Along Came Zoe

The woman pulled a newspaper from her bag, slapped the front page on his desk. Did Jenny Have To Die? the headline read. “I don’t know what kind of whitewash job you did on this reporter, but we both know this doesn’t even come close to telling the real story.”

He looked at her. So this was the problem—the Todd Bowen article about Jenny Dixon. “And, what in your opinion, is the real story?”

“Okay, so you closed the emergency neurology services, but you didn’t stop being a neurosurgeon, right? You could have come in.” She nodded her head toward the newspaper he had just moved out of her reach. “I’m sure you had some terrific reason, I just thought maybe you’d do me a favor and share it with me.”

Phillip could hear his ex-wife calling his name. “I’ll call you back,” he told Deanna, and put down the phone.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the woman. “You’ll need to talk to someone in administration.” She didn’t appear convinced, so he stood up. “Look ma’am—”

“Ma’am. God, I hate being called ‘ma’am.’”

And he hated the fact that he was having the damnedest time keeping his eyes off her breasts. Words he’d long forgotten he ever knew ran through his brain. Wench. Moll Flanders. He forced himself to look up at her face. Amber eyes and a full mouth. Her clothes, he thought, would just slip off. Her breasts already appeared in danger of escape.

She noticed his focus and tugged at her blouse. As he marshaled his thoughts, it occurred to him that perhaps she was part of a gag perpetrated by one of his partners. Last year, on April first, he’d walked in to his office to find a temporary secretary in a fringed buckskin jacket sitting at Eileen’s desk, snapping gum and filing her nails. Eileen was sick, she’d told him. After several hours of horrendous inefficiency, he’d finally asked for the name of her temporary agency so that he could send her back. Just then, his partner, Stu, an inveterate prankster, had walked into the office, laughing uproariously as he confessed to the joke. Later, Eileen confessed, too; Stu had roped her into it. Stu might have struck again. Frankly, he would prefer that she was the latest of Stu’s jokes, rather than someone completely on the level.

“I didn’t catch your name,” he finally said.

“I didn’t throw it to you,” she said.

He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

“Defensive posture,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Arms crossed like that.” She folded hers in the same way. “Denotes guardedness. Keep out, that’s what it says.”

He looked beyond her shoulder, hoping to spot Eileen. “So your name is…” he prompted.

“Um…” She appeared to be thinking about the question. “You don’t know, huh?”

“Should I?”

“Course not.” Another pause while she seemed to be thinking things over. “Anyway, my name isn’t important. I’m here on behalf of Jenny. The girl who died in the ambulance. All the Jennys and all their parents and families, who assume that if they need emergency room services, they’ll receive appropriate medical care.”

“Are you a relative?”

She looked at him. “Not relevant. Jenny could be a perfect stranger and her death would still be tragic and unnecessary.”

Phillip said nothing. He couldn’t. After the Bowen article, the hospital’s legal team had been crystal clear—he couldn’t discuss Jenny Dixon. Maybe he should send the woman down to legal.

“As if it isn’t awful enough to lose a child,” she said, “but then to know that this child didn’t have to die. You want to know my name? I’ll tell you what. You can call me Concerned. Frustrated. Mad as Hell.”

Or Crazy. Phillip reconsidered calling security. Last week in L.A., an angry family member of a former patient had walked into administration and fatally shot the assistant hospital administrator. The woman sitting across from him had a large yellow straw bag at her feet. Could be a gun inside for all he knew.

She leaned forward and jabbed at the newspaper on his desk. “How would you feel if this were your daughter?”

Caught off guard by the question, he felt a moment of panic. Did this woman know Molly? Just then his secretary appeared behind the woman’s shoulder. “Dr. Samuels on line one, Dr. Barry. Administration on line two and you need to get down to conference—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The woman nodded her head. “We get the idea, Dr. Barry is one busy dude. But I think, we, the Jennys of the world, deserve some answers. Why wouldn’t you come in that night—”

He needed to stop her questions. Now. “First of all, this isn’t about me. The trauma-system problem is a nationwide issue…” He wanted her to leave. The mild curiosity he’d initially felt had subsided along with his patience. She was, he was certain now, just another run-of-the mill crackpot. Her concern was probably genuine enough, but her methods needed work. “Second, unless you understand all the facts—”

“Exactly why I’m here.” She settled into the chair in a way that clearly meant to say she had all day. “What I want to understand is this. As Jenny was riding around in the ambulance, what exactly prevented someone, anyone, from coming in to save her? Really, I’m trying to imagine. You, Dr. Neurosurgeon, are asleep in your multimillion-dollar oceanfront house when the phone rings. A girl will die unless you come in to save her. What do you say? ‘Too bad, that’s the breaks,’ and just roll over and go back to sleep?”

The arrival of a security guard, apparently summoned by Eileen, saved him from having to answer the question, but not from feeling the bite of her anger.

“Brilliant solution,” the woman said as a blue-uniformed guard, who probably outweighed her by two hundred pounds or so, took her arm. “But you haven’t heard the last from me.”

SOMETIMES BRETT FELT he was surrounded by crazies. Like his mom, for instance, when she made him go sit in the car like he was some little kid while she ragged to his dad about taking him surfing.

Or like last week, when he got home from school and she was reading this magazine article.

“Watcha reading, Mom?” Like he cared, but he was trying to be nice. So she gives him this guilty look like he’s caught her doing something wrong.

Just because she looked so sneaky, he took a look over her shoulder to check out what she was reading. A full-page ad.

“It’s a moment all parents dread. The first time they hand over the car keys to their teen driver.” He read some more. ‘’Drivers in the sixteen-to-twenty-two-year-old age group are involved in more accidents and fatalities than…”

Then he figured out what the ad was all about and stopped reading.

“Jeez, Mom.”

“What?”

“See, that’s what I mean about you making a big deal out of everything. Roger’s folks are buying him a car—”

“And you can use the truck…”

“To go to the store. Big deal.” As soon as he said it, he knew he’d made a mistake. A few weeks ago, he’d driven the truck to pick up some stuff for her from the market and then, just because it felt so cool to be sitting behind the wheel, even if the truck was kind of a dump, he’d driven over to Roger’s, which was only three blocks from the market, but then Roger wasn’t home so he’d driven to another friend’s house and hung out there for a while. His mom had climbed all over him for that. She’d been standing at the door waiting as he pulled up.

“Three hours for a five-minute trip to the market?”

“Come on, Mom. I was just hanging out at—”

“Just hanging out. How did I know you hadn’t had an accident? How did I know you weren’t lying in an emergency room somewhere?”

He’d been grounded for a week, which he pretty much expected but then when she didn’t mention it again, he thought she’d forgotten all about it. Right.

“It’s a tracking device.” She was looking at the ad again. “When you’re driving, it will send me reports on your location, whether you’re speeding…”

Yep, his mom was definitely crazy, all right. And now, today, he walks in and she’s in the kitchen, standing over a screeching kettle. Just standing there, her back to him, with the kettle hissing and screeching away. Screech…rattle…hssssssssss. Standing there, like she had no idea it was practically falling off the stove, it was shaking so hard.

He coughed so she would know he was there, but she didn’t turn around.

“Mom?”

Finally. She turned off the gas, banged a mug on the counter and dropped a tea bag in it.