Page 21 of Near Miss

She’s not looking at me like I’m her son, or a living, breathing person who had things taken from him, too—she’s looking at me like she needs another favour.

I’m happy to do it. I am. I have this stupid life and this stupid job.

But sometimes, I wish they’d just look at me like they loved me.

I wish they’d just ask.

I’d say yes.

But I glance at my sister, lips tugging up to the side before I reach out and ruffle her hair again. “As many tries as you want, Sarah.”

Greer

“This is all veryGrey’s Anatomy, don’t you think?” I dig my thumb into the seam of the worn leather couch, my other hand toying with the stethoscope hung haphazardly around my neck. “Me, sitting here on your therapy couch on my lunch break, a few floors up from where I perform lifesaving surgeries?”

Rav cocks his head and taps his pen against the edge of his oak clipboard. It’s pretentious. I tell him that at least once a session, and I offer to trade him for one of the cracking plastic clipboards we keep downstairs.

He smiles at me, lines around his brown eyes crinkling, and sometimes, depending on how exuberant he is, a curl might flop down onto his forehead.

But he’s not exuberant right now. His mouth pulls into a tight line, and he raises a brow knowingly. “Deflection, Greer.”

I sit up straighter, tipping my chin. “This is my place of work; you should call me Dr. Roberts.”

“Oh?” He grins, nodding. “Alright, let’s go from Rav back to Dr. Mardhani then.”

“Great. Very professional.” I give him a thin smile and sink back on the couch.

He waits—he’s great at waiting.

But today, I win, because his nostrils flare and he looks down at the watch on his wrist. We only have forty-five minutes. “Okay, Dr. Roberts. Tell me, did anything out of the ordinary happen this week? You called and moved your session up.”

“Can’t a girl just want to see her favourite psychiatrist slash colleague on a...” I pause, looking down and checking my watch. “Tuesday?”

He taps his pen again. “She can, but you don’t. Out with it. I, too, would like to get to lunch.”

I inhale, and I think of my sister. She sits across from people like me—like us—on couches like this all the time. She’s endlessly patient, and she doesn’t mind sitting with people who’re just trying to understand or trying to unpack something. People who maybe don’t even know why they’re sitting where they are.

But I know why I’m here.

And I value Rav, his time, his expertise, his field of medicine. I really, really do. So I stop picking at the seam of his couch, I blink at him, and shrug one shoulder before I speak.

I don’t want it to, but my voice cracks. “I took a kidney from a perfectly healthy teenager the other day. They gave me permission to take it. No coercion, as far as I could tell. They gave it up willingly. All so their cousin could live a better, easier life, after years and years of cancer treatments. What do you make of that?”

The tapping stops and his nostrils flare. Rav sets his clipboard beside him on the arm of his chair and leans forward, hands finding his knees. “I think that people can be wonderful, generous, and kind in a very cruel world.”

I nod, lower lip puckering, and I blink again. My eyes burn, and there’s this phantom sort of twinge across the bottom of my right rib cage. “Do you think it’s fair that we take organs from people who aren’t even fully realized adults yet?”

“You tell me.” Rav raises his hands, gesturing towards me. “You’re the transplant fellow. What do you think?”

“You know what I think,” I whisper.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing. But he’s not annoyed or angry, I know him enough to know that. He seems sad. “What’s this really about, Greer? We’ve talked about this. We’ve established what you want to work on. Your boundaries.”

“Boundaries,” I repeat. But the word feels heavy on my tongue, like it might slip down my throat and choke me under the weight of its expectations. I gesture around the room, mimicking him. “Come on. How good am I at those? Look around. I dedicated my entire life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the thing that practically destroyed whatever semblance of family I had?”

Rav has this air of maddening patience about him—he always does. He nods along before he speaks, his words quiet. “Boundaries can change, and they can be established long after they were needed. You save lives, Greer. That’s what you do. Whether you want to rewrite history or not.”

I wish someone would have saved mine.

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