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  Technology had greatly changed but not necessarily enhanced how things were done. No longer did the staff need to fill out endless paper forms and entry sheets. Now they checked off endless touchscreens that often froze or wouldn’t advance to the proper next page.

  The world of paperless healthcare records was still tinged with imperfection.

  Rona tapped the stack of wireless input tablets.

  “All set to go, Tish.”

  “Then let the games begin.”

  The old RN laughed as she walked through the swinging doors to the ER bays.

  “Ever think we’d make it this far, Tony?”

  “Sure thing, JP. Sarah and Judy and I have brains and looks and you have ... uh ... help me with this, ladies.”

  “Cut it out, you two,” Judy said. “Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done this, I still get butterflies when I go on duty.”

  Her cheeks flushed.

  “She’s right, Tony,” Sarah added. “We’re all nervous on this rotation.”

  She patted Judy on the shoulder.

  “Guess they found out how we hide our tension, roomie.”

  Julius Petrie fingered the ear pieces of his stethoscope.

  Antonio Hidalgo eyed his three amigos who had been walking with him through the valley of medical school training from that first day of orientation. They had all aged a bit more than their cohorts in other fields of endeavor. They displayed a look of fatigue in their ever-ranging eyes, seeing, feeling, and hearing the misery of those who now and in the future would rely on their judgment.

  He saw his own image in the mirrored-glass door ahead of them: a young Tio Galen staring back.

  “Okay, ladies and gents, we’ve got incoming.”

  The first year resident, even more tired, hustled down the corridor in a classic rendition of the hospital walk, fleeing invisible demons behind him.

  “Hicks, Bay 2; kid with belly pain. Petrie, Bay 5; bicycle accident. Knowlton, Bay 3; lady with chest pain.”

  He looked at Antonio.

  “Hidalgo, Bay 11.”

  “What’s mine, Pete?”

  Peter Albrecht, doctor in title for only five months, looked up at the tall senior medical student and grimaced.

  “Lotsa luck, kid.”

  The other three shot looks at Tony then averted their eyes and moved off. They knew that Bay 11 was the special bay, the only one with a one-way lock on the outside of the door.

  Damn, a psych patient, just what I need to start the evening .

  “Hidalgo.”

  “Yeah, Pete?”

  “This one’s real important. Don’t prejudge. That’s all I’ll say.”

  He felt the fear baby belly kick, the visceral tremor he experienced every time he went on duty. Didn’t make any difference whether it was the wards, clinic, OR or ER. He knew from brief prior encounters that an injured soul would take more out of him than an injured body. He could feel the flop-sweat tension rising.

  What was it that brought out the nocturnal mind beasts?

  Every evening some would experience that Dorian Gray-like reflection in the mirror of their soul. Others saw only the darkness of despair. Young as he was, Antonio knew those feelings. He could never forget the agonal breaths of his first love, the dying Betty Orth. It had taken four years to get past that crushing grief. Now it was a vacancy in the heart that Sarah did her best to fill.

  He reached for the doorknob and felt his sweat-coated palm slip on the satin-finished stainless steel. He tightened his grip and pulled the door open. He took a deep breath.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Hidalgo. How can I…?”

  He spotted the heavyset, bearded young man sitting on the floor in the corner, shivers coursing periodically through his tall, lanky body, his shirt, shoes and belt missing. Fair skinned with straw-red hair, the patient was only a few years older than Tonio. A shock of recognition ran through both.

  “Ryan, what the hell’s wrong?”

  He crouched down beside the fetally curled man and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Ryan, come sit with me.”

  Slowly, Ryan Johnson rose and allowed himself to be seated in one of the two swivel back chairs. They were bolted to the floor.

  Yes, Tony knew him. Ryan was an up-and-coming assistant professor of psychology, one of the legions of specially trained talk therapists who assisted the psychiatrists with the ever-growing population of the disaffected.

  What had caused him to disintegrate?

  Ryan stared at him with hollow eyes.

  “Glad it’s you, Tony. You’ll understand.”

  Several times the two had talked after they had met at a Q&A class session when the young medical student was rotating through the mandatory psych training.

  “I’ll try. Tell me what happened.”

  Johnson shook his head from side to side, his arms braced across his chest as he rocked back and forth.

  “Tell me, Ryan.”

  “I killed a man today.”

  It had started out routine, one of those random days of mechanical activity. Paperwork, phone calls, brief talk sessions with worried well patients, and follow-up meetings with long-term cases had carried him through the early afternoon of that sunny, late-autumn day.

  Nothing unusual; he would leave early and meet his wife for dinner at the Pancake House.

  “Johnson, I’ve got a family emergency. My kid fell off his bike. Probably needs stitches. Would you do the preliminary intake screen on this new guy? Thanks.”

  His chief breezed in and out of his office before he had a chance to react.

  Crap! I knew it was going too smoothly. Okay, let’s see what this one’s about .

  He scanned the phone screen’s new patient encounter app.

  Nothing out of the ordinary. Marital problems. Another man in the picture.

  Whoa, what’s this? The other guy’s a stalker personality. The wife says she doesn’t even know him. Hell, this is a police matter, not something the shrinks need to handle … yet .

  He thought more about it.

  Maybe he feels inadequate in his marriage. Might need some shoring up.

  He rose from his desk.

  Damn, too much sitting! You’re getting creaky, Ryan … fatter. Well, you couldn’t keep that football-player physique forever .

  Then he frowned. His father had never let him forget how he couldn’t top his old man in sports or academics. Lyman Johnson had constantly reminded his son that he had earned two Ph.D.s and had been a college letterman.

  Kronos and Zeus. Screw you, Dad. You ain’t gonna eat me!

  He gritted his teeth, brushed his hair back, and walked out of the office.

  He entered the patient interview room and saw the heavyset young man sitting in the corner, his arms crossing his chest, his hands tucked under his armpits.

  Warning bells went off in Ryan’s head.

  He’s already in severe defensive mode .

  “I’m Dr. Johnson. Are you Mr. Deloit?”

  Nothing, not even a head nod .

  He walked toward the man’s chair, wanting to trigger a response by entering the guy’s personal space. But what happened next didn’t fit anything Ryan Johnson had been trained to deal with.

  “Stay where you are, you goddamn shrink.”

  The apparently passive patient had suddenly moved both arms, the left hand now holding a small caliber handgun pointed at Johnson’s chest.

  The mind functions on many levels in desperate situations. Ryan’s now entered a surreal phase of instant understanding coupled with panic and the awakening of the limbic beast within. But he tried to stay calm.

  “I take it you’re not Mr. Deloit, then.”

  He felt the rising tightness at the back of his neck, the urge to rise on the balls of his feet like some distant primordial ancestor preparing a preemptive strike.

  His forebrain shouted, Wait!

  “Got it figured out, shrink? That bastard Deloit is keeping me from the woman I lo
ve.”

  Slowly, slowly. Nice and easy. He’s the stalker, not the husband. Avoid direct eye contact. Don’t trigger him off. Let him feel like he’s in charge .

  Hell, he is in charge!

  “May I sit down?”

  “Shut up!”

  Johnson’s hearing suddenly became hyperacute. He could hear footsteps coming down the hallway and suddenly pause at his doorway. The door handle moved and the barely audible whoosh and squeak as the hinges started to move inward sent his sympathetic nervous system into overdrive.

  The other limbic beast in the room started to smile. His gun hand moved up and away from the therapist’s chest, taking full aim at the shadowy fullness beginning to enter the room.

  Johnson felt his reason leaving as the orgasmic surge of adrenalin hurled his body at the impending shooter, He saw himself grab the armed hand and felt the snap as he twisted it up and back just as the gun vomited its missile into the ceiling. His left arm and forearm became an avenging python as it encircled the other’s neck in a headlock. His right arm and forearm mirrored its twin as it reached across the other’s face and abruptly pulled the entire head to the far right.

  The sound of snapping rubber bands echoed in Ryan’s ears as the intervertebral ligaments of the other man’s neck tore and the lethal odontoid finger of the second cervical vertebra pierced the spinal cord as it fractured.

  He felt the body go limp, collapsing in on itself. The death scent of loosened bowel and bladder sphincters did not faze him. He released it and the thud echoed in the small room still reverberating from the gunshot.

  Relief and horror combined to overwhelm Ryan. He lifted his right foot and stomped on the back of the fallen man’s neck. He couldn’t believe his own words, the words he shouted down at the corpse on the floor.

  “How’s that, daddy?”

  Antonio closed his eyes as Ryan spoke those last words. He opened them to see his professor once more curled in a fetal ball against the wall of Bay 11. He bent down to touch him then stood up and left the room after signaling a security guard to open the door.

  He entered one of the communications carrels. He sat down and stared at the screen in front of him, trying to calm the emotional worms crawling under his skin. Slowly he punched the extension number listed on the screen page he had pulled up.

  “Psych ward.”

  “This is Tony Hidalgo, M4, down in ER North. We need an emergency admission stat.”

  He heard himself talking the jargon learned over the past almost four years. He was only an M4, a senior medical student, but he had to convince the psych resident on call to admit Ryan. The sweat on his face and under his arms started to dry as he heard the typical annoyed voice of the sleep-deprived resident say the magic words.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Okay, guys, end of shift. Hit the showers.”

  Albrecht assessed the four bleary-eyed senior students with equally tired eyes. It was 7 a.m. The new shift would be coming on duty.

  Sarah sat next to Tony and Judy had her arm around Julius Petrie’s neck, as they sat in the back lounge trying to decompress from the night’s activities. They were still exchanging their personal traumas when Tony stopped them.

  “What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?”

  “I’ve got nowhere to go, roomie.”

  JP sounded unusually down. His parents still hadn’t forgiven him his social gaffe from almost ten years earlier when he had befriended the kid from the “wrong side of the tracks.”

  Judy was alone in the world. She had lost her entire family in a freak accident four years before. She exchanged glances with JP.

  “Me, too.”

  Sarah shifted her position on the lounge chair and looked directly at Tony. “Grammie hasn’t gotten back from her Kenya trip. I’m sure she’ll be hot to get back to your Tio Galen when she does.”

  Her eyes engulfed him as she placed her hand on his.

  Maybe it was that look, the surge of animal energy flooding through him from her touch. He suddenly felt awake and alive again. He blurted out, “How would you all like to come to Safehaven?”

  THE TIN MAN

  She felt cold. November in Massachusetts did that to folks.

  “Freddie, you in there?”

  She hadn’t heard a sound since dinner. They both had completed their pre-dissertation hurdles and were gearing up for the final run through the academic gauntlet. The two-bedroom apartment afforded each an away place to focus on their individual studies.

  She opened the door to Freddie’s study. He was sitting there, papers and computer screen in full array, staring at the photograph hanging on the wall.

  “Something wrong, honey?”

  Lilly moved to his side and saw the tears on his face. She put her arms around his neck and stared at the picture. Three small children in playsuits sat at the feet of a threesome of younger looking guardians. Tio Eddie even had hair and his own teeth back then. Tia Nancy had less gray in her auburn hair. Ah, Tio Galen was, well, still Tio Galen.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  He shook his head.

  “I was such a fool, Lilly. I can’t believe you still want to be with me.”

  They both stared at the old photograph.

  Lilly felt herself shudder as she remembered that late summer day several months before...

  * * *

  Edison’s phone played the famous four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It brought the dreamy reveries the senior quartet had been enjoying to an end.

  “So much for a quiet summer day,” he muttered. He tapped the touchscreen as Nancy, Galen, and Sandy turned away from watching the ducks swimming in the migratory bird pond. Lilly’s face appeared.

  “Hello, Lilly! Nice to ... where are you?”

  “Oh, Tio Eddie, I’m here, at Safehaven. Where are you ?”

  The phone volume was high, a concession to the engineer’s increasing hearing impairment, so they all could easily hear the young woman’s voice.

  Point for point Lilly matched Freddie in looks, intelligence and devil-may-care insouciance toward life. Today she sounded desperate.

  “We’re down by the pond, Lilly. We’ll be up shortly.” Nancy said into the phone.

  She rose quickly from her rock seat, her normal muscle aches and joint pains vanishing when she heard a call for help.

  The four moved back up the path to the house. They saw the little green hydrogen-powered car that Luke Daumier had given his daughter when she had won entrance into MIT’s elite graduate school of engineering several years earlier. They also saw Lilly’s aquiline face bent over the steering wheel, her eyes puffy from crying.

  Galen reached for the driver’s door, opened it, and put his hand on her forearm.

  “Come on, Lilly, let’s all go inside.”

  He felt the tightness of her muscles release their grip as she slowly climbed out of the car seat and stood in the driveway. She stumbled slightly as her heels got caught in the gravelly surface. Edison and Nancy moved to flank and support her.

  Sandy whispered in Galen’s left ear.

  “Am I right, Bear? She looks…”

  He nodded, both doctors sharing an unspoken understanding.

  The group moved up the steps to the front door and entered the house. Once inside, the floodgate of tears burst, and Nancy guided Lilly to a stuffed chair in the living room.

  “Good heavens, girl, what’s happened?” Edison asked.

  He had always liked the young woman who could hold her own in his field and actually liked old radios and radio programs. This was someone he would have been proud to call daughter, just like Carmelita.

  “Freddie’s going to leave me.”

  The words fell heavily in the room, stunning the oldsters into silence. Galen shifted his weight then moved to her side. He laid his hand on hers and looked into her eyes. His words surprised only Nancy and Edison by their gentleness.

  “How far along are you, Lilly?”
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  Nancy immediately grasped Galen’s question and moved to her other side. She looked at Lilly, remembering the little girl they long ago had pulled out of the Shenandoah River, and squeezed her hand.

  “Does Freddie know?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed when Lilly nodded.

  Edison was confused at what his friends and wife were implying and Galen sensed his lack of understanding.

  “Little brother, Lilly is carrying, probably for a month. I suspect that fearless Freddie has reacted poorly to the news and is reverting to his normal escape-mode behavior.”

  Sandy stared at Edison, who still looked confused.

  Left-brained engineers!

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Edison’s face turned dark red, first in embarrassment then in anger.

  “Easy, little brother, easy. It won’t help Lilly if you have a stroke.”

  “That sonofa...!”

  He caught himself, even before the daggers from Nancy’s eyes could reach him.

  “We didn’t raise that boy to behave like this and it’s not going to start now!”

  “You’re right, Bob,” Nancy told him. “But first let’s find out what he has to say for himself.”

  “Damned straight we’ll find out! Lilly, where is that fool now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out.”

  He took out his phone.

  “Dial Freddie,” he spoke at it. A few seconds later a deep, resonant young voice answered and his ward’s face appeared on the screen. He could see that Freddie was in his car and driving somewhere.

  “Uh ... Tio Eddie ... hi.”

  “Get your sorry ass down here, boy!”

  “Uh ... I’m about ten minutes away. Is Lilly there?”

  “What do you think?”

  Edison curtly ended the connection. Galen could see him muttering under his breath.

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Galen laughed, walked over to his old friend, and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  They looked at each other nearsightedly and Galen grinned at him.