Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

Shit! “Please, Dr. Garnet. I’d prefer we keep this informal, off the record, and that you simply tell me your take on what I found in my father’s files.”

Earl studied him, eye to eye, but said nothing.

Mark opened the briefcase, retrieved a copy of Kelly’s letter from a manila folder, and placed it in front of him. “To begin with, here’s what she wrote about you.”

Earl regarded it skeptically.

“Just take a look. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of it, I go my way and do what I have to do. You do the same. But I think we can avoid that.”

He didn’t make a move.

“Dr. Garnet, I figure there are two possibilities here. Either you’re the good man that letter and your record say you are, or you’ve been a brilliant fraud, and should be made to answer to the police about your affair with Kelly and what part it played in her disappearance. Me, I’m betting on the first.”

Earl picked up the sheet of paper and began to read intently, the tension draining from his face. Within moments, he was trying to fight back tears.

Her words on paper sounded as clearly in Earl’s head as if she spoke them in his ear. From the secret place his memories of her had hidden themselves over half a lifetime ago came a rush of forgotten sensations – the musical sound of her voice, her scent, the electric feel of her fingers on his flesh. And his agony after her disappearance.

I’ve met a man.

A wonderful, caring man who loves me, and I love him.

What a release it is to be cherished, respected, and liked. I feel as if all the other garbage has fallen away, and I’m free, with a new life ahead of me. Whether it will be with him or not, I don’t know, but I’m full of hope. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it all, and look forward to talking over possible strategies with you. But I am ecstatic!

In a scar so hardened with time that he barely knew it was there, something gave. It felt as real to him as if withered bands of connective tissue no longer able to hold their burden had split open, and a release he’d never expected to find spread through him. Decades after the doubts stopped mattering, he finally learned she’d loved him.

Logically he knew that after all these years he shouldn’t have been affected so deeply. Not until he brought his hand to his mouth in a reflex of disbelief and felt his tears did he realize he’d involuntarily begun to cry. “Excuse me,” he said, hastily dabbing his eyes with his napkin. “This took me by surprise.”

“I understand.”

In Mark’s quiet voice Earl recognized the same nonjudgmental tone he’d often used himself to encourage a distraught patient to talk. Damned effective. He found himself wanting to explain his reaction, especially to someone who’d known Kelly. That Mark was also the son of Cam Roper, the man in whom she’d confided, made it seem even more like speaking directly to a link with her. “I thought she just ran out, on me, on medicine, everything. That I loved her more than she loved me. That she simply wanted to disappear…” He wiped his eyes again. “Sorry. The human heart can be a sneaky organ.”

“We both lost a lot that summer.”

Earl tabled the napkin. “Yes, you said she was like a sister to you.”

Mark seemed about to say something, but instead reached into his briefcase and placed a file on the table. “This contains photocopies of everything in my father’s chart on Kelly.” He flipped open the cover. “What do you make of that?”

Earl glanced down at the page and found himself looking at a record of Kelly’s visit to Cam Roper as a little girl. Soon hard clinical logic displaced the emotional quicksand of the last few minutes – ER had trained him to make that kind of quick change with personal feelings – and he studied it with his full concentration. Reaching the end, he flipped the paper over. “No follow-up?”

“Apparently not.”

He needed only a few seconds to piece together his initial opinion. “I’d suspect the symptoms were functional, possibly stress-related, just as your father did. I’d also agree with his insinuation in the margin that the mother played a big part in the problem. Clearly she ran from doctor to doctor, probably needing excessive reassurances that her daughter was okay. Except…” He trailed off, interrupted by the memory of Kelly arching against him, making love with the lights off. Always with the lights off because of the scars. But he could feel them – a bad job by whoever had closed the wounds, both of them being as rough and wide as a small rope. On their first night together when he asked about it, she grew embarrassed. “I had problems when I was a kid. It’s over now. Please, don’t talk about them. They’re so ugly.” But of course he’d eventually seen them, catching glimpses in the ambient light through the window and once by a full moon, when she fell asleep lying on her back with the covers half off. They looked like sterling ridges on a silver tray.

“Except what?” Mark asked.

“Those scars bothered her, even into adulthood. I’d say they were left by a surgeon who could have used some practice.”

He flipped ahead, seeing entries indicating Cam Roper had provided Kelly with support therapy over several years, from 1970 until 1974. “Obviously these sessions involved other kinds of scars. Invisible ones. God knows Chaz gave her enough cause for grief, and Samantha wasn’t exactly a mother of the year.”

Mark nodded.

“What are these doing here?” Earl asked, finding what he immediately recognized from their format as reports from NYCH Death Rounds.

“I don’t know. I didn’t look at them too closely – figured they must have been misfiled.”

Earl riffled through them. After years of auditing his own department, he could read the chart of a resuscitation and run it like a movie in his head. He just didn’t glean information; he could place himself in the middle of the action and sense whether the team had worked together with grace or in utter discord. Most telling was the order sheet. The time entries indicated what drugs they gave in what sequence and revealed not only whether they’d done the right things, but if they’d been fast enough doing them. In minutes he had both cases pegged and more. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mark.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.” He spread the papers out between them. “First the cases themselves. Both received the right treatment in a timely enough way, but the woman was a close call. Initially, whoever ran the arrest almost fell into the trap of ordering more digoxin. See where the order’s been written, then canceled?” He pointed at the appropriate line. “One person figured out what was really going on in the nick of time. After that, everything went like a charm.”

“Okay, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Kelly-”

“Not so. Look at this signature on one of the orders.”

Mark peered at the paper. “I can’t make it out.”

“Not surprising, given how we all scrawl our names.” said Earl. Doctors’ signatures were always indecipherable. That’s why residents and physicians had to enter their training or license numbers after anything they wrote in a chart. “But some of these stand out to me because we were in a study group together all through med school. I’d recognize them as surely as if I’d gone through a yearbook of old class photos.” He picked up the photocopy of Kelly’s letter, folded it to the bottom third where she’d signed Kelly , and shoved it beside the order sheet. “Recognize the handwriting?”

Mark grabbed both papers and held them up together. “My God, it’s her signature!”

“She was there, Mark.” He pushed the order sheet for the man who’d died toward him. “And at this patient’s resuscitation as well. Her name appears several places.”