The Anatomy of Perception

by AJ Rose

  “Jesus,” Craig uttered, looking green around the edges. “What happened then?”

  “The police thought Dad might try to hide out in New York with me, but I told them he hadn’t contacted me in years. I promised if I heard from him, I’d let them know right away. I got a number to the mortuary where Dylan’s body had been released, though I barely remember that part. When I called to find out what I needed to do to make funeral arrangements, I was told Dylan’s wife was already handling it. I hadn’t even known he had a wife, but I found out later they’d only been married a few months when my dad killed him.

  “The combination of trauma from the mugging, plus the surge of fear that my father was somewhere in New York, looking for me, is what triggered everything that happened after. And I know you heard from Chief Noble how it started, then saw the rest for yourself.”

  Craig was quiet for a long moment, then spoke. “Do you keep in touch with Dylan’s widow?”

  I shook my head. “After I moved out of the loft, too much time had passed for me to feel comfortable talking to her, and I was dealing with all my own shit, which wouldn’t have been good to lay at her feet when she’d just lost her husband. I talked to her a few months ago. Seems she knew about me, even though I’d never heard Dylan mention her. She’s the one who went looking for him when he didn’t come home that night.” We walked in silence for another block. I wanted to give him a chance to absorb everything.

  “So, what happened?”

  I stopped our progress on a street corner, moving out of the flow of pedestrians. Not meeting his eyes, I scanned for a taxi with its light on, seeing several occupied ones but none that were free.

  “The police caught him and sent him back to West Virginia to stand trial for second degree murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to forty years, with the chance for parole after ten. He’s about a year and a half into that sentence.”

  Craig turned me so I faced him. “Where was he when he got caught?”

  I couldn’t keep the haunted look from my face. “Three blocks from the loft.”

  The color drained from his face. “How close did he get? While we were going through… those few days, how close did he get?”

  “From what I could tell from the record of arrest, he never got past the doorman.” He sucked in a breath and looked away. I cupped his face, bringing his eyes around again. “Hey, it was Gerald’s call to the police that got him arrested, so it’s a good thing. We didn’t have a clue, which is another good thing. If you’re worried he’s still a threat, he isn’t. He’s going to die in jail. The prison system sent me a letter a few months ago, asking if I’d be willing to get tested to see if I’m a match for donating a portion of my liver. He’s already sick. He can’t touch me anymore. He can’t scare me anymore.”

  His gaze sharpened. “Did you get tested?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good.”

  “I called to tell them not to bother sending more requests, that even if I was a match, there was no way in hell I’d be giving him part of my liver. They understood and said they’d petition to have him put on the transplant list, but he’d have to be sober for a year before he’d be allowed on the list. Without a directed donation, his chances aren’t stellar. I haven’t heard any more.”

  “They give cons transplants from the general donor registry?”

  “Yeah. It’s considered cruel and unusual punishment if they ignore a felon’s health care. West Virginia doesn’t have the death penalty, so as long as he has a reasonable expectation of care, they have to treat him like they would anyone else.”

  “Doesn’t seem right.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said quietly. “I considered doing it, so he’d have to serve his entire sentence for killing Dylan, but there’s poetic justice in the alcohol killing him. That, and if he recovers and then gets paroled, ten years isn’t a long enough punishment.”

  Craig let go of me to slide his arm around my waist, saying nothing as my last revelation hung between us. My family was so beyond fucked up, I doubted he could fathom it. His parents were supportive, still in love, made charitable donations, and saw Broadway productions. They were every kid’s dream parents. I didn’t remember my mother beyond the occasional whiff of her favorite perfume giving me a sense of contentment, and my dad made the rest a nightmare. My brother was dead, and the only thread of family I had left was a woman to whom I’d spoken twice, who’d married and buried Dylan in the span of a few months. Holly was my family.

  Craig was my family, however fragile our connection.

  After a moment, he raised his hand to flag a taxi, and we climbed in the back. He recited his address absently, and we rode most of the way back to the loft in silence, holding hands and leaning on each other. I was desperate to know what was going on in his mind as he stared at the passing lights through the taxi window, but I didn’t press.

  “You know what I just remembered?” His gaze didn’t move from the outside world.

  “Hmm?”

  “Those last days in the loft, I kept telling you that you were safe and I had control. Holly and I were keeping you safe, so you didn’t have anything to be afraid of.” He turned, and his eyes were shiny, the brightness of the city reflecting in the pools poised on his lower lids. He blinked, and twin tracks appeared on his cheeks as the drops fell. “We were wrong. We just didn’t know it.”

  “Don’t,” I said fiercely. Holly had known every moment of my past, and she’d echoed Craig’s reassurances at the time, too. No one could have known I hadn’t been as paranoid as they’d thought. “You weren’t wrong. You just didn’t have all the facts.” I raised our clasped hands to my lips and kissed his knuckles. “Please don’t get lost back there, babe,” I whispered.

  “How do you do it?” Craig asked, his face sad.

  “Do what?”

  “Remember all that pain and still get out of bed in the morning?”

  The taxi pulled up to the sidewalk in front of Craig’s loft. Neither of us moved, and the cab driver didn’t bark at us to hurry up, but he left the meter running. I was grateful for the few extra seconds.

  “You really want to know?” I hoped the answer wouldn’t make Craig groan with its saccharine sweetness.

  Craig nodded.

  “When I was a kid, it was my friendship with Holly. Then it was the idea of being a surgeon and saving people’s lives. But my first year of med school, this really hot, talented artist started drawing me all over Manhattan and when I finally met him, he showed me there’s a beautiful world out there, full of color and love and people who do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. Nothing else has come along and eclipsed you.”

  I couldn’t see his face in the dim interior of the car, but the squeeze of his fingers in my hand was unmistakable.

  “Are you coming up?” he husked, voice breaking.

  “I think maybe this time it’d be best if I went home. Give you some room. But I’ll call you tomorrow if you’re free.”

  “I’m free.” He surprised me with a kiss, strong and a little desperate, but short. When we parted, he stroked my cheek and then got out. A chill had kicked up in the fall air, and he hunched his shoulders, his hands in his pants pockets. Just as he passed through the glass doors into his lobby, he looked back. When the elevator swallowed him up, I instructed the driver to take me home and the car pulled into the night.

  July 2010

  “I haven’t gotten to cut in over a week,” Sabrina groused, tying her hair into a knot on top of her head and walking with me to the pit, where I’d been assigned for the day. “Why can’t we get a good car accident or GSW?”

  “You want someone to get shot?” I asked her, eyebrow raised.

  “Well, of course not,” she said. “Getting shot would suck. Getting to fix someone who’s been shot? That would be fun.”

  I shook my head. “There’s a reason people call you a vampire. It’s like you thrive on blood.”

  “I’m hardcor
e, what can I say?” she countered, unaffected. I just stared. “What?” she demanded. “The more surgeries we get, the more we learn. We’re second-year residents now, and our little intern bubbles have been passed down to the younger generations. God, if I’d realized back then how protected we were in the name of being taught, I’d have put off taking the intern exam as long as I could.”

  She had a point. As residents, we were responsible for our own crop of interns, who ran our usual lab orders and radiology tests for us, but except for the most routine of surgeries, we had to consult the more experienced residents. We were in a bit of a no-man’s land in that we weren’t good for more than an appendectomy or heart cath, but we didn’t have anyone higher up looking out for us the way we had our intern year. The fight for OR time had gotten cutthroat, and Sabrina, however callous she sounded, was only saying aloud what the rest of us second-year residents were thinking.

  “Well, July fourth is tomorrow. There are bound to be some idiots drinking and playing with small explosives as the sun goes down. You know holidays bring out the arguments, too,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe we’ll get a couple fingers to reattach.”

  “You’re far too hopeful about someone maiming themselves.”

  She glowered at me momentarily as her pager went off, which she jumped on immediately. “Gotta go. Kingsley has me working a couple of her cardiac cases. Maybe I’ll scrub in on something unexpected that doesn’t involve burns. Even I can barely stomach the burns.”

  “Good luck,” I wished her. We split off as I arrived at the Emergency Room and checked in with the nurse’s station. “Anything emergent?”

  “Nope,” answered JoAnna, one of my favorite nurses, who often worked the trauma desk. “But there are a couple lacerations in the waiting room just waiting for your expert hands, Dr. Perry.”

  I sighed melodramatically, winking at her. “I’ll get the suture kits if you’ll bring in the patients. How many are there?”

  “Three needing stitches. There’s also one needing x-rays on a possible sprained ankle.”

  “Load me up, then. We have room in the bays, so let’s move them on through.”

  “You got it,” she said, taking her clipboard to call the pertinent names.

  All but one of my interns were on other rotations, so I had the remaining guy take the ankle sprain for x-rays and worked on the first of the lacerated patients, a young woman named Deirdre, who’d cut herself washing a glass in the sink. The glass had broken when she’d pushed her hand into it, cutting deeply into her ring finger. The location of the cut had me concerned about possible nerve damage, so I called for a hand surgeon to consult. While we waited for the surgeon, I stitched up the laceration on a homeless man who wouldn’t tell me what happened. He sat, reticent and smelly, his pores emanating a cloud of recycled alcohol so pungent I could have gotten drunk just breathing the air in his vicinity. I’d barely cut the last thread before he was off the gurney and bustling out the door, his trash bag of belongings slung over his shoulder.

  “Seven days, come back to have those removed!” I hollered at his retreating form. He didn’t acknowledge. Frankly, I was surprised he’d come to the hospital in the first place.

  The hand surgeon had taken the first patient, so I moved on to the third, and when I scraped back the curtain to that trauma bay, I nearly fainted.

  My brother sat on the gurney, holding his bleeding arm in his lap with a handful of paper towels to stem the blood.

  “Dylan, what are you doing here?” I demanded in a harsh whisper, quickly pulling the curtain closed before anyone could see how closely we resembled each other and get nosy.

  “Well, I periodically Google your name to make sure you’re not getting any publicity the old man can find and use to come make your life hell. Turns out Dr. Dane Perry was involved in fixing a woman’s spine after she’d had near-catastrophic laser spinal surgery.”

  “That wasn’t just me,” I hissed. “I was the resident on the case, but Dr. Dearborn is the chief neurologist. I can’t help it that I’m working in a hospital where high-profile surgeons perform groundbreaking procedures.”

  “I know,” he said. “I came here to warn you about it, urge you to maybe talk to whoever is in charge of hospital PR and tell them not to use your name. Or change your name, like I suggested when you left for Maryland.” The scold was gentle but still there. I scolded back, gesturing to his injury.

  “You don’t have to hurt yourself to visit me, you know.” But we both knew he didn’t visit me regularly, nor I him, because of who might be keeping tabs on him.

  He chuckled and peeled away the towels with a slight wince as the hairs of his forearm stuck to the blood. “Subways are crowded,” he said. I looked the wound over, relieved it would only require a few stitches. “I got bumped and caught my arm on the jagged edge of a sign. It’s pure luck I ended up here.” He looked sheepish. “I was trying to get to your apartment, but I got lost.”

  Carefully cleaning the wound, my mind raced in a hundred different directions. Did Dad have Internet access? Could I take the chance he didn’t? Should I get my name changed? Would it affect my license to practice medicine? If Dylan, who had a lot of common sense, could so easily get lost in the subway system, would my drunk of a dad even manage to find a train, let alone the right one to get him close to where I lived or worked? On the other hand, he’d been clever as hell at stalking me in college, drunk or not. How good was hospital security? I knew our doorman at home was like Fort Knox for unwelcome visitors.

  “I can’t ask them to leave my name off high-profile surgeries,” I mumbled, getting out a disposable razor to shave around the cut and ripping open a suture kit. “It’s kill or be killed in this career, and the more my name is on those kinds of surgeries, the better chance I have when I go for Chief Resident in a few years.”

  “Dad can still read, you know.”

  “Does he even have a computer? How would he get online to see that?”

  “What if it’s not only online, but in a print newspaper or magazine somewhere? Can you guarantee he won’t run across your name while he’s on the shitter?”

  “Does he read medical journals during his daily constitutional?” I countered. The absurdity made Dylan smile.

  “Probably not, but you spent a lot of time making sure he had no idea where to find you. If I found you in a few minutes after searching your name, his PI could too, if he ever gets another hair to hire one.”

  Dylan had never left West Virginia long term, and his accent took me back to our childhood, playing in the threadbare grass of the backyard where he’d taught me how to throw and catch a baseball. I blew out a breath, trying to let the tension out of my shoulders. Dylan wasn’t the bad guy here. As always, he was trying to protect me from the person who was.

  “Okay, I’ll talk to whoever is in charge of publicity and ask them to leave me out of articles that get circulated outside regular medical journals. I won’t completely go dark, because that would be career suicide. I didn’t take on a couple hundred grand in school loans to become a surgeon only to hide in the shadows. I’m making something of myself here.”

  “Why can’t you change your name?” he asked.

  “I’m going to have to stick this inside the cut to numb it.” I held up a syringe so he could see the thin needle. “It’ll sting, but only for a second. I suggest not watching.” For a minute, I concentrated on the immediate problem at hand while he looked away, only pulling in a hiss at the first poke. After he’d gone sufficiently numb, I took out the suture kit and got to work. “Changing my name feels like giving in,” I muttered.

  “Huh?” he asked, not comprehending.

  “If I change my name, it’s like Dad was right about me amounting to nothing. If I get a new name, I’m proving Dane Perry was the waste of space Dad always said I was. Oh, but Dr. Badass or whatever name I’d pick would be a superhero. It feels wrong, like I’m agreeing with the old bastard or something.” I sewed six st
itches in his arm and put a bandage over it, sticking it down with athletic tape instead of paper tape. That stuff stuck to hair and would hurt to take off more than it did to get the cut in the first place.

  “That’s stupid, you know that, right?” Dylan said, twisting his arm this way and that to test the bandage’s flexibility. “You’re the same person no matter what people call you. You’ve accomplished everything you’ve set out to, and you’re the only one who can let his mean-ass words haunt you. Your name doesn’t matter. I thought you’d be thrilled to ditch it, since it’s your last link to him.”

  He had a point. I stayed on the stool a moment longer, studying him. He looked good, healthy. I was glad.

  “It may be my last link to him, but it’s also my last link to her. Mom was a Perry, too.”

  “If she’d seen what he did to us, she’d have kicked his ass fifty times over. Wherever Mom is, she’s probably shouting at you to ditch your name and cut all ties with the fucker.”

  I went silent, peeling off my latex gloves slowly. After a moment’s contemplation, I snapped one of the fingers absently, suddenly very interested in the powder smeared on the backs of my hands. But when I spoke, I asked what I needed to know.

  “Did he ever hit her?”

  Dylan didn’t answer for a bit. When he did, his voice sounded far away, like mine had. “Not that I remember. She was happy, Dane. I don’t think she would have been if he was even a tiny bit of the asshole he became. Her death broke him.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, since he killed her.”

  “Yeah,” he said sadly. “Not that I sympathize with him at all, but how many times has someone had a couple drinks at dinner and driven home? He shouldn’t have been driving, but the risk he took was one thousands of people take. They get off scot-free and he didn’t.”

  “No,” I said sharply. “Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt, Dylan. A man with a wife and two kids doesn’t get a pass for making the decision he made that night. It’s not responsible. How many people do you think I see every year who are in some way hurt by drunk driving? Even in a city where public transportation is king? Hundreds, at least. Pointless injuries and death because people are too stubborn to get help going home.”