“It’s nice to be here.” I smiled back at her. “Still, I’m as nervous as I was my first day of university. Dr. Neal is so well thought of. I’m not sure anyone will accept me as their doctor, especially since I grew up here.”
“Nonsense. You’re a war hero. Anyway, you carry on like you’ve been doing it all your life and people will feel comfortable. Before long they’ll forget the time before you were here.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You’re in good hands with Dr. Neal. He’s sure to teach you anything they didn’t at school.” The word school was said with a tinge of disdain. Nurse Kelley had worked as a nurse overseas during the war. Having been there myself, I knew how invaluable the nurses had been. I imagined they’d seen more in those years than most nurses or doctors saw in a lifetime. School wasn’t like the front lines.
I looked around the whitewashed room. Immaculate and smelling of disinfectant. As strange as it was, I loved the smell. It was the same scent the labs had back at medical school. I breathed it all in, feeling at home here as I did in Papa’s library. An examination room was on the other side of one closed door and Dr. Neal’s office through another.
Dr. Neal came out then, looking harried. At thirty, he appeared closer to a boy than a man with his round face and blond curls that became unruly at the slightest provocation. Nothing but his white coat would have informed an onlooker that he was a doctor.
We’d all gone to school with his wife, Martha, and her sister, Elsa, but Dr. Neal was an outsider from the east and not to be trusted. However, over the years he’d won the hearts of our townsfolk. Now no one could remember the ogre we’d had before him. I did, though. Dr. Moore. I could remember everything about the man’s craggy features and long white mustache that had curled at the tips. He’d been there the day I’d found Mother dead in a snowdrift. He’d examined me, too, that afternoon, wondering if my silence meant I was as mad as my suicidal mother.
“Ah, yes, welcome, Theo,” Dr. Neal said to me before stifling a yawn. “I’m sorry. I was up all night delivering Mrs. Wright’s new baby. There’s something in the water here. Babies everywhere you look.” He walked over to me with a slight hitch to his step. His left leg had been wounded during the war, giving him a permanent limp.
“The signs of a growing community,” Nurse Kelley said brusquely.
“The baby was breech,” Dr. Neal said. “I had to turn her, and Mrs. Wright had a terrible time of it.”
“How is she?” Nurse Kelley asked.
“Resting now.” Dr. Neal yawned again. “Both she and the baby are fine.”
“Back when I was young, she and the wee one would probably have died,” Nurse Kelley said. “Your modern techniques saved her.”
“Nah,” Dr. Neal said modestly. “Turning a baby is as old as time itself.”
During my time at medical school, most of the older professors had been disdainful of doctors who delivered babies. They saw it as beneath them. Women’s work. The job of midwives. But here in Emerson Pass, Dr. Neal had embraced assisting in childbirth as part of a small-town doctor’s obligation. He’d made it clear when he interviewed me that I was to treat births as important as anything else. “We don’t want any mothers or babies dying on our watch. Here, we take lessons from the midwives of our mother’s generation and not the city doctors.”
Now he looked over at Nurse Kelley. “What do you have for us today?”
“Nora Cassidy called already this morning. Her mother’s still feeling poorly and wondered if you could come out to see her.”
Dr. Neal nodded before turning to me. “Mrs. Cassidy’s been sick all winter. Chronic colds. Trouble breathing.”
“Often forgetful or confused,” Nurse Kelley said. “Her daughters are worried about her.”
Was it lung cancer? Not wanting to appear upstart, I kept the question to myself.
“I can’t figure out what’s ailing her,” Dr. Neal said. “Her illness is a mystery, but I’ve ruled out cancer, thank God.”
“That’s good news,” I said.
“Come on in the office,” Dr. Neal said. “I’ll show you your desk.”
I followed him, pleased to see two desks facing each other. Like equals, I thought. A sense of gratitude washed over me for the opportunity to be mentored by Dr. Neal.
He sat in his desk chair and gestured for me to do the same. For the next few minutes, he went through his list of current patients and assigned several of the cases to me. He surprised me when the conversation turned. “I lost a baby last month,” Dr. Neal said. “Shook my confidence quite a bit.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It happens, of course, but it hurts every time. There was nothing I could do. It was either save the mother or the baby. A mother wants to sacrifice herself for the child, but I can’t do that for obvious reasons.”
“Right.”
Dr. Neal yawned again. “I don’t suppose you’d go out to see Mrs. Cassidy while I grab a little shut-eye?” A cot took up one end of the office space.
My pulse quickened at the thought of my first house call. “If you’re sure?”