Monica reached for the squirming two-year-old, who had by then decided he’d smiled long enough. This will be some picture, she thought as she waved at the camera, hoping that Carlos could follow her example. Instead he pulled the clip at the nape of her neck and her long dark-blond hair fell loose around her shoulders.
After a flurry of good-byes and “God bless you, Dr. Monica, we wouldn’t have made it without you, and we’ll see you for his checkup,” the Garcias were gone with one final wave from the window of the taxi. As Monica stepped back inside the hospital and walked to the elevator bank, she reached up to gather the strands of her hair and refasten the clip.
“Leave it like that. It looks good.” Dr. Ryan Jenner, a neurosurgeon who had been in Georgetown Medical School a few years ahead of Monica, had fallen in step with her. He had recently come on staff at Greenwich Village and had stopped for a moment to chat the few times they had run into each other. Jenner, wearing scrubs and a plastic bonnet, had obviously been in surgery or was on his way to it.
Monica laughed as she pushed the button for an ascending elevator. “Oh, sure. And maybe I should drop into your operating room while it’s like this.”
The door of a descending elevator was opening.
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind,” Jenner said as he got into it.
And maybe you would. In fact you’d have a heart attack, Monica thought as she stepped into an already crowded elevator. Ryan Jenner, despite his youthful face and ready smile, was already known to be a perfectionist and intolerant of any lapses in patient care. Being in his operating room with uncovered hair was unthinkable.
When she got off on the pediatric floor, the wail of a screaming baby was the first sound Monica heard. She knew it was her patient, nineteen-month-old Sally Carter, and the lack of visits from her single mother was infuriating. Before she went in to try to comfort the baby, she stopped at the nurses’ desk. “Any sign of Mommy dearest?” she asked, then regretted she had been so outspoken.