The Paper Shepherd

by Olivia Landis

  Now two hours later, Renee was exhausted, hungry, and bored. I wish I had something to study, she thought with regret. She stood up and gazed longingly into the vending machine. She took a crumpled dollar out of her shoulder bag and fed it into the machine. A candy bar fell with a satisfying thud into the opening below. Behind the double doors that lead to the treatment area, there was muffled yelling. Finally, one of the doors opened up slightly. A young man in hospital scrubs and a short white coat stood in the door way. His light brown hair was cut close to his head. He rolled his eyes as behind him the shouting continued.

  “You are the dumbest person I have ever worked with! It will be a miracle if you don’t kill all of your patients!” the voice said, unnerving all of the families in the waiting room. The young man slunk fluidly through the doors and found a chair in the corner to wait in. Renee took another crumpled dollar out of her bag and fed the snack machine. When she retrieved the candy, she walked toward the young man. She could see he was reading a study book about emergency room work ups. He was opened to the Abdominal Pain chapter. Renee held out a candy bar toward the boy and he looked up at her.

  “Oh, no thank you,” he said politely.

  “Please, I can’t stand to see an animal go hungry,” she said. “Not even one as lowly as a medical student.”

  “Thanks,” he said, smiling at her as he took the candy bar. “I haven’t eaten in twelve hours.”

  “I believe you,” Renee said, and sat next to him. “So, what were they yelling at you about?”

  “Oh, the usual,” The medical student said, rolling his eyes again as he recounted the story. “They were angry that they weren’t consulted right away and that the ER docs waited until they got the CAT scan and a pregnancy test to rule out ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Three days ago, I was on call with the same resident and he chewed me out because the ER docs hadn’t done these tests already before calling him.”

  “So basically, he’s a jerk,” Renee summed up.

  “Basically.”

  “So, why doesn’t he yell at the ER staff?” she asked logically.

  “Because he’s only a resident,” the medical student reflected. “The emergency room is staffed doctors who have already finished a whole residency and are higher on the social ladder. If my resident yells at them, he’ll get in trouble. If he yells at the nurses, they will find their own way of making his life miserable. Yelling at me, however, is completely safe, as I can’t do anything to help or hurt him.”

  “Bummer,” Renee said sympathetically.

  “Well, fortunately not everyone is this much of an ass,” the medical student replied. “But, you know what they say.”

  “What?” He opened his mouth to speak and then seemed suddenly hesitant. This mysterious little girl—this barer of food and sympathy seemed too innocent for him to repeat the old adage he was about to espouse. He thought if he said the word shit to her, she may wither in front of him.

  “Things roll down hill,” he said finally. Renee giggled.

  “That’s what they say?” she asked dubiously, having heard the real saying thousands of times before from her friends on the basketball team.

  “Yeah,” the student said sheepishly. “But they don’t say ‘things.’”

  “So, I gathered,” Renee replied. The student looked away toward the double doors. There were no more voices behind them, so he looked back at Renee. “How long are you going to keep her here after the appendectomy?”

  “Who says she’s getting an appendectomy?” the young man asked.

  “I did,” Renee insisted. “When she was just nauseated, I wasn’t convinced; but, when she started having McBurney’s point tenderness...”

  “She had what?” the boy asked.

  “McBurney’s point. It’s the area half way between the belly button and the...”

  “Oh, I know what Mc Burney’s point is,” he assured her. “But, why do you know that?”

  “The uncle who raised me was a surgeon,” Renee explained. “We didn’t have Cosmo or Newsweek growing up. We had the Journal of the American Medical Association.” The student shook his head.

  “You are a weird little girl, aren’t you?” Renee shrugged and looked shyly at the linoleum in the waiting room. “What are you doing tomorrow night, weird girl?” he asked casually.

  “Studying,” Renee said, giggling again.

  “Studying medical journals?”

  “No,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Why? Are you asking me out?”

  “Is that a problem for you?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t embarrassed her. Something about her was so attractively innocent. He wanted to rub her long brown hair against his cheek like the soft ears of the green flannel bunny who comforted him through every trial of childhood.

  “I thought doctors weren’t supposed to date their patients,” she conjectured.

  “I’m not a doctor. And, unless you develop an urgent surgical emergency in the next...” he looked at his watch. “Twelve hours, you are not my patient.”

  “You don’t even know my name,” she asserted.

  “You could fix that.” Renee tried hard to keep looking at the white speckled linoleum and not the young man sitting next to her. She had to admit she liked the attention, and this young man was handsome. But she wasn’t sure she wanted it to go any further than this. Max had broken up with her seven months earlier. She knew she needed to move on, but she didn’t want to. You’ll never want to, she told herself. But you have to. You’ll never be ready. Just do it.

  “I’m Renee,” she said quietly. She kicked her feet back and forth under her chair like a nervous child.

  “I’m...”

  “Joe, get your ass back here. We need to cut this girl open,” the resident’s harsh voice escaped from a crack in the double doors. The student dutifully jumped up and looked at the doors swinging shut. He turned to Renee who had jumped up beside him.

  “I’m sorry, gotta go,” he said, and sped off. Half way to the treatment area he turned around and started walking backward. “Thanks for the candy bar. You’re a lifesaver.” He backed up into the swinging doors and disappeared.

  Max ran hard down the court, his heart pounding.

  “Hey, Tone, I’m open!” he shouted. Tony quickly threw him the ball and Max delivered it precisely to the net. A cheer went up around the gym. It was an uncharacteristically large crowd for the first game of the intramural season. The year before, the God Squad had gone nearly undefeated and had created quite a buzz around campus, and not just among the religion majors. Max attributed it to their passing style. One had to focus, he expounded to his teammates. One had to block out every other stimulus, even teammates, and be an island onto himself. Other team members were just dynamic pieces of scenery, like the walls of a billiard table that could move into place creating the perfect angle for a bank shot. They soaked up his theory like sponges and had been transformed into a breathing, scoring machine. Prior to his arrival, they used to think of passing as “sharing” just like some silly girl he was friends with in high school. He had tried to explain this to her so many times but she never got it. A silly girl I used to date in high school. The buzzer sounded that the game was over and the crowd quickly dispersed.

  As they walked toward the dorm room they now shared, Tony reflected how easily Max had been assimilated into the seminary. He stood out as a model of what a seminary student should be. Tony couldn’t believe he had almost tried to prevent his friend’s admission to the program the spring before, thinking he was not emotionally mature enough for the gravity of this decision. Over a silly little girl he dated in high school, Tony thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Max’s only real trouble, Tony thought with some amusement, was dressing the part. Their first two years of seminary, students were supposed to wear dress shirts and ties. I can’t breathe, he insisted when Tony laughed at him for taking off his tie every day within seconds of making it into the safety of their dorm room. These ties are going to kil
l me.

  Well, if that is his biggest problem, Tony thought, he will be a very lucky man.

  In a Laundromat in Brighton, NY, a medical student dumped an old, well worn green duffel bag full of white clothes into a large, industrial washing machine. He had just ended his last call night for his general surgery rotation two hours earlier and now had a day and a half to get ready for his pediatrics rotation. I’m not going to survive another year of this, he thought to himself, let alone two. He had six loads of laundry waiting, and an apartment that had not been straightened up for six weeks. He lifted the duffel bag high over his head and shook out the last few items. One of his humiliating short white medical student coats fell on top of the now packed washing machine. He picked it up and riffled through the pockets. In one was a scrap of a candy wrapper. Renee 90......... It must have been there a week without him noticing it. His heart skipped a beat. She snuck it into his pocket while his head was turned. Cool, he thought. Very cool.

  35

  Renee watched the steam rise from a frothing pitcher of milk. She was shocked by how many people went out for coffee on Christmas day. She had by no means been busy, but neither had the coffee house been deserted. The flow of customers was similar to that on a Tuesday morning when the population of campus was still well rested from the weekend, not having worked up a crushing sleep deficit.

  Original Ray’s, Salome’s favorite coffee house, was now Renee’s second home, her first being the biology library. The store used to be closed on Christmas day. Three years earlier, the chain coffee house across the street opened up and remained open Christmas day. Unfortunately, some of Ray’s displaced customers made the shift permanent. For the past two years, Ray manned the store alone, cursing the commercialism that kept him away from his wife and daughters. This year, Renee begged for the dubious distinction as holiday coffee elf.

  It felt like only days since Renee had first walked through the doors of Original Rays for the first time with Sal. It was summer then and this new life Renee had just started held so much promise. She had a new apartment, a new school, and a new friend. She had no idea how taxing it would be not only paying for somewhere to live, but just keeping track of sending in the bills for phone and utilities and rent—which in her last apartment had all been rolled into one. School, which had always been fairly easy for her, was a struggle now that she never seemed to have the time nor the energy to study once she got home from work. At least work is going well, she reflected. Having spent so many hours of her high school years in the coffee shop at the Hectortown arcade, Renee fit into her new surroundings as well as the eclectic velvet chairs or the checker boarded tables. Ray could not ignore how much his customers seemed to appreciate how her apron looked over her short pleated skirts and fitted dress shirts. He was convinced that her smile inspired them to buy bigger sizes so they could bask in her glow for a few sips longer. It was like a dream come true for Ray when Renee asked if she could take an extra few shifts over the holidays, including Christmas day. He felt compelled to bring her part of his wife Gina’s special Christmas lasagna and green bean casserole. Renee’s eyes lit up. Home cooked food! she thought, feeling like Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim gazing at a gigantic Christmas goose.

  Lasagna or no, Renee didn’t mind so much working on Christmas day. Her more loyal customers tipped her heavily for giving up her own holiday to provide them the caffeine and sugar fixes on which they so depended for normal physiological and psychological functioning. She spent her few moments alone trying to decide if she should use the extra funds to buy vegetables for the week, get her phone service turned back on, or if she should save them away so she could take two days off during midterm exam week next semester. But, neither the promise of better nutrition nor extra study time was enough to get her to work on Christmas day. Her main motivation was simply to distract herself from where she wasn’t. She would watch merry revelers going to dinners with family and friends, she would see professors and graduate students with their children, students with their visiting families, and for a moment, she could pretend that they came into the coffee shop to be with her, like she was part of their Christmas celebration. It helped her not to think of a happy table with an empty chair that she used to sit in. It would help her not to feel so acutely the stab of homesickness for a place on the couch in front of a roaring fire. The smell of the gingerbread cookies that filled the store almost replaced for her the smell of Eleanor’s ginger bread.

  Maybe I could go to the ER and hang around... she thought. She wondered if Joe, that down trodden medical student she met a few months ago, was working tonight or if medical students got the holidays off. If she knew what department he was in, she was confident that she was smart enough to fake the appropriate symptoms. But, he wasn’t interested. She sighed heavily, ashamed at her own desperation. How did it ever come to this? she thought. She would do almost anything right now not to be alone.

  Renee heard the bell on the front door ring once more and it shook her out of her day dream. She made two large hot chocolates and a candy cane latte. When the sweet beverages were consumed and the clients gone, she sat down on the floor behind the counter. Jack and Eleanor want me to be here, she thought. They’re proud of me for being here. She took her grade report out of the pocket of her apron. But, they’d want me to do better than this. She looked in disappointment over her grades.

  Organic chemistryC

  Comparative physiologyB

  American LiteratureB

  Calculus IIIC

  Sal had been so pleased with Renee’s performance. You got as many B’s as C’s, she said. You should be proud. But, Renee couldn’t be proud of herself. If this was the limit of her intellectual ability, she could accept that. But, she knew she could do better if only she had more time to study. She had more talent than this. You wicked lazy servant, the gospel condemnation rang through her head. If only she could afford to work ten hours a week, maybe she could live up to her ability. Maybe she could return the talents God had given her. But, she was already struggling to make ends meet. Having paid for Micah’s appendectomy certainly did not help her financial situation. She could take more money from her academic account but the penalties for a non-academic withdrawal would eat into the money she was trying to preserve in the account for veterinary school. I won’t get in with these grades, she thought.

  She folded up her grade report and stuck it back in her pocket. She would put the tips away for next semester so she could study for her midterms in her apartment instead of behind this counter. Renee pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them. Things are going to get better, she thought. They can’t get worse.

  Eleanor sat on the floor in her kitchen leaning against the counter. She had a mixing bowl full of gingerbread dough in her lap. More ginger bread, in every stage of production from rolled uncooked dough to firm, cooling sheets lined every square inch of counter. She had been baking for hours. She just couldn’t bake anymore. Jack walked into the kitchen to get a beer from the fridge. He rarely drank more than two beers in a single night even on holidays. He was now on his sixth. When he saw his wife sitting on the floor, he sat down next to her. She didn’t say anything for several minutes. She didn’t even turn her head to look at him. She just stared off into the distance, like someone who had just watched everything they value in life washed away by a tidal wave.

  “El,” Jack said gently. “I think you can stop baking now. I think you’ve made enough.” She didn’t move a muscle. Jack took the mixing bowl from her and stood up to put it on the counter.

  “Why did you make so much ginger bread, honey? This is three times as much as we usually have.”

  “I bought the same amount of ingredients as I always do,” Eleanor said, tears welling up in her eyes. “But, Tiar wasn’t here to destroy half of it.” Jack sat back down next to his wife and enveloped her in his arms. She sobbed into his shoulder.

  “Why, Jack? Why would God take my daughter from me?” she s
aid between sobs.

  “Don’t worry,” Jack whispered to his wife. “She’s not gone. She’s just away at college. She’ll come back. You’ll see.” Eleanor looked at him with her sad green eyes, wanting to believe him. But, even as he said it, Jack knew what he was saying was a lie—a fool’s hope. She wasn’t their daughter. There were no real bonds to tie her to them. In all likelihood, she would never come back to Hectortown… not unless something drastic pulled her back in. Jack did not understand why Tiar’s presence was so fleeting the previous spring after her near fatal brush with hepatitis. Perhaps she was still recovering her strength and did not have the energy to walk the mile and a half across town to see them. Perhaps she was too busy preparing to start college. Whatever the reason, Jack now realized it was an omen that their role in her life was nearing an end. They were becoming part of her history. Now, on Christmas day, without the distraction of work, he had nothing to think about but his feeling of loss.

  Jack’s ruminations were joined by the muffled sounds of guitar floating down the stairs. Jack looked at the stairs with resentment in his eyes. Why didn’t you take him, God? Jack thought. My useless son. Damn sissy. Jack knew it was only because of his drunken anger that he was so free with his thoughts. But the feeling had been brewing just beneath consciousness for months. His patience with Max was failing. He had never really understood his son, not since the boy had learned to walk. He never understood why Max kept to himself, pouring over books in his room, having a baptismal ceremony for the cat, when the other boys in the neighborhood were playing cops and robbers or cow boys and Indians. He did what any self respecting American father would do. He sat Max down in front of the television when Eleanor was at the hair dresser and showed him hour after hour of horror movies and action adventure films. Anything from the video rental store with demons, mummies, ghosts was fair game. I’ll toughen this boy up yet, he thought to himself. Instead, all he inspired were several trips to the rare books room in the library to check out tomes about mummies, relics, catacombs, and ancient burial rituals; that, and an unusual obsession with demonic possession. What a freak, Jack thought to himself, beginning to feel the chill of sitting on the cold kitchen floor.