Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  You can see a thousand patients in the ICU, you can see a thousand of the sick and dying, a thousand bodies mauled by violence and disease, but years of such sights can never prepare you to see the woman you love nested amongst tubes and lines and all the artificial and ugly decorations that sustain her life.

  Brooke’s lips were chapped and fissured, open around the plastic tube that led into her throat. Her blond hair was shaved from the left side of her head, a bandage loosely adhering to the skin there. Around her left eye, the flesh was discolored and swollen.

  I looked at the monitor: vital signs were within normal limits. I began to examine her for other injuries.

  “Sir, you can’t”—the Filipina nurse was behind me—“do that. You need to step—”

  “I’m a goddamned doctor. This is my fiancée,” I snarled. “Get the resident.”

  She glared at me. “Get the resident now!” I roared.

  She disappeared, leaving me to continue the exam.

  No injuries on the extremities, no injuries evident on the torso. Her face, though…

  “Brooke,” I said. Then, louder, “Brooke!” There was no response. I saw that one of the drips flowing into her was propofol—a sedative—which would have made her unable to respond. I reached toward the drip to dial down the propofol. It would be ten minutes before it wore off enough that I could give her a thorough neurological exam—

  “Hey!”

  A young guy in a white coat came through the door. He was short and pudgy, with two days’ growth of beard. He looked as though he hadn’t slept since his residency started.

  “I turned off the propofol so I could examine her,” I told him. “I’m a doctor,” I added lamely.

  “I don’t care if you’re Jesus Christ or His mother. You can’t do that. Step away from the bed.”

  Others gathered outside the room: nurses, another resident. Everyone was watching me like they expected me to brandish a machete at any second. No one liked that I was monkeying around with the patient.

  “You need to step out of this room,” the resident said. He fingered the propofol, dialed it back up.

  “What’s her GCS score?”

  “Outside.”

  Brooke lay there, the monitor beeped, the drips dripped. I nodded. “Okay. Outside.”

  In the hallway, I asked, “What’d you get for her GCS score?” The GCS, or Glasgow Coma Scale, is the scoring system used to assess traumatic brain injury.

  “You’re a doctor? Her fiancé?” the resident asked.

  “Yes to both,” I said, feeling a little dirtier each time the fiancé thing came up.

  “All right. But you do not fool around with her, got it? You do that again, I’m throwing you out of here.” He sighed. “We’ve been doing one-hour neuro checks. GCS is eight to nine, which is what we’d expect.”

  “What you’d expect for what?”

  He looked wary again. “The police didn’t contact you?”

  “If the police contacted me, I wouldn’t be asking, would I? All I know is that she has a head injury.”

  Bored by years of delivering the worst news, the resident’s tone was insouciant as he told me what I assumed I would hear, what I dreaded hearing. “She was assaulted. Outside her home, I think. They got her with a bat or a club or something.”

  The helplessness returned, washing over me like an icy wave. But there was something else there, too. Something darker and much worse: the knowledge that I had caused this as surely as if I’d swung the bat or club or something at her myself.

  82

  I PUSHED PAST THE RESIDENT, through the small throng of health care androids. I almost overlooked Tim, still with the ward clerk. “I’ll be back,” I managed to say. “Watch him.”

  Tears filled my eyes. Choking on my own grief and rage, I walked half-blind through the hospital. Heads turned. I heard someone say, “Are you all right?” But I couldn’t answer. I began to run. Fast through the corridors of the hospital, down the steps, to the main hallway. I dodged people in wheelchairs, men with canes, doctors with their crisp white coats. Even in this world of cancer and disease, not one of them knew the depth of the world’s blackness.

  Out of the hospital, past the benches where nurses sat in pretty scrubs decorated with bears and balloons, past the eruption of color in the flower beds. When I was past them all, when I was in the plaza outside the hospital, when I was sure anyone who was interested could see me, I strode right into the fountain and only then did I stop.

  “Here I am! Here!” I spun in a slow circle, arms wide. “Come on! Here he is! Nathaniel McCormick! Nathaniel fucking McCormick! Your man! I’m here!”

  I screamed until my voice cracked, until I felt my vocal cords split.

  I hardly felt the water wicking into my shoes and pants. I hardly saw the security guards as they approached me, stepped cautiously into the water with me, as they reached out to restrain this man who was screaming, crying, sloshing around in the fountain. I barely noticed the little boy who’d followed me through the hospital corridors and who now stood at the water’s edge, his black eyes staring.

  The world tilted and bucked like a boat in a hurricane. “Nathaniel fucking McCormick! Come and get me!” I screamed.

  83

  AFTER THE STUNT IN THE fountain, the ICU team wasn’t especially keen to have me back in the fold. It was only through the intervention of the attending physician that I got back into the unit at all.

  I waited for the attending in a small, ugly conference room near the ICU—beaten chairs, ravaged whiteboard—staring at the wall, my mind flying from Brooke to Dorothy to Murph’s photos to the kid who sat slumped silently in the chair next to mine. I had trouble imagining Tim’s emotional landscape at that point: his mother gone, a trip to the ICU, his ad hoc protector having some kind of psychotic break and splashing around with the ducks. What does that do to a kid?

  It breaks a kid; it drives him to extreme lengths. In this case, extreme lengths was Social Studies. Tim pulled the text from his full backpack—he seemed to be carrying an entire classroom in there—and flipped through it for ten minutes. When he exhausted that subject, he pulled out another book, a novel by the looks of it.

  Though I wanted to be back in the ICU with Brooke, there were reasons to keep myself planted. The Filipina nurse was probably on orders to have me shot if I showed up there again without escort. Stomping around in a fountain is not the best way to demonstrate your stability. That, and bursting in before visiting hours. That’s a felony in some parts of the country.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, trying to get my mind off things.

  “The Hobbit,” Tim said.

  “That’s pretty advanced stuff for a third grader.”

  “I already read it twice.”

  “Twice? Wow.”

  “Actually, I read it once by myself,” he corrected himself. “My mom read it to me once.”

  “Who’s your favorite character?” I asked, trying to keep him away from the mother topic.

  “Thorin,” he said, not missing a beat. “He’s the head dwarf.”

  “I always thought head dwarves are cool.”

  “Thorin is a hero.”

  “What about Bilbo?”

  “He’s a bit cowardly.” Tim said it matter-of-factly, like it was a universally acknowledged truth.

  A bit cowardly? “He does his best.”

  “He’s still a bit cowardly.”

  Well, let’s see how well you do facing down a dragon, kiddo. “It’s about his journey,” I said. “He starts off a little shaky, but he becomes brave.”

  “Thorin starts off brave,” he pointed out.

  “But isn’t it better if you’re afraid and still do brave things?” Was I really defending the honor of a hobbit against the judgment of an eight-year-old? This, as much as anything else, told me I was not yet ready to sire a McCormick brood. But I soldiered on, because arguing with a kid about hobbits and dwarves was a lot more pleasant than thinking a
bout…well, everything else. “Who saves the day?”

  “Bard the Bowman.”

  “But who finds out about the soft spot on Smaug’s belly?”

  “Bilbo,” he acknowledged reluctantly.

  Take that, Einstein. Eight-year-olds of the world beware: do not try to best Dr. Nathaniel McCormick in an argument. About viruses or hobbits. “You want me to read it to you?”

  “No thanks,” he said decisively.

  Ouch.

  I reached over to Tim’s shoulder, grabbed it lightly. “We’re going to find your mom,” I told him. “We’re going to get the people who did this.” I didn’t elaborate on what “this” was. Probably because I didn’t know.

  The door to the conference room opened. I’d never been so happy—scratch that, I’d never been happy at all—to see Jenna Nathanson. But I was thrilled to see my old classmate that day. Even in her OR booties and dirty white coat, I was thrilled to see her.

  “Oh, Nate.” Her whiny voice didn’t seem irritating to me then. It was soothing. “I’m soooo sorry. Your fiancée?”

  “No. I said that because…we were living together, but not engaged.” I remembered the Brides R Us webpage on Jenna’s computer.

  “Well, you had to do what you had to do. Who’s this?” She gestured to my young sidekick, who refused to look up from his book. Probably on the hunt for damaging info on Bilbo.

  “That’s Tim. I’m watching him for a friend.”

  “Hi, Tim,” Jenna said, sticking out her hand for a shake. “I’m Dr. Nathanson.”

  Tim studied the hand for a moment, then shook it.

  Jenna sat. “First, let me say that everything should be fine. Brooke’s sedated, as you saw—”

  “Should be fine?”

  “She had quite a…uh, she took quite a blow to her left temporal region and had had a good-sized epidural hematoma in there. But we got in fast last night, did a quick burr hole, then opened the calvarium and drained the blood. We did an epidural tack-up to the craniotomy edge—”

  “Jenna—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t care about the details. What was she like when she came in?”

  You can get away with talking to a neurosurgeon like this if you’re a doc and have nothing to lose.

  Jenna let it slide. “She had some focal neurologic signs when they brought her in, but I don’t think that will be a problem. We got to it before there was any real herniation. She’s young, thank God.”

  “Yeah. Thank God. How long will she be in the ICU?”

  “A few days at most.”

  “Permanent damage?”

  “None that we see yet. It’s early, but I think she’ll be okay. We’ll get a CT later today to check for any more bleeding. Neuro checks so far have been good.”

  “Did you talk to the police?”

  “No, Nate. We don’t have time for things like that. You know that.” She sighed; her soupy brown eyes softened. “I guess you didn’t talk to them, either.”

  “Not yet. I came here right away.”

  She looked to Tim. “What are you reading?”

  “The Hobbit,” he said.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Christ, I thought, we do live on different planets.

  “Can I see her?” I asked, before Tim could launch into a dissertation on Middle Earth and the problems there.

  “Sure,” Jenna said. “No more splashing around in the fountain, though, okay? And no more screwing around with her drips.”

  “Scout’s honor.” But I couldn’t even bring myself to do the dumb three-fingered salute.

  Jenna leaned forward, put her hand on mine. “She’s going to be fine, Nate. Really.”

  She stood. I told Tim to stay in the room and read. He responded by keeping his eyes glued to the book.

  As we made our way to the warren of the ICU, I said to Jenna, “Congratulations, by the way.”

  “On what?”

  “Your wedding.” She looked at me as though she didn’t understand. “The vineyard,” I said. “When you left the library, you had that wedding page open on your computer. I closed the window for you.”

  “Oh, that.” She tried to smile, but couldn’t really force it. “I’m not getting married. That’s where I’d do it, though. You know, if something worked out. It’s the perfect place, isn’t it?”

  I looked at this woman, and suddenly realized she was in some ways as broken and wounded as Brooke Michaels. Or me, for that matter. “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s the perfect place.”

  84

  I APOLOGIZED TO THE NURSE at Brooke’s bed, who shrugged and took a long look at my legs. Word had gotten around, I guessed, about the loose cannon with the wet feet.

  Brooke just lay there, bruised and battered and with a hole in her skull drilled by Jenna Nathanson.

  “Brooke, it’s Nate.”

  She didn’t answer me, of course, so I just sat there having a one-sided conversation. “This is my fault,” I said. Like countless others who’d sat at this bedside before, I told her over and over she’d be okay. Her only response to me was the click-hiss of the ventilator.

  After ten minutes, I left the room. I went to the nurses’ station and called the local police. The assault had occurred outside of Brooke’s house, at about nine p.m., the detective on the case said. She was discovered by a neighbor out walking his four dogs.

  “You don’t have anything,” I said.

  “We’re doing what we can,” the detective said curtly. He asked me a few questions that I couldn’t answer, and we ended the call, both of us unsatisfied.

  Unlike the local police, I did have a lead. Telling the cops, I figured, would have complicated things. Brooke Michaels’s assault was not going to be helped by another set of police worrying around the edges.

  Perhaps a wise person would have quit then, would have heeded the warning. Brooke was in an ICU, a safe place, sure, but not that safe—the hospital hadn’t protected the Mings. I wouldn’t put it past Dragon Boy or Uncle Tony to don a white coat, saunter into Brooke’s room, and play hell with her meds or ventilator.

  So, I should have quit then. I should have raised the white flag, hung it out in the hospital cafeteria, left Dorothy Zhang to rot, let the pain continue to sear through her face, let the tumor continue to grow, let her be locked up, tortured, whatever they were going to do to her, let an unknown number of people with sarcoma eating through their tissue skulk untreated behind closed doors.

  In the end, I decided not to heed the warnings. I decided to give whoever was behind this a lot more to think about than a snowed Brooke Michaels lying in her ICU bed.

  “Tim, let’s go.”

  The Hobbit lay open in front of him, but he hadn’t been reading. His eyes were red but not wet. He wiped his sleeve across his face the moment he saw me.

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “We’re going to find her now.”

  “Where is she?”

  I expected his lips to quiver, but they did not. I could see the willpower at work, could see that the kid wasn’t going to let himself crumble. “We’re going to find her.” I hoped I sounded resolute, strong.

  “You said that already.” Lately, everyone seemed to enjoy pointing out my failings.

  I took the book from him, kept the page with his pink construction-paper bookmark, and put it in his backpack. “I’ll carry this for you,” I said, slinging the pack over my shoulder. God, the thing was heavy. “Come on, buddy.”

  He didn’t move, just sat there. I reached for his hand; he didn’t take it. “Tim?”

  Desperate times call for desperate measures. When I reached down and scooped him up, he offered no resistance. He was lighter than I thought; probably weighed about as much as his books.

  It was like that—a backpack over one shoulder, a kid who had no faith in me on the other—that I left the hospital.

  85

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHETHER THE bad guys were watching us, and, at that point, did
n’t care. There was no way I’d get out of the lot without being seen. Besides, by the time we got to the hospital lobby, my arm was aching with the unaccustomed weight of the boy, and I just wanted to get to the goddamned car. My respect for suburban moms skyrocketed.

  “What’s wrong with the lady in the bed?” Tim asked.

  “She got hurt.”

  “She got hit on the head.”

  “That’s right.” So why did you ask me what’s wrong with her?

  “Is she your wife?”

  “Not really.”

  “She’s your girlfriend.”

  “You got it.”

  “She’s going to be okay. The doctor said.”

  “Yeah. Doctors never lie.”

  My arm was really killing me now. Strange, but I didn’t want to put the kid down. Tim asked, “Did the people who hurt your girlfriend take my mom?”

  “I don’t know, Tim. I think they might have.”

  “I hope they don’t hurt my mom, too.”

  I hiked him up, readjusting his weight. “They won’t,” I said, trying not to scare him.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” he reminded me, with what I was finding out to be his customary zeal for the truth.

  I didn’t respond, which, somehow, seemed to be the best response.

  The kid then did an amazing thing. He read my mind. “I hate Uncle Tony,” he said.

  Leaving the parking garage, I took a detour through a mall near the hospital.

  I told Tim to look out the back window and see if anyone was following us.

  “I can’t turn around,” he said.

  “Take off your seatbelt,” I suggested.

  “Mom says I always have to wear a seatbelt. It’s the law.”

  “This is break-the-rules day. You can take your seatbelt off for a second.”

  He thought about that, then clicked off the belt.

  “That one,” he said, pointing. I looked in the rearview. A red sedan was creeping along behind us. I turned down a row of parked cars. The sedan continued straight.

  “That one,” Tim said again. A green SUV had fallen in behind us, turned off thirty seconds later.