Duby's Doctor

by Iris Chacon

  He picked up his new sketchpad and pencils and began drawing. For a change, the woman in the drawing was not some version of Carinne Averell. That old obsession did not survive the events of the past week—events that had threatened his life and solidified his priorities. He drew the most important thing on his mind. He drew Mitchell.

  Few people would have recognized the woman in Jean’s sketch as the strait-laced, no-nonsense, scholarly Doctor Oberon. Jean drew the young woman whose thick hair curled loosely around her shoulders while she sipped midnight cocoa in her flannel granny-style nightgown. This girl was glowing with inner light, sparkling with good humor and, yes, affection for someone or something at which she was looking, from behind her steaming Winnie-the-Pooh mug. He had drawn her in such a way that anyone standing in front of the picture would feel they were sitting across that kitchen table from her, receiving the joy and love that flowed freely from her happy heart.

  To be sure, the lady in the picture was very fond of someone, or something. Clearly, the artist realized it and had captured it spectacularly well. It was a picture of Doctor Oberon, and it wasn’t. It was Mitchell, and it wasn’t. Above all, it was totally Michel. His Michel, who was in love and didn’t even know it.

  Jean had spent nearly three hours on the sketch before he grew too tired to continue and stood it up in the chair beside his bed, to keep him company.

  When a tall man in a dark suit knocked and entered, late in the afternoon, Jean reached out to remove the drawing from the chair. The man stopped him with a smile and a gesture.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” the man said. “I can’t stay long, and I feel I should do you the honor of standing for what I have to say.”

  Jean looked puzzled. “I don’t understand. Do I know you, monsieur? I’m sorry if I have forgotten ...”

  “It’s all right,” the man said. “I know you don’t remember, and it’s okay. We were, sort of, friends once. You worked for me.”

  “Ah,” Jean nodded, the puzzle coming together now. “Yves Dubreau worked for you.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said the man. “I’m Captain Boone, I’m from the local office of the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Like a kind of policeman,” Jean said. “Like Agent Frank Stone.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like Agent Frank Stone.”

  “Neither do I, right now. That’s, um, sort of what I came to tell you about.”

  “You came to tell me you don’t like Agent Frank Stone?”

  “Not exactly,” Captain Boone said with a chuckle. “I came to tell you, we’re sorry. Officially sorry, the whole department, for what Agent Stone did to you. Actually, it’s not even ‘Agent’ Stone, anymore. I’ve asked for his resignation. He’ll be taking an early retirement in lieu of disciplinary action—like prison.”

  “Who is Lou?” asked Jean.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said he’s taking early retirement and Lou.”

  Boone laughed. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t make myself clear, did I. ‘In lieu’ means ‘instead of’ something. He’s taking retirement instead of going to prison. But he must absolutely have no further contact with you. If he bothers you at all, you call me, and he’ll be behind bars within twenty-four hours. Sound okay to you?”

  “And, he can’t bother Michel, too.”

  “Absolutely. If he does anything, anything at all, that you don’t like, he goes to jail. Just like in Monopoly. ‘Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.’”

  “Ah,” Jean nodded. “Oui, I know that game.”

  Captain Boone held up a 9 x 12 manila envelope he carried in one hand. “And these are for you. It’s a lot of paper, but basically it says that you get your life back. Name, Social Security number, bank accounts, even back pay for all the time you’ve been—pardon the expression—dead. And, you’ll be retiring with a good pension because of the disabilities incurred while serving your country. We’ll even have your boat all spruced up like new by the time you go home from the hospital. How do you feel about getting back in your own place, again, huh?”

  Jean was looking at Boone with lines of uncertainty across his brow. He had never thought for a second that he would not be going home with Mitchell, to Mitchell.

  “Man needs his own place, right?” Boone joked. “Like a man cave and all.”

  Jean nodded, saying nothing. Of course, he was a man. A man lived in his own house—or on his own boat, as it were—not in the house of some lady who wasn’t his mother, or his wife, or his...anything. Apparently, she wasn’t even his doctor any more.

  Captain Boone moved to place the manila envelope on Jean’s bedside table. As he passed the chair, he looked—then looked again—at the sketch propped there. “I know her from somewhere,” he said.

  He shook his head, studying the picture further. Suddenly, he smiled and snapped his fingers in triumph. “It’s Doctor Oberon, right?” he asked, turning to Jean.

  “You know Michel? Doctor Oberon?” Jean said, surprised. “How do you know her? I have been trying to find her all day. Do you know where she is?”

  “Not at this exact minute,” Boone said genially. “But this morning, she was in my office. That’s how all this came about.” He patted the envelope, indicating the papers and the arrangements for Jean’s—actually, Duby’s—future.

  “Ah, oui, I understand,” Jean murmured, subsiding into his pillow, suddenly very, very tired. Mitchell had arranged for him to go back to being Yves Dubreau. Yves Dubreau had another place to live, and a doctor who was a man, and a newly-met maman, who was the wife of a man who should be in prison for nearly getting Mitchell killed. “I understand.”

  Captain Boone held out his hand. “Duby, we’ve missed you. It’s great to see you among the living, and it’s great to see you getting your life back.”

  Jean shook the proffered hand briefly and attempted a smile. “Thank you for coming, Captain.”

  On his way out the door, Boone said, “You come back and visit us sometime, okay? All the guys would like to say hello.” Then he was gone.

  He didn’t hear Jean answer faintly: “Come back to where?”

  CHAPTER 22 – RECONSTRUCTION

  By dusk, twenty-four hours had passed since the rescue raid was launched at the Averell compound.

  After a supper that went uneaten, Jean received medication to help him sleep despite the pain in his leg and shoulder. He received nothing for a shattered heart.

  He would be awakened very early in the morning to be prepped for surgery to repair his knee. “Mitchell’s knee” he called it, in his own mind, though he would never say that aloud again. Before he retired for the night, he made sure to sign all necessary consent forms so that Doctor Goldberg could perform the surgery.

  When Hector passed the nurses’ station around 8 o’clock the next morning, Nurse Erskine called out to him before he could knock on the door to room 2114.

  “He’s already been taken to surgery, Hector,” she said. “No breakfast or lunch for him today. We’ll let him try to eat something at dinner this evening, if he’s up to it.”

  Hector placed on his metal cart the breakfast tray he was holding. He crossed the hall to speak to Nurse Erskine. “So, Doctor Oberon showed up!”

  “Actually, no. Goldberg is doing the surgery.”

  “Goldberg!”

  “What, you don’t think he’s competent, Orderly Velez? I’ll tell the hospital administrator to fire Goldberg immediately—oh, wait. The administrator might still remember that Goldberg was one of his professors in medical school!”

  “I didn’t mean Goldberg can’t do it,” Hector said. “I meant I was surprised that Jean would let Goldberg touch that knee. He wanted Oberon. You know that.”

  Erskine dropped her voice to a whisper and leaned across the counter to be closer to Hector. “Oberon is nowhere to be found. She’s taking personal leave, and she’s not answering her phones.”

  Hector whistled two long notes indicatin
g this was big news indeed. He, too, whispered when he said, “You sure it’s personal leave? It’s not sick leave?”

  “Personal. Definitely. I talked to Madeleine in Payroll.”

  Hector took three seconds to process the impact of Erskine’s statement. “When’s she comin’ back?”

  Erskine reached under the counter and pulled out a neatly folded set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle® bed linens. “Found these by my locker in the nurses’ lounge this morning. They were dropped off sometime between 3:30 yesterday afternoon and 7:15 this morning.”

  Hector touched the linens with something approaching reverence. “Jean’s sheets!”

  “Yeah,” said Erskine. “She returned them with a note thanking me for lending them to her. Didn’t mention him at all.”

  “Oh, no,” said Hector.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Erskine. “So, we know a couple things: one, she doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now. Otherwise, why sneak in and out in the middle of the night to drop something off?”

  Hector nodded in agreement. “And, two, Jean ain’t sleeping at her house no more.”

  “Exactly,” the nurse said sadly.

  Hector said a very naughty word in Spanish.

  “You got that right,” Erskine said, and she sighed.

  Hector perked up and turned to cross the hall to Jean’s room. “Maybe when she dropped off the sheets, she left him a note, eh? I’m just gonna look.”

  Ordinarily, Nurse Erskine would have stopped such a breach of patient privacy, but in Jean’s case, she felt that she and Hector were like a surrogate family, which changed the rules just a bit.

  Hector came out of the room carrying not a note, but Jean’s sketch of Mitchell Oberon holding a midnight mug of cocoa. He held it up for Erskine’s perusal.

  It was Erskine’s turn to whistle. “Wow!” she whispered.

  “I know! I almost didn’t recognize her! Who knew Doctor Oberon was so hot, y’know? Ay, Chihuahua,” whispered Hector.

  Nurse Erskine took two steps down the counter and picked up the nurses’ station phone. She ran a finger down a typed directory taped to the file cabinet beneath the counter. Finding the number she wanted, she made a call.

  While she listened to the phone ringing at the other end of the line, Erskine held up one finger to Hector in a “just-a-minute” gesture. The ringing stopped and an answering machine picked up the call.

  After the electronic beep, she left a message: “Hi, Doctor Oberon, it’s Nurse Erskine. Just wanted to let you know I got the sheets and your note. You’re very welcome, of course, and if you need them back for any reason, you just let me know. They’re always available for you. And, ah, we, ah, we found something of yours that you probably want to have there at home, so if we don’t hear from you before lunch break today, Hector’s going to drop it off at your house. Thanks. ‘Bye.”

  Hector looked at the nurse. He lifted one hand, palm up, in a silent question. When she didn’t respond, he shook the hand to call her attention to it, adding for emphasis: “Qué?”

  “You’re going to take this picture to Doctor Oberon’s house on your lunch break.”

  “Are you kiddin’ me? Dude! She lives way the heck in Coconut Grove!”

  Nurse Erskine opened a drawer near her feet, rummaged in the purse she had secreted there, and produced a twenty-dollar bill. Handing the money to Hector, she said, “So, you’ll take a long lunch break. Won’t be the first time, right? And it’s kinda hospital business, anyway. This is for lunch at the drive-through and gas for your car.”

  Hector seemed to calm himself. As he pocketed the cash, he said, “What if she don’t wanna talk to nobody?”

  Erskine shrugged. “Tape it to her door. What could you say, anyway? He’s thinking of her like that” - she gestured to the romanticized drawing - “and she can’t be bothered to even call and check how he’s doing? I don’t want to talk to the witch.”

  “Claro!” said Hector, before rolling up the sketch and placing it carefully in his cart. “Later,” he said as he pushed the breakfast trays onward down the hall.

  “Later,” said Erskine, and resumed her routine duties.

  Around 1:30 that afternoon, Hector taped the rolled sketch to the front door of Mitchell’s condo unit. He knew her car was there, so she was almost certainly at home, but she didn’t answer the door. He inhaled to shout something sarcastic and accusatory through the door, but instead he shook his head, with a sigh, and left.

  Around 3:00 that afternoon, Doctor Goldberg dialed Mitchell’s home phone number and left a message on her answering machine. He told her the surgery had gone as well as could be expected. He told her that with some weeks of diligent physical therapy, Jean should be able to walk virtually normally, but not engage in many of the “demanding” physical exploits that (judging by his scars) had been a large part of his past. He told her Jean was resting fairly well in Recovery and would be returning to his own hospital room in an hour or so.

  He implied that she should call Jean when he was back in his room, but silently he held small hope of that happening.

  He closed with, “Mitchell, I know you must be going through a tough time, personally, and I don’t want to stick my nose in your business. But, I am still your friend. Please call me if I can do anything, anything to help. Take care of yourself. See you soon, I hope.”

  Between 5:30 and 6:00 that evening, Jean was rolled back into room 2114, bandaged, connected to an intravenous drip, and groggy. He would sleep until morning, unaware that dinner was delivered and removed, an important drawing had been stolen from him, and no lady doctor called him that night on the telephone.

  When the sun went down, forty-eight hours had passed since the rescue raid was launched on Kyle Averell’s compound.

  CHAPTER 23 – RECUPERATION

  On the third day following the raid on Averell’s mansion, Jean alternated between periods of twilight-consciousness (due to painkillers) and periods of near-explosive agitation (when the meds wore off long enough for him to become alert).

  Hector recalled the early days of Jean’s first hospitalization, when Hector wore protective gear to deliver food to Jean’s room, and when inanimate objects often became abstract art splashed across the walls. Jean wasn’t that bad this time, but he wasn’t happy, and he certainly wasn’t peaceful.

  At mid-morning, Doctor Goldberg even had a serious talk with Jean about his attitude. Nurse Erskine peeped in the door at one point, to bring in a fresh water carafe, but she backed out, and stayed out, when she realized both men were shedding tears. (This caused serious psychological realignment for a nurse who had been trained to treat doctors—especially those of Goldberg’s caliber—as gods.)

  Goldberg and Jean had a frank discussion about Mitchell and the relationship Jean had tried to cultivate with her. They agreed that Jean could not force Mitchell to do or to feel something against her will—even if Jean was certain she would be happier doing as he wished. Both men grieved the loss of Jean's hopes, but Jean was forced to accept that he might never see Mitchell Oberon again. And, he might never know exactly why.

  Both men were more sanguine when they parted, and Nurse Erskine could find no evidence of weeping on either man’s face when Goldberg left the room and she passed him on her way in. She delivered fresh ice water for Jean’s bedside table, fluffed his pillows, adjusted his linens, brought him his over-bed table and sketching materials. Like a mother hen, she fussed around until she felt her chick was as safe and comfortable as possible, for the time being. Then, with a comforting smile, she left.

  Just before lunchtime, Dan Kavanaugh sneaked five-year-old Debbie into Jean’s room for a visit, which lifted Jean’s spirits considerably. They delivered get-well wishes from the nuns and students at St. Luke’s Daycare, where Debbie attended the after-school program, now that she was in K-5 morning classes in public school.

  Jean showed Debbie his colored pencils and sketchpad. He set her to work drawing a picture for him, and while she was
thus engaged, he motioned Dan closer to the bed. Dan leaned over, and Jean said very softly, “I need to ask you for a favor.”

  Mitchell Oberon answered her door at about 2:00 that afternoon, thinking it was the grocery delivery she was expecting. It was, and it wasn’t. The person holding a box of groceries was no delivery boy. Indeed, at a different season of the year, Mitchell would have thought Mrs. Claus was delivering a present.

  “Oh! Hello,” said Mitchell. “Here, let me take that.” She lifted the box from the small, round lady’s little hands. “I was expecting one of the usual boys...”

  “Quite right,” the lady said with a smile. “I met him in the parking lot and offered to bring it up, save him a trip, since I was coming anyway.”

  “Oh. Ahm, thanks. Can I help you with something?”

  “You are Doctor Mitchell Oberon, aren’t you?” the lady said pleasantly.

  “Y-yes...,” Mitchell answered warily, uncertain of the visitor’s purposes.

  “Of course you are,” the lady seemed happy in the knowledge. “Someone told me you were beautiful, and I can certainly see what they were talking about.”

  Mitchell scoffed. “Different Mitchell Oberon, I’m afraid. I am many things, but nobody ever called me ‘beautiful.’”

  “Oh, they did, dear. You just weren’t around to hear it,” the lady said, playfully shaking an index finger at Mitchell. “That’s sort of what I’d like to speak with you about.”

  Mitchell studied the supposed North Pole resident standing before her and decided there was no danger. She opened the door wider and stepped back. “Won’t you come in?”

  The lady nearly took a step but stopped herself. “I’d better tell you who I am first. My name is Mandy Stone.”

  Mitchell stared at her, saying nothing.

  “Do you still want me to come in, dear?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Oh, goodness, yes. I won’t subject you to any more of Francis in this lifetime, if I can have my way, and I usually can.” Mandy’s smile was all kindness.