13. April 10, 2023
Cherry
Tribe’s traditional security men had already packed their bags in the car and were waiting with a limousine to take them to the airport. The silence inside the car was beyond uncomfortable.
“Need to quiz me?” he asked.
“No, I’m good,” she replied.
More silence.
“I’ve never flown with you before. You fly okay? Anything I should know?”
“I fly fine.”
Even more silence.
“Do you sleep on flights or read, or what do you do?”
“Depends.”
Every second alone with him was crushing her. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“Want to join the Mile High Club?”
Her head whipped around to him, shock on her face, and she started coughing as she choked on the saliva that went down the wrong pipe.
Rubbing her back as she hacked up a lung, she heard him say, “Glad to see something got a reaction out of you.” She watched him shake his head and look out his own window.
“Look, I’m sorry you’re unhappy about partnering with me, but you should know, I’m not sorry.
I would have demanded it was me rather than Midas or Steel. ”
She studied her hands in her lap. Quietly, she said, “I’m not unhappy. Given this afternoon’s discussion, ‘uncomfortable’ would be a better description.”
She could feel his eyes on her. Things couldn’t stay like this between them. Kubrick was right. She’d apologized to Steel and Waters. She’d have to address it with the others later, but this she could fix now.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “You were right. About everything.”
Silence. He was going to make her say it all, and he should. Now she respected him even more because he was holding her accountable for her actions.
“When Dad disappeared, I… It was like I was two people at the same time. One was the same serious, practical brainiac I’d always been.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I didn’t demand things.
I went about the process of ‘losing’ Dad the same way I went about preparing for an exam.
I made lists of what I needed to do. I gathered information.
I followed up on every avenue. I followed through with every decision.
“But there was another me. An alternate me. I’d already lost my mom and had no other family.
I felt it was so unfair to have him taken from me too.
On the inside, I was seething so hard that I felt like I was on fire.
So, while on the surface, everyone saw methodical me, praised me for how mature I was and told me how proud my father would be of me, inside, there was this raging monster that no one knew was there.
It didn’t matter if I destroyed the city if it meant I got my father back. ”
She noticed the slight quirk at the corner of his mouth over the Godzilla comparison.
Looking at him, though, when she knew she’d hurt him, was painful, so she gazed out the window, seemingly at the buildings, people, and traffic going past, but none of it was truly registering.
“When I started at Georgetown, I vowed nothing would get in my way. I fought tooth and nail to get every opportunity, never worrying about who I might hurt. My rationale was they didn’t want it as badly as I did if they couldn’t compete and beat me.
I excelled at everything I did because I burned with this need to find my father and the men who stole him from me.
It was all I thought about. I’m sure there are whole days I went without eating, without sleeping… ”
Her voice was so quiet, she wasn’t sure he could hear her. “TB was right. I wanted revenge. There was nothing unselfish or altruistic about my goals. I wanted my dad back, and I did not give a holy grail who got stepped on or who suffered. I was so certain I knew it all.”
“You had to fight, Cherry,” Demon told her.
“You were alone. No one was looking out for you since you were technically an adult. Your attorney was logging billable hours. Your uncle had his own agenda, biding his time until you decided you needed him. Your friends and fellow students were busy living the last days of their childhood. I don’t know that anyone could really blame you. ”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“No. And I’m not saying I don’t believe you should have handled it differently, but it wasn’t my decision to make. I shouldn’t have pushed you like I did.”
“No. You were right to say it. Nothing you said was wrong. Being called out embarrassed me, which made me angry with myself, and I spent the last seven months acting like a total fuckwitch and pushing away those who could help. The people I love like my family. May have even gotten one of them killed.”
“They’re not going anywhere, Cherry. They will always help you, and they will always love you.” There was another long pause before Demon added, “I heard you talking to Waters in his office. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but you were in there for a while. Did you talk about Sarah?”
“He said there was nothing to forgive.” Her throat felt tight, and her head hurt as she worked to keep the tears from falling.
“He told me he understood. That he didn’t blame me, and Sarah wouldn’t have either.
” A tear fell then. She couldn’t stop it.
“He told me what happened in Egypt. I knew it was bad, but it was…” She shook her head, wiped away the tear, and tried to collect herself.
“It was so much more than bad. But he also told me she would have understood why I kept things secret, and even if it meant she became a victim anyway, she wouldn’t have done it any other way. ”
“Then I would believe him. He would know his sister better than anyone else on the team.”
Abruptly, she changed the subject. “I saw you, you know. In the paper. When the paper reported on the lawsuit.”
“Not exactly a ringing endorsement,” he griped.
“On its own, no. But they interviewed a former patient, and something he said struck me as odd. It’s what made me pursue you for the deadmen.
He talked about how he would never, ever believe you were responsible for those women’s deaths because when he had asked you for pain medication, you wouldn’t give it to him.
Now there are several things in that statement to unpack, but that doesn’t sound like a doctor who’s negligent. ”
She watched as Demon shifted in his seat, putting all his attention out the door window. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t make a mistake.”
“One mistake, maybe. Three?”
“It was a long two days. Almost as many hours in surgery as working in total. People get tired. Tired makes you sloppy.”
“Not you, Demon. I’ve seen you go for almost a week without sleep. All of you do it, and you function just fine. And I’ve never seen you even close to being sloppy in anything you’ve done. You’re almost anal-retentive about neatness. Worse than Waters. What really happened? ”
His nose twitched as he worked his jaw like he was biting down hard on his teeth to keep from responding.
She continued to wait.
He took a deep breath. Let it out. “We were all overworked.
As you probably remember from your reports, my team had been on shift for twelve hours when the first accident victim came in, and we worked on fourteen others.
Dense fog in the early rush-hour traffic.
A tanker truck crossed the center line and hit a string of cars basically parked at a standstill.
“The injuries were horrific. Some never made it to the table. We operated for twenty-one hours. Rules say none of us should have been operating on anyone, but there was no one else to do it because everyone had been called in already. They’d even diverted injuries to other hospitals, but the victims just kept coming, so we kept pushing.
“I trusted my team, but I rotated my nurses out so they could take catnaps. It was my anesthesiologist, though, who I didn’t pay attention to.
She was struggling, so she took a bathroom break and snorted a couple of lines of cocaine in order to wake up.
Apparently, it was something she did occasionally but rarely enough that we never knew.
The last three patients we operated on, she fecked up their sedation orders.
Between that and the normal medications we used for pain and infection, they overdosed within a few hours of each other. ”
It would have been so easy to prove he was innocent. “Why did you take the blame?”
“She was a single mom. Three kids. Husband was a total douchebag. Beat her, beat the kids. Was the one who got her into drugs. She was trying so hard to raise her kids on her own while the feckin’ sperm donor rotted in jail for dealing.
Neighbor lady watched the kids when they weren’t in school, and the mom never saw them because she was always pulling extra shifts to pay the bills, whatever.
Her kids would have gone into the system. I couldn’t let her go down like that. ”
“Oh my god. You sacrificed yourself for a woman who could have turned around and done it again the next week!”
“But she didn’t. I made sure of it. I told her I would take the blame, but she had to get clean.
She could never, ever use again. My attorney drew up the paperwork.
They tested her every three to four days for six months.
Got her into an outpatient rehab program so that she could still work and be with her kids.
She’s stayed clean all these years, back on her feet, met a good guy, and he spoils them all rotten. It was worth it for that.”
She wondered if he saw the irony in his condition for saving her job and ruining his life.
He looked out the window. “It was a long time ago. There’s no point talking about it anymore, and I’m not going to. Nothing I do or say now is going to change what happened to me, to my surgical team, and it sure as hell will not change what happened to those women who died.”