“No,” he managed. “Worse.”
He’d gone still. Without touching him or looking over, she could sense his horror on a cellular level, as if he’d suffered a cataclysmic rearrangement of atoms that changed him from Jonah into a not-quite-right clone, as if his scent or his shape or some fundamental essence had changed. She reached out to touch him and encountered a wall of ice. “What is it?” she asked, her voice gone hoarse.
He passed the phone to her. “Look,” he said.
20
HYSTERICAL, SELF-RIGHTEOUS HYPERBOLE
She took the phone from his hand. For a moment she wasn’t certain what she was reading; whoever had screenshotted the article had zoomed in too close. Then her eyes adjusted and she realized she was looking at an obituary. She flung the phone away. “Frieda Myers is dead? What happened?”
There was a pause before Jonah answered. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “The last I heard from Andreas, they’d tried a half a dozen doctors and no one could see a new patient.”
She froze.
His tone was awful; heavy and dull. “I should have done more.”
“It’s not your fault, Jonah. We don’t even know what happened.”
“Does it matter? The last thing she knew is that no one wanted to take care of her.”
“Oh, Jones, I’m—”
He crawled away from her, already halfway down the ladder before she could finish.
* * *
—
She followed him. “Jonah,” she yelled as he ran out into the street toward his car. After a brief hesitation caused by the fact she was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underwear, she tore out of the house after him. Edwin, alerted by her frantic hollering, assumed a defensive stance that blocked her from reaching the car. At the same time, it must have dawned on him that Jonah was in the midst of a getaway. He leapt backward in the direction of the car, his eyes trained on her.
“I’m not a threat,” she said, keeping her hands in the air. “I don’t have any weapons. I don’t even have pants.”
Edwin’s eyes dropped to her underwear—which was not, luckily, a thong—then hovered with brief but discernible focus on her thin T-shirt. His brow furrowed. The shirt was her favorite, a present from Jonah, with a drawing of the symbol for atomic power—a bunch of overlapping ellipses—and some blocky lettering:
YOU MATTER
Unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared
. . . THEN YOU ENERGY
“Sir?” said Edwin over his shoulder to Jonah. “I’m going to need to come with you if you’re leaving.”
“Shotgun,” Georgia boomed, realizing as soon as the word left her mouth that this was a poor choice of phrase to use in front of a confused bodyguard.
“You can’t come with me, George,” said Jonah. “You have to go to work. And, you know”—he gestured—“you’re naked.”
“Give me a second to get dressed,” she begged. Tentatively, her eyes on Edwin, she reached for Jonah’s shoulder. “I can call in to work. I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“You are not calling in to work. You’ve never called in to work and you’re not starting now. Let me go.”
She let out an inarticulate whimper and he softened. “I’ll be fine. I have Edwin, and he’ll make sure I’m fine. Right, Edwin?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jonah crossed around to the driver’s side of the car. “Go inside,” he said. “You’re causing a spectacle. I promise I’ll call you as soon as I’ve talked to Andreas. And after that, I do want to get away.” He looked at Edwin. “I won’t need a bodyguard if I’m not here.”
“Promise me you won’t go to your house alone,” said Georgia, her heart hammering. “Okay? Edwin goes with you until you leave town. Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said, and then they were gone.
* * *
—
She met Jonah and Edwin at Jonah’s house as soon as she could get there after work. When she arrived, he handed her a sparkling water and an empty travel case, directing her to pack his toiletries while he gathered his clothes and books. A bit surprised by this request, she employed a kitchen-sink approach, sweeping up an armful of grooming products and dumping them en masse into various zippered pockets. Jonah, normally a meticulous packer, seemed to be following in her footsteps as he packed, haphazardly flinging items into his suitcase.
All of them were jumpy. Jonah refused to discuss Frieda Myers, other than to say Andreas had been too distraught to talk much. He also didn’t want to stay at home long, in case the cops showed up: according to Stewart, they could issue a warrant at any time. This worried Georgia too, but even with Edwin present, she was less concerned about the threat of Jonah getting arrested than she was about how they’d handle a knock at the door if it turned out to be a herd of homicidal neighbors.
Still, after Jonah had finished packing, she was reluctant to leave. She wandered outside and he followed her, Edwin remaining discreetly behind on the other side of the sliding door. They stood silently on his ocean-facing porch, their hair whipping in the wind. The sky had gone darker as a bank of clouds rolled in off the sea, carrying with them the mysterious tinge of electricity preceding an imminent storm. Georgia watched as a beach umbrella raced along the shoreline, somersaulting and vaulting on the updrafts like a crazed gymnast.
“Where are you going?” she asked Jonah. He seemed to have regained a tiny bit of his equilibrium at the thought of evading the authorities; he’d always had a thing for old spy movies.
“North Carolina. Brevard, which is a little town outside Asheville. Tucker recommended it.”
“I’ve heard of it. They have more than two hundred and fifty waterfalls there and you can ride horses.”
Now he looked dubious. “Sounds kind of outdoorsy.”
She thought fast. “I think it’s where they filmed The Hunger Games.”
He brightened. “Really?”
“Yes. And The Last of the Mohicans.”
She leaned against him. “I wish I could go with you.”
The wind kicked up again, sending a groan through the floor joists and rattling a row of flowerpots against the back wall of the porch. The first drops of rain, turbulent and fat, slashed into her face at a nearly sideways angle, and she ducked, whirling toward the closed sliding door to the house. In the few seconds before she made it indoors, the rain intensified, consolidating from discrete drops into a solid sheet, drenching the floorboards and the porch chairs, turning everything sheeny and dark. Inside, she blotted her eyes with her hands, turning to Jonah to see if he’d gotten as wet as she had. But Jonah wasn’t there. Squinting through the downpour, she could just make him out: he stood, still facing the ocean, his hands at his sides and his head bowed as the skies rained their anger all around him.
* * *
—
Everyone said newspapers were a dying industry. With the press of a button, you could access news apps and twenty-four-hour cable news channels, not to mention the ability to hop on social media to glean invective-laden opinion from your high school best friend’s barely literate stepbrother. In the midst of all this instant gratification, who had the patience to wait for someone to deliver to your door a giant wad of pressed cellulose pulp studded with inkblots?
Georgia, that was who. She hated the hysterical, self-righteous hyperbole of the cable news channels, and while she did read various stories from her aggregated news apps, she was mindful of the necessity to be wary; half these things were fueled by bias masquerading as genuine journalism. It had become acceptable in this country to stretch the truth, or even invent a story out of whole cloth, as long as it suited your ideological preferences.
The newspapers were—literally—a different story. Aside from the opinion pages, which were clearly marked as opinion, not fact, newspapers still be
lieved in journalistic purity. They had to back up their assertions with evidence or they could be sued for libel. They were, in their ideal form, the result of meticulous research, sometimes occurring over weeks or months, and consequently they boasted a heft and depth you could never find in a twenty-sentence news app article.
Normally, Georgia liked reading the paper. She had a ritual on her front porch, involving coffee and Dobby and her swinging chair, that she tried to enact whenever time allowed. But this morning, she’d awoken beset by a flurry of nervous energy. It had taken an extra three miles tacked on to the end of her run before she’d been confident she could face the day with anything approaching calm. She’d left the house late, arrived at work late, and been forced to play catch-up all day. Now, as people streamed from the clinic at the end of the workday, she dangled in the swinging chair in her office, kicking against the wall again and again to propel herself in a loop. The motion was soothing, but she eased the paper from its plastic sleeve with no small amount of dread.
It didn’t make the front page, but instead had landed as a prominent, above-the-fold story on page two: Local Physician Accused of Drug Theft. She skimmed it quickly and then read it again more slowly. The reporter had done her homework, turning what could have been a two-paragraph nothing of a story into a nuanced human interest piece. She touched on Jonah’s backstory, briefly mentioning his childhood as a biracial boy in the Deep South. She didn’t mention the rift with his family, but of course she was aware of his recent firing before the current scandal broke, since the paper had already run a couple stories on it. All of this was fine; favorable, even. But as the piece took a deeper dive into the allegations against Jonah, things got ugly.
Yesterday, the video had leaked online. To say it had gone viral would be an understatement; you’d be hard-pressed to find a sentient creature anywhere in the greater Charleston area who hadn’t seen it. Georgia had watched it on her computer at work. Even though she’d known what to expect, she pressed her hands to the sides of her head, breathing in short bursts as she read the comments beneath. After she’d seen it once, she made herself watch it again, imagining the experience through the eyes of someone who didn’t know Jonah.
She’d known, of course, that it would appear damning. Taken from a vantage point about ten feet from the entrance to the medication area, it showed a male figure, dressed in black, hovering at the keypad of the Pyxis. At first only the back of his head was visible, but then he shifted, revealing three quarters of his face: a short nose, one high cheekbone, the contours of an eye marred by a resolving bruise. His hair, too, was recognizably Jonah’s; spiky and dark. He looked in the direction of the camera for a long moment with an expression of unbearable sadness, almost as if he knew it was there. Finally, he shifted back to the keypad, shoulders curving inward as he hunched forward to punch in the code.
The video didn’t actually show him removing any medications, but it didn’t matter: the intent was clear. The newspaper article described the video in detail, following with a paragraph of responses from people at the clinic. Several of them caught her by surprise: blinking hard, she read the words of people she knew and liked, people she knew to be smart and generous, as they sucker-punched Jonah in the face. Or no, it wasn’t a sucker-punch, exactly; more like a thin-bladed knife sliding between the ribs, so subtle you were halfway through your day before you realized you were bleeding to death. She had to hand it to this reporter. Physicians were a notoriously tight-lipped group when it came to judging their own. But here there wasn’t much restraint.
Reading the article for a third time, she realized she was probably giving the reporter too much credit. The comfort in speaking freely had undoubtedly filtered down from the leadership of the clinic; if they were outspoken in their certainty and condemnation, what was to stop someone else? She pulled out her phone and checked the comments section of the paper’s online version. A few people cautioned against a rush to judgment, but most people fell all over themselves as they rushed to judge. It was an awful accusation: if true, not only was it thievery for the worst of motives—debauchery and money—but it also raised the specter of a clinic patient suffering through a procedure, awake and feeling pain, because the bulk of his anesthesia was comprised of useless salt water. And then the hapless anesthetist, believing the patient to have a high tolerance to medication, might have administered more—this time from an unadulterated batch—and the patient could have overdosed.
And sure enough, halfway down the comments section: I had a knee replacement there in August and I could feel everything! I knew something was wrong but no one would listen.
Okay, this was bullshit. Joint replacements were performed in the OR, an entirely separate entity from the moderate sedation room. There was zero chance this person had been affected by these events, even if they had been true. But how long would it be before someone who had had a legitimate procedure performed in that room alleged the same thing?
Thirty seconds: that was how long. She hit refresh on the browser and an astonishing number of new comments came up. Things had gone downhill in this crop: the words faggot and homo figured prominently, and those were the gentler epithets. There was a lot of concern for the children, and how they might have been corrupted. Devastated parents of Jonah’s teenaged patients relayed how, even if he hadn’t molested their children, he’d probably tried to turn them gay. One man, who identified himself as Jonah’s neighbor, insisted he’d frequently heard the loathsome sounds of orgies drifting down the street.
She turned off the phone and set the newspaper aside. Jonah had been gone for three days, and in that time, thanks to the video, the story had exploded. The local TV stations had it, as did a few national media outlets. Every time she hit the news app button on her phone, she’d run across his face. Most of the news sites used Jonah’s professional headshot when they needed a photo of him, which they must have downloaded before it had finally been scrubbed from the clinic’s website. Some of the dodgier sites, however, featured a blurry full-length shot of Jonah leaving Stewart’s office. Wearing a baseball cap and a furtive expression, he looked every inch the felonious pervert your mother always warned you to avoid. It was only a matter of time before he became a meme.
He should have been blowing up her phone. He had to be aware of these news stories and the mounting outrage over the clinic’s allegations and he should have been calling and texting about it, but she’d heard nothing other than one message saying he’d arrived at the rental house, and a peevish follow-up the next day complaining about the quality of the sheets. The last twenty-four hours: nothing. Not for the first time, she wondered if it had been a bad idea for him to go out of town. Isolated in the mountains far from home, watching helplessly as his life imploded—who knew how he’d react? He’d borne up remarkably well throughout all of this so far, but a shudder went through her as she thought of the handful of times in the past when he’d stumbled across the depression trip wires hidden in his brain. What if that happened again and he was alone?
She tried calling him and got his voicemail. Jonah Tsukada’s phone, his voice sang. Do it!
She did it. “Hey, it’s me,” she said. “I’m getting nervous that I haven’t heard from you . . . Call me.”
“Hey,” someone said.
She spun in her chair, aiming for the direction of the door so she could see who it was, but overshot a bit. She twirled in a brief, dizzying circle before she managed to get a boot on the floor to halt her motion.
“McLean,” she said.
McLean shut the door behind him. “Sweet Georgia Brown,” he said. “Sorry for busting in. You have a moment?”
“Sure.”
“The committee is meeting tonight.”
Georgia raised an eyebrow; she hadn’t heard this.
“Listen, Georgia. They found a box in a locked drawer when they searched the room that used to be Jonah’s office.” McLean’s round fac
e had twisted up in discomfort. “It had a stack of syringes and a tourniquet in it. Some alcohol wipes. And . . . an empty bottle of fentanyl.”
Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a cry. “Jonah didn’t take those medications,” she said.
He looked at her with unmistakable pity. “I don’t want to believe he did either. But I’ve seen the video and when I heard this . . . I thought you should hear it from a friend.”
His words blurred in Georgia’s ears as she tried to make sense of this. Jonah had not stolen any medications. She thought again of the drugs named in the article: ketamine, Ativan, fentanyl. The last one, fentanyl, was one of the deadliest drugs in America, accounting for a third of all overdose deaths.
“McLean,” she said, leaping to her feet. “I have to go. Thank you for telling me. I’m very grateful, I . . .” She was out the door in two steps, waiting for McLean to make his way out so she could lock it. “It was kind of you to tell me.”
“Georgia, can I do anyth—”
“Nothing!” she shouted over her shoulder, already halfway down the hall. “No. But thank you!”
21
A STEEL HUMMINGBIRD IN FLIGHT
He didn’t answer the phone. She tried him repeatedly on the drive home and again every thirty minutes. Nada.
She called Mark. “I can’t get in touch with Jonah.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told her. “It’ll be okay; I’m sure he just has bad cell phone reception.”
It was the same in the morning. No answer. After checking again to make sure her ringer was on, she set down the phone. Normally at this time on Saturday morning, she’d have gone for her run, read the paper, and changed into her coveralls in preparation for whatever project she had going in the backyard. Today, none of that mattered. She should have tried to burn off her angst by exercising, but a paradoxical electricity had taken over her brain, leaving her hyped and jittery but also unable to take any concrete action. At the least she could have tidied the house: Mark would be here soon and he’d never seen her home; he hadn’t even made it through the front door during his aborted earlier visit. But instead of running or working or cleaning, she paced the house, Dobby by her side, until he couldn’t take it anymore and started barking.
The Antidote for Everything Page 23