Code Blues (42 page)

At last, a bus pulled up.
Its sign flashed "129" and then "
Côte-Ste-Catherine
."

I turned to Tucker. For the first time, I
noticed that his brown eyes curved down at the corners, giving him
a rueful air. He had to raise his voice over the rumble of the bus
engine and swishing of passing cars. "Tori will meet you at your
stop if she beats you there. Or if you get home first, she'll buzz
you." He hesitated.

The bus doors folded open. An old lady began
mounting the steps, her cane digging into the black rubber
floor.

Tucker added awkwardly, "You'll be
okay."

I nodded. I was already better. I closed my
eyes.

I felt a light touch at my forehead. Tucker
brushed a stray hair behind my ear, his fingers barely sketching
across my skin.

I opened my eyes. Tucker waved me on to the
bus, where two teenaged guys were hopping up the steps, flashing
their Opus cards at the bus driver.

I didn't want to leave him there. I leaned
forward. "Aren't you going to—"

He shook his head.

I hesitated. I'd imposed on him too much,
but it didn't seem right to just cry on his shoulder and run away.
"Thank you."

"You're welcome." He smiled down at me.

Out of the corners of my
eyes, I saw the bus doors twitch. I yelled, "
Non, non, attendez-moi
!" and leapt
on, shoving Tucker's ticket in the silver fare box. The bus driver
grunted and shot the bus into gear, throwing me
off-balance.

The light had just turned red, but we
barreled through on the tails of the car in front of us. Clinging
to the hand rail, I swung around for one last glimpse of Tucker
through the wide panes of the bus window. He never took his eyes
off me.

THE END

Copyright 2011, Melissa Yuan-Innes

Published by
Olo
Books

In association with
Windtree
Press

Melissa Yi is an emergency doctor who did
her residency training in Montreal, minus the murder and male
mayhem. She now runs codes in Ontario.

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Author's Note

An enormous thank you to
everyone who helped me with
Code
Blues
.

My friends from Montreal to Vancouver got me
through medicine and now support my scribblings. Bruce Kahn is a
police officer who poked holes in my plot and helped me fix
them.

For edits, I'd like to give a special shout
out to Camden Park Press, Andy Rorabeck, and Alberta's Dr. Greg
Smith. Much gratitude to the Oregon Writers Network, most
especially Kris Rusch and Dean Smith. Couldn't have done it without
you. Or actually, I could have, but it wouldn't have been half as
fun or look one tenth as good.

Speaking of fun and looking good, my husband
Matt always encouraged my writing. Max and Anastasia are my little
wonderwalls. My parents really did call and bring me food.

Once again, this is a work of fiction. All
names and details have been changed or invented. If you are a
doctor and want to make fun of the medical errors, bring it on, but
remember, Hope's just a resident. Go easy on her and her
creator.

Please note that this book is set in 2011,
but I have altered some of the dates as an artistic liberty. The
spelling may also seem like a Choose Your Own Adventure (TM), but
it's Canadian, which is a luscious hybrid of British and American
spelling.

And now, an excerpt from Hope Sze's next
adventure.

Notorious D.O.C.

I'd avoided St. Joseph's emergency room for
the past week, but it hadn't changed. Stretcher patients lined the
wall and spilled into the hallway. Fluorescent lights turned
everyone's skin yellow, even though most of them weren't Asian like
I was.

I smiled at a nurse who squeezed my arm and
said, "Welcome back, Hope!" just before a patient's wrinkled mother
waved me down. "Miss. We need a blanket!"

Home, sweet home.

Well, sweet except for the smell of stool
drifting from bed 12.

I nodded at a few fellow medical residents.
Officially, we're doctors in our first post-graduate training year,
formerly known as interns. Unofficially, we're scut monkeys
rotating from service to service. Last month, I'd done emergency
medicine and tracked down a murderer; this month, I was on
psychiatry and opting out of any drama.

I just needed to see one scut monkey in
particular. A blond dude. A guy who appreciated sausages and beer
and me, not necessarily in that order. A guy I'd overlooked when I
first came to Montreal for my residency, but I wasn't about to make
that mistake again.

Sadly, no matter how casually I glanced out
of the corners of my eyes, John Tucker did not appear.

Since I was officially starting my
psychiatry rotation a week late, duty called first. I perched on
the chair in the psych corner of the nurses' station, near the
printer, and grabbed the chart lying on the table. Normally the
psych nurse would occupy this chair, but she was probably talking
to the patient whose chart I was holding: Mrs. Regina Lee.

I pretended to read the triage note, my skin
still electric at the possibility of seeing Tucker. Was that high
school or what? I might be 26 years old, with an M.D. behind my
name, but I still got rattled thinking about A BOY.

My favourite emerg nurse, Roxanne, paused
beside me and shoved a pen behind her ear. "Hope! Nice to see you.
Are you doing okay?”

I nodded. We hugged. She smelled like Purell
and she was built like me, skinny but strong. Once she told me her
Italian grandmothers practically cried when they saw her, they
found her so emaciated-looking. Of course, that didn't stop me from
complaining about my thighs on a bad day.

Roxanne glanced at the blue plastic card
clipped to my chart. "Oh, no. You got Mrs. Lee. Is it Fall
already?"

I frowned. "August fourteenth?" After
sitting in school 20-odd years of my life, including most summer
vacations, I hate when people call autumn prematurely. As far as
I'm concerned, it's still summer until the snow hits the ground. I
don't even like to see the leaves change colour. Call it denial if
you want. Whoa—I was in psych mode already.

Roxanne shrugged. "Close enough. She always
comes here. Especially around now. It's very sad."

"Why?"

"Did you know Laura Lee?"

I hesitated.

She shook her head. "You're too young.
Anyway. She was a resident here. Star of her year."

A resident, just like me. "What does that
have to do with Mrs. Lee? Are they related?"

Roxanne pointed to the clipboard. "I'll let
Mrs. Lee tell you. It's her favorite story."

Strange. I strode through
the open door of room 14, the designated psych room. The stretcher
and its five-point restraints stood empty, but a woman sat in a
chair by one indented white wall.
"Mrs.
Lee?"

She clutched the clunky leather purse in her
lap as she turned to face me. Her permed black hair was streaked
with white, but I noticed her strong cheekbones and her skin, still
enviably smooth considering her 64 years. Although her lips parted,
no sound emerged.

"Hi.” I held out my hand.

She didn't take it. My hand hovered in the
air until I shoved it back in my lab coat pocket. I belatedly
remembered I was trying to improve my body language and dropped my
hand to my side instead. The smell of bloody stool wafted toward us
from room 12 and we both winced before I changed the subject. "My
name is Dr. Hope Sze. I'm a resident from psychiatry. Could
we—"

She was staring at me with such intensity, I
faltered.

Her eyes filled with tears.

Oh, dear. She really was depressed. The
psychiatric patients who come to the emergency room are usually
depressed or psychotic. I set her file down on the desk and scanned
the room for tissues. They always kept a box handy on psych.

She said something in Chinese.

"I'm sorry. I don't speak Chinese. But I
could get a translator if you like.” My parents thought we should
be Canadian and always spoke English to us.

She reached a hand toward my face, gazing at
me like she was in a dream.

I flinched, not wanting to
jerk away, but mildly freaked. Who
was
this woman?

She checked herself. Her hand dropped to her
side and she tried to smile. "Excuse me," she said, in perfectly
good English. "It's just that you look so much like my
daughter."

I relaxed a little. "Oh. That's nice. Is
your daughter, ah, here with you?"

"Not anymore.” Her brown eyes met mine,
direct and level. "She's dead and somebody killed her."

My shoulders tensed. It's an answer you
never expect. And, even though I tried not to be superstitious, I
found it eerie that her dead daughter was a resident who looked
just like me.

She blinked. The tears already shining in
her eyes dripped on to her cheeks. She ignored them, still staring
at me. "I'm sorry," she said. "You must think me very foolish."

"Not at all."

She dabbed her eyes with a tissue she
extracted from her purse. "I know you're not Laura. I know she's
gone. It's just that I've been without hope for so long."

I twitched. My name, Hope, is a constant
sore spot for me. When people mention the concept, I always feel
like they're talking about me, although Mrs. Lee was the most
poignant example.

She shook her head. "I know what they say
about me, that I can't accept my daughter's death. They think it's
tragic but I should move on after eight years."

Although the emerg nurse, Roxanne, hadn't
rolled her eyes, I could certainly imagine others would and Mrs.
Lee knew it. To use psych lingo, Mrs. Lee had insight, meaning that
she understood her condition. A lot of psych patients don't. They
think you're the nutbar who doesn't receive the secret messages
from the Cadbury commercial and they're perfectly sane.

So far, Mrs. Lee didn't seem crazy, just
sad.

Somehow that was worse.

Her mouth twisted with what might have been
humor under different circumstances. "They even think I should move
'so I'll make new memories' and, not coincidentally, remove myself
from their sector."

I nodded. I only knew about sectors because
Tucker, who did psych last month, had explained them to me. The
Island of Montreal was carved into psychiatry "sectors" according
to postal code. If you had mental health issues, you had to go to
whatever hospital sector you belonged to. No exceptions, even if it
made no sense. We had patients who were literally born at St. Joe's
and lived across the street, but they had to get downtown to the
Montreal General for their psychiatrist.

Mrs. Lee already knew this, which was a
little scary. She was a highly intelligent woman who'd been
grieving for eight years. What was I going to do for her? I'd
better steer her away from the subject of her daughter's death,
even though I really wanted to know how she'd died. Curiosity not
only killed the cat, it lured me into medical school and into
fighting crime, although I was hanging up my magnifying glass after
my first and only case last month. "I'm very sorry for your loss.
Maybe we should start at the beginning. How would you describe your
mood, on a scale of one to ten—"

She waved her hand, cutting me off. "I
already have a psychiatrist. Dr. Saya is happy to prescribe me
medication or let me run off at the mouth, but I don't want to talk
about it anymore. I want justice."

Justice. I knew I should get back on track,
asking her about depression, but I couldn't resist. "Have you
talked to the police?"

She laughed and tossed her tissue in the
garbage. Two points. "They know me well. They say I don't have any
proof it wasn't an accident. It was a hit and run, you see."

Well. Maybe it really was an accident. I
crossed my legs. "Do you have any proof?"

She leaned forward and placed her hands on
her knees, eyes suddenly sharp. "You believe me, don't you?"

I hesitated. I yearned to say yes, even
though my logic and medical training shied away from her.

She shook herself. "How silly of me. Of
course you don't, yet. But I could show you what I have. I have an
entire file on Laura."

I had to draw the line at sorting through
Laura's gap-toothed elementary school photos and stellar report
cards. "I'm sure you do, Mrs. Lee, but—"

"Not that kind of file. Evidence. The police
reports. The autopsy.” She paused. "I used to carry it with me, but
most people here have seen it already and don't take it seriously.
I couldn't bear that."

How many mothers could say "autopsy" without
breaking down? On the other hand, she'd had eight years to
acclimatize to the word. I had to admire her drive, still searching
for justice.