“You’ll be careful, now, lassie,” was the last thing he said to me as I watched the anesthetist set up the intravenous drip that would maintain him while I amputated his cancerous left leg. “Be sure ye’re takin’ off the right one, now.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him, patting the weathered hand that lay on the sheet. “I’ll get the right one.”
“Ye will?” His eyes widened in simulated horror. “I thought ’twas the left one was bad!” He was still chuckling asthmatically as the gas mask came down over his face.
The amputation had gone well, and Graham had recovered and gone home, but I was not really surprised to see him back again, six months later. The lab report on the original tumor had been dubious, and the doubts were now substantiated; metastasis to the lymph nodes in the groin.
I removed the cancerous nodes. Radiation treatment was applied. Cobalt. I removed the spleen, to which the disease had spread, knowing that the surgery was entirely in vain, but not willing to give up.
“It’s a lot easier not to give up, when it isn’t you that’s sick,” I said, staring up at the timbers overhead.
“Did he give up, then?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t think I’d call it that, exactly.”
“I have been thinking,” Graham announced. The sound of his voice echoed tinnily through the earpieces of my stethoscope.
“Have you?” I said. “Well, don’t do it out loud ’til I’ve finished here, that’s a good lad.”
He gave a brief snort of laughter, but lay quietly as I auscultated his chest, moving the disc of the stethoscope swiftly from ribs to sternum.
“All right,” I said at last, slipping the tubes out of my ears and letting them fall over my shoulders. “What have you been thinking about?”
“Killing myself.”
His eyes met mine straight on, with just a hint of challenge. I glanced behind me, to be sure that the nurse had left, then pulled up the blue plastic visitor’s chair and sat down next to him.
“Pain getting bad?” I asked. “There are things we can do, you know. You only need to ask.” I hesitated before adding the last; he never had asked. Even when it was obvious that he needed medication, he never mentioned his discomfort. To mention it myself seemed an invasion of his privacy; I saw the small tightening at the corners of his mouth.
“I’ve a daughter,” he said. “And two grandsons; bonny lads. But I’m forgetting; you’ll have seen them last week, aye?”
I had. They came at least twice a week to see him, bringing scribbled school papers and autographed baseballs to show their grandpa.
“And there’s my mother, living up to the rest home on Canterbury,” he said thoughtfully. “It costs dearly, that place, but it’s clean, and the food’s good enough she enjoys complainin’ about it while she eats.”
He glanced dispassionately at the flat bedsheet, and lifted his stump.
“A month, d’ye think? Four? Three?”
“Maybe three,” I said. “With luck,” I added idiotically.
He snorted at me, and jerked his head at the IV drip above him.
“Tcha! And worse luck I wouldna wish on a beggar.” He looked around at all the paraphernalia; the automatic respirator, the blinking cardiac monitor, the litter of medical technology. “Nearly a hundred dollars a day it’s costing, to keep me here,” he said. “Three months, that would be—great heavens, ten thousand dollars!” He shook his head, frowning.
“A bad bargain, I call that. Not worth it.” His pale gray eyes twinkled suddenly up at me. “I’m Scots, ye know. Born thrifty, and not likely to get over it now.”
“So I did it for him,” I said, still staring upward. “Or rather, we did it together. He was prescribed morphia for the pain—that’s like laudanum, only much stronger. I drew off half of each ampule and replaced the missing bit with water. It meant he didn’t get the relief of a full dose for nearly twenty-four hours, but that was the safest way to get a big dose with no risk of being found out.
“We talked about using one of the botanical medicines I was studying; I knew enough to make up something fatal, but I wasn’t sure of it being painless, and he didn’t want to risk me being accused, if anyone got suspicious and did a forensic examination.” I saw Jamie’s eyebrow lift, and flapped a hand. “It doesn’t matter; it’s a way of finding out how someone died.”
“Ah. Like a coroner’s court?”
“A bit. Anyway, he’d be supposed to have morphia in his blood; that wouldn’t prove anything. So that’s what we did.”
I drew a deep breath.
“There would have been no trouble, if I’d given him the injection, and left. That’s what he’d asked me to do.”
Jamie was quiet, eyes fixed intently on me.
“I couldn’t do it, though.” I looked at my left hand, seeing not my own smooth flesh, but the big, swollen knuckles of a commercial fisherman, and the fat green veins that crossed his wrist.
“I got the needle in,” I said. I rubbed a finger over the spot on the wrist, where a large vein crosses the distal head of the radius. “But I couldn’t press down the plunger.”
In memory, I saw Graham Menzies’s other hand rise from his side, trailing tubes, and close over my own. He hadn’t much strength, then, but enough.
“I sat there until he was gone, holding his hand.” I felt it still, the steady beat of the wrist-pulse under my thumb, growing slower, and slower still, as I held his hand, and then waiting for a beat that did not come.
I looked up at Jamie, shaking off the memory.
“And then a nurse came in.” It had been one of the younger nurses—an excitable girl, with no discretion. She wasn’t very experienced, but knew enough to tell a dead man when she saw one. And me just sitting there, doing nothing—most undoctorlike conduct. And the empty morphia syringe, lying on the table beside me.
“She talked, of course,” I said.
“I expect she would.”
“I had the presence of mind to drop the syringe into the incinerator chute after she left, though. It was her word against mine, and the whole matter was just dismissed.”
My mouth twisted wryly. “Except that the next week, they offered me a job as head of the whole department. Very important. A lovely office on the sixth floor of the hospital—safely away from the patients, where I couldn’t murder anyone else.”
My finger was still rubbing absently across my wrist. Jamie reached out and stopped it by laying his own hand over mine.
“When was this, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice very gentle.
“Just before I took Bree and went to Scotland. That’s why I went, in fact; they gave me an extended leave—said I’d been working too hard, and deserved a nice vacation.” I didn’t try to keep the irony out of my voice.
“I see.” His hand was warm on mine, despite the heat of my fever. “If it hadna been for that, for losing your work—would ye have come, Sassenach? Not just to Scotland. To me?”
I looked up at him and squeezed his hand, taking a deep breath.