They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Dr. Selwyn

Gabriel Maitland brings his grandmother into Jackie's emergency room, where Jackie in scrubs runs the case and he admits he should have spoken at the dinner, until her chief calls her in because the Selwyn Foundation has complained.

By Sunday night I was back in scrubs, which is the only place I have ever felt completely sure of my name.

Mass General's emergency department on a Sunday starts quietly and then fills.

At eleven the charge nurse put a hand on my shoulder.

"Dr. Selwyn, you look like someone ran you over."

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're gray. Eat a cracker."

I ate a cracker.

At eleven-twenty the automatic doors opened.

A big man in a dark overcoat came through them, pushing a wheelchair with an old woman in it.

He was walking fast.

The old woman was small and furious, with white hair set in curlers under a scarf.

"I told you it's indigestion," she said to nobody. "Put me back in the car."

"Gran," the man said. "Stop."

I looked up from the board.

He looked up from the chair.

It was Gabriel Maitland, still in the suit from dinner, with his tie in his coat pocket.

For one second neither of us moved.

Then he saw the badge on my chest, and the stethoscope, and his face went still.

"Triage says chest pain," the nurse said, behind me. "Eighty-two, hypertension, left arm."

"Bay four," I said. "Now."

I took the chair from him myself.

She weighed nothing at all.

I got the leads on her and the EKG running while she told me, in great detail, what was wrong with the hospital's parking.

"Ma'am," I said. "Does it hurt right now?"

"It's a pressure. Like somebody sitting on a suitcase."

"For how long?"

"Since supper." She glared at her grandson. "He made me say."

The tracing came off the machine.

I read it and felt my stomach tighten.

"I'm going to give you aspirin and something under your tongue," I said. "I think your heart is asking for help. We're going to ask the cath lab to look at it tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Within the hour."

"Oh, good," said Gran. "I'd hate to rush."

Gabriel stood at the end of the bed with both hands wrapped around the rail.

His knuckles had gone pale.

"Is she going to be all right?" he said.

It was the first thing he had said to me in a hospital.

He said it in a voice I had never heard him use at my father's table.

"She's in the right place," I said. "That's the only thing I'll promise you."

The cardiology fellow came down, and the nurse drew the labs, and Gran talked through every bit of it.

"Gabriel Francis," she said, as they unlocked the wheels. "Do you know this girl?"

"I've met her."

"Where?"

He didn't answer for a moment.

"At a dinner," he said.

"What dinner?"

"A dinner where I should have done something and didn't."

Gran looked at him a long time with the kind of eyes that had raised a boy by herself.

"Hm," she said.

Then she turned to me and took my hand.

Her fingers were thin and dry and cold, and her grip was strong.

"Dr. Selwyn," she said. "They will tell you he's slow. He's not slow. He thinks it over, and then he thinks it over again, and sometimes he misses the bus."

"Gran," Gabriel said.

"Go with them," I said gently. "I'll see you upstairs."

They wheeled her out.

Gabriel did not follow them.

He stood in the middle of bay four with his hands still on the empty rail.

"Dr. Selwyn," he said.

"Mr. Maitland."

"I should have said something."

The curtain was still swinging from where the bed had gone through it.

I looked at him: the black hair, the nose that had been broken once, the shirt he had not changed since dinner.

Last night he had sat three feet from my father and watched me get put out of the only house I'd known.

Tonight he was afraid for someone, and I liked him better for it, and I did not want to.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded.

"Is there anything..." he started.

"Your grandmother is going to the cath lab. She needs someone she knows in the waiting room when she comes out."

"Right," he said.

"That's the thing you can do."

He went.

I watched him go, and I did not let myself feel anything about it.

The rest of the night was a fall from a ladder, a sixteen-year-old with a broken wrist, and a man who had swallowed a key.

At five a nurse came to find me with a message from upstairs: his grandmother had a stent and was asking for crackers.

At five-thirty my phone buzzed in my pocket.

The chief of emergency medicine had texted me, which he had never done.

Dr. Selwyn. My office, 6 a.m. The chair of the Selwyn Foundation has been on the phone to the board since midnight. Come before the day shift.

I read it twice.

My mother had not even waited for the sun.

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