Suicide Med (38 page)

I’ve been on my emergency medicine rotation for over two weeks and I officially hate my life.

It’s the third rotation of
my third year of medical school. The third rotation is supposed to be the specialty you’re interested in doing for the rest of your life. That way, you have enough time in the hospital that you don’t look like a complete idiot, but you take the rotation early enough that you have plenty of time to get letters of recommendation or change your mind in case you end up hating it. Which is the case for me.

Actually,
I like the pace, the patients, the procedures, and even most of the staff. But what I hate is Dr. Virginia Zaleski. And somehow, that’s enough to make me completely miserable.

“
Carly!”

I
look up from the computer monitor at the sound of Dr. Zaleski’s voice. Most residents allow me to call them by their first name but Dr. Zaleski does not. I groan inwardly and brace myself.

“What are you
doing
?” Dr. Zaleski demands to know.

“I was just writing up the last patient,”
I explain. I silently curse the fact that Dr. Zaleski is working during nearly all of my shifts in the ER. I checked the schedule last week, hoping maybe it had changed. It hadn’t.

“I
told
you to see the kid with appendicitis in Room 3,” Dr. Zaleski says accusingly.

Yes, but
she also told me that I had to write up patients I’d seen before moving on to the next one. Mixed messages, seriously.

“Sorry,” is all
I say.

Dr.
Zaleski looks like she’s about to ream me out, when her attention gets distracted by a janitor nearly sweeping dirt over her shoe. She yelps and jumps away, snapping, “Will you please watch where you’re going?”

The janitor, whose nametag says Julio, doesn’t apologize.
I heard that the hospital started a program where they hire janitors from the local prison, sort of a work release option. This guy Julio is probably a felon. I make a note not to get on Julio’s bad side.

“Well, because you were so slow,” Dr.
Zaleski says snippily, “I already saw the kid with appendicitis. Why don’t you make yourself useful and call Surgery to come see him?”

I
nod, afraid to say anything to further incur my resident’s wrath. I heard Dr. Zaleski is bad-tempered because she really wanted to land a spot at Yale instead of at lowly Southside. Apparently, stellar grades don’t make up for mediocre evaluations from attendings on rotations.

Not that Southside Hospital is so bad.
The medical school is one of the best, especially now that it’s no longer known as Suicide Med. Everyone knows the story about that old nickname though—it’s huge gossip in our school.

A
pparently, for six years straight, one student at the school always committed suicide. Also, the anatomy professor was this real player, a total Casanova, who frequently used to have affairs with his students. He was having an affair with this girl in the class, and another student found out about it and tried to blackmail him. The whole thing went horribly wrong and that student ended up murdering the professor. And that apparently ended the “curse”—nobody else committed suicide again after that.

The student who killed the professor was sentenced to life
in prison—first degree murder charges, I guess. I was always curious what happened to the girl who had the affair with the professor and that’s never been clear, aside from the fact that she withdrew from the school. My friend Meg, who is usually right about this kind of stuff, says she became a psychotherapist. But I’ve heard people say she became a yoga instructor, a kindergarten teacher, or just that she married rich and doesn’t have to work.

Now that I think of it, Dr.
Zaleski was probably at Southside back then. Maybe she knew that student and could tell me what happened to her. But Dr. Zaleski frowns on personal conversations during work hours.

I
call the operator and discover that the surgery resident on call for consults is Dr. Abe Kaufman. It’s the only good news I’ve gotten all night. Of all the surgery residents, Abe is the nicest. Hell, he’s the
only
nice one. You call Abe, he comes down right away, and usually he gets the patient into the OR immediately. That guy operates a
lot
. I’ve never seen him say no to a case.

But that’s fairly typical for surgery residents, isn’t it?

Sure enough, Abe rushes right down after I explain the situation to him. I spot his red hair and his large frame lumbering down the hallway, and I wave. He waves back enthusiastically.

“
Appy?” he asks me.

“Uh huh,”
I say. “It’s an eight-year-old boy. Right lower quadrant pain, fever, elevated white count.”

Abe takes the chart from
me, and strides into the room.

“Ben!” he greets the boy, who looks intensely uncomfortable.
“How are you doing, buddy?”

“My tummy hurts,” Ben whines.

Abe lays his
right hand gingerly on the boy’s abdomen. It always surprises me that a big guy could be so gentle.

“You know,” Abe says.
“According to your chart, my wife is actually your pediatrician.”

“Dr. McKinley is your wife?” Ben’s mot
her exclaims in surprise. “Oh, we adore her. How is she doing?”

Abe grins.
“Mourning the end of her maternity leave.”

“I’ll bet.
Was it a girl or boy?”

Abe grins wider.
“A boy.”

Abe reassures the family about the surgery they’re about to do, then leads
me out of the room.

“What did the CT show
, Carly?” he asks me.

“I, um…”
I bite my lip, bracing myself. “We didn’t get one.”

“Ultrasound?” he asks.

I shake my head again.

Last time that happened, the surgeon screamed at
me for ten straight minutes. But Abe just shrugs.

“Well, it’s a clinical diagnosis,” he says.
“Let’s get the kid into the OR and open him up.”

I
nod, relieved.

“By the way,” Abe says with a wink.
“How’s Ginny treating you?”

I
don’t even know who he’s talking about at first. “Do you mean Dr. Zaleski?”

“Oh, Christ,” Abe laughs.
“I think that answers my question.”

“
She’s fine,” I say quickly, glancing around nervously.

“I’m sure,” Abe says, rolling his eyes.
“Well, if you ever need someone to straighten her out, give me a call.” He cracks his knuckles and adds, “It would be my pleasure.”

He’s joking.
I’m almost positive.

I find Dr.
Zaleski back at her computer station, writing up a patient encounter. She takes a long sip from her cup of coffee then whips her head around to look at me accusingly.

“Well? A
re you going to tell me what happened with that patient or do I have to guess?” she asks.

“Dr. Kaufman is going to take
him to surgery,” I explain.

She raises her eyebrows.
“He doesn’t want to wait for the CT results?”

“No,” I say.

Dr. Zaleski takes another sip of coffee and mutters something under her breath that sounds sort of like, “Butcher.” But I must have heard her wrong. From everything I’ve heard, Abe is a really good surgeon.

Dr.
Zaleski stands up.

“I’m going to get the paperwork filled out,” she says.
“If you want to make yourself useful for a change, you can write up the history and physical on that kid like I asked you to.”

I can’t believe she talks to me that way.
Oh well. Less than two weeks to go…

I slide into the seat that Dr.
Zaleski vacated, and bring up the screen to write up the history on little Ben. As I’m waiting for the template to load, I hear an accented voice over my shoulder say, “She shouldn’t talk to you that way.”

I startle, and whirl around.
To my utter surprise, I see Julio the janitor standing there, leaning on his mop.

“What?” I say.

Julio stares at me for a moment with his black eyes then says, “She isn’t very nice to you. It’s not right.”

“It’s okay,” I say.
“She’s, you know… under a lot of stress.”

Julio just shakes his head.
He’s right, of course, but I’m not going to vent my frustrations to the janitor, that’s for sure. Especially a convict janitor.

“I’ve heard very bad things about that doctor,” Julio says
ominously.

I look up at him in surprise.
“You have?”

“That doctor has done terrible things,” he hisses.
“To innocent people. I’ve heard the stories. She’s ruined people’s lives.” His black eyes grow even darker. “The sort of things she’s done—there are consequences. She won’t get away with it.”

What the hell is he talking about?

“Yes,” I mumble.

Julio is frightening me a little bit.
I’m not sure why he has a particular grudge against Dr. Zaleski or who this person is who has told him “very bad things” about her. But I definitely don’t want to get involved.

As I go back to writing up my history and physical, I see Julio’s hand brush against Dr.
Zaleski’s coffee cup. And here’s the really weird part: as he does it, I’m almost positive he drops something into her coffee. In fact, I’m pretty sure he dropped a pill into her drink. Whatever it was, it was small and white. And it disappears instantly into the hot, black liquid.

After he does it, our eyes meet for a second, but he doesn’t say anything.
And for a moment, I could swear I imagined the whole thing. I
must
have imagined it.

After all, who would want to poison Dr.
Zaleski?

The first draft of
Suicide Med
was written about a decade ago. In the time since then, it’s gone through dozens of permutations, and was read by at least as many friends and acquaintances. I am grateful to all of those people who read my book over the years, including the always wonderful Gizabeth and Dr. Orthochick. My mother has even read it twice, and she probably deserves some sort of medal.

I recruited a few new beta readers to help me with the final draft of the project. I want to give thanks to Laura Waller, Nathan
Geissel, and Jessica Schuster as well as Roy Arnold, who helped me with his extensive knowledge of firearms. And of course, I owe a debt of gratitude to my editor and friend Jenica Chung, for doing a fantastic job as usual.

And finally, I want to thank my own Dr. Conlon, my anatomy professor in medical school, who made the class the most grueling, fun, amazing, and important course I’ve ever taken in my life. And don’t
worry, nothing funny went on between us.