Page 17 of The Lie Maker

“When are they supposed to call?” I asked.

“Don’t know for sure. Probably the next day or so.”

“You met these people?”

“I was... approached. By a representative. Asked to relay their interest and give you the phone.”

“Suppose I just pitch it?” I said, raising the phone in my hand.

“Then you’ll never know,” Harry said. “You’ll never know what the opportunity was, and you’ll never stop wondering, either. The road not taken, that kind of thing.”

Shit. Like some dime-store-thriller writer, Harry had set the hook.

“Jesus!” Harry said, looking through the thick aquarium glass. On the other side, staring at us, was a massive, prehistoric-looking turtle the size of a Honda.

“It’s Myrtle!” Harry said.

Nine

“Okay, stick a fork in me, because I’m done,” Dr.Marie Sloan said, peeling off her surgical gloves and mask and pitching them into a plastic-lined waste bin. One gunshot wound (not too serious, nicked the guy’s arm), a five-year-old with a high fever, two elderly heart attack patients (lost one, saved the other), a woman who had nearly cut her finger off trying to pry the lid off a tuna tin, and a guy whose seasonal allergies were so bad he couldn’t stop sneezing no matter how many over-the-counter meds he took. And that was just the last three hours of a twelve-hour shift in the ER at Boston Community Hospital.

She headed to the doctors’ locker room, peeled off her scrubs, tossed them into the laundry basket, and debated whether to have a shower before heading home to Zack, her husband, who would be fast asleep, given that it was midnight and he had to be up at six for his own shift at the local fire station. When he went to work, it would be Marie who was comatose. She wouldn’t even feel it when he kissed her forehead on his way out.

One of these days, they might actually see each other. There were times when Marie wondered whether this was any way to live. Could you be burned out at thirty-four? Could she put up with this kind of shit for another three decades? Okay, so maybe she’d switch gears, set herself up as a GP out in the suburbs somewhere, maybe even in a small town, somewhere in the Berkshires, get some regular hours. Zack could probably find a job there, right? There are always forest fires, aren’t there? One day, maybe. If she could make it to that point before she self-destructed.

Back during the pandemic, which had gone on for so much longer than anyone could have predicted—Delta, Omicron, just how many Greek letters were there, anyway?—how many times had she nearly packed it in? Pretty much the end of every shift.

Even now, with the worst of it over, Marie was still dealing with the trauma. Nightmares, for sure, but for months now she’d been suffering from a general, debilitating anxiety. It didn’t hit her so much when she was at work—she was so busy she didn’t have time to think about how fucked up she was. But in the off times, the quiet times, it often overwhelmed her. Like the middle of the night—or the middle of the day, if she’d been working the overnight shift—she’d stare at the ceiling, praying for sleep to come, but terrified that it would, because then the bad dreams would resume.

She compared it to having ants crawling through her veins. She needed to be numbed to make it stop. That was when she started hitting the booze pretty hard when she wasn’t at work. Drugs, too, on occasion, and luckily, she managed to hide it from her superiors. As if she was the only one. If they started sacking the nurses and doctors who were self-medicating, there wouldn’t be anyone left to tend to the afflicted.

She’d engaged in dangerous, risky, random sex with one of the other doctors in the back of his Cayenne in the staff parking lot late one night, and the guilt from that only compounded everything else. Christ, how could she have betrayed Zack that way?

Jesus, those early days. Patient after patient coming to the ER. So many in the hallways you could barely make your way through. Shortness of breath, fever, coughing, diarrhea. At that time, they weren’t sure how many ways it was spreading. Was it just airborne? Could you get it from touching someone? What if you ate something that was prepared by someone who might—just might—have it?

And because they didn’t know, they had to keep the sick separated from their healthy loved ones. It seemed so cruel, so heartless, but did they really have any choice?

One time when she got home from her shift she told Zack about an eighty-two-year-old man who was fading fast, and his grown daughter had demanded to speak to him before he passed.

“So we get hold of her at home and I’m putting the phone right up to her father’s ear so they can say goodbye to each other, right, and I can hear what she’s saying. That she loves him, that he means more than anything in the world to her, and then she pauses because she’s waiting for her dad to say something, and I realize he’s dying, that he isn’t hearing a thing she’s saying, that he’s slipping away as she talks to him. And she starts saying ‘Dad? Dad? Did you hear me?’ And I have to tell her it’s too late, and she just goes nuts on the phone. Should I have lied? Should I have said he whispered that he loved her but she just didn’t hear him? That’s what I should have done.”

Zack took her in his arms and told her she’d done the best she could.

He was, bless him, a good listener. He’d seen his fair share of shit in his line of work, too. Colleagues trapped in a burning building when a ceiling gave way. Children overcome by smoke. Bad stuff, for sure. But it was sporadic. She tried to explain what it was like. Imagine the fires never stopped. Every call you went to led to another, and another, and another, and pretty soon the whole fucking city was on fire, and when you went to hook the hoses to the hydrants, there was no water left.

On this night, Dr.Marie Sloan, sitting on the bench in the locker room, leaned over, put her head in her hands, and had a short cry. Just enough to get it out of her system so she could move on, get in her car, and go home.

“Okay,” she said to herself, raising her head. “I got this.”

She slipped on a jacket, grabbed her purse, and closed her locker. Skipped the shower. She’d have one when she got home. When she reached the outdoors she inhaled two lungfuls of cool night air, then let them out slowly.

It suddenly hit her that she was starving. The McDonald’s drive-through would be open. She’d do that on the way home.

Marie crisscrossed her way through the doctors’ parking lot, hit the button on her remote. The lights on a Lexus SUV flashed once. She got to the car, opened the door, and was about to get behind the wheel when she felt something sharp and pointed touch the side of her neck just below her ear.

A man whispered, “Someone would like to have a word with you.”

Ten

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