Terminally Ill

by Melissa Yi

  “Is this a party?” asked a student nurse who was one of a gaggle wearing navy uniforms.

  “Yes, it’s a party, and everyone’s welcome!” called Mrs. Bérubé.

  That did it. Soon the room overflowed with eager hands reaching for chips and scooping up salsa.

  “Free food!” I heard someone call from the nursing station.

  “Everything’s homemade, except the chips, of course,” said Mrs. Bérubé. I imagined that most of it had been for her husband’s funeral, but if she wanted to bring the leftovers to a hospital party, well, it kind of made sense.

  “Try the ham casserole. I made it myself,” said one of Mrs. Bérubé’s daughters, so I had to grab a paper plate and load it up.

  Dr. Huot sipped some punch. When I checked her reaction, she winked slightly at me.

  Well, that was trippy. I leaned against the wall, away from the food, praying that people would forget about me. The last thing I needed was more notoriety.

  Then I noticed another figure in the hallway. A plump one with pale skin. Her hands were jammed into her hoodie’s kangaroo pocket over her stomach, but she ventured closer to the doorway, glancing at the food out of the corner of her eyes.

  It couldn’t be.

  “Excuse me.” Mrs. Bérubé made her way into the hallway to speak to the girl, who raised her face for a nanosecond.

  Before I could do more than gape, Mrs. B placed her arm around her and drew her firmly into the room. “Kameron, I want you to come in and join the party. You are always welcome here.”

  Kameron bit her lip before she dared to meet my eye.

  I stared into Kameron Rosenberg’s face. She hunched her shoulders before she mumbled, her hands still twisting inside her pocket, “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said slowly. I looked from her to Mrs. Bérubé. “Do you two know each other?”

  “Oh, we met at Peter the Preacher’s service, not this Sunday, but the Sunday before. Such a charming girl. She met my George. We had cookies and juice together.”

  I ignored the charming bit and clicked back to my memories of a certain video. “Right. I saw that service on Peter the Preacher’s YouTube video channel.”

  Mrs. Bérubé waved her hand. “I don’t keep up with all those things, but it was an excellent service. Very well-attended.”

  “Yes. I saw Kameron and her family there, along with David Watson and his mother, Mary Kincaid.” I eyeballed Kameron.

  She kept her eyes on Mrs. Bérubé, but she flinched when she felt my gaze land on her. She knew what I was thinking.

  “Did you have a little visit with Kameron after the service?” I asked Mrs. B.

  “You know, I did. She was so interested in the quilt and in the silver dollar…” Her voice trailed off.

  I raised my voice slightly. “What do you have in your pocket, Kameron?”

  Kameron’s shoulders jerked. “Nothing,” she said, with a trace of her old defiance.

  “Give it back.” My tone brooked no argument.

  The breath whooshed out of Mrs. Bérubé’s chest. I put out my arm to steady her, but she shook it off and bent over Kameron Rosenberg. Even at 84, she still had a few inches on the teenager. “You took George’s silver dollar.”

  Kameron shrank toward me, as if she expected me to protect her.

  I placed my hands on her shoulders and whispered three words in her ear: “Give. It. Back.”

  Kameron glared at me. “Finder’s keepers.”

  “You didn’t find it. You stole it from my husband!” said Mrs. Bérubé, and the whole room grew very still.

  “Give it back, or I will explain to this entire room how you were the one who brought your family to the service so he could meet another patient’s son.” I spoke clearly and deliberately, so that she knew that I knew her mother had taken a bribe from David Watson. Verna had gotten the word that he was literally willing to kill for a bed upstairs. Or hire a killer, anyway. Verna Rosenberg would never do that, but Kameron figured out someone who would. Someone whom she would like to get arrested anyway: her stepfather.

  So she brought Jeremy to the service, introduced him to David Watson, and let him kill Mr. Bérubé. Maybe he’d killed another patient or three on the internal medicine ward, before Wednesday, to make room for her there first. St. Joe’s was investigating all recent deaths.

  I stared at Kameron, wondering if she’d engineered me, too. She knew I was “the detective doctor.” She’d sought me out as her family doctor and dropped hints about abuse, bringing me her sister, alluding to her baby sister. One way or another, she’d wanted Jeremy gone. And she’d not only had she succeeded, but at some point, she’d stolen a lucky token from a dying man.

  I’d thought Kameron was a defiant, bratty kid. But maybe she was worse than that. Maybe she was the worst psychopath I’d ever met. At age thirteen.

  My head spun. Could I get the police to investigate this, too? Charge Kameron with theft, at the very least, so she could get professional help before she spiraled from assisting to committing murder?

  In that breathless second, Kameron pulled the silver dollar out of her pocket and handed it to Mrs. Bérubé.

  Mrs. B snatched it. Her pale lips trembled.

  Her daughter, Julia, leaned over Kameron and said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, missy, but you messed with the wrong family this time. If you stole that from my father’s bedside—”

  “Wait,” said Mrs. Bérubé. “I want to say two things.” She swallowed. She held the dollar in the air, her hand shaking only slightly, and said, “This is for Dr. Hope Sze. She earned this, and so much more.”

  I didn’t want the dollar, but it could be evidence if we brought charges against Kameron, so I accepted it in a paper napkin. That might help preserve Kameron’s fingerprints, if it wasn’t enough that a roomful of people had witnessed her returning the dollar.

  Mrs. Bérubé faced Kameron. “A wise man once said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’” She smiled faintly at me. “I may not be as wise as Martin Luther King, Jr., but I know he was right. And so, Kameron Rosenberg, I forgive you for stealing this silver dollar from my husband’s deathbed, on one condition. I will mentor you.”

  “Mom, do you know who this is?” said Julia Bérubé. “This is the child whose mother’s boyfriend murdered Dad!”

  “I am aware of that, and it makes me very sad,” said Mrs. Bérubé. “I have also heard that these children were abused by that man. It doesn’t excuse them, but maybe they’re young enough to learn better.” She paused. “She certainly can’t get any worse.” She smiled at her own joke. “I will set up a weekly meeting with Kameron and her sisters. Maybe it will have an effect.”

  Slowly, Kameron’s jaw relaxed. She still looked angry and scared, but she also seemed puzzled.

  Was she a good actress? Playing us? A child only guilty of stealing a coin?

  I couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t trust her, but I didn’t have to. I’d entrust the silver dollar to the police, maybe with Officer Visser, who could make up their own minds about pressing charges or starting a rehabilitation program.

  In the unlikely event that they approved Mrs. Bérubé’s plan, I’d speak to Mrs. B privately about my suspicions and make sure that she held her weekly meetings in a public place.

  Better yet, she should have supervised meetings.

  Maybe meetings supervised by me.

  Because when it comes to forgiveness, not to quibble with Martin Luther King, Jr., but right now, I leaned into John F. Kennedy’s camp: “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First, I have to thank the escape artist, Dean Gunnarson. In honour of Houdini, he really did chain and nail himself in a coffin and lower himself into Winnipeg’s Red River. He barely escaped with his life. I’d already started to write a much darker third book for Hope, but it required
a lot of research (ugh). After I heard Dean’s interview with Sook-Yin Lee on the CBC Radio show DNTO, I wrote to Dean, and he kindly gave me permission to use the stunt in this book. Of course Elvis (and Archer) Serratore ended up being a very different, fictitious characters, but it was much more fun to let Hope flirt with magic. If you’d like to see the real deal, head over to Dean’s website, www.alwaysescaping.com.

  Next, I’d like to thank the magicians at the Magic Café. When I explained my dilemma and asked for magic resources, they came up with lots of good answers, including the actual solution to Elvis’s mystery. So Dave “Sparky” Matkin, Cliffg37, Ian McColl, Wolflock, Harley Newman, and Jay Leslie know how to solve puzzles in fiction, as well as escape from handcuffs and the like. Wow.

  Medical-wise, Dr. Chantal Vaidyanath generously gave advice about hypoxic-anoxic encephalopathy. Without her, I would have made Elvis aphasic. I thought that would be a fun case to solve, if he couldn’t talk, but it turned out that’s not a common problem after hypoxia. Well, maybe the next time.

  Permanent thanks to Dr. Greg Smith, who knows everything from current Pap smear guidelines to correct English and French grammar, although my husband teased me, “Too bad a guy from Alberta is correcting your French.”

  Speaking of my husband, Matt, he’s the one person who’s consistently told me to write, and who has given me the time and privacy to do so. Without him, I might just be another grouchy or wistful doctor saying, “Y’know, I’m going to write a book one day.” Words can’t express how important that is.

  Thank you, my children, who always inspire me and usually allow me a teaspoon of time alone to think and write, although to close this book, I had to hypnotize Anastasia with Jackie Chan’s Adventures and order them both to keep quiet unless they were bleeding. It’s funny to think that I first started writing about Hope soon after graduating from my emergency training, before kids, and now my son Max is almost as old as her brother, Kevin.

  Way to go, Camden Park Press, for the editing. Please note that I had to adjust the dates slightly to make them work with Hope’s call schedule. I also use Canadian spelling according to my own whims. For example, Lyn informs me that the apostrophe in Hallow’en is archaic, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s correct, and much creepier that way. She also marks jargon that I choose to keep. Especially when a patient is crashing, that’s how we talk. Sorry. The librarians at the Alexandria Public Library and Dawn Kiddell of the Cornwall Public library tagged still more copyedits, for which I am most grateful. All errors are, of course, my own.

  Thank you very much, Kobo, for sponsoring the cover by the professional cover artist, Scarlett Rugers, and for giving promotional support. Such a pleasure to work with professionals, in all senses of the word.

  And one big Namaste for Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, who helped mold me into the writer I am today.

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  Want more Hope?

  CODE BLUES

  I pictured the city of Montreal as a woman with bleached blonde hair and a generous, lopsided bosom, who would draw me into her perfumed embrace and whisper, “Bienvenue.” Instead, I found a skinny brunette with a cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth who turned around and bitch-slapped me.

  At least, that’s what it felt like. Even before I got mixed up with murder.

  At 7:25 a.m., I stepped through the ER’s automatic doors on the east side of the hospital, near the bike racks. I promptly spotted ten people on lime-green plastic chairs, dozing or watching the TV in the waiting room on my right.

  Ten people already, on my first day of residency, also known as my first official day as Dr. Hope Sze. Happy Canada Day to me.

  Dr. Dupuis handed me a chart for a seventy-five-year-old woman with abdominal pain. “Have fun.”

  I drew the dirty pink curtain around bed number 11 before I began the interview. The patient’s son helped swish it around his side of the stretcher. My patient turned out to be a tiny, white-haired, half-deaf woman who only spoke Spanish. Her family spoke a little French, but not much. I found myself yelling and playacting a lot. “Do you feel nauseous? Are you vomiting?” Grab stomach, pretend to retch. “Do you have pain in your chest?” Hands to heart, with tormented eyes raised to the acoustic tile ceiling, like I was Saint Hope at the stake. “Do you have diarrhea?” That one was hard. I made shooing motions around my rear end. Even the patient laughed.

  During the physical exam, my hands traversed all over her abdomen, while I asked if it hurt. “Dolor? Dolor?”

  The family enjoyed this demonstration of fifty percent of my Spanish vocabulary (the other word I knew was si, or yes) and praised my excellent command of the language. “Très bien!” The patient beamed at me. She didn’t look too pained. I was in the middle of asking her to turn over for a rectal exam when I heard a flat woman’s voice from the speakers overhead, “CODE. BLUE. OPERATING ROOM.”

  I froze.

  “CODE. BLEU. BLOC OPÉRATOIRE.”

  The pink curtain ripped open, revealing Dr. Dupuis’ flushed face. “Come on!” he yelled.

  We flew around the nursing station and past the X-ray light boxes. He slammed the side door open with the heel of his hand. We dashed down the narrow back hallway.

  He punched open another teal door. As we sprinted up two flights of stairs, one of my black leather clogs almost went airborne. I jammed my foot back into it. Dr. Dupuis ended up a half-flight ahead of me, but I caught up to him on the landing.

  We dashed left, and then another left past the elevators, and then we were at the T junction of a hallway and Dr. Dupuis was yelling, “Where is it?” at a guy in a white uniform and a blue bonnet-cap.

  The guy pointed back over Dr. Dupuis’s shoulder. “Men’s change room!”

  Dr. Dupuis doubled-back a few steps and shoved open the door to a small, jaundice-yellow room.

  Should I follow him in a men’s room?

  The door nearly swung shut again. I thrust it open.

  Beige lockers lined the four yellow walls and made a row down the middle of the room. A wooden bench stretched lengthwise in each half-room.

  In the far half, wedged between the bench and the lockers, I spotted a pair of men’s leather shoes. The feet sprawled away from each other. The scuffed gray soles of the shoes pointed toward me.

  Dr. Dupuis crouched at the man’s head, blocking my view of the top, but someone had yanked the man’s charcoal T-shirt up to his armpits, exposing his white belly and chest, above his brown leather belt and khaki pants.

  A black woman in a white coat pressed her fingers against the side of the man’s throat. “There’s no pulse.”

  “I’ll start CPR!” I yelled, running toward them. I’d only ever seen one code blue, on a sick patient in the emergency room who didn’t make it. I’d never heard of a code in a men’s room. We didn’t even have gloves. Mouth-to-mouth wasn’t my first choice.

  I knelt on the cold tile floor, my arms extended, hands laced, and braced to do CPR. Then I finally saw the man’s face.

  His features were mottled purple, his filmy eyes fixed half-open, his jaw hanging open under his moustache.

  I knew this man. Or at least, I used to.

  CODE BLUES

  The first Hope Sze novel

  NOTORIOUS D.O.C.

  I’d avoided St. Joseph’s emergency room for the past week, but it hadn’t changed. Stretcher patients lined the wall and spilled into the hallway. Fluorescent lights turned everyone�
�s skin yellow, even though most of them weren’t Asian like I was.

  I smiled at a nurse who squeezed my arm and said, “Welcome back, Hope!” just before a patient’s wrinkled mother waved me down. “Miss. We need a blanket!”

  Home, sweet home.

  Well, sweet except for the smell of stool drifting from bed 12.

  I nodded at a few fellow medical residents. Officially, we’re doctors in our first post-graduate training year, formerly known as interns. Unofficially, we’re scut monkeys rotating from service to service. Last month, I’d done emergency medicine and tracked down a murderer; this month, I was on psychiatry and opting out of any drama.

  I just needed to see one scut monkey in particular. A blond dude. A guy who appreciated sausages and beer and me, not necessarily in that order. A guy I’d overlooked when I first came to Montreal for my residency, but I wasn’t about to make that mistake again.

  Sadly, no matter how casually I glanced out of the corners of my eyes, John Tucker did not appear.

  Since I was officially starting my psychiatry rotation a week late, duty called first. I perched on the chair in the psych corner of the nurses’ station, near the printer, and grabbed the chart lying on the table. Normally the psych nurse would occupy this chair, but she was probably talking to the patient whose chart I was holding: Mrs. Regina Lee.

  I pretended to read the triage note, my skin still electric at the possibility of seeing Tucker. Was that high school or what? I might be 26 years old, with an M.D. behind my name, but I still got rattled thinking about A BOY.

  My favourite emerg nurse, Roxanne, paused beside me and shoved a pen behind her ear. “Hope! Nice to see you. Are you doing okay?”

  I nodded. We hugged. She smelled like Purell and she was built like me, skinny but strong. Once she told me her Italian grandmothers practically cried when they saw her, they found her so emaciated-looking. Of course, that didn’t stop me from complaining about my thighs on a bad day.

  Roxanne glanced at the blue plastic card clipped to my chart. “Oh, no. You got Mrs. Lee. Is it Fall already?”