Stop. Not here. Not now.
I go completely still. My instincts are not normal. They never have been. According to the doctors my parents took me to when I was a kid, I have a personality disorder some might describe as sociopathy. But I was too young at the time to be properly diagnosed, and I haven’t bothered to go back. A certain level of detachment has always been a boon to my lines of work, so why try to change that?
Still, sometimes it would be nice if I didn’t have to consider every move just to seem normal. It gets exhausting to pretend all the time.
Two pats on the back, then I gently pull away. “Yes, seriously.”
She starts to ramble while my brain takes notes on the exchange. I’m not a man who is touched much. Not for free, anyway.
In my medical life, contact is purposeful and bounded. I’m examining, suturing, maintaining an airway, keeping a situationfrom becoming worse. In the other part of my professional life, contact is also purposeful, but the people who touch me in that context do so for reasons I don’t mistake for warmth.
What Lena did fell into neither category, and I have no real framework for it immediately available, so I stand there and wait for what is the common amount of time for such interactions I have observed. It’s nothing more than that, yet I can’t stop feeling her warmth against me, even though there are at least three feet between us now.
Odd.
I give her prescription instructions and watch her gather the girl and the sample pack and leave. Lena’s round ass sways crookedly as she carries her daughter from the clinic—cocked to one side to support the half-asleep Opal—and I find I want to watch her ass sway until I go blind from focusing too hard. This has been the strangest interaction I’ve had in months, and I’m unsure what to do next. So, I stand in the empty bay for a moment in the aftermath, still noting the contact.
But she’s gone now, and there’s Hale to handle.
He’s finishing up in bay six with a patient who has clearly been waiting longer than necessary for what turns out to be a straightforward presentation. I wait until the patient is discharged, and then I step into the bay and pull the curtain.
“I’m going to say this once.” I keep my voice low. “There was a five-year-old with chronic recurrent strep and a fever of 103.6 sitting on your floor for over an hour tonight. You’ve had her chart several times. The treatment you prescribed on both occasions was inadequate for the presentation. I’ve corrected it.”
The middle-aged fucker squints at me. “Where do you get off?—”
“If this clinic’s standard of care stays where it is, I’ll have a conversation with the coordinator. If I come back and find something like that waiting on the floor again, I’ll have a different kind of conversation. One you’ll find less comfortable than this one.”
Hale’s mouth opens.
“Think carefully, Hale. You know who funds this place.”
His mouth closes.
I collect my things and leave.
I sit in my car for a moment before starting the engine. Chilled leather in all directions. The city is wet from earlier rain. It’s a cold rain. The kind people avoid when they can. The streetlights scatter on the asphalt, making everything look like itself and its reflection at the same time.
Lena’s answers to my questions were the self-minimization of someone who has spent enough time in rooms where her problems are received as inconveniences. Meek, mild, inoffensive, not out of her natural personality, but because she’s been forced to fit into that mold. A woman who has learned to make herself smaller so that when she asks for something, the ask seems proportionate.
There’s a fire in that woman that she can’t unleash, because she’s learned it’s dangerous to do so.
I try, in a genuine and specific way, to remember the last time I did something because it’s simply the right thing to do. Not because it serves a purpose. Just because a kid is sick and her mother is running on empty, and it’s the correct human thing to do.
I go back a long way in my history to remember my last good deed.
Nothing comes up.
THREE
LENA
Opal is worse by morning.
I know it before I open my eyes. Shallow, labored breaths mean every swallow is a negotiation. It gets through the wall between our rooms and through whatever thin sleep I managed to collect after midnight. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed before I’ve done anything as coherent as a thought, my hand already on her forehead.
Hot. Too hot. Not the fever-breaking kind of hot, not the this-is-actually-working kind. The kind that means we’re still climbing.
“Mama,” she says, when she feels me. Her eyes don’t fully open.
