Page 25

Greer

Rav asked me to think about the sometimes, and the other times—when I love my job, and when I hate my job.

We didn’t start the session that way the last time I was there because I was too busy spreading the word about Napoleon, and I’ve been too busy since being spread out by Beckett to really give it much thought.

But that’s not terribly friendly, and it’s not in my nature to leave homework incomplete, so I locked myself in an available on-call room and drew a line down a scrap piece of paper, like I could somehow reduce whatever it is inside me that broke all those years ago to a pros and cons list.

I tap my pen against the top of the page.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when I started feeling a bit like a thief.

I didn’t feel like a thief this morning when I put a new kidney in someone who spent their whole life attached to a dialysis machine.

But a page comes in on my phone, my chest constricts, and I feel a bit like one now.

My least favourite kind of page.

There are different types of organ donation—and most people don’t realize that the majority of what we do is because of living donations. Only about one-to-two percent of donors are deceased, and within that tiny, infinitesimal percentage, there are two different kinds.

Organ donation after circulatory death, when your heart stops, and after neurological determination of death, when your brain does.

It’s one of the most beautiful things to me—that people have made this choice in life that allows them to save other people after they’re gone.

But for some reason, it hurts me the most.

I think it might be because it reminds me that I’m a hypocrite—to allegedly be dedicated to saving lives, but once upon a time, I was just a little girl wishing on a star that someone else, somewhere on the planet, lost theirs.

Inhaling, I drop the phone against the desk. The invisible clock starts—there isn’t always long to do a harvest and I need to go.

But the phone starts vibrating, and my stomach twists for an entirely different reason when I see the name on the screen.

“Dad?” My fingers slip when I pick it up.

“Greer?” He sounds weary, and maybe a bit congested. “I’m sorry, I forgot to go get my meds this week. I kept meaning to go after my meetings. I ran out yesterday but I’m just not feeling ... Could you go to the pharmacy for me? Your sister is out of town.”

She is. She left yesterday for a conference in Vancouver.

Two whole days of someone who relies on immunosuppressants going without them.

I squeeze my eyes shut; there’s a pang in my right side, and I wonder if that’s my liver telling me the other part of it that lives in him has started to attack him.

“I can’t—” I pinch the bridge of my nose. The back of my throat sets itself on fire with unshed tears. “How many times have I asked you to let me know if you’re running low? You can’t just stop taking your meds. Even if it’s just a day. Your body could start—” I inhale, and it hurts. I press my hand to the right side of my ribs. “I can’t leave. I need to—there’s a harvest and—okay, you know what? I’ll call a friend. I’ll get him to bring them over. Just stay put.”

I don’t wait for the exasperation or the apology—I’m never sure which is going to come—before I hang up and make another call.

Beckett picks up on the first ring. I can hear his smile through the phone. “Hey, Dr. Roberts. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You haven’t left for Philadelphia yet, right?” My voice cracks horribly, and I think I can feel one of my ribs go with it.

I imagine him shaking his head, one wave of chocolate hair falling over his forehead and emerald eyes sharpening with concern. “No. We don’t leave until Friday. I just got home from practice. What’s wrong?”

“I need a favour, and it needs to be right now. My sister is out of town. My dad isn’t feeling well and he’s out of his meds. He needs to take them every day. I can’t go to the pharmacy because I have about fifteen minutes to scrub in for a liver harvest before it’s no longer viable. Can you—if I text you everything—go get them and drop them off?” I press harder against my rib cage. “Please?”

“Just text me everything you need me to do, and you can consider it done. Okay?” He pauses, and I can imagine him in front of me, peering down at me, breathing with me until I’m ready to answer.

“Okay. Wear a mask, please? He sounds like he’s coming down with something. He’s immunocompromised, and he’s never met you before,” I whisper. “Thank you.”

I can hear the smile in his voice again, and the sound his keys make when he picks them up from his kitchen island. “Sure. You don’t have to thank me. Go save lives, Dr. Roberts.”

He hangs up before I can tell him that it might not exactly be a life he’s saving, but it’s a piece of me.

I stand, take my hypocrisy with me, and go operate.

The plants spilling from the garden onto the sidewalk leading up to my father’s house have shrunk since I was last here, curling inwards more and more as October starts and the air cools off.

Some have already started shedding their leaves, and they crunch under my shoes as I walk up to the door.

I kick them off like I always do when I come straight here from the hospital.

I took the time to shower and change today, my arms still red and raw from the scrub brush I took to my skin, trying to get every little speck of everything clinging to my skin off, so I could be clean, safe, and not this thing that might pose a danger when I came here.

Logically, I’m aware I’m being paranoid. But I think I know too much and I’m about as close to it as you can be.

I knock before opening the door and dropping my coat and bag on the floor. “Dad?”

There’s this little kernel of anxiety that’s been burrowing in my chest all day. It defies logic and all the things I know, and it whispers to me that it’s already started—he missed his meds and he’s rejecting the liver after all these years and all of it was for nothing.

But its sharp, stabbing edges soften when my dad answers from the living room, “He won’t take the mask off, Greer.”

“What? Who?” I ask the question, even though I don’t have to.

Beckett glances at me from where he sits when I round the corner into the living room, kicked back in an ancient leather chair, face half hidden under a blue surgical mask, but I can see the edge of his dimple drawing a line in his stubbled cheek.

I raise my hand, this tiny gesture that I hope conveys all the big, impossible things stretching and pushing against all my lines and rules that I feel for him right now.

Inhaling, I close my eyes briefly before turning to my dad, brows sharpening. “Well, he’s never met you and you’ve been without your immunosuppressants for two days, so you’ll have to forgive the extra precaution.”

My dad barely spares me a glance from the couch, fiddling with the remote. “I’m not in isolation.”

Beckett raises his hands, and I can tell he’s smiling by the way the corners of his eyes crinkle ever so slightly. “I’m just following the doctor’s orders. She can get pretty mean, you know.”

My dad makes a noise of acknowledgement, and I give Beckett a pointed look as I press the back of my hand to my father’s forehead.

He doesn’t feel warm, and I swipe my hand through the feathers of his hair. I hope he knows it’s all because I care—because I do mean well even if it hurts me when he forgets. I’m not trying to be harsh or mean.

“I feel fine, Greer.” My dad glances up at me, the ghost of an apology waving up at me from the lines of his smile. “Your friend Beckett delivered everything, and I’ve taken my meds. I’m a bit nauseous, but I ate, and Beckett brought ginger ale.”

I roll my shoulders and force the weight of the intonation he put on the word friend off my body and try to ignore the fact that not only is Beckett still here, but he stayed all afternoon, and now they’re on a first-name basis.

“The nausea should subside by tomorrow.” I run my hands through my dad's hair one more time, against the burning in the back of my throat. All these things I want to say—that I love him, but it hurts me when he does this, and can he please, please stop?

But I take a measured step back when I feel Beckett’s eyes on me.

His features are soft, and he’s looking at me with something I can’t quite place and it makes me feel a way I’m not sure I like.

I clear my throat. “You can take your mask off now.”

Wonderful, calloused hands find the loops around his ears, and when he takes it off, he’s grinning, dimple on display, all of him looking radiant and entirely unbothered.

“You didn’t have to stay all afternoon. I didn’t mean to imply you had to.”

Beckett shrugs, raking a hand through his hair, muscles of his arms flexing underneath his sweater. “All good. We got to chatting when I was dropping things off and I mentioned I’d never seen Game of Thrones —”

“You’ve never seen Game of Thrones ?” I ask flatly.

“Nah.” He shakes his head, right leg starting to bounce up and down, and I wonder if he skipped his stretching to get here. “Didn’t sit quite right with Henry over here, so I said I’d watch an episode or two. And here we are, about to watch something called the Red Wedding.”

I cross my arms and drop to the couch opposite my dad. Closest to Beckett. “That’s in the third season, and I don’t think that surgery was a time portal to another dimension, so you certainly haven’t been here that long.”

“Oh, I just”—Beckett smiles, brushing his palms together with a clapping sound, pointing his right hand towards the TV—“dove right in. Headfirst. You know me.”

“I told him that’s not how the series is meant to be consumed.” My dad shakes his head, finally dropping the remote when the opening credits start rolling across the TV. “But he was insistent on just joining in where I’d left off.”

“You know me,” Beckett repeats, winking at me.

I do know you , I think. And I’m not sure there’s anything scarier than that.

The room dims when my dad turns off the light, not even bothering to ask if I’m going to stay. He knows I won’t leave until I’ve checked his temperature at least three more times and watched him consume at least a litre of fluids.

Fingers brush across my thigh, gentle, soothing circles just like those ones they painted on my calves all those weeks ago.

Before I can think better of it, I grab Beckett’s hand, interlacing our fingers in the dark. I squeeze it three times and I hope he hears what my heart whispers to him.

Thank you. I see you. I know you.

And I think you know me, too.