Who's That Guy?

Hello, Everyone!

I’m back in the book proposal trenches and asking, begging, pleading for some good vibes from y’all! The last time I sent out queries about my CHASING LIGHT memoir was March of 2022, and that was round two. (Round one was the summer of 2021.)

The time away from actively pursuing agency representation and publication has been fruitful in many ways, and I’m glad I’ve had these months to figure out how to be a grandmama to my sweet granddaughter June, now almost a year old! (September 16th, OMG.)

Virginia June Kerr, AKA June Bug

Lately, I’ve been getting myself in the frame of mind to get my work back out there, so, these next couple of weeks are gonna be GO TIME! Please send your good vibes and blessings of positive juju my way.

Also, it’s been over a year since I started this Substack newsletter, and since I began posting DEAD RINGER chapters from the mystery novel I wrote way back in 2002. I thought I’d give you a little background about one of the characters, the EMT who makes Blainey Blair’s heart go pitter-patter, Guy Trubiano.

He’s loosely based on a man I crossed paths with in 1991 when I was serving as a chaplain at the Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, a required Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) residency for my M.Div. degree.

Children’s was known to be a hard, intense place to be, and my supervisor was an ex-Marine who had a reputation for making CPE a living hell for seminarians. He’d singled me out, a thirty-something mom from the affluent suburb of Upper Arlington, and assigned me to be on call every Saturday.

I’m not sure why, but all hell broke loose on Saturdays. One night I held the hand of a trembling sixteen-year-old with a bullet wound in his thigh, while we waited for his grandmother to arrive, police officers hovering in the corner of the room. Another afternoon I stood with the weeping mother of a four-year-old intellectually challenged boy who’d been badly savaged by a neighbor’s Spitz. He lay on a gurney, bleeding and confused, while a doctor explained to her the extent of his injuries. Sometimes babies in the NICU would take a turn for the worst. Sometimes kids struggling to recover from major surgeries began to fail.

On one of those on-call nights a five-year-old girl who’d been in a car accident was brought in via ambulance with such a deep gash through the left side of her forehead, eyebrow, and cheek that the entire left side of her face sagged, giving her a forlorn and aged look. Her mother had been life-flighted to another hospital. One of the nurses angrily whispered to me that the girl said her mom had let the twelve-year-old brother drive home from church, and he’d panicked and crashed into a tree. His injuries had been minimal.

This sweet little one had curly light brown hair, blue eyes, and a death grip on my hand. She was terrified and alone, tears leaking out of her eyes. I promised not to leave her for even a second.

After a while, a tiny blond woman in blue scrubs and a muscular dark-haired man in green scrubs walked in and introduced themselves to the girl with so much kindness and confidence I thought I might cry, too. The woman was a plastic surgeon and the man was an EMT. As I later learned, he’d taken extra training in suturing, and the two of them regularly worked together as a team.

I moved around to the top of the gurney to make room and placed my hands on the girl’s shoulders while they numbed her wound (“The worst part, we promise, you’re so brave, you’re doing great!” they soothed) and began their repair. Using thread as fine as spider’s silk, they stitched, their heads bent together, working and talking. The girl seemed calmed by the sound of their voices, and when they were finished, he gently pulled on a thread, and like a true miracle the sagging flesh on her face lifted, and the transformation was like seeing her for the first time.

Several nurses and other staff stood off to one side watching, and when the EMT tied off the suture, a small round of quiet applause and murmurs of wonder filled the examination room. Her wound was nearly invisible.

“Is it over?” the girl asked, and I was able to look at her sweet baby face, newly restored, and say, yes, it is. In the meantime, we’d heard from the other hospital that her mother was going to be all right and that a family member was on the way to pick her up. What a night! A happy ending to be savored.

What I also remember about that night? I was close enough to watch the EMT’s deft hands. He had beautiful fingers, long and fine. His forearms were taut and covered with swirls of dark hair. A hint of dark stubble swept across his cheek. And he smelled really good. No, I mean, really good.

I never knew his name. He and the plastic surgeon came and went, and I stayed with the girl until her aunt arrived. I never saw him again.

But, golly, when I began to write this story so many years ago, guess who showed up? I gave him the name Guy Trubiano. And now you know.

New DEAD RINGER chapter drops next week.