Code Blues (34 page)

Mireille touched Tori's hand. "Ohhh, Tori.
It makes me so happy to hear this. Yes, I loved him more
than—anyone. He said I was his little star."

I shifted in my plastic patio chair. Little
star?

"That's beautiful," said Tori. They looked
at each other intently.

Their connection completely bypassed me. I
could've been the terrier at the next table. I tried to tell myself
it was a good thing. Mireille was more likely to confess if she
forgot all about me.

"Yes." Mireille smiled. "He was proud of me,
both personally and professionally. He encouraged me to present at
my first surgical conference. He couldn't come with me, but we
talked the whole time." She patted her white bag, indicating her
cell phone. "He was right. I was glad I went. Everything was
perfect. We were true equals. Soul mates."

So why did he dump her?

Tori laid her hand on Mireille's. Mireille
smiled, but her eyes were glistening.

The server appeared with a red plastic tray.
She clicked our drinks on the table and swished off.

My smoothie was a little thin, but otherwise
quite tasty. I played with the straw to give me something to do. I
felt uncomfortable with Mireille's emotion. It was easier to think
of her as a charging rhino than a wounded woman.

Mireille ripped open a pack of sugar and
stirred it into her coffee. Her metal spoon clinked against her
ceramic cup more than was strictly necessary. She said,
matter-of-factly, "That woman preyed on his weakness."

I set my smoothie back on
the table. Tori pressed her knee against mine for a second. I got
the code:
shut it
.

Mireille gave a hard laugh and released her
spoon, letting it clatter on the edge of the cup. "It's quite
simple. Kurt loved to help people. He couldn't resist it. That was
why he loved family medicine, why he worked in a teaching centre,
why he chose St. Joseph's. The more trouble people were in, the
more irresistible he found them." She glanced at me for the first
time. "His cell phone and pager rang at all hours. I told him,
'Look, Kurt, I'm only a medical student, but I know this. You have
to set limits. This is what all our professors are telling
us.'"

I couldn't speak. I heard a high-pitched
ringing in my ears. I knew she was telling the truth right here,
right now.

"But no. He wanted to be the hero. He wanted
to be available. Even to his patients who quit smoking, he told
them to call if they were thinking of smoking!" She flapped her
hand, and not just because at least five people had lit up around
us. "This was quite apart from all the residents and medical
students. Bob Clarkson continually asked for meetings. It was too
much." She shook her head and repeated, more softly, "Too
much."

"Did he cut back?" Tori asked softly.

Mireille's lips tightened. "No." The
syllable was clipped. "He went back to a woman who told him that
everything he did was perfect. But in the end, he chose—" Her voice
broke. She pulled her spoon out and dropped it back on her tray.
She swallowed her coffee. After a minute, she said almost steadily,
"He was coming back to me. I know he was."

Chapter 20

In parting, Mireille pressed kisses and a
hug on Tori and even a peck-peck shoulder squeeze on me. I forced
myself to hug her back, feeling more awkward than ever.

Back in my apartment, Tori helped cut open a
box of CD's. I said, "So, do you believe her?"

Tori shrugged. "It's difficult to know what
to believe."

I made a face. "Can't you just say yes or
no?"

She laughed and cut open a box with an
Exacto-knife. "I'm sure she believes what she's saying."

"So what?"

She shrugged. Another non-answer.

I pulled a handful of CD's out. I couldn't
bear to sell them, even though I only listen to MP3's now. "You
know what, maybe we'd better leave these until I find my CD rack. I
know it's somewhere."

Tori moved on to the next box, labeled
Medical Books, and applied the blade.

I said, "Actually, you know what bothered me
the most?"

She murmured, "What she said about
Kurt."

"Exactly. About him being a martyr,
basically. You think it's true?"

Tori hesitated. "He enjoyed it. But yes, it
was true. He was always available." She ripped open the flaps of
the box.

"Yeah. It made him a great
doctor and a great teacher. But I bet it didn't make him the
world's greatest boyfriend. I'd need someone who was more
there
for me
. And
not just helping me with my poster for a surgical conference." I
peered inside the box. "Oh, those are more notes from med school.
Damn, I wonder where my ACLS went."

I spun
The Best of Miles Davis
on my CD
player, which was sitting in the corner behind some boxes. Miles's
melancholy tones hit home today. Kurt had been universally loved
and lauded for giving so much of himself. That was the way doctors
used to be, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for births,
deaths, fevers, sore throats, and things that went bump in the
night. Everyone loved and respected the town doctor.

Things changed. I wasn't sure where,
exactly. But now, there were walk-in clinics, academic physicians
who worked in research centres, and ever-fewer old-fashioned family
docs. The public had lost respect for us, the money wasn't as good,
and, perhaps as a consequence, our generation of doctors were not
as willing to sacrifice their whole lives to medicine. Surgeons
were still hard core, especially during residency. But most
physicians wanted to live, too. We usually banded together in call
groups to arrange time off. At St. Joseph's, the doctors took turns
backing up the resident-on-call for the FMC. There was no need for
Kurt to be on call 24/7.

So what did you do, if you
were the old-fashioned type, medicine
über
alles
, and you went into family medicine,
which is looked down upon as a more slack field? Kurt could have
gone the rural route. Instead, he chose to stay in Montreal, but he
selected the most derelict hospital he could find, and advertised
far and wide that he was there for everyone. All the time. He was
going to be the St. Joseph's Superman.

I'd never known the guy, and I couldn't
really guess what motivated him to work like that. But it finally
made sense to me. I'd been wondering to myself why anyone killed
him, when everyone seemed to love him. Like I said, in fiction,
it's always the biggest stinker who gets knocked off, and no one
knows who did it, because everyone else plus the cat has a good
motive. But for the first time, I thought the very quality that
made Kurt the best-loved doctor was what broke up his personal life
and, maybe, made him vulnerable to a murderer.

How depressing. I'd chosen a profession that
would consume your soul, if I let it.

Tori's raised her voice above Miles's
trumpet. "Are you all right?"

I realized that I was sitting on the living
room floor beside the boom box, barricaded behind boxes, with my
arms wrapped around my knees. I said, "Yeah."

She perched on the lumpy green cushion of
the futon I'd managed to assemble. "What's wrong?"

"Is it worth all this? To become a doctor?"
I gestured at my tornadoed room, but I really meant all of it. The
work, the crap pay, the rocked relationships, moving across the
country because the Match said so, sleeping on the floor for a
week.

Her dark eyes were kind. "Why did you go
into medicine in the first place?"

"I wanted to help people." The traditional
answer, but true. I added, "And I thought it would be challenging
and fun."

Her eyebrows lifted a touch. "And is
it?"

I nodded. "Most of the time."

She waited. I conceded, "I guess I like it.
When I don't have to work with Dr. Callendar."

She smiled. "You'll live."

"I guess." I hadn't thought about Alex for
an hour, and it felt good. But remembering Alex now felt like
ground glass in my stomach. "Do you think Alex was with Mireille
Friday night? When Kurt was killed?"

Tori hesitated. "It's hard to tell when
either of them is telling the truth."

I bowed my head again. The drummer tapped
his cymbals, the pianist played background, and Miles's trumpet
blew across them both.

A breeze rustled the tree leaves outside my
living room window. Tori turned her face to it and closed her eyes.
"But Mireille insists she was with Kurt that night, for at least
part of the night. " She hesitated. "It would be a lot to make
up."

We'd never grilled Mireille about her alibi
for the rest of the Friday night. Tori read my mind. "I wasn't
going to ask her for an alibi. I want her to trust me." She smiled
a little.

"You want me to be the bad cop," I said.

She shrugged. "I want the cops to be the
cops. But yes, if you insist. I don't want to alienate Mireille in
an attempt to investigate her."

Pah. I still thought there were more holes
in everyone's story than Havarti cheese, a product I'd recently
discovered in the Montreal supermarkets. No one was willing to play
Kinsey Milhone with me. I tried to needle her. "Okay. Are you
willing to alienate Alex?"

Tori laughed. "I'll leave it to you." Her
hand flew to her mouth. "I'm sorry, Hope. I wasn't thinking."

My eyes smarted, but I tried to smile. "It's
true." A pain twanged in my chest around my heart. Maybe I could
have aortic dissection and get it over with.

Tori shifted on the futon. She traced the
white piping of the cushion with her index finger. "All I know
about Alex is, he seemed very disturbed about his past. He used to
talk about it a lot with Kurt—" She stopped abruptly.

I clicked through what I knew. He was from
Kitchener. He might be a Mennonite. What could be so traumatic
about buggies and plain clothes? Or in his case, forsaking buggies
and taking up zippers? Wait, maybe that was the Amish. "What about
his past?"

Tori shook her head. "I'm not sure. Alex
used to joke about it a bit. You know, if someone asked him why he
talked to Kurt, he'd say, 'Blast from the past.' But he never said
any more. And of course, Kurt kept all our talks confidential."

I knew very little about Alex's past. I
hadn't thought it mattered. We were here, we liked each other. If
he rejected me, one of us had done wrong. But there might be a
third factor holding him back, in addition to Mireille. His family,
somehow.

Some white people make a big deal about my
race. Their favourite question is, "Where do you come from?" That
means that I'm from elsewhere. I like to shoot back, "Where are you
from?"

"Oh, I'm Canadian," they say, laughing.

"So am I."

"No, where are you
really
from?"

This can go on forever.

Others ask, "How often do you go to China?"
They're astonished that I've never been there, and want to regale
me with descriptions of their own trip to China in 1989. So their
question was a cover for a travel monologue.

I've come to realize people's questions
about my race reveal a lot more about themselves than it does about
me.

On the other hand, in the last few years,
I've figured out how much my family has subconsciously influenced
me. Although I've been educated as a scientist, I'm very
superstitious. I'm 26 years old, and I still don't step on cracks
in the sidewalk. Just one of my quirks, I thought, until my mother
told me four was an unlucky number because in Chinese, it sounds
like the word for death. I'd never thought much about the number
four, but I started avoiding it. Just in case. I even counted the
leads in my mechanical pencil before each exam and made sure there
were seven or eight but never four.

I rejected the stereotypes—ah, Asian girl,
therefore, must be a rich math whiz with good legs—but clearly,
culture had influenced my personality. Because Alex didn't talk
about it, because he dressed and acted and spoke like an average
guy, I hadn't thought culture was a big deal to him. From Tori's
comments, it was probably the opposite.

"Huh," I said, finally.

She flicked her eyebrows at me with her
trademark economy of words.

"It's just not me," I said. "Keeping it all
bottled up inside. I've tried it. I just end up obsessing and, uh,
exploding." Compared to her silence, it seemed immature. Cultural
differences again. To change the subject, I peered into a box by
the wall. Even though it was marked "Study," it was filled with
interview clothes. "Geez, that's useful," I said.

Tori checked her watch. "I should go soon."
She surveyed the room. "I wish I could help more."

"That's okay. You've done enough slave
labor. We'll have to do something fun next time."

She smiled wryly as we waved goodbye.

I was overwhelmed by the chaos when I
returned to the living room. The bedroom wasn't too bad. I'd
unpacked some day-to-day clothes, and left the other boxes to be
dealt with later. The bathroom was in order out of necessity, and
boy, I was glad to have all my face-cleaning solutions and choice
of hair conditioners again. The kitchen I was mostly deferring to
that nebulous tomorrow when I'd have free time. As long as I had
the basics, like some cutlery and dishes, a milk pitcher, and a can
opener, life was pretty good.

However, the living room suffered from the
"dump everything here and start unpacking" syndrome. Three walls
were stuffed with boxes, with tunnels to my desk and futon. The
desk had become a collecting ground for fragile things like flower
vases and jewelry boxes, as well as important papers and my laptop.
I could hardly see Henry.