Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (34 page)

Sure enough, my pager went off. I stopped it at the first
beep.

DUPLICATE, said my pager.

"Screw you," I said back to it. I had a date with
Reena.

Chapter 37

First, I checked Reena's chart. Psych wouldn't accept her
until she was completely medically cleared. Normally they take an internist's
word for it, but this time, with the patient trapped in a supposed coma, they'd
asked for neuro to weigh in. Neuro had deferred it until Monday.

In other words, the different services were playing games
(what the book
House of God
might
call buff-and-turf), and Reena was still where I'd left her.

I knocked on the door.

No answer, of course. It was after visiting hours, she was
playing possum, and possibly genuinely asleep at eleven thirty-six p.m.

I glanced nervously down the hall, and knocked again. One of
the nurses had been doling out medications as I checked the chart, but so far
no one had really paid attention to me. I wanted to keep it that way. I pushed
my way in, and made sure the door closed behind me.

The bedside light illuminated a spot on the floor. I
wondered why they bothered burning electricity for someone who didn't open her
eyes, but it made it easier for me to navigate to her side and ease myself onto
the chair at the far side of the bed, next to the window. "Reena," I
whispered. "It's me. Dr. Hope Sze."

Her breathing stayed slow and even, heaving the blankets up
and down. Her arms stuck out over the blankets. I wondered if her arms got cold
or cramped, staying like that for hours, until someone moved her. I couldn't
imagine a situation that would make me fake a coma for a week unless it was
extremis, like a concentration camp. "Reena. I know you're awake."

The cracked lips stirred and her fetid breath wafted out at
me.

I sat back.

She gave a ghost of a laugh. "Scared you, huh?"
Her eyes opened, wincing at the bedside lamp.

She was only twenty-nine, around my age, but she looked
prematurely aged, the way anorexics do. "You got me," I said.

"What do you want this time?"

I licked my own lips. "To talk to you about
post-traumatic
stress."

She started to scoff, but stopped, and I knew I had her. For a few
seconds, anyway. I carried on. "I've got it, too. I jump when someone
slams a door. I have nightmares. I replay the scene over and over again,
wondering if I could have done something, anything else. Sometimes I think the
only thing worse than living through it is reliving it for the rest of my
life."

Her forehead wrinkled. "Whad'ja do?"

A good therapist would deflect the question, but I wanted to draw her
in. "This guy tried to strangle me, and he almost got away with it."
I realized my hand had drifted up to my throat and dropped it back down to my
side.

"Oh, yeah, I read about that. The whole 'detective doctor'
thing." She rubbed her nose, sniffed, and rubbed it again, clearly not
impressed.

I changed tactics. "What about your thing?"

"What about it?"

A tacit admission. She hadn't denied the PTSD. "You might want to
talk to someone about it."

She yawned and had enough manners to cover her mouth. "Jodi says
I've got plenty of friends. I don't need to talk to you."

"True." Although she wouldn't keep coming to emerg if she
weren't desperate for something her friends weren't giving her. "But I'm
here, and I know what you're going through."

"What are you doing here, anyway? It's the middle of the
night."

"I was in the neighbourhood. I just delivered a baby. And we're
alone. No nurses, no Jodi, no Wendy. Just us."

She yawned and pointed and flexed her toes. "A nurse might come
in."

"Probably not. They're getting ready for sign-out." At her
blank look, I explained, "The night nurses come on at midnight, so the
evening nurses have to get ready with their notes and explain who each patient
is and what's happening to them."

She yawned again and scratched her nose. "So that's what they're
doing. I thought they just all went on break or something. For, like,
hours."

I smothered a smile. Doctors always tease nurses about going on break.
But I had to get Reena back on track. "Do you want to talk about
yourself?
 
Do you have nightmares or
flashbacks?"

She shrugged and ducked her head, but not before I saw anger crease
her face. "Well, it's not like I was in Afghanistan, but yeah, been there,
done that. Someone slams a car door and I'm whipping around. The phone rings
and I wake up screaming. I try to sit with my back to the wall. I try not to go
out at night." She twisted her hands in her lap. "My friends are sick
of talking to me. But what else is new? My frickin' doctors are sick of talking
to me."

"What do you think we could to help?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do know, but you're scared to say it."

Her dark eyes darted toward me and away again.

"We can talk about the symptoms as much as you want. Or you can
finally unload what's behind it all." I paused. She blinked hard, avoiding
my eyes. We both heard footsteps patter by in the hallway and the high-pitched,
steady beep of another patient's blocked IV. I continued. "Eight years.
That's more than a quarter of your life. Aren't you sick of keeping it to
yourself?"

She glared at me. "Are you accusing me of something?"

"No." Not yet, anyway. "Just offering to listen. That's
why you kept coming to emerg, right?"

She rolled over and yanked the sheet on her bed until it loosened from
under the mattress. For someone who’d been lying in bed for a week, she seemed
pretty strong, pushing herself to half-sit up on the pillows. "I wanted
good drugs."

I waited.

She glared at me. "No one would give me any."

I waited.

"You think you can trick me, but I don't think you know
shit."

"Maybe. I know a little bit, though. I know you've been scared of
me ever since you saw me, and that I look a lot like Dr. Laura Lee."

With a small gasp, she wound the end of the sheet around her wrist.

"I know that you got even more upset when I dropped an envelope
with Mrs. Lee's name on it."

She tightened the sheet hard enough to indent the muscles of her
forearm.

"And, after it became clear Mrs. Lee was my patient, you refused
to see me at all. I thought you were being difficult. I didn't realize you were
scared."

She unwound the sheet a little. The skin had blanched, surrounded by
red inflammation. Old scars criss-crossed her wrist. "You just want me to
confess," she mumbled.

Now I remembered her saying that to me when we first met. I’d thought
she was being a typical psych patient, over-dramatic and annoying. But now I
understood something quite different. I saw the new weariness in her voice, as
well as the slope of her shoulders and the re-ratcheting of the sheet around
her wrist.

"No, Reena," I said, as gently as possible. "You want
to confess."

Her eyes met mine suddenly. "You think you can get me off?
 
I've got a huge psych history."

I tried not to recoil. She wanted to plead "not criminally
responsible," what used to be called criminally insane. Somehow, I hadn't
expected that.

But I didn’t have to like Reena. And my testimony would be irrelevant.
Any lawyer would get a hot-shot psychiatrist to assess her, not a resident
doing a six-week psych rotation. I still had to coax a confession out of her,
or at least lead her to give one to the police. So I tried to look agreeable.
"They'd definitely have to consider your psych history."

She dropped the sheet for a second. It flapped against the side of the
bed. "Yeah. Not just the borderline and dependent personality bullshit.
I've got depression. That one doctor thought I might be schizophrenic, and
another one said maybe schizoaffective. And I was on a lot of drugs, you
know?"

It took me a minute to realize she meant medications, but maybe she
was thinking street drugs, too. "Sure."

She grabbed the dangling sheet and stretched it between her fists,
ripping it out further from under the mattress. "You don't care."

I did care, but
I was starting to think I'd made a mistake. I'd thought I could usher her
toward the police, or at least agree to talk to them if I sent them to her
room. But maybe I was just muddying the confessional waters and angering her.
I'd better bail. "Reena, look. If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here."

She narrowed her eyes. "I know what you care about.
Murder, right?"

I jumped a
little. She smiled. I raised my chin and said, "Do you know anything about
it?"

"Hell,
yeah.
Arrest my foster sister's ass. She's the one who gave me the
drugs! The Haldol that almost killed me," she added impatiently, at my
blank look.

"Okay." The time she ran out of the emerg she was
demanding drugs, today she said she thought she could get off because she was
on drugs and now she was accusing Wendy of giving her drugs. Again, I wondered
if I were getting anywhere.

"That's attempted murder, right? Isn't that what you
were asking about?
 
Because you
care
about me so much?" Her lips
twisted. She waved me away when I tried to speak. "She knew I was allergic.
I almost died when I was fifteen because this crazy psychiatrist thought I was
psycho and gave me Haldol. I wear a Medic Alert bracelet and everything,
see?" She shoved back the striped sleeve of her shirt to show me the heavy
links. "It's all over my chart, too. So when Wendy gave me those little
white pills, you bet your ass she did it on purpose."

Mrs. Schuster and Wendy had both danced around how Wendy had
found Reena and brought her to the hospital. They'd never specified how Reena
had gotten the drugs in the first place. It was plausible. There was only one
problem. "Let’s say that she did. Why did you take them?"

"'Cause I hate that little bitch and I wanted her to
freak out!" She laughed, low and ugly. "Yeah, I know what you're
thinking. Why do I hurt myself and think it'll hurt other people? That's what
all the head-shrinks say. Well, I don't give a flying fuck about myself. If she
ends up burning in hell because she killed me, it'll be worth it."

I tried to piece it together. Say it was true. Wendy offered
her Haldol, and Reena was nuts enough to take it, to punish her. How did that
tie in to Laura?

Reena sure didn’t help. "She was shitting herself when
I was in ICU. Sometimes she held my hand and cried. It was great."

"And now that you’re on the ward?"

"Ah, she thinks I’m getting better, especially because
they’re booting me back to psych. I’ll show her ass. That fucking bitch, that
little squaw whore, that filthy cunt, I could rip off her tits and choke her
with them!"

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. They say depression is anger
turned inward. I’d never understood it before, but now I saw rage that scared
me. I stood up and backed toward the door.

"She stole everything!
 
My parents, my name, my girl—everything! And what is she? A foster
kid! You take them in for the money and give them the boot when they're
eighteen. But my parents actually fell in love with her and tried to adopt
her!" She swiped her tearless eyes with the back of her hand. "God
damn them. God damn them all."

I hovered above the chair, torn between leaving and
listening.

"Ah, you don't believe me. No one does. No one
except—" She bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. A ruby
drop gathered on her lip as she paused. "No one. That's right. No fucking
one."

If she hated Laura Lee like this, I had no doubt she would
run her down. With pleasure. Now I was worried about Wendy. I rubbed my temples
where my head was starting to pound. I’d heard of opening a can of worms. This
was more like a nest of vipers.

She rubbed her nose. Blood smeared up her arm.

"I have to go," I said.

"Sure you do. Everyone has to go. Everyone has
something to do. Even me!" she screamed so loud I bet they could hear her
at the nursing station as I rushed for the door.

Chapter
38

I still felt smothered when I sat in my car, keys dangling
in the ignition, and tried to make sense of things.

One thing was clear. Reena was furious. At Wendy, at her
mother, at me, at herself. That rage could not be self-contained. It had to go
somewhere.

Was that what happened eight years ago? She exploded and ran
Laura Lee down? Was she the woman who maneuvered Mike Martinez to steal a car
for her?

I wouldn’t have banked on her doing that kind of advanced
planning, but I also wouldn’t have bet she’d be able to fake a coma for a week,
either. She had a lot more willpower than I’d have credited her.