by Sandra Block
Hi, you’ve reached Dr. Berringer. I’m not here right now…
Grabbing my satchel, I run up to the floor, hoping to catch him before he leaves for the day. When I get there, he’s on his way out, buttoning his long navy coat.
“Serotonin syndrome!” I blurt out, breathless from racing down the hall.
He loops a merlot-colored scarf around his neck. “I assume you’re talking about Candy. And yes, I’ve considered it.”
“It fits. It does. She’s moaning, confused, diaphoretic. She’s on an SSRI.”
“All true. And a good thought in the differential.” He spots his untied shoe and perches his foot on the chair to tie it, unraveling his scarf in the process.
“But?” I ask.
“But it doesn’t fully make sense,” he says, rewrapping his errant scarf. “We just started the SSRIs. And she was only febrile once.”
“But we can’t just ignore it.” I take a deep breath. “We’ve been focusing on catatonia. But what if it’s not catatonia? What if it hasn’t been all along? What if it’s encephalopathy?”
He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Confused, but not catatonic?” he asks, seeming to consider it.
“Right.”
“I don’t know,” he says, debating. “I’ve stopped her benzos. Her labs all look good. Nothing smells like encephalopathy to me.”
“Let’s repeat the EEG,” I say, thinking of it just then. “If it’s consistent with encephalopathy, maybe we can take off the SSRIs for a bit. Just in case it’s serotonin syndrome.”
He shrugs. “Fine. It can’t hurt. And we’d need one before ECT anyway.” He pulls his hand out of his pocket, looking at the blue-and-red watch. “Off to AA,” he says.
“The O-club?”
His look is puzzled for a second. “Right,” he says. “I forgot I told you about that.” He taps his watch with a resigned smile. “Can’t be late.”
* * *
Christmas music, Pink Martini–style, fills the air as I browse through my e-mail in my favorite eggplant settee. Mike sits next to me, drinking coffee (he has coffee in his veins) and reading an ER board review book. No e-mail from Detective Adams yet. Googling “Eliza Sapierski,” I gather a few hits. Instagram photos of a woman making pierogis and one Vine of a thirteen-year-old doing an impressive skateboarding trick. It was from a month ago, so that can’t be my girl. I add “adopted” to the search, but nothing comes up.
A young couple with matching laptops and facial rings comes in through the door. They sit at the table across from each other, unfold their laptops, then proceed to ignore each other completely. Mike coughs and turns a page while I search for New Promises next, pulling up some rehab facility in New Haven as well as the Toronto adoption agency. I plug her name in the agency’s search box.
Sorry. Your search did not reveal an answer.
The website is a hodgepodge of photos, pretty much what you’d expect—happy youngsters and babies, with every race equally represented. They also have a staff page of headshots with “fun facts” about each person below.
Clarence Adams
Social Worker
Fun Fact: Loves Pop-Tarts!
Raymond Donner
Social Worker
Fun Fact: Dresses up as Santa at local malls!
His picture reveals an overweight man with a gray-white beard and some poorly treated rosacea, so I can see how this would fit. He’s even got the right name for the job. Donner, and Dancer, and Prancer, and Blitzen. I flip through a few more pictures from the website. Mike stretches and puts the book down. He sits down on the edge of the settee.
“So I’ve made a decision,” he says.
I look up from the computer. “Okay.”
“I’m taking a couple weeks’ vacation and going to stay with my mom for Thanksgiving.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure how to take this, but my stomach churns. “When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow, actually. Sort of a last-minute thing; I got a cheap flight. Sort of.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. To go see her.” I’m hoping I sound supportive and not nervous.
“My brother will be there, too, and Samantha. And my mom’s been bugging me.”
“Good. Definitely. You should go.”
He takes another sip and puts his cup down with a clink. “So, while I’m there, I’m probably going to meet with the urgent-care people. Get in an interview.”
I nod and notice he’s looking away from me.
“You have one set up already, you mean?”
“Yes.” He meets my eyes this time.
“Okay?”
“Just to keep our options open,” he adds, “until we’ve come to a decision.”
“Right.” I stifle a twinge of anger that I know is misplaced. As he said, sometimes doing nothing is the same thing as doing something.
“Anyway, we’ll see,” he says, standing up and leaning over my computer. “What are you looking at?”
“That adoption agency I was telling you about. New Promises.” I go back to the home page, to the montage of baby and kid pictures. “Success Stories.”
“Hey,” he says over my shoulder, pointing at the screen.
“What?”
“The blond girl. She kind of looks like that picture you showed me…”
“Oh my God, you’re right.” I widen the screen to a picture of a young girl with blond, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes. Pulling up the photo Dr. Koneru texted me, I see the same smattering of freckles on her nose and the same cool blue eyes staring up at me from the dead face of Eliza Sapierski. I stand right up. “I’ve got to call Detective Adams.”
I’m already dialing when Mike points to his watch with a rapid head shake.
“Hello?” The detective’s voice is gravelly and tired. “Zoe?”
I figure out Mike’s miming then and realize it’s nearly eleven. After the last texting fiasco, I did promise not to call him after nine p.m. Oops. “Hi. I got some news.” I head to the back vestibule so I don’t bother the other patrons. “I just thought I should share it.”
“Okay,” he says with a groan and yawn combined. “What is it?”
“Remember Eliza Sapierski?”
He pauses so long I wonder if he’s fallen back to sleep. “Hello?”
“Yeah, yeah. The girl with the scar. The adopted girl.”
“Yes. Well, she’s on the New Promises website.” The laptop couple walk by me, laughing, on their way out the door.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
He clears his throat. “How sure are you that it’s her, this girl?”
“I don’t know—ninety percent? It’s a good likeness. Plus what are the chances that they have the same scar, both ended up in Buffalo, and both were adopted? It’s got to be her.”
“Yeah,” he admits. “Pretty solid reasoning.” A car idles outside with its hazards on, blinking a yellow rhythm into the rain. “I’ll look into it tomorrow, okay?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I’m not good at reading EEGs but it looks slow to me. “What do you think?” I ask the tech.
“No seizures,” she says, her eyes wrinkled from years of smoking. “Kind of slow, not too exciting.” We sit a minute, watching Candy stare out, electrodes spouting out of her head like she’s Frankenstein and we’re experimenting.
“Lots of sweat artifact,” the tech comments, wiping Candy’s forehead off with a paper towel. She does this clinically, not like a mother dabbing her child but like a tech who’s annoyed with all the artifact. “Does she always sweat like this?”
“Yeah, lately.” Serotonin syndrome, but my attending doesn’t agree. But then again, he’s the “wunderkind” from New Orleans and I’m a lowly resident, on probation.
“Well, the doc will be reading it today. We’ll let you know what we find,” she says by way of dismissal.
“I’ll check in later.”
The tech doesn’t respond, frowning and wiping at one of th
e electrodes. As I walk out, I nearly slam into Detective Adams.
“Hello there,” he says, peeking into the room. “What’s going on in there?”
“EEG,” I answer. “She’s still out of it. Catatonic. Encephalopathic. Whatever.”
He stares at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. And I guess I am. I remember wondering how on earth I would ever learn all the Latin, all the -opathies, the medications. And one day, without warning, I was fluent.
“So I guess it wouldn’t help to show her some pictures,” he says.
“Pictures?”
He rattles the bulky manila envelope under his arm. “We have twenty cars with that partial in New York.”
“Any limos?”
“No. But a couple of black town cars.”
“Maybe it’s worth a try.” She was just this side of coherent when she picked out the license plate numbers after all. We walk in, and he takes out a close-up black-and-white glossy of a skinny white guy in a tracksuit. Candy’s eyes drift down, and she does her mechanical moaning sound.
“Maybe that means something?” he asks, his eyes brightening.
“I doubt it. She does that all day.”
“Been doing that for twenty minutes now,” the tech adds. “And sweating. Did I mention sweating?” She reaches up to give her another wipe.
“Try another one,” I say.
He picks a mid-twenties Asian woman, the picture an enlargement of her driver’s license, with a soft smile and a bob haircut.
Same glance, same moan.
“Huh,” he says.
“Yeah. That’s what I mean.”
His shoulders droop a bit as he stacks the photos up in a tight pile and fits them back in the envelope. “I don’t like any of them for kidnapping anyway,” he says. “No one’s got a decent prior to speak of.” We walk side by side out of the room, the detective’s knees cracking.
“Did you find out if that was Eliza Sapierski?”
“No. The staff person I talked to last time supposedly up and quit, and the agency clammed up. Said it wasn’t her place to talk to us anyway, and they won’t release patient information without a warrant.”
“Can you get one?”
“I’m trying. But we have no jurisdiction in Canada, and so far the authorities have been less than helpful.” He pops a piece of gum into his mouth, filling the air with mint.
We walk toward the nurses’ station. “But it looks like her, don’t you think?”
He shrugs and throws the silver gum wrapper away. “I think so, but it’s hard to know. I mean, that’s a stark before-and-after photo. Smiling in one and a corpse in the other.”
I tap my pen on Candy’s chart. “So what do we do then? We can’t just do nothing. Maybe I should try calling New Promises.”
He puts up a hand to slow me down. “The Canadians are looking over all these photos right now, seeing if anyone matches up on their side. Frequent border crossers or whatever. That’ll help us focus a bit more.”
I nod, staring at the brown floor.
“I want to find her, too. But it won’t help to send ten agents out on a wild-goose chase and miss our perp, will it?”
Perp, vic. Cop talk. A language he woke up speaking one day. “I guess not.”
He looks me in the eye. “You get Candy better. Let me take care of Janita. Deal?”
“Deal,” I answer, hoping to hell I can live up to my end of the bargain. As the detective walks out, I get to the nurses’ station and start writing my progress note, when my phone rings. Dr. Berringer’s name pops up.
“Hi, Zoe?”
“Hi.”
“I’m down in the cafeteria. Do you have a few minutes to meet? Maybe discuss the case?”
I glance at my stack of waiting charts. “Um, sure. That’s fine.”
“I mean, if you don’t have time or something…”
“No, no. I have time. It’s no problem.” Of course Probation Girl has time. “Be down in five.”
* * *
Dr. Berringer waves to me from one of the alcoves in the cafeteria. These are the rooms they dress up on the holidays—candles and wreaths on Christmas, hearts and chocolates on Valentine’s Day—an effort to soften the blow of spending your holidays in the hospital. Though I’ve always found this fabricated cheer even more depressing. I pay for some coffee, grab some mini-creamers, and meet him at the table.
“Thanks for coming,” he says as if this is his living room. “Just wanted to get some updates on Candy and stuff.” He lifts his coffee mug to his mouth with two hands, like a kid drinking hot chocolate on a cold day.
“Oh yeah, sure.” I dump in one creamer and take a test sip. Needs more creamer.
“Did Detective Adams have any more to say?”
“Yes, actually. I was going to tell you at rounds. I showed Candy’s scar to Dr. Koneru, when she first was admitted. You know, the one on her ankle?”
He nods.
“And she looked into it and ended up finding the same scar on another girl from one of her old cases. And,” I continue, “it turns out they were both from the same adoption agency. In Toronto, called New Promises.”
He sits upright as if the revelation troubles him. “Maybe they were abusing them over there.”
“Maybe. She could have run away or something. Though it wouldn’t be so easy to cross the border like that.” I take another sip of my coffee, which is now too creamy. “Did you think any more about the serotonin syndrome?”
“Yeah, it’s not a bad thought. But everyone I talk to still thinks catatonia.” He clears his throat. “We’ll see what the EEG says.”
“Right, that makes sense.”
He taps his long fingers on the table. “This case is a bitch. Hardest one I’ve ever covered. I’m not afraid to admit it.”
“For sure.” We pause then as a group of residents sits down at the back table by the window, running through their patient list. It’s a favored spot for this; visitors and patients don’t usually venture into the alcove rooms. For a few minutes, we sip at our coffees, having seemingly run out of things to say about Candy.
“Zoe, I wanted to talk to you about something.” He fidgets in his seat. “You probably figured out that I didn’t just want to talk about work.”
The residents at the back table start laughing. “I was kind of wondering.”
“Yes, I needed to tell you something.” He takes a deep breath, staring down at his coffee, and lowers his voice. “I lied to you before, that night on the twelfth floor. When I said I wasn’t cheating. I was.”
I lean back in the chair. “Okay.”
“That was the main reason for the divorce.”
I nod, crinkling the empty creamer.
“It’s over now. It was stupid. She was a lot younger than me, and I guess I was just, I don’t know, flattered.”
Perhaps this explains the tense silence at the coffeehouse when he and his wife came that one time. “It happens,” I say.
“Yeah, but not to me. Well, not before this time anyway. We had our problems even before all that, but this was the last straw.”
I take off my glasses and start cleaning them, not sure what I’m supposed to say. “I don’t mean to be rude, Dr. Berringer, but why are you telling me all this?”
He pauses, flicking his mug with his index finger in a tinny rhythm.
“You know, Zoe, I don’t have many friends,” he says. “Good friends, I mean.”
“Okay?”
“And I feel like we connect. You’re going to be an attending soon, a colleague, not just a resident.”
“This is true.”
“I guess what I mean to say is, I think”—he looks in my eyes—“we could be friends, you know. You and me. I hope we can, anyway.” He looks in his coffee again. “And I don’t want to be lying to you. I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from someone else. I’m not a bad guy, Zoe. I did something stupid, but I’m trying. With everything, I’m trying.”
The residents at the back table get up to leave, carrying their trays. “I don’t think you’re a bad guy. We all make mistakes.”
“Well”—Dr. Berringer takes another sip of coffee—“thanks for saying that, anyway.” He puts the mug down. “And how are you doing with everything? With the ADHD and all that.”
“Good, I guess. Better anyway. I can focus for more than, like, three consecutive seconds.”
He throws his head back with a laugh, and the overhead light shows a smattering of blond-gray stubble on his cheeks. A nascent fall beard? A three o’clock shadow? His eyes glitter gray blue in the light. “You’re damn smart, Zoe. One of the smartest residents I’ve ever taught.”
“Oh, you don’t have to say that.” I feel myself blushing.
“I know I don’t. I mean it, though. You keep me on my toes.” He touches my wool sleeve, delivering a static shock. “Sorry.” He retracts his hand.
“That’s okay. I’m not easily shocked,” I say, a lame attempt at humor, and he gives me a sheepish smile and stands up. “Be right back.”
As he walks off to the bathroom, I fight the buoyant smile about to take over my face. The telltale, stupid, budding-crush smile. Which is ridiculous, considering Dr. Berringer may be wunderkind smart and, yes, somewhat attractive even. But he’s also married, for now anyway. And an alcoholic. And my attending.
Not to mention that I’m already dating someone.
Taking a sip of my cooling, syrupy coffee, I wonder about this. Is this why I haven’t made a decision about next year with Mike? Just to keep my options open? The notion does not paint a pretty picture of me, and offers yet another reason for Mike to flee to North Carolina. The sound of a text interrupts my unhappy musings, and I search in my pocket. But then I realize it’s Tad’s phone, which he left faceup on the table. I shouldn’t look, I know that, but I do anyway.
Sign the papers or I will tell them everything.
It’s from his wife.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I can make…” I say, mentally perusing my minuscule catalog of recipes, “cheese and crackers?”
Scotty openly guffaws. “You mean, you know how to open up cheese and crackers and put them on a plate?”