The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  Salvation came from an unexpected source. “I’m afraid this is entirely my fault, sir,” my benefactor said. “May I answer the question?”

  —

  Well, well, well. It seemed that someone should have instructed me that sutures needed to be removed somewhere between six and twelve days, depending on the body part in which they were located. Suture removal was definitely a third-year-student kind of job, so I was grateful that Dr. X had fallen on his sword for me during rounds.

  I had no idea how Dr. Markham had been able to discern that the patient’s sutures were still intact beneath his molting and scabbed exterior, but once Dr. X volunteered he’d forgotten them too, Dr. Markham lost interest. Mirror Trauma would likely have slightly more pronounced scarring from all his scattered lacerations than he would’ve had if we’d remembered to remove the sutures promptly, but everyone recognized that this was the least of his issues, and we’d moved on to the next battered guy. After rounds, I sought out Dr. X and said simply, “Thank you.”

  “Hey, it really was my fault,” he answered, pleased that I’d acknowledged his protection. “I sometimes forget that you guys don’t know your ass from your elbow in here.”

  “I’m stellar at ass recognition, actually,” I said, which earned me a laugh from Dr. X and his counterpart, Dr. Ken Linker, the chief resident of Team B. They were conferring about issues likely to arise regarding the new patient admissions. The chiefs liked to touch base at a few points during the day, knowing that the afternoon sign-out to one another could be disrupted at any time by the thumping of the hospital’s trauma copters.

  “Keep it quiet in here, X-man,” Ken said finally, and gave Dr. X a quick bro handshake. Ken’s team included Emma, who regarded being on the trauma service the way a normal person might feel about spending a month at a luxury resort. Emma could be a little weird.

  “Okay, guys.” Dr. X clapped his hands and surveyed the rapidly wilting remains of Team A. “Another day dawns bright for us to rage against the motherfucking Grim Reaper. Let’s go save lives and stamp out disease. Or . . . let’s at least get breakfast. Bring your lists and we’ll divvy this shit up.”

  The five of us—Dr. X, Dr. Kalena, Dr. Clancy, Ethan, and me—adjourned to the bustling cafeteria. Graced with floor-to-ceiling windows, the enormous room brightened my mood a little. If I couldn’t be in nature, at least I could see nature. Well, at least I could see a parking lot ringed by a few trees.

  We grabbed coffee and sat down in a corner to run the list. This produced a depressing amount of stuff to be done. I inhaled caffeine.

  Dr. X assigned me the easiest but most repugnant of these tasks. As soon as we left the cafeteria, I met Emma, who had also been given a checklist for her team’s patients. I considered telling her about the possible flirtation with Dr. X; unlike some of my friends, Emma had a filter and could be sworn to secrecy. But everyone knows evil genies will curse you if you actually state your most embarrassing hopes out loud. I decided to keep this one to myself.

  Emma stood against the nurses’ station, her long flaxen hair piled into a loose bun. She wore scrubs, but a hint of gray camisole and her bony clavicle peeked out at the top. The intensity of trauma surgery suited Emma, although she tended to be baffled by the patients themselves since so many of them had been injured because of their insistence on stupid behavior. “So this guy”—she motioned to one of the TICU beds behind us—“you remember what he did? He put a lit firecracker in his mouth.”

  “Remind me why?”

  Emma riffled through the chart. “His friend said he was imitating Bugs Bunny.”

  Across the room, one of the respiratory techs—a red-faced, portly guy in his late twenties—leered in our direction. I frowned at him, and he blew me an exaggerated kiss. I made my frown meaner, but it didn’t work: he pantomimed a dagger to the heart and cartwheeled dramatically out of sight behind the nurses’ desk. I grinned in spite of myself.

  “Well, I guess I’d better go drain some pus out of this guy’s face,” Emma announced with inappropriate relish.

  “Right.” I steeled myself. “I guess I gotta remove some scabbed-up sutures.”

  —

  By afternoon, I was struggling through chin-deep murky water. I had gotten up at four o’clock in the morning—yesterday, not today—and had maybe an hour or two of sleep in the thirty-six hours since I’d been at the hospital. I began to sink into helpless micro-sleeps whenever I stopped moving. The rest of the team seemed more functional than I thought they should be, especially considering they’d been doing this every third day for years.

  Dr. X was reviewing discharge instructions. “Return to the hospital for fever, bloody urine, severe pain, blah, blah, all the usual things; give him a scrip for some Vicodin for a couple days, tell him no sex for six weeks, and have him come back to the clinic in a week.”

  “Um, I can’t actually write prescriptions,” I reminded him.

  “I’ll cosign it. Do you know how to write it?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Mostly. Well, sort of.” I hesitated. “Okay, not really.”

  “Right, Zadie, I’ll show you, then.”

  I had a quick little flush of pleasure that he’d noticed my actual name.

  “Here we go.” X handed me a prescription pad. Behind him, I noticed our coffeepot had a giant hole scorched in it. A resultant flood of foul coffee oozed across the counter and down to the cabinets below. So much for recaffeinating.

  Clancy blearily raised his head. “Does anyone know when Hollister is showing up?”

  With controlled emotion, Dr. Kalena said, “He’s in a BMI 45 horrendoplasty over at Norton Hospital. His case got bumped, so he’s just starting.”

  The rest of the team responded with uncontrolled emotion, namely dejection. Dr. Hollister was a general surgeon who agreed to act as trauma attending for a brief stint each year, but his primary concern involved patients at another hospital. Depending on what kind of case he was beginning, it could be hours before he arrived, and therefore, hours before we could leave. Tentatively I asked, “What’s a BMI 45 horrendoplasty?”

  Allison regarded me kindly. “He’s starting a very long case on a very large patient,” she said.

  Miserable groaning from Clancy, on the couch. Mentally, I joined in, wondering if I could physically make it another couple hours.

  “Okay, I’m going to page Ken and get the B Team over here for sign-outs so we can get that out of the way,” Dr. X decided. “Then everybody can hit the deck until Hollister shows.”

  We met up with Team B as instructed and we filled them in on our new patients, in case intervention was needed during the night. Suddenly, I was incapable of speech. Knowing I had to return to the hospital in less than seven hours, I staggered over to the couch, wedging in between Clancy and Ethan. My vision blurred.

  Someone shook me gently. I blinked and noticed Dr. X’s face looming next to mine, wearing an indulgent smile. “Wake up, ray of sunshine,” he said. “He’s here.” I looked at my watch.

  It was nine p.m.

  —

  Limping out to the parking lot an hour later, I began to question my sanity. I drove a piece-of-crap Dodge Colt that might or might not survive the night, let alone another two years until I began to earn any money at all, and here I was, leaving the hospital at ten o’clock after a marathon forty-two hours since I’d last been home. And I had to return before five a.m. How had I become such a masochist?

  Like many teaching institutions, Christ the Redeemer Hospital and the affiliated medical school campus were not located in a posh section of town. I was unnerved to hear clomping footsteps behind me in the creepy garage. The only illumination came from a dying streetlight located on the corner of the structure; the cars and pillars inside cast long shadows from its feeble tangerine glow. I glanced over my shoulder and made out a hulking shape moving toward me. I stifled a shriek.
What ghastly irony it would be to survive an attack in the parking garage and wind up as a patient on the trauma service. An abhorrent visual image came to mind of my naked body on full display in the trauma room while a faux-somber Clancy topped off the assault with a chest tube. I was about to break into a panicked run when an arm reached out and gripped my shoulder.

  I turned, and was barely able to make out the name on the white coat behind me: DR. XENOKOSTAS.

  It was Dr. X.

  Chapter Seven

  EVERYONE THOUGHT HE WAS DANCING

  Late Summer, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky

  “Are you okay?” asked Dr. X. Solicitously, he placed a hand on my shoulder, sending a thrill from the tip of my clavicle directly to that mysterious part of the abdomen that clenches up with sexual tension. The last little surge of energy I possessed eclipsed me. How could another person’s touch do that to you?

  “I’m fine,” I said with fake perkiness, “aside from you scaring me witless. You’re lucky I didn’t scream and bash you on the head.” I considered this. “Then you’d be the trauma patient.”

  Dr. X smiled. “You don’t strike me as the murderous type, Zadie.”

  I started to protest, but was derailed by fatigue. “That’s true,” I acknowledged, slumping. “I’m actually kind of a pacifist.”

  Dr. X’s grin widened. “Fortunately for me,” he said.

  I made my wavery way to my car. Dr. X opened the car door for me, but then appeared to reconsider. “You look like you’re about to topple into a face-plant,” he observed politely. “Can I drive you home?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, waving my otoscope around for emphasis. “I’m great. I’ll see you . . . in a few hours.”

  “Be careful, Zadie,” he said, and closed the car door.

  —

  I was watching Graham watch Emma.

  He sat in a booth at the Rooster. Kicked back, beer in hand, a languid half smile lighting his face, his sleepy doe eyes locked on her, he seemed oblivious to the escalating stupidity around him. In turn, Emma was equally oblivious to the smoldering gaze of her on-again, off-again boyfriend; she stared straight ahead at the spectacle of our other friends as Landley magnanimously distributed a round of 107-proof Old Forester.

  Despite our near-constant exhaustion, my friends and I had survived the first weeks of our third year intact. Clearly, this required a depraved celebration. We’d packed ourselves into a decrepit Toyota Camry, referred to as the Caminator, and we’d tried to avoid the elderly bits of food festooning the floorboards. It was highly probable that the Caminator had never, even once, been cleaned by its owner, a shaggy-haired beast in our class called Rolfe. It reminded me of an archaeological dig: over here, one of Rolfe’s term papers from college, era early 1990s; over there, registration items from the first year of medical school, circa 1996; near the top, a proximal layer of sediment containing pilfered items from the hospital.

  We’d caromed down Bardstown Road, windows open to the night air, leaving in the Caminator’s wake the carbonaceous odor of burned rubber and the sound of receding shrieking. We passed bar after bar after bar. Louisville was up there in terms of alcohol-serving establishments per capita, maybe even top five among US cities, with plenty of stylish places to choose from. Rolfe, however, had veered off toward a humbler destination: the Rooston Bar and Grille.

  This was our fallback zone. “Unpretentious” would be a kind depiction of the Rooster, and if you were less charitable, it could be described as vile. Low-ceilinged and dim, the interior existed in everyone’s mind as an amorphous hazy blob; whether because of its general nonnoteworthiness or because of the mind-erasing aspects of its beverages, or both, no one could really ever describe it later. You just retained an impression of dingy squalor.

  In contrast, we were a good-looking lot. This wasn’t lost on my loopy friend Georgia, who complained, “What the hell, Rolfe? The Rooster? Look at my clothes!” She bounced on her heels with a vigor usually reserved for meth addicts. Georgia was afflicted—or blessed—by a manic personality topped off with a bunch of oddball quirks, such as an insistence on dressing like a seventies-style pimp. Tonight she wore a vintage shirt with wide, frilly lapels in a screaming shade of orange, which fought with her shiny high-waisted purple pants.

  “Take some off,” offered the ever-lecherous Landley, setting Georgia’s bourbon in front of her. He attempted a bra snap.

  “Hands off me, bastard. I am too hot for you.”

  “How’m I going to pick up any chicks from this dump?” groused Landley, sweat dripping from his handsome blond head. “There’s never anybody here except you asshats.”

  “Please. The last time you hit on a girl she looked like she would’ve slapped an infant to get away from you.”

  “Dude, no. You guys ruined it when you offered me a hundred bucks to fake a seizure, and—”

  “That was bullshit. Everyone thought you were still dancing,” interjected Rolfe, unbuttoning the top two buttons of his dress shirt and rolling up his sleeves.

  “—and that was when she ran out. My moves were excelle—”

  Landley shuddered to a dead stop, closing his eyes and flinging his hands in the air as if praising Jesus. At first I worried his brain had been entirely replaced by a sloshing fishbowl of bourbon, but then I realized the ancient jukebox was playing “Funkytown.”

  “Shut up!” screamed Georgia. She threw down her drink and began an exaggerated hip-grinding dirty dance toward Landley. Rolfe hooted approval and jumped in. He actually did have moves; he was a graceful but masculine guy, with dark eyes, black wavy hair, and a nicely squared jaw. He and Georgia made an attractive pair, with her fiery red locks bright against his shoulder. Our other friend Hannah joined them, her decorous sway providing some balance against the lurid debacle of whatever Landley was doing with his pelvis as he danced. I tried not to laugh.

  Next to me, Emma put a hand in front of her eyes. “This is appalling.”

  “Close your eyes and think of England,” I suggested. “It will all be over soon.”

  Graham leaned across the table toward Emma. “Dance with me,” he said. I thought Emma would say no. But she extended her hand, and he took it, then folded her against his chest, his bearish build dwarfing even Emma’s height.

  “Well, I’m . . . sitting alone,” I said to no one. But no matter. It was so good to be out of the hospital, to be having some drinks, to be dancing and flirting and carrying on like normal twenty-four-year-olds. Thank God for my friends. Thank God for this night off. Thank God, no one here had a Foley catheter or a ventricular drain or a subclavian line with which to contend. It was so nice to see people who were intact.

  On the ersatz dance floor, both the song and the partners shifted. Landley and Georgia dangled their arms in a surprisingly coordinated side-by-side version of the Robot; Rolfe pulled Emma away from Graham into a low dip; Hannah retreated to the bathroom.

  My booth creaked as Graham clunked back into it. He’d removed his blue flannel shirt and tied it around his waist, and his light brown hair was ruffled up on the sides, where he’d apparently run his hands through it. He twisted to keep Emma in view, finally turning to me as my body was hijacked by a massive yawn. “I might have to go,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m turning into a social dud.”

  “You’re the exact opposite of a dud, Zadie. I’m the boring one here.”

  “Graham,” I said, offended on his behalf. “You might be shy, but you are not boring.”

  He smiled. “I am kind of boring, Zadie. I live ninety percent of my life in my own head.”

  I was intrigued. “What’s going on in there?”

  He shrugged, an easy, self-effacing grin transforming his face. “Are you up for a drunken existential conversation? Alcohol gives me logorrhea.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I like drunken existential conversations. It reminds me
of college with Emma.”

  “Yes,” he said, animation lighting his eyes. “That’s the extraordinary thing about Emma. It’s like she knows what I’m thinking before I say anything. And she does that by paying careful attention. Most people judge everything they see through a filter of how it affects them; they add their own bias and desire so that their perception of what’s real is changed before they’ve even fully processed things. She doesn’t do that. She notices things.”

  “Yep, she does,” I agreed, as Landley and Rolfe crowded back into the booth. “And so do you, Graham.” I felt a flush of vicarious pleasure for Emma, that she had someone who saw past her ice-queen facade, but I was also curious: Emma hadn’t told me they were back together.

  The door to the Rooston opened with unusual timidity, like it was having second thoughts already about this course of action, revealing a herd of fresh-faced girls: undergrads from the nearby University of Louisville. Despite the proximity to campus, attractive undergrads never wandered in here, apparently repelled by some subliminal warning signal. The girls blinked, caught in that moment where one realizes that this was the wrong sort of place, but as no graceful way out presented itself, they headed bravely to the bar.

  “Sweet mother of God,” breathed Landley. “What is this?”

  “They must be lost.”

  Rolfe nodded sagely. “Follow me,” he said.

  Landley was already on the move. He lumbered over, materializing by the girls, his large damp head crooked hopefully toward them. He gestured, speaking quickly, making them laugh. Maybe the moves had some validity after all. Rolfe was helplessly drawn in, unable to resist even long enough to seem cool.

  “Would you look at these fools?” grumbled Georgia.