Cassie Alexander: Shapeshifted

People were looking at me, registering that I was there, that they didn’t know me, and then looking away. I didn’t feel I was in danger, but I did feel like an outsider. I got my bearings while trying not to turn my back completely on anyone. I’d been too paranoid for too long to let my guard down now. According to the map in my head, the clinic was two blocks up. I set off down the sidewalk while listening for footsteps behind me.

The road was lined by the walls of run-down businesses, a few painted fresh white over graffiti. Others were turquoise and pale pink. There were some cars parked outside, though none that would have shamed my Chevy. The road itself could only questionably be called such, full of potholes and patches of gravel. The sidewalk wasn’t much better.

I looked back where I’d come from. Who knew there was this whole other world that I’d never been to before, or even seen? I thought back to the train. Had I taken that line before? Yes. It’d been a while, but I had—I’d just never gotten off at this one stop. It was like Europe—you were sure it was there, but you mostly only saw it on TV.

Kind of like cancer too.

A car pulled up beside me, and the music playing inside it turned off. I elbowed my purse a little closer to my chest.

“Need a ride, lady?” asked the man inside the car. I thought about ignoring him. I didn’t want to be the type of person who thought poorly of anyone, but I also didn’t want to wind up a sad morality tale that women told to other women on dark nights. Still, it was one P.M., and there wasn’t anything in my purse worth stealing.

I leaned over. “I’m just walking to the clinic. It’s up that way, right?”

“Yeah. Just up the street. Tell Hector I say hi.” He nodded and turned his music back on, veering back into the center of the street and heading up to proposition another pedestrian.

Just a gypsy cab—a cabbie without a license. I relaxed a little but kept walking quickly. There were men standing on a corner, outside what looked like a liquor store, but that was farther down. I saw the clinic itself, its name at the top of one wall, the letters painted on where the original ones had fallen off. I realized I was facing the wall that had been on the street view—but that the mural was gone, replaced with off-white paint that hadn’t been weather-beaten by an entire summer’s sun. Santa Muerte was gone.

I wondered what that meant for me.

I stood for a moment, trying to compose myself. Just how much of a fool’s errand this would be. An early-teens kid standing outside the clinic door walked over to me. He looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, judging me, and then he clucked, shaking his head. “You’ve got susto bad, lady. You won’t find help for that in there. You need to come with me and see my grandfather.”

My left eyebrow rose involuntarily. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

“Are you sure? Only farsantes in there. My grandfather is a curandero —” He kept going, his patter confident. His pants were a little short, and the center of his shirt had the logo of a brand I didn’t recognize.

“I’m sure. Thanks, though. I appreciate your concern.” I squeezed around him and opened the door.

“Don’t put that in your mouth, mija !” a mother told a child inside. An elderly woman coughed in a corner, running rosary beads through the fingers of one hand. A pregnant woman sat with one hand on her full belly, the other pushing a stroller back and forth with a sleeping occupant inside. And two men were having a discussion—one of them didn’t have any teeth, and the other had a grotesquely swollen hand.

They may not have been my people, as I had come to understand it, when I was working with the vampires, daytimers, and sanctioned donors on Y4. But they were patients. And just like that, I knew where I was again. It was home.

Hard plastic chairs lined the waiting room walls; the bulk of the clinic itself was walled off by double-paned plastic. I presented myself at the nearest window, and a woman with short dark hair and copper skin told me to wait a minute for Dr. Tovar to see me.

“Miss Spence?” My name rang out from the side door. I stood and smiled, and went over to the woman in pink scrubs holding it open. She looked me up and down and snorted dismissively, but she still opened the door. “Dr. Tovar will see you now.”

I followed her down a corridor with instructional posters in English and Spanish. I could count the Spanish words I knew on both hands. I knew corazon meant “heart,” sangre meant “blood,” dolor meant “pain.” Other than that, I was pretty good at guessing, and quick to call the translation line at the hospital if need be. The woman I was following knocked on a closed door and, at an answer from the occupant, opened it for me.

Dr. Tovar held my résumé in his hands.

He was beautiful. Dark skin, black hair, a strong jaw, wide shoulders under a tweed coat—suddenly I wished I’d dressed up a little more for this, until I remembered he was a doctor.

Doctors were bad ideas, and off limits, for any nurse. You got into fights with doctors too often to think of them that way. At the hospital, it was like war. Nurses were on the front lines, and doctors were like distant generals who never believed you when you said you were running out of ammunition while they were yelling at you to march.

When he was done frowning at my résumé, he glanced up and looked surprised, for the briefest of moments, to see me. Regaining his composure, he gestured to the extra chair.

I sat down across from him. This room was a personal office with a simple desk and worn-down chairs, not a place for seeing patients. There were books in both Spanish and English behind him, thick medical dictionaries that looked out of date. If it were any smaller, my knees would have met his beneath the desk.

“And just why am I looking at your résumé?” He had a mild accent, the kind that said he’d grown up somewhere else but lived here a very long time.

“Lucky, I guess?” I tried halfheartedly to sound convincing.

He looked up at me with a grimace, and his eyes traveled up and down the length of me, much as the woman who’d walked me down the hall had. At a club or on a date, it might feel sexual, but here I felt like he was cataloging all my flaws. When he was done, he sighed. “You don’t speak Spanish, do you?”

“I’m sorry, but no. I can play a mean game of charades, though.”

He didn’t crack a smile. “What do you know about serving diverse patient populations?”

I’d had to camouflage the second-to-last job on my résumé. No way to put works well with vampires down in the prior employment blank. “I worked at a county facility. We saw all kinds of patients there.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t like working night shift.”

“And yet your next job was at a sleep clinic? Your … current job?” he said, after inspecting the dates more closely.

“I’d rather work days. And with patients that are awake.”

He made a thoughtful noise. He wasn’t that much older than me, early thirties, but he seemed older, like he was required to exude the aura of middle-aged wisdom here. I guessed as the doctor of a community health clinic, it was expected of him.

“So, um—what happened to the mural outside?” I asked, trying to make small talk.

He gave me a dark look over my résumé. “We painted over it. I don’t want people praying to death on my watch.” I swallowed and nodded as he went on, setting my résumé down. “Nothing personal, Miss Spence, but you’re completely unqualified to work here. You don’t speak Spanish, you’ve never done real clinic work with people who were awake, and you’ve never been out of a hospital setting. I don’t think there’s anything you can offer us. At all.”