by Deanna Roy
I heard water running, and my bravado evaporated. This wasn’t a movie. And I had been fired. Whatever force had brought me back here might be pushing this man to do something he didn’t want. He could be ready to take it out on me.
By the time the door swung open, I was prepared for something awful. But the man who strode out wasn’t nearly as old as I expected. Barely fifty. Aged well. His face lit up with welcome and charm when he saw me.
“You must be Tina. Come sit.” He gestured to the sofa and chairs. “I’m John Duffrey. I run this little funhouse.”
I was probably supposed to laugh, but I was sort of freaked out. This was the horrible and imposing head administrator? Instead of some evil dictator, this guy was more like a talk-show host.
I lowered myself to the edge of a sofa cushion. Duffrey dropped into one of the wing chairs.
“This is a beautiful office,” I said.
Duffrey glanced around. “It’s part of the original hospital core. Took a little sprucing up when I got it.”
“How long have you been the director?” I smoothed my skirt over my knees so that it would fall evenly, trying not to show too much striped stocking.
“Two years now.” Duffrey leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, elbows out, like he was about to watch football at home. Boyish black curls topped his head, out of sync with his age. But something in his eyes was sly, like he was putting on a show.
I tensed up, my senses going on alert.
“You’re probably wondering what the heck happened yesterday,” he said, crossing one perfectly pressed trouser leg over the other.
“It was a strange day,” I said. “Getting escorted out like I’d robbed the place. Then getting called back a few hours later.”
“Here’s the score. Sabrina Longly hired you because she had not done her homework on the position, and she had gotten in a bind. That was a mistake. And hospitals can’t afford mistakes.”
“I understand you wanted a certified therapist.”
Duffrey nodded. “It requires a master’s degree in psychology or social work. For a job like yours, not much more. It’s not up there on the pay scale.”
The way he said it made me feel small and inferior. I burned with a little more anger. Stay calm, Tina. Don’t blow it.
“The position was funded by a patient. He put some contingencies on a rather extraordinary endowment, one being that the program began, at least rudimentarily, while he was still here.”
Duffrey set both feet on the ground and leaned forward. “I’m not one to be pushed around, but a gift of this magnitude doesn’t come along very often. Sabrina was asked to get the ball rolling.”
“Did the guy take a turn for the worse or something?”
Duffrey chuckled. “Actually, he was doing well.”
I felt a trickle of horror. “Did you keep him here just to make the deadline?”
Duffrey held up both his palms. “No, no. That would have been unethical. We just accelerated the plan. Sabrina started the program herself, filling in until we brought someone on.”
I remembered how strung out she had been when we first talked. “I think you gave her too much to do.”
“Probably. That’s often the case in a hospital. Your job is probably one of the easiest there is.”
God, this man made assumptions. “Say that when people are chucking scissors at my head.”
He smiled briefly, and now I could see the facade slipping. “You see why training is important.”
I shrugged. I felt like I had little to lose here. Duffrey’s hand was being forced. He didn’t want me, and he was having to bring me back. I could probably call him a jerk to his face and suffer nothing but making an enemy.
But I couldn’t afford enemies.
I tried to inject a pleasant lilt to my voice. “What am I supposed to do?”
Duffrey jumped up and rummaged around on his desk, producing a file. “We’ve put together some local programs for you to get your master’s degree.” He looked up at me. “I assume your bachelor’s is in order? Your transcripts will be in good shape?”
I wasn’t sure what he was insinuating. That I had lied about my degree? Faked my application? “Yes. I graduated back in May. Won’t I have to take the GRE?”
He passed me the folder and sat back down. His voice held a note of bitterness. “Yes, but the score won’t matter. With a ringing endorsement from the hospital, you’ll get into any of these programs.”
“But I can’t afford to be in school. I already have loans for undergrad.” I tried to picture my life, working all day, night classes, barely paying the bills.
“It will be covered. You can take it slowly. One or two classes a semester.” He seemed impatient with my arguments.
“What if I don’t want to do my master’s? I just finished school. Maybe I don’t want to go back.”
Duffrey’s smile grew pained. “I suppose we could create some administrative position for you within the program. You wouldn’t actually be in charge of any patient activities, but you’d be in the room to satisfy the donor.”
I was missing something. I flipped through the papers in the folder. “Why are you doing this? I wasn’t even here when this money was donated. This can’t be about me.”
“You’ve made a very powerful friend since your arrival, Tina.” Duffrey leaned forward, and now his dark blue eyes flashed.
I pictured Dr. Darion in here insisting I keep my job. Maybe he involved someone he knew, someone with connections. “Do I get to find out who he is?”
“Anonymity was one of the stipulations.” He sat back again. “I hope you’ll do the program. I think you’ll enjoy it. And I think you’ll like Master of Psychology much better than Art Assistant on your resume.”
I shrugged. “I’m not in this for titles. But I did like my job.”
This did not sway Duffrey at all, and I could see why people thought he was a hard-ass. “Fill out the application so I can get your irate benefactor off my back. If you decide not to do the program, let me know, and we’ll go the other route. Either way, I need you back in your room like nothing has happened by midafternoon.”
Now it was time for my power play. I had him over a barrel. It was plain as day. “I want a budget for supplies,” I said. “And a new table with an adjustable height for the different age groups.”
He waved his hand at me. “Those are easy. Just don’t go anywhere. We’ll be drawing up a contract that will keep you here until the program stipulations are met.”
Wow. I was going to be stuck here. “How long?”
“Probably a year at least, possibly for the duration of your master’s program.”
“If I leave?”
“You forfeit the money for your program and have to pay it back.” He frowned. “It’s not often you get a free ride for a graduate degree. I’d take it.”
“All right.”
“Let my secretary know your budget needs. Find this table you want and bring her the ordering information.”
“And chairs,” I said hastily. “I need both adult and child chairs.”
“Just tell her.” He walked back to his desk, probably disgusted that I was bringing in petty details. His job was just to make sure the hospital didn’t lose the money for this program.
And to appease some powerful person.
I wanted to know who it was.
Chapter 18: Darion
I had a break in the day around lunch and decided to check on Cynthia. I wanted to make sure her temperature was normal and there were no ill effects of her little expedition yesterday. Her first clinical trial chemotherapy was scheduled for tomorrow. I had hoped her ANC would recover between rounds, but since the clofarabine infusion would destroy her immune system again, it wasn’t relevant at the moment. We had to divide and conquer the various complications she was experiencing. At least for now, we were keeping the cancer at bay.
I checked my phone as I crossed through the outdoor courtyard. Tina had no
t responded to my text. Perhaps I had been too emotional, too emphatic. I regretted the message. I should have been simpler, plainer. Can we meet for coffee tomorrow? Or Let me know how the meeting went.
But I had been overwrought, affected by her physical proximity. Away from her, I could remain detached, see the situation from the outside.
Maybe.
I still felt an ache, a need for her that I couldn’t quite subdue.
Damn nuisance.
I should stay far far away from the spritely art therapist.
But I already knew I wouldn’t. I’d gotten my hands on her. There was no direction to go except closer.
The chemotherapy hall was quiet on a Friday afternoon. Few patients were scheduled during this time slot, although a smattering of family members dotted the waiting-room chairs. It always surprised me how many didn’t sit directly with their loved ones on the drip. It shamed me that I couldn’t sit with Cynthia, not anymore.
At our first hospital, where they knew she was my sister, we would play games. Her favorite was called “Brother Pix.” She would start a drawing, then pass it to me, and I would add to it, then return it to her. We’d do this until the page was too full to add anything else to the picture. We had dozens of these now, amassed during the hours we waited on her bag to empty.
But here, after I’d purged her records of my name, I was her doctor. Whenever I felt a twinge of regret that I’d chosen this course, I remembered the mistakes they had made at Children’s. Not catching the tumor cells in her kidney until it was too late to save it, misdiagnosing a strep infection that almost killed her. I knew this was what I had to do. I didn’t trust anyone else with her care.
In the late evenings, when I was forced to go home to my empty apartment, I studied her charts, placed her stats in spreadsheets, looking for patterns like a fortune-teller might divine the future from tea leaves. If there was a way to save her from this aggressive form of her disease, I would find it.
Here at the hospital, I kept personal interaction with staff to a minimum. I wanted to do my job with competence, to garner respect and not camaraderie, the sort that might get me found out.
The wireless on my iPad usually dropped in certain spots of the courtyard, so I waited until I was back inside to pull up Cynthia’s current chart. Her temperature an hour ago was normal. I relaxed a little. She would be able to see Tina, if we got that chance.
If Tina messaged me. It had been two hours since our encounter in Surgical Suite B. Her meeting had to be over.
Before I could make it to Cynthia’s room, my hospital phone buzzed with a code. Harriet.
I rushed to her room. The team had already assembled. Abrams was acting as code doctor.
Harriet’s husband stood by the window, frozen with fear.
I glanced at the monitor. Ventricular fibrillation. A nurse was sliding a CPR board beneath her while another affixed the pads to her chest.
The respiratory therapist leaned over, pumping air in. “She’s fully intubated.”
Abrams glanced back and saw me. “You want to handle the code?”
“Yes. Prepare for first shock,” I told the cardiac assistant. To the nurse, “Prep one milligram epinephrine.”
I turned to the nurse holding an iPad. “She might be septic. When was the last bloodwork?”
The nurse glanced down. “This morning. Bacteria present. Antibiotics started three hours ago.”
“Call someone in infectious disease — maybe Dr. Carter — to get on top of this.”
The nurse nodded, clicking her stylus on the pad.
“Clear,” a man said, and the first electrical pulse went through.
We all stared at the monitor. The pattern settled back to a regular heartbeat.
“Three hundred milligrams of amiodarone, then get her to imaging,” I said. “I want to see if there is fluid on her heart.”
“We can bring in a portable chest X-ray,” the nurse said.
“Perfect.”
I kept watch another minute. Harriet’s rhythm held. The room visibly relaxed.
“Continuous amiodarone infusion at one milligram a minute,” I said. “Get that image, then move her to ICU.”
While having a patient code was always an emergency, this particular situation was not unusual during heavy rounds of chemo. I didn’t want to cause more damage by overtreating her.
I turned back to the nurse with the iPad and took it from her. They had to be treating the wrong bacteria, or not aggressively enough. We had to get the infection down, or she would have more organ failure.
The code team began to withdraw.
“Is she okay?” her husband asked.
I stepped over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He was shaking. “She’s stable. This was just a little bump. She has an infection. Her body isn’t able to fight it. We started treating it this morning, but it was more aggressive than we expected. We’re going to go check her organs now and administer stronger medications to fight the bacteria.”
He nodded, although I’m not sure how much he was hearing. Families who witness a code go into a type of shock themselves. I’d repeat all of this to him again later.
“Will she be okay?”
“We’ll get that fluid off her, and that will help her heart.” I wasn’t answering the question, really. Second onset of cancer as an adult after pediatric leukemia was not an easy thing to treat. Harriet had a lot of damage to her body already.
Life was always a risk. Everything about it.
“When will she be back?”
“They will move her to ICU for close monitoring.” I glanced up at the waiting aide and squinted at her badge. “Sheila here will show you where the waiting room is for that.”
He nodded numbly, his face drawn and tired. They had been here for a week already.
I squeezed his shoulder. “Hang tight. She’s a tough woman.”
Sheila helped him gather their bags, and I headed out to the hall. I’d go check on Harriet again after imaging. With the amiodarone helping her heart, she would be all right for a while, long enough to treat her.
The code had used up most of my break, but I had about five minutes to eat a sandwich with Cynthia. I turned down the hall toward her room. Angela was by the door, taping another image onto the collage.
“Almost out of room here,” she said.
“She’s prolific, that’s for sure.”
The new picture was the one she had drawn with Tina, Mom onstage singing. I could almost hear her voice, clear and pure, belting out one love-gone-wrong ballad or another. My father hadn’t seen how much she cared for him. He wasn’t wired to recognize it. But I had. I had always known. When he’d accused her of sleeping with other men after her pregnancy became obvious, it had cut her deeply.
I followed Angela inside. Cynthia was sitting on the bed cross-legged. “Dary!” she cried.
“You look good,” I said. She was surrounded with a deck of cards all spread out. “What are you doing?”
“I’m learning a card trick!”
Angela rummaged through a soft-sided cooler. “Her little friend Andrew,” she said.
“Pick a card!” Cynthia said.
I selected one from the center.
“Not that one!” she said.
I laughed. “Which one, then?”
“Mmmm. This one,” she said, pointing to one near the end.
I picked it up.
“Is it the eight of spades?” she asked.
It wasn’t. I showed her the card.
“Well, rats.” She began stacking the deck back together.
“Just a little more practice.”
Angela produced a sandwich and a bottle of water and handed them to me. “Here you go, Dr. Darion,” she said.
“How is she today?” I asked as I unwrapped it.
“I was going to suggest some IV fluids, actually, if you want to take a look. She’s not getting much output.”
Cynthia had tuned us out, her habit late
ly if we started talking about her illness. She hummed a little tune as she shuffled the cards by pulling a few out and stuffing them back in the stack.
“I’ll check her chart,” I said, trying not to feel any concern, pushing down emotion so I could retain the same cool detachment in assessing Cynthia as I had done in the room with Harriet.
But her one functioning kidney had to be watched carefully. If the cancer cells liked renal tissue, they could attack the other. I would order a PET scan, just to be sure.
“Dary, will you draw me a picture?”
“Of course. What would you like today? A blue unicorn? A pink bear?”
She giggled as she tugged a drawing pad out from under her pillow. I found it amusing that she slept with it. Mom had pulled my sketchbooks out from under my blankets many nights.
“I want you to draw Miss Tina.” She held out the pad and a pencil.
I rewrapped the sandwich and set it down. “But you have so many very good pictures of her.”
“But you do it better. Make her a princess!”
My heart hammered a bit as I accepted the sketch pad. “Does she have a castle?”
“Yes! St. Anthony’s Castle.”
I laughed. “A hospital castle?”
“This is where she will rule!”
“Crown or cone hat?”
“Crown!”
I laid out the lines of the overall image. The flowing gown, the indentation of her waist, the bend of her elbow. “Pigtails?” I asked.
“Of course!” Cyn bounced a little on the bed as I drew in Tina’s head and flared out a few arching lines for her hair.
“Ribbons?”
“Big ones!”
I smiled. Tina was not a big-bow kind of girl, so it was fun to sketch in giant ones on either side of her head.
Now that the rough shape was in place, I began filling in features. The detail of the gown. Her eyes and nose and mouth.
I paused, shifting her expression to one I knew, looking up at me with vulnerability. As I formed the dress to her curves, I could feel them again, warm skin under my fingertips.
