It was like she was trapped, like her life had knotted itself into this snare, tightening around her the more she moved, and she didn’t even know why.
A moment of silence passed. Miriam seemed too far away, though her voice was too close, directly in Fiona’s ear.
“That’s not my problem anymore, all right? It’s yours. Stop calling me. Goodbye.”
There was a click when she hung up. Fiona resisted the urge to throw the phone against the wall, the way a character in that modern Jane Austen novel would who didn’t have to care about propriety and what it would cost to replace a phone.
Sometimes Fiona thought this could only have been worse if Miriam had left her for a man.
None of it was ever real. That was the worst part, how Miriam had never loved her to begin with, despite stepping up to an altar with her. Relationships ended, even marriages, that was the way it went; Fiona knew that intellectually. But she’d never loved anyone else so much. This had been how she had wanted to spend the rest of her life, and for Miriam, it simply…hadn’t been like that. She’d met another woman who worked better for her. A helpless part of Fiona kept insisting that Miriam should have warned her of that possibility up front, of how her marriage could be ripped away like a Band-Aid, disposable, applied only as long as required.
Laughter and “Jingle Bells” could be heard far away, muted by the walls of the cafeteria, and Fiona was sick of it, sick to her bones. She turned on her heel. She had two units full of patients to keep going until they perished.
* * *
June Sekelsky was the only patient on the Oncology floor who was awake. Remote control in hand, the young woman was following a Christmas special on TV with that mix of exhaustion and boredom exclusive to long-term patients. Jessie was nowhere to be seen, and it seemed like the stubborn glow that had fueled June’s demeanor during Fiona’s previous visits had left the room with her fiancée.
When Fiona entered, the young woman smirked without joy, not even bothering to raise her head from the pillow; yet it was surprisingly easy to picture her with defiant black eyeliner and a multi-colored Mohawk on a stage in a punk rock band, trashing somebody else’s guitar and screaming “Fuck!” into a microphone.
“Anything interesting on?” Fiona asked, sitting down on the visitor chair. She would check June’s chest sounds in a moment, to make sure that sore throat didn’t grow into anything more worrisome.
June squinted at the screen, as if Fiona’s appearance outside of rounds was quite ordinary, and she got courtesy visits by doctors all the time. Maybe she did; maybe her band was more famous than Fiona had thought, and there were fans amongst the staff.
“Dude called John visiting the family of dude called Sherlock. I’m not sure if they’re gay or what; it’s British. I think Sherlock poisoned his parents?”
“Okay. Please tell me you have actually heard of Sherlock Holmes before. Unless television has gone through some drastic changes recently, I’d say he’s straight.”
June snorted. “It’s British,” she repeated, as if that explained everything.
A moment of companionable silence passed as Fiona made an attempt to follow the story alongside June. Restlessness had befallen her, a need to move around and act, while at the same time, nothing that she could have done came to mind. She was trapped in the hospital, after all, and would be until Christmas was over.
“Your fiancée went home?”
“Christmas thing with the family.” June’s smirk grew. Although she’d started running a fever again and her mouth had to feel sore along with her throat, her voice remained strong. “Woulda dragged them all here if Nurse Leena’d let them in and all.”
“Seems like a great girl.”
“Oh yeah.” June made a weak, wavy gesture, eyes still on the television. “They’re all fab. Paying my bills and all, I mean, how great is that, right? Jessie thinks it’s weird that I keep bringing that up, but it’s, like, it’s a lot of money, you know? Her dad’s a real bigwig, though.” She paused and closed her eyes to breathe before she continued, betraying how much the conversation exhausted her. “When we signed the contract with him, we totally thought we’d made it big. And then we kinda did, too.”
Fiona looked at her hands for a moment, wrapped in rubber. Picking at the wristband of the glove, she thought of Miriam.
“I’m gay, too.”
“Yeah. Figured,” was all June had to say to that.
Fiona chuckled at her dismissive tone. Textbook generation gap; it made her feel old.
“Don’t you have a place to be on Christmas or nothing?” June asked.
“Not how it works in a hospital. We can’t close shop and go home.”
“Coulda fooled me the way Doc Kapstein got the fuck out of here yesterday to eat turkey and shit.”
Fiona laughed despite herself. “You’re an orphan, I gather? There might have been a better bone marrow match in your family otherwise.”
June averted her gaze. “Might as well be,” she muttered, studying the remote control.
Fiona frowned.
Sometimes, her clinic patients over at the hospice prattled on about bone aches and shortness of breath for what seemed like hours until quite suddenly, they brought up the actual alarming issue, like the blood in their urine, hidden in some subordinate clause.
“June,” she said firmly. “If you’ve got blood relatives out there—”
“Well I don’t,” June said, eyes still fixed on the remote.
Fiona tried picturing old, ever-distracted Kapstein questioning a stubborn young woman further after she gave him this answer but couldn’t. So she may not have known which doctors June had seen before she came here, but she could bet that nobody at St. Anne’s had pressed the issue.
“This is vital information, June,” she said. “Listen to me. You’re only going to receive a partial match transplant. Do you have any idea how huge the risk is with a MUD that your body will reject it? It’s called donor-versus-host disease. I know they’ve told you about that. If there’s any chance—any chance at all—that there could be a relative of yours out there, he or she could get tested and the odds that they’d match better are incredibly short—”
“You’re not gonna find anybody from my family who’ll donate anything for me!” If June had been on a heart monitor, it would probably have blipped in rapid elevation, sending nurses running her way. She tried sitting up, paling, the words followed by a coughing fit.
Muttering a swearword under her breath, Fiona reached out to steady her. But June had already caught herself, swatting her away weakly.
“I ran away from home back when. I haven’t seen them in years; I have a new family now. The old one don’t want anything to do with me!”
“Oh dammit, June…” Fiona hovered for a moment longer and then slumped back in her chair, eyeing the kid with a mix of shock and pity. After waiting to make sure that June had calmed down and that she had her full attention, she spoke firmly. “Tell me what happened.”
June threw her an unkind look that showed how little she appreciated that question.
“I got out of there, all right?” she said defiantly after a moment. “I made it on my own. It wasn’t hard. School is stupid anyway,” she muttered to herself, taking an unsteady breath.
“I was playing at this club with some guys. Dude picks me up, says he needs someone to play guitar in a band. Next thing, we’ve got a contract with McGee, and I’m meeting Jessie and all.”
Wow, Fiona thought. Your regular lesbian Oliver Twist. Except that June had cancer, and she wasn’t speaking to her family that apparently existed. Fiona was fairly certain that nobody in Oliver Twist acted that stupidly, or readers would have rightfully complained.
She focused on the important part. “Why did you run away from home? Was it because you’re gay?”
“Sure didn’t help,” June said cynically, still looking away.
The television was forgotten; in the corner of Fiona’s eye, men were shoo
ting at each other.
“I…” June closed her mouth, paused. Then she opened it again, angrily. “Shit happened, all right? They hate me. They want nothing to do with me. They said.”
“And that was how long ago?”
“Three years.”
“Geez, June. They’ve probably been too busy being scared to death for you to waste a thought on whatever it is you think you did so wrong.”
But June was shaking her head already. “They threw me out. They said I’m a monster. So I ran. I don’t need them anymore. I’d rather try the bad match than ever talk to them again.”
Fiona couldn’t believe this. “Even if it gets you killed?” This wasn’t the time to sugarcoat the ramifications of that decision. She could have recited any number of ways that receiving the wrong transplant could do terrible, terminal damage.
June pressed her lips together. “Yeah.”
“If they’re really that awful,” Fiona said, carefully handpicking each word, but getting more determined to get through to the girl. She felt more motivated to get to the bottom of this than she’d felt about anything in weeks, filled with a new, unexpected kind energy. “If they’re really that bad, then what’s wrong with using them for your health? You don’t owe them anything. Call them up, tell them what they want to hear, laugh in their faces afterwards.” She took a calming breath. “Do you have any siblings? You could ask them.” A sibling was likely to match best anyway, a nine or even ten-out-of-ten match.
But June’s face hardened even more—an angry, bald, sickly statue of pride. “Not anymore,” she said, barely audible.
Everything that Fiona had just learned was such a waste. She couldn’t believe it had taken a substitute from geriatrics to hit on this. June had been sick longer than she’d been a legal adult. This shouldn’t be happening.
“They hate me,” June said for the third time, like an incantation.
Why do people always throw the good things away? Fiona didn’t understand. It was almost like they didn’t need them. Like they didn’t care that there were all these other, hollow people who’d never had the privilege of letting a chance like this one slip away. June was gay like her, and maybe that was a shallow reason to feel any kinship when there wasn’t much else they had in common, but she couldn’t possibly want to risk her life out of some teenage upset. She had cancer. It was a great and exciting case for everybody at St. Anne’s except June.
Fiona wasn’t sure if her thought process made any sense at all, or if it made all sense in the world. She wouldn’t put up with it, in either case. She was tired of her life, tired of false Christmas cheer, when people could be doing actual good things instead. She was tired of managing pain but not improving patients’ health, when this one here was young and strong and proud, and maybe didn’t have to go down. June had a fiancée who loved her and a surprise career in music that sounded like it had been made for a movie. What was there to decide?
June was too young to know anything anyway, barely old enough to make the decision herself. When Fiona was her age, she hadn’t even known she was gay, and her parents hadn’t cared enough to give her either love or hate.
Much like Miriam, come to think of it.
If you don’t like a thing, do something about it, she told herself and stood up.
* * *
Securing the phone number proved shockingly easy. The duty nurse accessed the complete patient file on the computer at the Admission desk, then turned the screen so Fiona could see without so much as pausing the game she was playing on her cell phone. The Oncology floor was always quiet, but now it seemed particularly so; the staff party had to be reaching its fabulous fruit punch peak about now.
June’s complete history was located all the way down at the bottom, and there it said Father: Joseph Sekelsky and Mother: Edith Sekelsky. There were birth dates and job descriptions and an address. The last June had known, Mr. Sekelsky had been a factory worker.
Siblings: Tyler Sekelsky, deceased, it said, and a date from three years ago. Tyler had been two years younger than his sister.
Fiona didn’t dwell on it.
Seeking refuge in an empty exam room, she had no problem finding the landline attached to the address, a poor neighborhood in East Boston.
“Yes,” a harsh male voice answered when she called.
“Is this Joseph Sekelsky? My name is Dr. Porter. I’m calling from St. Anne’s Hospital in Andover.”
“Huh. What do you want?”
This was how people reacted to a call from a hospital when their circle of loved ones was both small and currently gathered in the living room in full.
Fiona took a deep breath. “I need you to come to the hospital, sir. I’m treating your daughter June. It’s not looking good.”
* * *
The sky outside the windows was pitch black by the time Mr. Sekelsky made it to St. Anne’s. This late on Christmas Eve, the I-93 would be empty; a drive from East Boston shouldn’t take over an hour.
Fiona identified Sekelsky immediately when he stepped into the mostly abandoned hospital lobby. His face was crunched into a frown and he was as short as his daughter, sharing her strong jaw, though where cancer treatments had left her skinny and haggard, he was badly hiding a beer belly underneath his ill-fitting, worn coat. He hadn’t aged well, his skin an unhealthy shade of nicotine-yellow, and he looked like he had brought very little patience along.
“Mr. Sekelsky,” Fiona said, stepping up and offering her hand. “I’m Dr. Porter. We spoke on the phone.”
Mr. Sekelsky eyed her hand without taking it. “Where is she? She dead yet?”
Fiona attempted a smile, then waved him down the corridor towards Radiology. The receptionist was already glancing at them with too much interest. Radiology was close by. Nobody would be there but Brian, and he would either be asleep on the cot in the lab, or busy with an emergency patient.
Her smile transformed into a grimace when they had made it down the corridor. She turned towards June’s father again.
“Thank you for coming here,” she said. “I’m currently June’s attending physician. She’s being treated in our Oncology unit for multiple myeloma, which is a cancer that attacks her stem cells and her bone marrow. She’s stable right now, but that’s probably going to change. We’re preparing her for a bone marrow transplant. It’s the only way to prolong her life.”
Mr. Sekelsky frowned. A number of emotions crossed his face, too many for Fiona to count, before it settled into something dark and defensive. Yes, she might have given him the impression that June had been brought in as a medical emergency, so that his immediate presence was required, but how else could she have made sure to get him into the hospital before Kapstein returned and took the case away from her?
A beat passed before Sekelsky asked, “Is this about money? She’s eighteen by now. She doesn’t need my insurance. Kid can get Obamacare now all she wants.”
“I understand that the bills are taken care of, actually.” Fiona collected herself, adopting her most serious and professional voice. “Mr. Sekelsky, your daughter is very sick. She needs that transplant to survive. However, the partial match found for her in the national donor registry has extremely shaky odds; it’s probably not going to work. A donation by a family member will raise her chances of recovery considerably, if you or your wife are a match.”
“She sent you after us to get a transplant from us?” Sekelsky exclaimed, and Fiona wondered if he was a little bit drunk, if this was a story of abuse by an alcoholic parent. I got out of there, June had said. But he didn’t smell of alcohol.
“A bone marrow transplant, yes,” she said evenly, despite her uneasy sense that something was off. “You can spare the bone marrow; it’ll regenerate completely. We would only take about five percent, from your or your wife’s hipbone. It’s a very safe procedure. And no, she didn’t send me. She didn’t want me to contact you, in fact. But as her doctor, I have to do what’s best for her health.”
“Best
for all of us if she dies!” Sekelsky growled, taking an angry step towards her that made Fiona retreat in surprise, although he was just moving in agitation. Sekelsky wasn’t the type who’d dare hit a doctor; there was something intrinsically helpless in the man, a trait found typically in people who’d been poor all their lives. His kids, maybe he’d been hitting them, though suddenly Fiona wasn’t sure about anything.
“Demon spawn is what she is! That kid made me and my wife’s life hell, all those years! All that money that we spent to feed her!”
“Please, Mr. Sekelsky, hear me out,” Fiona tried again. His voice was ringing loudly through the empty Radiology corridors. Her skin was crawling now, the situation so out of her control.
Sekelsky’s Boston accent grew more and more pronounced the angrier he became. “You know what she did? Did she tell you what she did? Whore around before she was even twelve, that’s what! Ran around with druggies and juvie court regulars. Dragged her little brother around with her to parties, the poor kid, when she was supposed to be watching him ‘cause me and my wife had to work. She was doing drugs when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on him! Did she tell you any of that, huh? How them doctors called me up at work to tell me Tyler’s dead because her and her friends were driving around high as kites? My little boy! Jesus Christ, he was only thirteen years old!”
Fiona wasn’t a person who ran out of words easily, but today was proving a never-ending line of stutters, with nothing making sense. Yet again she’d been blindsided, unable to think of an appropriate reaction. “Mr. Sekelsky…”
“She did it!” Sekelsky sputtered, his eyes full of pain and his voice high and thin. “I don’t care that she wasn’t the one driving the car. She got her druggie friends to take Tyler on all their little joyrides. Let them drive her little brother around, stoned out of their minds on weed. Might as well have been her that smashed that car into that tree!”
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