he couldn’t take care of us on his own so he put my brother and me into foster care. He’s still alive, but I don’t have any contact with him.”
“Too bad,” Alice said shaking her head. “We all need family.”
The women nodded.
“We have a saying,” Grandmother Alice said, murmuring in her own language. “It means we are all related.”
“Most of us, my generation anyways, we got separated from our folks, too,” Rose Marie said. “They took the kids from the reserves and put us either with foster families in the city or in residential schools.”
“I’ve read about that,” Jordan said. “That had to be one of the most destructive things politicians ever did.”
“Yeah.” All three women agreed, but without any show of emotion.
“It was bad, getting taken away,” Alice said, matter-of-fact. “And then it was real hard, comin’ back.”
“Culture shock comin’ and goin’,” Rose Marie agreed, and they all laughed.
“But now we got our own school, our kids stay here in Ahousaht.”
Jordan recognized the pride in her tone. “When I saw the school the first time I came here, I was impressed. It’s beautiful.”
Rose Marie nodded. “And we got some really good teachers.”
“Did any of them grow up here?”
“Three.” Alice poured Jordan another cup of coffee. “There’s two from Away, but they’ve been here two years now. Looks like they might just stay.”
“Is that a problem?” Jordan asked. “Teachers leaving?”
“Oh, yeah, big-time,” Christina said. “Last year we had some leave before September was even over. That young couple who came from the Interior—”
She was interrupted by a man in rough work clothes and rubber boots who opened the sliding door wide and stepped inside.
Rose Marie got up fast. “Peter, what’s happened?”
“Louie’s cut his leg damned near off with the power saw,” he said, breathing hard. “I knew the new doc was comin’ here for lunch—we called for the ambulance but it’s got a flat tire.”
“This is my husband, Peter Crow,” Rose Marie said.
“We’d better hurry, Peter.” Jordan got up quickly, adrenaline pumping. “I’ll have to get my medical bag from the apartment.”
“You go with Dad,” Christina said. “Give me your key, I’ll bring your bag.” She turned to her father. “Where’s Louie?”
“Down by the old wharf, he’s bleedin’ pretty bad, but Silas is there. He’ll get it stopped. C’mon, Doc.”
Jordan had to run to keep up with him. He’d left a battered green half ton running, and she climbed into the passenger seat, barely getting the door shut before Peter stepped hard on the accelerator.
A medical emergency. For the first time all day, Jordan felt confident that she was doing exactly what she was meant to do.
CHAPTER SIX
HER PATIENT WAS LYING FLAT on an old dock in a pool of coagulating blood. His right thigh, halfway between knee and groin, had been torn open in a crosswise cut. Someone had been smart enough to elevate the wound and apply a pressure bandage.
Jordan knelt and looked into the man’s eyes, at the same time taking his wrist, gauging his pulse.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Burke. Can you tell me your name?” She knew it, but needed to ascertain his level of shock.
“Louie Adams.” His voice was thin and reedy, but he was conscious and responding. Rapid pulse, dilated pupils. Shock, but not bad. Considering.
Louie was stoically silent, and an equally silent crowd had collected around him. Someone had draped a jacket over his chest and shoulders, possibly the lean man who knelt beside him. He was talking to Louie in a low tone, his shoulder-length black hair partially hiding his face.
The man’s hair had a dramatic white streak, although he looked young. His black leather jacket was well-worn, open to reveal a white T-shirt with a picture of an eagle in full flight. His jeans fit like a second skin, molding to his long, strong thighs. He looked up, meeting Jordan’s eyes. His were clear and cool, a surprising pale green with specks of gold, and for an instant she had the disconcerting feeling that he could see into her mind.
“I’m Silas Keefer,” he said in a deep, soft voice. He didn’t smile.
“Jordan Burke. Hi.” She’d heard that voice before, she thought, turning back to her patient. “Okay, Louie, we’ll get some fluids into you and then take you up to the medical center.”
Although just how she was going to accomplish that without any medical supplies or an ambulance—
“It’s slowing down now, Silas. I’ll have it stopped in a minute.” Louie’s glazed eyes looked to the man beside her.
Obviously he was in shock. Silas leaned over her patient and murmured something close to his ear. Jordan couldn’t make it out.
From somewhere nearby, she heard Christina. “I’ve got your bag here, Jordan, and the medical pack from the ambulance. The first-aid guys are bringing a stretcher. We’ll have to use a pickup to get him to the center—it’ll take too long to fix the damned tire. You want me to establish a line?”
Christina crouched beside Jordan, proving herself first-rate at finding a vein.
The flow of blood from the wound was much less than Jordan had expected, and there didn’t appear to be a severed artery or nerve damage. The saw had bit deeply into the muscle, the fleshy part of the thigh.
Jordan supervised Louie’s transfer first to a stretcher and then to the back of the pickup truck that had backed in close. Through it all, Silas Keefer helped without once getting in the way. Jordan was aware of him the whole time, as she was sometimes aware of electricity in the air before a thunderstorm.
In the back of the truck, she crouched beside her patient, feeling a little like a pioneer doctor as she steadied the drip and kept tabs on Louie’s pulse and breathing. Christina and Silas Keefer rode in front beside the driver.
At the medical center, Jordan had to argue with Louie, who refused to be airlifted to Tofino.
“What good’s having a doctor here if you’re gonna send me to the hospital over there? Can’t you sew me up right here, Doc?”
Jordan considered it. It would have been impossible if there was major nerve damage or arterial bleeding, but Louie had lucked out.
“I’d have to give you a brief general anesthetic,” she warned. Christina had said she was qualified at anesthesia, but they’d never worked together. “Wouldn’t you feel safer having this procedure done in hospital?”
“Hell, no,” Louie insisted. “You’ve sewed people up before, haven’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Jordan grinned. “One or two.” She’d done more than her share of minor surgery in the E.R.
“Then do it, Doc. I want you to patch me up here, that way I can be home in a couple days, keep an eye on the kids for the wife. She works at the RCMP office.”
Jordan hoped she was making the right decision. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do.”
As she and Christina scrubbed, Jordan said, “That tall guy, Silas Keefer, who is he? He knew a lot about first aid, but he left before I could talk to him.”
“Oh, that’s my older brother.”
“Your brother?” Jordan shot Christina a surprised look. Different surnames and no family resemblance. Even Silas’s speech patterns were unlike Christina’s slow, measured delivery.
“He’s my half brother,” Christina amended. “From Mom’s first marriage.”
“I see. Has he had medical training? He seemed to know exactly what to do.”
“Not really.” Christina concentrated on soaping her hands. “Silas does a lot of things. He’s a writer, he’s published a few books and he writes articles for various journals. He lives in the bush outside of town. He’s not very social. I keep telling him thirty-six is too young to be eccentric, but he’s determined to play the part.”
“So he’s your big brother.” Jordan felt a familiar jolt of homesickness, thinking of her own big brother. “Is he married?” There was no real reason for the question—except that she very much wanted to know.
“Nope. He came close a couple years back, a nurse from Edmonton who spent a year up here. But she couldn’t stand the isolation. She went home, Silas didn’t follow, so that was that.”
Jordan filed that information away and forcefully evicted Silas Keefer from her mind. She had work to do.
The surgery on Louie’s leg took every ounce of Jordan’s concentration. She was accustomed to an entire crew of nurses and aides, and far more sophisticated equipment. The clinic had the basics, but it was a strange experience to work with only Christina and an ambulance attendant standing by. Jordan was acutely conscious of being totally responsible for her patient’s well-being, in a way she never had been at St. Joe’s.
The wound was jagged and dirty, the flesh ripped by the teeth of the saw. Splinters of wood needed careful extraction, and there was heightened danger of infection from the dirt and oil off the blade of the saw. She heaved a sigh of relief when the procedure was finally over, shocked to learn that the afternoon had faded into evening.
She talked to Louie’s wife, Roberta, and then to his mother, Angie. A long string of concerned relatives and friends dropped by the clinic, and Christina was kept busy reassuring them.
Louie came out of the anesthetic in record time, and within an hour was asking for something to eat, which astonished Jordan.
He had to be in severe pain. She’d ordered five milligrams of morphine every hour to keep him comfortable, and she couldn’t believe he was actually hungry. “Food’s not a good idea,” she warned. “You may be nauseous, I’d recommend only liquids until tomorrow.”
“C’mon, Doc,” Louie wheedled. “I cut my leg, not my stomach. Can’t I at least have some soup?”
“Okay, then. I’ll see if I can find a tin of clear broth,” Jordan offered doubtfully, thinking of the woodstove she had no idea how to light. She felt more than a little nostalgic about St. Joe’s, where one call to housekeeping took care of these kind of details.
“Oh, you won’t have to make anything. I think somebody left a pot of soup back there in your kitchen,” Christina said with a mischievous grin. “I unlocked your door so the donor could get in. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? What are you, nuts?”
Jordan went through the connecting door into her apartment, and stopped dead at the kitchen. The cookstove was giving off waves of heat. Not only was there a pot of soup simmering, but on the table someone had laid out three kinds of salad, a tray of sliced beef, what looked like a meat pie, along with jars of pickles, relish and berries. On the counter, she saw another pie, chocolate cake, oatmeal cookies—and homemade bread.
Jordan studied the bounty, and for the second time that day, tears burned at the back of her eyes. For several long moments she couldn’t contain them.
Get a grip, for God’s sake. It’s only way too much food. But there was something about women welcoming her by bringing gifts of food that touched her deeply.
“Louie’s hungry,” she said aloud to no one, blowing her nose and studying the feast. She filled a small bowl with broth from the potato chowder, poured a glass of apple juice and, folding paper towel into a napkin, used a battered cookie sheet as a tray. Then she took it all to the room where Louie was stretched out, his heavily bandaged leg elevated and IV firmly in place.
Roberta was there with him and she took over, putting the tray on a bedside stand, spooning the soup into her husband’s mouth.
“You and Christina go have some supper,” she suggested. “I’ll take care of Louie. Nothin’ to it, I been doin’ it for ten years already. He’s an awful baby when something goes wrong.” But the glance she and Louie exchanged was tender.
“I dunno about you, Jordan, but I’m starving,” Christina said.
“Have I got a dinner for you.” Jordan took her back to the kitchen, and together they filled plates and sat on the rump-sprung couch to eat.
“I’ll have to give some of this away or it’ll go bad. There’s enough here for twenty people,” Jordan said.
“We can put some of it out in the clinic for a free lunch tomorrow. There’ll be a crowd around—everybody will want to size up the new doc.”
That should have unnerved her, but Jordan was far too tired. By the time she’d finished a slice of blueberry pie, she was yawning.
“Excuse me,” she apologized, and then yawned again.
“Why not go to bed?” Christina gathered up their dishes and stacked them in the plastic dishpan in the sink. “These’ll keep till morning, dirty dishes always do. We’ll just stow the meat and salad in the fridge— I’ll take Roberta a plateful. I’m gonna set up a cot for her beside Louie’s bed. That way she can keep an eye on him for us during the night. I’ll check the drip and make sure there’s no bleeding.”
“Bless you. I’m absolutely wiped out. It must be the sea air.”
“Or it could have something to do with a major emergency your first day on the job. I meant to ask, are you planning on having office hours every day? A couple of Roberta’s relatives were asking.”
“Every day except Sunday. I didn’t come here to laze around, I’m used to the pace in the E.R. I’ll put a sign on the door with the hours. What do you think is reasonable? Eight to twelve, and then two to five?”
“You can try that.” Christina laughed. “People here don’t go much by the clock, we run on what we call Indian time. That means people will turn up when it suits them. But they also don’t mind waiting, so it evens out. There’s also a lot of extra stuff that won’t fit into rigid office hours. Like the well-baby clinic once a week and Community Care where we go out to whoever needs us. There’s also a drug education program for teens and a prenatal group. You sure don’t have to attend all those things all the time, but it would be great if you’d come once in a while.”
“I wish now I’d gone into general practice. Until I get the hang of it, I’m going to have to rely on you to keep me on track.”
“It shouldn’t take that long, you strike me as a reasonably bright woman.”
“Gee, thanks.”
They both grinned. Today they’d worked together as a smooth, efficient unit. As if they’d done it for years.
“We’ll grab time tomorrow to work out a sort of timetable,” Christina said. “You go on to bed. If anybody needs you, they know where to come.”
“Thanks, Christina. For everything. And tell your mom thanks for the lunch, I sort of ate and ran.”
“No kidding, I wonder why? I’ll tell her.”
After Christina went back into the clinic, Jordan covered the remaining food, turned out the lights, and made her way into the bedroom. Groaning when she realized her suitcase had been flopped onto the double bed, she wrestled it to the floor so there’d be room for her to sleep. She put on the worn flannel nightgown she’d had since her intern days, and after a quick wash in the bathroom, tumbled into bed. She’d unpack in the morning.
The mattress was firm, the sheets soft, and Jordan burrowed into the fluffy comforter. The window she’d opened let in the smell of the sea with a distinct tinge of pine, mingling with wood smoke, maybe from her own kitchen stove.
She really had to learn how to light that thing—she’d probably even have to learn how to use the oven. Unless the women took pity on her and kept bringing food, she’d also have to learn to cook. There was so much for her to learn here. It felt as if she’d been catapulted to a different planet. One where Garry couldn’t find her.
But it wasn’t Garry’s face that came to mind as she began to relax. It was the lean, hard-edged features of Silas Keefer.
You’re out of it, Burke. You’re so tired you’re hallucinating.
With a sigh of exhaustion and something closer to contentment than she’d felt in a long while, she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
LESS THAN A MILE AWAY, Silas slumped in front of his laptop, struggling with the lengthy article he’d agreed to write on ideological differences toward healing between native and white culture. It was for the University Press, to be included in a book on many diverse healing modalities. It had been assigned by a professor he’d come to respect during his student days, and Silas was being well paid for it—the main reason he’d taken on the contract.
Living in Ahousaht was definitely a low-rent proposition, but even the simplest lifestyle required an income.
He ran a hand through his hair. This wasn’t going well at all, and it should be a piece of cake. He knew the material, he lived the material.
He deleted a couple of paragraphs, scowling at the screen. Why couldn’t he keep his mind on what he was doing?
Because I’m thinking about the blue-eyed doctor. The answer surprised him. He hadn’t been consciously thinking about her, but she was definitely there, just under the surface, distracting him.
His body had reacted to her today. He’d tried to pretend it hadn’t, because he liked to believe he was in control of himself, his thoughts, his responses.
He’d been celibate for a long time—by choice. Several attractive women in the village had made it plain they’d welcome him in their bed. And he’d been tempted. It would be a lie to say he hadn’t.
But he wanted someone to share his ideas with, a woman he could trust enough to open up to, dream with, laugh with—and, yeah, take to his bed. He was strong and healthy, with a hale and hearty libido. He was also solitary, preferring to watch people rather than engage with them. It wasn’t a trait that endeared him to women when the lovemaking was over, and there hadn’t been many who intrigued him enough to risk sharing more than sex with them.
The problem was there were no secrets on this island. Everyone would know before noon who he’d bedded. Not that there was anything wrong with that, either. But as a healer, he had a certain status. He wasn’t obliged to embrace celibacy, except during the periods of purification necessary for certain ceremonies. But there was a personal moral code he felt obliged to sustain.
“And now you’re laughing at me, Grandmother,” he whispered. He could almost see Sandrine in the corner of the room, as she used to be, sitting in the rocking chair she’d given him long ago. “You’re right, I’m a stuffed shirt. I take myself way too seriously. You always told me I needed to laugh at myself more.”
“Love more, too. The opposite of man is woman, and we all need to know our opposite and embrace it. You will only find the other half of yourself in another person, Grandson. It’s the only way we ever really see ourselves.”
He turned and looked directly at the chair.
“Help me, Grandmother.” He wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly. He only knew that he suddenly felt vulnerable.
But Sandrine wasn’t there.
He had to escape outside. He saved his document and got to his feet, grabbing his jacket from the wooden peg by the door.
Outside, the woods were alive with night sounds. Silas stood and listened, separating them, naming them. Owl. Coyote. The scurrying of a small animal, maybe a marmot. The twittering of birds, settling in for the night. The faint scent of skunk, somewhere off to the west. The tang of the evergreens, the salt of the sea.
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Bobby Hutchinson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Jordan had tried to love and support her husbandEven after he′d cleaned out the apartment and sold many of their belongings for drug money. But when, as the doctor on call in the E.R., she′d been forced to treat Garry′s overdose, it had nearly killed her, too. Knowing she couldn′t survive much more, she left him and Vancouver behind. She hoped only to find peace as the new resident G.P. in the remote First Nations village of Ahousaht.She never expected to meet someone as gentle and nurturing as native healer Silas Keefer, a man who understands Jordan′s need to escape her past. He′d done the same thing himself years earlier.Their love is unexpected and right, but can Jordan and Silas have a future if they cannot heal the past?