by Jamie Canosa
Chapter 15
~Sawyer~
*6 months ago*
The minute the car was in park, Frank shoved through the Emergency Room doors and plowed his way to the front of the line. He ignored the complaints of those there ahead of us. Just pushed right past them. I followed. I followed because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d been in a state of questionable shock since Frank woke me up that morning to tell me Sylvie was sick. Really sick. In the hospital. He told me to pack. To get in the car. And when I didn’t know what else to do, I followed Frank’s lead. Always had.
Whoever had called Frank to inform him of his sister’s condition hadn’t done it justice. Or maybe he’d sugar coated it for me. Either way, she wasn’t sick, she was . . . fading. Disappearing before our very eyes. She’d always been a small girl. Not enough nutrition for proper growth, but now? She was nothing but skin and bones lying in that hospital bed.
“Sylvie?” I wandered into her room, while Frank talked to her doctor.
Apparently she’d been there several days before she’d allowed them to call her next of kin. She hadn’t wanted to worry us. Well, I was worried now.
“Sawyer.” She opened her eyes and smiled at me. Even her lips looked fragile. Paper thin and chapped.
“Hey, stranger.” I took her hand and did my best to return her smile. She’d taken on a sickly yellow tinge and patches of rough skin scraped against my palm. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine. You shouldn’t have come.”
“Don’t be silly, Syl. You’re in the hospital. Of course we came.” The stink of sickness and bleach were ripe in the air.
Rheumy eyes blinked up at me. “I’ve missed you.”
We spoke several times a week. She called Frank at least once a day. But a year and a half was a long time to go without actually seeing each other. We kept saying we were going to go visit, but with work and money being tight . . . there was always an excuse not to.
“I’ve missed you, too.” Her hair felt like straw combing through my fingers. “But you didn’t have to go to such extreme measures just to get us here.”
Her laugh turned quickly into a deep chested cough.
My smile cracked. “Shit.”
“I’m okay.” She cleared her throat once, twice, and then smiled again, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s just a cough. Relax.”
Sylvie sighed and laid her head back against the pillow.
“Are you tired?” I grabbed the control device strapped to the side of her bed and hit the down button.
“I’m always tired.” Her slurred words were nearly lost under the mechanical whir of the bed lowering.
“Sawyer?” Frank stuck his head in the room. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Sylvie’s eyes dipped once more and this time they stayed shut. I waited a moment, until her fingers became lax and I was certain she was asleep before carefully removing my hand from hers.
“So?” I stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind me. “What did they say? What’s wrong with her?”
“Acute toxic inorganic arsenic poisoning.” He recited the words like lines from a play.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Frank shrugged, his gaze locked on the small window in Sylvie’s door. “Apparently, it’s pretty rare. They don’t know what caused it.”
“What are they doing about it?”
“They tried . . . hemo . . . dialysis? Tried to clean it out of her bloodstream, but it’s already bound to her tissue.”
“Okay.” I nodded, growing tired of the bullshit I couldn’t care less about. What I wanted to know was . . . “What now? What are they doing for her now? How are they going to make her better?”
“They’re not.” His gaze shifted to meet mine. “They have her on some medications to manage the symptoms—something to control her low blood pressure, something else to prevent seizures. That’s what got her brought in in the first place. She had a seizure at work.”
“But what about the poison? How are they getting it out of her?”
“They’re not. There aren’t any approved therapies for her condition.” A look crossed Frank’s face. Something I’d never seen from him before. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was fear. “She doesn’t have any insurance, Sawyer. They’re sending her home.”
“That’s bullshit,” I blurted and then remembered to quiet my voice. “She’s sick. It’s a friggin’ hospital. They can’t just send her away.”
“They are. Said there’s nothing they can do for her here that can’t be done at home.” He reached for the door handle and paused without moving his eyes from the glass. “I’m gonna sit with my sister for a while. Thanks for coming, Sawyer.”
Before I could answer, he pushed his way inside and the door swung closed between us.
They wanted to send her home? These people who called themselves doctors wanted to just give up on her? Because she didn’t have the money to pay them enough to care? Fuck that.
I fought to control my temper the whole way to the nurse’s station. If I got myself escorted from the building it wouldn’t do anyone any good.
“Excuse me.” I leaned against the tall counter.
“How can I help you?” A woman—mid-thirties, blonde bob, in powder blue scrubs—smiled up at me.
“I need to talk to the doctor treating Sylvie Varis, please.”
“Oh.” Her hand went to a clipboard and she scanned a list of names. “Are you her brother? I heard her brother arrived today.”
“Yes.” I was in every way that counted.
“I’m very sorry about your sister. How’s she doing today? My shift just started. I haven’t made rounds yet.”
A little of the fire burning in my chest cooled. This nurse seemed like a decent person. Like she actually gave a damn about Sylvie. No price tag attached. “She’s resting now.”
“Alright. I’ll save her for my last stop, then. Let her get some sleep. Here we go . . .” Her finger settled on Sylvie’s name and slid over to something scrawled in illegible handwriting. Illegible to me, but she read it just fine. Picking up the phone from her desk, she pressed a button and the intercom overhead sprung to life with a faint buzz. “Dr. Lawrence. Paging Dr. Lawrence to the third floor nurse’s station.”
She hung up and smiled at me again. “She should be here any minute. If you’ll have a seat, I’ll point her in your direction when she arrives.”
I thanked her and found a chair with a view of the desk. Several minutes later a woman in a white lab coat approached the desk. She exchanged words with the nurse who pointed at me, but I was already on my feet and met her where she stood.
“Dr. Lawrence?”
“Yes.” She extended a formal hand.” And you are?”
“I’m Sawyer. Sylvie Varis’ . . . brother. I have a few questions. I heard you’re planning to discharge her?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Mr. Varis—”
“Sawyer.” I may have been pretending to be Sylvie’s biological brother, but Mr. Varis was a name associated with pure evil. I wanted nothing to do with it.
“Sawyer,” she corrected. “If you wouldn’t mind following me. There’s a private office where we can discuss—”
“Right here is fine. Or are you too embarrassed to publicly admit you’re sending a sick girl away because she isn’t rich enough to pay for your fancy car and summer home?”
I was guessing, but I was pissed so I didn’t really care.
Irritation flashed in the good doctor’s eyes. “I know this is difficult to hear, but there’s only so much medicine can do. At this point, with the resources available to us, we’ve exhausted all options where it comes to your sister. It is not this hospital’s policy to take on the financial burden of patients we can no longer provide care for.”
That I did not take well. “You’re killing her.”
“Good day, Mr. Varis.” Dr. Lawrence turned and h
er shoes clicked over the tiled hallway as she walked away.
“By sending her away, you are killing her!” I wheeled around, looking for something to throw, or hit, or shatter, and found the glassy-eyed nurse staring back at me.
“I . . . I’m sorry.” Embarrassed to be caught eavesdropping, she dropped her head and started flipping through pages in a chart. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
She bit her lip and I realized she was more than embarrassed. Forcing a deep breath, I smoothed my face. “It’s okay. The ‘policies of this hospital’ aren’t your fault. Sorry if I scared you.”
I was ten feet away, headed back to Sylvie’s room, when she called my name. “Sawyer?”
“Hmm?”
She was standing at the end of her desk, fiddling with the hem of her shirt.
“I . . .” Her gaze darted down the empty hallway and then back to me. She waved me closer and I went. “I heard what Dr. Lawrence said. It’s true. Technically, they’ve done everything they can to help Sylvie.”
“But?” I was guessing this secret pow-wow wasn’t to support her boss’s claims.
“There are specialists, trial medications . . . Things that require money.”
“If you heard the doctor then you know we don’t have that. Sylvie doesn’t have insurance.”
“I know.” She nodded and bit her lower lip again. “This condition your sister has . . . She isn’t the first case. There have been others.”
“I thought it was rare?”
“It is. Which is why a reporter from the Little Falls Gazette has been investigating. His name is Steven Marsh. He’s been around here a few times, asking questions.” Her thin fingers knotted together, turning her knuckles white. “We’re not supposed to talk to him, but . . . I like your sister. She’s a sweet girl. Maybe he can help you.”
“Thank you . . .”
“Tara,” she supplied.
“Thank you, Tara. I’ll go see him.”
She nodded and ducked back behind her desk. I heard the clicking of her fingers flying over the keyboard before I braved asking the question sitting on the tip of my tongue. “Tara, what happened to them? The other cases like Sylvie?”
The corners of her eyes turned down along with her lips and I felt ice water flow through my veins. I didn’t stick around to hear an answer I already knew.
The Little Falls Gazette was as dinky a rag-tag publication as you could imagine. Their ‘offices’ included a single store front room in the middle of town. Large glass windows showed a half dozen desks spread round the open floor plan with as many people sitting behind them, plugging away at their computers.
We pushed our way through the glass-plated door and Frank marched right up to the closest desk. “We’re looking for Steven Marsh.”
Apparently this kind of behavior wasn’t uncommon. The young woman pointed toward the back left corner of the office without ever removing her eyes from the screen she was working on. In fact, no one paid us any attention at all as we squeezed between desks and chairs and filing cabinets.
“Steven Marsh?”
A young guy—maybe early twenties—tall, thin, with dark hair and facial scars from what was probably a bad acne problem as a teen dropped his pen and pushed away from his desk. “I’m Steven Marsh. What can I do for ya?”
“We wanted to talk to you about a story you’re working on.” Frank shifted his feet. I knew this couldn’t be easy for him, going to someone else for help. Frank never accepted help from anyone in his life, besides me, but I was family.
“Which one? You’re going to have to be more specific.” The shoddy rolling chair Steven was sitting in creaked as he folded his arms back behind his head and stared up as us.
“The one about arsenic poisoning,” I supplied.
“Oh.” His arms dropped as he scooted forward, landing with a thud on his desktop. Without looking at us, he scooped up his pen and went back to whatever he was working on when we arrived. “That one.”
“Yeah.” Frank folded his arms and I could feel the tension radiating from him. “That one. My sister’s sick.”
Steven kept on writing, but I was getting the sense that it had nothing to do with what Frank was telling him. “I see.”
A minute stretched into two as we stood there, waiting for him to say something else. He didn’t.
The end of Frank’s patience was punctuated by a grunt. He took a step toward the desk, but I grabbed hold of him before he could make a scene in the middle of a news room. “Don’t you want to know more? Aren’t you writing a story? Haven’t you investigated other cases like this? People getting sick . . . dying? What are you gonna do about it?”
“Nothing.” Steven shoved back. This time when his eyes came to us, he was glaring. “I’m not doing a damn thing about it. And I’m not writing a story. Not anymore.”
“Why the hell not?” A loud clap echoed through the room as Frank’s hands slammed down on the desktop, sending several papers fluttering to the floor.
Steven scanned the others as several heads turned in our direction. “Meet me at the Main Street Dinner in twenty minutes.”
He bent to collect his papers and I took that as our cue to go.
We sat at the dinner for almost half-an-hour before Steven finally showed. Five more minutes and I wouldn’t have been able to keep Frank from storming right back into his office. He waved to the waitress behind the counter as he made his way to our table and called out his order of a black coffee. I swung around to Frank’s side of the booth, leaving an open bench for Steven. It felt right, facing him side-by-side. It was us against him. Us against the world. It always had been.
We all sat quietly as the waitress with the silver, coiffed hair and a friendly smile delivered Steven’s mug and topped off ours. “How you boys doin’ this mornin’?”
“Fine, Milly.” Steven lifted his cup and tipped his head in thanks. “How ’bout yourself?”
“Oh, these old bones are doin’ about as well as can be expected. You let me know if there’s anything else I can get for ya.” She toddled away and Steven took a sip of coffee, watching us over the rim of his mug.
He set it down on a sigh. “Alright. You want to know about the story?” It was a rhetorical question. One he didn’t wait for an answer to. “It was supposed to be my big break. My earth-shaking expose on big business. Paragon Gen poisoning the local population. It was supposed to get me out of this Podunk town and into the big city. A real job at a real publication.”
I didn’t understand. Such a controversial story should have been splashed all over the headlines. Obviously Frank didn’t get it either.
Steven frowned and leaned into the table. “You need to understand small town politics. That company employs more than three-quarters of our residents. If they were to get shut down . . . The hike in taxes alone would bankrupt everyone. The Little Falls Gazette included.”
Frank’s knuckles turned white around his mug. I worried for the ceramic, but felt his frustration. They were going to let some company get away with murder to protect their bottom line?
“What kind of bullshit news outlet do you work for?” Coffee sloshed over the side of Frank’s mug as he slammed it down. “It’s your responsibility to—”
“I agree with you.” Steven set his mug down more calmly and folded his hands. “I absolutely agree with you. But what can I do? My hands are tied. My sources have all dried up and I’ve been warned against pursuing this any further. I can’t risk my job. I’ve got a wife and a kid on the way.”
Dammit. I didn’t want to feel for this guy, but I couldn’t help it. He was just as screwed by this turn of events as we were. Steven Marsh wasn’t the enemy.
“What the hell are we supposed to do now?” Frank’s jaw turned rock hard, an indication that he was either about to put his fist through something, or fighting back tears. I thought I knew which one it was this time. “My sister doesn’t have insurance. The hospital’s letting her go. She needs help.”
�
�Here.” Steven threw open the satchel he came in wearing and pulled out a thick manila envelope. “It’s everything I’ve collected on Paragon Gen. Medical reports, statements, facts about arsenic poisoning. I believe the contamination is coming from some of the semi-conductor computer chips they use in their manufacturing. The gallium arsenic has somehow found its way into the ground water supply. Stick to bottled water around here. It isn’t much. Not more than a hunch with some corresponding facts, but nothing to link them. No proof. There are phone numbers in there, though. Numbers for the Paragon headquarters. If you call, make a big enough stink, it may be worth it to them to help pay your sister’s medical bills just to shut you up. It’s worth a shot.”
Steven pushed the file across the table to Frank. He drained the rest of his cup and we watched in silence as he slid from the booth and walked away. The bell on the door sounded louder than it should have. Another dead end.
Frank flipped open the file and sorted through a mountain of papers. It looked like we had some serious work to do.
“Goddammit!” Frank whipped his phone across the room and I watched as tiny bits of plastic scattered across the floor.
“No luck?” He’d been trying endlessly for three straight days to find a lawyer who would take on Sylvie’s case pro-bono. The officials at Paragon Gen refused to speak with him directly. Their assistants and secretaries kept referring him to their legal department, who would only confer with his lawyer. A lawyer we couldn’t afford to pay for.
“Not one of those goddamn blood-sucking leeches is willing to take on a major corporation without a big payday in it for them.”
They knew as well as we did that the odds of winning against the team of world-class attorneys on the Paragon payroll was near zilch.
“What the hell are we supposed to—?”
“Frank?” Sylvie’s voice was low and strained. She tried to hide it, put on a pretty good show, but she was hurting.