A Laird for All Time by Angeline Fortin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

Didn’t she have what she had always wanted?

Did she know what she really wanted?

“You asked to see me, Dr. Lane?” Emmy asked as she rapped on the open door frame of the chief practitioner’s office.

“I believe I have asked many times for you to call me Cathy,” she reminded without looking up from her computer.

“You have, Cathy.  I’m sorry.”  Emmy hovered in the doorway.

“Please close the door and have a seat, Emmy,” the doctor turned away from her computer, pulled off her reading glasses and studied Emmy seriously across the desk for a long moment as Emmy did as she was asked.  Emmy fidgeted nervously under the woman’s assessing stare.  “You have been doing an excellent job since you started here, Emmy,” Dr. Lane began.  “Surveys from your new patients and the staff are highly favorable; you are described as friendly and knowledgeable from both sides.”  She slipped the glasses back on briefly and picked up a piece of paper.  “This one even wrote in, and I quote ‘Dr. MacKenzie made it almost fun to deliver my baby’.”

Emmy smiled slightly.  “Maggie Ross.  She was fun, too.”

Cathy dropped the glasses back on the desk and regarded Emmy thoughtfully.  “You do an excellent job here, just as I expected when I hired you.  You work hard and even volunteer to be on call on the weekends, never say ‘no’ to anyone who asks you to take their turn.  The other doctors will take advantage of you if you keep this up.”

“I don’t mind,” Emmy shrugged.  “I like to be busy.”  She did.  The busier she was, the less chance she had to sit alone in her house thinking of the ‘could’ve beens’ of Connor.  The times she was alone were the hardest to bear, when she would bring the pictures of him up on her computer screen and just stare at them for hours.

“Still,” the doctor said with authority.  “You will burn out quickly if you keep it up.  Don’t you have some friends or maybe a boyfriend who are rattling the cage for your attention?”

Emmy just shook her head and bit her lip.

Cathy Lane stared hard at her newest doctor for several moments.  She hated to get involved in her associate’s personal lives.  She didn’t want them to feel as if she was mothering them or pestering them to death.  As a general policy, she refrained from offering comments of a personal nature on their lives, but with Emmy she felt as if she didn’t have a choice.  Something had to be done.  “What is it, Emmy, that seems to haunt you so badly?”

Emmy was startled by the question.  “What do you mean?  Didn’t you just say that everyone thinks I’ve been doing a good job?”

“I’m not talking about the job,” the doctor sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest.  “When you are talking to someone, I mean actively talking, you are involved, interested and, I would say, almost…perky.”

Emmy cringed.  Who wanted to be described as perky?

“But,” Cathy continued, “when no one is looking, when you are alone in your office, you seem incredibly, I don’t know, sad?  I used the word haunted, but it more like something is missing not lingering about you.”

“How?”

“These offices do have glass walls, you know?” she said drily.

Emmy sat in stunned silence for a moment.  Did it show so badly?  She tried  hard to keep her woes and pains to herself, especially since her friends had begun avoiding her and her morose behavior.  She tried to be happy and, ugh, even perky.  Had she failed so badly?  But Dr. Lane had been more correct in her first descriptor.  Emmy did feel haunted. Haunted by the memories of Duart and of Connor.

“See there it is again,” Cathy pointed out.  “That look...I don’t know how to describe it.  Incredibly sad.  So!” she sat forward again and crossed her arms on the desk.  “This is what I want you to do.  Christmas is next week and other than those who are due in the next week, we have no appointments scheduled.  Doctors Hamilton and Johnson will be taking the on call rotations…yes, I know you already volunteered, but that’s not going to happen…and you are taking the week off.  If this is a guy-thing, then figure it out.  If it’s something else, well, figure it out.  I want you to be happy here, Dr. MacKenzie, and right now you just are not.”

Emmy started to protest that, of course she was happy but her boss halted her with an upheld hand.  “Take the time.  Figure out what it is you really want.”

“What I really want?” Emmy repeated as her most burning question again raised its head.

“That’s right.”

Emmy drove home that night with the words pounding in her head.  ‘What I really want, what I really want…’  She had always wanted to be a doctor, always.  And, after a long moment of examination, yes, she still did, she knew.  It was her vocation, her calling.  When she had been at Duart, though, it had been even more rewarding because the woman were so appreciative of her.  Here it felt like the women considered good prenatal care their due and the doctor merely a tool to achieve what they wanted.

The only other thing she really wanted…was Connor.  “I want Connor,” she said aloud straightening in her seat.  “I want Connor, I want Duart and if I have to take every nineteenth century passé piece of ancient technology that goes with it to have them, then that’s what I want too!  I want gas lighting!”  She pounded her fist against the steering wheel.  “I want way too much food!” she pounded again.  “I want nagging relatives, that stupid carriage and a sister who’s not really my sister!”  She pounded the steering wheel again and again.  “I even want my corset!” she yelled into the silence of her car.

She panted into the darkness.  “I want my love, my happiness and the