He felt happy.
* * *
—
The thing about fentanyl: you habituate to it quickly. When you start, a relatively small amount can kill you, but your body develops a rapid tolerance. By the end of the month, Donovan’s usage had ramped up to the point where the glow would wear off within a few hours, and now it took him three times, four times, five times the original dosage to get it back. Even though he didn’t use during work hours, this level of theft was not sustainable. Rather, it wasn’t sustainable from his cases alone: he began sneaking into the Pyxis of the med room, using someone else’s code. He started drawing up more painkillers than were necessary for a given patient and stopping into ORs staffed by other providers, under the guise of his supervisory capacity as head of the department. All of this upped the level of risk to another stratosphere, but by then, he was desperate. He could barely make it through the day, and the only thing sustaining him was the thought of the relief he’d have after his last case finished.
The clinic began to take notice that someone was stealing opiates. Fortunately for Donovan, a nurse’s assistant or a tech or some lower-level employee had OD’d last year, which tended to direct suspicion away from the doctors. People were much more likely to accept the idea of a twenty-something tattooed dude as a junkie than they were the head of the anesthesia department. They should have been thinking the opposite, of course, but they weren’t. Work-wise, he kept it together. He took excellent care of his patients; he kept his mind sharp. He didn’t use until he got home.
Mostly.
But he did get crankier. The later the day grew, the more he yearned for release, and the more he yearned, the more his personality soured. People began to be a little afraid of him. Then, several months into his new life of loneliness and debauchery, he hit a low point.
Keely was out of the picture: her parents had yanked her from her job after she’d passed out in a Food Lion, and one of her siblings had narced on her, after which they sent her away. Donovan didn’t know where: rehab, presumably. He started hitting on women at work, or in bars, emboldened by his loneliness and the drug use. He’d begun to confide, a little, in a woman at work, a quirky urologist named Georgia, who wasn’t his usual type. She was sexy, in her weird way. She dressed in shiny clothes and she had a nose ring, and something about that combination screamed Wild in bed! to him. He could tell she wanted him.
One afternoon he’d been on his way to a pain management consult when he passed a commotion in the rehab wing. When he stuck his head in the room it was apparent in an instant that no one knew what the fuck they were doing. Codes weren’t common in the rehab unit—people that sick were supposed to be in the hospital proper—and the room was a cluster. No one was doing the two things that needed to be done immediately: defibrillating the patient and securing an airway. Georgia, the hot urologist, stood at the head of the bed with an expression of terror. This was his wheelhouse; he sprang into action, taking the laryngoscope from her and barking orders.
Within short order, he got the patient tubed and lined and shocked and vasoconstricted. It was a futile effort—she died—but at least they’d done what they could. He looked for Georgia, expecting admiration for his competence, but she’d left without even discussing it. As the adrenaline from the procedure wore off, the yearning kicked back in with the force of a gut-punch. He found himself suddenly shaky. The urge was so bad he could have clawed out the eyes of a baby, assuming the baby in question had access to opiates, of course.
He had nothing. The well was going dry; he hadn’t dared try to palm any meds from the OR today in the one case he’d had the chance, because the nurse had been watching him like a hawk. Did she suspect?
He felt his blood pressure rise. He almost yelled at a nurse’s aide who brushed by him, but caught himself just in time, forcing himself into a courteous comment when what he really wanted to do was backhand her. And then he saw it: a syringe sticking out of a pocket.
The pocket in question belonged to a nurse, who must have been en route to inject someone when she was drafted into service during the code. She stood by the counter, jawing with the unit secretary in the kind of low, intense voice people use after a tragedy. They were caught up in the conversation.
He pulled out his phone and leaned against the work counter as if answering a page. In a move that he’d question for the rest of his life, he snaked out a hand toward the nurse, extracting the syringe from her pocket. She didn’t feel a thing.
He hustled to a bathroom. For a moment it seemed his audacity would be rewarded; the syringe was labeled HYDROMORPHONE, a narcotic. But then he held it up and realized it was empty. Or almost empty; a minuscule amount remained, which he heedlessly shot straight into the antecubital vein in the crook of his elbow. It barely touched the urge. Then, lowering his head to the same elbow, he began to cry.
* * *
—
Five minutes later, he stumbled out into the hall, turned a corner, and there she was: Georgia, the red-headed urologist.
She looked like she was crying too, and for some reason that touched him. She felt bad about the teenager, or, more likely, she felt guilty that she couldn’t have saved the girl without him. (The fact that they hadn’t saved the girl was irrelevant, obviously.) For a moment, the urge receded, replaced by tenderness.
He lifted her from her sad crouch and embraced her. She was shaking and flushed. He took in her long fluttering eyelashes, the metallic glint of her hair, the confluence of her tan freckles, and an altogether different kind of urge possessed him. He swept her down the hall until some sort of closet presented itself, reminding him of the encounter with Keely in the street. He kissed Georgia’s neck and pulled her shirt aside and squeezed her breast. She moaned and writhed and this excited him further. She pushed him away and this fanned the flames to an extreme. It might not be a drug, but this feeling was pretty fucking close. He reached for her again and suddenly found himself tumbling away.
She’d shoved him. Or maybe she’d slapped him. He felt his mouth open and close uselessly, like a fish. She said something and he said something and then he floundered out of there, every cell in his body burning with shame and anger.
It was the worst he’d ever felt.
* * *
—
He didn’t tell Georgia all of this, of course. He omitted any mention of his absurd belief that she had wanted him, or of his conviction that their conversations in the surgeon’s lounge had meant something significant. In retrospect, they’d apparently barely registered to her, and this realization, even in light of his current utter debasement, was too humiliating to speak aloud. But he told her about his addiction and about stealing the syringe from the nurse right before their encounter in the closet.
By now, he’d been able to bring himself to watch her as he spoke. At first her face had been guarded. But the deeper into the story he went, the more her shield fell away. Her warm brown eyes had widened and her mouth had parted, just a little, so the tips of her two front teeth were visible.
“It was you,” she whispered. “Jonah never touched the drugs.”
He nodded, closing his eyes.
It took her a minute, but she figured out the rest of it. “And you planted that empty bottle of fentanyl in his coat pocket, so people would think it was him.”
His head, which had begun to nod, abruptly switched to a shake. “I didn’t know it was his coat at the time,” he said. “I almost got caught with it in my hand.”
He could see the wheels turning. “That’s why you asked the board not to fire him for drug theft. You knew—you were the only person who knew for sure—that it wasn’t him. That’s why you came to me, offering to help him.”
He slumped back in his chair. “I owed both of you. I didn’t agree with what Jonah was doing with his practice, but I didn’t want him to be fired for something I’d done either.”
>
“But—the box in his office—”
He nodded again.
“But why? Why him? I thought you said you’d help him.”
Here it was: the most shameful of the shameful things he’d done. “I started to be afraid he’d turn me in.”
“He knew? Jonah knew it was you?” She paled; even the brown of her freckles went dormant.
“He saw me. He was in the clinic after-hours one night after he’d been fired, hanging outside the med room door. I was inside, and didn’t know he was there. I thought, actually, that he was there for the same reason I was, when I came out and saw him. But he confronted me, about the drugs, and about what—what I did to you, and he said he was calling the administrators.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Because,” he said, “I told him I could save your job.”
32
STATUS DRAMATICUS
This was the last thing Georgia expected him to say. “What?”
“It wasn’t an idle threat from the administrators,” said Donovan. “They would have fired you next. They’re cleaning house.” He cleared his throat. “They’ve been combing through your charts, looking for anything they can use against you.”
She thought of the patient death that had haunted her, and her face flamed.
“You’ve had medical errors. You’ve had disagreements with coworkers,” Donovan went on. “You’ve been a thorn in their side for years.”
Georgia sat back, hard, against her seat. “I didn’t realize it had gone that far.”
“When Jonah caught me,” said Donovan, “I begged him not to turn me in. He wouldn’t have listened, but then I told him I’d help you.” He looked down. “From that point on, he only cared about protecting you; whatever happened to him was secondary. I kept my word to him: I convinced Claude and Beezon and the rest of those guys it would be a mistake to fire you. They’re not going after you anymore, or at least, they aren’t as of right now. My ability to protect anyone from this point forward”—he allowed himself a tight, painful smile—“is obviously going to be limited.”
“Jonah agreed to let you go,” said Georgia, in a broken voice, “because he thought you’d help me?”
Donovan straightened, his trim form projecting a sudden intensity. “He didn’t agree to let me go. He made me call my primary care doctor to start Suboxone and he made me agree to take a leave of absence from clinical work until I enter a treatment facility when a spot opens up. I’ve only been at the clinic for meetings since then.”
“He helped you. How could you put that box in his office?” At a sound near her feet, Georgia looked down; she was trembling hard enough to rattle the legs of her stool.
“I couldn’t understand what was happening,” Donovan said. He rocked forward on his stool. “I’d already gotten a firm commitment from Dan to vote to reinstate Jonah back to the clinic. I even had Claude on board; we were on the verge of canceling the arbitration. We’d already drafted letters to send to some of Jonah’s patients, inviting them back. And then . . . and then that video came out.”
She heard herself make a small sound, like a kitten mewing, almost inaudible over an enormous rushing in her ears. Leaning forward, she gripped the counter with both hands to brace herself.
Donovan’s voice filtered in, dimly, over the noise in her head. “That video ruined everything,” he said. “Claude reneged immediately on his support, and even Dan said no. They got investigators involved. I was baffled—I knew Jonah hadn’t been stealing drugs, so I couldn’t understand what in the world the video meant. I thought he had to be involved, but I couldn’t figure out why. Maybe he intended it as some kind of threat to me? Or maybe he really had been there that night for the same reason I’d been there. By the time I realized the video had been faked, it was too late; he was in the hospital and I heard he was going to die. And I also realized”—he took a breath—“I realized that gave me an opportunity.”
“It gave you an opportunity to pin your crime on someone else,” Georgia said in a voice so low and vicious that Donovan glanced at her, startled, and then lowered his eyes to the black-and-white-checkered floor.
“Right,” said Georgia. She stood, sending her chair scooting backward with a screech. “You did it when he couldn’t defend himself. We’re done here.”
“Georgia, wait,” said Donovan. He reached for her arm, and she recoiled, so violently it flung him backward. “Please,” he said. “I came here to tell you all this before I go to the board to resign. My spot in a treatment facility opens up next week.”
“What do you expect, a medal?” she hissed.
Alerted by the tension between the two of them, people were starting to look over. The pool-playing dudes paused their game, one of them slowly raising his cue in the air as he took her in. “You need help, miss?” he said.
“No, thank you,” said Georgia. “I’m just leaving. But I appreciate it.”
The pool dude nodded. She could tell Donovan wanted to follow her out; the desperation in his gaze could have seared a hole in the wall. But he wouldn’t risk it, not with the whole bar watching. He leaned toward her, making one last effort before she got away. “I want you to know,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
* * *
—
The ride home was agony. Her heart hurt, her brain hurt. Everything hurt, more than she could have believed was possible. There was no denying the significance of what Donovan had said—with her absurd confidence that she could swoop in and fix things for Jonah, their plan had devastated him. She replayed Donovan’s words: they’d been on the verge of canceling the arbitration. Of inviting Jonah’s patients back. All while he was still whole and alive and in a reasonable frame of mind.
And then she’d suggested they film that video.
As soon as she entered her home, she heard it: the buzzing of her phone, abandoned on the couch. After so many days of checking it obsessively, it felt odd to have left it behind and not even noticed. She scrambled up the ladder and grabbed it, scrolling through all the notifications. Missed calls from Jonah’s hospital. Missed calls from Stewart, two of them. Texts from Dr. Levin. She opened the texts from the doctor to find they contained a summons: the hospital needed her to come in as soon as possible.
* * *
—
The shroud coating her brain fell away as she raced to the hospital. Never had she covered any ground in such a short period of time; she sped, cut corners, and startled passersby on her rampage from the house to the hospital and then from the hospital entrance to the ICU. Too impatient to wait for an elevator, she barreled up the stairs two at a time, so by the time she reached the doors to the unit, she was breathing so hard she probably looked as if she required admission herself.
Dr. Levin’s final text had been short and to the point: He’s awake. Georgia’s imagination carried her all over the place: he was conscious, briefly, but in the final throes of organ failure and wanted to tell her goodbye. He’d had a miraculous recovery and would be fine. He was awake but altered, never to regain the essential spark of whatever it was that made him Jonah. This last vision terrified her beyond all others: a shell Jonah, a husk, someone who would live without living, only dimly aware of what he’d lost. She charged past the central work space of the ICU, not registering who might be sitting at the counters or what was happening in any of the other rooms, until she reached the open door to Jonah’s room.
A swelling, soaring gush of wonder almost brought her to her knees.
She could tell at a glance: they must have just finished extubating him sometime in the preceding seconds. Free of the tube connecting him to the ventilator, he seemed to take a moment to readjust to the sensation of moving air through his lungs on his own. His breathing was shallow and punctuated with small hitches, giving him the appearance of someone shuddering after a momentous cry. Automatically her eyes went to the mon
itor above his head to check his oxygen level: perfect.
A respiratory therapist on the far side of the bed tossed the discarded breathing tube into a bag. In front of her, Dr. Levin and another physician, Dr. Wasserman, one of the toxicologists, turned at her entrance. “Ah,” said Dr. Levin, beaming. “I was just about to text you again. Look who is breathing on his own.”
She stated the obvious. “You’ve been weaning him off the vent.”
“It didn’t take long,” Dr. Levin said. “He woke up and started fighting it.”
She and Dr. Wasserman shifted positions, allowing a space to open up at the bedside so Georgia could move closer. She eased into the gap, not taking her eyes off Jonah. His hair hung in clotted strands, and his lips, ridged and cracked, had turned so pale they were almost white. His skin, too, was abnormally drained, flecked with pepperish dots of stubble that for Jonah constituted a substantial period of beard growth. His cheeks had cratered into hollows. But his eyes, black and aware, locked on to hers.
“Give us a minute with him?” someone said. Georgia looked over her shoulder: the toxicologist. In contrast to delicate Dr. Levin, everything about Dr. Wasserman radiated solidity: the Paul Bunyan of women, she probably stood over six feet tall, with a build that looked as if it could withstand hurricane-force winds. “We’ll come find you in a few.”
Georgia pointed at a chair in the corner. “I’ll stay there,” she said. “I won’t speak or get in the way. I promise.”
Dr. Wasserman nodded, and Georgia watched them as they examined him, conferring over labs on their tablets and ordering new ones. The respiratory therapist drew a blood gas from his arterial line; somebody came with a new bag of fluids to hang. One of the nurse’s assistants, a sweet-faced older woman named Karla, came with a comb and a spray bottle of water and fixed Jonah’s hair. Throughout all this, he slept, occasionally opening his eyes to take in the hubbub around him. It was clear to all of them, though: barring some new deterioration, Jonah would live.
The Antidote for Everything Page 33