Her eyes grow even rounder. “But you’re a doctor. You can’t hate hospitals.”
I shrug, looking up at the ceiling. “I like helping people. That’s why I became a doctor. But I don’t like hospitals. You know, my daddy is a doctor just like me. And when I was little, I never saw him. He was always working, always coming home so late, when I was already tucked up and asleep in bed, and I used to get so angry with him for spending all of his time at the hospital. I used to get mad at all the sick people that wanted him to spend all of his time with them instead of me. It took me a long time to realize that he was doing a very important job and that they needed him more than I did. I realized he still loved me, no matter what, and I would always be his little girl. That never changed how I felt about hospitals, though. I always hated them.”
Millie’s eyebrows climb upward. “Do you hate being here now?”
“No. Not now. I like being here, talking to you.”
With a little wriggle and a grunt, Millie sits up, resting against the mountain of pillows her brother insisted she needed on her bed. “You helped me when I came here earlier, didn’t you? I remember this.” She reaches up and touches me lightly on the arm, pointing at my watch. “It’s very shiny,” she whispers. “I think Mason used to have a watch like that one.”
My watch, an inexpensive copy of a Rolex, is one of my most valuable possessions. It was given to me by one of my very first patients—a woman I treated with ovarian cancer. I’d been an intern at the time, so she wasn’t even my patient, but I’d been the one to diagnose her. The doctor presiding over her case, Dr. Withers, had insisted she had celiac’s disease but back then I’d had the same nagging, uncomfortable sensation that something wasn’t quite right, and I’d investigated further. The tiny mass on her left ovary would have been easy to miss if I hadn’t been looking so hard for it. The woman, Casey, had been so grateful that I’d caught the malignant tumor that she’d come back and brought me the watch a couple of weeks after she’d finished her chemo treatments. She’d looked tired, with large shadows underneath her eyes, but she’d been given the all clear. She was cancer free, and she said she had me to thank for that.
Casey and I kept in touch for a long time. She’d send me pictures of her daughter, telling me about all of the milestones she’d been able to witness in her child’s life. After a while the letters stopped, though. A couple of years into my residency, I learned that Casey had died from a secondary bout of ovarian cancer that had snuck back in and taken root. By the time they started treating her, it was already too late.
“You like it?” I show Millie the reflective glass face, marked with years of use and abuse in St. Peter’s of Mercy Hospital. She nods. Quickly, I unclip the strap and slide the watch onto her rail-thin arm, fastening it as tightly as I can. “Do you think you could look after it for me while you’re here? I keep banging it on things.”
Millie studies the watch for a second, her tiny index finger tracing over the scratches and scuffs on the glass, and then she nods again. “I’ll look after it for you,” she says. “I’ll give it back when Mason takes me home.”
“Thank you, Millie. I’d like that.”
******
Dr. Bochowitz isn’t exactly a rule breaker, but the old guy knows when not to ask questions. He doesn’t seem to find it out of the ordinary at all that I might want to house a six-year-old patient in the morgue. Millie doesn’t seem to be bothered by the lack of natural lighting or the strange chemical smell that permeates the room, either. In fact, she seems quite comfortable in her new surroundings, away from the hustle and bustle of nurses running through the corridors and people coding around her twenty-four seven. Bochowitz makes sure all of the bodies he was working on are securely locked away before she can lay eyes on them, and then he brings her some dinner and sits with her as she eats, telling her stories about his granddaughter, who is apparently the same age as Millie.
I wait for Mason to arrive upstairs on the trauma floor, hoping a horrific car accident is brought in so I don’t have to explain to the guy that his little sister is now safe and sound downstairs in the morgue. The poor kid’s probably going to have nightmares for years.