The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  Silence. Both Jonah and Stewart were staring at her, Stewart with polite puzzlement, and Jonah with an expression of dawning comprehension. She rushed to fill the silence. “Never mind. Meet with him if you want.”

  “Stewart,” said Jonah. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “Would you mind giving us a moment?”

  Stewart, nodding assent, gathered up a few papers from the table and slipped out of the room. The sound of Georgia’s breathing, fast and ragged, filled her ears. She concentrated on trying to slow it as Jonah walked around the table, gently rotated her chair, and knelt in front of her. He picked up her hands. “Tell me,” he said.

  14

  FALSUS IN UNO, FALSUS IN OMNIBUS

  Almost six months ago, there had been a code at the clinic.

  It had been awful, a tragedy. The cheerleaders at a local high school had been performing a maneuver called a pike basket toss, and even though this was a fairly routine stunt, something had gone wrong. The girl who’d been flung into the air had been dropped, or missed her catchers, or somehow landed incorrectly. Georgia’d never been clear on the specifics, although apparently a viral video of the event existed, providing entertainment for the legions of ghouls out there who got their kicks from watching a beautiful sixteen-year-old break her neck.

  The girl had been transported to the biggest trauma center in Charleston, where she’d remained for more than a month, through spine-stabilizing surgeries and multiple evaluations. By the time she’d transferred to the rehab facility at the clinic, it seemed conclusive: she was unlikely to walk again, and, even more devastating, would have only limited use of her hands.

  Georgia had the bad luck to be present when the girl coded, because she’d been called on a neurogenic bladder consult. It was near the end of the day, and she walked into the room with no warning of what she’d find: a young girl, so slight that her immobile limbs and torso barely created a rise under the sheet, her face dusky from lack of oxygen, her blue eyes staring sightlessly ahead. It took a moment to sink in: evidently, Georgia had bungled into the room just ahead of the Grim Reaper. She found herself so unprepared for the sight of imminent death that she stood for a full five seconds before screaming out the door for the nurses to bring a crash cart.

  The code, too, had gone spectacularly wrong. As the first physician present, Georgia knew she’d have to run it until someone more competent arrived, and that made her nervous as hell because, while she could start CPR like a boss, the main intervention this girl needed, immediately, was defibrillation and an airway. Georgia hadn’t intubated anyone in years; it wasn’t something the training for her specialty emphasized. With shaky hands she attached a pulse oximeter to one of the child’s icy blue fingers as one of the nurses grabbed a defibrillator and another started chest compressions. Georgia had to hold the mask to the girl’s face tightly, with two hands, because her chin was so tiny the air seeped around it, but even so, it wasn’t doing any good. Her oxygen levels weren’t rising. Weren’t there any respiratory therapists nearby?

  Georgia realized she was going to have to try to intubate her.

  A tremor rattled her hands as she attached the curved blade of the laryngoscope to its handle. Even had she been confident in her ability to place the breathing tube in the girl’s trachea instead of her esophagus, this was going to be difficult; because of the injury to her spine, Georgia couldn’t simply open her mouth and yank back her neck to get a good view. A nurse’s aide wheeled a black, snaky contraption into the room, setting it next to the crash cart. Georgia recognized it as a fiber-optic scope—a tube with a camera on the end of it, which would allow visualization of the structures in the girl’s throat without tilting her head—but she didn’t know how to turn it on. She reached for it anyway and yelped in relief when someone appeared beside her and took it from her hand.

  Donovan Wright. Without a word, he took over, and within thirty seconds, the tube was in place and connected to a ventilator. For a brief, intense second their eyes met. Georgia held the precious tube in place while he secured it with tape and she mouthed her gratitude: “Thank you.”

  By now, chaos gripped the room: people churned at the bedside, wielding defibrillator paddles and starting IVs; discarded equipment wrappings littered the floor; bloody gauze was crumpled atop rickety metal Mayo stands. From outside, an eerie, whooping wail of grief: someone in the girl’s family must have arrived.

  The code kept going. Georgia switched places with the valiant but exhausted nurse who’d been doing chest compressions, her arms aching at the strain after only a few moments. No one wanted to call it, especially after all the indignity and pain this child had endured in order to cling to life. So they kept at it, doggedly compressing and zapping, forcing air in and out of her lungs, sending shots of epinephrine through her sluggish bloodstream, until someone finally bowed to the inevitable and called it. Georgia felt arms wrapped around hers, holding her back from performing any more compressions; she had not realized they’d been shouting at her to stop.

  “Time of death,” said a voice behind her, “six seventeen p.m.”

  * * *

  —

  The thing was, the outcome of the code had not been her fault. If anything, it had been preordained; the girl had probably been without oxygen for a significant time when Georgia found her. Rehab patients weren’t on telemetry, and this girl had been doing well, her youth and her otherwise good health working in her favor, so she didn’t have eyes on her every second. Usually one of her parents stayed with her, but that day her mother had stepped out; Georgia never did find out why. And yes, it was tragic, and yes, it was normal to feel stunned and distressed after a code—especially when they weren’t a daily part of your job—but she barely knew this child. She’d met her only once before. She had done everything she could do to try to save her, and, thanks to the timely intervention of Donovan Wright, she hadn’t screwed anything up.

  So why then, once it was all over, had Georgia staggered out of the room until she landed on an empty corridor, pressing one cheek and then the other against the cool cinder-block wall, her legs trembling with such violence they could not support her? This was not the doctorly way to react. This was not even the Georgia way to react. But something about the juxtaposition of what she’d expected to see—an engaged, expressive patient—and what she’d actually seen, the buggish eyes, the gaping mouth, the blue skin, had thrown her, as had her desperate panic when Georgia’d thought she’d kill the child by screwing up her breathing tube.

  She’d had a case go wrong last year and her patient had done poorly, and it had haunted her in a way she’d never have anticipated. She could not bear the idea that she’d almost harmed someone again.

  She wanted to cry, and she hated to cry, and that made her angry. So she sat puddled on the floor, up against the wall, in her stupid little seething pile of emotions, and she didn’t hear the footsteps.

  She didn’t actually stand, or at least she didn’t think she had, but suddenly she found herself supported by another body.

  “I’ve got you,” someone said, somewhat roughly. Startled out of her reverie, she looked up and found herself facing Donovan Wright.

  This took a few seconds to process. Although they had very little in common, over the past year she’d developed an easy camaraderie with Donovan. Their interaction in the beginning had been limited to a couple banal pleasantries, including some pointless chitchat in the surgeon’s lounge one day while waiting for their respective cases to start, during which he’d shown her a picture of his family, naming his four blond sons with obvious pride, but not naming or mentioning his blond, pallid wife; and one longer, slightly heated discussion a few months later related to whether or not people living in Charleston had any business being fans of the Carolina Panthers. The football argument had broken the ice, though: after that, he sought her out from time to time in the lounge or in the cafeteria during their
limited minutes of downtime, mainly to talk about sports or clinic gossip, or, on a couple awkward occasions, a complaint about his wife.

  It wasn’t unusual for people to think they were better friends with Georgia than they were; she didn’t know why, but something about her face or the way she dressed seemed to give people the impression they could unload on her. She didn’t mind—she was happy to listen to anyone who needed it—but even so, Donovan Wright didn’t interest her. He was fundamentally a boring guy; she’d spent her life seeking an antidote to men like him.

  Therefore, she had no reason to ever think she’d one day find him grinding himself against her in a remote hallway in the rehab center. At first, before she realized what was happening, she was grateful: she interpreted his presence, even the fact that he’d hauled her to her feet, as an attempt at comfort. Or maybe he wanted comfort himself; she’d seen him at the end of the code, his blond hair damp, his neck pink and blotchy. He did not look good.

  But then: his hands were roaming her breasts, pressing against her back, clutching her ass. She gasped in shock.

  Her gasp didn’t calm matters down any. Misreading her reaction as lust instead of horror, Donovan lifted her off the ground, simultaneously groping the rest of her body with what seemed to be twenty-five tentacled hands. His lips, thin and rubbery, smacked against her neck. “Wait,” she said, “no,” but he carried her about five feet down the hall and nudged open the door to a supply closet lit by a flickering fluorescent tube.

  “Donovan,” she said. “Stop.”

  “Georgia,” he breathed. “That was— Oh, God.”

  “No. I’m not—”

  His mouth smashed into hers. She tried again to say something but the only sound she could produce was an underwater wohhh. Nausea surged up from her midsection. If she vomited into his mouth the only option left would be death from instant mortification; the thought of regurgitating her sushi dinner into someone’s open throat was so repellent it almost produced the exact circumstance she wanted to avoid. She wrenched her head to the side and, in desperation, clamped her teeth together. Donovan seized the opportunity to start gnawing on her neck with his rubbery lips, smashing her back against the ridge of a shelf. She felt him pawing between her legs, tugging at the zipper on her pants. How was this happening? Her ability to articulate thoughts vanished, even in her own mind. She raised an arm, and, with great strain, shoved his face off her neck.

  “You little tease,” he breathed. His pupils were tiny pinpricks.

  She had to get away. But in an irony worthy of an O. Henry story, she had morphed into one of the rehab patients, aphasic and disoriented. She tried and failed to command her legs to move. All other sensations had been eclipsed by the urge to vomit. She began to breathe through her nose, ragged desperate breaths.

  “Mmm, mmm,” said Donovan. Sweat slicked his forehead; it oozed from his temples onto the side of her face. His breath, fetid and revolting, mingled with hers. With a mighty effort, she shoved him, hard enough that he staggered back a step or two. Seizing the opportunity, she lurched to one side, just outside his reach.

  “No,” she said. “Donovan, no.”

  He stared. “I thought—” For one fleeting second he looked bewildered and vulnerable, like a child who’s been smacked, who didn’t know, even, that getting smacked was a thing. She’d already reached an appeasing arm toward him, feeling bad, she supposed, at his embarrassment, or maybe even feeling some vestigial flush of feminine guilt for rejecting someone who wanted her, but then his face changed again. His small pupils darkened even as the white space around them expanded, giving him the look of a creepy cartoon owl. “Are you kidding?” he said.

  “I’m sorry—” she began, and then stopped. What the hell was she sorry about? She hadn’t asked to be groped in a supply closet. She started to say more when she traced the path of his eyes to her chest and realized he’d ripped her shirt open and pushed her bra up. Face flaming, she grabbed the edges of her shirt and pulled them together.

  “You’re sorry?”

  “Please don’t—”

  His eyes flashed; all she could see was a rim of icy blue. Before she could finish her sentence he’d thrust up a hand, gesturing backward with such blazing fury that she flinched, even though the swipe of his arm had been away from her. “What was all this about, then?”

  “All what?”

  “You’ve been coming on to me for months.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “And I just saved your ass in there. What about that? Was that nothing?”

  A feeling of shame swamped her that she had not wanted to be the one to try to intubate the girl. Some rational part of her brain insisted that this was wrong: she was not an ER doc or an anesthesiologist; being competent at intubating people was not part of her everyday job. But the rational part of her brain, subsumed by a great tide of adrenaline, could not get any traction.

  It was stifling in this closet, even if hurt and accusation hadn’t been emanating from him, poisoning the atmosphere. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then abruptly closed it, reaching up with an angry finger to flick off the lights in the closet as he kicked open the door. He was gone before Georgia could react, the door slamming behind him, hard enough to rattle the shelving full of toilet paper rolls and thin white hospital towels. She leaned against the vertical support beam of a shelf and slid to the ground, her breath exiting her chest in a keening bark.

  She lowered her head to her knees and rocked.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Stewart came back into the room, Georgia had resigned herself. She couldn’t keep the ugly episode between her and Donovan a secret. Now that she’d breached the dam by telling Jonah the entire story, it would surely become easier to tell other people.

  And the more people who knew, the more the story would change. People had no qualms about rendering judgments on events they didn’t witness and didn’t understand; for most, reality was filtered through perception. She’d cease to be herself and become a symbol, an emblem of the culture wars, an embodiment of a belief, someone you supported or hated. What had actually happened, and her reaction to it, would become irrelevant.

  In retrospect, all she could think was that the code and its terrible aftermath must have disarmed her, somehow opening up her skull and applying an iron to her brain, searing out all its ridges until nothing remained but featureless white noise. It seemed as if the assault had happened to someone else. That fit with her memories of the event too: when she looked back on it, her vision flickered like a strobe light, revealing in pulsating shiny bursts a woman doubled over in a closet; not her, though, not her, not her.

  It was still hard to believe. If you had told her before this happened that someone would feel her up in a hallway at work without her consent, she’d have told you exactly how that would go down: her professional devotion to testicles notwithstanding, she’d kick him in the balls as hard as she could, and then, for good measure, she’d spit in his face. Georgia did not think of herself as some pliant good girl who worried about hurting normal people’s feelings, let alone someone who worried about hurting the ego of a blustery alpha-male doctor. She generally didn’t care that much about what people thought of her, unless they were people who mattered to her. But still, if he had apologized, if he had said he misunderstood or read the signals wrong or was overwrought in the aftermath of the code—anything—she’d have let him save face. But instead he transfigured his embarrassment into toxic anger and blamed her.

  People thought they knew how they’d respond in that situation? They didn’t. It didn’t happen with academic forewarning and a couple of cool heads. For instance: Georgia’d have definitely counted herself among the people who thought sexual assault should be reported. She might be a bit roguish in the way she dressed, and you could credibly accuse her of a progressive slant on issues such as the legalization of
drugs (yes, they should be legal, and no, not because she had any personal desire to party down all the time), but she was not soft on crime. She had a keen sense of right and wrong. She had a conscience. She didn’t condone liars or thieves or people who ripped other people’s bras open at work in horror-movie-quality supply closets lit by tenuous fluorescent bulbs. If it had happened to her friend, she’d be all over her to go to the clinic’s HR department, or maybe even the police.

  But here was the thing. Georgia didn’t have any friends present when it happened, and her overriding concern in the moment—all she could think about—was getting out of that closet and down the hall and out of the building and up the stairs in the garage and into her car without anyone seeing her ripped shirt. She wasn’t so much angry or frightened at first as she was in a state of disbelief. She could not accept the fact that this had just happened; it seemed surreal, nightmarish, totally unreal.

  But, of course, it did happen. Pretending it didn’t, or allowing her brain to warp reality into something a little more palatable than victimhood, wasn’t helpful. By the time she could face it, though, it was no longer possible to do anything about it. She’d wrenched off the shirt the moment she entered her house, and it was now long gone, relegated to the middle of some festering heap in the Charleston County landfill. She didn’t have any photographable injuries, and she didn’t go crying to anyone else who could attest to her traumatized state. She didn’t have any disgusting Donovan Wright DNA to offer up to a lab. Everyone knew what happened to women who claimed sexual assault when they could not prove it. Georgia wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to skepticism; she preferred a logical world to an emotional one, and sometimes that meant crimes went unpunished. You couldn’t convict someone based solely on someone else’s word. She had absolutely nothing to back up any assertion she might make to anyone that this had ever happened.