by Milly Taiden
Charles motioned over his shoulder at the door. “It’s got a lock on it, you know. You might want to use it.”
“I just brought her in here to talk.”
Another chortle. He lit a match, illuminating his face with the flare. Charles was easily sixty, Hispanic, fuzzy facial hair covering his jaw, gray intermingling with black. I met him a month ago after he spotted me in Cynthia’s room at three a.m. She was sleeping on my lap, her head on my shoulder.
I knew when he came in and saw us that he had discovered my secret, that I was family to Cynthia. I chased him down later and asked for his discretion. We talked here in Surgical Suite B.
I hadn’t hired Angela at that point. That incident is what prompted me to do it. Cynthia needed someone with her, and we had no one to step in. Our mother was an only child. Her mother had died young as well. Probably the same damn T53 gene.
Our grandfather lived in a nursing home in Houston, an impossible drive or flight in his condition. We had visited him on our trip to M. D. Anderson last week. He was recuperating from stomach surgery, but was alert and in decent spirits. Seeing Cynthia without hair was hard on him. I imagined how impossible it was to lose a wife, daughter, and granddaughter. No, I caught myself. Cynthia would be fine. We would get her in remission.
The whiff of smoke reached my nose. I would reek of it myself if I didn’t go. “See you around, Charles,” I said. “Don’t set off the fire alarms.” I glanced at the ceiling.
He lowered the cigarette. “Disabled them in ’09,” he said. “Tell the pretty art lady I said hello.” He guffawed again. “Your secret’s safe with me. I got a ton of them. I could be a rich man if I were the blackmailing kind.”
“I bet.” I strode out and walked briskly, deciding to cut through an exterior courtyard to hopefully remove any lingering smell on me. Smoke or Tina.
Just saying her name in my head made my crotch tighten again. I had to get it together on this. I didn’t have time for a love affair, and the last thing I needed was another random person knowing about Cynthia.
But she wasn’t random. She was like a child herself in her pigtails and colored stockings, petite and full of energy. But her attitude was all woman.
And so was the response of her body.
New subject.
A couple of families lingered in the courtyard by the fountain. The air was chilly, but the sun pleasant. I recognized one of my patients. Melancholy Melanie. I waved hello and called out a greeting. Melanie waved from where she perched on a concrete bench, gazing down at a few winter flowers. Another leukemia case. Her visit was routine, unlike Cynthia’s. Her remission had lasted four years. Still, she was sad, always, as though the cancer cells might be subdued but she would not forget the years they stole from her.
Back inside the corridor, the smells and sounds of a busy hospital helped drive the past half-hour from my head. By the time I made it back to the nurses’ desk to check on my rounds and what patients were lined up to fill my morning, my distraction with the art therapist had been shoved into the deepest recesses of my mind.
***
Chapter Nine: Tina
My biggest art therapy group was eight adults from the traumatic brain injury ward. This class was always challenging. I had two aides who assisted, since four of the patients were just regaining use of their arms and hands and two of them often erupted into unexpected shouting matches.
I quickly learned what types of activities would frustrate them the least. I wanted my time with them to be relaxing and productive, not upsetting.
But still, this hour was the one with the most flung paint, torn paper, and angry outbursts. I felt acutely undertrained for this group, although I wasn’t sure anyone could be prepared when a hulking three-hundred-pound man hurled a pair of scissors at your head.
I ducked. The plastic safety scissors meant for young children crashed against the wall and broke in two.
“Maybe we should skip cutting today,” a heavyset nurse said, rolling the patient away from the table before he could get his hands on any more missiles.
You think? I thought, but I just smiled. “I’ll get some clay.” Sculpting was always a foolproof art activity. Pretty much anyone could roll a ball around, and punching at it was as good a therapy as anything.
I glanced up at the mermaid on the tallest cabinet. Thinking of Albert and our quiet time always gave me something to look forward to. Just meeting him made all the other groups worth it. Maybe I could ask someone in administration if we could showcase his work somewhere in the hospital.
When I turned back around, Sabrina, my supervisor, was standing unsmiling in the doorway. I waved and pried open the plastic bin.
“Class is ending a little early today,” Sabrina announced. She seemed anxious, clutching a folder full of papers to her chest. She’d decided to dye her hair red a week ago, and the color made her wild hair appear to be flames shooting around her face. With black cat’s-eye glasses and a zebra-print dress, she looked like she stepped from a 1960s magazine.
I set the bin on the desk. The aides helped their patients make the tight turn to head toward the door. One man hunched over his drawing of an angry rooster as though he would refuse to leave. And actually, without someone coming to escort him back, I wasn’t sure how to get him out.
“What’s going on?” I asked Sabrina.
She flashed an artificial smile, one that seemed more menacing with her dark red-black lips. Corabelle had been totally creeped out by Sabrina when she was in the hospital. The clothes, the glasses, the busybody attitude. But I’d hung out with stranger people than this. Sabrina was all right by me. Maybe a little excitable. I hoped this emptying of my class was just another dramatic act, and not an indication of something more serious.
I thought back to my moment in the surgical suite with the doctor and yesterday’s upset nurse when Cynthia snuck to my room. Plenty of errors to be held accountable for.
Only the rooster picture patient remained, filling in the blue sky on his page. I knew he couldn’t get back to his room on his own. Since his car accident, he had struggled with basic tasks. He talked only in quotes from cartoons he had watched as a child, and preferred to spend class drawing the characters.
“Toby?” I said, kneeling next to him. “I’m going to call a nurse from your ward to come get you.”
He turned away from me, and I saw a tear drip from his eye onto the table, as though he were a child losing something he cherished. This was so hard, as otherwise he was a full-grown man with a beard and big beefy arms. No one knew how or when he would recover. The brain was so mysterious.
I glanced over at Sabrina, still hugging the file and standing to one side of the door, as I reviewed the list of patients and called the nurses’ desk for Toby’s ward. No one answered at first, but finally a clipped voice said she’d send someone after him.
A puddle of tears had formed on the table when I went back to him. I was irritated at Sabrina now. For many patients, this was their refuge, a place that wasn’t like the rest of the hospital. She was taking this away from them. Why couldn’t she have come between groups? She had my schedule. She was in charge of it.
“Tell me about this picture,” I said gently. Sabrina could just stand and rot over there for all I cared.
“Who’s responsible, I say, who’s responsible for this ruckus?” he asked.
“It’s Foghorn Leghorn!” I said. “You did a great job on him.” The rooster in his drawing had his arms folded across his chest. Toby had done a remarkable job capturing the details of the character. “What is he saying?”
“Son, you’re dimmer than a ten-year-old lightbulb,” Toby said.
My throat tightened at that. It could have been a random quote. Or Toby could be projecting the way he felt about himself. If he was, it would indicate higher-level thinking skills, an awareness of his condition. I’d have to write that up in his report.
If I got a chance to make a report.
“Can you writ
e that sentence at the bottom?” I asked. Toby had been relearning to read and write. The skills came back in spurts, as though he wasn’t actually learning, but remembering.
He shook his head. At the rooster’s feet, he began to sketch out the baby bird from the cartoon, one with giant round glasses. I waited and watched, not just to avoid Sabrina, but also to give Toby some attention since I had him one-on-one.
The minutes ticked by. There must not have been anyone available to come get Toby, which didn’t surprise me. Hospitals were nothing if not highly scheduled.
Sabrina wandered the room, looking at the pictures and paintings I had taped to the walls. She paused when she got to the clay mermaid.
My indignation welled up. I didn’t want her looking at it. It felt intimate, as though she were spying on some private communication between me and Albert.
The group had only five minutes left when an aide arrived to escort Toby back to his room. Toby picked up his picture and held it tight to his chest as he stood up to leave.
I was doubly irritated now, as group could have gone on as usual. This couldn’t be good for the patients. They needed structure, to know what to expect from one hour to the next.
I snatched an antibacterial wipe from the container clipped to the end of the table and began cleaning all the colored pencils.
When the aide and Toby were gone, Sabrina turned around. “I need you to pack any personal things right now,” she said.
My face popped up in shock. “What?”
“I have to escort you out of the building.”
I jumped from the chair. “What for?”
God, was it that bad with the doctor? Or Cynthia? I couldn’t imagine that either transgression would warrant this sort of treatment.
“It’s not you. I made a grave error in protocol. You aren’t cleared for this job. Not trained. I should have known better. I have to let you go.” Sabrina glanced around the room. “At the time I had to hire someone quickly or lose the endowment.”
“We should go talk to someone. I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” I circled the table to confront her. “You don’t just escort someone out like this.”
“No choice. You’re not a licensed therapist.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t find one.”
“The hospital director is quite certain I could have.” She pinched her dark lips in a tight line. “Don’t worry, you’re not alone here. I’ve been given my notice too.”
“What?”
“Yep. After dealing with paint splatters and irate patients myself before you came, PLUS my regular flow of referrals and paperwork.” She leaned against the counter, and I could tell she wanted to cry. “He’s a difficult man. He knows social workers like me are a dime a dozen, and he’ll have a hundred applicants.”
“This is ridiculous. What are you going to do?” And what was I going to do? It hadn’t really sunk in. I’d moved across the country for this job, and now I had nothing.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll figure something out.” She huffed out a rueful little laugh. “Maybe I’ll marry a doctor and give up on the whole career thing. Pop out babies and complain about my house cleaner.”
“Can I meet with this guy? Talk some sense into him?” I thought about Albert, and Toby, and the teen girls with cancer. And Cynthia. “He has to know the trauma some of my patients are going to feel if I just disappear.”
“You couldn’t get to him if you tried,” Sabrina said. “He doesn’t exactly make himself available to the little people.”
“Watch me.”
Sabrina held out her arm. “Tina, don’t. It’s not worth it. He could really make a mess for you. Technically, your working here broke a lot of rules. There’s no telling what he might do.”
I plunked back down in a chair. “You must have really been desperate to bring me on, then.”
“I didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it was.” She set the folder on the table, and I saw it was my personnel file. “I thought we could get you certified once you were established.”
“I don’t even get to say good-bye to anyone?”
“He wants you out and the records gone,” she said.
I reached for them. “I’m not above blackmail,” I said.
Sabrina shoved them away. “You don’t even want to go there,” she said. “He’s gotten doctors stripped of their credentials. Nurses blacklisted.”
“Why is he even here, then? It’s a hospital!”
“It’s nice to think that everybody has the patients’ interests at heart,” she said. “But really, it’s all about careers and power.” She sighed. “At least once you’re above the peons like us.”
I glanced at the clock. I should be having another class, Cynthia’s little group, in fifteen minutes. “Have my other classes been canceled?” I asked.
Sabrina nodded, her flaming hair dancing around her face. “All the nurses have been notified not to bring patients down.”
I wondered how long until Dr. Darion would check on Cynthia and find out I was gone. If he would step in.
For a moment I let myself focus in on him, his smell, his hands on my skin. That encounter felt like a lifetime ago already. I wondered if he could do anything to stop this.
But Marlena said he’d only been here a couple months. He probably didn’t have any pull. And if this director was as horrible as Sabrina said, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
“Do you need a box or anything?” she asked.
“I have one,” I said. “Let me just gather a few things.”
“I have to get you to sign this,” she said. Reluctantly, she pulled a sheet of paper from inside the folder. “It’s a nondisclosure and an agreement to stay off the premises.”
“Why the hell would I sign that if I’m already fired?”
“Withholding of your last paycheck,” she said meekly.
God, what a lunatic. If I signed it, I couldn’t come back and say good-bye to Albert or Cynthia. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to pay Corabelle’s rent on the apartment I was subleasing from her.
But you know, the thing about agreeing to stay away is that it relied on something important — getting caught.
“Give me that,” I said. I scrawled my name across the bottom.
They’d have to arrest me.
***
Chapter Ten: Dr. Darion
I was back at the nurses’ desk checking the paper records against the glitchy iPad software when I saw Tina out of the corner of my eye.
She looked even angrier than usual, and she’d taken her ponytails out. Maybe someone had suggested she not wear them anymore. I could imagine that would rile her. Now that I knew about her lack of a bra, it was hard to keep my eyes from drifting to the sweater. But the corded weave was thick enough to hide it. She was pretty slight.
The memory of her skin beneath my hands made my blood pressure rise.
When she got closer, I saw she was carrying a box with a potted plant sticking out the top, some books, and various odds and ends. Another woman, one of the social workers, if memory served, walked alongside her. She didn’t seem too happy either.
I knew I shouldn’t speak to Tina, but I couldn’t help it. “Leaving early today?” I asked. It dawned on me as I said it that she hadn’t had her art class with Cynthia yet.
“Leaving for good is more like it.” She turned away from me and punched a button on the elevator.
When her words actually sank in, I strode over and grabbed her arm.
She looked down at it and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “Again?”
I let go. “What do you mean ‘for good’?”
“I got fired,” she said.
Now my blood boiled. “Who found out?” Charles wouldn’t dare tell anyone about our encounter in the surgical suite.
She rolled her eyes. “Not that.”
This made the other woman snap her head around and look at us. God, I could already see the rumors trailing through the halls, as visi
ble as kite strings.
The elevator dinged. “I’m apparently not qualified,” Tina said. “That time you called me the art teacher? I’m not even certified for that.”
The doors opened, and she stepped through.
Damn it.
I looked left and right, not sure what to do. Impulsively, I dashed into the elevator as the doors were closing.
She and the retro social worker were the only ones inside. “What about Cynthia?” I asked.
Tina shrugged. “I’m out. And I’m not allowed back on the premises.”
“That seems a little extreme.”
“They don’t want me to make a ruckus.”
“You struck me as the kind of person who likes a good ruckus.”
Tina stared at the list of floors and wards printed on the wall.
The flame-haired social worker peered at my badge. I resisted the urge to turn away.
“Dr. Marks,” she said, “I would advise you to stay out of this. It’s a personnel matter.”
“But I have a patient who will be dramatically affected by Tina’s unexpected departure,” I said, knowing the words sounded false.
“We have already identified a qualified candidate for the position,” the woman said. “There will be minimal disruption to the schedule.”
The elevator stopped. We were at the bottom floor. Panic started to rise in me. Cynthia would be devastated. She wouldn’t eat. She would go into a vicious cycle of nausea and lack of appetite. Mental health affected physical health. I knew this to be a fact.
The two women stepped out. I was about to lose her. God, I couldn’t let that happen. I followed them. “I would like for us to go to HR right now,” I said. “I want an explanation.”
The social worker stared at me from behind black cat’s-eye glasses. “I assure you that you do not want to do that. This goes all the way up.”
“Then I’ll take it all the way up.” Hell, what was I saying? I was in hot water with HR myself after taking a two-week leave of absence only two months into my tenure at the hospital. But Cynthia had to go to Houston. I had to see what our options were beyond St. Anthony’s.
