Judy Duarte: Under The Mistletoe With John Doe

But where would he go? What would he do? How would he support himself?

Did he have any skills? A degree? A job that was pressing?

He’d be damned if he knew.

Dr. Nielson had said that he’d been asking about someone named Pedro. But who was the guy? And why did he want to find him?

Maybe he was a private investigator working on a missing-person case, but that didn’t seem likely. For some reason, the real missing person in the whole scenario seemed to be him. And no matter how hard he tried to think or to focus on his name or his past, he drew a complete blank.

He didn’t even know what day it was, although he suspected it was late November or December because of the Frosty the Snowman trim on the bulletin board in his room.

The Christmas season, he thought. A time for home and hearth, for family and friends.

Did he have anyone special in his life? Was there someone who’d been counting on him to come home last night? A wife? Kids? Maybe even a dog or a cat?

The questions came at him like a volley of rubber bullets, but he had no answers.

A sense of frustration rooted deep in his gut, making it hard to relax, to sleep, to heal. And no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to wrap his battered brain around anything. All he had were the details Dr. Nielson had given him, and right now, she seemed to be his only connection to the outside world.

No wonder he looked forward to seeing her again, to talking to her.

Maybe, with some time, a little rest and another visit from the pretty E.R. doctor, everything would start falling into place.

At five-thirty that evening, just before her next shift began, Betsy rode the elevator up to the third floor to look in on John Doe, just as she’d told him she would.

Again she pondered the wisdom of following up on a patient who was no longer her responsibility. But what was the harm in making one last trip upstairs?

As she walked along the corridor to the west wing, her rubber soles squeaked upon the polished linoleum floors, announcing her arrival. There was still time to turn around and head back to the E.R., with no one the wiser, but she pressed on.

Upon reaching the nurses’ desk, where Jolene Collins was talking to someone on the telephone and scratching down notes, Betsy caught a whiff of the dinner cart before she actually saw it. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she probably should take time to pick up a bite to eat in the cafeteria before starting her shift.

In fact, maybe that’s where she ought to be now, but it was hard to backpedal when she’d already come this far.

She could reach for her pager, check it and pretend she’d been called to another floor, but the hospital didn’t get amnesia victims every day.

Or handsome young patients who piqued a single doctor’s interest.

It was at that realization that she almost did an about-face, no matter how abrupt it might seem to anyone observing her behavior.

She had no business even imagining anything remotely romantic with a patient, especially John Doe, whose background was a complete unknown. After her divorce, she’d made up her mind to focus on work and to look after her aging parents, the loved ones who had never let her down-and who never would.

So she shook off the misplaced attraction to John, telling herself that the brief visit would never amount to more than that.

As she neared John’s room, she scanned the corridors but didn’t see Molly, who was undoubtedly with a patient, which was just as well. There wouldn’t be any need to come up with a good reason for her return to the third floor.

As Betsy reached the open doorway of 314, she spotted John sitting up in bed, his meal spread out on the portable tray in front of him.

“Hey,” he said, brightening as he spotted her. “Finally, there’s a familiar face.”

She supposed that meant he was still struggling to regain his memory.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, returning his smile.

“Better, I guess.” He pointed to the IV that dripped into the vein in his arm. “The stuff they’re putting in here must be working. My head isn’t aching quite as bad as it was earlier.”

“That’s good.”

“But I still don’t remember anything of substance.”

“Do you remember anything at all?”

He shrugged. “I turned on the television earlier, and as I flipped through the channels, I came to a college football game. The USC fight song was familiar, and I knew the words.”

“So you think you might be an alumnus?”

“Or I could be a dropout. Who knows?”

She made her way to his bedside and peered at his plate. “Roast beef?”

He nodded. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.”

“Actually, Brighton Valley Medical Center has a great cafeteria. I usually prefer to eat here more times than not.”

“And where do you eat when you’re not working?”

“At home.”

“Where’s that?”

Normally, she didn’t offer her patients any details about her personal life, but for some reason, she felt like opening up to John. Maybe because she felt sorry for him. “I live on a small ranch outside of town.”

“Oh, yeah? That surprises me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You’re a doctor, and I figured you for a place in the city and close to good restaurants and all the cultural haunts.”

She laughed. “In Brighton Valley? You’re definitely new in town.”

“Which means there probably isn’t any reason to post a picture of me on the back page of the newspaper and ask residents to call in if they recognize me.” The smile he’d been wearing faded, and she figured that he’d been trying to make the best of a bad situation but wasn’t having much luck.

“Well, we have some clues that we didn’t have before. You might be from California. And you might have once attended USC.”

His shrug indicated that her guess wasn’t much to go on.

“What about you?” he asked.

“Originally? I’m from Houston. After my…” She caught herself, realizing she didn’t want to mention her divorce-certainly not with a stranger whose gaze was enough to set off a flurry of hormones. So she altered her explanation by saying, “Well, after my internship I had an opportunity to take over a medical practice in a small town, so I moved to Brighton Valley and worked with Dr. Graham until he retired.”

“And so you liked it here and purchased property.”

It was a natural assumption, she supposed. And there was no reason to set him straight, but she did so anyway. “I’d planned to get a place of my own, but Doc invited me to stay in the guesthouse at his ranch until I got settled.”

They’d both thought it would be a temporary arrangement, but Betsy had never moved. She’d blamed it on being too busy to look for a house, but it had been more than that. Living so close to Doc had provided her with an opportunity to learn from an old-school physician who was a natural diagnostician and who was still making house calls up until the day he took down his shingle.

Sometimes, in the evenings when she wasn’t on call, she would brew them both a pot of tea, and they would sit before the fireplace and talk. On those cozy nights, she would laugh at his anecdotes and soak up his wisdom like a child sitting on his knee.

She might have learned the modern methods of treating illness and disease in med school, but Doc had taught her how to deal with people-and not just the patients.

“Are you still living on his ranch?” John asked, as he shifted one of the pillows behind his back.

She nodded, and a slow smile stretched across her face as she thought of the little decorative touches she’d added to make her bedroom warm and cozy, the green-and-lavender quilt she draped over the foot of the bed, the picture of a lilac bush that hung on the wall. “Yes, I’m still there. And even though his guesthouse is just a little bigger than a studio apartment, it’s home to me.”