Lie Still (30 page)

“I suppose. Now if we just grow little Celia some new lungs, then she can grow up.”

“Oh, I know what you mean. We’re dragging out her death. Celia is an ongoing tragedy.”

“No,
her
tragedy is over.” She squinted slightly. “For the mom it goes on and on.”

I smiled. Mary Ellen was every bit the doctor I remembered. What might have built up to an internal warm glow got squelched when I remembered the new booby traps I’d put inside our friendship. I had to keep fresh exactly what details Mary Ellen was likely to know about my ouster from the residency and what was still unclear. I hated the secrecy.

Thus cooled, I took one more peek at Henry, “sleeping,”

and said my goodbyes.

The elevator ride down from the PICU was a painful reminder of what I had lost. Stopping at every floor, the car took on, person by person, a gathering of pale patients and their sweating, hopeful family members, of lost-in-thought doctors and giggling junior volunteers. They packed into the elevator as if I weren’t there. The struggle was going on without me. It seemed the combined weight of Henry’s debacle and the coma of my career would crush me.

The bell dinged, signaling Floor 1, where my claustro-222

DAVID FARRIS

phobia would be relieved. The crowd decompressed into the Lobby of the Seething Masses. I was last out, about to be able to breathe deeply again, when I came face-to-face, with my mouth open for special effect, with Robin Benoit, the Glory ER nurse, a seeming alien on turf I still thought of as mine. She was dressed for something athletic, but looking like the desert had blown sand in her eyes.

13

Here in Hooker, besides watching thunderstorms while I’m
on call in the hospital, I am witness and sometime partici-pant in the decline of my father.

Not long after the Trouble with Henry and my skulking retreat home, Dad had his first stroke. In my darkest hours I
fear the former caused the latter, but that’s just superstition.

In reality his vascular disease is directly linked to his addic-tion to cigarette smoke—he quit a hundred times—and the
fact that he completely ignored his own blood pressure.

That first “event” did little harm, though, and would have
been a godsend had he taken it seriously enough to change
his ways. But the old fuck, like most doctors, thought he
knew everything, even—without measuring it—what his
blood pressure was at any given moment.

Last Christmas he had a big stroke. Now he is profoundly
damaged. Unable to practice. Unable to speak or, for that
matter, do anything that would imply intent on his part. The
irony of that is too much to bear.

Mom—after the stroke, after the tears, after we sat and
wailed and gnashed our teeth—sold his practice. There was
no choice. I lacked the credentials to do what he had been
doing.

The only possible buyer was a local favorite son, a three-224

DAVID FARRIS

sport letterman from Hooker High, well thought of in the
banter of the town barbershops, Brant Kudamelka. We were
afraid it would kill Dad. He thought little of Brant.

Brant, after resetting the records for accuracy in passing
a football at a state college of little academic renown, and
earning a third-string All-American rating in his division,
failed twice to win a spot in an American medical school.

Undaunted, he flew to a spot in the Third World where American dollars supplant test scores as admissions criteria. He
completed the course, then came Stateside to an obscure
surgery residency teetering at the edge of extinction. He has
not passed his Boards.

I remember Dad, when confronted with Brant’s parents’

bubbling joy at their son’s “success,” always smiling
broadly and congratulating them loudly. Alone later he
would mumble to me general worries about the future of
medicine. Though I knew he was not thinking of me at such
moments, I was inevitably chilled with chagrin.

H E N RY RO J E L I O , DAY T WO ( C O N T I N U E D )
Once I thought about it, stepping off the Maricopa elevator to see Robin Benoit emerge from the Seething Masses should not have been shocking. I knew of no connection she had there, but the medical world is small enough, even in Phoenix. There are dozens of legitimate reasons any particular nurse might show up at the County Hospital.

Once I mentally slapped myself for being paranoid, I was glad to see her: She was my own latest Hot One.

When she started working at Glory, a month before our Henry Event, we were both unattached. She was a stylish and pretty brunette, shapely, friendly, not annoyingly talkative, and intelligent. My low-key if unsubtle flirtatiousness seemed to be well received, though she politely declined a suggestion one afternoon that we share a drink after her evening shift. I called her the next day to suggest dinner and a movie. Apparently upping the ante worked; she accepted.

LIE STILL

225

Unfortunately our date got postponed when she had to work because one of her colleagues phoned in “sick.”

Nonetheless, in the idle hours in our quiet ER, we had gotten to know the basics about each other. I knew she came most recently from an ER job in the San Francisco Bay area to Phoenix to be with an unnamed male. Something like:

“What brought you to the Valley of the Sun?”

“Hmmf. I thought I was in love.”

“And . . . ?”

“He thought he ‘needed a little space.’ I was apparently cramping his style.”

I nodded sympathetically—to both of them—and sipped my Squirt.

Our embryonic romance gave our chance collision in the Maricopa lobby an extra dimension. Trying not to blink and fumble like a seventh grader, I came up with, “Seeing an old boyfriend?”

“No. If they’re old they’re not my boyfriend anymore.”

“Okay. Seeing a young boyfriend?”

“Could be.” She mustered an enigmatic grin. “How about you? Seeing anyone special? Avoiding anyone special?”

“Well, I just saw our mutual friend Henry Rojelio. That was special.” Her grin died.

“Yeah, I was going to go up there, too,” she said.

“Well, brace yourself. It goes from bad to worse. The family is all there. That was more special. There’s, um, more than a little hostility there. Dad told me they’ve got a lawyer already.”

“Oh God.”

“My words exactly.”

She frowned. “How is the boy?”

I filled her in on the progress. I said, “Not waking up, though.”

She bit her lip and turned away for a second. When she tuned back she blinked back tears. “He should . . . It’s still early, isn’t it?”

I found her apparent lack of the usual emergency worker’s cynicism endearing. “Sure, Robin. He should still be okay.”

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DAVID FARRIS

She sniffed. “I got a call from the Glory Hospital. Administration. Sally Marquam, the Vice-President of Clinical Ops, wants to meet with me tomorrow, before my shift, about two in the afternoon. They told me I’m not supposed to talk to anybody about this, but I really want to talk to you first. I don’t know what to say, what happened.”

“Yeah, they beeped me, too. Told me the same thing.”

“I’m so, I don’t know, jumpy about it. I hate
meetings
with bosses.”

“It shouldn’t be that big a deal. Sick kid crumps; happens all the time.”

She curled her mouth. “Yeah, but I’m still real nervous about what they might be thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am.”

“So, we’ll talk it over if you want. That’s not against the law. They probably say they don’t want any of us to talk to each other thinking we’re going to cook up some cover story, but we don’t have anything to cover.”

“Of course you’re right.”

“What are you thinking—about us getting together? We could go get coffee or something.” I gestured toward the door.

“Sorry. Time crunched right now. And it should probably be in private.” Her expression changed. “You know, I’d love to make you dinner tonight.”

“Can’t. I got a twelve-hour night shift out at St. Green-backs’ in Scottsdale. Covering for a doc with a herniated disc.”

She thought. “Maybe breakfast then. I do great waffles.”

“Geez, Robin, sounds great, but after a night in that ER, I’m pretty sure I’ll be asleep, no matter where I’m sitting.”

“How about tomorrow night?” she said. “I’ll just blow off the meeting till the next day. They can wait.”

“What about that evening shift?”

“I meant after that.”

“Elven-thirty? Yeah. Late dinner. Sure. I’ll sleep all day and be wide awake about then, anyway.”

“Meet me at work,” she said. “We’ll go from there.”

LIE STILL

227

*

*

*

My night in Scottsdale was depressing. At 2:00 A.M. they brought in the dangling harbinger of Henry, Day Three, an apparent suicide someone found hanging from a scraggly cottonwood tree behind a strip mall. The medics cut him down and ran him in, bells and whistles on full display,

“Code Three.”

I was unable, despite much pulling, pushing, fighting for leverage at ridiculous angles, and grunting, to get his mouth open to intubate him. As I struggled—hunched over an engorged head, marveling at the purple snake of a bruise en-circling his upper neck, my own adrenal glands on

“turbocharge”—the muscles under my left shoulder blade began to cramp. On my fourth try to pass the tube the knot imploded with a racking and painful finality.

The spasm in my shoulder opened my internal memory file on the physiology of muscle tetany. From there it was no leap at all to figure out why the patient was so damn stiff—he was in rigor mortis. Needless to say, the code was unsuccessful.

Once home, I slept, though poorly. I blamed the knot in my back, though Henry might have had more to do with it.

At ten-thirty that evening I drove to Glory. Crossing Phoenix is another source of a bad mood. The urban mass goes from horizon to horizon with no meaningful structure, points of interest are miles apart, yet much of the area is vacant. Desert, in small broken plots, stripped of all interesting cacti and variously littered with urban residues, looks a lot like dirt, sand, and trash. Were there a Poster City for Contemptuous Land Use, Phoenix would be it. One of my residency mates coined a facetious motto for the city: “Phoenix: Where Land Is a Disposable Commodity.”

Normally, the most depressing part is the river dividing Phoenix from Tempe and Mesa: You see only its desiccated bed. They suck what was the Salt River absolutely dry to grow bluegrass in Scottsdale. The Salt, that night, though, was running full. The winter rains in the mountains east of town had been exceptionally generous.

228

DAVID FARRIS

I got to the Glory ER as the nurses were changing shift.

Patty Kucera was at the control desk. I limped in, head and neck cocked rigidly to my left. “Ooh, you look stiff, Doc,”

she said. Robin came out of the med room.

I said, “I got this knot in my shoulder from a corpse. Did you know rigor mortis can be contagious?” While I recounted my 2:00 A.M. code Robin stepped around behind me to feel the offending muscle.

“Ooh, that’s a bad one,” she said.

I quietly let out something like “Unnnh.”

“We better get you into something comfortable.” She leaned over the desk toward Patty and added in a stage whisper, “We have a date!”

Robin, in her Chevy Camaro, led the way to her house, a stucco bungalow in an older tract development in Mesa, most of the way back to town from Glory. As she unlocked the door to let me in she said, “Will you have a drink with me?”

“Absolutely. What are you pouring?”

“Well, I have a couple of choices: There’s some Bailey’s in the fridge, a couple of beers, and some white wine. It should be champagne, since we can finally get together, but I’m not feeling that much like celebrating.” Robin had on worn jeans and a snug knit top. She looked great.

I said, “Enh, who needs bubbles? Got any Scotch?”

“Sorry.”

“The wine’ll be fine.” I sat at the breakfast counter.

Opening the refrigerator, she said into the top shelf,

“Yeah, I have a thing about bubbles anyway.” She poured us each a glass. “You’re such a dear. I’ve been so wrung out. I mean, to come and put up with me after a night on call,” she said.

“Oh, I got some sleep today.”

“I barely made it up to the Pedes ICU yesterday, after we ran into each other, and then they wouldn’t tell me much.

You said you thought Henry was going to be okay though . . . ?” She gave me an inquiring look.

“I guess that depends on your definition.” I tried again to stretch my neck.

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229

“Oh God,” she said, “I thought he was doing pretty good by the time he left the ER.” She got out salad makings, a wok, Baggies of chopped vegetables, and a plastic container of marinating fish.

“His heart was doing okay.”

She laid into some radishes with staccato knife strokes.

“What do you think could have happened to him?”

“Freak things, I guess. Arrhythmia from the epi. Laryngospasm. Exacerbated bronchospasm. Maybe his asthma was just way worse than we knew and he coded from garden variety hypoxia, good old lack of oxygen. Since it doesn’t make any sense, it could have been anything.”

She said, “I mean, I gave him the shot you ordered, and he—he codes. They’re going to think it was me—that I did something wrong.” She studied my face. “And then, what should have been a routine code apparently goes all wrong and he barely makes it back. I mean, he was young and all, he should have bounced right back, whatever it was.”

“That’s what they say. But the only routine I’ve ever noticed about codes is that most of them don’t work.”

“But he should have been . . . recoverable.” Her voice quavered slightly.

“Yeah, but things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to, eh?”