In Case of Emergency

by E. G. Scott

  “Do you happen to know any neurological experts who could help me understand neural pathway reprogramming to break bad habits?” He touches his beard, which has grown in pretty impressively since I last saw him six weeks ago at Rachel’s memorial service.

  “Have you been googling me?” I ask wearily.

  He hesitates. “Yes.”

  I glance down at the table. There has been so much written about me in the last several weeks. I shudder at the thought of what he’s read.

  “Sorry. It was just that with all the coverage, I couldn’t avoid it. And I got curious about your surgical work. So much of what people have written about you has been about your current work.”

  “Yeah, because I won’t give them anything new,” I mutter.

  “You are really impressive, Charlotte,” he says.

  I try to let go of the now-daily feeling of being exposed all over again. “Luckily the news cycle is losing steam and people are hopefully on to the next thing.” I dodge his compliment.

  “Isn’t the trial starting soon?”

  “With any luck, it won’t go to trial. There is overwhelming evidence, the detectives did their jobs right, and Annie is expected to plead guilty on all counts. But who knows. She could pull something at the last minute.”

  “Will you have to take the stand if it goes to trial?” he asks.

  “They are working on a plea bargain that might keep me from having to testify, which I’m hopeful about. But I will, if it comes to that.” I sigh. It’s the last thing I want to do.

  “They should lock that psycho up for a very long time,” he says spiritedly.

  I shrug.

  “Don’t you want her to suffer for what she’s done? Aren’t you furious? I am.” He hits the table dramatically to punctuate.

  “Yes, I think she should be held responsible. But I don’t like the idea of anyone suffering. And Annie was obviously a person in a tremendous amount of pain.” I think about my short time in jail. “Being locked up for the rest of your life sounds horrific.”

  “Well, I definitely don’t share your equanimity. This woman murdered your friend—our friend—and almost you.” He flares his nostrils. I don’t entirely love his quickness to anger, but I appreciate where it’s coming from.

  “And Brooke Harmon,” I say wistfully.

  He nods. “You are just furthering my case. I hope she never sees the light of day again,” he responds acidly.

  “Annie wants me to do a sit-down special with Gayle King,” I tell him. “Her press rep reached out to me.”

  “For real? Gayle seems cool . . ,” he jokes.

  “My life is so surreal right now.” I shake my head slowly from side to side.

  “Are you going to do it?” he asks.

  “Not a chance,” I say resolutely.

  “I think it is amazing that you haven’t done any media or taken any of the offers,” he says. “I’m impressed. I don’t know if I would have the same self-control. I’d love a few minutes to get on my soapbox and take that crazy bitch down.” He clocks my reaction. I frown. “Sorry. Not cool,” he says. “What is it okay to call a cruel female woman who impersonated a chat room full of people, tricked, stalked, and harassed and murdered two, almost three people?”

  “Well, I guess she is a crazy bitch, technically speaking.” We both laugh. “And it looks like Annie may have killed more than two people. They are investigating the deaths of her brother, who died under mysterious circumstances, and possibly her parents, years ago,” I tell him.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  “Rachel wouldn’t have wanted any of the attention on her life. And I definitely don’t want it on mine,” I say.

  “No, she wouldn’t have,” he agrees. “And I totally understand.”

  “I’m glad that the truth is out about Brooke’s death and her parents now know the full story about everything. I just wish the phone calls and emails would stop.”

  He nods, listening intently. It feels good to talk about this with someone other than my therapist.

  “If you need any help with the press, I have a patient who does crisis management who owes me a few hundred favors for saving her life,” he offers.

  “Thank you. I actually have a self-appointed, live-in press agent. She has mastered the art of saying ‘fuck off’ in a hundred ways and lives to do it. And she actually has the members of the media trying to get off the phone with her by the end,” I marvel.

  “This wouldn’t happen to be the woman at Rachel’s memorial service who looked like she was either on her way to or arriving from a Jackie O look-alike contest?”

  “That would be the very one,” I confirm. “She was also successful in finally getting Yelp to take down all the terrible reviews about me. So my practice is starting to pick up again.”

  “Is that why you were too busy to see me for an appointment?” He starts to wink and then realizes midway through, which leaves him in a comical frozen blink expression.

  “Well, no. I want to be careful about boundaries. I don’t treat people that I’m—” I catch myself before I vocalize the embarrassing presumption of what I was about to say.

  He’s highly amused and closed-mouth grinning like a cat with a mouse tail hanging from between his lips.

  “People that you are . . . ?”

  I blush and look away. “Having friendly coffee and conversation with,” I respond. I pivot from the awkwardness. “I really have been overloaded, though. I’m actually not taking any new patients right now, and have another acupuncturist moving into Rachel’s room next week to help with the workload.”

  It was a hard decision to make, allowing a stranger to come in and occupy her space, but a healthy one according to my shrink. “I am happy the new recruit seems really excited and open. She’s already painting and decorating the treatment room to make it her own.” Which I’m deeply grateful for. I still have a hard time going in that room as is.

  “Oh, and that love letter of a review that is up is probably helping things too. I read it and felt a little threatened, to be totally honest,” he shares.

  “Love letter review?” I ask. I’ve kept my promise and not looked at the site, even now that Rachel is no longer here to watch for me. My mother versus Yelp was her idea, and while I appreciated it, I’ve let go of caring about that stuff. It isn’t important in the grand scheme. I see that now.

  John pulls out his phone, touches the screen a number of times, and hands it to me.

  The Yelp app is open and I read the top review.

  Dr. Charlotte Knopfler is the best kind of healer, the kind who empathizes deeply, believes in the power of love and connectedness, and makes everyone who comes into her presence feel safe, valued, and special. Every time I have encountered her, I’ve been made whole. She takes away pain, replaces it with love, and holds your hand through even the most difficult things. There are not enough stars in the universe to rate her with.

  I look at the screen name and the posting date: OmRach. The night she died. I hand the phone back to him, speechless.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah. I hadn’t seen that before.”

  “There are a ton of other glowing reviews. Not so much about your practice, but about what an inspiration you are. How amazing it is that you defended yourself. A lot of female empowerment happening on your page.”

  I’m a little dumbfounded. “I assumed the influx of new patients was because of the news coverage and people’s morbid curiosity about me. That is pretty incredible.” I know I could tell him that it was her, and probably one of the last things she did before she died. But I want to keep it to myself.

  He scans the restaurant. “Our waitress appears to have gone on break. Are you starving? Maybe I should track her down?” he offers gently.

  “I’m fine. I’m not in a rush and not starving
. It’s just nice to be out,” I say, appreciating his efforts to tend to my potential hunger. I’m a little surprised that a surgeon picked a diner for our rendezvous and wonder if he is sending a decidedly “undate” message with the understated venue choice.

  “You know, Rachel and I used to come here after our NA meetings,” he says, intuiting my speculation. “We definitely had some laughs about our own wild days. I miss the hell out of her.” He looks out the window, the glass reflecting our images back at us with the dark outside.

  “Me too. So much it hurts. I know I can’t do anything about it now, but I am having trouble letting go of the fact that she and I were in a fight when she died,” I reply sadly.

  “I feel the same way, actually. She was furious at me when she died,” he says gravely. “I keep trying to let go of it, but it is difficult. I’ve even been dreaming about it and apologizing to her in my dreams. Isn’t that silly?”

  “Not at all. I’ve been doing the same. And she always forgives me,” I say. “So I feel better temporarily.”

  “Me too.”

  “What was she furious about?” I don’t want to be unkind and tell him what I’m thinking, that she’d never mentioned his name or existence to me even once. It is ironic that Rachel was hiding details about a man in her life as I was, but given the anonymity of their connection, I understand.

  He balls his hands up and looks uncomfortable. “That is why I asked you to meet me.” He stops short and we sit in silence for a minute. “I’m going to need to just get this out and let you have whatever reaction you are going to.”

  “Okay.” Given the buildup, I’m considering running for the exit.

  “A month before Rachel died, she passed out in a yoga class and someone called the paramedics. She’d come to before they arrived and refused their attention, but they insisted she go to the ER because her blood pressure was so low. They brought her into Stony Brook, and by coincidence she saw me on my way out of a surgery and begged me to intervene. If we hadn’t had the connection we had, I wouldn’t have stepped on my colleagues’ toes, but she was adamant.”

  “Okay.” I’m hanging on every word. I had no idea that any of this happened and am feeling hurt beyond measure. “She didn’t call me. Didn’t tell me any of this.”

  He nods. “Yes, by design. She explicitly asked me not to call anyone on her behalf and pleaded with me to be her contact person so that she could be discharged. Which I agreed to do once she let the intake doctor run some basic diagnostics.”

  I am nodding and taking repeated sips of the water in front of me, out of the need to do something with my hands and my growing anxiety. The waitress finally appears with a pitcher and refills my glass. She is about to speak and I say, “Not now,” firmly, and I wave her away, which she abides obediently, but with a look of disdain.

  John continues. “The irony is, the chance encounter in the ER prompted Rachel to lasso me into being her proxy, but once the test results came in, I would have been called in for the consult anyway. I was the only resident oncologist on duty that day who was not in surgery.” He gauges my face to see if he should continue.

  The emerging truth is pulling at every nerve ending in my body. John sees the pain in my face and moves his hand slowly across the table toward mine. I let him squeeze it before I pull it away. I’m not anywhere near letting this man comfort me.

  “Please.” I attempt to clear my coated throat. “Continue.”

  “The results of her tests were undeniably indicative of something pervasive in her body. Her white blood cell count was dangerously low.” I see him remember that he’s speaking to a doctor and he adjusts. “There was a significant elevation in her carcinoembryonic antigen and CA 19-9.”

  “Pancreatic.”

  “Yes. And it was very advanced based on the CT scan I finally convinced her to let me do,” he says solemnly. “I gave her three months, tops.”

  “So, you said this was four weeks before she died. But that can’t be. She would have told me. I would have walked her through the process. Taken her to Sloan Kettering. Done all of the things.” I’m leaking tears without even realizing I’ve begun crying. John slides a napkin over to me.

  “It was a really long shot that chemo would have done anything other than make her feel terrible. And she was unrelenting about not having any surgery.” I can hear the emotion coming through. “I tried, Charlotte. I swear to God. I tried hard to get her to do something. I was so desperate.” He wrings his hands. “That’s why I came to your office and used a fake name. I didn’t want her to know I was reaching out to you. She found out and tore me a new one. I figured if anyone could talk sense into her, it would be you. She’d shared about you so lovingly, many times. I felt like I knew you without ever having met you.”

  “I know the feeling,” I reply softly. I move my head to acknowledge that I’m still participating in the conversation, but I’m quickly transported miles away, processing all of the truth that has been heaped on me. The sounds of the diner take on a muted humming quality all around me.

  “Charlotte, are you okay?” He looks concerned.

  “I am.” I close my eyes. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Rachel believed that we heal ourselves. She didn’t believe in surgery,” I say steadily.

  He meets my eyes when I open them, and I can see the skepticism in his face.

  “Her dad died during a routine surgery when she was a kid, and I think it really scarred her. And then all of her beliefs developed against Western medicine. And in Eastern modalities, practitioners believe that cancer is a result of energy blockages, and some hard-core people don’t believe in surgical or chemical practices.”

  He looks unsatisfied with this explanation, which I can understand. He’s doing what I was mere minutes ago. Making this about his beliefs. But this is Rachel we are talking about. Give me a sign that you are still with me, I say to myself. Please.

  “And she didn’t want to tell me, I’m sure, because this was one subject we agreed to not talk about,” I reassure myself.

  “About medicine?” He looks incredulous. “But you were a doctor!” He bites his bottom lip and composes himself. “Sorry. You still believe in medicine, don’t you?”

  “I do. Of course I do. But after everything happened with Michelle Harmon, I didn’t want to talk about my time as a surgeon ever again; at least that is how I felt when Rachel and I first became friends. And she honored that. And I knew she didn’t want to talk about her feelings about Western medicine, or talk about what I was trying to do in my surgeries, which I think she had a real problem with. So we had an unspoken agreement.”

  “And it just happened that the one thing you both didn’t want to talk about was the thing you should have,” he says frustratedly. “That makes no rational sense.”

  I am heartened by his emotion, and I see how much he cared about Rachel, which makes me like and trust him more than I have yet. But I won’t try to explain to him why nothing I would have said to Rachel would have made a difference. That rationale was not the place she lived, and no one, not he or I, was going to ever change that about her. Which is the thing we both loved about her. Her resolve in herself.

  “I know from your point of view, none of this makes sense. But it does to me.” I focus on his beautiful clear eyes. “I feel so grateful that you are telling me that she was sick, terminally sick. I hate that Annie took her life, but given the choice to go out the way she did or dying slowly and painfully, I think Rachel would have chosen fast oblivion. That gives me some peace of mind.”

  His face twists into an indecipherable expression.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You can’t say that someone who had the amount of sobriety time that she did would have wanted to die high. You just can’t.” I’m surprised to see a tear roll down his cheek, which he swats away aggressively and bows h
is head.

  “You are right,” I say softly. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “But then again, given the choice, I know what I would choose.” He sighs.

  “This is a way that you knew her better than I did.” I extend my hand across the table. “I’m so glad to know that she had you as a friend, and that you can tell me more about her. I’m grateful you told me everything.”

  He leans forward. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are processing this news a lot better than I expected. My therapist prepared me for the worst,” he says.

  I bow my head when I hear the lyrics clearly and let the light fill me.

  “Everything is okay.” I tell him, then pull my hand from his and place both of my hands over my heart.

  “It is?” he asks, mildly confused.

  I silently point to the ceiling, where the song hits its chorus again. Rachel loved this song. We loved this song. The last time I heard it she was singing and dancing along to it.

  John tilts his head to hear the words being sung along with the chords of an acoustic guitar.

  “Listen,” I tell him.

  Woke from a dream, was soaked in sweat;

  I’d never known you, we’d never met.

  I’d never known how sweet life gets;

  When you find the piece that fits.

  The one who sees you, knows your soul;

  Knows each part and loves you whole.

  I’d never said, to my regret;

  How much I love you, my best friend.

  And I listen for my friend between the words.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We are so grateful to our incredibly talented agent, Christopher Schelling.

  We have the publishing dream team at Dutton. For the unparalleled editorial talent of John Parsley, who is patient, wise, and an all-around mensch; Maya Ziv’s sage editorial notes; and Cassidy Sachs’s sharp eye and amazing support, we are so very grateful. So many thanks go to our powerhouse publicity and marketing crew, made up of Amanda Walker, Jamie Knapp, Kathleen Carter, and Stephanie Cooper. Special thanks to Christine Ball for championing us early on, and to Madeline McIntosh, Allison Dobson, Lauren Monaco, and the PRH sales team for their enthusiasm for our books. And to David Litman for the stunning jacket design, art director Christopher Lin, and everyone else who typeset, copyedited, designed, etc.