“Do you agree with Dr. Carey that death resulted from aortic exsanguination?”
She took a breath and reluctantly turned to face him. “Whatever Dr. Carey says.”
“What do you remember about the surgery?”
“There was . . . a small nick in the aorta. He patched it up. But then we saw the bullet . . . had passed through . . . there was an intimal tear. An aortic dissection. Then the wall blew open. . .” She swallowed and looked away. “It was a nightmare.”
He said nothing.
“I knew him,” she whispered. “I’d been to his house. I’d met his wife. Oh Jesus.” She pushed out of the room.
The only refuge she could find was the doctor’s sleeping quarters. She closed the door behind her and sat down on the bed, crying, rocking back and forth. She didn’t even hear the knock on the door.
Dvorak came quietly into the room. He’d stripped off the gown and gloves, and now he stood by the bed, unsure of what to say.
“Are you all right?” he finally asked.
“No. I am not all right.”
“I’m sorry about the questions. I had to ask them.” “You were so fucking cold-blooded about it.” “I needed to know, Toby. We can’t help Dr. Brace, not now. But we can find the answers. We owe it to him.” She dropped her face in her hands and struggled to regain control, to stop crying. Her tears felt all the more humiliating because he was standing there, watching her. She heard the chair give a squeak as he sat down. When at last she managed to raise her head, she found herself looking straight into his eyes.
“I didn’t realize you and the victim were acquainted,” he said.
“He’s not the victim. His name was Robbie.”
“Okay. Robbie.” He hesitated. “Were you good friends?”
“No. Not . . . not good friends.”
“You seem to be taking this pretty hard.”
“And you don’t understand. Do you?”
“Not entirely.”
She took a breath and slowly released it. “It catches up with us, you know. Most of the time, when we lose a patient, we can deal with it. Then there’ll be a child. Or someone we know. And suddenly we realize we can’t handle it at all. . .” She wiped her hand across her eyes. “I have to get back to work. There must be patients waiting out there—”
He grasped her hand. “Toby, if it makes a difference to you, I don’t think there’s anything you could have done to save him. The damage to his aorta was devastating.”
She looked down at his hand, feeling faintly surprised that he was still touching her. He, too, seemed taken aback by that spontaneous contact, and he quickly released her wrist. They sat in silence for a moment.
“This hits too close to home,” she said. Hugging herself, she found her gaze drawn, once again, to his. “I walk through that parking lot every evening. So do all the nurses. If this was a robbery attempt, any one of us would have made an easier target.”
“Have there been other attacks at Springer?”
“Only one I can think of. A few years ago—a nurse was raped. But this isn’t like downtown Boston. We don’t worry about our safety here.”
“Monsters live in the suburbs too.”
The knock on the door startled them both. Toby opened the door to find Detective Sheehan.
“Dr. Harper, I need to ask you a few questions,” he said and stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. The room suddenly seemed very crowded. “I just spoke to Mrs. Brace. She thinks her husband might have come here to see you.”
Toby shook her head. “Why?”
“That’s what we’re wondering. He called her around six-thirty and told her he was driving to Wicklin Hospital, and that he’d be home late.”
“Did he go to Wicklin?”
“We’re checking that now. What we don’t know is why he ended up here. Do you know?”
She shook her head.
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Brace?”
“Last night.”
Sheehan’s eyebrow twitched upward. “He came to Springer?”
“No. I went to his house. He helped me look up a medical record.”
“You got together to look at medical records?”
“Yes.” She looked at Dvorak. “It was right after I saw you. You’d just told me Angus Parmenter’s diagnosis. I wondered about Harry Slotkin—whether he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease as well. So Robbie and I looked up Slotkin’s outpatient record.”
“What disease?” interjected Sheehan.
“Creutzfeldt-Jakob. It’s a fatal brain infection.”
“Okay. So you and Dr. Brace got together last night. And then what?”
“We drove to Brant Hill. We looked at the medical chart. Then we both went home.”
“You didn’t stop somewhere? He didn’t go to your house?”
“No. I got home around ten-thirty, alone. He didn’t call me afterward, and I didn’t call him. So I don’t know why he’d come to see me tonight.”
There was a knock. How many more people can fit in this room? wondered Toby as she opened the door.
It was Val. “We’ve got a guy with left-sided weakness and slurred speech. BP’s two fifty over one thirty. He’s in room two.”
Toby glanced back at Sheehan. “I don’t have anything more to tell you, Detective. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have patients to see.”
At eight o’clock the next morning, Toby pulled into her driveway next to Jane’s dark blue Saab and turned off the engine. She was too exhausted to climb out of the car and deal with Ellen just yet, so she sat for a moment, staring out at the dead leaves blowing across the lawn. It had been one of the worst nights of her life, first Robbie’s death, and then a succession of seriously ill patients—a stroke, a myocardial infarction, and a case of end-stage emphysema so critical the patient had required intubation. Added to that was the general sense of confusion from all those cops milling about with their chattering walkie-talkies. Was it a full moon last night? she wondered. Some crazy juxtaposition of the planets that had blown chaos into her ER? And then there’d been Detective Sheehan, ambushing her at every opportunity to ask just one more question.
A gust of wind buffeted the car. With the heater turned off, she was starting to feel cold. It was the chill that finally drove her out of the car and into the house.
She was greeted by the smell of coffee and the pleasant clatter of chinaware from the kitchen. “I’m home,” she called out, and hung her jacket in the closet.
Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway, her smile warm and welcoming. “I’ve just made a pot—would you like a cup?”
“I would, but I won’t be able to sleep.”
“Oh, it’s decaf. I figured you wouldn’t want the real thing.”
Toby smiled. “In that case, thanks. I’d love a cup.”
Pale morning light shone in through the window as they sat at the kitchen table, drinking their coffee. Ellen wasn’t awake yet, and Toby felt almost guilty about how glad she was for the reprieve, how much she was enjoying this moment of peace. She leaned back and inhaled the steam rising from her cup. “This is heaven.”
“Actually, it’s only a cup of Colombian roast.”
“Yes, but I didn’t have to grind it. I didn’t have to pour it. And I can just sit here and actually drink it.”
Jane shook her head in sympathy. “It sounds like you had a bad night.”
“It was so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.” Toby set the cup down and rubbed her face. “And how was your night?”
“A little chaotic. Your mother had trouble going to sleep. She was up and down, up and down, wandering the house.” “Oh no. Why?”
“She told me she had to go pick you up at school. So she searched all over for the car keys.”
“She hasn’t driven a car in years. I have no idea why she’d start looking for car keys now.”
“Well, it seemed really important to her that you not be kept waiting at school. She was worried you might be col
d.” Jane smiled. “When I asked her how old you were, she said you were eleven.”
Eleven, thought Toby. That was the year Dad died. The year everything fell on Mom’s shoulders.
Jane rose from the table and washed her cup in the sink. “Anyway, I gave her a bath last night, so you needn’t bother with that. And we had a big snack at midnight. I expect she’ll stay in bed for a while. Maybe all day.” She set her cup on the dashboard and turned to look at Toby. “She must have been a wonderful mother.”
“She was,” Toby murmured.
“Then you’re lucky. Luckier than I was . . .” Jane’s gaze shifted sadly to the floor. “But we can’t all have the parents we want, can we?” She took a breath, as though to say something else, then simply smiled and reached for her purse. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Toby heard her walk out of the house, shutting the front door behind her. Without Jane’s presence, the kitchen seemed empty. Lifeless. She rose from the kitchen table and walked up the hall to her mother’s room. Peeking inside, she saw that Ellen was sleeping. Quietly Toby entered the room and sat down on the bed.
“Mom?”
Ellen rolled onto her back. Slowly her eyes opened and focused on Toby.
“Mom, are you feeling all right?”
“Tired,” Ellen murmured. “I’m tired today.”
Toby lay her hand on Ellen’s forehead. No fever. She brushed a strand of silver hair away from her mother’s eyes. “You’re not sick?”
“I just want to sleep.”
“Okay.” Toby dropped a kiss on Ellen’s cheek. “You sleep, then. I’m going to bed too.”
“Good night.”
Toby walked out, leaving Ellen’s door open. She decided to leave her own bedroom door open, so she’d be able to hear if her mother called out. She took a shower and changed into a T-shirt, her usual sleeping attire. As she sat down on the bed, the phone rang.
She picked it up. “Hello?”
A man’s voice, vaguely familiar, said: “May I ask who I’m speaking to?”
Taken aback by the man’s rudeness, she answered: “If you don’t know who you’re calling, sir, I can’t help you. Good-bye.”
“Wait. This is Detective Sheehan, Boston PD. I’m just trying to find out whose number this is.”
“Detective Sheehan? This is Toby Harper.”
“Dr. Harper?”
“Yes. You’ve dialed my home phone number. Didn’t you know that?”
There was a silence. “No.”
“Well, how did you get this number?”
“Redial.”
“What?”
“There was a cell phone under the seat in Dr. Brace’s car. I found it just a few minutes ago, and I punched in redial.” Sheehan paused. “You were the last person he called.”
It took a half hour for Vickie to arrive at the house to watch Ellen, and another forty minutes for Toby to fight her way through morning traffic into Boston. By the time she’d sat through another questioning session with Detective Sheehan, she was tired and edgy enough to bite the head off the first person who crossed her. What she should have done was driven straight home and climbed into bed.
Instead she used her car phone to call Vickie and tell her she had one more stop to make.
“Mom doesn’t look too well,” said Vickie. “What’s going on with her?”
“She was fine yesterday,” said Toby.
“Well, she threw up a while ago. I got her to drink some juice, and I think she’s a little better now. But she just wants to sleep.”
“Does she have any other complaints?”
“Mainly the upset stomach. I think you should take her to a doctor.”
“I am a doctor.”
“Well, of course you know best,” said Vickie.
Toby hung up, irritated with her sister and vaguely troubled by the report of Ellen’s illness. Just some gastrointestinal bug, she thought. Mom will bounce back in a few days.
She left the police station and drove directly to 720 Albany Street. The ME’s office.
Dvorak seemed to sense her ugly mood at once. Politely he ushered her into his office, poured her a cup of coffee, and set it down in front of her without asking if she wanted it. She did; she needed the caffeine.
She took a few quick gulps and then met his gaze head-on. “I want to know why Sheehan’s fixated on me. Why he’s harassing me.”
“Is he?”
“I just wasted the last hour with him. Look, I don’t know why Robbie called my house. I wasn’t home last night—my mother’s sitter took the call. I just found out about it.”
“Did the sitter know why Brace called?”
“She didn’t understand the message. He told her he was driving to the hospital to see me, so she didn’t bother to tell me about it. Believe me, Dan, there was nothing going on between Robbie and me. No romance, no sex, no nothing. We were barely friends.”
“Yet you seemed extremely upset about his death.”
“Upset? Robbie bled out in front of me! I had his blood all over my hands, my arms. I had my fingers around his heart, trying to keep it going, trying to keep him alive. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be upset?” She took a breath, fighting back tears. “But you don’t work with living people, so you wouldn’t know. You just get the corpses.”
He said nothing. The silence seemed to magnify the anguish, the rage of her last words.
She sank back in the chair and covered her face with her hand.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have to watch people die in front of me. And maybe that’s why I chose the field I did. So I wouldn’t have to watch.”
She raised her head but didn’t feel like meeting his gaze. So she stared at a corner of his desk. “I don’t suppose you’ve done the autopsy yet.”
“We did it this morning. There were no unexpected findings.”
She nodded, still not looking at him.
“And Mr. Parmenter? Did the neuropathologist confirm the diagnosis?”
“It was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.” He said it without inflection, without a hint of the personal devastation that diagnosis must have wreaked.
She looked at him, her attention suddenly focused on Dvorak’s crisis, on his fears. She could see he hadn’t been sleeping well; his eyes seemed sunken, feverish.
“It’s just something I’ll have to live with,” he said. “The possibility of getting sick. Not knowing if I’ll live another two years or forty years. I keep telling myself, I could walk outside and get hit by a bus. That’s the way life is. Just surviving another day comes with its own risk.” He straightened, as though trying to shake off the gloom. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “Not that I live such a thrilling life.”
“Still, I hope it’s a long one.”
They both stood up and shook hands, a gesture that felt too formal for friends. While their relationship had not quite passed over into friendship, that was the direction in which she felt it moving. In which she wanted it to move. Now, as she looked at him, she felt confused by her sudden attraction to him, by her response to the warmth of his grasp.
He said, “The night before last, you invited me over for a glass of brandy.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t take you up on it because I—well, I was still in a state of shock about the diagnosis. I would have ruined the evening for both of us.”
She remembered how she’d spent that night, sitting alone and depressed on the sofa, leafing through medical journals while gloomy Mendelssohn played on the stereo. You could hardly have ruined that evening, she thought.
“Anyway,” he said, “I wondered if I could reciprocate. It’s almost noon. I’ve been here all morning, and suddenly I can’t wait to get out of this damn building. If you’re free—if I could interest you—”
“You mean . . . now?”
She hadn’t expected this. She looked at him for a moment, thinking how much she’d wanted this to happen, yet afraid that she was
reading too much into the invitation.
He seemed to interpret her hesitation as reluctance. “I’m sorry, I guess it’s pretty short notice. Maybe another time.”
“No. I mean, yes. Now is fine,” she said quickly.
“It is?”
“On one condition. If you don’t mind.”
He cocked his head, uncertain what to expect.
“Could we sit in the park?” she asked wistfully. “I know it’s a little brisk outside, but I haven’t seen the sun in a week. And I’d really love to feel it on my face right now.”
“You know what? So would I.” He grinned. “Let me get my coat.”
14
They sat with scarves draped around their necks, huddling close together on a park bench while they ate steaming slices of pizza straight from the take-out box. The topping was Thai chicken with peanut sauce—the surprising first choice of both of them. “Great minds think alike,” Dvorak had said, laughing, as they’d walked beneath leafless trees to this bench beside the pond. Though the wind was cold, the sun shone down from a bright, clear sky.
This isn’t the same man, Toby thought, looking up at Dvorak’s face, his hair ruffled, his cheeks ruddy from the wind. Take him out of that depressing building, away from his corpses, and he becomes someone entirely different. Someone with laughing eyes. She wondered if she looked different, as well. The wind had tossed her hair in all directions, and she was making a mess of her hands with the pizza, but at that moment she felt more attractive than she had in a long time. Perhaps it was because of the way he looked at her; the most potent of beautifiers, she thought, is to be smiled at by a desirable man.
She turned her face upward, savoring the brightness of the day. “I’d almost forgotten how nice it is to feel the sun.”
“Has it been that long since you’ve seen it?”
“It feels like weeks. First we had all that rain. And then the few sunny days we did have, I slept right through them.”
“So why did you choose the night shift, anyway?”
She finished off the last bite of pizza and fastidiously wiped the sauce from her hands. “It didn’t start off as a choice, really. When I finished my ER residency, that was the only time slot I could get at Springer. At first, it made a lot of sense. The ER gets quiet after midnight, and sometimes I’d manage to catch a few hours of sleep. Then I’d go home, take a long nap, and have the rest of the day to play.” She shook her head at the memory. “That was ten years ago. When you’re in your twenties, you can get by on a lot less sleep.”
Life Support Page 21