Under the Knife(38)

Chase hated losing.

So, yes: That was the way forward for her.

“Chase. Look.” She reached out and placed a hesitant hand on his shoulder. “I know all of this, uh, looks weird.” She chose her words carefully. “Whatever happened, last night … well—I can’t completely explain it. I think it’s safe to say I’ve been working too hard, and that it finally caught up with me. But I feel good, Chase.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Really!” she said. “I can do this. I can do it safely. Besides, the auto-surgeon is going to do most of the work anyway, right? It passed all the cadaveric models, and the animal tests, with flying colors. I’m just there to set things up and let it do its thing. It runs itself. That’s what it’s supposed to do. Run itself.”

He squinted at her, hard, and clenched his jaw.

“Look, Chase,” she continued. “I’m not a, uh, media expert, or anything. But I have a feeling that if we cancel, it’s going to make us look bad. Like we don’t know what we’re doing, or that there are major safety problems. And the university president, and the dean, and whoever else is here—they’re not going to like it, either. If only because you’ve wasted their time.”

He squinted still harder, the horizontal slits of brown skin that encased his eyes almost squeezing shut at the mention of their superiors. She could all but hear the political gears in his brain grinding away.

“And if we postpone today, Chase, it’s going to put us behind schedule. Way behind schedule. Look how long it took us to find Mrs. Sanchez. She’s perfect for it: perfect anatomy and body habitus. If we cancel today, we’ll have to find another patient. I don’t know how long that will take. The Europeans are nipping at our heels. Fabius, in Lyons—”

“I know about Professor Fabius,” he growled.

She also knew that Chase in private often referred to Fabius as that frog bastard. As in: There’s no way in hell I’m letting that frog bastard beat me to the punch.

“Okay, then you know that Fabius is almost as far along as we are, with that EU consortium he’s heading up. We need to get this done, Chase. We need to get this done, and out there, ASAP. Or Fabius will be first. We can’t afford to wait. Not even a day.”

Chase’s face remained inscrutable.

She took a deep breath and plowed ahead. “You pulled all of this together. It was your leadership and your vision, Chase, that made this possible.” As with any political beast, she knew that ego-stroking was like heroin to him. “You’ve believed in me all of these years. You know me. You know that I would go forward only if I thought it would be safe. I can perform this operation in my sleep, Chase. Trust me. Trust me the way you’ve always trusted me.”

In the hallway outside the alcove, a group of men and women laughed. It sounded full-throated and uninhibited, unusual for so early on a Monday, and Rita wondered if they were laughing about her.

Chase’s face was stone.

This isn’t working. He’s not going to go for it.

“That was a nice speech, Dr. Wu,” Finney said. She realized only then that he hadn’t interrupted her for a while.

The tight lines around Chase’s eyes and mouth relaxed a fraction. Or was it a trick of the light?

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” he asked. “You don’t look like it to me. You look pale.”

“Yes. I’m okay, Chase. Really.”

“Huh.” He worked his jaw, as if chewing on a piece of gum, crossed his arms, and leaned backward on his heels.

“You know,” he said, “I remember the first time I met you. When I interviewed you for the residency program. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” Rita recalled Chase in his corner office, sitting at his football-field-sized desk of polished oak. His office windows overlooked a stand of eucalyptus trees, through which she’d caught a glimpse of a blue sliver of the Pacific.

She remembered thinking how handsome and impressive he was, the wunderkind just promoted to chief of surgery, and at being surprised to see the framed vintage movie posters adorning the walls of his office alongside the diplomas and awards. The Godfather, Part II. His Girl Friday. The Terminator. The Searchers. Chase, she’d soon learned, was a film buff who took particular pride in his limited edition Star Wars: Revenge of the Jedi poster—of which, he loved pointing out to bemused visitors, only a few thousand were ever issued before the movie title was changed to Return of the Jedi.

“God, I remember it so well. So many applicants. So many kids wanting to be surgeons. But you: You stuck out immediately.”

“Why?”

“Your confidence. I asked you where you saw yourself in ten years. A standard bullshit-interview question, to which we normally receive a standard bullshit-interview response. Do you remember what you said?”

“No.”

“You pointed to me, and said, ‘Sitting in your chair, sir.’” He laughed, with warmth, and the ghost of a smile lingered on his lips. “‘Sitting in your chair.’ Jesus, what goddamn nerve!”

This was the first time, in all the years she’d known him, he’d told her this story.

“God—you reminded me so much of myself, at your age. Full of piss and vinegar. A lot of the faculty didn’t care for your attitude. I had to argue your case. Tell them you were the best applicant I’d ever seen. Talented. Smart. Gutsy.” He grunted. “But they were uncomfortable around a strong woman.” A strong Asian woman, he didn’t need to say. The opinion of the old boy’s club, she knew, was that a nice Asian girl like her, good at math and science (which in their Neanderthal worldviews were the only things Asians were good at), belonged in a lab, not an OR. She couldn’t care less about their asinine opinions. She never had. She could operate circles around any one of them.