Stockholm Syndrome

by Melissa Yi

  “This is my job,” I said, through my raw throat. My eyes felt like they had silt in them. Whatever they put in the smoke can’t be healthy for you, but as long as you survive to complain about it, you’re not too badly off. “I’m a doctor. He needs a chest tube. I’ve got Kelly forceps.”

  The officers were still talking above me, on their radios.

  Olivia took my hand and helped me up and back toward the bed, but used her larger body to block my vision as they carted Tucker out on a stretcher. She said, “Hope. We’re going to take care of him.”

  Then she tried to remove the Kelly forceps from my grasp, and I almost whacked her on the knuckles with them.

  I would have, too, except she was too fast. She whipped her hand out of range while the other guy wrestled my arms behind my back and I yelled, “Tucker. I love you! Don’t give up.”

  CHAPTER 44

  When it was my turn, they didn’t just escort me out of the room. They aimed to run me out of the building.

  I squinted at the sudden light of the hallway and balked. “I need him.”

  They didn’t answer, except to yell, “Move, move, move!” They now had me sandwiched between four officers, two of them abreast, one in front and one in back and maybe more, I don’t know. It was like a running convoy. I had to keep up. I could hardly see anything except black uniforms.

  But when one of them shoved the back staircase door open, I stumbled to another halt.

  They were taking me down the stairs.

  Tucker must have gone through the elevator, because of the stretcher. They were taking me away from Tucker.

  The female officer seized my arm to make sure I kept up.

  I planted my hand against the door frame, feeling the cool white wood under my palm.

  “Please. Help Tucker. I need him. He’s my...” I still couldn’t call him my boyfriend. “He saved my life.”

  “Dr. Sze, we will!” A male officer stared at me with wild green eyes, and suddenly I understood that I was acting illogically, like a patient in the emergency room asking the same questions over and over again. The more time they spent reassuring me and coaxing me out of harm’s way, the less time they had to spend on Tucker.

  I ran down four flights of stairs, staggering at one point, but with two officers holding my arms, I stayed upright.

  They swept me into some unmarked vehicle right by the back door. I don’t know car or truck makes, but it was the most tank-like thing I’d seen in my life, let alone in downtown Montreal. The engine grumbled into first gear before I’d fastened my seat belt.

  The hind part of my brain was amazed to see the sky again. It was dark outside, and cloudy, pockmarked with streetlights, but I could still see it through the tinted windshield. I was in the centre of the vehicle, flanked on all sides by officers, yet if I twisted around, I could see the sky.

  But not Tucker.

  “Is he still alive?” I asked.

  “As far as we know,” said the green-eyed guy.

  “Could you please find out?” I said. My throat rasped on the last word, and someone handed me a water bottle.

  I stared at it for a second, uncomprehending. Should I be able to drink water when Tucker was fighting for his life?

  I felt like making a deal with death. I won’t drink this water. I won’t eat. I won’t take a shower. I won’t do anything if you just save Tucker, okay?

  I reached for my phone. Until today, Tucker annoyed me with his constant texting and messages, and now I’d give anything to have him talk to me again.

  My turn to text him, even though he couldn’t possibly answer me.

  Also, my parents and Kevin must be going nuts. Not to mention Ryan. And now that I was finally free to use my hands however I wanted, I needed my phone.

  My fingers fumbled around in my front shirt pocket until I eventually realized that it was empty. At some point, my phone had bounced away from me. My thousand-dollar iPhone. My gift from Ryan. My connection to the world. Gone. Lost.

  This is not a metaphor for Tucker. I refuse to believe that.

  Still, I would have cried if I could have summoned any tears.

  “I need to know if he’s alive,” I said.

  “We’re trying to find out,” said the female officer. “Just drink your water, Dr. Sze. We’ll try and get some food into you too.”

  “I’m not hungry. I want Tucker.” I couldn’t focus on anything else. Not the fact that I was being driven away in an unmarked vehicle. Not the fact that Ryan and my family must be rioting behind me, hearing that I was free and they still couldn’t see me, couldn’t touch me.

  I couldn’t get to Tucker and they couldn’t get to me and I couldn’t get to them....It was like a Möbius loop, a benzene ring, an unending cycle of want.

  The tank vehicle soldiered down a street I didn’t recognize. I can’t figure out which way is north at the best of times. Ryan used to orient me when we were walking down the street by pointing at the sun, but it was something I tried to consciously learn, not instinctive.

  Who were these people?

  Where were they taking me?

  True, they’d shot Bastard, which made them the better guys, but still. “Who are you?” I snapped.

  Their radio crackled to life with words like Sûreté and police, but no one answered for a second.

  I said, “Are you the police?”

  “We work with the police in high-risk situations like this one,” said a man with a moderate French accent. He twisted around from the front seat, so I could see his face. He was black, heavy set, with a previously-broken nose, but something about his eyes—and the fact that I wasn’t the only melanin-heavy person around—somehow reassured me.

  “Did you hear from Tucker?”

  “They just brought him to UCH. They’re taking care of him.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Yes,” said the black officer, holding my eyes. “He’s in critical condition, but he’s alive. We’re praying for him.”

  That would have reassured Ryan a lot more than me. I’ve glanced at studies on the power of prayer, but it still falls into the “can’t hurt, might help” category for me. I’d rather put a chest tube in him.

  “Where was he shot?”

  He looked pained. “We don’t know the extent of his injuries yet. But when we do, we’ll tell you.”

  They kept saying he was alive. On the other hand, after an unsuccessful code, I know that some doctors won’t tell family members over the phone that their loved one didn’t make it. They’ll just say, “In critical condition.” They don’t want the family to get into an accident on the way over.

  So was Tucker really alive? Or were they just trying to calm me down so I didn’t shatter into a billion pieces?

  I was starting to shiver. I didn’t want to shake. It seemed weak. But I couldn’t seem to help it. Not just my hands, but my arms and my legs, all quivering hard enough to jiggle the water inside the bottle I still hadn’t opened. Sometimes women shake like this after giving birth.

  That’s why they call it labour, I heard a nurse’s voice echo in my head.

  But I hadn’t given birth to anything, unless it was helping to kill a murderer.

  My teeth chattered.

  Something dropped around my shoulders, and I stifled a scream. But when my hands flew up, all I felt was rough wool. One of the officers had tried to wrap a blanket around me.

  I patted the blanket. I clenched the water bottle between my trembling thighs, thinking, Tucker. Ryan. Kevin. Dad. Mom.

  Tucker.

  Ryan.

  Tucker.

  Then I managed to unwrap the blanket and replace it around my shoulders, even though I was still shaking.

  What kind of person had I become? I always said I wanted to go into medicine to help people. But here I was, not only helpless, but dragging Tucker into the dragon’s den, possibly getting him killed, and then trying to kill people myself.

  There’s some saying like, when you gaze
long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

  For the first time, I realized that the more I hunted down murderers, the more I was turning into a monster.

  CHAPTER 45

  “We’re taking you for a debriefing,” said the female officer who might have been Olivia, as the tank laboured its way through the Montreal night. “Don’t worry. You’re safe.”

  A debriefing. For some reason, I thought of briefs. Underwear. Bastard, who wanted to strip me down, and Tucker, who stopped him.

  Tucker.

  “I love him,” I said. “I mean, it’s complicated, but he’s...like, I need him.” I knew that I was babbling and over-sharing, things I try to avoid, but I had to unleash this after being confined for so long. “If he dies, I want you to tell me. It’s okay if he dies. I mean, not that it’s okay, but I can handle it. I’m a doctor.” I stopped. I wondered why I kept telling everyone I was a doctor. If they couldn’t figure that out by now, they weren’t very good police officers, or whatever they were. “I break bad news all the time. We even had a class on it. You’re supposed to sit down, or at least lean against a wall, so it looks like you’re more permanent. And you have to listen and let them cry. Some people think you shouldn’t even offer a tissue when they’re crying, because that’s too intrusive. We’re sitting down now, so you can tell me.”

  “He’s not dead,” said the black officer. “They told me they moved him into the operating room. I promise.”

  I keeled over in my seat and rocked back and forth. Thank God, thank God, thank God. The unopened water bottle tipped out of my lap and thunked to the floor.

  I didn’t know if I should believe these guys, but I had to believe them until I saw him with my own eyes. “Can you take me to him? I can take a shower before I scrub up for the OR. I promise I won’t touch anything.”

  The black officer shook his head. “Both of you need to be debriefed.”

  “But can’t we be debriefed together?”

  They all exchanged a look, and I swear my heart stopped beating for a second before it lurched back into a rhythm, and I knew what they didn’t want to say, so I said it for them. “You’re afraid that he won’t be able to talk. You think he might die.”

  Jesus, what did the guy do to him? I swear that if Bastard had been in front of me, I would have annihilated him all over again, only single-handed and faster and harder.

  I kept rocking back and forth. I’d seen people do this before, when faced with tragedy. Big tragedy. Like bombs exploding, tsunamis carrying away villages, fires ripping through forests. Women rocking their children, as if they thought their bodies moving back and forth fast enough could blindfold them to the heartbreak, the loss, the gnawing bellies, at least for a few minutes.

  “I want to kill that bastard,” I said. They were the worst people to tell this to, of course. No matter how much the police sympathize with you—and believe me, even more than doctors, police are forced to witness the seamy underbelly of life. If I’m a medical sin eater, the modern-day equivalent of the person who used to eat food off a dead person’s belly in order to imbibe the recently-deceased’s sins and ensure his or her ascension to heaven, the police are sin maters—but they are supposed to uphold the law. Their job is to prevent murder.

  Unless it’s capital punishment, of course. If the state kills, that’s okay.

  None of that stopped my mouth. “I want to blow him up. I want to rip out his testicles and feed them to the wolves. Then they’ll have a taste for blood and eat the rest of him. Just rip him apart.”

  There aren’t any wolves in Montreal, of course, so one of them said “Huh,” a half-laugh, but I wasn’t joking.

  I was thinking about the Israeli government. You know that Israel was set up after the Holocaust killed so many Jews, the world thought they deserved a homeland? So they carved a piece of land out for them and said, Here you go. Of course, the problem was that Palestinians were already living there, but anyway, the point is, Israel was established by people who had been wronged. And wronged on such a massive scale that they built a homeland out of it.

  With revenge. They wanted to kill as many Nazis as possible. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.

  Of course, the higher echelons of the Third Reich greased enough palms to escape, often into South America, although Kurt Waldheim became the Chancellor of Austria before anyone thought to ask him what he was doing in the 1940’s.

  The Israelis didn’t spend all their time on extradition and lobbying and education on what a tragedy the Holocaust was. Well, maybe they did, I don’t know. But the important part was this: they never lost sight of their goal, which was death for the deserving.

  They trained the Mossad, which is like the CIA, only more deadly and precise. Their job was not to overthrow governments and cut down children, no. They worked only to kill. Find and execute escaped Nazis. And they did.

  A few escaped. Mengele, for example. Some people would say that the ones who died in prison escaped, too. But I breathed a little easier, thinking that even if they were about to lock me up in a lunatic asylum, I could still orchestrate Bastard’s death.

  “He’s dead, Hope,” said the female officer.

  “I know.” I summoned up an image of his half-exploded head.

  I still wanted to kill him.

  Part of me knew that I was the one who sounded insane now. Far crazier than Bastard who, in the end, wanted to see his ex and his baby and fuck me on the side.

  Lots of guys do that kind of thing, right?

  I was the only doctor I knew who got kidnapped and was willing to stab her rapist to death, and go back for seconds if necessary.

  I didn’t care.

  A perfect frame of mind for the debriefing, as the tank rumbled to a halt in front of a brick building.

  Oh, they were very civilized about it. They got me the most comfortable chair possible, apologizing for the fact that it was bolted to the floor in order for a TV camera to film the interview, with my permission. They offered to bring me coffee—fresh, from a barista, not the police kind.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” I said, although my eyelids sagged like someone had attached a rare earth magnet on each eyelid. “I just want to see Tucker. Let’s do this.”

  “Water? You need water,” said the female officer.

  I hesitated. I loved water. I needed water. But Tucker was waiting for me.

  “No water. Not until I see Tucker.” I sank into the bolted seat.

  After that, I didn’t remember the interview so much. They wanted to rehash everything. I mean everything. Especially how I got kidnapped in the first place, when he shot Dr. Biedelman.

  “How’s Stan?” I said, jerking myself upright. I couldn’t believe that I’d forgotten about him.

  “He’s—” The female officer hesitated. “He was moved to University College Hospital.”

  The English trauma hospital. Same as Tucker. I said, “But he’s still alive?”

  They exchanged looks.

  And I knew what they weren’t saying.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no,” I said, starting to stand up.

  “Do you need—should we get a doctor?” one of them said.

  “No. I don’t want a tranquilizer. Don’t you dare inject me.” I knew they always did that kind of thing in the movies, but I’ve never seen it. Of course, I don’t hang out in police stations. I was afraid that if they did give me some benzos, I’d fall asleep. And I couldn’t do that. I had to get to Tucker. And Ryan. But first, I had to mourn my senior resident, the first victim of the night. “Stan. I’m sorry, Stan. I’m sorry.” He was lazy, but he was my friend. He always made me laugh.

  He also tried to avoid getting involved in my murder cases, at any cost.

  It made me wonder, did he know what was going to happen to him? Was that why he’d refused to help me? Some sort of intuition that, in a few months hence, he’d leave his wife a widow?

  I get tired of doing detective work. Really. It weighs on my so
ul, dragging me down so I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of tar. But before today, I never thought it would cost Stan’s life, and possibly Tucker’s.

  “What about June?” I said. My voice climbed another octave. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s stable,” said the female officer. “She was shot in the abdomen. She’s recuperating.”

  June was alive. I closed my eyes and thought, Gott sei dank. That means thank God in German. I got it from Tucker. He was always teaching me little snippets of languages. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he did half the things he did, but I had to get to him.

  “I have to see them. Especially Tucker,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm. They’d never let me out of here if I wasn’t calm. “Even if he’s dead, I have to see him. He’s mine.”

  That reminded me of what Tucker had told Bastard, and my breath rasped in my throat. She’s mine.

  He’d protected me as long as he could.

  He laid down his life for me.

  “Please, Dr. Sze,” said the officer. “We will take you to him. Just a few more minutes to build your case.”

  Again, I reminded myself of patients trying to leave the emergency department. We try and reason with them, tell them that we need time to rule out a heart attack. We tell them that we’re working in their best interest, that they could die or collapse if they go home. But if they head out the door anyway, they have to sign an AMA form, that they’re leaving against medical advice.

  “We need you to finish this. For Tucker, and Stan, and June,” said the officer, and I understood. They were asking me to delay gratification.

  I know all about that. Like, I’ve been in school for over twenty years. Which means that I will not drink, not go to parties, not stay up late (except for studying!). I will not date the cute boy sitting next to me, because I need to focus on my exams. I will not smoke. I will not pop out babies until I finish my final exams.

  I will sit with a madman who is pointing a gun at us, and I will stay in control. Because I have to. Because that is what I do.

  But this was the closest I’d come to running out AMA. To saying, FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK you. I can’t be your hero. I can’t even save myself! Now let me at my men, and leave me alone!