|
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 - Chapter 9
Veronica splashed cold water on her face. Her nerves had settled with the change of scenery. She looked at herself in the tin plated mirror of the camp office bathroom. The mirror was made of unbreakable metal and did not reflect well. The image presented was slightly warped. Veronica stared for a moment feeling distorted from within. She let out a deep breath. It had been almost a year since she had felt that overwhelming anxiety. The strange sensation that she was not really in her body had not plagued her since after the death of her father. She grieved for a time after his passing. Soon after the funeral she had suddenly realized how alone she was. Spending almost seven years devoted to her dad had left her without purpose. She had things to busy herself. She had the goal of studying medicine but almost nothing else. Veronica floundered at San Francisco City College in remedial Math and English classes. She had to make up for lost time in basic courses to gain entrance to the classes that really interested her. With extreme patience, she labored to complete arbitrary scholastic tasks while silently suffering with her loss. She lasted a year in the city alone. Her last semester at SF City College, she had taken sixteen units. Veronica had shoveled education into her brain the way a fat kid eats a birthday cake; as fast as possible, lest someone else get more than their share. She had taken Intro to Algebra, Critical Thinking in History, Intro to Psychology, Biology with a lab and English. Her last final over, she bent down to tie her sneakers. The string broke low in her laces, leaving her no way to secure her shoe. She began to cry. Veronica had no idea what was happening to her. Her elaborate system of emotional defensive barriers seemed to collapse. The broken shoelace, a small and simple issue, was the last straw. The ride home on public transportation was a trek through emotional chaos. She pretended that everything was alright and to the untrained observer on the street that is how she appeared. Inside, she was screaming.
She had been uncomfortable in large cities since she was eleven years old. Since that October day when her father took her to a baseball game, her life had changed forever. They had gotten lost on the serpentine assemblage of concrete and asphalt that made up the Oakland, California highway system. Her father had just exited the interstate to a not so savory part of town in search of a gas station when the earthquake hit. The car shook so violently that she thought they had run over a patch of rutted dirt road. Her senses would have attributed the shaking to the car having a bad suspension if it were not for the loud rumbling. Her father pulled over right away and held her hand with reassurance until the quake ended.
The Loma Prieta earthquake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. Moments later, several people started running past Veronica’s car asking for help. The upper level of the Cypress freeway had collapsed onto the lower deck trapping hundreds of motorists. Feeling his duty as a doctor, Veronica’s father identified his profession to one of the worried men. The man jumped into the back seat and directed them to the scene.
The earth had stopped shaking only minutes prior to their arrival at the structure yet one had to wonder how so much damage could occur in so little time. Veronica was stunned as she got out of the car by the number of cries and pleas from the double-decker concrete sandwich. Thick black smoke crawled out from the thin access in between the smashed road beds. A man had climbed up on the first deck, balancing himself on a cracked support column. He was yelling to another man on the ground to find a ladder and “something to pry the door open.” He was a black man with a rough appearance. Someone that the young sheltered Veronica might have been afraid of in other circumstances, but not then. He was an everyday hero, casting aside his own safety to help a stranger. The man had tears of frustration in his eyes as he tried to talk to someone trapped in the structure. She would never forget the man’s courage.
She was deathly afraid, not for herself or so much for those trapped, but for what her father might do. She did not want him to put himself at risk and possibly get hurt. She ran to his side and hugged him. The young Veronica begged him not to go. She did not want to lose her daddy. He knelt down to her level, like he always did when he wanted to tell his daughter something important.
“I am a doctor Honey.”
“Daddy, don’t go up there,” she said, her lip starting to quiver.
“People need me.”
Veronica shook off the cascade of memories, stopping up the passage to her past. She was desperately laboring to learn to become a doctor so that she could be there for others who needed her. She was there for her father in his final moments when he had needed her. As she spied her countenance in the distorted mirror, things became clear. She had spent a great portion of her life being needed. The encounter with the man in the store had revealed to her something that Veronica had a hard time admitting. She was too accustomed to putting others needs first and ignoring the fact that she had needs.
The bathroom was quiet and all of a sudden very lonely for Veronica. She wiped her face with a paper towel.
“I don’t have to figure it all out today,” she said aloud to herself in the mirror and left.
When Veronica rejoined her work in the store she noticed a middle aged man trying far too hard to engage Nikki in conversation. Nikki appeared to be reading a copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association that Veronica had brought from home. This caused Veronica’s eyebrows to rise in an amused expression. Nikki never read anything more difficult than a Cosmopolitan magazine. People, US magazine or sometimes an Entertainment Weekly, however she had never seen her take the slightest interest in JAMA. Yet there she was, trying to pretend to be very interested in the magazine and not in what the man had to say.
The man opened a beer while trying to interest Nikki.
“No open containers in the sales area,” Veronica said sternly as she walked behind the counter. Dejected, the man looked at his beer. He meekly lifted his hands in a defensive posture, collected his belongings and walked out the door. Veronica approached Nikki with a knowing look.
“JAMA huh, Do you find the articles intriguing?” she asked.
Nikki put the magazine under the counter exasperated.
“Why do creepy old men always try to hit on me?” Nikki asked, and then spit her well chewed gum into the wastebasket.
Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7 - Chapter 8 - Chapter 9
|
