The Gift

 

Welcome to the Spot Writers. The prompt is to start with the sentence “When he was a child, he’d been told dolls were for girls.” 

Today’s post comes to us from Val Muller, author of the Corgi Capers mystery series.

The Gift

by Val Muller

When he was a child, he’d been told dolls were for girls. By his dad, of course. It was always Mom who offered hugs for scraped knees, who always had an extra arm to sling around a shoulder after a rough day. Dad was always stiff, like a soldier or a robot, and he expected the same stoic compliance from his son. All Dad offered a scraped knee was a straight face and a monotone comment about toughening up for life.

When the gym teacher died halfway through the year, Josh’s sisters went to bed squeezing their dolls for comfort. Evelyn had Suzie-doll, a plush doll with yellow yarn braids and a blue-print dress, and Ashley had Mr. Koala, a threadbare plush wearing a Santa hat and elf shoes. Josh went to bed with a fleece blanket pulled over his basketball and pretended it was a big teddy bear.

For years Josh thought something was wrong with him. He had emotions. His dad seemed not to. When Mr. Hadley died, it was okay for his sisters to cry. Hell, Dad even hugged them for a minute or two after the loss of the teacher. But Josh—he guessed he wasn’t supposed to have emotions about it. He wondered secretly if he might be a girl and just not know it.

He was also expected to become a doctor, following Dad’s footsteps. He was allowed cadavers—or at least dead mice and spiders and frogs to take apart. And once in a while, Dad allowed Josh to perform pretend surgery on Evelyn and Ashley’s dolls. But playing with them or offering them comfort—that was a girl’s job. It always fell on Evelyn and Ashley to tend to the dolls after their pretend surgery, to dote on them, to administer medications. It was his sisters who developed a proper bedside manner.

Josh felt lucky to meet a woman as terse as he—a fellow med student who didn’t want children of her own, who was focused on becoming a famous surgeon. She carried no pesky emotions. Everything was clean-cut. They lived together for financial support and convenience, but they barely spent time at their apartment, nearly living in the hospital instead during all the residencies. At first it was sexy, having a woman so competitive, but soon Josh came to see it as being married to his father. She got mad at herself and mad at him if either of them missed a question, misdiagnosed a patient, or failed to outshine all the others.  

When Jess won the opportunity to practice on the other side of the country, he decided to stay where he was. They weren’t splitting up, not exactly, but for practical reasons, he told her, he wanted to stay where he was established. Two days after she left, he got a cat. He’d been thinking about it for a while now, in the back of his mind. A cat was not a doll. It was a living creature. He could study its anatomy. And at night, when it happened to curl on his lap on the couch, well—that wasn’t cuddling. It was—well, he didn’t know what it was, but while he was cuddling with the cat, he decided to switch to pediatrics.

And it was there, in the pediatric hospital, after he’d just skimmed an email from Jess about her latest exploits, that he did it. The patient, a nine-year-old male, presented with symptoms of MIS-C, and his regular doctor was having a hell of a time treating it. He was admitted to the hospital for IV treatments and observation.

The boy’s father visited often, and he tried to look brave. He neither smiled nor frowned, but Josh caught the quiver in his lip as he walked away at the end of each visiting hour. The boy, too, attempted stoicism in the presence of his father, but the tears started as soon as his dad walked away. Josh saw on the boy’s face the same feeling that had emerged at the death of Mr. Hadley. And now, of course, Josh knew that emotions belonged to all humans, that his father had forced him to deny a part of his humanity. The boy’s lip quivered as he tried to stifle tears.

Josh held the bear behind his back as he returned to the children’s ward that night. The plushie had been sitting in the window of the gift shop. It was blue with a hospital-logo sweatshirt and incredibly soft. “It’s okay to cry,” Josh told him. “You’re going through a lot. Nothing is certain—except that this will make it easier.” And then he slid the bear into the boy’s arms. The boy’s face lit up, and he wiped his tears on his new stuffed friend.

Josh’s phone vibrated. Based on the number of texts coming in, Jess had read his email about his decision to switch specialties. Really, children? she texted. You were going to specialize in internal medicine. We were going to…

But he stopped reading. He didn’t need that. He knew their relationship had already dissolved, it’s just that neither of them had articulated it yet. He would find someone different next time, someone softer, someone who liked teddy bears and hugs, someone who wasn’t afraid of dolls.

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/