by Harry Kraus
“Wonderful.” Tori let the words drip with sarcasm.
When the psychiatrist looked hurt, Tori explained, “I couldn’t care less about whether medical science benefits from this. I just want to assist in bringing justice if someone was really trying to hurt Dakota Jones.”
“Okay,” Dr. Jaworski said, “let’s begin.” She opened a laptop and poised her fingers over the keyboard. “Tell me about your earliest memory.”
Pastor Randy Slaytor folded his hands in his lap and looked at Phin. “It doesn’t sound like you’re being fair. You’re leading her on by your actions.”
“That’s just it—I don’t want to lead her on. In fact, it doesn’t feel that way. When we kissed, it was something that I really wanted to do. It’s just …”
Randy hesitated and finally finished the sentence for him. “You just don’t think it’s right.”
“She’s a great lady, don’t get me wrong. But we don’t share the same faith. She’s a scientist. She believes in what she can see and feel.”
Randy leaned back. “And did you tell her that the faith issue is what’s holding you back?”
“No.” Phin shook his head. “I didn’t want to see her exploring faith out of a motivation to get on my good side.”
“So you really think you have that much influence?”
“I think it’s pretty clear that she liked me. But now I’m not so sure.”
“She sounds hurt.”
Phin nodded. “My fault, bro.”
“I think you know where I stand on this. I’m concerned about whether you’re being fair to Tori.”
“I know.” Phin paced around Randy’s small office. “I should never have let things go so far.”
“You need to give her space.”
“Oh, believe me, that’s no problem. I’m not sure she’d want to see me at all anymore.”
Randy sighed. “Maybe that’s best.”
Phin stared out the window across the empty parking lot. “I think it is. But it doesn’t really feel best.”
Kesha watched Mike limp over and plop onto the couch. “Are you hurtin’, baby?”
“A little.”
“We need to take you back to the clinic.”
“But my doctor’s dead.”
“There are other doctors, silly.”
“Can you call that lady doctor, the one that was looking at Dakota’s place?”
“She works in Richmond, Mike. That’s a long ways.”
“But she told you she’d see me, right?”
“She said ‘if’ I could get you to Richmond, she’d make sure you were taken care of.”
“We can take a bus. Willie did it.”
“Willie has money.”
“You have money. I’ve seen the jar under your bed.”
“You need to stay out of my things.”
“Call the lady doctor. I don’t want to go back to the clinic. They just want to give me drugs.”
“The drugs helped, didn’t they?”
“The pain, maybe, but the lump is still there.”
Kesha opened her purse on the kitchen table and began to search. A moment later, she lifted a small card. “Here it is,” she said, reading the card. “Victoria Taylor, MD, FACS, Department of Surgical Oncology. I wonder what all those initials mean.”
“That’s her degrees or something.”
Kesha nodded. How did her son get to be so smart? “Go bring me that jar,” she said. “I’ll see if we have enough for bus fare.”
Her earliest memory?
It was to be the trip of her young life. A trip to Walt Disney World. Breakfast with Mickey Mouse. The Magic Kingdom.
But somewhere in the throngs of people, six-year-old Tori Taylor stood in line with her mother so she could ride on the spinning teacups. Again. Tori looked at the park map and tightly gripped the sleeve of her mother. But when she looked up, the sleeve she held wasn’t her mother’s after all.
Little Tori stumbled backward from the line and began calling her mother’s name. Back and forth along the line, then back to the bench to see if her Dad was waiting.
No Dad.
She squinted at the sun.
She was alone in a crowd. She studied the people walking hand in hand and others eating ice cream.
How will they find me?
Have they left me?
Was this the plan all along?
Tori felt for the bulge in her pocket, the silver flip-open lighter that her Dad let her carry for him. He’d even showed her how to use it.
She could get their attention.
She walked to a large trash bin, casually lit the paper map in her hand and tossed it into the open trash container.
In a few moments there were screams of “Fire!” Park visitors scattered. A man in a uniform grabbed her by the arm; another wielded a fire extinguisher.
The man released her arm and knelt to eye level. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know where my mommy is.”
Later, after she’d been taken to what she forever after thought of as the lost-and-found building, she saw her parents through the window in the door to the small room where she’d been waiting. Her mother talked with a uniformed man, covered her mouth with her hand, and cried. Tori remembered hearing her father’s comment, “We should have expected something like this.”
Her parents escorted her from the park.
Tori cleared her throat and looked at the psychiatrist.
“Wow,” Dr. Jaworski responded. “What did you feel? Scared?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you cry?”
“My mother cried.” Tori looked at her hands. Her knuckles had whitened as she gripped the edge of the recliner. “I remember how she looked at me. Not like she was glad to see me, but like she pitied me.” She shook her head. “I didn’t cry,” she responded, her voice just above a whisper.
“Come on, all lost little girls cry.”
Tori shrugged. “Not me,” she said. “Not me.”
25
Christian Mitchell was a favorite of his little patients and their parents. His ability to explain problems in plain language as well as to empathize with their misery, even through shedding his own tears, endeared him to them as a caring and competent physician.
Unfortunately, his superiors didn’t appreciate his emotional connections. As a consequence, Christian was scrutinized. He was often given assignments others didn’t want. When a program to give interns a taste of the life to come was instituted, his chief resident assigned other interns to assist in the private practices around the Baltimore suburbs and routed Christian to the downtown free clinic where the poor and uninsured clogged the system with trouble.
After a morning of seeing a dozen kids with flu symptoms, Christian spent thirty minutes following up with a child who suffered from terminal recurrent retinoblastoma, a cancer that had begun in the patient’s eye. His patient, Dale Walker, had undergone surgery to remove his right eye, as well as chemotherapy and radiation. Unfortunately, the cancer had recurred, and after three more rounds of an experimental regimen of chemo, his oncologists had told the Walkers that Dale’s condition was ultimately terminal. It was time for comfort measures only.
Christian had reviewed the latest MRI scans and made a referral to palliative care. He was sitting down to eat a ham-and-cheese sandwich when Clara Rivers, the clinic’s director, opened the door to the small break room. She held a prescription in her hand. “What’s the meaning of this?” she asked.
Christian looked at the prescription. “It’s a prescription for oxycodone for my terminal patient. Is there a problem?”
“Only with the amount.”
Christian sighed. “Look, addiction isn’t a conce
rn here. The boy is going to die. My main concern is to get him pain relief.”
“You don’t seem to understand. I’m not critical that you provided too much medicine. I want you to give him more.”
“I prescribed thirty tablets and referred him to palliative care. They should be able to take care of him.”
The director pushed a strand of graying blonde hair behind her ear and took a deep breath, her expression conveying clear annoyance. “This family can’t afford the palliative team. You need to provide him more medicine.”
“Okay,” Christian said. “Sure.”
She shoved a new prescription in front of him. “I take care of the palliative treatment for the clinic patients. Just sign the script, and I’ll fill out the details.”
“But it’s a controlled substance, a powerful narcotic. I’d like to know what’s being done in my name.”
“Just sign this. Dr. James oversees everything anyway.”
Christian shrugged. Dr. James was his department chair. It wouldn’t do for him to think that Christian was rocking the boat. He signed the prescription.
“Would you mind signing a few more?” she asked. “I’ll only use them for the palliative cases.”
Christian studied her for a moment. She appeared tired, and even a heavy coat of foundation couldn’t hide the crow’s-feet extending from the corners of her eyes. “Actually,” he said, “I do mind. Let’s keep this to a case-by-case basis, shall we?”
She straightened and sighed. “Well,” she said, smoothing the front of her white lab coat.
He thought some other comment was forthcoming, but she turned and stomped out, clicking her heels on the spotted linoleum floor.
He watched her disappear as the door closed and shook his head. Weird.
He turned his attention back to his brown bag, but his mind was far from lunch. His eyes had fallen to a small framed photograph on the wall. It was of Clara Rivers receiving some sort of civic award. He squinted at the photograph. Shaking her hand was his chairman, Dr. James. Great, that’s all I need. She’s in with my boss.
He looked at his sandwich, suddenly not hungry. He stuffed it into the bag again and tossed the bag into the corner trash can.
Sighing, he left the break room in search of his next patient.
Tori talked for two hours about growing up in Richmond, Virginia. First memories. Biggest fears. A childhood without tears.
She wearied of the questions. She’d told all she could remember and felt spent. Dried up. She sat. She paced. She consumed a liter of bottled water, and still Dr. Jaworski questioned, probed, and pried.
When time came for a trance induction, she welcomed it. Anything to stop the conscious searching of every little recollection. For her, the time during the trance passed without consciousness.
When she awoke, she heard her name being called, as if at the end of a tunnel. And for the first time since her heart transplant, she had the sensation of heart pounding. A horse race in her chest.
Sweat stung her eyes.
“Tori, Tori!” A voice sharpened with urgency. “You’re okay. No one is hurting you.”
Images of fire, falling, and pain fled from the edges of consciousness.
A man? Screams? I’m burning!
Tori reached up to touch the face in front of her. The psychiatrist. She wiped sweat from her eyes. Was I crying?
She looked into the searching face of Mary Jaworski. “You’re okay, Tori. You’re in your home. You’re safe.”
Tori shook her head and tried to dispel the sense of fear. She couldn’t speak. She took inventory of her emotions. There was something besides fear.
Anger! White-hot. A tiger ready to defend or attack.
When she finally found her voice, it came as one finding air upon breaking the surface of the ocean. She gasped. “What did I say?”
Dr. Jaworski returned to her laptop and typed for a moment.
Tori pressed. “Did I reveal something important? Did I tell you who killed my donor?”
“Oh, Tori,” she said, “I really need to go over the tape.” She closed her laptop and folded her hands and let them rest on the surface of her denim skirt. “Are you hungry? You’ve been working so hard.”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry. I want to know what I said.”
“You don’t remember?”
Tori concentrated. “No. Everything’s gone.”
The psychiatrist smiled in a smug sort of way that irritated Tori.
“Tell me what I said,” Tori said, standing, still feeling the fear and anger that had greeted her when she surfaced from the trance. “I have a right to know.”
Mary Jaworski stood and backed away from Tori, her face showing a hint of fear. “Not now,” she said, lifting her hand. “I want to reveal the information to you in a controlled setting. I’m concerned for your well-being.”
Tori huffed and shook her head. “You think I can’t handle this? The memories can’t hurt me. They belong—” she touched the front of her blouse—“to Dakota Jones.”
“Your case is complicated, Tori. Give me a few days to make some sense of this and make a report for the captain.”
“Give me a clue.”
“We made real progress.”
Mary Jaworski slipped her laptop into a leather satchel and lifted the video camera from a tripod. She folded the tripod, lifted the satchel, and collected her notes.
As Dr. Jaworski prepared her belongings, Tori protested. “I’m your patient. You’re obligated to me.”
“Well, not exactly. I was hired to interview you as a potential witness to a crime, not as a patient,” she said. “Baltimore PD is paying my salary. I’ll make my report, and we can talk next week.” The psychiatrist headed to the front door.
Tori wanted to scream. This didn’t seem fair. She was so close, yet so far from the information she wanted.
At the open door, the psychiatrist stopped. “Call my office and make an appointment. We can talk once I’ve had a chance to process the information on the tape and go over my notes.”
“Was I able to give you any more information?”
Jaworski put her hand to her lip and sighed before speaking. “Yes.”
“So what did I say?”
The doctor held up her hand and stepped onto the front porch. “Later, Tori. We’ll have a chance to figure this all out.”
“Later,” Tori muttered.
Tori watched as Mary Jaworski plodded across the lawn to the driveway and her BMW sedan. She thought for a moment about wrestling the video-camera case from the psychiatrist, but she let the feeling pass. Instead, she just nodded and looked at the sky, feeling a sudden strange urge to pray.
“Help me, God.” She touched the front of her blouse. “Why was Dakota so angry?”
Confused and still a bit angry, she closed the door. As she did, her cell phone sounded. She found it on the recliner in the den. “Hello.”
Heavy breathing and a man’s voice.
It was as if the call uncapped her anger again. “Who is this?”
“I thought I’d made myself clear.”
“Clear? You’re a coward. Tell me who you are!”
She ran to the front room and stood behind her front door before stealing a glance through a window bordering the door.
“I told you to stop. Now someone is going to get hurt.”
There was no one on the street. Mary Jaworski’s car was gone. Was someone watching me?
Who knew about this?
She repeated her question, but her voice had weakened, betraying her fear. “Who—who is this?”
But the line was dead. She looked at her phone. The call had ended.
26
A duo of Richmond police officers responded to Tori�
�s urgent call for help.
After an interview and a careful search of Tori’s property, the officers seemed unimpressed. To make things more difficult, Tori was reluctant to explain all the details of her transplanted memories, unwilling to risk more ridicule. So she told them only about her threatening phone call.
Hands on hips, she glanced toward the front windows, now dark since the sun had long set. “So what am I to do? Someone is threatening me.”
The older and heavier of the two officers sighed. “You said the caller said someone would be hurt. How do you know that someone is you?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “We just don’t have enough information, do we?”
“Could you at least watch my house?”
She watched as the pair exchanged a look. They think I’m crazy.
“We can drive through the neighborhood a few times during the night. Do you have a security system?”
She nodded. “Doesn’t everybody?”
“Is there any place you can go? A friend’s place you can crash for a night?”
She thought about Phin. She hadn’t left things on a very open note there. She didn’t want to bother Charlotte. Besides, Charlotte would worry, and she had warned Tori to stop looking into her donor’s death.
Tori looked up. “I’ll go to a hotel. Could you stay to give me time to collect a few things?”
The older officer nodded. “Sure.”
A few minutes later, she left her neighborhood in her Mazda. She circled her neighborhood, frequently checking the rearview mirror. Twice, when headlights appeared in the mirror, she pulled to the side, pretending to park, forcing the other vehicle to pass.
She drove downtown, occasionally doubling back, turning left three times in order to go right, and timing the traffic lights so that she could just scoot through on yellow. Finally, after thirty minutes, she pulled into the Jefferson and used the valet to park.
She paid with a credit card and settled into a room on the fourth floor. There, she took a long shower, hoping the water would not only cleanse her body but also soothe her troubled soul. She adjusted the showerhead to pulsate its delivery.