Chapter Thirteen

A dentist’s office is never a pleasant place to spend time. Its main duties are to scrape, pull, or drill at your face. Patients are either terrified about an appointment or annoyed and filled with dread about it. Either way, ain’t nobody terribly polite about being there. Celeste Parker knew this, and she brought low expectations for a “good day” to work with her every morning. She also brought with her the same snide, dry sense of humor that had gotten her through every day of her life. Dr. Emmett warned her repeatedly that one day her attitude would get her into trouble.

Usually she just arched an eyebrow at him. But yesterday, on her way out the door to get her son instead of waiting for some furniture delivery, like Dr. Emmett wanted, Celeste had been more daring, less appropriate, and loud as hell.

“Well, Max, when you stop doing all the shit you do, I’ll cut out my fucking attitude, OK?”

He scoffed but said nothing.

She walked into the office this morning assuming that she’d have to face consequences for that. For fuck’s sake, she’d said it within earshot of patients in the lobby. Ain’t no way Dr. Emmett wouldn’t reprimand her in some way for that. He was a good sport, as long as it was all in good fun, but she had crossed a line. And she knew it. That’s why she didn’t look back at him on her way out the door. But, for God’s sake, she always got Marcus from JV basketball practice on Wednesdays. Dr. Emmett was just being a pill because he had one of those boys waiting on him in the parking lot. This latest one had no game whatsoever. That kid always parked in the same place. She didn’t dare tell Dr. Emmett she knew about any of that, though. Those are the kinds of secrets you keep for a rainy day.

Dr. Emmett thought he was good at keeping down low, but, after two years of being his nurse, the only one who stuck around, there was nothing that Celeste didn’t know about him. He could bitch at her all the time if he wanted, how “inappropriate” she was, that HIPAA nonsense he was always on about when she got to know the patients and asked them about their lives. She could put up with a lot of stuff, turn a blind eye to some shenanigans, so long as he kept paying her well. She could block out when he whined. Dr. Emmett was white noise. Very white noise. Just let him try and threaten her job, though, and Dr. Emmett would see how quickly storm clouds would brew.

Instead of rushing to work and facing whatever headache of busy work he had prepared as “punishment,” Celeste tried her best to have a leisurely Thursday morning. She woke up and watched a makeup tutorial. Listened to the end of a mystery audiobook—and predicted the ending again. She took Marcus to breakfast at Hardee’s before school. She filled up the Olds with gas.

Let Dr. Emmett unlock the office. Let him turn on all the lights. Let him figure out how to walk around a new, stupid, unnecessary white couch while scanning all those records, if he could walk after his “date” last night.

When Celeste finally showed up for work, sauntering in about ten minutes after the office was supposed to open, she was primed to raise hell if Dr. Emmett gave her any grief. Instead, the front door was unlocked, but the waiting area was dark. That new couch was just randomly placed in the middle of the room, still wrapped in the plastic. Receipt on it. It was unlike Dr. Emmett to leave that sort of thing undone. The man was so persnickety, he was practically a stereotype. If there was still plastic on it, that’s how he wanted it.

She looked at the receipt for delivery, put it in her pocket. He’d want her to scan it for taxes. He’d also want her to unwrap the thing and make it look as pretty as the rest of his beloved New York waiting room. For a moment, she considered that he maybe left the plastic down so that he could christen the couch with his little date. But she didn’t want to think about that shit.

Or touch it.

The lights behind the reception desk weren’t on, either. Maybe Dr. Emmett was running late himself. Or hiding from her, waiting to pounce.

She called out to him. Nothing.

So, Celeste thought, screw him and his dumb jokes. She didn’t have time for this kind of passive-aggressive white nonsense. She hmphed and proceeded to her desk, even though no morning in Dr. Emmett’s office had ever started like this. Patients were about to show up, if anyone followed medical instructions and actually showed up 15 minutes before their actual appointment time.

Celeste saw the problem as soon as she walked through the door. He lay face down in front of the desk, a bloody gash in his bald spot, surrounded by his blond crown of hair. Some of his blood had pooled on the floor around his head. He was surrounded by paper. And she didn’t scream. She didn’t freak out. There was no time for hesitation. She knew what needed to be done, and she did it. Find his pulse. Mouth-to-mouth. Chest compressions. Talking to him, saying his name, trying to get him awake. She sang “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees to assure she gave the right amount of thrusts. She used his Christian name, tried to sound warm.

“Max...,” she spoke, hoping it wasn’t futile to do so. She reached for her phone, tried to unlock it. She kept at the compressions. He was alive. Please be alive. He was alive.

The front door jingled behind her. The patient was early. Celeste turned toward her, told her firmly to call 911, all while keeping up the compressions. Then she breathed into his mouth. This was what needed to be done right now, not any questions about how this all happened. He wasn’t Dr. Emmett. She wasn’t his employee. There was no division between them. They needed to connect. They needed to survive. There’s an intimacy to saving a life. She knew he had to be touched. He had to be kissed. She had to reach him, wherever he was, if she could. She had to believe she could succeed, even if she couldn’t. Celeste worked to keep Max alive.

“Do you have those electric paddles to shock him?” the patient asked, whoever she was.

“There’s a pulse,” Celeste said matter-of-factly. “We don’t need the paddles.”

And she worked for the five minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive, the stressful, terrible, endless five minutes that feel like hours. She tried not to second-guess herself. She tried not to think her actions heroic. She just did the practical applications, the things she had been trained to do.

He wasn’t a fair boss. He underestimated her. He misunderstood and dismissed her. Dr. Emmett always treated her like she had a flair for the dramatic, an unfair distinction that she let him continue to use on her. She wasn’t playing at emotion. She felt it. She wasn’t acting. It was real. Life could be intense, and it takes people willing to acknowledge that to do what needs to be done. If you live with extremes, they scare you less when you come face-to-face with their absolute fucking worst.

Δ

When the medics took over CPR, Celeste stepped back from the scene and began to pray for her boss. He wasn’t dead. She did what she could. She prayed it was enough. She prayed for God’s mercy, which she believed in and believed was deserved by everyone. Though she intentionally kept her own son from visiting her at work once Marcus hit puberty, though she suspected the kind of tastes that Dr. Emmett had, though she turned a blind eye more often than not in favor of a paycheck, Dr. Emmett did not deserve to die. He did not deserve pain. Celeste believed that.

Maybe this was the hypothetical rainy day. She couldn’t keep Dr. Emmett’s secrets after this. Celeste dreaded what it all meant. Dr. Emmett got bit in the ass by evil. She had to tell the cops, even if she was afraid. But she had to be careful so that evil wouldn’t bite her in the ass too. Maybe. But it wouldn’t look good for her or her son if word got out that she kept Dr. Emmett’s secrets. She could point out that lots of people had motive, but she had motive too.

After Dr. Emmett was rushed away in an ambulance, Celeste went back to her desk and got on the phone, never mind the fire engine in the parking lot or the cops circling around. She needed to be Miss Marple—with better hair. She needed to be Poirot without the showiness.

Better to be a blank page. Celeste wanted to listen more than talk, even if she was the witness, even if she was the hero.

She pulled up the day’s appointments on her computer and began dialing the phone.

Every appointment needed to be postponed before people started showing up annoyed and pissed off to an office with no dentist.

Celeste waited for the cops to come ask her questions, and one of them eventually did. Some chirpy girl who didn’t look like she could find a toy in a Cracker Jack box, let alone any facts in this situation.

“How did you find him?”

“He was face down on the floor in front of my desk, surrounded by papers. He was hard to miss. I flipped him over, gave him CPR.”

“He looked like he banged his head pretty hard,” the cop said.

“Yes,” Celeste agreed. “Hit his head on the desk, probably. I’ve done it before.”

“Was anything out of the ordinary when you walked in?”

“My boss was face down on the ground for God knows how long. And, um, there was a new couch.”

“New couch?”

“The one wrapped in plastic in the lobby. The cream-colored one. They were supposed to deliver it yesterday. I guess they did it last night or this morning.”

“I’ll go check it out.”

“OK,” Celeste said. “May I continue calling our patients to tell them about the accident?”

The chirpy cop nodded.

Celeste spoke into the phone to another answering machine.

“Mrs. Foster, this is Celeste from Dr. Emmett’s office. He won’t be seeing patients this week due to an emergency.”

The cop wandered away. Cops are dumb.

Celeste just called down the list, first today’s patients, then tomorrow’s. And then the next day’s. Looking over the couch, the cops left a business card, then left the scene. They’d check on him at the hospital, they said. Agreed it looked like an accident. Said they’d reach out if they had any questions. It was all far more painless than Celeste feared it might be. Life is never like the movies.

Δ

Maybe an hour after everyone had left her alone, Celeste dug the delivery receipt out of her pocket, glanced at the signature at its base. Wade Emmett. Wade Emmett? Stupid, stupid kid.

She added a call to the end of her roster, finding the patient’s phone number in the database. There were only so many Wades. And she remembered Wade Harrell, the hilarious boy who kept talking about how beautiful Dr. Emmett was. She still had that video on her phone.

The call went directly to the kid’s voicemail. Celeste played it cool.

“Hi Wade, this is Celeste at Dr. Emmett’s office. I see you have a cleaning scheduled on the second to never, and I just wanted to touch base with you. Dr. Emmett will be unavailable for any appointments. But I suspect you knew that. Call me back on my cell number. 404-945-1870. Unless you want trouble.”