Third Degree (20 page)

I’m on autopilot, tossing items into the cart and running through the checkout. By the time I’m back at the dorm, my phone is ringing, my dad calling.

Shit. My dad. Heart transplant
. “Dad, I’m sorry, I’m not coming home. I should have called earlier, but something came up.”

“Okay,” he says, “Call your mother and let her know, please. I’ve got a patient on the operating table.”

I have a feeling he’s going to use the “patient on the operating table” excuse a lot to avoid communicating with Mom. And he’s obviously annoyed with me, but he’s hiding it well.
Guilt
. He may have booted someone out of the OR to let me in. Or else he was worried something had
happened to me, and I know he likes to go into every surgery, especially one this risky, with a clear head.

I’m not in the mood to call my mom. Lately I’m not in the mood to call either one of them, so I send her a quick text:
Staying at school this weekend, Dad said to let you know
. And then I hit ignore when she calls ten seconds later. I cart the Walmart bags inside the abandoned dorm building. Everyone appears to be gone. I’ve been away for nearly an hour, but Marshall is still completely out, breathing in that way only deep sleep can create. I’m still struggling to get a grasp on my motives, so I busy myself picking up all the dirty laundry around his room and taking it to the third-floor washers. I don’t want to wake Marshall yet, since I told him I’d leave after he accepted my compromise/blackmail, so I strap on the surgeon’s headlamp my dad got me for my birthday last year and roam around his room with a garbage bag, picking up trash. After returning to the laundry room and switching his clothes to the dryer, I wipe every surface in the room down with disinfectant.

An hour later, the laundry is folded in a basket on Marshall’s floor and I’ve also scrubbed my own room and swept the floor. I don’t know what else to do, so I take a shower and drink some of the Gatorade I bought for Marshall and eat a protein bar.

Finally, after four hours of sleeping, he wakes up and stumbles toward the bathroom, not even noticing me standing near the closet or the much cleaner surroundings. It’s dark outside now and his eyes are barely open. The bathroom door closes, and I quickly flip the light on and rush over to the bed, stripping the sheets and pillowcase. I found an identical set folded neatly under his bed, and the dirty, sweat-covered sheets in the now practically sterile room were driving me insane.

I sigh with relief when I hear the shower turning on right after the toilet flushes, because I’m not even half done with changing his sheets. Pain meds with a fever that high would cause anyone to wake up in a sweaty mess.

Once the bed is made and the lights are out again, I start to panic about him falling in the shower, but luckily he emerges shortly after, his hair damp, a towel around his waist. He fumbles around in the laundry basket, and just when I think he’s about to drop the towel and flash me, he says, “I know you’re still here, Izzy.”

“I’m sorry,” I say right away.

He shakes his head. “Just cover your eyes.”

I slap a hand over my eyes and hear the towel drop to the floor. “I tried to leave, I swear I did.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he mumbles.

I peek through my fingers and see him climbing back into bed, wearing gym shorts this time instead of boxers. He pats the empty space beside him and my mouth practically falls open
in shock. I walk over and tentatively sit down next to him.

“Let’s have one of our chats, okay?” He’s lying on his side facing me, but his eyes are already closing. The pain meds must be working still. “I’m sorry I yelled at you and kicked you out. If you were sick and I saw you like this, I’d stay and help, too, no matter how much you refused.”

I sit perfectly still and quiet, waiting for him to finish.

“But I wouldn’t call your doctor or parents unless you asked me to or unless I thought it was that much of an emergency and you weren’t in any state to handle it yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

He opens his eyes and looks me over. “I don’t need a doctor, parent, or constant stream of medical advice.”

“I know.”

“But,” he says, taking over the conversation again, “I wouldn’t mind some company, okay? Friendly company.”

“Okay,” I whisper, afraid to say anything else that contradicts my agreement to keep it friendly and non-medical.

“And please take that damn thing off your head before I have nightmares that involve you coming at me with a scalpel.” He closes his eyes again, and after pulling the headlamp off, I sit there as still as possible until his breathing gets slow and heavy. Then I grab my laptop, climb back into Marshall’s bed, and begin a night-long research project.

He told me I couldn’t talk about medical-related subjects—he didn’t say I couldn’t read up on the condition. Or possibly hack into his medical records …

Chapter 16

I jolt awake, feeling the weight of my laptop vanish. I rub my eyes and catch Marshall leaning over me, sliding the computer underneath my side of the bed.

“Sorry,” he whispers. “Looked like it was about to slide off your lap.”

I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but I check the time and realize I must have dozed off somewhere between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. When the sleep fog lifts from my brain, my face immediately heats up, knowing what Marshall probably saw before closing my laptop.

“Can’t decide if I’m pissed at you for illegally reading shit about me or impressed that you had the ability to do that all along and restrained yourself until today,” he says.

“I’m sorry.” I’ve said these words way too many times tonight. I stand up and retrieve a new bottle of Gatorade and two more pain pills for him. Luckily he takes both without any argument. I settle back down beside him, twisting and turning my neck. It’s sore from my having fallen asleep sitting up. “But you have to realize that I’ve looked at thousands of charts. It’s not personal for me. It’s just numbers and data.”

“You mean like you separate the chart from the person?” he asks, taking a big swig of his drink.

“The chart is the person.” The words are out before I can fully process them.

Marshall stares at his hands and peels back the label on the plastic bottle. “That’s what I was trying to get across earlier. I don’t want to be a chart to you.”

We sit in silence for several minutes, the weight of his words occupying the space between us and pressing on me from all sides. Part of me feels like crying but I can’t decide why exactly. Finally Marshall pats my hand and says, “Thanks for cleaning up my room and the laundry and the shopping and all that.”

“I shouldn’t have read it.” The dark hollowness is back, reminding me of all my fears, my lack of humanity. My failures. The words Dr. Winifred James, Ph.D., wrote about me. I swallow the lump in my throat and discreetly wipe away a tear that slips from my eye.

Marshall must sense that I’m upset, because he pats my hand again and settles under the covers, then says, “Well, how about you ask normal questions that eventually fill in all the pieces? We can pretend that no illegal acts took place in order for you to gain those details about my life.”

“Sure.” I turn on my side facing him. “How long have you been sick?”

“Since middle school,” he says, yawning. “My first major symptom was joint pain. I
played a lot of sports, so it really got annoying. The doctor tested me for rheumatoid arthritis first, then lupus. I’d been having the stomach problems all along, too, but not so severely that anyone put it together. Plus, thirteen-year-old me didn’t want to tell people how many trips I made to the bathroom a day or talk about feeling bloated after eating at McDonald’s, so I kept that to myself longer than I should have.”

Most of that isn’t in his chart. “What about your surgeries?”

“First one was in ninth grade, and the second one was the summer after high school. I still don’t understand them completely, except that they took sections of my intestines out.”

I start to put together a basic explanation for him, but then I decide against it. If he’d wanted explanations, he would have asked someone by now or read up on it. “You got sick during boot camp,” I say. “That’s why you’re not in the army right now.”

“Yeah, that part blows big-time. It doesn’t matter if my symptoms stay away for years in a row—I still can’t get back in.” He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter anyway. Obviously I’m not okay.”

“But you’ve been in good shape for months, right?”

“Yep, it was awesome.”

The wistfulness in his voice, the sadness—they hit me pretty hard. I hate that he’s feeling so bad when he should be bouncing around and driving me insane with his complicated and mostly wrong answers to anatomy-related questions and running backward with flip-flops on.

“I’m sorry for blackmailing you and reading your chart,” I blurt out.

“You already apologized, and I accepted that apology,” Marshall says.

I wipe away another tear, hoping he doesn’t notice. “Maybe you shouldn’t forgive me.”

“That isn’t your choice to make, Izzy.” His voice is back to the sleepy-sounding tone, and I figure he’s about to drift off, but then he speaks again. “How was your date with Mr. Can’t-Keep-His-Hands-to-Himself?”

“He’s not nearly as bad in that area as you are,” I point out, and remind him of all the ways he found excuses to touch me.

“Amateur.” Even in the dark, I can see him smile a little. “I don’t ever do this … letting a girl take care of me, do my laundry, feel my forehead. Just thinking about being
that guy
makes me nauseous.” He reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. “But I don’t mind having you here.”

And I don’t usually do this taking-care-of-people routine. Diagnosing, prescribing, operating, labs, blood work, and tests—I’ve done all that. But the rest I hand over to nurses, family members, or the patients themselves. I don’t even think about these parts of patient care. If I thought about these things for every patient I treated, my head would probably explode from overload.

I roll on my back and stare at the ceiling, watching it turn blurry from tears. All my effort becomes devoted to keeping my breaths even and normal.
Let him fall asleep again and then you can go in your own room and cry or whatever
.

That plan works for about two minutes, and then Marshall is shaking my shoulder gently. “I know you’re crying, so let’s cut out the denial part of the routine. How about you just tell me what’s wrong?”

I lift the bottom of my shirt and wipe my face with it. I can’t look at him, even in the dark. My eyes stay focused on the ceiling. “I get it now. I get why you didn’t want me to know anything about your medical history. It’s like that for me, too, except it’s something else. I’ve been carting it around for almost a week, and it’s just so … I’m afraid that if I tell people, they won’t be able to see
me
anymore, and everything I do will potentially be a symptom.”

“If you tell me you’re dying and this new take on college is a part of some bizarre bucket list, I swear to God I’ll kick your ass,” Marshall says.

I shake my head, my throat even more constricted now. “It’s not like that. I have all these feelings like heaviness—I have for a few years now. Like I can’t maintain control of my thoughts. I can’t force myself to feel what I know I’m supposed to feel. Death doesn’t scare me. And by that, I mean other people’s deaths. And then I’m sitting alone, cursing myself out for all the horrible thoughts. Most of the time I think I’m right, that I’m not doing anything wrong—everybody else is wrong. And then I have this crushing realization that maybe I’m so screwed up in the head, my system of right and wrong are not even on the map.”

“That’s your secret?” Marshall asks.

I still can’t look at him, especially knowing that I’m going to tell him the rest. He deserves to know. It would help even the score. “That’s only part of it. I’ll tell you the rest, but I don’t want to talk about it. So can I tell you and then we can go back to sleep?”

“Okay.” There’s an odd tone to his voice, something hinting that he might be afraid of what I’m going to say. He’s no longer touching my hand and I sense a few more inches of space between us.

“I’ve only done what I did with your records one other time. Last weekend.” I draw in a deep breath, forcing away the images of pages and pages of text from the other medical file I illegally searched. “You know how I’m adopted?”

“You searched for your birth mother?” he guesses.

“Not exactly.” I cover my face with my hands. “After last week … when we … after we—”

“Yelled at each other and then started making out?” Marshall suggests.

“Yeah that.” I breathe again—in and out. “I had to know what the stupid psychologist wrote about me. Whatever she said kept me out of every residency program. I thought I could
figure out how to pass next time on my own, but then other things were screwed up and …”

“You had to know,” he fills in for me, giving me a second to compose myself.

“I read a little bit and then I tried to shut down my brain, to not memorize or think about the rest. I closed it so fast but my stupid fucking photographic memory sucked it all up. Every word. Every page. My birth mother had three different Ph.D.’s—history, anthropology, and forensics. All before she was twenty-five. So my IQ isn’t a fluke. It’s obvious where it came from. She wasn’t married and didn’t have me until she was forty-two. There was no father, at least not outside of the technical sense. She used a sperm donor and in-vitro. She’d been treated for depression on and off since age twenty-one.” I can feel Marshall inhale and hold on to that air. I hate that I’m causing him even an ounce of stress. But it’s a little too late to turn back now. “She killed herself. Postpartum depression, supposedly.” I leave out the details described so vividly in the medical records and stop talking right then.
The ones I tried not to read. The ones I can’t erase
. I wipe my nose on the sleeve of my T-shirt and turn on my side.

Marshall doesn’t speak at first, but he breaks his promise after about two minutes. “The depression, it’s hereditary, right? That’s what you’re afraid of?”