The Color of a Memory
By Julianne MacLean
Prologue
Audrey Fitzgerald
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was something quite extraordinary that drew my daughter Wendy to the window that morning. In my ignorance, I was simply pleased to have an excuse to leave the dirty dishes behind for later when she said, “Look, Mommy.” Her tiny nose was pressed to the glass. “A little girl…”
Wendy was three years old. It was just the two of us then, living alone together in a ground-floor apartment in Manchester, Connecticut. Wendy had very little memory of her father who had died the year before.
He was a firefighter and a great hero on many levels, though I didn’t always believe that. We’d had our ups and downs, Alex and I.
But on that particular day, all that mattered to me was my daughter’s happiness. As a result, when she asked to go outside and play with the little girl enjoying a picnic with her mother across the street, I was quick to grab our jackets and go.
* * *
“Do you live near here?” I asked the girl’s mother as we stood in the playground watching our daughters run around in circles.
“We live in Waltham,” she replied in a friendly tone of voice. “We’re just passing through.” Then she noticed her daughter, who looked to be about eighteen months old, struggling to climb up the steps to the big swirly slide. “Pardon me for a second,” she said.
She went to help her, and down they went, laughing and squealing.
It was a moment I appreciated because it had been a somber year since my husband’s death.
Oh, how I missed that feeling…being able to laugh and experience such joy over simply being alive.
“I confess,” I said to the woman when she returned to stand beside me, “that we only came out here because we saw the two of you from our front window. There aren’t many kids on this street—at least none Wendy’s age. She’s an only child.”
“My Ellen’s an only, too,” she told me.
“Are you married?” I asked, not knowing why I suddenly blurted out such a personal question, but I was curious for some reason. There was something familiar about this woman.
She nodded, but didn’t meet my gaze. “Just recently, but my husband’s working today. You?”
I looked down at my running shoes and wondered when I would be able to answer that question without feeling like I wanted to crawl into bed, curl up in a ball and draw the covers up to my ears.
“I was,” I replied, “but my husband passed away about a year ago. He was a firefighter. Died on the job.”
The woman said nothing for a moment, then she, too, looked down at the grass and ran the toe of her shoe over a brown patch. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Funny, how the mention of death always casts such a dark shadow over any conversation. I wished I hadn’t said anything. I really had to learn to keep my tragic widowhood to myself. Why couldn’t I just smile and give the subject of marriage a wide berth?
* * *
Later, the woman invited Wendy and me to join her on the blanket for some yogurt and juice. Soon we were chatting about preschools and kid-friendly menu options, and for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, she began asking questions about Alex.
Given the circumstances of my relationship with my late husband and how we came to be together, I should have been more suspicious of her—because when it came to Alex and other women, I’d been burned before. Quite literally, in fact.
But this stranger in the park had a way of making me let down my guard. Before I knew it, I was spilling out my whole life story to her—to this person I would later learn was connected to me in the most profound way, in a way I never could have imagined. At least not at the time.
But isn’t that what life’s all about? Learning new things about ourselves and making sense of our destinies?
How extraordinary it is when all the puzzle pieces finally come together and we are able to see the whole picture…and behold something beautiful.
Chapter One
If someone told me years ago that one day I would become “the other woman,” I wouldn’t have believed it. I’d been raised by two happily married parents with an iron-clad set of rules about family values.
“You don’t cheat,” my father said to all of us on a regular basis, pointing his chubby finger at the air. “It’s a simple matter of honor.”
He and my mother could have been the poster children for every self-help book on the market about how to succeed at marriage. After thirty years, they still held hands and flirted with each other as if they’d just spoken their wedding vows the day before.
I’d always imagined I would end up in a relationship just like theirs—because didn’t people say girls usually married carbon copies of their fathers?
I suppose I blew that rule out of the water on the day I met Alex Fitzgerald for the first time—because he was exactly the sort of man my father always warned me against.
Too handsome for his own good. And Lord, did he know it.
Chapter Two
“Are you Alex Fitzgerald?” I asked as I pulled back the blue curtain in the ER and regarded the dark-haired firefighter on the bed. He wore a black T-shirt and faded blue jeans, and smirked at me like he was Colin Farrell.
“Yep.”
Standing with my pen hovering over the chart on my clipboard, I said, “Can you tell me what happened?”
There was a second firefighter in the room as well. He stood beside the bed. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was equally handsome but with honey-colored hair. He bowed his head and chuckled.
Alex gave him a smack with the back of his hand before he answered my question. “Don’t make fun, David, or my pretty nurse will ask you to leave.”
My eyes lifted and I regarded them both without humor.
“He dropped a fire extinguisher on his foot,” David explained.
My next enquiry was directed at the patient. “What part of your foot, exactly?”
David chuckled again.
“What did I just tell ya?” Alex said to his friend with a laugh. Then he swept me a flirtatious glance with those dark-lashed brown eyes, and smiled. “Though maybe it would be better if he left. Is he distracting you, Nurse…?” He sat forward to squint at my badge. “Nurse Audrey. That’s a very pretty name.”
I lowered the clipboard to my side and glanced from one firefighter to the other. They each wore tight T-shirts that shamelessly flaunted their muscular upper bodies. The testosterone in the room was palpable, but I’d had a rough morning with a difficult pediatric case—possible leukemia—that left me in no mood for barroom pickup lines.
“Any smoke inhalation?” I asked, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose.
David, the blonde one, was quick to pipe in and answer the question. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. Alex was stuffing his face with French fries at the station and his hands were all greasy. He picked up an empty extinguisher to move it off a chair so he could sit down and take a load off, but it slipped through his fingers. Ketchup flew everywhere, and it was quite the ordeal. He thinks something’s broken.”
I inclined my head at Alex, who didn’t appear to be in much pain at all. “Is that what happened?”
“It’s dangerous work sometimes,” he replied.
I glanced down at Alex’s sneaker. “Well, hotshot. You’re going to have to remove that shoe so the doctor can examine you. The sock, too.”
Without warning, one of the other nurses whipped the privacy curtain back and I jumped. “Can you come over to bed six?” she asked. “I need help with an IV.”
“I’ll be right there,” I smoothly replied. Then I met my patient’s gaze. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he replied with a playful note of seduction in his voice that made me shake my head in disbelief as I turned away.
* * *
When I pulled back the curtain on Mr. Hotshot Firefighter a few minutes later, he was sitting up on the edge of the bed.
Shirtless.
Though I was a practical and levelheaded woman by nature, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was standing before a ridiculously extravagant plethora of bronzed, rippling muscles that must have taken years of workouts at the gym to achieve. I couldn’t help but laugh at the proud spectacle before me. This man was unbelievable. “I said the shoe, not the shirt.”
“No, I’m sure you said the shirt,” he innocently replied. “Don’t you have to listen to my heart or something? Take my blood pressure… I did feel a bit woozy when it happened.”
It had been an utterly wretched day for the most part, so I decided at last to surrender to the comedy of this moment. Striding forward, I removed my stethoscope from the pocket of my uniform and kept my eyes fixed on his as I touched the scope to his chest. “Where did your friend go?”
“I told him I didn’t need a babysitter,” Alex replied. “He’s probably chatting up some young nursing student by now.”
I nodded my head. “I see. You two are quite the pair. I can’t imagine what sort of trouble you must get into on a Saturday night.”
“Oh, no,” Alex replied. “We’re not like that.”
I chuckled. “Says the man who couldn’t wait to strip off his T-shirt for the poor unsuspecting nurse.”
He slanted me a look. “Poor, unsuspecting? Pardon me for sayin’ so, Nurse Audrey, but those aren’t the words I would use to describe you.”
With no intention of falling for his charms, I gave no reply and focused on the task of taking his blood pressure.
“I guess I don’t need to ask you to roll up your sleeve…since you aren’t wearing one,” I mentioned with dry sarcasm as I wrapped the cuff around his generous bicep.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Nurse Audrey?” Alex asked as I pumped air into the BP cuff.
Timing the pulse in the crook of his arm, I chose to ignore the question. Then I tugged at the Velcro and removed the cuff. “Blood pressure looks good,” I said. “You’re healthy as a horse.”
The resident doctor walked in. “Hey there,” he casually said, sliding his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “What’s up?”
“This is Alex Fitzgerald,” I explained. “He’s a firefighter and he dropped an extinguisher on his foot. He thinks it might be broken.”
“Sounds like you had an off day.” Dr. Grant moved around the foot of the bed and patted the mattress. “How about swinging your legs right up here.”
Backing out of the way, I watched while Dr. Grant examined Alex’s foot. He pressed the pads of his thumbs in different areas and asked all sorts of questions.
He made no comment about the fact that Alex was shirtless.
“It does look like something might be broken,” Dr. Grant said to me. “We’re going to need an X-ray to see what we’re dealing with, so take him up to radiology and let me know as soon as you have the results.”
“Sure,” I replied.
After he left, Alex inclined his head at me and spoke cheerfully. “Looks like we’ll get to spend some more time together, Nurse Audrey.”
“Not until you put your shirt back on,” I replied matter-of-factly as I went to fetch a wheelchair.
* * *
Over the next five hours, I kept abreast of Alex’s case. The X-ray images revealed that he had broken two of his metatarsals, which are good-sized bones in his foot. This surprised me because most people are pasty gray and do a fair bit of moaning and complaining when they arrive in the ER with even the smallest fracture.
But Alex was a trooper and managed to get through all the poking and prodding with a sense of humor, pouring on the charm to all the nurses, even the older ones. Especially them. After a while I began to relax and stopped assuming he was just trying to pick me up. In fact, it lifted my spirits to see the older ladies blush.
When at last he was discharged with a cast boot on his foot, I was just finishing my shift, so I volunteered to push him in the wheelchair onto the elevator to take him down to the front lobby.
“You never answered my question,” he said when the elevator doors closed and we were alone.
“What question was that?”
“I asked if you had a boyfriend,” he reminded me.
For a long moment I stared at the floor indicator above the doors and watched the numbers count down. When the display flashed L and I knew it was time to get off, I said with a sigh of defeat, “No, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
The doors opened. I pushed the chair forward.
As we were rolling out, he tipped his head all the way back to look up at me, and I found myself smiling down at his face, which was no less handsome from that angle.
“You’re a good nurse,” he said. “I’m glad it was you today.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” I replied with a smile.
“Nope, just you. So how about you let me buy you dinner?”
“I don’t think so.”
“At least tell me your last name. Or give me your phone number.”
I grinned down at him. “Not a chance.” Then I briefly glanced up to make sure I wasn’t about to steer him down a steep flight of stairs. That wouldn’t be good.
He faced forward as well. “Then don’t be surprised if you see me again next week with some other random ailment. Maybe I’ll develop a pain in my side that will take hours to diagnose.”
“Didn’t you ever hear the story about the boy who cried wolf?” I asked. “That didn’t end well.”
He tilted his head back again. “Then maybe you should just give me your number.”
I laughed and shook my head at him then realized we were about to collide with a woman who was standing directly in our path to the door.
I pulled the chair to a halt and Alex jolted forward.
“Melanie,” he said, seeming startled to see her.
“Hey.” She glanced at me suspiciously, then adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder. “Who’s this?”
“This is Audrey,” Alex replied. “She’s my nurse. Audrey, this is Melanie.”
“Hi,” I casually said, waving a hand.
Melanie was tall and supermodel-skinny with blonde hair, full lips and big eyes—eyes that glared at me with venom.
“I thought David was picking me up,” Alex said to her.
“I told him I’d do it,” she replied. “Why didn’t you call me earlier? I would have come right away. Is it broken?”
He lifted the cast boot to show her. “Yeah. Guess I’ll be off work for a few weeks.”
“Bummer,” Melanie said. “Are you ready to go? I can bring the car around.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
Melanie hurried off, leaving Alex and me alone to wait inside. I set the brake on the chair and sat down on the window ledge to face him.
“Who’s Melanie?” I asked point blank. “Your sister? Cousin? Housekeeper, maybe?”
His eyes were fixed on the view of the parking lot outside the glass. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he said. “Well, she sort of is. She was.”
I held up a hand. “Don’t bother to explain. It’s none of my business.”
We waited in silence for a moment.
“So I guess dinner Friday night is out of the question?” he asked, turning his head to look at me.
“Yep. Totally out of the question.”
His chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh, and he nodded his head, as if he wasn’t surprised.
Melanie came speeding up to the entrance in a sporty little lime-green Volkswagen convertible. She pulled to a halt and got out to open the passenger side door.
I rolled Alex outside, set the brake again, and he hobbled out of the chair and into the front seat.
“Thanks, Audrey,” he said as I backed up and rolled the chair out of the way.
“No problem. Take care, now.”
He shut the car door and Melanie hit the gas. They sped off into the hazy evening sunset. For a moment I stood alone, watching the car grow distant, then I returned inside to grab my stuff and go home.
* * *
Over the next few days, I thought about Alex Fitzgerald more often than I cared to admit and it bothered me how much he was on my mind. I hardly knew the guy, and he certainly wasn’t my type because he was too much of a flirt. I had seen dozens of patients that day. Why should I be thinking of him?
Because he looked great shirtless?
Needless to say, I made sure I worked hard to purge him from my mind, but I also felt sorry for Melanie who was clearly devoted to him while he was asking other women out on dates.
I decided I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes. Not in a million years.
Looking back on it, I wish I had mentioned the encounter to someone, because that’s when the phone calls began. It would have been helpful to have had a record of everything.
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