It Was Always You

by Sarah K Stephens

  “I mean the other one—she’s my normal doctor.”

  Debbie drops her hand from her face and offers a smile to Dr. Holdren and Dr. Koftura as we come up on them.

  “Just going for a stroll,” she chirrups. “Come for a visit, then?” She directs the question to Dr. Koftura, who offers a warm smile in return.

  “Yes. I wanted to see my patient. Dr. Holdren and I were just consulting for a few moments about Morgan’s condition and plan of treatment.”

  I’m still clutching my plastic bag of belongings. Dr. Koftura’s arrival—however welcome—makes my phone feel like an unexploded bomb in my hand, waiting to be disarmed.

  After some slight resistance to Dr. Koftura’s insistence that she was perfectly capable of settling me back into my room, Nurse Debbie leaves with Dr. Holdren close behind. Dr. Koftura takes my shoulder and elbow and guides me into my room, and then onto my bed. Before I lie down, my arms and legs still feeling like shredded electrical wires, she fluffs my pillows for me and smooths the bottom sheet with the flat of her palm.

  It’s obvious she’s a mother.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she says, once my sensors are all attached again properly and she’s settled herself into the chair next to me. No foot-of-the-bed chart glancing for her.

  I have no words, and so I just nod. The bag with my belongings sits on the little table, where the plastic-covered dishes have been cleared away by some invisible hand. The sun slants vaguely through the window of my room and the black dust in the bag stands out in the beam of light like little fleas. Dr. Koftura notices me glancing at them.

  “It’s just standard procedure, right?” I ask, but she says nothing.

  A thought occurs to me. “Have the police been in touch with you?”

  I watch as a shadow crosses her face.

  “Yes, they have. And, Morgan, you have to understand that I am here to care for you as your doctor. My only intentions are to ensure your health and safety.” She has her left hand up on her chest, her palm pressed flat against her sternum. The diamond of her wedding ring winks at me from the fluorescent lights above. “And the safety of others too.”

  A hard seed starts to form in my stomach. I pull at the neck of my gown.

  “I see,” is all I say. It feels strange, seeing her outside her well-appointed office. For the last almost-twenty years, we’ve only ever met each other inside those walls. But now she’s here, trying to apologize for something she’s done because she thought it was for my own good.

  “When I saw you last week, I had a few concerns about your condition.”

  Last week—what day is it?

  “My condition?” I roll the word around on my still-healing tongue, and it leaves my mouth bland and tasteless.

  “Yes. You know that there are certain indicators we are always looking for. After your initial trauma when you were a child—and then the later incident.” Dr. Koftura looks apologetic when she says this, and I almost stop her to say It’s okay. You can say I stalked my ex-boyfriend. I know.

  But I don’t. I sit and listen, because I’m starting to understand why she’s here.

  “Your interactions with the police have been rare and fairly minor, granted, but they are of record. And you know as well as I do the signs that would cause concern. Erratic behavior. Changes in personality as expressed by behavioral choices. Hints of violence.”

  My eyes search her face for reassurance. “I know. But at our appointment you said there was nothing to worry about. You said they were habits, not symptoms.”

  A lightning flash of protest surges through my mind. You said I was safe.

  She nods her head, but her eyes are defiant. “I know that’s what I said—” And her voice catches. She shifts in her chair and brushes the same strand of hair behind her ear again. All her fidgeting makes Dr. Koftura seem like a child called to the principal’s office. She takes a moment to smooth out the fabric of her black pants on the top of her thighs. “—but then I received a call from the police, saying that you’d been in an accident and that your boyfriend was dead. They asked about your diagnosis and symptoms.”

  There’s a moment of weighted silence before Dr. Koftura lurches on with it.

  “They think you killed Justin. That you ran the car off the road.”

  “I didn’t,” I protest. “You know I didn’t.”

  A scratch at the back of my mind. Did I? I look at Dr. Koftura, who I’ve trusted for so many years. With all my secrets.

  Did I?

  No, I answer myself. I force my mind back to those seconds stretched into timelessness. I was trying to save us. I know I was.

  Dr. Koftura lets out a long breath. “You grabbed the steering wheel right before the car crashed?”

  My mind is ping-ponging, too agitated to land on anything.

  Mom on the screen. Justin’s mother. Does she even know yet?

  And I’m suddenly very, very angry.

  “What did you tell the police about me?” I ignore her question.

  “Memory is a strange thing,” Dr. Koftura says quietly. She’s been staring at her feet, but now she looks up to meet my gaze. I can barely look at her. It hurts too much.

  “You didn’t remember your mother throwing you out of the house when you were seven, and wandering the streets until you were hit by a car in the middle of the road. In fact, you still don’t—not really.”

  I stare back at her, willing myself to not look away.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Koftura offers again, and this time she’s not talking about the accident. She’s apologizing for something else.

  “I could have prevented all of this.” Her hands wring each other, until finally her fingers find her wedding band and start to worry it around in circles. “I should have called you back in for another follow-up. I should have known this would happen.”

  She thinks I killed him.

  A thousand pounds of pressure slam onto my chest. I can’t breathe. I need fresh air. I need to get out of this room. I strain to pull air into my lungs, and I hear beeps urgently signaling from the machines my body is still tied to.

  “Why don’t you believe me?” I’m shouting, my voice too loud in my ears. “Why don’t you believe me?” I repeat.

  She looks at me with her cool, dark eyes. “Why do you believe yourself?”

  A twitch at her jaw. A slight curl to her mouth.

  Dr. Holdren rushes into the room, yelling something at Dr. Koftura, who moves meekly out of the way so Dr. Holdren can inject something into my IV.

  And then I’m gone.

  19

  I wake up, in the same blue polka-dot hospital gown, to the opening strains of “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos, and I know it’s my phone, and that Annie is calling me. The dense chords of the song keep insisting as I flail around, looking for where they’re coming from. I finally see the rectangle of my phone lighting up from the side table, which has been pushed up against the edge of my bed. I rip open the bag, and the fingerprint dust puffs out in a black cloud and catches in my throat, making me cough.

  The screen of my phone glows back at me, telling me it’s Monday. Monday morning.

  I’ve been in the hospital for almost three days already.

  I retrieve my phone from the bag and press the green button, my desperation to hear Annie’s voice causing me to fumble around. That, or the damn meds they have given me as a sedative have had side effects on my motor control. Still, I manage to pull the phone to my ear, wiping my other hand on the sheets, which leaves a black smear on the white fabric.

  “Annie?” My voice breaks as I say her name, and I feel a swell of fear mixed with relief rising in my throat.

  “Oh my God—Morgan! I didn’t know if I’d be able to get through to you.”

  However glad I am to hear from Annie, I’m surprised my phone still has any battery left, let alone 45 percent power, like the indicator on my screen tells me. I haven’t charged it since Friday morning, before Justin and I left for our trip.
It should be drained by now.

  The realization snaps into my mind with a metallic click.

  The police must have charged it somehow. While they were doing something else with it.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice,” I choke out, and it absolutely, truly is. But inside I’m wary. Dr. Koftura’s visit, and detectives before that, cling to the edges of my sleep.

  Annie charges ahead, like she always does.

  “The cops called me—apparently they got my contact info from your phone, the bastards—but I told them all to go fuck themselves and that I’m not talking to them without a subpoena.”

  The vise stretching across my chest unspools just a little. Annie never curses, unless she is atomic-bomb-level pissed. And when Annie’s angry she won’t stop until the world bows down.

  Annie tells me that the cops didn’t give her much information, which is partly why she’s so furious. “They wouldn’t even confirm that you were okay. I was going out of my mind!”

  She gives me twenty questions next. Am I hurt? Where am I? How’s Justin? What happened?

  I steel myself and tell her about the accident. About Justin.

  “I can’t believe he would do such a. . .” She stops herself, and then says, whisper quiet, “I’m so sorry.” Neither of us knows what to say next. And then something must jump to the front of Annie’s mind, because she asks, “Have the police interviewed you yet? What did you tell them?”

  I can picture her, pacing back and forth and running her hands through her short spiky hair as she talks to me. I hear her rummaging around in her kitchen, working off her nervous energy by cleaning the dishes or rinsing out the sink, and the normalcy of the sounds feel like they’re coming from some alternate world.

  I try to remember my earlier conversation with Ormoran and Miller, but my memories from after the crash keep coming in and out of focus. “They came for just a few minutes. I didn’t even realize I was being interrogated until afterwards.”

  “Fuckers,” Annie says under her breath.

  “Dr. Koftura came to see me.”

  “Did she set the cops straight? Did she tell them to leave you alone?” Over the years, Annie’s come to admire Dr. Koftura almost as much as I do.

  Did? I don’t know.

  “Annie, she thinks I did it.” I do know that.

  Annie’s quick intake of air slices across the phone line. “What?”

  “She thinks that she should have seen this coming, after my fight with Justin and my emergency appointment. She’s blaming herself for not seeing the signs.”

  There’s a pause at Annie’s end. My heart is becoming more insistent, pounding against my chest, and I worry it’ll set off another slew of beeping in the machines I’m hooked up to.

  And then Annie’s voice comes across loud and clear. “What signs? There aren’t any signs. You’ve never hurt anyone. Ever. This is ridiculous.”

  The knot that’s been tightening in my chest since I woke up starts to unthread. I take a deep breath, and my pulse slows down. Because Annie knows about Richard. She knows about my past. And she still believes me.

  “I don’t know what she’s told the police, but I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m unstable. And that I’m capable of hurting someone.” Breathe, Morgan. “What am I going to do?”

  Asking it out loud makes the chasm of what I’m facing spread out in front of me. Justin. Dr. Koftura. The detectives coming back soon. Any moment now.

  Annie pauses for a moment, and I almost hear the cogs turning as she sorts through this disaster that’s become my life. “You are going to say fuck all to the cops, because you don’t have to tell them anything. You are going to stop seeing that quack of a neurologist. You are going to call Dana. And we are going to figure this out. Together.”

  I’d forgotten about Dana Vasquez, and tell Annie as much. She’d been the legal representative for both Annie and me as we navigated through the child welfare system and into adult life. She’s brilliant, and actually cares more about the clients she works with than charging $200 an hour, which is why the myriad social workers of Mahoning County direct their child charges to her when in need of legal advice.

  “Dana is our best bet. I’ll look up her contact info and call her as soon as I’m off the phone with you,” Annie tells me, and I’m relieved that I won’t have to hold Dana’s name in a to-do list in my foggy brain.

  A wave of fatigue washes over me, as sudden as the wave of anger I felt earlier.

  “What am I going to do?” I ask her again, and this time I’m not talking about the police, or lawyers, or doctors.

  “I’m so sorry,” Annie repeats. And unlike Dr. Koftura, I know it’s for what happened to me, and not for what she thinks I’ve done.

  Annie told me that the detective she spoke to—she thinks it was Ormoran—didn’t want her visiting me. Or rather, they told her that I was in recovery and wasn’t allowed to see visitors yet. I gave her Dr. Holdren’s name, hoping that Annie could get permission from her. In the meantime, Annie has my room number and the name of the hospital—Conneaut Medical Center—along with my location (at least until my phone dies) on our tracking app.

  “I have no clue where that is,” she’d said, her voice growing fainter as she started putting the name into her mapping app.

  Where am I?

  I check the battery on my phone—30 percent left. And the charger was in the suitcase in the trunk of the car, not in my purse. Shit.

  However much I want to search for clues, the thought of looking at Justin’s old texts—or worse, hearing him speak out from old voice mails—twists my stomach into a knife-edge of pain. I tell myself I should save the battery for when Annie might call again.

  I need to focus. I need to get out of this hospital.

  As if conjured, Dr. Holdren walks through the door of my room, wearing a baby blue shirt in some sort of silky fabric and her hair hanging loosely over her shoulders.

  “You’re healing nicely,” my doctor tells me. She looks at me with my chart held open in her hands. “How are you feeling?”

  It is the first time that she’s asked me this since I became her patient, and it takes me a moment to respond. I need to get out of here.

  “Better,” I answer, my voice as clear as I can make it. I move my tongue around in my mouth, and only feel small ridges where the windshield glass found its way inside me.

  “Excellent. The results of your MRI scan. . .” Dr. Holdren frowns slightly as she reads something over in my chart. “They indicate that the swelling on your brain—which was surprisingly minor to begin with, given the trauma incurred on your car during the crash. . .” She pauses. Incurred on my car. And on Justin.

  But neither of us says this, and Dr. Holdren moves on like a well-trained robot. ASD disorder, I think involuntarily, well aware that there’s a surprisingly high prevalence of doctors on the autism spectrum. Brilliant attention to detail, but terrible bedside manner. “The swelling is reduced to the point of being minimal at the most. You’ve been stable for over twenty-four hours now, and the only reason you weren’t stable for longer was because of that quack who came to see you.”

  My mind snags on the insult. She’s talking about Dr. Koftura.

  Maybe I can. . .

  “She’s been my doctor for years—since I was a child, really,” I say.

  Dr. Holdren offers a guttural noise from the back of her throat.

  “That’s unfortunate,” she says.

  “Do you really think so?”

  Dr. Holdren is still standing at the foot of my bed, and she stares at my forehead. “Yes. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said so.”

  “I’ve always trusted her,” I begin, but Dr. Holdren cuts me off, her face buried in my paperwork again.

  “That was your first mistake.”

  “She thinks I did this,” I gesture to my broken and bruised self, but Dr. Holdren isn’t looking. And then I go for it. “She thinks I tried to kill my boyfriend.”

  Dr. Hold
ren snaps her head up from my chart. “What did you say?”

  I explain again what Dr. Koftura accused me of. I start to tell Dr. Holdren about my work with Dr. Koftura, to which she waves her hand impatiently.

  “I’ve read your case history. Conneaut and St. Elizabeth’s are in the same network, so your records are already in our system. Even if they weren’t, I would have followed-up until I had access to them. What kind of doctor do you think I am?”

  I don’t answer that.

  “There is no reason to think that your condition,” she points emphatically in my chart at something I can’t see, “would contribute to any sort of violent tendencies. Particularly after decades of behavior that has shown no aggressive symptoms.”

  She’s lecturing me, probably envisioning Dr. Koftura, not me, in front of her, listening obsequiously to her brilliance, and I don’t care. She thinks Dr. Koftura is wrong.

  I think of Richard and involuntarily glance at the small white scars on my knuckles. I think of the contract Annie made me sign. I see Justin’s face, right before we crashed.

  “Did you tell the detectives. . .?” I start to ask, but Dr. Holdren interrupts me.

  “You’ll need to sign a few forms, and I have a prescription for some extra-strength Ibuprofen for your aches and pains. As you may know, we’re moving away from opioid painkillers—so sorry, but no Oxycontin for you.”

  I’d never said I wanted any to begin with.

  “Do you have someone you can call to pick you up?” she asks, and it takes a few moments for me to answer because I’m just registering that I’m leaving.

  “Annie. My friend Annie can pick me up.”

  “Good—how quickly can she get here?”

  “I’m not sure—she lives in Cleveland.”

  “About an hour or two, give or take which side of Cleveland she’s on. That’ll do. Now,” Dr. Holdren levels her gaze on me for the first time. She looks confident, but uncomfortable. “I can’t guarantee that those detectives won’t be back before your friend arrives, and since I’m discharging you I can’t really say that you’re unfit for questioning. But if you want my advice—and I’d certainly say you should want my advice—then I’d recommend talking as little as possible to them until you have a lawyer and are being officially questioned.”