9. The War Council
The War Council
Marisol Vega staged an intervention on a Tuesday, using the printed appointment book as a visual aid, which I think tells you everything about Marisol.
It was the second week of the silence. I had come downstairs that morning at seven-forty in scrubs with my hair wet and had walked past the coffee cart without stopping, which I had been doing for nine days, and Tess had let me, which is not like Tess.
Then at one o'clock I came out of chair two to find the front door locked, the CLOSED sign turned, Tess sitting on the waiting-room sofa with a bag of the good biscotti, Marisol standing behind the reception desk with the printout, Anh Trinh hovering in the hallway looking as though she'd been invited and wasn't certain it was legal, and Floss sitting up on the reception desk itself — on the desk, where she is not allowed, ever, in five years — in her Chief Investigator bandana.
"Who put the dog on the desk," I said.
"I put the dog on the desk," said Marisol. "Sit down."
I sat down.
Marisol turned the printout around. It was the appointment book for the coming three weeks, and she had gone through it in red pen, which is a thing I have never seen her do.
"Eleven cancellations Thursday," she said. "Nine Friday. Six yesterday. Twenty-six in one week, and eight of them are people I have known for twenty years, and four of them didn't have the guts to say why." She let that sit. "Now. Look at the red."
The red was every gap. There were a great many.
"That's what it looks like," Marisol said.
"I'm not going to soften it and I'm not going to tell you it's fine.
In eleven weeks this practice is in trouble it doesn't come back from, and you know it, because you've been in that drawer every night for a month, and you think I don't hear you open a drawer in a building I've worked in for twenty-two years.
" She put the pen down. "So. That's the situation.
Now we're going to talk about what you're doing, which is nothing, and why, which is a man. "
"Marisol—"
"I'm not finished. Tess."
Tess put the biscotti down.
"You haven't cried in front of me once," Tess said.
"Not once, in two weeks, and I've been sitting out there at seven every morning for nine days for exactly that purpose and you've walked past me every single time.
" Her voice wobbled and she took it back under control, which she does by getting sharper.
"And I know why. It's the same reason you had a loan statement in a drawer in September and told him fine.
You've decided that the correct response to being frightened is to go and be frightened by yourself, quietly, where it doesn't inconvenience anybody, and Lila, honest to God, it is the single worst thing about you. "
"That's not—"
"Grant put your name on a loan," said Tess Okafor, "and you paid it off alone in four years and you never once let me help, and I offered, I offered four times, and you know what you said?
You said it's my name. And I have watched you build an entire personality out of that sentence.
" She was crying now, openly, which she does the way she does everything, without embarrassment.
"And now you've decided Nate left because that's what they do, and you've decided it privately, and you haven't asked anybody, and you're going to sit here in the red until the bank takes it. "
The waiting room was extremely quiet. Floss, on the desk, put her ears flat and looked between us.
"He went quiet," I said. My voice came out wrong. "Tess, he went quiet the week I got named in a newspaper."
"Yes."
"That's not a coincidence—"
"It might not be," said Tess. "It might be exactly what you think.
But you don't know, and you've been treating not-knowing like it's the same as knowing, for two weeks, because that way you don't have to go and find out.
" She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Which is the other worst thing about you, and it's the same thing, actually. It's all one thing."
"Enough," said Marisol.
And she came around the desk and stood in front of me with her arms folded, forty-five years old, twenty-two years in this building, and said the thing that turned the whole autumn around.
"You are going about this wrong, mija. All of it.
You're sitting here waiting to find out if you're a suspect and waiting to find out if a man loves you, and both of those are things other people decide about you.
" She pointed at the ceiling, at the street, at the forty-foot face across it.
"So stop waiting. There is a dead dentist across the road and a building full of something rotten, and the police have the room and the phone records and the cameras, and every single one of them is a thing we don't have. "
"So what do we have?"
"We have their mouths," said Marisol Vega.
Nobody said anything.
"Nineteen people came here on a Saturday," she said.
"Eleven of them were his. You looked in eleven mouths with a treatment plan in your hand and you came out of it white as a sheet and you have not said one word about it to me in ten days, and I have not asked, because you were drowning. I'm asking now. What did you see?"
I looked at the four of them. At Anh Trinh in the hallway, twenty-nine years old, who had volunteered for a Saturday and brought her own charts. At Tess with her face wet. At Marisol. At my dog, sitting on the desk where she has never been allowed.
"Two of them had already had the work done," I said.
"Crowns. Billed, staged, signed for, a year of somebody's benefits gone.
" I heard my own voice go flat and clinical, which is what it does when it's finally safe.
"And it isn't in their mouths. There's nothing there.
Original enamel, no prep, no margin, no restoration of any kind.
Marisol, somebody billed two insurance companies for eight crowns that do not exist and were never placed, and the patients don't know, because why would they? Nobody looks in their own mouth."
Marisol Vega put both hands flat on the reception desk.
"Well," she said. "There it is."
"I don't know what it is yet."
"It's the thing you can do that nobody else can.
" She was already reaching for a legal pad.
"The police can't look in a mouth. The insurance company can't look in a mouth.
That FBI of yours can't look in a mouth.
There's maybe forty people in this county who can look in a mouth and tell you with certainty what's in it and what isn't, and eleven of them are in Goleta and don't care, and one of them is standing in her own waiting room feeling sorry for herself.
" She uncapped a pen. "How many did we see Saturday? "
"Nineteen."
"And how many people have gone through that building since August?"
"Hundreds," I said slowly. "Thousands, maybe. They were doing families on Saturdays."
"Then we need more mouths," said Marisol.
Tess started laughing. It was slightly hysterical and entirely welcome and it set Floss off, who leapt down off the desk and did a lap of the waiting room with a squeaky toy, and Anh Trinh said, from the hallway, in the tone of a young woman deciding her entire career in one sentence: "I could do Saturdays. "
"You'd be working for free," I said.
"I'd be working," said Dr. Anh Trinh, "for a reason," and shrugged, and went back to her patient.
We opened for free second opinions every Saturday in October.
Marisol ran the phones. Tess put a chalkboard out on the sidewalk — FREE SECOND OPINIONS · SATURDAYS · NO APPOINTMENT · YES THE DOG IS HERE — and it filled, and it kept filling, and in the second week the Independent ran a small piece about it, and it filled more.
And on the desk, in a locked drawer, in Marisol's handwriting, a list started to grow.