The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  She stayed until they made her leave. She drifted through the ICU and out onto the regular floor, up and down the stairs, pacing aimlessly, unable to convince herself that this miracle was real. It was nearly dawn when Dr. Levin buzzed her again. She didn’t bother answering the page; instead she ran for the stairwell, bounding up the same flights of stairs and into the ICU and into his room, where she skidded to a stop beside his bed.

  Jonah opened his eyes. She picked up his hand and in a voice sounding nothing like herself she said, “Jonah.”

  His cracked lips formed a smile. With some difficulty because of the IV tethering him to a pole, he lifted his arm weakly and pointed to himself. “Status . . . Dramaticus,” he croaked.

  She clamped her lips together so hard she wound up making a weird whinnying noise though her nose. Status Dramaticus was one of her nicknames for him, a play on status asthmaticus, the medical term for a severe, unrelenting asthma attack. It was also a snarky slang term used by doctors for patients who magnify their symptoms to get more attention. “I love you,” she told him, not caring that she’d begun openly weeping.

  He shut his eyes and she thought he might have drifted off, but then he opened them again. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed. She shook her head, her vision distorted by tears. A machine-like sound filled her head, louder and louder; her knees began to buckle. Quickly, she leaned forward with her arms extended, placing both her hands on Jonah’s bed and dropping her head to her chest. Dr. Levin, recognizing her instability, took a small step forward and placed a hand on her back. “Hey there. You okay?”

  Georgia took a few shuddering breaths of her own. “His labs?”

  “We just got the last round back and they’re better,” she said. “We’re not there yet. He’s still sick. But—”

  She cut off, and Georgia looked up to see she had a few tears of her own. “I can’t tell you how much I hoped for this,” Dr. Levin said.

  Jonah had closed his eyes again; his face was peaceful.

  * * *

  —

  Georgia called her scheduler and told her she wasn’t coming in for the next few days. She spent much of the next day and night on the chair in the corner; when they made her leave, she dozed on the hard plastic couch in the waiting room. The following day, Jonah was in and out of it, spending a long time sleeping. When he did speak, it was in brief bursts and short phrases and she couldn’t tell how much he understood. They kept it light; Georgia read to him or they listened to music or they just sat, him in the bed and her in a bedside chair, holding hands and dozing.

  She tried not to let her hope run away with her as she entered the ICU on the third day after he’d regained consciousness. The team had just wrapped up their morning rounds, with various medical staff streaming in and out of rooms to carry out the business of the day before the new admissions started rolling in. Entering Jonah’s room, she braced herself for confusion or mental dullness. But Status Dramaticus had been a positive sign; how addled could you be and still come up with that one?

  It was bright in here; someone had fully opened the shade on Jonah’s window, allowing a cheery blaze of sunshine to bounce off the reflective surface of a faceted metal washbasin by the bed, creating a crazy disco-ball effect on the ceiling. The bright light washed out Jonah’s face, making it look even paler than it was. They still hadn’t shaved him, probably worried about causing bleeding or an infection. His stubble had progressed from peppery to whiskery, granting him a rakish air despite his pallor. He caught her staring at his whiskers and grinned, and immediately she could tell: he was back.

  “Manly?” he rasped.

  “Very,” she said. “I didn’t know you were capable of such masculinity.”

  He smiled. “Don’t mock me, woman.”

  He wasn’t alone. Sitting next to his bed were Jonah’s neighbors, Jace and Tucker. She’d seen them in here once since Jonah had been hospitalized; they’d shown up early in the course of Jonah’s illness and she’d offered to bring them into the ICU with her, which had not gone well. They’d stood, frozen, at the end of the bed, staring at Jonah’s inert form. Even Jace, so loquacious that Tucker claimed he talked nonstop in his sleep, couldn’t manage a single word as he took in the tubes and the drips and the ceaseless, monotonous gush of Jonah’s ventilator. Afterward, they’d continued to stop by the hospital on occasion, but confined themselves to the waiting room, where they barraged Georgia with piles of magazines and French macaroons and once, memorably, a coupon for something called Restorative Facial Filler. (“What the fuck?” she’d said, laughing, at which Tucker had turned to Jace and snapped, “I told you she wouldn’t want that.”)

  Today Jace beamed at Georgia, his blue eyes alight. “We asked if we could come in, and look what we found. He looks marvelous!”

  “I look like five kinds of shit,” said Jonah, working the controls of his motorized bed to sit up more fully. “But I’m here.”

  “Luckily he was never all that pretty,” added Tucker, the acerbity of his voice belied by the doting manner in which he leaned toward the bed.

  “You need anything?” Jace asked Jonah. “We’ve been bringing Georgia all the essentials.”

  “Thank you for taking care of her,” said Jonah, at the same time that Georgia said, “Maybe he’d like the facial filler.”

  Seeming to sense that Georgia wanted to see Jonah alone, Jace and Tuck visited for a few more moments before making a gracious exit.

  “You sound good,” she told Jonah. “Like yourself.”

  “I feel . . . with it, actually. Must have knocked out the cobwebs yesterday.”

  “You were still snowed all day yesterday. I read you seven chapters of Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae”—this was Jonah’s favorite book—“and all you said was ‘Neato.’”

  “Must have . . . needed downtime.”

  She’d been smiling back at him but now the smile vanished. “Oh, Jonah . . .”

  They were both silent, caught in their individual reflections. She wanted to ask him so much: what were his memories and his understanding of what had happened; what had that last evening alone been like; in what frame of mind had he been to think this solution was the one? She didn’t even know for sure when he had done it. But most of all: why had he tried to kill himself? It was all too much; she couldn’t ask any of it.

  His thoughts must have paralleled hers, because he reached for her hand and said, “You must have been through hell.”

  “How did . . . how did you get to that point? You seemed okay. Not okay, but you know what I mean: not despairing. Not suicidal.”

  “It’s happened to me before, but this was so much more powerful than the other times. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Try. Please.”

  “It’s like a demon swept through me and ate all my hope,” he said. “I can’t get it into words right: it’s not that I’d had hope and it was gone; it’s more like I didn’t realize anything had ever been good. All that was good was gone—not just gone from the present and the future but the memory of it gone too.”

  She nodded slowly. It had always been a fear in the back of her mind—sometimes in the front of her mind—that one day, this blackness would appear in him again and progress, sweeping through until there was nothing left. What would that be like: to believe, with every ounce of your being, that the only thing existing was misery and the only thing that had ever existed was misery and the only thing that would ever exist is misery?

  He went on: “I was still in the mountains when Andreas called. He’d seen Freida Myers’s will. He said she’d left some things for me and started reading me this list and I realized that every single item on it was something I’d once complimented her on. She’d remembered everything. There was this brooch—I told her my Nana would love it . . .” His voice twisted and trailed away.

  She waited for
him to continue.

  “Andreas said every time I’d admire something, she’d go home and take it off and put it in a box marked Dr. Tsukada. Most of it was stuff I wouldn’t even want, but you know how it is: I was trying to find something nice to say.”

  She picked up his hand.

  “I didn’t help her.”

  “Jonah,” she said, her voice thin. “Did you mean to take the Tylenol?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even remember. I drove home and decided to get hammered and I think I wrote you a letter and that’s the last thing I remember.”

  “You did write me a letter.”

  He turned to her, interested. “Ah, okay; yes. I thought I had done that but I wasn’t sure it was a real memory. I told you not to let Mark go.”

  Her gaze shifted to the side, briefly, but Jonah caught it. “Wait,” he said. “You did it? You dumped him?”

  She shut her eyes against the memory of Mark’s face, Mark’s scent, Mark’s voice. “Not exactly.”

  “You’re ghosting him. Because of all this—because of me?”

  “No,” she admitted, feeling the same stab of loss she experienced every time she thought of Mark. “He left. I told him—about what I had planned to do.”

  He took this in, mulling it over with a blank look. She wondered if he even remembered the details. Her understanding of the human psyche was as limited as anyone’s, but she could imagine the trauma that would result as your brain slowly unearthed a memory upending everything you believed about yourself.

  “We can talk about this later, Jones,” she said. “I don’t want to wear you out.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I need to rest.”

  33

  THE COUP DE GRCE

  One nice thing about spending ninety percent of her time trekking back and forth between a hospital room, a waiting room, and a cafeteria, all in the same massive building, was that it effectively shielded her from reality. She slept in the waiting room, dodging phone calls and emails and texts. She ignored TV and news apps and social media. She saw none of her work colleagues. She stayed in a bubble, catching a glimpse of others from time to time; Dr. Levin or Karla the nurse’s assistant or any of the capable and kind RNs who cared for Jonah. But mainly she tuned the world out.

  This avoidance came to an end a week later as she approached the waiting room of the ICU after visiting with Jonah. Before she could dodge, a silver-haired man in a bespoke suit accosted her. “Dr. Brown!”

  “Stewart.”

  “You haven’t been returning messages. But you’re here, so Dr. Tsukada must be in somewhat the same condition? He hasn’t . . . worsened?”

  Poor anxious Stewart: he had clearly been worried Jonah had died. Since he was a nonrelative, she was his only source of medical updates. She’d completely neglected him.

  “He’s better, Stewart,” she said apologetically. “He’s awake. They took the breathing tube out and his liver and kidney function have improved.”

  Stewart faltered, coming to a halt just outside the doors to the waiting room. “He’s awake?”

  The look of wonder on his face: it just about destroyed her. “He’s awake. He’s talking.”

  “Is he . . . is he . . .”

  He could not bring himself to complete the sentence.

  “It took a couple days, but his cognition is good,” she said, punctuating this news with her hands clasped in front of her chest. “Excellent, even. He has gaps in his memory but he’s sharp. So far, anyway. They had a neurologist in to look at him this morning, and I haven’t heard the results, but I can’t imagine they’ll be bad. And a psychiatrist assessed him as well. He’s okay.”

  This might be an overly rosy assessment, but she still found herself in the grip of a profound astonishment that Jonah had recovered to the degree he had. The liver, remarkable and unique when it came to the human body, was the only visceral organ known to have the capacity to regenerate. Jonah’s seemed to have risen from the ashes. At the same time, she knew it was likely to be a long road: spending significant time in an ICU could have long-term consequences. But having his brain back: that was a boundless gift.

  “Can I see him?” Stewart peered over his round, nearly frameless glasses. “Does he want to see me?”

  “I’ll ask.” She should have asked this already, she knew, but the urge to protect Jonah from his recent past had seemed too important. “Stewart.” She waved a hand in the air, a vague moue of apology. “I should have called you right away.”

  He nodded, turning toward the elevators, dragging her, reluctant, in his wake. “Where are you going?”

  “We need a more private place,” said Stewart. The elevator opened and he stepped on, presuming she would follow. They reached the ground floor and she expected him to head for the exit, but instead he stopped at a row of chairs at the far end of the atrium, at least ten feet away from anyone else. “This will do,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, and sat, childlike, before she was instructed to do so. Suddenly it was the most enormous relief to have someone else handling the problems. She listened to Stewart talk about Jonah’s case and the developments that had occurred since she’d gone dark. The words, couched in Stewart’s prudent legalese, flitted in and out of her head. It wasn’t until the name John Beezon floated by that she straightened up and began to pay attention.

  “Say that last part again?”

  “I said, it seems in the course of the investigation into Dr. Tsukada, the clinic uncovered damaging information about Mr. Beezon as well.”

  “Why were they looking into John Beezon?”

  “Someone asked them to review Mr. Beezon’s handling of Dr. Tsukada’s firing.”

  “Who?”

  “A physician named . . .” Stewart cast his eyes to the side, as if reviewing a mental database. “. . . Darby Gibbes.”

  Georgia’s mouth fell open. “Darby?”

  Stewart cleared his throat. “Dr. Gibbes organized a campaign to have the hospital issue an apology to Jonah’s former patients, along with an offer for them to return to the clinic to see any physician of their choice. During this process, Dr. Gibbes reported to the executive committee some concerns about Mr. Beezon’s judgment. He was investigated and now it seems he’s being discharged from his position here.”

  “Why? Because he read everyone’s email?”

  “Not quite.” Stewart smiled. “Because of material found on his computer.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “Ah,” said Stewart. He hesitated and then delivered the coup de grâce. “A trove of photographs of female coworkers at the clinic.”

  Georgia tried to process this. “Are you saying John Beezon is a Peeping Tom?”

  “The photos appear to have been shot at the clinic, and they aren’t pornographic or compromising. But”—here Stewart’s lips stretched into a wide, satisfied smile; the closest thing to schadenfreude she’d seen him express—“they’re fairly creepy. Close-ups of a woman licking her lips, for example. A zoomed-in shot of someone’s décolletage or someone’s derrière. All of coworkers who were technically subordinate to him.”

  She still wasn’t processing this. “Beezon took pervy pictures at the clinic? So they’re firing him?”

  Stewart’s smile dissipated. “Well, not quite. He is voluntarily resigning from his position.”

  She dreaded asking, but she had to know if Stewart suspected. “Who do you think shot the video of Jonah?”

  Stewart shifted in his seat, averting his gaze. He reminded her of a gentleman from another era with his precise speech and his immaculate grooming, but in the bright light of the exterior window behind them, she could see the tender sheen of his scalp between the carefully combed strands of his hair. It softened him somehow.

  “It’s interesting about that,” he said. “I don’t know who
sent the video. John Beezon monitored usage of many of the employees’ computers, which is allowable. But he did more than note what websites they accessed; he went into their personal email accounts and took screenshots. He also ignored several complaints about inappropriate behavior on the part of certain doctors from their female coworkers.”

  “He certainly didn’t ignore any complaints about Jonah.”

  “No,” Stewart agreed. “He seemed to focus much of his attention on Dr. Tsukada. I wonder if he’s the one who actually faked the video.” He met her eyes. “But there is no evidence to indicate that.”

  Georgia’s heart clanged; a jittery little beat. “They’re pushing him out, so that has to be good.”

  “Well, perhaps,” he said. “It’s my understanding he’s being transferred to a very nice facility a few counties over. We’ll see what happens.”

  “Stewart,” she said. “Thank you for everything. For everything you’ve done for Jonah. Do you think once he’s recovered, the clinic will give him his job back?”

  Stewart turned and looked directly at her. “Do you think he’ll want it?” he asked.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, they moved Jonah from the ICU to a step-down unit, and then, two days after that, to the regular medical floor. He started physical therapy to regain his strength and did well, rapidly progressing to the point of complaining about the hospital food.

  This evening Georgia was bringing him his favorite noodle bowl from Jack of Cups, an überhip restaurant near his house in Folly Beach, along with a bag of things he’d requested from his house. It had taken her far longer than she’d thought to get out to Folly and back, so it was considerably past dinnertime by the time she got to his room. She strode in after a cursory knock and halted in her tracks at the sight of a large figure leaning over Jonah’s bed. For a moment she thought someone had sent in an assassin: the person, dressed in various shades of black, looked as if he’d eaten Jack Reacher for lunch. It took her a minute: overinflated biceps . . . giant flat-topped head . . . expressionless gaze . . .