The Select (17 page)

He reached through the window and
gripped her shoulder. His voice rose in a panicky
quaver.

"Oh, no, Quinn! Not
another abortion. This makes three this year! I
told
you I'd stand by
you!"

A fellow student who had a seat near
hers in histology lab was passing nearby. His head whipped in their
direction and he almost tripped on the curb, but he recovered and
hurried past.

Quinn fixed her eyes straight ahead as
she felt her cheeks go crimson. She tried to keep her voice
level.

"I hate you, Timothy Brown. It's as
simple as that. Even if you lend me this car every day for the next
four years, I will still hate you forever."

He flashed his boyish smile and
slapped the roof.

"Take good care of Griffin for me,
drive carefully, and wear shorts more often—you've got dynamite
legs."

Her cheeks didn't cool
until she reached the highway, then she smiled and shook her
head.
My third abortion?
How did he come up with things like
that?

She checked the gas gauge and saw that
it read full. He was a clown, but a considerate clown.

She found Route 70 and followed it
east. Company would have been nice, but how could she explain to
Tim this need to learn about their cadaver?

She took the inner loop on 695 to York
Road in Towson and followed that south. She almost cruised past the
Towson Library without seeing it. Not because it was small. It was
huge, but it looked like the town had used the same architect as
the Berlin Wall. With all that bare, exposed concrete it looked
about as warm and inviting as a bomb shelter.

Inside wasn't much better,
but the friendliness of the librarians went a long way toward
countering the bunker decor. They gave her a stack of back issues
of the Towson
Times
, the local weekly, and she began to search through the
obits. There weren't many. Quinn was beginning to worry that
the
Times
might
print only select obituaries when she spotted the
heading:

Dorothy Havers, long
time

Towson resident. Age
82

Dorothy O'Boyle Havers, the only
daughter of Francis and Catherine O'Boyle, both Irish immigrants,
died on July 12 of natural causes at the Laurel Hills Medical
Center. Prior to that she had been a resident of the Towson Nursing
Center for seven years. Mrs. Havers was predeceased by her husband,
Earl, and by her two daughters, Catherine and Francine. No plans
for viewing or burial were announced.

Ireland...Dorothy came over from
Ireland...just like her mother. And she'd died right next door to
The Ingraham.

Quinn reread the obit and was swept by
a wave of sadness. Of course no plans for viewing or burial were
announced. There was nobody to view her remains, nobody left to
mourn at her grave side. Husband dead, children dead, seven years
in a nursing home, probably without a single visitor, completely
forgotten, no one caring if she lived or died. So she'd willed her
body to The Ingraham.

Poor woman.

But what had she died of? That might
be interesting to know during the dissection. She wondered if
they'd know at the Towson Nursing Center. How far could it
be?

Quinn xeroxed off a copy of the
obituary, then went looking for a phone.

*

"Dorothy Havers?" said Virginia
Bennett, R.N., head nurse at the Towson Nursing Center. "I remember
that name. You say you're releated to her?"

"Her great niece," Quinn
said.

She'd discovered the Towson Nursing
Center was a couple of miles from the library, so she'd stopped in
to learn what she could. The one-story dark brick building seemed
about as pleasant as something called a nursing home could be.
Elderly men and women sat in wheelchairs around the foyer while
others inched by with the aid of four-footed canes. A vague odor of
urine suffused the air, like olfactory muzak.

"Well, I'll be." Nurse Bennett
scratched the side of her neck with short, scarlet fingernails. She
had ebony skin, gray hair, and a bulldog face, but seemed pleasant
enough. "We searched high and low for a next of kin last year when
we were getting ready to transfer her to the medical center.
Couldn't find anybody. Fig ured she was alone in the
world."

"We have a common relative in
Ireland," Quinn said, amazed at how easily the lies tripped off her
tongue. She'd figured no one would tell her a thing about Dorothy
unless they thought she was related. "I just happened to come
across her name while I was researching the family's medical
history. Was she very sick?"

"Just a little heart failure, if I
remember. But Dr. Clifton—he's one of our doctors—is very
conservative. He refers patients to the medical center at the first
sign of trouble. But he's top notch. A graduate of the Ingraham,
you know."

"Really? That's good to
know."

"But what sort of family history were
you looking for?"

"There's ovarian cancer in one of my
aunts and I was wondering..."

"Very important," Nurse Bennett said,
jabbing a finger at Quinn. "But I don't know a thing about Mrs.
Havens, so I can't—" She glanced past Quinn. "Wait. There's Dr.
Clifton now. Maybe he can help you. Dr. Clifton? Could we see you a
minute?"

Quinn turned and saw a young,
dark-haired doctor, surely not much older than thirty, entering
through a rear door, dressed in a sport coat and carrying a black
bag.

"Dr. Clifton," Nurse Bennett said as
he approached the desk. "You remember Dorothy Havers, don't you?
This is her great niece."

It almost looked to Quinn as if Dr.
Clifton stumbled a step. He blinked twice, then smiled.

"I didn't know Dotty had a great
niece, or any kind of relative at all."

Quinn repeated her story about the
Ireland link, and about researching the family medical history. The
lies came easier the second time around.

"No," Dr. Clifton said. "Dotty had no
history of cancer of any sort. Her main problem was
arteriosclerosis—coronary and cerebral. We were sorry to lose her
this summer. She was a nice lady."

"I wish I'd known her," Quinn said,
and that wasn't a lie. "Was she in bad heart failure when you
transferred her to the medical center?"

"Bad enough in my clinical opinion to
need more intense care than a nursing home could provide," he said
stiffly. "Is there a point to these questions, Miss...?"

"Sheedy," Quinn said, barely missing a
beat. "No. Just curious."

"Well, then, as much as I'd like to
satisfy your curiosity, Miss Sheedy, I have rounds to make. Excuse
me."

"Not much of a bedside manner," Quinn
said after he'd hurried off.

"Must have had a bad day," Nurse
Bennett said. "Usually he's very easy going."

Not today, Quinn thought. Today he's
downright defensive.

As she left the Towson
Nursing Center, she noticed the small print on the entry
plaque:
Owned and operated by Kleederman
Medical Industries.

KMI is everywhere, she thought. I
guess I'll be pretty well connected after I graduate.

She wondered why she took no comfort
in that.

She pulled the folded copy of Dorothy
Havers' obituary from her pocket and reread it.

"There's no one left to remember you,
is there, Dorothy Havens," she said softly. "Tell you what. I'll
remember you, with gratitude, for the rest of my life. And maybe I
can get someone else to remember you too."

*

"Well, now. Look at you."

Quinn glanced up from her dissection
of the Accessory Nerve to see Tim peering at her from the other
side of their cadaver. He'd just arrived, late as usual.

"What's the matter with me?" she
said.

"Here she is, the gal who was turning
three shades of green out in the hall before her first An Lab last
month, and look at her now: Having lunch with her
cadaver."

Quinn paused. Tim was right. She
hadn't given it any thought, but she had come a long way since that
first day when she'd feared she was going to toss her cookies as
soon as she stepped into this room. She hardly noticed the smell
anymore, and here she was, barely a month later, sitting with her
nose in her dissection of the rhomboid muscles, a Pepsi to her left
by the cadaver's shoulder, and a half-eaten Twinkie to her right by
the hip.

"A testament to the human organism's
adaptability, I suppose," she said.

"And how."

Quinn watched him open his kit, pull
the damp cloth off his dissection, and sit down. Only his head was
visible on the far side as he got to work. She'd been debating how
to broach a certain subject with him and figured now was as good a
time as any.

"I've been thinking," Quinn
said.

"Careful. That can be dangerous. Habit
forming, even."

"Seriously. I want to name our
cadaver."

Tim glanced up at her. "Yeah? Well,
why not? Kevin and Jerry named theirs Auntie Griselda. We can name
ours Skinny Minnie."

"No. I mean give it a real name. A
person's name."

He went back to his rhomboids. "Any
particular name in mind?"

"Dorothy."

"Dorothy...like Dorothy of the Oz
variety?"

"Exactly."

"Should we scare up a little dead dog
and name it Toto?"

God, he could be annoying at times. "I
don't know why I even bothered."

Tim must have tuned in to her tone. He
glanced up again. "Okay. Dorothy it is. We can call her
Dot."

"No," Quinn said firmly. "Not Dot.
Dorothy."

"Why is this suddenly so
important?"

Quinn had hoped he wouldn't ask that.
She couldn't tell him, That's her name, and she wasn't sure how to
answer otherwise without sounding like some sort of
wimp.

"I've got my reasons," she said. "But
you're going to think they're corny and sappy."

Tim set down his instruments and
leaned forward. "Try me."

"All right." She took a
deep breath and rattled off her rationale: "I want to call her a
real name because she was a real person when she was alive and I
think it's only fair that we think of her as a 'she' or a 'her'
instead of an 'it.' And as we whittle her away and she stops
looking like something even remotely human, maybe we can still
think of her as a person if she's got a person's name. Dot isn't
very human. It's like a punctuation mark. But Dorothy sounds pretty
neighborly and very human—even with
out
a dog."

Tim's lips were struggling against a
smile as he stared at her. Finally it broke through.

"You're right," he said.
"Those are
very
corny and sappy reasons. But if it's important to you, then
it's a done deal. From now on, our friend on the table is Dorothy.
Do we want to give her a last name?"

"No." God, no. The first name was
already too close to reality. "Just Dorothy should do
fine."

She'll like that. I
hope
.

Tim was still staring at
her.

"What?" she said.

"Dorothy's her real name, isn't it.
How did you find out?"

She was stunned. How did he know?
"Tim, you're nuts. I—"

"Truth, Quinn: How'd you find
out?"

She hesitated, then decided he should
know. After all, he was dissecting her too.

She told him everything, from finding
the toe tag to Dr. Clifton's cool response to her
questions.

Tim grinned. "Probably afraid you were
some money-hungry relative fishing for a hint of malpractice. I
hear it's a jungle out there."

Harrison walked up then, his
teaching-assistant smirk firmly in place.

"Late again, Brown?"

"Was I?" Tim said. "I didn't check the
clock when I came in."

"I did. And you were late—the third
time this week. You're batting a thousand, Brown." He pointed to
Tim's dissection. "Let's see what you've learned here. The
Accessory is which cranial nerve?"

"The twelfth," Tim said.

"Name the other eleven."

Tim rattled them off.

"Okay," Harrison said. He withdrew a
pointer from his pocket and poked at Tim's dissection. "Identify
these tissues here."

Tim scorched through them
without a miss. Quinn knew he was comparing his dissection to his
mental photographs from the pages of
Gray's
.

"Well, apparently you've learned
something from this, although I don't see how. Looks like you've
been working with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. Where is your
technique, Brown?"

"I think I left it with your tact,"
Tim said with his little-boy smile.