Under the Knife(52)

“Oh. Well. You should probably go then, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Because I need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez.

“What time will you be home?”

Something inside Rita felt like it was dying. Home, and everything that went with it, seemed so remote now that it might as well be on the far side of the moon. “Don’t know yet,” she said mechanically. “Late, probably.”

“Okay.” Darcy yawned. “I’m going back to bed. Call me when you’re on your way and I’ll throw something together for dinner. Okay?”

They were chatting as if today were like any other day, and God, what Rita wouldn’t give for that to be so.

“Okay.” She could barely push the word out of her mouth.

“Good luck, okay? Love you, Ree.”

“Love you too, kiddo.”

As Rita hung up and leaned against a nearby wall, a horrible thought seized hold of her.

She would never speak to Darcy again.

“Your sister has had some bad times. Hasn’t she, Dr. Wu?”

Leaning there, Rita supposed that, in a morning filled with the most disturbing things imaginable, the realization that Finney could not only listen in on a private conversation with her kid sister but had somehow rigged Darcy’s head with the same thing he’d implanted in Rita could crush whatever was left of her. Stamp out her will completely.

But it had the opposite effect. What had been simmering anger became hatred. She balled her hands into fists. She was a doctor, had taken an oath to protect human life, but in that moment, she wanted to hurt Finney, hurt him badly, in all the ways possible for one person to hurt another.

“What have you done to my sister?” she growled.

No answer.

“Coward. You’re a coward. Hiding behind your microphone.”

No answer.

She staggered back to her locker as if in a dream (nightmare). The nurse with the locker next to hers had finished and was gone. Rita loosened her towel and began to change into fresh underwear (she always kept at least one extra pair for call nights) and scrubs. She was careful to leave her glasses facing away from her, toward the back of the locker.

Finney said, in barely more than a whisper: “What do you know about cowardice, Dr. Wu? Pilots go down with their planes. Captains go down with their ships. But surgeons get to walk away from their disasters. Just like you walked away from Jenny.”

Bastard, she fumed.

Yeah, okay, she did feel guilty about his wife. Of course she did. She always would. More than he could ever know, for reasons he could never fathom. But, to hell with him: What the hell did he know about being a surgeon? About what that meant? About complications, and living with the ghosts of patients who’d died under your care? Each day, she made countless decisions that altered people’s lives. Operate, or don’t operate? Big incision, or little one? Cut out more of an organ—a colon, perhaps, or a liver—and risk serious complications, or cut out less and not cure the disease? And always, always, there were consequences.

“What do you know about anything?” Rita mumbled.

“A lot, actually. Take your sister. Darcy Rose Wu, aged twenty-two. Mother, Rose Wu, died shortly after birth, from unexpected complications of delivery. Correct? Raised by your father, Kevin Wu—”

“Don’t you say my father’s name,” she hissed. An orthopedic surgeon she recognized but had never spoken with, seated on a nearby bench, paused her texting to eye her curiously. Rita turned the other way and placed a hand over her mouth. “Don’t you dare say either of my parents’ names. Ever.”

“—and, after his death, by your grandmother, Peggy. And yourself. It must have been hard to be orphaned, at such a young age. I imagine it’s one of the reasons why all of those bad things happened to your sister when she was at Brown.”

Rita pursed her lips and tried to take some comfort in knowing he didn’t have the story quite straight. Because the bad things with Darcy had started long before Brown, when she was in high school: after their grandmother had died, and Rita, in her late twenties, scarcely more than a teenager herself, had become Darcy’s guardian. They’d been little things, at first. Typical teenage things. No big deal. Open the teenager textbook, flip to the moodiness chapter, and there they were. Shouting matches. Slammed doors. Sullen looks. Missed curfews. Provocative clothes.

Then the escalation when Darcy was sixteen: sneaking out for a secret night of clubbing in Tijuana with girlfriends. An awful early-morning phone call; Rita signing out her duties and leaving her shift early to drive thirty miles to the U.S. Border Patrol office in San Ysidro, its front windows glazed brown with the grimy sediment accumulated from the exhaust of millions of idling cars waiting their turn to cross into the U.S.

The humiliation. Picking up Darcy—dazed, reeking of booze and puke—from a meaty, uniformed female agent with judgmental eyes and stringy hair the same dirty shade of brown as the front windows of the office, who pushed forms at Rita across a pitted Formica counter. Sign here, please. And here. And here.

Furious, she’d let Darcy sleep Tijuana off for most of the next day, then let her have it over dinner. Really got into it with her: like what the hell had she been thinking; and didn’t she know how lucky she was that she hadn’t landed in a Mexican jail, for God’s sake; and what would Mom and Dad have thought.