Capitol Reflections Read Free

have a mind of its own. The fingers of her right hand began to rhythmically pull at the silver chain around her neck, as if it were too tight and prevented her from breathing. A heart-shaped pendant, a Christmas gift from Gwen, dangled from the chain as Marci tugged hard on the small silver links.
    Seconds later, she fell to the parquetry of the courtroom floor, her arms and legs moving spasmodically like those of a marionette whose strings are being pulled by a sadistic, unseen puppeteer.

2
     
    Marci slipped in and out of consciousness on the way to Bellevue, only occasionally managing to pry open her eyes to look at whatever appeared directly above her head—a hand, the head of a male paramedic, and IV tubing coiled in an overhead storage rack. Something—she guessed Valium—had broken her seizure, but she could only keep her awareness focused for seconds at a time, and even then reality was a series of unrelated slides in an out-of-focus carousel projector. Just when one image began to make sense, she would start to slip away again, alternating between memory and reality. Pictures of herself on the beach swam through her brain as she spiraled into unconsciousness.
    Now, overlapping voices clamored for attention. Multiple conversations—the kind she’d always been able to decipher—scrambled together. She was being rushed through a corridor on a gurney, and the overhead fluorescent lights were blinding. Doctors and nurses seemed to float about her in the awful luminescence, and either their speech was garbled or they were speaking in tongues. The fuzzy outline of a head appeared and asked if she knew her name, but Marci was too tired to answer.
    Got to hang in, she thought. Keep your head in the game.

    Gwen Maulder was relaxing with her husband Jack at the bar of The River Café, waiting to be seated. She was drinking a glass of Chardonnay, happy to get away from work early. This was one of those rare trips when her workload, Jack’s traveling schedule, and her best friend’s day planner all meshed. The subdued lighting over the bar created a lovely ambience of both peace and elegance. It was a good feeling. Gwen wished she could get Marci to understand that. Careers didn’t need to own your life. You could have it all if you performed the balancing act perfectly. She glanced over at Jack and smiled at him softly. No—career didn’t need to own your life.
    Gwen was in town to review current stats with people at the New York FDA office. She could have done this via download back at her computer in Rockville, Maryland, but she always relished a chance to see Marci. Gwen’s deceased father, Dr. Fitz McBean, had been an old-style family practitioner who put great emphasis on personal contact with people. Indeed, Gwen took over her dad’s practice when he died, but found she couldn’t run it alone. No one wanted to make house calls like Fitz, and using a minimal office staff to deal with HMOs had become oppressive. (“It’s not managed care,” Fitz had remarked. “It’s mangled care.”) So Gwen decided to use her considerable diagnostic skills in a different venue at a time in history when the federal government needed real doctors, not bureaucrats, to take the pulse of the nation’s health. Terrorism, anthrax, flu, AIDS—these factors and so many more demanded that competent physicians assess health concerns from a broader, more comprehensive perspective. So here she was in New York City, a public health official, a division chief in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service. Yet, she was still very much the daughter of Fitz McBean, only two generations removed from making house calls in a horse and buggy.
    And she couldn’t wait to see Marci.
    The conversation at the bar revolved around medicine, politics, movies, and a mutual friend whom, both Maulders were convinced, was having an affair with a decadent artist in SoHo, a man named Ernesto—no last name.