“Ms. Lane?”
She stands and aims her smile at the young man in scrubs who can’t be more than twenty. He’s a beefy thing and awkward, and she knows exactly what to do with him. She swings her hips as she walks toward him, feeling the burn from her wounds but knowing better than anyone how to function through pain. He holds open the door for her, and she bows her head and scoots in, always turning toward him attentively. He weighs her—she’s lost a pound, which is a pleasant surprise, despite the fact that she’s well aware she hasn’t been eating—and takes her blood pressure, which is just this side of high.
“White coat syndrome,” she tells him, a little shyly.
“We see that a lot,” he agrees. He walks her into a treatment room and changes the paper on the bench. She hops up, girlish, and wishes she could cross her ankles.
“So what brings you in today?”
“I had a little accident.” He raises his bushy eyebrows, so she reaches down to her calf and unwinds the bandage, steeling herself for the moment of disgust and horror she feels each time that flap of skin and meat dangles freely. It’s stopped bleeding, with a rough, black scab outlining the clear marks of teeth.
“Oh.” He swallows. “Wow. Yeah, that’s…something. That might be a little beyond our, uh, abilities.”
She puts a hand on his arm, where a cartoon ghost thing is crudely tattooed. “You look thoroughly capable to me.”
It’s funny how quickly she can tap into this old part of herself—the part of her who used to judge a man who walked into the diner and figure out exactly how to treat him for the best tip. This young man—nurse or doctor, she’s not sure—when she touched him, his breath sped up. Maybe he likes older women, or maybe women his age never give him the time of day. He’s large and rough and looks like he doesn’t own a mirror, but he has something she wants very much, and so she’ll resurrect the coquettish part of Patty if it’ll get her leg fixed and send her home with a bottle of antibiotics.
“I’ll send in the doctor.”
Patricia’s smile doesn’t waver, but she’s a bit disappointed. This boy would be easy to deal with, and now she has no idea who’ll be sent in to tend to her—possibly someone better at saying no. She gives him a coy little wave goodbye as he galumphs out the door. Barely a minute later, the door reopens, revealing the exact kind of person Patricia was hoping to avoid.
The doctor is her age but a battle-ax to Patricia’s rapier. She’s wide and stocky and pasty, with dull-brown hair cut like a helmet and muddy eyes behind thick glasses. Her small lips are set in a scowl, and she’s wearing Crocs and a stained white coat.
“Ms. Lane,” she says—not asks—as she peers at Patricia’s chart.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Dr. Ellis. How did this happen?”
The doctor puts down her chart and squats down laboriously to inspect Patricia’s wound. Patricia holds up her thin, tan, sculpted, perfectly hairless leg for her frowning scrutiny. She’s given this answer a lot of consideration.
“I was bitten.”
The doctor glares at her. “I’m not an idiot. I know it’s a bite. From what?” She reaches out to touch the dangling bit, her eyes snapping up to Patricia’s face to gauge her reaction to the sudden pain.
But even if Patricia looks like a country-club woman, her backbone is a trailer-park girl, and she doesn’t flinch.
“Does it really matter? I’d just like to have it cleaned up, sewn up, and defended against infection.”
This time, when Dr. Ellis touches the dangling bit, she isn’t as careful. She presses into the wound, tugs a little, and Patricia pins her lips against cursing or vomiting. Yes, the nice young man would’ve been vastly preferable. This woman is testing her. Either she’s a sadist, or she’s become hardened to her purpose, or she hates thin, beautiful women. Patricia has met all of their types, over the years, and she won’t let any of them see her sweat.
“I suppose that is my job, but it would really help me if I knew what I was defending you against. The bite marks look human. Child-sized.” Dr. Ellis stares at her, a dare.
Patricia is too smart to rise to the bait.
That’s the thing about when both people know it’s a lie—someone still has to say it out loud, and the other one has to agree to it.
“How peculiar.”
The doctor snorts. “Yes. So very peculiar. If that’s all you’re willing to tell me, I’ll just assume it’s not a rabid raccoon and do the best I can. I can give you a shot of local anesthesia, but we’re not fully equipped like an emergency room.”
“That sounds perfectly acceptable.”
Dr. Ellis shakes her head and stands, slowly, grunting, her knees clicking. “I’ll be back shortly with supplies and help. You understand this isn’t going to be fun?”
Patricia smiles sweetly. “Getting it wasn’t particularly fun, either.”
Once the doctor has left the room, Patricia takes one last look at her wound and then remembers to pull the gauze off her thigh. She forgot that one—but it’s also not the one she’s worried about. She flicks through her phone and snoops around for a remote control to turn off the TV, another high-hanging parasite that blares a little too loud and shows commercials she’d rather turn off. She had forgotten how time runs strange in blank white treatment rooms, how dehumanizing they are. She’s just a faceless body with a problem, and the doctors here don’t know her, don’t know her history, just want to get her taken care of and out of the room so they can roll down a new length of crunchy white paper.
It’s monstrous, really, how modern medicine treats people.
Well, poor people.
It worked quite well when Dr. Baird drove right up to her house in his BMW and already had her full history on his laptop. Here, she feels like a number. Like cattle.
“Here we go.” Dr. Ellis bustles back in with a plastic bin. The awkward young man is behind her carrying yet more supplies.
Patricia braces herself for small talk or admonishments, but Dr. Ellis goes into teaching mode, explaining everything she sees and does to the young man and telling him what to do and pointing out how he could do what he’s doing more effectively. Patricia goes from feeling like cattle to feeling like a piece of meat. The anesthetic they inject into her calf dulls the pain, at least, but she can still feel pressure and tugging, and she has to look away when the needle and black thread come out.
“Ms. Lane?”
Patricia looks up. She was lost somewhere in her thoughts. “Hm?”
“I’m afraid we’re going to need to excise some of this dead tissue.” Dr. Ellis is pinching the dangly bit of meat between her blue-gloved fingers.
Patricia just stares at her,
“I just wanted you to be aware.”