17. Brendan
Brendan
Despite my best efforts at going back to sleep following Adrian’s pre-dawn departure, my brain wouldn’t let me rest. Nor would my damn ferret.
Puck decided to climb atop my chest and stare at me while I closed my eyes.
He didn’t move or dance or jump. He just sat there and stared—which was as effective as if he’d banged a drum.
My internal paranoia kicked in because my overactive subconscious knew I was being watched.
So, with little choice in the matter, I decided to get my day started a few hours earlier than usual. I had a complex case to solve, and a hundred other run-the-business tasks to complete. A few hours of peace in the office would do me good. At least, that was my story.
It was six o’clock, an hour I’d never seen in my workspace.
I was humming when I unlocked the clinic.
Approximately four bars into something with a low, insistent drum line—one of the songs Adrian moved to on Saturdays—I realized I was humming and stopped.
Standing there, in the quiet of the empty waiting room with my keys in my hand, I struggled to acknowledge what had just happened.
I had been humming.
Me.
A devout non-hummer or singer or anything musically inclined.
Was humming.
I put my keys in my pocket and went to make coffee and did not hum again.
Here is a thing I would not have said out loud, even standing alone in my own dark waiting room at six in the morning: A small, quiet, badly-raised part of me had been mildly surprised, that first night, that the song stuck, that I’d carried a go-go dancer’s Saturday-night playlist home in my head like it was something of mine, as though the music a man danced to in a Speedo belonged to a different, lesser shelf than the music a person was allowed to simply love.
I really didn’t like that part of me.
I had located it, the way you locate a funny noise in an engine—not yet sure what it is, only sure it shouldn’t be there. I made a mental note to look under the hood later, which was my lifelong strategy for feelings. I had a flawless track record of accomplishing nothing.
Then I made more coffee, because that, at least, I knew how to finish.
Marcus arrived at eight-fifteen, which was his standard time, precise to within two minutes on any given day.
I heard him go through his opening routine.
He unlocked the door, turned on all the lights, flicked his computer to life, and began his quiet organization of the front desk that he performed every morning like a liturgy.
Then I heard him stop.
I looked up from my desk because I felt him standing in my doorway.
“Good morning,” I said.
He squinted at me for a moment. “Good morning, Dr. Davis.”
Without another word, he went back to the front desk.
Thirty seconds later, he called down the hallway, “Dr. Davis?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that you humming when I came in?”
“No,” I said.
A pause.
“Okay.” He didn’t sound convinced.
Diane arrived at eight-thirty, dropped her bag by the front desk, and appeared in my doorway with the unerring instinct of a woman who had been reading this particular room for years.
She stared at me. I stared at my chart.
“You look different,” she said.
“I look exactly the same,” I said.
“You look like someone who slept well.”
“I always sleep well.”
“You look like someone who slept well for specific reasons,” she said.
“Diane.”
“Doc.”
“Diane.”
She leaned on the doorframe and continued to stare, and investigator who’d caught a whiff of something and refused to relent. “I’m just making an observation; and, well, Marcus said you were humming.”
“I wasn’t humming.”
“He said it was something with a drum line.”
I nearly choked as I swallowed.
“Marcus misheard,” I said, glancing up. “Room one ready?”
She squinted at me the same way Marcus had earlier. Unlike Marcus, she had the clear-eyed patience of a seasoned interrogator who had time and knew it. “Room one is ready,” she said. “Golden doodle, annual wellness. Very normal.”
The golden doodle was named Biscotti and was, as promised, completely normal and very fluffy and extraordinarily pleased about both of those facts.
Her owner, a teacher named Margaret who had been bringing Biscotti to the clinic since she was a puppy, sat in the corner chair and gave me the same update she gave every year.
“My baby has a good appetite, good energy, sleeps at the foot of the bed, and still has a vendetta against the neighbor’s sprinkler system. ”
Yes, she used that line every single year. Owners were almost as predictable as their pets.
“She barked at it for forty minutes last Tuesday,” Margaret said.
“Any changes in the barking otherwise?”
“Just the sprinkler. It’s personal between them.” She watched me complete the exam with the comfortable familiarity of a regular. “You seem cheerful this morning, Dr. Davis.”
“I’m always cheerful.”
“You’re usually focused,” she said. “Cheerful is different.”
I handed her Biscotti’s discharge summary and thanked her for coming in.
The imaging from Dr. Reyes had been sitting in a folder on my desk since Friday.
I’d been back to it four times over the weekend, twice before Adrian arrived on Sunday, once in the ten minutes after he left, when the apartment was quiet and I needed something to do with my brain, and once more late Monday morning before I kissed Puck’s head and drove to the office far too early.
It was, as complicated cases went, genuinely interesting.
And most complicated.
The presentation Dr. Reyes had described—intermittent lethargy, reduced appetite, occasional labored breathing that resolved without intervention—pointed in several directions at once, which was either very helpful or very unhelpful, depending on how you approached it.
I preferred to think of it as helpful. A case that pointed everywhere was a case that hadn’t been asked the right questions yet.
I spread the imaging across my desk between the morning and afternoon patient loads, letting the picture build itself. The pulmonary imaging was the interesting part. It wasn’t alarming, but it was interesting.
There was something in the density readings that didn’t fit the presentation cleanly.
I thought it was too subtle to be the primary issue, but too consistent to be incidental.
I had the beginnings of a theory that I wasn’t ready to call a theory yet.
It was more of a direction or a gut feeling, a question I wanted to ask the image before I committed to anything.
Turning to my laptop, I fired off an email to the zoo. I was scribbling notes when Marcus knocked.
“Dr. Reyes from Lowry Park,” he said. “Line two.”
“Jesus, that was fast.”
Marcus shrugged and stepped back toward the front.
I picked up with, “Dr. Reyes, how are you?”
“Good morning, Dr. Davis. I’m great, thanks.” Her voice held the same carefully prepared quality it always did. “I wanted to ask about the pulmonary imaging. You mentioned in your email that you had a thought about the density readings.”
“I’m not sure I would even call it a thought. It’s more of . . . let’s call it a direction.”
“I understand the distinction.” A brief pause. “We had another episode last night. It was brief, and it resolved on its own, but I wanted you to know.”
“What kind of episode?”
“Labored breathing that lasted approximately eight minutes. She was calm throughout, which is consistent with her character.” I heard her shuffle some papers. “She’s eating this morning and alert. There don’t appear to be any residual signs.”
I glanced at the imaging on my desk. “Can you get me video of the next episode, if there is one?”
“We already have cameras in the enclosure. I can turn on monitoring.”
“Please do that, and I want bloodwork, a full panel, not just the standard. I’m looking for something specific.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’d rather not say yet,” I said. “I don’t want to send you looking for something that isn’t there.”
She was quiet for a moment. “But you have a theory?”
“No, just a direction,” I repeated.
“I’ll take a direction,” she said. “We’ve been going in circles for six weeks.”
I restated what bloodwork I needed, confirmed the imaging protocol, and hung up, then sat with the imaging for another few minutes.
My theory, my direction, was specific enough to feel real and vague enough to be wrong, which was the exact reason I tried not to get attached to new ideas.
I had been wrong about directions before.
The imaging said one thing. The bloodwork might say another. The truth was usually in the conversation between them.
I made a note to call Peter. He was always good at brainstorming challenging diagnoses.
Lunchtime at the clinic was always a frustrating negotiation.
Diane’s position was that I should leave the building, walk somewhere, eat food that required the use of utensils, and return like a person who understood the concept of breaks.
My position was that I had a complicated case and a full afternoon and a desk that was right there in front of me.
We had been having this negotiation for two years. Neither of us had fully won.
Today, Diane arrived in my doorway at twelve-fifteen with a container from a place two blocks over and set it on my desk like a judge delivering a verdict.
“Marcus called the order in,” she said.
“You mean you and Marcus,” I corrected with a half smirk.
“Marcus and I are allies,” she said, smirkless. “We have been since the capybara incident. Shared trauma bonds people, ya know?” She sat in the chair across from my desk, which she only did when she had something to say or some unsolicited advice to offer. “So.”
“So?”
“The humming.”
“Diane.”
“The humming and the being unusually cheerful and the looking different.” She crossed her arms. “You can tell me there’s nothing to tell, and I will respect that completely.
I will also continue to notice things and draw my own conclusions, which will be correct, because I am always right about these things, and you know it. ”