Page 11 of Summer with the Single Dad

She glanced at the screen. Yeah, it was her mother. That was her first guess.

She let it go to voicemail.

A moment later, it began to ring and vibrate again. This time, it was her father.

She let that go to voicemail.

Then it was their landline.

She let that go to voicemail.

She reached her cabin porch and sat down on the hammock, staring at the voicemail notifications. Until her finger pressed the screen and opened her voicemail. She pressed “one” a moment later and put the phone to her ear. Her nerves were nearly shot even before her mother’s voice began on the other end.

“Justine, it’s your mother. Enough is enough. We don’t know what is going on, but you need to pick up your phone. Please. We need to know you’re all right.”

Then the next message came from her dad. “Justine, what is wrong? What have we done? What have I done? Please talk to us. We’re worried. We love you.” His thick French-Canadian accent made her smile, but it was only for a second. She deleted both messages, then texted her dad.

I’m on vacation. Thank you for your concern. I love you too.

She didn’t bother to text her mother. Her dad would relay the message to her.

He replied back immediately.

I wish we could speak in person.

I can’t, Dad. Heading to bed now.

She could just imagine his disappointed face.

But what could she say to them?

“I let my personal life affect my professional life and a patient died because of it?”

She came from a family of doctors. Professionals. It was drilled into her sisters and her’s brains since they were children that leaving emotions on the other side of the door was critical to success. Don’t take your friendship woes with you into a math test. Leave your grief over your dead cat at home, otherwise your frog dissection will suffer.

Emotions were for home, not for work.

Her family was also exceptional at not getting personally invested with their patients.

Death was a part of life. They took an oath to do no harm, but sometimes too much harm had already been done before they got their shot to help.

They’d never understand. Not her parents. Not her sisters.

She was the black sheep. The middle child. The daughter who needed a math tutor, and a speech pathologist because she had a lisp. She was the difficult one. The one who made her parents miss work because she needed someone to drive her to her tutor or her speech path. She was the child who needed more help with her long division homework in the evenings.

She needed to study harder to get good grades. Daniela had an eidetic memory and an IQ of one hundred forty. She skipped three grades and graduated with her bachelor’s degree in two and a half years. She was accepted to six med schools, all of them offering her full scholarships.

Everything just came easy to Tasha too. She was valedictorian, captain of the debate team and the mathletes, and won numerous awards for science. MIT, Caltech, and NASA expressed interest in buying the patent to her junior year science project. But Tasha wasn’t interested in the money. Or so she said. For now, she was just sitting on the patent, waiting to see if she wanted to pursue it, or just pass it along to someone else.

Justine’s parents were so proud of their two daughters and their achievements. Meanwhile, they were just glad that Justine was accepted to Johns Hopkins and made it through med school.

She was their disappointment. The problem child. The middle kid with no real identity or place. A spare. A filler. An extra mouth to feed.

They may not have ever called her that, or said such things to her, but she knew it. She felt it.

So, no, she wouldn’t tell them, or her sisters, what she did. That she overheard nurses talking in the bathroom right before surgery, then she took what she heard into the OR and let it affect how she operated. She thought she was doing fine. Thought she had left that information on the other side of the door. But when one nurse addressed another by name, Nurse Busche, Nurse Ashli Busche, Justine’s hand slipped. The hand holding the razor-sharp scalpel less than a millimeter away from Mr. O’Malley’s artery slipped.

And Justine killed him.

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