Black Cat Weekly #2

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD GIRL! by Jeff Cohen-3

“No, she can’t,” I said before Sharon could start throwing her med school diploma around. “And they don’t have any here, anyway.”

Sharon, pouting, looked at my hands. “Not even ice chips?”

I looked at her. “You keep a civil tongue, young lady, or I’ll marry you again.”

“In your dreams.” She pushed a button on one of the many devices that hung from her bed. You could probably oversee the invasion of a fairly small country with the equipment they gave my ex to have a baby. The only thing they were using at the moment was an IV drip attached to her left hand, which had saline solution in it for hydration. I considered telling Sharon she was hydrated and didn’t need ice chips, but Jonesy showed up in the door before I could be a wiseass, which indicates she’s really fast.

Jonesy gave me an interesting look as she entered and seemed to take an extra-wide path around me as she approached Sharon. “Something you need, doctor?” When a physician like Sharon is the patient, every single person on the staff, even if they’ve never laid eyes on her before, is sure to be aware of that fact. Hospitals don’t like to annoy doctors because without doctors, they’re just really bad hotels.

“Can I get a cup of ice chips, please?” Sharon asked.

“Certainly. I’ll be right back.” Jonesy took that circuitous route past me again, and I started to wonder if I was radioactive. It would actually explain a lot that has happened in my life.

“Did you two hear that Sharon went into labor on your electronic grandchild sensory scanners?” I asked my parents.

“Sharon called us,” my father explained, prompting me to give my ex-wife a look combining stupefied astonishment with a tinge of irritation. I can do a lot with my face.

“You didn’t,” my mother noted, in case I wasn’t aware that I hadn’t called them.

“Everything happened very quickly,” Sharon said. “Luckily, your parents were in the neighborhood.”

I figured Mom and Dad had been circling Midland Heights, where my theater and Sharon’s office and home are located, in their car for weeks, stopping only to gas up the car and get necessary supplies. “What were you doing up here?” I asked, to be polite.

“We needed an electric heater,” Dad said. Like that explained anything.

Jonesy walked in with a polystyrene cup that I assumed was filled with ice chips. Dr. Wiseguy was right behind her, stethoscope around his neck like he was a preppie (which he probably was) and it was a pastel-colored sweater (which it wasn’t). Jonesy handed the cup to Sharon, who thanked her, and left while Dr. Wiseguy approached the bed.

“Doctor, I don’t want to intrude, but of course you know this is a teaching hospital.” That seemed sort of an odd fact to bring up just at this moment, especially since I saw a slightly larger contraction on the way, according to the monitor. But Sharon, after wincing a bit, seemed to understand where he was going with this.

“You want to bring in an obstetrics resident to observe?” she asked.

Wiseguy nodded. “Only if it’s all right with you. He’s actually a surgical resident, but he’s doing a rotation in obstetrics.” His voice got theatrically confidential. “I think he’s just interested in C-sections.”

Sharon didn’t even hesitate. She believes in paying forward to those who are trying to be doctors like her. “Sure,” she said. “It’s fine with me as long as he’s not pushing surgery.”

Wiseguy smiled and shook his head. “Thank you, Doctor. We’ll be right in.”

“Great. I love having men examine me.”

Wiseguy, who only liked humor when he was the one he thought was funny, didn’t pick up on the joke and walked out, saying he and Dr. Anderson would be back momentarily.

“Do you need anything?” my mother asked Sharon. Mom has always felt that Sharon was the child she never had.

“That milkshake would go down great right now,” my ex said. She put an ice chip into her mouth and sucked on it. “Not really the same thing.”

“You’re not getting a milkshake,” I told her. “Cope with it.”

Sharon scowled but put on her professional face as we heard footsteps from the open door. Everybody turned in that direction.

Dr. Wiseguy walked in grinning his self-satisfied grin (he didn’t have another kind) and approached the bed. “This is Dr. Anderson,” he said, and gestured to the man behind him.

Dr. Anderson was a young man in his mid-to-late twenties wearing blue hospital scrubs. He looked like he was trying to be serious, and I noticed that the scrubs he was wearing seemed freshly washed and new.

Which was logical because he was the guy I’d seen in the utility closet.

I guessed he couldn’t have kept the old scrubs on because even in a hospital a lot of blood on his shirt and pants would have probably caused some concern. At the very least someone would have asked which patient had bled on him.

Anderson tried very hard not to react when he saw me standing in the room, and for the most part he did an excellent job. No one who wasn’t me would have seen the slight eye widening, and they would have attributed his licking his lips to a little nervousness at being brought in to help with an examination of a woman in labor.

But from my point of view it was easy to see what was behind that expression. Dr. Anderson was afraid.

Sharon smiled as he walked in because she wanted the resident to feel comfortable. She had told me about her residency every day when she came home and most of the difficulty that wasn’t directly related to doing and learning the job was tied to trying desperately to fit in and feeling the “real doctors” weren’t very welcoming. I’d seen her ever since being extremely generous and helpful to the up-and-comers.

Right now I wanted her as far from this resident as she could get.

“Come right in,” she said. Then she must have caught a glimpse of my face and said to me, “Are you okay, Elliot?”

“Fine. It’s just... there’s a contraction coming.” There was, but they were about eight minutes apart now and that wasn’t exactly cause for concern. This one wasn’t even that severe from what I could see.

It hit Sharon, and she drew in a breath and let it out like they’d taught us in Lamaze class. “Not so bad,” she said, smiling as if to reassure me.

She wasn’t getting this.

Dr. Wiseguy gestured Anderson over to him at the foot of Sharon’s bed and pointed to one of the monitors, which had her chart projected on it, luckily not in her line of sight. Doctors make terrible patients largely because they’re also hopeless busybodies who want to oversee every aspect of their own care. “Take a look at this,” he said to his young colleague, whom I was fairly sure had stabbed a woman to death in a closet for as-yet-unknown reasons.

“Everything appears to be perfectly normal,” Anderson told his mentor. But he was staring at me the whole time and had taken only a cursory glance at the monitor. I knew. He knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

I know.

“How much more time would you say Dr. Simon-Freed has before the baby is born?” Dr. Wiseguy asked. Clearly this was a test, either of the young resident’s reading of the data or of his bedside manner, to see if he was stupid enough to estimate an actual number of hours in front of the patient, her ex-husband, and her ex-in laws, who were hovering around more nervously than if their own child had been giving birth. Which probably would have made the papers.

“I’d say five or six hours,” Anderson said, falling into Dr. Wiseguy’s trap.

“I wouldn’t be that precise,” his teacher told him, despite the fact that Wiseguy himself had given us what he thought was a precise estimate a few hours ago and then grinned about it. Or maybe he’d been thinking about how he’d humiliate a homicidal resident later in the day. And indeed now the resident’s face registered alarm. He’d failed the test.

“Just one thing,” their patient, whom neither of them seemed to remember was present, said. “I can feel the IV moving in my hand. I think the tape is coming loose.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of that.” Anderson, eager to restore himself, walked to Sharon’s side and reached for the tray next to her.

The one that had the scalpel on it.

“Don’t do that!” I shouted. “I’ll get Jonesy!” I was halfway to the door before anyone could react and through it before their reactions (other than my mother saying that I was “behaving rudely to the young man”) could reach me.

I bolted toward the nursing station, where thankfully Randy was standing up and filing someone’s chart. He looked up and didn’t even have time to roll his eyes in irritation before I got within his earshot.

“It’s him!” I said. “The guy in the closet! He’s in that room right now getting ready to s***h my ex-wife!”

Randy was a nurse. And for all I know he was a fantastic nurse. I wouldn’t know because I’d never seen him doing any nurse stuff. I’d only come to him under stress because he was a much larger and more muscular man than I am and I didn’t think Jonesy could take Dr. Anderson two out of three falls.

So when he took a moment and looked at me I didn’t understand. “Come on!” I urged. “Let’s go!”

“Go where?” Randy said. “You want me to call security again?”

Um... “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I want. Call security. I saw the guy stab a woman in the closet and now he’s in that room posing as a Dr. Anderson. He’s got to be stopped. Call them. I’m going back in. Cover me, okay?”

On my way back to the room, I heard Randy mumble, “Cover him? Does he think he needs to shoot his way out?”

Inside Sharon’s room little seemed to have changed, except now Sophie and Jonathan had appeared and were watching the screen that had been drawn around her bed.

That couldn’t be good. I started toward the bed to keep Anderson away from my ex until Mom said Sharon had asked for privacy. That almost stopped me, but I figured I was the father and he had the knife, so I pulled the curtain open just enough to step through and watched with some fascination as Dr. Wiseguy did an examination of areas on Sharon I hadn’t gotten to examine until we’d known each other much better than she knew this guy.

Anderson stood to his side dutifully watching the Master at work and folded his arms in front of him either in a gesture of superiority or as a way of showing me that his hands were available for his use anytime he wanted to hurt someone. He continued to glare in my direction whenever his attention was not absolutely required elsewhere.

And in that position, I could see the small wad of cotton gauze in the pocket of his scrubs. The one with the bloodstain on it.

“Elliot,” Sharon said, sounding irritated. “If you don’t mind.” I got the hint and slinked back out through the curtain. But I wasn’t happy about it.

I swallowed hard wondering how long it took a couple of security guys to make it up to this floor. But Sophie didn’t know about the danger and came over to look at me. “You okay?” she asked quietly.

“Fine. Who’s running the snack bar?” That was usually one of Sophie’s jobs at Comedy Tonight.

“Carla. There are only about twenty people in the theater anyway.”