After that, Ty knew he wouldn’t get another pass, so he did his best hustling up and down the court looking for loose balls and rebounds. But his knack for finding his space on the court and his role on the team eluded him. He was bumping into his own teammates, and they were becoming aggravated with the “old man” they’d been stuck with. Instead of finding a spot under the basket and holding it, he’d tried to bully his way past the opposing teammates.
Ty usually found the hard-charging up and down of a pickup game tiring in an exhilarating way. But as he ran the length of the court chasing another layup by the other team, Ty found himself enjoying his exhaustion only as a form of self-punishment. Breathing hard, he grabbed an offensive rebound and went up hard against a rail-thin high school student. The teenager fell back, holding his nose.
“Damn, man,” someone said behind him as the defender sat on the hardtop and dabbed his nose with a T-shirt.
Ty breathed a big sigh.
“Sorry about that,” Ty said. He reached out his hand as a gesture of conciliation. The high schooler swatted it away.
Ty turned and walked off the court with a wave. As he made his way to his motorcycle, he felt none of the normal pleasure of exercising his body to exhaustion. He felt irritable, and then it occurred to him that he had been playing in anger, not with joy. He’d had the idea that the release of hoops, the physicality, would somehow cleanse him of the mental demon that was stalking him. It didn’t. As he drove home, the fear remained that he would choke during his next operation—or worse, that he would perform the operation with catastrophic results. Ty noticed his breathing was elevated, and it wasn’t from the basketball. He needed to do something. He needed to shake this doubt that gripped him—that had infected him like a retrovirus. Ty had an idea. More accurately, he returned to an idea he’d had a week earlier.
Ty showered, changed, and then checked his wallet to see if he still had the scrap of paper he had placed there. He did. He checked the address on Google Maps, got his car, and drove to an apartment building a few miles from his own, behind a Kroger grocery store. Ty took a deep breath, got out of the car, and walked to the building.
Confronting his fears head-on had been Ty’s credo since his brother’s death.
Ty rang the buzzer under the name
A. MCDANIEL—5H
.
“Yes?”
“Allison, this is Ty Wilson.” There was a pause. “Dr. Wilson. From Chelsea General. I wondered if you had a moment.”
There was another pause, followed by a buzz. Ty pulled the door open and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The carpet in the hallway was worn, and the lighting was dim. Ty knocked on the door. Allison opened it a moment later, looking a little suspicious. When he had seen her before, her hair was pulled back and she was dressed in a gray pantsuit. Now her shoulder-length hair hung loose; she was wearing blue jeans and a simple V-neck white T-shirt. She was barefoot. She looked younger than she had at the hospital but also very tired.
“Hi, Ms. McDaniel. Allison,” Ty began. He realized he had not thought about what he was going to say when she opened the door. He had another reflexive thought: that she was a beautiful woman. “I was wondering if we could talk. I’ve been thinking about your son.”
Two small children ran around behind Allison. Ty looked at the children, who looked so little they could be Quinn’s younger siblings. Allison saw his confusion.
“That’s my niece and nephew. Since I lost my job, I’m watching them for my sister.” Ty didn’t know what to say. He saw the woman swallow hard. “Listen, it’s hard to talk when I’m watching the kids. You want to get a cup of coffee sometime, call me. There’s a Starbucks just down the street.”
She held up a finger for him to wait and disappeared for a moment. When she returned, she handed him a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“There’s my cell phone number.” Her voice was calm, flat, and noncommittal.
“Okay. Thanks.” Ty took the paper as Allison shut the door. He lingered for a moment outside the door. As he walked away, Ty wondered what he was thinking by showing up at her apartment unannounced. What could she give him? She had lost everything. He knew he should feel selfish for what he had just done, but for the first time in a while, he felt a slight sense of relief.
T
ina sat at the large farm table in the kitchen sipping a glass of expensive Chardonnay. Her husband, Mark, stood by the six-burner Wolf stove holding a spatula as he pan-fried sole. A covered casserole dish with green beans amandine rested on the counter. Their six-year-old daughter Ashley sat between them in a wheelchair specially designed for children with cerebral palsy, with a tray like a high chair. The girl’s head lolled to one side. The sounds of two older girls singing a pop song in another room drifted into the kitchen.
“You’re not listening,” Tina said.
“I am listening,” Mark said. Between him and his wife, an air of tension. This palpable, almost visible wall had been growing for months now, adding a sharp and clipped edge to their words, making their conversations strained. But they were still married; they were still roommates. They needed at the very least to relay information about the children and their own schedules.
Mark’s schedule had become a lot less complicated. He’d lost his job as an architect when the Michigan economy cratered. He was now home full-time, and his initial flurry of job hunting had waned to nothing. Few job seekers were as unattractive in the market as an architect. Builder maybe. So Mark had shifted his energies to their three daughters. He helped the older girls get ready for middle school and then took Ashley to day care in the morning. In the afternoon, Mark was home with Ashley until the older girls returned home on the school bus. His plan had been to get in shape during his free time in the morning, but as often as not he returned to bed and slept the morning away. He didn’t have the energy. Just listening to Tina seemed to require more energy than he had.
“Michelle Robidaux has a single bad outcome—something that could have happened to any of us—and they’re going to ruin her career.”
“Shit happens,” Mark said. “Wasn’t that what you told me when Richter and Griffin sent me packing?”
“Mark!” Tina motioned toward Ashley, who banged on her tray.
“Sorry. Didn’t you say she was having trouble anyway?” Mark asked.
“That’s not the point, Mark,” Tina said in a tone that was both cold and condescending. “The hospital is supposed to stand by its people.”
They had been married for fifteen years, and he seemed to Tina to be willfully ignorant of the way medicine worked. He had his head in the sand. No wonder he’d had no clue he was going to get canned when his firm needed to tighten the belt.
“I really don’t think you listen to me. You hear what I’m telling you, obviously, but are you really listening? We’re talking about a young doctor here. I think you’re in your own world. Hospitals are supposed to protect their people, not toss them when there are problems,” Tina said, with emphasis as though that might help her get through to her husband.
Tina’s husband turned to the stove for a moment to flip the fish. His mouth was closed and his gaze was fixed on the pan. She could see the masseter muscle flexing on his jaw. He paused a second and then turned back to Tina and pointed the spatula at her, his voice now erupting with anger.
“Wives and mothers are supposed to stand by their people, too.”
“Excuse me?”
“How well have you stood by your husband? Or your children? It has been an incredibly difficult year. We’ve had our troubles. We’re having trouble, and where are you?”
“Mark, what are you talking about?”
“You’re never here. I can’t even reach you when I need to.”
Ashley banged on her tray again and made a keening noise. Tina looked at her daughter, then Mark, but said nothing.
“Any nurse or resident or physician can reach you all hours of the day, any day of the week, but I couldn’t get hold of you at the hospital most days if my life depended on it.”
“Where is this coming from?” Tina asked.
Ashley knocked one of the toys off her tray, and Mark reached down to pick it up. He had tears of frustration in his eyes when he stood up.
“Where did it come from? Right here. It comes from me,” he said.
A
gain, Mark went back to the stove. He turned the burner off and walked to the doorway.
“Madison. Mackenzie. Dinner,” he called.
Tina looked at him, her lips pursed, with an expression suggesting indifference.
Mark grabbed a stack of plates and quickly set them around the table, not looking at Tina as he slammed a plate down in her spot. Mark grabbed paper napkins, forks, and knives and put them around the table. He then went to the stove and placed the fish on a serving platter.
Tina and Mark were glowering at each other when the two teenage girls burst into the room. The moment they entered the kitchen they saw the tension between their parents.
“What’s for dinner?” Mackenzie asked. Madison walked over to the stove and peered into the frying pan.
“Gross. Fish? Again,” Madison added.
“That’s rude, Madison,” Tina said. Her voice was calm. “Apologize to your father.”
“Sorry, Dad. But it is gross.”
“That’s it—go to your room,” Tina said. “Go to your room, now.”
“Mom!”
“It’s all right,” Mark said, looking at his wife. “All things considered, it’s a relatively small slight.” Tina glowered.
The older girls looked from their father to their mother and sat down to dinner. Their eyes downcast, they began eating in silence. With tears streaming down her smooth cheeks, Mackenzie stopped eating and looked up.
“It tastes good, Dad,” Mackenzie said.
“Thanks,” Mark said. His voice was flat.
“Is everything going to be okay?” Mackenzie asked, her voice now breaking with sobs. The question caused Madison to start crying. Ashley banged on her tray. The question hung in the air for a moment. Mark said nothing. He turned to Tina as though he, too, wanted an answer.
Tina turned to the girls.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mackenzie,” Tina said in a voice as soothing as she could make it. “You’ll see someday. Marriage is…” She paused. “Marriage is not always easy, but your father and I love each other.” Tina spoke almost as though she was trying to convince herself. “Come here. You, too, Madison.”
The girls walked over to their mother. She turned in her chair and opened her arms. The girls folded their lanky bodies into Tina’s embrace. Mark watched, lips pursed, as their two daughters bent and nuzzled with their mother.
P
aramedics rushed through the swinging doors of the ER. They had the distinctive look of panic on their faces. Lying on the stretcher was an elderly woman, her blood-soaked blouse ripped open. A small white sweater had been sheared from her body, and now lay tattered at the end of the gurney. Her polyester brown pants were covered with splotches of blood. Patches of adhesive gauze, serving as a chest seal, did little to close the gaping wound across her chest. There was a distinctive sucking sound coming from her right rib cage. Blood speckled her white hair and face and pooled on the gurney next to her frail, limp body. One of the paramedics squeezed the bag end of a breathing tube protruding from the elderly woman’s mouth while desperately trying to hold pressure on the chest gauze.
“Sweet Jesus,” Villanueva muttered from his stool. “Eight!” he called to the EMTs, and they rushed toward the back of the emergency room where the Code Team was waiting. His eyes were quickly scanning, and he didn’t like what he saw. A flail chest, pale limbs, and no obvious movements from her arms or legs.
“Eighty-two,” he muttered to himself. The elderly woman’s heart was still beating, but the rhythm was weak and irregular.
Villanueva rocketed off the stool and met the paramedics at the trauma bay. He grabbed a penlight from a nurse walking by, flipped back the elderly woman’s eyelids, and started looking at her pupils.
“Hang in there,” he said.
The chief resident started calling orders almost as fast as the words could come out of his mouth. “Eighty-two-year-old with a shotgun blast to the right chest. Hemodynamically unstable with a flail chest and near complete exsanguination at the scene. Two bags of LR hanging. We are out of time people, let’s go!” he shouted. Two residents, nurses, techs working fast: running a central line, starting a blood transfusion, getting the blood gases, getting the epinephrine and atropine just in case she went from V-fib to asystole—flat line.
Villanueva stepped back, shaken. He grabbed the sleeve of one of the EMTs.
“What’d you bring me?”
“Shotgun, close range,” the EMT said. “It was her grandson that pulled the trigger.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Villanueva said again. “And I didn’t get you anything.” It was a standard Villanueva retort, but this time it wasn’t delivered with the usual verve.
The EMT pointed across the ER. “He’s right over there. He did Grandma then shot himself with a thirty-eight.”
Villanueva looked at the wiry young man in the trauma bay. His skin was ashen. His upper lip was split on either side of his mouth in what forensic pathologists called “devil’s horns,” caused by the intense gases from the muzzle blast pushing out through the mouth. Villanueva also noticed a teardrop inked below his remaining, left eye.
P
iece of shit,” Villanueva said, his anger spiking as he looked from the old woman to the young man. He started rushing toward the man, his nostrils flaring, picking up speed. “I am going to strangle that piece of shit.”
He nearly ran over a nurse who jumped back the way you might jump back from a rampaging bull. As he reached the huddle of doctors and nurses around the young man, a petite resident stepped in his path and held her hands up, cringing with the impact she expected any moment.
“Dr. Villanueva, he’s dead. No EEG activity.” Villanueva stopped, processing the information. “The organ harvest team has already been notified.”