Code Blues

by Melissa Yi

  He gripped the bottle hard enough to dent the plastic. I chuckled and drew the bottle from his hand. "Thanks."

  I waited for him to say I was welcome. Instead, he took a breath and surveyed my hair. "It's better. But it's all wet now."

  Well, duh. He'd just poured two cups of water over my hair. I smoothed my bangs back from my face. "It'll dry."

  He whipped off his T-shirt. I got a glimpse of his bare chest and abs before he threw the shirt over my head and started scrubbing my hair dry.

  "Alex!" I yelled, muffled under the cloth.

  "I don't want you to catch pneumonia," he said cheerfully, rubbing my head with extra vigor as I tried to push him away.

  "I won't catch pneumonia, you kook! That's an old wives' tale, and anyway, it's July!"

  "Atypical pneumonia," he said, a medical joke that made both me and Tori laugh, even as I ripped the T-shirt out of his hand and tossed it back to him, looking his lean shape up and down as I did so. He had a little chest hair, including a line running down to his belly button and below. "That's enough," I said.

  He caught the shirt in one hand and let me look for another long beat. "If you say so." Then he slipped the shirt back on and grinned at me as his head popped through the collar.

  A guy wolf-whistled, and a girl yelled, "Take it off!"

  Alex watched me with a half-smile.

  "Show-off," I said.

  His smile widened. "So are you."

  I guessed he meant the dancing earlier. I laughed. "A little. But you take the cake."

  His eyes gleamed. "Tastes better that way."

  It sounded like a come-on. I found myself blushing again. I wished Tori would say something. She just threw her empty cup in the trash can, making us back away from it.

  It was a lot easier to be mad at Alex in the abstract than in the flesh. I'd been pissed because he lied to me, but I'd also been jealous Mireille had had him first. Not to mention gun shy after Ryan. Ryan and I had never had any significant ties before each other, but now that I was in my mid-20's, a virgin with a clean record was going to be pretty hard to come by, unless I started cruising the high schools. Maybe even middle schools.

  As long as Alex didn't lie to me any more, I could handle his history. I smiled at him as I finger-combed my hair into place.

  "You look beautiful," Alex said softly.

  Tori walked up to him and held out his Labatt's. "Here's your beer."

  I eyed her carefully, but she was more focused on me than him. In the depths of her gaze, I saw concern. She shook the beer cup at Alex.

  "Thanks," he said, his eyes still on me.

  If it had been just Alex and me on Ste-Catherine Street, I might have followed him home and taken off his T-shirt again.

  He watched me over the rim of his cup, his eyes flicking up and down. He was thinking the same thing.

  But we hadn't talked about Mireille yet. More importantly, Tori was here, and I wouldn't abandon her or slag her off. She deserved better. So I tried to break the mood with a joke. "Free hair washing. Almost worth getting beer in my hair."

  "Maybe it was good for your hair," said Tori. "Some women use beer like shampoo."

  "Oh, yeah, I heard that," I said, finally taking my eyes off Alex. But when I glanced back at him, his eyes were still fastened on me. I gulped water, finishing the bottle Alex had used on my hair.

  Tori said, "We just ran into Vicki. Kurt's fiancée."

  Alex's eyes flickered.

  "Yeah." I roused myself. "That was weird. I got a call this afternoon from a woman who said she was Vicki. She wanted me to leave her alone. But we just ran into the real Vicki, and she didn't know what I was talking about."

  Alex said, "Huh. That's weird. You think someone was impersonating Vicki?"

  "Either that, or she's got multiple personality disorder," I said.

  Alex and Tori exchanged a glance.

  "I'm joking," I said. Then I looked at them. "You think that's possible?"

  Tori laughed. "I don't think so. I did obstetrics at St. Joseph's as a med student, and she was pretty reasonable. But you do hear stories."

  "What stories?" I asked.

  She shrugged. "Gossip."

  Man. She was tight-lipped. Alex stepped in. "You get some weird personalities on OB. When we started, the residents told us to avoid certain people." He lowered his voice. "One of them was Vicki. She came off as sweetness and light ninety percent of the time, but the other ten percent, watch out. She'd tear your arm off if she thought you weren't delivering the baby right."

  I frowned. "But you guys were always supervised during deliveries, right?"

  Alex quaffed some more beer. "Pretty much. Either a resident or staff would be there. But once in a while, in the middle of the night, the student would be the first one on the scene. If it was Vicki's patient, watch out. She didn't trust us."

  Tori made a face. "That's normal on OB."

  I nodded. "And peds." Those are two the specialties where the nurses are notoriously protective of their patients and think that med students are rabid creatures to be kept at bay. It's understandable. You don't want some dopehead med student bludgeoning a sick kid or difficult delivery. Some of the nurses there have been working longer than we've been alive. On the other hand, these are teaching hospitals, and if the nurses won't let us learn, future doctors won't be properly trained. Since I'd just started here, I had no evidence if Vicki was really off-kilter or if the residents didn't like her because she was overprotective. "I wonder how she hooked up with Kurt. He seemed like the original champion of medical education. I don't know why he'd pick a girlfriend who dismembered med students." I smiled. They didn't smile back. I decided to put the screws to Alex, at least lightly. "Plus the whole Mireille thing."

  Alex exhaled and studied the pavement. Tori glanced at him, waiting for him to answer, but when he remained silent, she finally stepped in. "Kurt was—" She stopped, choosing her words carefully. "—very popular. Easy to like."

  "He, ah, dated around?" I would have said screwed around, but Tori was a lady.

  She eyed Alex again. "Well. Mireille was the only student he was ever involved with, as far as I know."

  He lifted his head and swigged the last of the beer before he said, "She broke up with me and hooked up with Kurt." He threw his empty cup in the garbage.

  I raised my eyebrows. It was one thing for Alex and Mireille to go mini-golfing together a few times in first year. It was quite another for her to dump him right before taking up with a teacher. Could Alex have been upset enough to kill Kurt?

  But then why would he ask me to investigate? This was so screwed up.

  Alex's mouth twisted wryly. "I didn't kill him, if that's what you're thinking."

  I shrugged. "Well, you're the one who'd know." I left a questioning note on the last word.

  He snorted. "Great. Now I'm a killer. No, seriously. No one likes to be dumped, right?" He pulled at the collar of his T-shirt. "But that's, like, WTLY." He pronounced it like "wit-ley," saw my confused face and explained, "Welcome To Last Year. I'm over it. Mireille was the one who botched it; Kurt didn't even know we were still going out. He called me at home, asked me if I was okay with it, offered to break it off with M." Alex's voice softened. "He was really a decent guy."

  I checked Tori's face, but she was doing the poker face again.

  The crowd cheered the end of the song, with one guy yelling, "Ay caramba!" I laughed a little, and Alex shifted his weight, more relaxed now.

  I said, "First of all, you should have told me you and Mireille were going out instead of this junk about a 'friend.'"

  "I didn't want you to get—"

  I held my palm to his face. "Hand." Since it was his turn to look confused, I added, "Talk to it." He wasn't the only one who knew slang, even if mine was a little out-of-date.

  He stopped. "Okay. I guess I deserve that."

  "You deserve more than that. Don't lie to me." He started toward me, but I backed away. "Don't lie to me,
don't ditch me, don't do anything you wouldn't want me to do to you."

  He exhaled, extending his head and surveying the night sky. "The golden rule."

  "Not just for Christians anymore."

  "Sounds good to me," Tori said in a low voice.

  I flashed her a smile and waited for Alex.

  His shoulders sagged. "Yeah. You're right." He looked at me levelly, no flirting now, straight up. "Sorry."

  I nodded.

  "I'm an asshole. Odey-oh," he added.

  Hey. That was an obscure song reference. I liked it. "Okay. Just go forth and asshole no more."

  He choked on a laugh. "I'll do my best. Seriously."

  I'd had enough mea culpa. I turned to include Tori in the conversation. Her eyes gleamed with approval. I gave her a small smile. "Now that we've solved that mystery—" I tilted my head. "Well, actually, I still don't know why Mireille ended up with Kurt. But the bigger question is, why did Kurt end up engaged to Vicki?"

  Alex shrugged and grinned a little. "I think Kurt didn't trust Mireille completely after she lied about me. Too bad, so sad."

  In the distance, the band started up again, the brass wailing another tune. The crowd cheered and clapped.

  Tori waited for the noise to subside a little before she put in, "It's not against the law for a staff member to date a student. But it's not approved of, either. It probably would have been all right if Mireille had gone into surgery, as she'd planned. But at the last minute, she ranked family medicine first and asked to be at St. Joe's."

  Alex snorted. "Yeah. She had to get greedy."

  I remembered running into her on the street with the surgery guy from the Jewish. I looked from Alex to Tori. "Mireille wanted to be a surgeon?"

  Alex raised his eyebrows. "General surgery, no less."

  Arguably the most draining kind of surgery. Gen surg used to cover everything from thyroid to basic ortho, C-sections, and bowel CA, but now, with subspecialization and turf wars, they've largely been confined to "breast and bowel," as I'd heard one resident sum it up.

  Bowel includes the appendix, and when I was on call for gen surg, almost every single night, we'd go to the OR for at least one appy, plus they'd have to cover any trauma. No other surgical consultants had to come in every night. Generalists also tend not to get paid as well as specialists. Of course surgeons usually do well, but everyone envies the ophthalmologists who tend to work from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and make a killing on cataract or laser surgery. To be a general surgeon, you have to love the work.

  Mireille must have loved the work. Instead, she chose her boyfriend, only to have him toss her away.

  If what they were saying was true, Mireille hadn't just lost a boyfriend. She'd lost her career. And at this stage in our lives, that's everything. If it were me, I'd be questioning my choices, seething at Kurt and Vicki, and most of all, flagellating myself while trying to put on a happy face for family medicine. I asked, "Can she switch to gen surg?"

  Alex half-laughed. Tori said, "I think she may try to. But she could lose the year."

  Losing a year was bad. Doing family medicine against her will was arguably worse. It didn't excuse her rudeness to me, but it helped explain why she was already pissed before I started poking around.

  And yet, when I pictured her in my mind, I couldn't forget her powerful shoulders and arms. She could have dragged Kurt in the locker room. She had good reason to hate Kurt, the best motive I'd uncovered so far. Mireille was definitely a candidate.

  Too bad. I wanted it to be Dr. Callendar. The whole two birds, one stone thing.

  I tried to work out the timing. We applied to residency last fall. Alex implied he and Mireille had broken up before the New Year. I think we submitted our rank lists—the list of programs we'd accept, in descending order of preference—in February, a month before the match. We got our match results on March 15th, telling us which residency program and which city we'd been matched to.

  So her romance with Kurt must have lasted until at least Valentine's Day, or else she would have changed her rank list. Sometime between February and July first, he had broken up with her and proposed to Vicki. Five months. Fast work. I found myself not liking him as much.

  I had to verify my calculations. "When were Mireille and Kurt dating?"

  Alex snorted. "October to April. As far as I know." He looked at my half-empty water bottle. "Are you going to finish that?"

  I handed it to him. "And when were you and Mireille together?"

  He took a long swig. "On and off, until December. For a year."

  A year. That was pretty serious. It also didn't seem to go with his previous timeline.

  Alex waved his hand. "More off than on. We hardly saw each other. We were finishing clerkship and applying for residency."

  Tori's eyebrows quirked, but she said nothing.

  I tried to shove aside my own disappointment. "If you guys were together for that long, and you both did family medicine at St. Joseph's, Kurt must have known that you were together, just the way you acted around each other."

  Alex recapped the water bottle and handed it back to me. "Uh uh. At McGill, we rotate through the hospitals starting in second year, as an introduction, and then again in clerkship. Mireille and I were both here in second year, but in different groups. Then she came back in clerkship, but I was at the Jewish. Kurt never saw us together."

  Tori said, "So how did he find out you'd been dating?"

  Alex suppressed a burp. "ESP."

  We both wrinkled our noses. He said, "Sorry."

  Tori repeated, "If he never saw you together, how did he find out you'd been dating?"

  "Maybe Mireille told him."

  Not likely. It wasn't in her own best interest. She wasn't about to say, "Guess who I used to do, right before you?" Or, even worse, at the same time as I was doing you?

  Alex grimaced. "Oh, all right. I told him off for dating a student. He figured out the rest." He spread his arms. "But that goes way back. When Mireille told me they were getting engaged, I said Mazel tov. What's it to me?"

  Was he Jewish? No, I thought he was, if anything, a Mennonite. Maybe Mireille was Jewish. Oh, who cared. I was getting distracted from the important stuff.

  Tori stepped in. "I never heard they were engaged."

  Alex smiled wolfishly. A lot of teeth. "No, you wouldn't have. Because soon after she told me that, he dumped her and took up with Vicki. Tit for tat." He cackled.

  Despite how much he protested, Alex didn't seem over Mireille. Even wanting to nail her as a killer meant he wanted to nail her in one form or other.

  Tori said, "She must have been hurt."

  Alex bobbed his head up and down in cheerful agreement. "That's why she may have killed him."

  "No, Alex," Tori said. "That's a terrible thing to say."

  Alex held his hands, palm up. "The truth hurts."

  His definition of truth was pretty lax. Not attractive. Also, if he expected me to root the dirt out on Mireille just so he wouldn't look petty while she took the fall, he'd have to try a lot harder than hair-washing. I took a step back. "I have to go."

  Alex stepped forward, his arm raised and ready to loop around my shoulders. "Aw, no. Not yet. The night's still young, Hope."

  I made a show of checking my watch. "Not young enough. Thanks for the hairdressing. See you. Coming, Tori?"

  She said, "Yes. It's been a long day. 'Bye, Alex."

  I felt a sour triumph. I wouldn't play his fool.

  On the other hand, I probably wouldn't get to play with him at all. I should have felt liberated.

  Alex said, "All right. I'll go listen to some jazz. 'Bye, ladies." He kissed Tori's cheeks fast, and then drew me close. His breath was heavily sautéed in alcohol, but his twin kisses were warm and tender against my skin. He stared deep into my eyes. "Auf wiedersehen."

  My heart thumped twice. It sounded so poignant when he said it. I knew enough German to translate it as "until we see each other again." It meant the same as the m
ore predictable French "au revoir," but on his lips, the German somehow carried more intimacy.

  Or maybe I was reading too much into it, as usual. Didn't Mennonites speak German?

  I spread disinterest over my face and turned to Tori. "Subway calling?"

  She nodded.

  I glanced over my shoulder, at Alex. He waved and began weaving back through the crowd, but he turned once to give me a regretful grin before his lanky figure cut into the night crowd.

  My stomach squiggled again.

  Tori shook her head.

  "What?" I said.

  She quirked her eyebrows until I rubbed the pavement with my sandal, pretending to polish a piece of gum off the sole. I said to the asphalt, "I know what I'm doing."

  I felt, more than saw, her shake her head, but she dropped it. "You still have time to catch the blue line. The last train is around 11:15."

  My jaw dropped.

  She laughed. "Did you not see the signs in the station?"

  I shook my head. I'm usually people-watching, or staring at the map, making sure I'm heading the right way. "Well, that sucks! How am I supposed to go out at night then?"

  "Taxi. Or, depending exactly where you are, you could walk from the orange line. You have a lot to learn about—Montreal." The slight pause made it clear the city wasn't all that she had in mind, but I wasn't ready to talk about Alex. I was embarrassed by my strong reaction to him. Zing is good, but he was someone who could carve his way into my heart, leave footprints on my brain, and inscribe his initials in my small intestines. If I let him.

  Part of me wanted to jump into free fall. The other part, the careful part, the doctor part, the Tori part, whispered, he is dangerous. Run away and stock up on garlic and crucifixes.

  But whenever I was with Alex in the flesh, the first part won.

  I honestly think I'm somewhat screwed up from being good so long. The most hazardous thing I've ever done was to get drunk and kiss a stranger when I was sixteen. But it was never perilous. I was tipsy, but I knew exactly what I was doing and how far I was willing to go. The guy was toasted enough to be harmless. When I decided I'd had enough, I took a cab home. Granted, it was 4 a.m. and he was a decade older than me, but it's the wildest thing I've ever done in my life. And that was ten years ago.