Chapter Twenty-three
It’s an out-of-body experience walking back into Grey Tusk General Hospital as a patient.
Outwardly, the building is unremarkable: a one-story seventies concrete box that immediately makes your eyes want to move on.
The architects didn’t concern themselves with aesthetics, choosing instead to clamp the heat and ventilation pipes to the side of the emergency department like tubes and wires connected to a patient.
Inside the sliding glass doors, it’s a punch of industrial light and noise.
On long night shifts, the soundscape made me feel like the hospital was a huge ship traversing the ocean of night: the ever-present hum of the high-volume air exchangers, the electric whir of diagnostic machines, the palpable vibration from loaded stretchers rolling across metal connecting strips in the linoleum.
This place is eerily the same, yet different. Or maybe it’s me who’s changed.
Physically, I’m not injured that badly. My arm hurts like a motherfucker, and I need irrigation and stitches. But I’ll heal.
Emotionally, though… it’s not the shape I’d rather be in when I run into god knows which ex-colleague in the middle of the night. Not exactly one of the triumphant comeuppance fantasies I conjured on those midnights I lay awake, too steeped in injustice to sleep.
I held my head high on the way out of this place, fueled by the fury of being right and losing anyway.
Can I do the same tonight, now that I understand how goddamn sad I was then?
Not to mention how sad I am now. In all probability, I’ve lost my business, my secrets, my last best chance to stay near my friend.
And Lyle.
I recognize the burning feeling in my stomach when I think about him, because I used to feel it all the time when I worked here.
It’s the sensation of knowing something’s wrong and wanting to ignore it.
Wanting the fantasy so badly I’m willing to overlook what’s real.
For an entire year, I told myself he and I were wrong for each other. What if I was right?
At the triage desk sits a nurse I don’t know.
His face looks tired for someone so young, brown skin pasty under the fluorescent lights.
He straps the blood pressure cuff on my uninjured arm with efficient movements, empathetic in the measured way I recognize so well.
He’s learned not to spend all his kindness too early in the shift.
I give him a sanitized version of what happened and don’t tell him I used to work here.
He gloves up, then peels back the edge of my damp, pink-tinged dressing to check out what’s underneath. “There might be a wait to see the doctor.”
“I understand. Could I have some acetaminophen for the pain?”
He cocks his head at the generic drug name. “Are you a health care provider?”
I take a breath, fail to find the right words, and let it out with a defeated huff. “I don’t know.”
His eyes narrow. “Did you hit your head?”
“No, sorry, no head trauma. I meant that I was a doctor. Before. I left medicine after…”
“After,” he says, expression softening, and I don’t correct his impression that I’m referring to the pandemic. “I’m sure you’re missed.”
I nod, throat tight, imagining a world where this could be true.
“There you are.” Sloane appears with two take-out cups from the all-night Tim Hortons in the hospital lobby.
She hands me the one with a tea bag tag dangling from under its lid.
“I’ve never seen you drink coffee, but if you want to make an exception for exceptional circumstances, I also bought something called a double double…
?” Sloane looks dubiously at the second cup.
“It’s good. It’ll make you happy,” I reassure her, wishing real happiness was something that came in a cup.
She takes a sip. “Accurate.”
The nurse frowns at Sloane. “Do I know you?”
With dirt smeared across one cheek, a stained shirt, and third-day hair, she looks a lot like she does in the Nighthawke trailer. “I’m friends with someone who used to work here. Maybe we’ve met?” She’s a good actor; his face smooths out. “Where do we wait?”
I get a cubicle not far from the triage station.
Sloane helps me up onto the crinkly plastic mattress of the stretcher, where a different nurse cuts off my shirt, then slides on a patient gown, taking care with my injured arm.
Once she’s gone, Sloane kicks up the footrests of the wheelchair I rode here in, collapsing it with fight-sequence efficiency.
“You’re a pro with that.”
She smiles grimly. “Lots of practice.”
We wait in silence. It’s hard to keep up light conversation in the emergency room. Even if I weren’t distracted by the throbbing in my arm, my brain wants to go back and pick at everything that happened.
If I’d been warmer to Petra, things might have turned out differently.
If I’d pushed harder to get Lyle to believe me.
If I hadn’t put off calling Sharon. If I’d bailed out on the Love Boat at the first sign of trouble, instead of calling Sloane and faking the engagement and walking deeper into the quicksand with every step.
If I hadn’t frozen when Lyle needed just one person on his side. If he hadn’t left at the moment I needed him most.
If I weren’t in love with him now.
Sloane’s phone chimes. “Whoa. Brent has not learned the art of the brief text. Hold please, reading… McHuge and the dog are at the vet; looks like she’ll stay the night for monitoring.
Lori and Mitch are safe at the hotel. Brent, Willow, and Petra are heading over to the Mountie detachment to give statements. Is there anyone else I should call?”
I check the five-dollar IKEA clock above the cubicle door: ten minutes to midnight. Tobin and Liz need their rest, but it’s past time I called Sharon.
Maybe the only bright spot in this whole disaster is watching my sister get flustered at being fangirled over by Sharon’s husband.
“Hi, is this Sharon Keller-Yakub? Sloane Summers, I’m a guest at the Love B—yes, you can put it on speaker.
Who am I talking to? Yes, good evening Mr. Yakub, it’s nice to meet you too.
I… um, I really can’t reveal how faithful the movie is to the books, but I hope you enjoy it.
I’m calling because… oh, aren’t you sweet.
I have limited power to cast extras, but I’ll see what I can do if there’s a sequel.
Sharon, could we talk business for a minute?
A few things happened tonight. To put it mildly. ”
There’s a light knock at the door. “Hi, it’s Dr. Winters.”
My heart trips wildly in my chest. I don’t know Evan Winters that well; he joined the department after me and promptly took a two-year leave of absence to work at the World Health Organization in Geneva. He was still away when I left. But there’s no possibility he hasn’t heard gossip about me.
Sloane holds the phone away from her ear, mouthing, Should I hang up?
I gesture around like, Seriously? This is my wheelhouse , and wave her out of the room. She ducks through the door, her voice fading as Evan closes it.
“I hear you found yourself on the wrong end of a dog bite, Doctor.”
The hunch in my shoulders unwinds somewhat at his friendly “Doctor.” I could have drawn a much shorter straw than Evan.
“Scratch, not a bite.”
“Let’s take a look.” He makes doctor noises as he presses gloved fingers to the ragged edges of skin left by Babe’s claws. “Hmm. I might want a few stitches. Hang tight, I’ll get a suture tray.”
He’s back in under a minute with a sealed sterile tray piled with disposable supplies. He rolls an equipment stand over to the bedside and adjusts the height. It’s all so familiar, yet strange.
“Freezing first, then irrigation, then closure. Sound good? I’ll do my best to get your ink to line up, but there might be some spots where it’s not perfect.”
I was good at suturing once. Good at setting bones and reducing dislocations. Putting things back together so you couldn’t tell one side had ever been separated from the other. Putting myself back together and pretending I was fine, too.
But maybe it’s time to stop hiding the evidence of my own hurts.
“I don’t mind if the tats get edited. And you don’t need to clear your plans with me. I’m the patient.”
“You’re still one of our own,” he says. “Or you could be, if you wanted to. Which I guess you don’t. Kat says you never replied to her emails.”
You could be, if you wanted to…?
“I blocked the hospital domain,” I say bluntly, wanting not to reveal too much. Asking for my job back, accidentally or on purpose, ranks somewhere below “self-administer random electric shocks” on my list of priorities.
“Then this will be an exciting conversation. Hold still now.”
I close my eyes, letting Evan’s one-sided conversation wash over me.
“Last September, someone forwarded your dataset to the hospital CEO and the dean of the medical school. Both launched investigations. Turn your head to the right. Here comes the freezing—little poke. In December, the emergency department got sanctioned by the hospital for failing to meet our mandated gender diversity targets. We’ll get sanctioned again this year; no women will even apply here since you left.
It’s a hard sell for genderqueer folks, too.
Last little poke. You hanging in there?”
“I’m good.” The rhythm of his patter reminds me of falling asleep as a child with the sounds of adult conversation and television banter filtering through my bedroom walls.
I worked at Grey Tusk General longer than I’ve lived at any single address in my life.
The language of this place is the language of home, in a very real way.
“The university pulled the residents back to Vancouver pending a review of the learning environment. Without them, our workload increased by 20 percent overnight. People started leaving for greener pastures,” he says, listing a handful of men I used to know, pausing meaningfully when he gets to my old department chief’s name.
“Throw in the postpandemic labor shortages, and we’re on the verge of closing the ER some nights and diverting patients to Squamish. ”
I thought I’d feel triumphant hearing about the downfall of the place I spent so much time hating. Vindicated, at least.
But I don’t. It feels good to know I left a mark here, but mostly, it’s sad to see the damage done.
“It must be hard for the people who are left.”
“Yeah. There’s not enough of us to go around. Patients are angry. I’ve been working my ass off since six; haven’t made a dent in the waitlist. And I probably shouldn’t have told you any of this, because Kat was asking you to come back.”
My chest snags on an inhale.
Come back. I’ve literally dreamed of this moment, where the people who threw me away begged me to take them back once I didn’t need them anymore. Although given tonight, maybe I do need them.
In my fantasies, I didn’t have to choose between telling off my enemies and coming back in a blaze of glory. In real life, I’ll get neither of those, but there would be a job, at least, if the Love Boat died. It doesn’t make my stomach feel great, but my student loans would like it.
Evan pauses, gloved hands poised on the sterile towels he’s draped around my arm.
“I heard about what happened to you, Stellar. Words probably feel pretty empty from where you’re standing, but I’d like to think I would’ve backed you up if I’d been here.
A lot of people in the department would be glad to see you again. ”
“Um,” I say, unable to summon something angrier, like they can keep dreaming , or something smarter, like send me an offer, and I’ll consider .
I can’t process Evan’s pitch right now. I need room to grieve everything I hoped for with the Love Boat, everything I worked for, every part of my heart I handed over and might not get back.
So I ask, “What would you do if you were me?”
“Ha. My first instinct would be to tell them to go fuck themselves, honestly. But my second instinct…” Evan waggles his head like Will I, won’t I . “I’d probably be curious. Maybe I’d give them a chance to show me they’d changed.”
He ties the last stitch, then cuts the suture with a flourish.
“Acetaminophen and ibuprofen every six hours. I’ll give you a prescription for antibiotics, but don’t fill it unless you see signs of infection.
Bag it when you shower. No baths or swimming until the stitches come out in ten days.
No strenuous exercise for a couple of weeks.
” He disposes of the needles in the biohazardous waste bin.
No exercise. No getting wet.
I should’ve put it together before now.
This injury is the end of the road for me. And where will Lyle find another doctor? Even a rescue paddler will be tough to hire at this point in the summer season. This situation is getting worse all the time.
“Knock, knock,” Sloane sings, peeking around the door. “Sorry, that took forever. Sharon’s called an emergency meeting tomorrow at—” Sloane breaks off, seeing that Evan’s still here.
“Come on in. We’re just finishing up here,” Evan says, stripping off his gloves. He angles his head to indicate Sloane should take the chair. “I’ll come back with that prescription.”
The second he leaves, Sloane’s all over me. “You’re too fucking pale. Did he give you enough freezing? Let me see the stitches. I know a plastic surgeon in LA who can make any scar disappear.”
“Jesus, Sloane. It’s fine. I’m fine. What did Sharon—”
But I don’t get to hear what Sharon said, because Lyle’s voice cuts through the ER soundscape.
“I know she’s here. She’s my fiancée. Now can you tell me where she is?”