LITMIR.BIZ

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sounded glad to see him. Lewis wanted to run up and hug her and cement the moment in his memory. Luckily rational thought prevailed. “Is it okay if I stick around for a little while? Scarlet asked if I could watch Nikki for a few minutes.”

      “Sure,” Lewis said, setting down his backpack and dropping onto the soft couch. “Who’s Nikki?”

      The door opened and a little girl with red pigtails, a face full of freckles, wearing a pair of eyeglasses ran to hug Jessie. She really had a way with young children. Watching her, Lewis entertained the first inkling of a hope that maybe she’d follow in his footsteps and become a pediatrician.

      “This is Nikki,” Jessie said.

      “I’m four.” Nikki held up four fingers on her right hand.

      She looked to be closer to three. “Nice to meet you, Nikki,” Lewis said. “I’m Dr. Jackson, Jessie’s dad.”

      “She’s a NICU graduate,” Jessie explained. “That means she got big enough and healthy enough to go home with her parents.”

      “And two,” Nikki held up two fingers, “big brothers.”

      A woman with red hair similar to Nikki’s joined them. “Would you mind telling Scarlet that Erica Cole is waiting for her in the lounge? I don’t mind talking with new parents out here, but I can’t handle seeing all the sick babies.” She shuddered. “Brings back so many memories.”

      “Of course.” Lewis stood. “Keep an eye on my bag, Jessie.” She nodded from where she knelt on the floor, setting out a bunch of dolls.

      Lewis entered the darkened, quiet NICU, so unlike his bustling ER, and walked to the first of two nurses’ stations. “I’m looking for Scarlet Miller,” he said to a young secretary, keeping his voice low. An older nurse he recognized from the cafeteria when he and Scarlet had met to discuss Jessie walked up beside him. “May I ask what for?” the nurse, he looked at her name badge, Linda, asked.

      “Erica Cole asked me to relay the message she’s waiting for Scarlet in the family lounge,” he said.

      “She’s in with Joey Doe,” Linda said with a shake of her head. “If you ask me she is getting way too attached to that baby.”

      “No one asked you,” a younger, nurse said to Linda. “Room forty-two,” she said to Lewis. “Come. I’ll show you the way.”

      Lewis followed her. “It’s so quiet in here.”

      “Not always.” The nurse smiled. “But we try to maintain a calm, soothing environment as premature infants are hypersensitive to their surroundings.” She stopped and pointed. “There she is.”

      Through the half glass outer wall he saw Scarlet sitting in a rocker beside Joey’s incubator, feeding her from a special bottle, staring down at the tiny baby girl with a loving smile, looking very much like a mother caring for her own newborn. He walked to the doorway and cleared his throat to get her attention.

      She looked up guiltily.

      “How’s she doing?” he whispered.

      “Still not taking the bottle, but we keep trying.” She lifted Joey to her shoulder and rubbed her back.

      “Any news on her family?”

      “No,” Scarlet answered. “Are you here about Joey or did something else bring you up?”

      “I came to get Jessie and she said you asked her to watch Nikki.”

      “Shoot.” She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I lost track of time.”

      “Erica Cole asked me to tell you she’s here.”

      Scarlet stood.

      “I’ll take over,” the nurse offered.

      “Thank you.” She handed Joey into the other nurse’s care. “I changed one wet diaper. She’s taken next to nothing from the bottle.” Scarlet removed a disposable gown, balled it up, and pushed it into a waste bin.

      “I have a couple in crisis,” Scarlet shared quietly as she exited the room. “Erica Cole is a member of a group I formed for moms of NICU graduates. There are about fifty of them who are willing to come in with their children to talk to new parents who are having difficulty adjusting to the NICU and bonding with their babies.” She looked up at him. “It gives new parents whose infants are struggling to survive a little hope. Sometimes it makes all the difference.”

      “Yes it does,” he said from experience. Because Scarlet had given him that little hope that’d made all the difference with Jessie. She was a truly extraordinary woman.

      He stood at the desk and watched her through the glass of a small private room as she spoke with a couple. Although he couldn’t hear her words, her small smile conveyed understanding and compassion, her gentle touch conveyed support and caring. The couple watched her as she spoke, trust evident in their eyes. The woman started to cry and Scarlet took her into her arms and hugged her while the man turned his head as if trying to hide his emotions.

      “Our Scarlet is something special,” Linda said, coming to stand beside him. With such a big unit, did she have nothing better to do than hover?

      “Yes she is,” Lewis said, not taking his eyes off of Scarlet as she handed the woman a box of tissues and led her out of the room.

      “She deserves a good man who will appreciate all she has to offer and treat her right.”

      Linda’s tone implied a better man than him.

      “No argument there.”

      But after eighteen years of riding the manic-depressive, passive-aggressive maternal roller coaster of emotions, Lewis had used up his lifetime supply of energy earmarked for understanding, appeasing, and striving to meet the ever-changing expectations of women. He preferred the ups of flirty banter, new acquaintances, and satisfying sex to the downs of compromise, arguments, and frustrating disappointments inherent in long term relationships.

      After a childhood spent catering to the whims of a mentally ill mother, Lewis would not regress to allowing another woman any degree of control over his life. Ever.

      He was his own man. He did what he wanted when he wanted and didn’t have to get approval from or justify his actions to anyone. At least that’d been his pre-Jessie modus operandi.

      Now the waters of his life had gotten unrecognizably muddy.

      He couldn’t bring various women home night after night, not with an impressionable young daughter watching his every move. Most unsettling, with four days of freedom ahead, was the fact he seemed to have lost the anticipatory thrill of the chase, catch, and release. Random, meaningless hookups with generic, unmemorable women no longer appealed to him. But neither did monogamy or marriage. So where did that leave him?

      Lewis left the NICU without another word to Linda, entered the lounge to get his backpack, and told Jessie to meet him in his office when she was done. He needed time to think.

      It’d taken a near successful suicide attempt for his mother to get his father to lift his head out of his prestigious surgical practice long enough to acknowledge the toxic level of dysfunction in their family. With renewed attention, love and support from her husband and some long-overdue treatment his mom’s condition had stabilized.

      Unfortunately for Lewis, the damage to his ability to form lasting, trusting, positive relationships with women was done.

      Instead of waiting for the elevator, he took the stairs down, needing to burn off some energy.

      Supportive evidence of his lack of interpersonal finesse: The past nine months of torture with Jessie.

      Although things were finally turning around thanks to Scarlet, his daughter’s friend and confidante, a woman who deserved more than a man like him, a woman whose appeal extended beyond good looks. A woman he could not have, who made him want with an intensity he’d never before experienced.

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