It’s been a long couple of months of deep revision on my CHASING LIGHT memoir and getting back into the querying trenches, as well as completing several magazine writing assignments. But during these next weeks I’ve carved out a good chunk of time, so let’s jump back into DEAD RINGER with our heroine Blainey Blair and see if we can help her wrap up this case that has haunted her so.
From the end of CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (full chapter linked here):
(After Blainey’s hospital visit to Nora Malone, mother of heart transplant patient Jenny Malone)
I was alone in the elevator leaning against the back wall when the cab slowed, the door opened, and a young woman in dark green scrubs got on. I stared at her, my mouth open, and tried to breathe. Tall and slender with high cheekbones, cinnamon-colored hair, and eyes the blue of an October sky, as Guy had so eloquently put it, she was a dead ringer for Rachel Roper. She nodded at me and gave me an odd look, clearly put off by my gawking.
I pulled my eyes away from her, but not before catching the name on her ID badge.
Mandy Wytheman.
The words were out before I could stop them. “Is Miller Wytheman your father?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Mandy turned her blue eyes on me with more than a little suspicion and tilted her head to one side. “Do I know you?”
It took a moment to find any words, my brain careening every which way with the things I obviously couldn’t say — “No, we don’t know each other, but I knew your birth mother who your father probably drugged, raped, and impregnated when she was just fifteen, and also he probably murdered her because she was looking for you” — so that I had to bite hard against the inside of my cheek. Instead, I caught my breath and said as evenly as I could, “I know Dr. Wytheman from St. Regis.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, he’s my dad.” She snuck a glance at my plastic badge with VISITOR on it.
“I came to see a friend in ICU,” I said. Thank God I’d observed the professional courtesy of keeping my St. Regis pastoral care ID badge in my pocket. Under no circumstances could she tell Miller about meeting me. I stared at the floor, feeling her gaze on me.
“You work there, at St. Regis?” she asked. I could tell she was trying to draw me out, knew her intuition was telling her…something.
I looked up and kept my expression as vague as possible. “Used to,” I said, which maybe wasn’t going to turn out to be a lie. “Some admin stuff.” I shrugged and looked back at the floor. Elevator etiquette is clear about conversation if someone keeps staring down when you try to talk to them. She took the hint and said nothing more.
As I leaned against the wall, the hum of the slowly moving elevator vibrating against my back, an unwelcome flash of memory rose, Miller’s hands on my bare hips, my skin burning under his touch and how in those moments I imagined the passion could immolate us both, then as quickly thinking of him with Rachel, still a child, and him using her young body for his own sick pleasure. A wave of nausea rose up, and for a horrifying moment I thought I might vomit.
Then the elevator stopped at the second floor with a gentle jolt. Mandy moved in front of me, and when the doors slid open, she half-turned and said over her shoulder, “Have a nice day.”
“You, too.” The doors took their goddamn time closing.
My hands were shaking and my knees felt weak. The cheery summer sun was no match for the spreading darkness in my soul. On the drive back to St. Regis I rehearsed what I’d say to Fred. Besides coming clean about the work I’d been doing with Mark and confessing my boundary breach with Rachel Roper, there was the matter of Miller. If he was the father of Rachel Roper’s daughter, then he also was most likely the one who supplied controlled substances to Rachel’s addict mother years ago. And worse, he was probably the one who’d slipped into WindDancer and with his whole life at stake injected a lethal dose of fentanyl into Rachel’s IV. In the event Miller Wytheman still had privileges at St. Regis, I was absolutely required to disclose all I suspected.
It was now just after one o’clock in the afternoon. There was time to grab a quick lunch before my meeting with Fred at two, but I didn’t see how I could possibly put a single thing in my mouth. My stomach churned and I wanted to cry, but I felt too numb to even do that. Scurrying in through one of the hospital’s side doors, I avoided the elevator and took the stairs up to Pastoral Care. The thought of running into Miller again sent me into a near panic. If I saw him face to face, there would be no way of hiding what I knew. And considering what he’d done to Rachel, that would be a very dangerous situation.
Mavis was still at lunch, and Fred’s office was dark. I shut my door behind me and sat at my desk with my head in my hands. I should call Mark. I should call Weston, the grieving brother. I should call Detective Chad Miller, even though he’d told me in no uncertain terms to keep my nose out of his investigation. Instead, I sat paralyzed. And, anyway, I didn’t have proof of anything. I wasn’t going to tell anyone else until after I’d spoken with Fred. I didn’t want him blindsided any more than he already would be. I thought of how shitty these past months had been for him, with the love of his life, Maxine, battling late stage breast cancer, what he must be going through. I hated that I was going to add to his overwhelming burdens, but it couldn’t be helped.
I now had forty-five minutes until my meeting, until I was going to drop the news and Fred was most likely going to drop the hammer and fire my ass. That would probably please Mavis, but it felt weird to think of not being here, in this place that had come to feel like somewhere I sort of belonged, or at least some old remnant of me did.
Well, I hadn’t been fired yet. There was just enough time to go track down Benny The Intern and find out if he’d come through and made those pastoral visits or ridden off into the sunset. I paged him and waited…waited…waited some more. Then I huffed out to look for him, starting in the ER, where the nurses all swore they hadn’t seen him. I glanced into the nearly empty cafeteria. No Benny.
I tried surgery waiting and peeked in at ICU, then did a quick spin through pediatrics. When I ran out of places to look, I returned to Pastoral Care where by now Mavis was back from her lunch break. Before I could say anything, she asked in an anxious tone, “How is Nora?” and I realized in all my freaking out about Miller I’d completely forgotten about the woman I’d just driven to the next town to see, a woman we all cared deeply for, who we’d known for months as the fierce lioness mother to our heart transplant patient, twelve-year-old Jenny. And who now hovered between life and death because of the aneurysm that had without warning blossomed in her brain.
“About the same,” I said, feeling guilt for the concerned expression on Mavis’s face and shame at how Nora’s condition had all but slipped my mind. “They’ve put in a stent. Things could go either way. It’s a waiting game now.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, thanks for going to see her.”
I nodded, hesitating in front of her desk.
“Is there something you need?” There was a new softness in Mavis’s tone, maybe her concern about Nora, maybe detesting me a little bit less these days.
“Yeah, actually, I’m looking for Benny,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You know, the errant intern I’m about to throw out of the program.”
After a pause, she said, “Well…rumor has it he likes to frequent the nurses’ lounge on fifth floor.” I felt like she’d thrown me a juicy bone, and I gratefully snatched it up.
I yelled my thanks as I flew back out into the hallway, and fueled by irritation at Benny and adrenaline at the thought of all I had to confess to Fred, I took the stairs up to fifth floor two at a time. Pushing into the hallway, I passed the nurses station and hurried on down the hall to the lounge at the end, and dang it all if Mavis hadn’t been right on the money.
Opening the door, I saw Benny leaning over a young nurse, one of his hands pressed against the pistachio-green wall she was trying to melt into. Well, well, well. Not so shy and withdrawn after all.
“And, there you are,” I said. I wish I could have bottled the look he gave me, saved it for later to inject right into my veins for an instant hit of dopamine. That whole “deer in the headlights” description doesn’t even begin to sum it up. Think “toad in the road about to be squashed flat.”
He removed his hand from the wall and turned to face me. The young nurse edged away to stand over by the window, where she peered at us from behind a wispy curtain of pale, blond hair. She looked like she couldn’t have been a hundred pounds soaking wet, and she seemed both embarrassed and relieved that I’d barged in on them.
“I, uh…” he began, but I cut him off.
“Get out,” I said to him, surprising even myself at how piano-wire-tight my voice sounded.
“But, I…”
“I said get out. Get the fuck out. You’re done.”
I watched him try to puff himself up, jutting his scrawny chest forward and going for an indignant tone. “You can’t just…” and I could tell from his don’t you know who I am tone that my hunch about mommy or daddy having some kind of monied connection to the hospital was on target.
“Oh, Benny, but I can. I just did. Go.” I was determined not to be the only one bounced out of here today. It made me feel wild, reckless.
When he didn’t move, I turned my attention to the young woman. “You know you could file a complaint against him, right? Report him for harassment. I’ll help you write it up.” She blinked hard, looked at Benny, then at the floor.
Benny muttered something under his breath and scurried past me, leaving a disgusting wake of bad aftershave and musky arousal. I resisted the urge to follow him out into the hall and yell obscenities after him. Good riddance, but now I’d have one more problem to lay at Fred’s feet, a minor but necessary reshuffling of the pastoral care team, sure, but the real problem might be blowback on Fred from Benny’s wealthy, connected mommy or daddy.
In truth, if I was Fred, I’d be asking me how I let things got to this point. He’d be right to wonder. I’d been completely sidetracked by the jolts of adrenaline from my work with Mark, craving the feeling more and more, while feeling less and less at home in my work as a chaplain. And because of that, on my watch and as his supervisor I’d allowed things with Benny to get completely out of hand.
More immediately, though, Benny’s negligence meant today’s patients hadn’t been seen.
I fished out one of my cards from a back pocket and offered it to the young nurse. Her cheeks were flushed and her large brown eyes were puddled with tears. “You did nothing wrong,” I said in as kind a tone I could muster. “Let me know if you want to talk or pursue any action.” She nodded, took the card, and wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand.
I dashed back downstairs and got the patient sheet from Mavis, who surprised me by handing it to me without comment. I had time to squeeze in at least half the visits. Tamping down my frustration at how wildly out of control this whole day was beginning to feel, I folded the list I’d made, tucked it in my prayer book, and went to make some calls. How surreal it all was. The man who raped Rachel Roper as a fifteen-year-old girl, who impregnated her and murdered her to keep the horrible truth hidden was the neurosurgeon I’d slept with. Meanwhile, there were still patients to visit, to listen to and pray with and for. It was impossible to balance the everydayness of it. But right now I had to. I had to shove down the horror and do my job. And somehow I had to call Mark and bring him up to speed. But when?
I finished my last patient visit ten minutes before my two o’clock meeting with Fred and returned to Pastoral Care, shutting my door to collect myself and to practice again what I would say. At three minutes till two I heard the quiet thump of the main door and then the hum of voices, Fred and Mavis talking. I stuck my head out and gave Fred a wave.
“Oh, Blainey, good. Give me five minutes?” Fred nodded in my direction as he moved toward his office.
“Sure thing.” I shut the door again. My heart was banging so hard I had to sit down. I felt like a fifth grader who’d been called into the principal’s office for passing notes in class, but the principal didn’t know I’d just planted a bomb in the gym. A sad blue cloud of remorse engulfed me. Fred had been a champion for me and in my work here and this, all this chaos, is how I’d repaid him.
I closed my eyes and breathed, practicing what my counselor had taught me the last time my life was coming unglued, after I’d found out about Nate and Tari, and then Tari taking all those pills and dying, and then Nate and I coming apart, so hard and ugly it was still hard to believe.
With my eyes shut, I pictured Fred and I sitting together under a beautiful, flowering tree, with a soft breeze brushing our cheeks and sunlight glinting between the leaves. I imagined both of us calm. I heard the words between us being delivered with slow, careful kindness.
Just then the intercom on my phone buzzed, jolting me out of my small oasis of peace. “Fred will see you now,” Mavis announced.
I stood. “Okay. Here we go,” I said out loud and walked out of my office and past Mavis’s desk, into Fred’s office and toward the point of no return, with no idea what my life would be like on the other side of all my confessions, only that so many things would never be the same again.