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Kathy rolled her eyes.
“Chiquita’s a sweet-tempered child,” he went on, “even if she is named after a banana. Smart, healthy in every respect. Except, of course, for that harelip splitting her face in half.”
Kathy frowned. He knew she was seeing the parade of such children they’d treated in the past three years. And others, too. Older children who had been maimed by the faceless monster named Vajaras. Parents who had been wounded in armed combat. Sometimes Jason felt like a surgeon patching up a tide of wounded on a battlefield. Only he fought this war year in, year out. Because his enemies were not only endless disease and poverty, but the cruelty and inhumanity of a ruthless overlord.
“So—” Jason focused his gaze on the map “—at this late date, Jose and Rosita have already loaded up the rental donkey and are making the arduous trip—” he ran his finger over the mountainous region on the map in a slow, twisting path north “—in the hope of getting a miracle for their baby.” He flashed a wicked smile at Kathy. “Cancel? Don’t think so.”
“Then the least I can do is help you find my replacement. I want you to know—” she glanced over at him again, this time with apology in her eyes “—that I only found out about this on Friday.”
“Maybe I can locate an interpreter in the region,” he offered. The Miami-style hotels facing the turquoise ocean in Cancún were crawling with bright young bilingual Mexicans looking for ways to improve their economic status. But even crossing the border without a Spanish-speaking cohort could be very risky, especially when you were trafficking medical supplies and drugs and sharp instruments past Mexican customs.
“Even if you can hire some bright kid to travel across the peninsula to the Chiapas clinic, if he or she doesn’t have a medical background…” Kathy left the rest unsaid—that such a person couldn’t adequately explain the strange and frightening procedures to the patients. She stood, facing her boss. “I really am sorry.”
“It can’t be helped.” Jason walked around the desk and gave her shoulder another reassuring pat. “Now get your behind back out to salt mines.” He winked at her.
“Watch it. I’ll turn you in for harassment.” Kathy quipped as she walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “I hate leaving you with this snafu.”
“Go drown your guilt with a cookie, Martinez.” He flapped a dismissing palm at her.
“Hold it. I do know someone who speaks fluent Spanish, who might even understand the Chiapas dialects. What was that drug rep’s name? The one who brought the cookies?”
“Kendal Collins?” He’d seen the woman around the hospital. Something about Kendal Collins had definitely snagged his interest.
“Yeah.” Seeming excited, Kathy hurried back to his desk. “Could I see that card you stuck in your pocket?”
He swiveled the desk chair to his coatrack and dug in the vest pocket of the leather jacket. “Kendal Collins speaks Spanish?”
Kathy took the card. “Yeah. Can I keep this until tomorrow? I might be too swamped to call her until this evening.”
“You’re going to ask this little drug rep to go to Mexico?”
“No. I’m offering her the open brunch slot. She’s on your waiting list. You’ll at least need to make an appearance. Maybe if we do her a favor, she’ll do us one.”
He nodded. The drug reps lined up to get his ear. There was never enough time to listen to everybody, never enough time for anything, which was why he wanted Martinez to cut the blather and split.
“It’s worth a shot. Now beat it, Martinez.”
Kathy closed the door with a quiet click and a smile.
Jason finished the charts, then sank back in his desk chair with a worried frown. He wondered how long Kathy’s gallbladder had been acting up. She never missed a day of work. Sometimes he felt guilty for pushing his staff too hard.
But he didn’t push anyone any harder than he pushed himself. It seemed the only thing that gave him any peace was healing the scarred and hurting.
He closed his eyes. He had been too young, too dumb, to save Amy. The pain had dulled with the passage of time, of course, but on some level the tragedy haunted him every day. Every scarred face was Amy’s. Every broken nose, every collapsed eye socket, every deformed palette…every burn contracture. He cut and stitched and mended as if he were trying to repair the past. It was like a giant, lifelong undo. But what had happened to Amy could never be undone. No matter how hard he worked, it would never be enough.
He placed his open palm on the stack of charts before him. Still, he could save these. And the ones in Mexico. One case at a time. One life at a time.
CHAPTER TWO
ON THE NIGHT of her thirty-first birthday, Kendal Collins sank into her giant Jetta tub until the bubbles grazed her chin. After brooding for one full, uninterrupted minute, she slowly raised a limp hand from the sudsy water and picked up one of the heart-shaped gourmet cookies she’d stashed at the side of tub. She unpeeled the cellophane wrapper, then thoughtfully nibbled the sinful treat. The second cookie went down a little faster. She washed the third down with a tall stemmed glass of very expensive merlot.
The cookies were verboten. So was the wine for that matter. Kendal always struggled with a teeny, tiny weight problem that her best friend Sarah insisted on calling “voluptuousness.” But today was her birthday, Kendal told herself. And Valentine’s Day. She reached for another cookie. She deserved a little celebration. But as she drained the last of the wine, she knew she wasn’t celebrating.
She started to cry.
At first her weeping was gentle, controlled, like a character in a soap opera trying not to wreck a mask of makeup. But before long she broke down, sobbing, hiccuping, letting the tears run down her face as she sank lower into the scented water. Finally, she had scooted so low that her lips skimmed the surface. Another inch, she thought, blubbering, and I could just go ahead and drown myself.
She rolled her eyes at such a ridiculous thought. But in this past year she had not let herself have one single pity party. And by Jove, she was going to have herself a doozie tonight.
In this past year, she had been brave, trying to show everyone that she was okay. Somehow she’d been strong this whole long, lonely year since Phillip had dumped her. Dumped was such a brutal, ugly word, but nonetheless a true one, and Kendal was all about truth these days. The ugly, unvarnished truth. She was fat. And childless. And Phillip had dumped her.
“It’s not working anymore,” Phillip had announced on the night of the fifth anniversary of their so-called relationship, which was also the date of her birthday. Which was also Valentine’s Day. Which was also this exact hateful date.
“I’m sorry. It’s just not.” His big brown eyes had looked pained as he’d said it. As if the breakup was something totally beyond his control and he was so sad, so powerless, about the whole thing.
Kendal had asked the usual questions that sputter out of the shocked and bereaved—the dumped.
What do you mean? Are you saying it’s over? Just like that? Are you moving out?
But of course he was moving out. Phillip was already packing his bags, right there in front of her eyes. And he was consulting one of his never-ending lists while he did it. He’d apparently given this considerable thought. But then, Phillip gave considerable thought to taking a poot. That’s why Kendal had never expected this kind of rash act from him.
Kendal had wanted to scream. You can’t just walk out like this! It’s our anniversary! And it’s Valentine’s Day! And it’s my thirtieth birthday, for crying out loud! Instead she forced herself to remain calm, adult, as she followed Phillip around the bedroom.
She argued that they’d built a life here. That they’d even bought this town house together.
“I’ll need my equity back,” he said flatly as he meticulously stacked underwear into his suitcase.
“You know I can’t come up with that kind of money!” Her false veneer of calm cracked as reality slammed into her. Phillip was leaving. And on the heels of that realization came another. This lifestyle they’d built had become rather expensive. “And you know I can’t come close to affording this place on my own.” The two of them had been on the rise in their careers, and Kendal had been foolish enough to assume their live-in relationship would eventually lead to marriage. Though she certainly had no intention of mentioning the M-word now, not while Phillip was packing his suitcase like some felon on the run.
Phillip carefully arranged the last of his socks in a zipper pocket. “This place was your choice, not mine. Let’s face it. We are not a good match in so many ways.”
“How did you suddenly come to that conclusion?” Kendal demanded. “Did you make another one of your damned lists or something?” Phillip was the ultimate anal-retentive pharmaceutical rep. He lived by lists. Elaborate, extensive, three-tiered lists. That was one of the things Kendal had found so comforting about him. With Phillip, nothing was ever left to chance. Once, back when their relationship had drifted into the doldrums and he couldn’t quite make up his mind to walk down the aisle, he had actually come to her with a pro and con list, suggesting that she make one of her own.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he admitted now, “right before I made my final choice.”
“Your final choice?” Kendal echoed.
But he turned away. “Let’s face it,” he repeated. “This relationship is just not working.”
Why did he keep saying that? By the time he faced her at the front door with one last parting look of regret and one last “I’m sorry,” Kendal was reduced to mumbling, “I understand.” Though she really, really did not understand. She’d only said that because she couldn’t endure the sight of his guilt-stricken eyes for another single second.
But two weeks later, she’d wanted to scratch those big brown eyes out when she learned that dear Phillip was involved in a new relationship—one that worked, a woman who fit his list, Kendal supposed. The woman, Kendal suspected, who had been at the root of their troubles all along—Stephanie Robinson. The snotty little drug rep who pulled down stellar sales for Merrill Jackson’s chief competitor, McMayer. The woman who now had Phillip cozily moved into her condo.
Kendal had seen Phillip only once after he’d moved out, when both of them were in Dallas for a Merrill Jackson sales meeting. He was coming down an escalator at the enormous Galleria mall and there was that hated woman, glued to his side. That hideously tall stick-figure blonde had actually spotted Kendal, grabbed Phillip’s arm and steered him in the opposite direction.
Kendal had suffered a very bad moment then. Really suffered.
She’d staggered into a nearby soup shop. Sank into a booth. Blindly ordered French onion, extra cheese. Normally she would have dived into the melted topping with gusto. But that afternoon she had stared at the bowl without so much as lifting the spoon, wondering why, why, why?
All their friends, the other pharmaceutical reps at Merrill Jackson, had sided with Kendal after the breakup, labeling Phillip the L.M.B.—List-making Bastard—and labeling Stephanie Robinson an anorectic bimbo. Which seemed like a bit of an oxymoron to Kendal but she enjoyed the sound of it anyway. She tested the words out loud against the bubbles, “Anorectic bimbo.”
But her friends’ anger on her behalf hadn’t really helped. In the long run, she had ended up missing Phillip and their tidy upscale life. Missing him with a strangely hollow pain that surprised her in fresh waves every few weeks.
As the year dragged by, Kendal’s long, lonely nights seemed to only get longer, lonelier, while she watched another of her girlfriends get married and another have a baby. And when she’d heard a few months ago that Phillip and Stephanie had also gotten married, the pain had solidified into a heavy, solid thing, squeezing like a vise around her heart. Kendal thought she had succeeded in sealing away the hurt where she wouldn’t have to feel it. Except that now, on her thirty-first birthday, here she was, with her tears pouring down into her fancy bathtub.
And fast on heels of the hurt came the fear.
Kendal had to admit that she had some major fears. Her future, without Phillip, looked a little shaky, a little scary. Too scary to contemplate after a hefty glass of merlot. Thoughts of her looming mortgage payment made her wish she hadn’t wasted money on a manicure. She raised a hand out of the sudsy water and examined her perfect French nails through the haze of tears. She’d had them done in anticipation of the girls’ night out that her friends had cooked up for her birthday. Knowing this was now the worst night of her life, they’d made a big deal out of celebrating “the one-year anniversary of Kendal Collins’s emancipation.”
She supposed the whole exercise was meant to be therapeutic, and she loved her friends dearly for trying, but she found she simply didn’t have the heart for a party.
After a hard day on the road with her boss—he seemed to be insisting on spending field days in the car with Kendal more frequently—the idea of getting all fixed up and oozing false cheer in some trendy bar seemed more like drudgery than fun. She’d called Sarah and begged off. She just could not do it, she told her protesting friend. Not tonight.
The real truth was she wanted to stay home and brood about her life.
She studied her fingers, and suddenly the expensive manicure looked like a metaphor for all that was wrong with her life. It was too perfect. Perfect nails, perfect clothes, perfect car, perfect town house—her whole life looked like a magazine ad. And she hated it. Suddenly it all seemed so sterile, so false. And she hated Phillip for leaving her all alone with it. And all alone to pay for it.
Why did she persist in living a lifestyle that no longer had meaning? Because she didn’t know how to do anything else? Because she didn’t actually have anything else? And if this was all she had, how was she going to continue to pay for it?
Her district sales manager’s voice came worming up out of her memory.
“Collins?” They were in her company Taurus, on their way to a tiny hospital in western Oklahoma. What had started out as a quick road trip had been hampered by thunderstorms and road construction. Warren’s mood was as testy as the weather. To mollify him, she’d slipped him a Valentine’s cookie from her stash in the glove box. But he’d just called her by her last name. Not good.
“I’ve been going over the western region’s sales figures, yours in particular.” Warren bit into the cookie. “Your numbers have certainly fallen off a bit in the past year, haven’t they?”
“Yes, but…” But what? Kendal didn’t have a good answer here. She knew she’d let her sales numbers slide. She regretted that for more than one reason and had vowed more than once to change it—along with everything else about her life. “I’m taking steps to correct that.”
“I was wondering…” Warren was talking with his mouth full, a small slight, perhaps another ominous sign. “Have you made any progress in getting Dr. Bridges on board with Paroveen?”
Dr. Bridges. The very name made Kendal’s insides seize up. Dr. Jason Bridges, the up-and-coming facial reconstruction surgeon whose thriving practice sat smack in the middle of Kendal’s territory, yet remained frustratingly out of her reach. She’d heard all about him. Supposedly, he was some kind of handsome bad boy. The Wolf. That’s what the single women at Integris had labeled him. They said any woman who attempted to slip a choke chain onto that man’s neck, much less jerk on it, would quickly find herself dumped.
But she also knew Jason Bridges leaped at the chance to use his brilliant mind and his incredible hands to help people. Aggressive was hardly the word for him. Coming straight from an extended residency at Johns Hopkins, he had burst onto the scene at Integris and nothing had been the same in the surgery department since.
People had talked about him from day one. Within months patients had started flocking to him.
Kendal represented Paroveen, the perfect drug for a busy doctor like Bridges. Paroveen was now being aggressively marketed after years of research and development, and promised to dramatically reduce post-op swelling and scarring with almost no adverse side effects. Kendal believed in its efficacy wholeheartedly, but getting Bridges to believe in it was another matter. He stubbornly persisted in using the competitor’s equivalent, Norveen.
Warren swallowed his bite of cookie. “When I saw you at the Christmas party, you told me you were going to close in on Bridges right after the first of the year. And now—” he waggled the cookie “—it’s already Valentine’s Day.” Warren smiled a coercive smile that was anything but sweet.
Since Christmas, Kendal had launched a one-woman campaign to get Bridges to switch. To no avail. She’d done everything in her power to forge a positive connection with the man, arriving earlier and earlier at the hospital to catch him on rounds. Didn’t the man ever sleep?
But so far she’d barely gotten her foot in the door of his tenth-floor offices. And that was only thanks to getting on a first-name basis with Bridges’s nurse, Kathy. And that was only because over a box of doughnuts one morning they’d discovered their mutual loves—chocolate and the Spanish language.
“Uh, actually, I haven’t made as much progress with Dr. Bridges as I’d like, but I’m working on it.” She bit her lip before she blabbed about the basket of Valentine’s cookies and promos. Recent regulatory codes prohibited such gifts, but Kendal was desperate. She couldn’t ever seem to schedule a sanctioned breakfast or dinner in Bridges’s office, which, of course, just happened to be Warren’s next suggestion.
“Why don’t you set up an in-service breakfast in his office?”
Duh.
Kendal wondered if the other reps got micromanaged like this. “I’ve offered to do that many times, but the nurses keep saying Bridges doesn’t have time. He’s got an awfully full surgical schedule. The man’s apparently some kind of freaky machine—doing surgery from dawn ’til dusk.”
“I am well aware of that. That’s why he’s the number one facial reconstruction surgeon in the region, our highest potential market.” Warren had stretched out the words well aware with exaggerated patience. Indeed, that was the point. Everybody in the business was well aware that if a prolific, fastidious surgeon like Bridges used Paroveen, the rest of the local surgeons would soon follow. “That’s why we need to get him to at least try Paroveen. We’re never going to get him to prescribe the drug until we get him to at least try it.”
Kendal let the wipers beat to the count of two, seeking the right words to defuse her boss. “I know things have slipped in my territory. But I’ve done everything I can to meet this guy. I try to leave samples. I talk to his office staff a couple of times a week, but I have yet to lay eyes on the man—”
“I don’t have to tell you how this stuff works, Collins.” Warren pronounced each word as if she’d suffered a lobotomy. “You used to be one of the best reps in the business. I’m telling you, do whatever you can to impress him.”
There was her last name again. That and Warren’s choice of words—used to be—sent a warning buzz ripping straight from Kendal’s toes to the top of her head. Kendal used to be Merrill Jackson’s hotshot sales rep, the one who won all the quota awards at the national meetings. But when Phillip had bugged out on her, it had felt like he’d pulled some kind of plug. All of her confidence had been seeping like air from a tire ever since. While she should have been aggressively garnering new business, Kendal found it was all she could do to get out of bed some mornings. The truth was she had been too busy surviving emotionally to expand her business. And in the cutthroat world of pharmacy sales, stagnation was bad. Real bad. Now she was stuck with a dwindling territory, a lifestyle built around two handsome paychecks instead of a single meager one and a growing pile of debts.
Her manager knew Bridges was a tough sell. Very set in his ways. Very particular about patient care. Very brand loyal. This was a test.
“Look, if you don’t want to go after Bridges, I can always call—”
“No!” Kendal wasn’t about to let some other rep take part of her territory. She would get Bridges or die trying. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to tap into his schedule, and when I do, I’ll wow Bridges and his crew.”
“’Atta girl, Kendal.” Warren had smiled, and Kendal had actually been grateful when he used her first name.
She sat up and smacked the sudsy water with her beautifully groomed hand, railing at the one who started this mess. “Phillip Dudley, I hate your freaking guts!” She raised her chin higher to the ceiling, shrieking even louder, “And I hope you die!” The word “die” echoed back off the Italian tile walls, sounding so ugly that it shocked Kendal to her senses. What kind of bitter woman was she becoming? She slid back down into the water and might have dissolved into tears again if the portable phone on the counter next to the tub hadn’t bleated in her ear.
Annoyed, she grabbed the thing. This was Sarah, no doubt, trying one last time to talk Kendal out of staying home alone on her birthday. But the caller ID displayed an unfamiliar number. With a sudsy finger, she punched Talk. “Hullo.”
“Is this Kendal Collins?” A vaguely familiar female voice.
“Yes.”
“Hi, Kendal. This is Kathy Martinez from Dr. Bridges’s office.”
Kendal tried not to make watery noises as she sat up straighter in the tub. Dr. Bridges’s nurse?
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Kendal leaned forward in the water, adjusting the phone. “No, actually, I was just…relaxing. What can I do for you, Kathy?” She was grateful that she was able to maintain a fairly coherent business voice, despite the wine.
“Stephanie Robinson—” the nurse started, “do you know Stephanie?”
“I know the name.” Stephanie Robinson. Kendal gripped the phone, thinking that if Stephanie Robinson were anywhere near this bathtub, Kendal would drown the woman. Why was Dr. Bridges’s nurse calling her about Stephanie Robinson? To rub in the fact that her boss was still prescribing Stephanie’s drug like candy?
“Well, she had to cancel a breakfast she had arranged for Dr. Bridges and the staff. I knew you were on our waiting list in case we had a cancellation. You wouldn’t be interested in doing it, would you?”
Kendal almost slid under the water in disbelief. Would she do it? Would she do it? Was the sky blue? Did the Pope wear a beanie?
“Actually, I’d love to.” Was she saying actually too much? She frowned at the empty wineglass.
“Great! Apparently Stephanie’s expecting and has such a dreadful case of morning sickness that she can’t even function until noon most days.”
Expecting? Stephanie was pregnant? Kendal raised her knees out of the sudsy water and propped her elbows on them. She pressed her forehead with the butt of one hand and squeezed her eyes shut while she fought down tears. Pregnant. With Phillip’s child.
When Kendal remained quiet too long, Kathy Martinez said, “Kendal? Are you still there?”
