Do No Harm

by Christina McDonald

  The café was busy. Most doctors went to the staff cafeteria upstairs for lunch, but the coffee was better down here. I got in the back of the line.

  “Hello, Emma.” Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I whirled to see Cass Robbins standing in line behind me. Cass had huge, soft brown eyes that were serene and thoughtful, matching a calm demeanor that was much admired in the ER, where she worked as a doctor. She smiled, revealing teeth that were an orchestra of chaos, her front teeth too large, her canines twisted and sticking out at odd angles.

  “Oh, hi, Cass.” I risked a quick glance out the window for Gabe; he was still on the phone.

  “How are you? How’s Josh?” Cass peered at me, her brow furrowed. Word spread fast in a small town.

  “He’s okay right now, thanks. How are you?”

  Cass sighed. “I need more coffee. The amount of ODs coming in lately, I just can’t keep up. We had two resuscitations this morning, a mother and father. Their four-year-old called nine-one-one when she couldn’t wake them.”

  “Oh my God. Did they survive?”

  She shook her head. “Poor little girl’s going to grow up completely traumatized.”

  I opened my mouth to answer but was saved by the cashier calling me up. I ordered a blueberry muffin for Moira, a double-shot Americano for myself, and a mocha for Gabe, which I remembered was his drink of choice.

  “You must really need the caffeine!” Cass chuckled, an eyebrow arched.

  “Ha.” I forced out a breezy laugh, busying myself with stuffing my receipt into my purse. “I’m meeting a… friend.”

  She glanced over my shoulder and grinned. “Oh my God! Your friend is hot. Maybe introduce me later.”

  I turned to see Gabe watching me from the other side of the glass. My stomach twisted.

  The barista plopped our drinks on the counter. Cass grabbed hers and waved good-bye. I picked up the coffees and blueberry muffin and found a mostly-clean table tucked in a corner at the back. A minute later, Gabe slumped into the chair opposite me.

  He took a long slug of coffee and made a face.

  “Why are you here?” I hissed.

  “You wanted my help, right?”

  “Yes, but this is where I work!”

  “I wanted to see him.”

  “I told you, you can’t meet him. My husband doesn’t know about us. He’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to find out like that.”

  The thought of it, Gabe telling Nate he was Josh’s father, triggered a sickening, clammy feeling deep inside me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I lifted one shoulder. “I guess I just wanted Josh to have a family. And I knew he wouldn’t get that from you.”

  Gabe looked pained by my words. After a minute, he nodded. “I won’t tell your husband. Promise. I just want to meet Josh.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Gabe, I—”

  Gabe stood, somehow managing to both lift his chin and glare down his nose at me at the same time. God, he looked like a thumb when he did that. A very hairy thumb.

  “Look, sweetheart, you want my help, I want to meet Josh. Arrange it, or I’m out.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Fine.”

  Gabe sat back down, looking smug. He reached across the table and grabbed the half-eaten ham-and-cheese croissant sitting next to me. He took a massive bite, cheese oozing out the bottom and dribbling down his chin as he chewed. I watched him impassively.

  “Have you heard from Ben?” I asked.

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  Gabe finished the croissant. He grabbed a crumpled napkin from the table and wiped the grease from his mouth.

  “She wants to meet you,” he finally said.

  “Who?”

  “The person who can help you.” He thunked a small black backpack onto the table. “Here’s the money for the scripts you left at the gas station. Cash. There’s five K in there. She’ll give you two thousand dollars per prescription, so she still owes you another five K.”

  I did the math quickly in my head. From what I’d read, oxy’s street value was around $45 per pill. There were 120 pills in a bottle, so one prescription could bring in over $5,000. Why was she only offering me $2,000? I would have to sign 50 prescriptions to get enough money to pay the $98,000 for Josh’s reprogrammed cells to be injected. Even with prescription pads for six different doctors, it was far more than I’d wanted to sell.

  It was too risky.

  “She also has a business proposition for you,” Gabe said.

  “I’m listening.” I leaned back and studied him.

  Gabe shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Like I said, I’m out. I just know her through a friend. She said she’ll meet you tonight. Midnight. At the old Skamania Mill. And she’ll give you the other five K then.”

  “The abandoned warehouse over by the waterfall?” I exclaimed, incredulous. “You must be joking. I’m not meeting a drug dealer I don’t know at some deserted old warehouse. I know how that movie ends!”

  Gabe rolled his eyes. “She isn’t a drug dealer. Not like you’re thinking. She isn’t part of some cartel or gang. She has a job, a kid. She’s smart. She just deals a little to make a bit of extra money. Like I did. Like you’re doing.”

  I tried not to let my disdain show, but Gabe saw it. “You can look down your nose all you want, but you’re just the same as us now.”

  I wanted to scream.

  But she still had the rest of my money. “Fine, I’ll meet her. But you have to come too. And then I’ll organize a time when you can meet Josh. Lunch or something.”

  Gabe shrugged. “Sure.”

  I pushed one of the cheap cell phones I’d bought across the table to Gabe. “I have one just like it. I’ve put my number on this one and downloaded WhatsApp. Only contact me using that.”

  He seemed exasperated by my caution.

  “I have a lot to lose here, Gabe. I’m trusting you. Josh is trusting you. We can’t have anybody find out.”

  “Whatever you want, sweetheart.” He slipped the phone into his jeans pocket.

  “And don’t call me sweetheart.”

  I grabbed the black backpack and the canvas bag and stood, coming around to Gabe’s side of the table. I leaned close to whisper in his ear, “By the way, that ham-and-cheese croissant was here when I sat down.”

  I straightened, pleased at the look of horror that crossed his face.

  “See you tonight,” I called over my shoulder as I strode briskly away.

  CHAPTER 12

  “YOU SHOULD GO HOME. Get some rest,” I told Nate that night. “Charlie needs to be fed and let out.”

  He’d come straight from work to the hospital, not even bothering to go home and shower. He had a distracted, faraway look in his eye.

  I felt a twinge of resentment pull in my chest. He wanted this promotion to help Josh, but if Josh died, the promotion would mean nothing. He was working for something in a future that might not even matter. Knowing his mind was on unraveling the tangle of a stranger’s death rather than fighting for our son’s life made me furious.

  “I thought you said Jennifer was going to do it?”

  “We still need to make sure he’s okay.”

  Nate hesitated. “I don’t know.…”

  He looked tired, physically and mentally, dark circles under his eyes, his skin gray. He wasn’t sleeping well either. But still, he looked at me and smiled, drawing me close, and as he did I softened, melting against him.

  “It’s fine. Honestly.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed his lips, not wanting him to feel guilty for leaving.

  I remembered one evening when we’d only been dating a couple weeks, it began to snow. We still lived in Seattle then, and snow was unusual enough that we decided to go for a walk. The snow fell softly, clumping into our eyelashes and melting on our lips. I’d stopped walking, drinking in the sight of this man I already loved more than I’d ever thought possible.

  I’m so lucky to have you, I’d thought, and
then I said it out loud, just so he knew.

  He had gently brushed a flake from my cheek and bent to kiss me tenderly. At that moment, I felt such a deep sense of belonging. He reached for my hand and pulled me against him.

  “Come here, mo chuisle.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s Irish for my heartbeat or my heart. My dad used to say it to my mom.”

  “That’s so sweet…” I struggled to think of a cute reply, then flashed back to my high school French. “… mon homme,” I blurted.

  We both burst out laughing. “Sorry,” I said between gasps of laughter. “I’m crap at being a girlfriend. This is all just so new to me!”

  “Then why don’t you be my wife instead?”

  For a moment, I couldn’t speak. School and then the hospital were the only constants I’d had until I met Nate, kindhearted, loyal, cheerful Nate. His optimism and his love for his family were infectious, and I ached to be a part of it. He would love me, protect me. We’d get married, have a family, grow old together. I’d never felt that way before, and it was magic.

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  I’d found out a week later I was pregnant, and when I read the DNA results I knew exactly what I needed to do. The instant I told him, Nate proposed a second time. My face was covered in snot and tears, my heart aching, but somehow that second time was even more romantic than the first.

  We were married just a couple months later.

  Nate was a good man. But all his good qualities meant I couldn’t tell him what I was doing now. He wouldn’t understand, and he certainly wouldn’t agree.

  I wrapped my arms around Nate’s waist, feeling the warmth of his body against mine. He dropped his chin onto my head and exhaled heavily.

  “You’re exhausted,” I said. “Just go home and get some sleep. I’m fine sleeping on the couch here. And anyway, you have to work tomorrow.”

  “All right,” he finally agreed. His breath was warm against my hair. “I’ll be here tomorrow morning, okay?”

  “Sure. Love you.”

  Nate kissed me good-bye and stumbled out of the room, bleary-eyed and exhausted.

  Josh was sleeping soundly, the room a peaceful oasis for the next hour before I had to leave to meet Gabe and his drug-dealer friend. I checked Facebook on my phone, saw what a few college friends were up to, caught up on the news.

  A doctor in Spokane had been charged with more than eight hundred counts of illegally selling opioids; a police officer in Oregon had stoned a squirrel and killed it; a murder-suicide in Tacoma. I tapped on local news, my eye snagging on a story about a drug dealer called Santiago Martinez who’d been murdered over in Mill Creek.

  This, I realized, was the case Nate was working on. The case that was taking him away from us but could get him promoted to lieutenant.

  The story outlined a man with a history of drug abuse and dealing, who’d left Seattle for a fresh start and gotten caught up in a turf war that had left him dead.

  Nate was quoted in the article: “I would like to appeal to anyone who was in the area at the time of the incident to come forward, if they haven’t already done so. We can assure the public that the Skamania community is very safe. We’re doing all that we can to establish the full circumstances of this case.”

  After a while reading the news, my eyes started to droop, exhaustion smearing the room around me.

  Glass shattering.

  My mother’s scream.

  Daddy sobbing, “Don’t leave me!”

  I jolted awake, my body covered in a cold, sticky sweat. A shadow hovered over me. I gasped and lurched upright.

  “Mommy?” Josh’s voice. I put a hand out to touch him, felt his skin, warm under mine.

  “Josh?”

  “Were you having a bad dream?”

  I pulled him against me, still panting. “I guess I was.”

  “What was it about?”

  It was a memory more than a nightmare. Only somehow the images had shifted, revealing things that hadn’t happened. Instead of being inside the car, I’d dreamed I was on the road watching as it careened toward me. I screamed as the car abruptly jerked to the right, hurtled through the air, and flipped onto its side. And then the dream had started over again.

  Over and over I’d watched, unable to do anything to stop the accident. Unable to do anything to save them.

  “I can’t remember,” I lied.

  “I had a bad dream too.” He snuggled into me, his body warm, smelling just faintly of yeast.

  “What happened?”

  “I builded a sand castle and then I went inside, and a big giant came and he stepped on it and everybody in the sand castle died.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I pulled him tight against my chest. “I’m so sorry. That sounds like it was really scary.”

  We lay in silence for a long time before I remembered I had somewhere to be. My eyes flew to the clock. It was almost midnight.

  “Time to get back in bed,” I whispered. I tucked Josh into the narrow hospital bed and kissed his forehead where a creamy slice of moonlight fell across his face. “Love you, sweetie.”

  He yawned and rolled onto his side. “Love you too, Mommy.”

  I lay on the couch, my eyes wide, staring at the ceiling. A hospital room was never dark—not totally. And it was rarely quiet. The machines in the room hissed and spluttered; doctors and nurses hurried past; lights flooded the room; there was the scrape of curtains being pulled back against metal rods and the sound of bells and beeping from different rooms. I couldn’t have gone back to sleep if I’d wanted to.

  Eventually Josh’s breath deepened, the telltale click at the back of his throat indicating he was asleep.

  I pulled on my fleece-lined ankle boots and slipped into my wool coat. Then I tucked the canvas bag with the prescriptions into my purse and crossed my fingers, hoping Josh wouldn’t wake up in the next hour or so.

  Outside, the night was crisp, a cool breeze cutting sharply through my coat, biting at my cheeks and fingertips. I pulled my knitted hat down and drove carefully through town. The last thing I needed was one of Nate’s colleagues pulling me over right now. Fortunately, the streets were empty at this time of night, not a soul in sight.

  At the edge of town, I crossed the bridge and turned downriver in the direction of the old Skamania Mill. I drove for miles, the dark road potted with holes and cracks that jarred my teeth and set me on edge.

  Eventually I pulled up next to a beat-up old Ford parked in front of a chain-link fence. There was only one car. There should be two. I debated waiting around, but I was already late. I grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment and tucked my purse over one shoulder, heart thundering in my ears. I wiped sweaty palms on my jeans.

  When I got out, I instantly heard the distant rumble of the falls. A wind-driven mist rose beyond the warehouse, fingers curling over the evergreen trees, sliding over the river, and tangling at the bottom of the mill.

  I slid through a gap in the chain-link fence and crossed a long-deserted parking lot. A few years back, the building had been rezoned for commercial redevelopment, but city officials had found that the steel trusses atop the walls were damaged, forcing the company to shelve the project. The building had sat abandoned ever since.

  I swept the beam of my flashlight over the ground as I walked. Dead leaves and crackling branches whispered in the wind. Weeds pushed up through huge cracks in the cement. My boots crunched over fragments of glass. My neck prickled.

  The warehouse itself was two stories tall, the ancient wood rotting from the constant humidity. A crumbling brick smokestack jutted into the sky at the far end of the building, the outline a moody and sinister shadow against the sky. The gaping holes of broken windows were like screaming black mouths.

  I approached the front door, careful to avoid splintered wood pierced with rusty nails. It was locked, a bicycle padlock coiled around the handle. I moved around the side of the building, pushing past a
cluster of overgrown bushes. A spiderweb clawed at my face, and I felt the tiny feet of a spider tapping on my cheek. I stifled a scream and swiped at it. It fell to the ground, illuminated in the yellow glow of my flashlight. It tried to scuttle away but I squished it with my boot, my pulse throbbing in my ears.

  I stood for a moment, rigid as the stark winter trees surrounding me. Every one of my senses was screaming at me to get the hell out of here. But I was here for Josh. Nothing could get in the way of that.

  I elbowed my way through the rest of the brush and moved to the rear of the building, where there was a little clearing, muddy grass rolling down to the rushing river, the waterfall churning beyond.

  The back door was propped open with a large rock. Inside, the skeletons of rusted factory equipment were pushed against corrugated walls. Decaying steel beams stretched high overhead. Water dripped rhythmically down the walls. The air was thick with damp, the pungent smell of mold on rotting wood.

  A lantern sat on a table under the stairs, casting a warm, buttery glow onto the floor. It took me a minute to make out Gabe sitting at a table tucked neatly beneath the stairs. He was with a woman. Her head was bent over the table; she was snorting a line of something. Cocaine? She sniffed and threw her head back, pinching her nose.

  “Gabe,” I whispered.

  “Emma!” Gabe hurried to me, as the woman tucked a small baggie back into a briefcase on the table. “You’re late.” He motioned for me to sit in one of the dilapidated chairs and turned to the other woman. “See, I told you she’d be here.”

  “Sorry, Josh woke up.” My voice sounded breathless from the nerves writhing in my stomach.

  The woman was nothing like what I’d expected. She was very young, for starters, and small, the size of a teenager, although I’d peg her as in her early twenties. She had a petite, heart-shaped face and long, dark hair that was held back with a crimson silk scarf. She wore skinny jeans with Ugg boots and a frilled white shirt under a leather jacket.

  Her eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated she looked like a cartoon character. But when she smiled, her teeth were straight and white, her hand warm and soft when she shook mine.