Oh, right, the mythical report he was spending all summer on. Sullenly, Tommy exited from his browser window and clumped off to watch TV. We have to talk, I told myself, but I didn’t yet have the will to push past his teenaged bristliness.
For now, all I could do was check his browser history.
You want justifications for this invasion of his privacy? Well, I’ve got lots. And they’re all handy, because I went over every one as I snooped through his site visits list and download log. It was my computer, after all.
Is that justification enough? How about I had the right to know where he was going on the Web, just as I had the right to know where he went after school? How about we make a distinction between this and my mom reading my diary when I was fourteen?
I clicked on his last bookmark and was deep in some dissertation about the stock market crash of 1929. It wasn’t like I’d found him in some pervert’s chat room. But it was disquieting. Maybe his father’s death had inspired some need to match Don’s salutatorian status. Tommy was changing in front of my eyes, and outside of my control.
But for now I had something else to worry about. I ran a search for Misticol, the medication Dr. Warren had prescribed. I’d heard stories of strange reactions to medicine before. Was that why Mike Warren had come to the funeral and asked all those questions? I’d been a fool to imagine it was out of concern for me, when he was pretending that his last contact with Don had been a year ago.
Misticol, the article said reassuringly, bypassed that common anti-depressant problem “erectile difficulty.” Obviously, the new erectile-enabling Misticol was just the medication an up-to-date male doctor like Mike Warren would recommend for his patients.
There was nothing in the entry about suicidal behavior, but only a caution not to abuse alcohol while taking the drug.
I had to make another list.
How many drinks?
Did Wanda know about pills?
Why did he go to his office that night?
And finally, Why didn’t Dr. W tell me?
Questions. No answers. But I knew who could provide them.
I GOT TOMMY off to camp the next day and then headed past the university to the office complexes along the bypass. Don and I used to drive here every week, arguing all the way, and stonily silent (except for my occasional sob) on the way back. Just the sight of the low-rise office park ahead made my heart sink. That was where the resuscitation efforts on my marriage failed—right there, on the first floor, in the office of Michael Warren, MD.
With savage pleasure, I noted a backhoe chewing the new exit ramp just beyond the parking lot.
I pushed open his office door like a linebacker with a sack in sight. “Tell Dr. Warren Megan Ross is here.” Heck, it worked at Netmore. Why not here?
I’m not one to bully staff, so I tried to moderate the growl a bit. Still the receptionist looked up with alarm. “But Dr. Warren does his emergency room shift Wednesdays.”
I was still full of fire, and I didn’t intend to slink off. “When does he usually get back?”
“About ten, if there are no emergencies.”
It was nine-thirty. “I’ll wait.” I spent the half hour skimming the magazines I read only in doctors’ offices: The New Yorker, Family Circle, Co-dependent’s Monthly (just kidding about that). Dr. Warren told me once I had to get in touch with my rage. Well, I’d show him rage.
Finally, a buzzer rang on the receptionist’s phone. She whispered into it, glancing now and then at me, and put it down. “The doctor is in his office. You can go in.”
She pointed to a door, keeping the other hand on the phone receiver. I could tell she was ready to call security if I turned out to be one of those former psycho patients shrinks worry about. So I tried to look harmless until I opened the door, then I let my natural expression take over. I didn’t care if I scared Dr. Warren. I wanted to scare Dr. Warren.
He rose as I entered. He looked tired, and I considered holding back. But the momentum was too great. “You lied to me!”
For a moment, he didn’t answer, and I saw no answer on his face. Then, quietly, he said, “No. I didn’t tell you. That’s not the same thing as lying.”
“You led me to believe you hadn’t seen Don in a year. That is the same as lying.”
His eyes, and his tone, hardened. “That’s doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“I don’t care about confidentiality. What did you want from me?”
With a sigh, he indicated a chair. “This looks to be a long siege. How about we sit down?”
That worked for me. When we were sitting, his height wasn’t so intimidating, and I could glare him more or less right in the eye. “At the funeral, you asked me all these leading questions. I thought you wanted to know how I was doing. But you wanted to know something about Don.”
“I wanted to know how you were doing. I also wanted to know whether you thought he’d committed suicide.”
That word again. It struck me in the face. “I didn’t think that then, and I don’t think it now.”
“But it’s not a new idea to you. That’s why you’re here.”
I didn’t like his second-guessing my motives. I didn’t like a lot of things about him. “I’m here because you lied. And because you must have tipped off the insurance company.”
“Ah.” They must teach that sound in med school. He sounded just like Freud. “The insurance company.” His gaze became disconcertingly gentler. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“You’re the one who should be talking.”
“Okay. Let me say this. I haven’t said a word to the insurance company, and I never will. As far as I’m concerned, doctor-patient confidentiality applies to insurance companies too, hard as that is to arrange these days. In my experience, they don’t need much reason to contest a claim, and the mode of Don’s death gave them reason enough.” He must have seen me simmering, because he added, “I won’t give them any more ammunition, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
The sense of betrayal subsided. Damn. I needed that fuel. “You must have listed a diagnosis. So much for confidentiality.”
“I generally make the diagnosis as vague as possible on the claim form. Stress is the most common one. But in this case, my billing service hadn’t filed the claim yet. When I heard about Don’s death, I pulled it so it wouldn’t show up in his file.”
That was good. That was smart. I had to admit that. “But you prescribed him medication. An antidepressant. Misticol. The pharmacist filed that claim.”
“So United got hold of the prescription, did they? The pharmacy probably bills online.”
Bitterly, I replied, “Yes. And it didn’t take them long to jump to conclusions.”
Too late, I saw his eyes flicker at that word jump, but otherwise he didn’t comment. “They are not, whatever they might say, in business to pay out big claims if they can help it.”
“Well, they’re trying to deny this claim. I’m not going to let them do it. And—” I added, “I don’t care if you agree with them about the cause of Don’s death.”
He did one of those pauses, the kind I knew from experience with him was meant to calm me down and make me think and all that rational stuff. And he knew I abhorred silence. I wasn’t going to fall for that. I wasn’t going to calm down, and I wasn’t going to talk. So I sat stubbornly silent, pretending to be interested in the little stand of woods outside.
That didn’t hold my interest, pretend or real, so I got up and walked around his office. I used to stand at that oak bookcase, fiercely studying the titles as Don did his how-do-I-love-Wanda-let-me-count-the-ways routine, and I had them memorized: Reinhold Niebuhr, Aristotle, Stephen King. No Freud. Once, when I made some crack about Freud, Dr. Warren said in the more-scientific psychiatry profession, The Bearded One was no longer followed, thou
gh his concepts were historically valuable. I pictured Freud as some drunken, abusive father, still influential but publically unacceptable and embarrassing to his straitlaced descendants.
The books’ spines were broken in, so someone, maybe even Dr. Warren, had read them. They weren’t alphabetized by author or title. Clearly, he wasn’t obsessive-compulsive, but as long as I was standing there, I thought I’d do a bit of re-organization.
“Meg.”
He’d never called me that before. It sounded unexpectedly tender in his weary voice. “When did the idea of suicide first come up?”
I thought back a couple of days. “A friend of ours mentioned it. I told him it wasn’t true, and he backed down. Then I asked another friend, and he said he’d heard the rumors too.”
“Then what?”
“I decided I couldn’t let it bother me. I didn’t want Tommy to hear it, but I had to move on. Then that damned insurance adjustor said they would argue that Don had jumped from the building. And the insurance policy is less than a year old.”
“Is this going to cause problems for you?”
I laughed. At least I meant it to be a laugh. “I’ve got some income, and we own the house, and Tommy will get Social Security till he’s eighteen. But without the life insurance, there’s no child support, no trust fund, no college money. And I—” I recalled what he’d said about my cleaning up Don’s messes and flushed. “I gave Don’s sister $20,000 for her kids’ college bills, and that depleted my capital.” Defensively, I added, “That was before I knew about the insurance adjustor.”
He didn’t say anything about being enabling. “When did the insurance adjustor come?”
“Yesterday. He’d checked the health insurance and found out about the prescription.”
“So how did you find out about the prescription?”
I tried to shrug insouciantly, but my convent-school guilt flared up and made it more of a twitch. “I called the pharmacy. I said I was Mrs. Ross. Which I am. The clerk told me what the prescription was.” Before he could say anything about my deception, I reminded him of his. “That’s where I found out that Don must have seen you the day before he died, because he filled the prescription that afternoon. I also found out there might be side effects.” Grimly, I said, “Is that why you came to the funeral? To find out if it was the drug that had caused the fall?”
“There’s nothing in that medication that would cause problems. And he couldn’t have been on it for more than a day, so even if there were any toxins, they wouldn’t have had time to build up.” He sounded like he’d already worked this through, like maybe with his malpractice insurer.
“It doesn’t mix well with alcohol, however. I looked it up.”
“There’s nothing extreme about its combination with this medication. I warned him not to drink much, and presumably, the pharmacist did too. The medication has been tested.”
“So was thalidomide.”
“Where are you going with this? Are you hoping to prove it was the medication?” He shrugged. “Go ahead and make the case if you can. Maybe the autopsy report will show a higher than prescribed level of the drug. Or maybe it will show he’d been drinking. Anyway, the death certificate said accidental death, and there’s plenty of play in that.”
“You got a copy? Why?”
“Physician of record.” He added, “And I was curious to see what the coroner decided.”
“And you disagree.” Bitterness crept back into my voice.
He had to think this over. “I don’t disagree. There’s no reason to upset the family by calling it suicide when there was no note.”
Suddenly, I remembered the two pages in the silver box. One was some reduced photocopy of a survey. I didn’t know what that was about, but it couldn’t count as a suicide note. The other? The print was too small to make it out, but it didn’t make sense. Don surely wouldn’t type a suicide note at all, but he certainly wouldn’t reduce it to incomprehensibility. My hands itched to reach into my purse and take out that box. But I wasn’t going to do it now, in front of the doctor. So I made my voice strong. “Right. No note.”
He held up his hand in surrender. “Tell me why you’re angry. You don’t still think I tipped off the insurance company.”
“No.” I didn’t admit I’d never considered it likely, at least that he did it deliberately.
“Then it’s either you’re angry because you think I lied to you, albeit by omission—”
Albeit. I always wanted to hear that word out loud.
“Or,” he continued, “because I might think suicide is a plausible explanation.”
“Or both. They both mean I can’t trust you.”
“Is that what they mean?” He asked this meditatively, as if he were actually contemplating the issue. “You can’t trust me?”
Trust was a loaded word. Too personal for this case. “You don’t understand,” I told him. “Don wouldn’t do that to Tommy.”
“You’re saying you don’t see it as a possibility.”
He was just restating what I’d said, and it annoyed me. I remembered him patiently teaching Don and me to do that, to “mirror” each other so we’d hear what the other said, and not what we wanted to hear. But I was a rotten student. I just couldn’t bring myself to say, I hear you saying that you love Wanda and she’s the only one who can make you happy. Instead I’d yell, I don’t care what you say! She can’t make you happy, unless lying and cheating are what make you happy! Dr. Warren—Mike—would close his eyes and take a deep breath and start all over.
He was closing his eyes now, and before he could take that deep breath, I said, “I don’t want Tom to hear the word suicide. Ever.”
“He won’t hear about it from me. I told you, I pulled the bill and won’t file another.”
“But the investigator has your name from the prescription. So he’ll be calling you.”
“And I’ll tell him that the consultation is protected by doctor-client confidentiality.” Gently, he added, “I don’t want your son to hear anything negative about his father.”
“What if I sue United Guaranty? You might get subpoenaed.”
“My attorney will say I cannot be forced to testify. And if the judge doesn’t agree, I’ll appeal. The state medical association will join me. That’s a lot of firepower.”
Still I needed reassurance. “Insurance companies can find out all sorts of information. What if you are forced to testify?”
He looked out the window into the woods. “If I thought Don was suicidal, I would have had him hospitalized. I missed the diagnosis. If there was a diagnosis.”
“There was no diagnosis because it’s not true.” I said this slowly, firmly, because obviously he hadn’t quite gotten it yet.
“It’s not important now. I won’t testify that I thought Don was suicidal.”
“Will you testify that he wasn’t? If I asked?”
“Look, whoever asks, I’m going to claim confidentiality.”
So much for helping me out. I guess it was just the principle after all. “But Don’s dead.”
“And you think confidentiality goes just one way? I can’t say anything to help the insurance company, but I should abrogate confidentiality to help you?”
I nodded. “Right.”
“But it doesn’t work that way.”
Typical male thinking. There are rules, arcane rules, with lots of sub rules. And if you’re going to uphold one rule, you have to uphold them all, in every situation . . . unless you want to break a rule, in which case, well, you just claim to be following another set of rules.
I wasn’t having it. “If you had to sue Don because he didn’t pay your fee, you’d breach confidentiality just like that, at least enough to say how many sessions he’d had. So don’t tell me this confidentiality is unbreakable, becaus
e I don’t believe it.”
He studied me. “You know, you’re pretty good at that.”
The compliment, if that’s what it was, flustered me. “At what?”
“At cutting through to the truth. Makes me wonder how Don fooled you for so long.”
That stung. It stung enough that I decided he was trying to change the subject, and he’d almost succeeded. “The issue is how you can help me with the insurance company.”
He turned to grab a water bottle on the credenza behind him and took a swig. He took his time recapping it. “Say I testify I did not see suicidal indications. Then the door is open. They’ll ask what I did see. I’d have to say that he was in a depressed state, with periods of inappropriate excitement, and I thought it worth medicating. And that won’t help you.”
“They know about the anti-depressant. So that’s no loss.”
“Then they ask, what do I think now? And that answer will be a loss to you. Because—”
I broke in harshly. “Because now you think he did it.”
“A fall is like a one-car accident–automatically suspicious.”
“Well, my brain doesn’t work on automatic. He could have fallen. He could have been drunk. But you think, just because of the nature of the death, that it has to be suicide.”
“It’s not that simple. He was depressed, and he fell out of a building. If someone happy fell out a building, I wouldn’t give it much thought.” He paused, and I could see the reevaluation going on. “Well, I’d speculate, and wonder if he was just pretending to be so happy.”
“You are such a skeptic.”
“So are you.”
That came so quick I didn’t have a chance to do more than dodge it. “Oh, right. That’s why Don was able to fool me so long. Either I’m gullible or I’m skeptical. I can’t be both.”
“Now who’s arbitrary? You’re gullible when you’re safe, and skeptical when you feel at risk.”
It was as incisive a delineation of my character as any my mother made, and more true. But he’d been well-paid to figure me out. And he knew only what I’d let him know. “So why don’t you give more weight to my skepticism about your suicide theory?”
Until Death Page 12