Dr. Knox Read Free

mother comes back.”
    Lydia’s face grew darker, and she counted on rigid fingers. “First, you don’t even know if this woman
was
his mother. Second, mother or not, you don’t know she’s coming back. And, third, don’t be giving me this
we
crap—it’s
me
you want looking out for him. We got to call the cops, doctor, them or DCFS.”
    “Child and Family Services? You can’t be serious, Lyd—it’s one shit storm after another with them. You remember that series in the
Times
last month? They can’t find their asses with both hands. I wouldn’t trust them to look after a cup of coffee.”
    “It’s
their
job, doctor, not ours.”
    I shook my head. “And besides, she
is
his mother—they look alike, and you don’t get that kind of scared unless you’re a parent.” I turned to Lucho. “You were there—tell her.”
    Lucho put his hands up and shook his head. “I learned young not to correct my
tía,
doc. I’m gonna check the kid.”
    “You’ve got your nephew intimidated,” I said.
    Lydia sighed. “Him, but not you. Piss-poor mother, if she is his mother—running out on a son like that.”
    “She said she’d be back.”
    “From the
bathroom,
doctor. And she said it right before she abandoned him.”
    “She didn’t abandon him. She was afraid of something. I think she was on the run.”
    “And this you get from what—a few bruises?”
    I had a professor my fourth year of med school, a white-haired internist who’d told me:
Your nurse sees more patients than you do, and spends more time with ’em. She talks to ’em about things you don’t, and knows ’em in ways you can’t. Not listening to your nurse is like watching TV with the sound off—you might figure out what’s goin’ on eventually—but chances are you’ll miss something, and in the meantime somebody will die. So—you can listen to your nurse, or you can be an asshole. Try not to be an asshole.
    Even when I was twenty-six, and still very much an asshole, it had struck me as sound advice, and I’d tried to follow it. Certainly I listened to Lydia—she was smarter and more experienced than any nurse I’d worked with, had more clinical sense than most of the doctors I knew, and was tougher by far than any of them. I listened to her even when she spoke to me as if I were an errant child, and made
doctor
sound somehow ironic. I listened, but didn’t always agree.
    “It was more than a few bruises, but it’s not just about those. Take a look.” I beckoned, and she followed me to the file room, a narrow space lined with metal cabinets. Arthur was sitting at a desk at the back, looking at a laptop. His tanned face went pale when he saw Lydia’s expression.
    “Play the security video again, will you?” I asked. Arthur nodded, tapped at the keyboard, and turned the laptop around for us to see. Two windows opened on the screen.
    “This is from the front-door camera,” Arthur said, pointing to the window on the right, “and this is from the one mounted on the second-floor corner.”
    The window on the left showed an image of an empty sidewalk and a storefront, viewed from above. The angle was oblique, but the clinic was plain—the big front windows, the glass door in between. Security grating aside, it still looked like the hardware store it once had been.
    “See the time in the corner?” I said. “Seven-nineteen—that’s when we were in the thick of it with the kid. Not five minutes after he and his mom came in.”
    Lydia interrupted. “You don’t know that she’s his mother.”
    “Just watch.”
    “I’m watching. All I see is—”
    And then two men appeared on the screen, in the left-hand window, walking quickly. They looked big in their dark suits, and they moved in unison, with a precise, tight gait. They stopped in front of the clinic and scanned the street. Then they spoke to each other and stepped to the front-door vestibule. Their hard white faces and crew-cut scalps filled the right side of the screen. The