Mount Mercy

I looked at the old guy. The sudden fear I saw in his eyes, just at the mention of Seth’s dad, made me go cold inside. They hadn’t been nervous about being caught by the cops. They’d been nervous about what Seth’s dad would do if they got themselves arrested. Who the hell was this guy?

“A half hour,” I told them. “Let us do the ultrasound and you can get out of here.”

“I can do it!” said Taylor, so fast it was almost one word. She and Seth looked at each other and grinned again and she blushed. Seth reluctantly nodded and the two men sat down.

As I walked away and grabbed the chart for my next case, I couldn’t shake my uneasiness. The instant that ultrasound was done, I wanted those guys the hell out of the ER. They seemed harmless enough themselves, but they were mixed up in something bad. Bad enough that I didn’t want them bringing it here.

4

Amy

THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA is a lot like a high school cafeteria. Bartell and the other suits are the teachers and they stick strictly to their own table, if they deign to eat in the cafeteria at all. The ER staff are the jocks, loud and confident, fist-bumping and back-slapping. The medical students are the new kids, big-eyed and anxious. And surgeons sit at the geeks’ table in the corner. That’s where I was, on my own, American Journal of Surgery propped up between my coffee and my tray so I could hide behind it.

I was always going to be an introvert. From the time I was toddling around our apartment, my parents could tell I was taking after my dad, a biologist who studied insect anatomy. I preferred books to playing ball, went quiet and big-eyed around other kids and had my dad’s unnatural focus, happy to sit on his knee and peer through a microscope for hours.

But it was okay because my mom was this glittering, sparkly sunbeam of a woman who dragged me to other kids’ birthday parties and forced me out into the sunshine to hula-hoop with her. At first, I couldn’t understand how she and my dad could be in love when they were so very different. As I got older, I realized she was the puzzle piece that fit with him exactly, balancing him out. With both of them together, I had a hope of turning out something like normal.

And then, when I was six, she started to get this pain in her side. A pain that made our doctor look worried and send her for tests. And then she went to hospital... and didn’t come home.

For two months, my dad and I visited her every day as the cancer destroyed her one organ at a time. The doctors fighting to save her were heroes, in my eyes. When she kept getting worse, I wasn’t angry at them. I just wanted to help.

At her funeral, squeezing my dad’s hand as they lowered the casket, I said, I want to be a doctor.

And, tears running down his face, he said okay.

He probably forgot about it within a few days, but I didn’t. Studying was a way to cope with the pain and without my mom to coax me away from the books, I became a recluse, spending every break and lunch hour in the school library memorizing anatomy. My dad reacted the same way: devastated at losing her, he buried himself in his work. When I ran out of textbooks, I’d help him. While other girls were braiding each other’s hair and talking about boys, I was preparing microscope slides. It turned out I’d inherited my dad’s steady hands. We loved each other, supported each other, but we were two introverts holed up in a house with no one to drag us outside. Each day, I became a little more isolated, a little more shy.

The other kids bullied me mercilessly: I was so awkward, so weird, it was easy for the girls to make fun of me and for the boys to make me blush. So I learned not to draw attention. I got smaller and smaller until I could walk into a room and no one would even notice I was there.

When it came time for college and I told my dad I wanted to go to med school, he tried to talk me out of it. People like us do better in a lab, he said. But I was stubbornly determined and, eventually, he nodded. The day I went off to med school was the happiest day of my life.

But medicine was nothing like I expected. I soaked up the science like a sponge, but when we started to do rounds and had to take histories and present cases, I mumbled and flushed. When a question was asked, I didn’t have the confidence to speak up. Worse, school had taught me to be invisible, so no one noticed me or realized I needed help. The residents teaching us just plain forgot about me.