The Surgeon

written by sarah feng

illustrated by emily cai

music played by ilana zaks

When I was eight, I curled up on a metal stool in the corner of an operating room to watch my mother return to her patients the ability to think. Armored in pale blue scrubs, hair combed into a tight bun, she directed the phalanx of nurses that surrounded the operating table and handled the variety of instruments with stiff dedication to the task at hand. Her solemnity stayed with me. I learned the names of the different tools by listening to her call them out; I memorized the words used to describe the brain in the same way. 

On Christmas morning, she treated me to a cup of hot chocolate from an upscale coffee store on the nicer side of town. I warmed my fingers on its thick, Styrofoam shelling, treasuring the richness of the drink, as she drove into the hospital’s parking lot. My mother guided me past the waiting room and patiently explained to me that today I would be allowed to watch her work. 

An unconscious, middle-aged man lay unconscious, face concealed under a filmy blanket. As my mother inserted a slim metal tool whose name I did not know into his open skull, the nearby machines let out shrieks of higher and higher frequency, their pixelated green lines flickering into large, mountain-shaped jags. I craned my neck to look more closely at his exposed brain, that viscous mass of folded tissue, gleaming with gel-like liquid. Sharp metal pins jutted from the folds, catching the glare of the operating light, hooked up to red and blue wires that fed into the humming machines.  

The brain – what a clever contraption made of pulsing flesh. Its grotesqueness entranced me. As my mother probed further with her tools, the electrical signals grew louder and louder, then suddenly quiet, then loud again. A bead of sweat slid down her temple. She stood as still as a window.

As a neurosurgeon, the work that my mother did required the most intense mental focus. She was the leader of a ritual in the operating room.    

Even after an hour, the medical workers showed no sign of fatigue. Brief murmurs elicited sequences of trained movements, blue-uniformed arms rustling in muscle memory. I watched in rapture, wondering if I could memorize each of my mother’s movements. I was unfathomably curious about the seemingly limitless depths of knowledge that lay in her mind about human anatomy, about the structure of the brain, that I would have never found out in our daily conversations. When the operation was completed, attendants re-stitched the pieces of his skin that had been peeled aside and wrapped bandages around his head. They wheeled him out, and I watched the doctors slip off their gloves and filter out, one by one. 

My mother washed her hands in the sink outside of the operating room and shook out her hair. Her eyes were tired and hollow. 

“What’s wrong?” I said.

She shook her head, indicating that she didn’t want to speak about it. As she turned around, beckoning for me to follow her, a presence accosted us. A stubbled man with vermillion-red hair and thick green glasses burst forwards, panting, his face flushed, clad in rumpled scrubs, holding a clipboard. “I need a word with you, Camille,” he said. “Come with me.”

“How can I help you, Dr. Weiss?” my mother said. I detected a hint of coolness in her tone, and I held her hand to comfort her. 

“Camille, I’m reassigning you right now. Forget the rest of your operations for the day.” 

“Dr. Weiss,” my mother said. “There are patients I have been working closely with for weeks who have their most major operations scheduled for today. This is a matter of life or death – but I feel as if I shouldn’t have to say that. I am more familiar with their conditions than anyone else in the hospital. They’re in delicate conditions. I think it’s best if you find someone else – ”

“Camille,” he said. “I let you take on the last patient because you asked me to – a homeless man you found on the street, who can’t even pay us.” I felt my mother’s hand tense with anger. “But we have the governor in the waiting room right now, and he won’t let anyone operate except for you – he asked for our best, the one who the newspapers covered last year for doing the miracle surgeries on the amnesiacs. They had a break-in last night, and the daughter has blunt trauma to the head and retrograde amnesia. Doesn’t remember her name, doesn’t remember where she is. The entire family is crying in our waiting room. There are other donors who’ve been calling to put pressure on us. I’ve got media and photographers outside. They won’t take anyone except for you. I need you to drop your other patients right now and focus on her.” 

“But what about the other families who have been depending on me? I’ve been seeing them for weeks now – talking them through options, through all the risky pathways forwards. I can’t, and I won’t, let them down.” 

“Camille!” Dr. Weiss said in frustration, and it was loud enough that a few surrounding interns stopped to eavesdrop. A gynecologist who I knew was friendly with my mother approached, gauging the situation with anxious eyes. “You’re being unnecessarily difficult. Think of the future of the hospital – ”

“I am,” she said. “I’m thinking about the futures of every individual.” 

“You’re always so serious, and it’s normally fine – but you’re getting on my nerves,” he said, with gritted teeth. It was clear that he was stressed about the situation; his face was red, and I couldn’t imagine the cajoling conversations he’d had with people coming into the hospital. Through the windows, I could see the photographers attempting to file through the doors, likely trying to take photos of the daughter in the waiting room, but security guards were blocking them. “Get a fucking grip. They won’t take anyone but you. You should feel special. Why can’t you just act like a normal person, goddamnit?” 

I was shocked by the sudden outburst of frustration, but I held tight to my mother’s hand. “Find someone else,” she repeated.

Dr. Weiss stared at her. Then he walked quickly away, as if dogs were at his heels, slamming the door shut.  

“He’ll punish you for that later,” muttered the gynecologist to my mother. “He doesn’t take well to that kind of thing, Camille. Why didn’t you just agree? I worry about you sometimes.”

“Then he can punish me,” said my mother. “There are some things I won’t sacrifice. Come on, Clover. I need to fill out some paperwork.”

When the day ended, I leaped into the front seat of our Buick and buckled my seatbelt excitedly. I was still too short to see over the dashboard, but I loved being in front, my hand resting over the gearshift. I admired the powdery snow drifting in rippling sheets across the street, covering the ground. As Mom maneuvered us carefully through the parking lot, the words Connecticut Central Hospital shone dimly above us; in the early evening, the setting sun kissed the snow with marbled, golden light. The streets were paved, but even the black asphalt was slick with moisture; she drove slowly, for fear of losing control of the steering wheel over ice.

I twisted the knob on the car’s radio to let out a faint stream of grainy music. Familiar Christmas songs trickled out, mixed with the chatter of advertising audio. Out of uniform, Mom had released her hair into a lower ponytail and shivered in her gray turtleneck. The heater in our car was broken, but I’d bundled up this morning with many layers. I climbed into the backseat, then reached into the car’s trunk and found a few old blankets, which I shoved in a wad towards Mom. She wrapped them around her shoulders at a stoplight.

“What did you think?” she asked me.

“That doctor was so mean,” I said. “I didn’t like him. I didn’t like the way he talked to you.” I had never encountered another adult speak to my mother in such a way, with such a commanding and aggressive tone. It irked me. 

“I brought you today so you could see what the world is like,” my mother said. “There are hierarchies that are built into systems everywhere, and people who will try to enforce them. You must learn to never think like that.” There was a set to her mouth I could identify when a situation had gnawed its way through her skin. I felt that I had to say something to comfort her.

“But you were there to stop him,” I said. I could tell that it was bothering my mother underneath her exteriority of calmness.“And besides…” I paused. I couldn’t erase the image of my mother in the operating room, each sure, swift motion tugging a life closer towards resurrection, away from the pull of death. “I don’t know, Mom. The work you do – it seemed… magical.” I was stirred by the austerity of the majority of doctors at the hospital – it sparked respect in me. There was an authority to the white halls of the institution. Further, the people wearing the white coats were filled with the knowledge to resuscitate, to revive, to retrieve not only a body, but a person’s words, their consciousness. My mother was brimming with the ability to bring others back into the community of the living and the thinking. 

“No,” my mother said harshly. “No, Clover. It’s too stressful. You don’t know what it takes… It’s too much. I wish someone had told me that before I began this path. If I could go back… I sometimes wonder about that. You should focus on ballet. Take care of a family. Better to make a positive impact on a few, than not quite know how you’ve disturbed the balance of the world – and wonder if you’ve changed it for the worse.” 

“What do you mean?”

“Just focus on those around you,” she repeated.

I wondered how much of that was influenced by my father, who had left our family because he said he wanted a sense of romance, a sense of life. To this day, I have never seen my mother cry. She said she was disappointed in his desires – for frivolity. He didn’t take that well, and I saw the pain evident in both of their faces, incapable of thawing the distance that opened up between them after that argument. Mom insisted upon maintaining a regular schedule of family dinners and weekend outings to create a sense of normalcy for me, to keep their conflict out of the broader family. I still don’t know what happened behind closed doors, however much I lingered outside of their bedroom door, attempting to catch fragments of their arguments, wondering if there was something I could do to alleviate their hurt. My father began to withdraw, taking up hobbies within his room, driving around on the weekends. On the morning of the last new year’s day, we watched him drive away. He’d left a note behind – that he believed there was more to what life could be for him, that he’d finally discovered the strength to discard the bonds of regularity–along with his wedding ring and a page of his diary, where he had drawn a sketch of the three of us together. To this day, Mom still wore her wedding ring firmly on her finger, dodging questions from probing neighbors about her marriage. 

“I think what you do is better,” I said.

“At a cost,” Mom said quietly. The tone of her voice shifted, and I knew that she wanted to stop the conversation there. I kept quiet and turned the volume of the music up. The streets that swam past my windows appeared menacing to me, foreign. We were on the highway now, and vehicles flashed past us.

When we were driving through our city to our house, Mom slowed down the car in the main streets of our downtown area, where the streets grew thinner, the foot traffic grew heavier, and the shops and restaurants grew denser. A few Christmas lights glowed from the roofs of the larger restaurants, along with some lit-up snowman decorations smiling garishly, but most of the shops were closed, with dark windows. Snow had piled up on the curbs in grubby heaps, discarded cans and old trash leaning against them, puddles of grime near the grates. Two figures were hunched over on a bench in the darkness. The streets, except for them, were completely deserted, the lamplights poorly functioning, the shops brooding and sinister.

 “Clover, roll down the window.”

“I did. “Who are they?”

Mom drove the car closer, and I saw the shapes come into sharper definition: it was an older man with his arm around a boy around my age who seemed to be crying. 

“I don’t know, but I think he’s crying,” I murmured.

Mom pulled the car over and stopped the engine, then left the car. It took me a moment to unbuckle my seatbelt and follow her. She approached the two of them, the harsh wind whipping her hair around her face and turning her cheeks a bitter red. I squeezed my arms around myself, rocking back and forth on my heels. 

“Are you two okay?” she asked, raising her voice to speak over the wind. The father, it seemed, with gray-matted hair and weathered blue eyes, was wearing only a leather jacket, while the son was wearing a tattered white sweater that didn’t fully cover him. Both were shivering, and the son was crying, cradling his bare ankle, which was swollen and bruised. It was so cold I could feel the wind chill through my three or four layers of thick jackets, and I could see the whiteness of cold apparent on their pallid faces; I wondered if their fingers were numb.

“My son broke his ankle,” said the father, whose low voice was tinged with an accent I couldn’t place.

“Do you need us to drive you to the hospital?”

He shook his head. We understood. They couldn’t afford the treatment.

“Give me a second,” Mom said. She unlocked our car, rummaged in the trunk for a few minutes, which was packed full of an odd selection of materials accumulated from years of use, and emerged with rolls of bandage wraps and gauze. She tore off a segment with her teeth and deftly wrapped the injured limb.  

They looked so cold. I went back to the car and emerged with two sweaters and folded them up and put them next to the son.  

“Are you a doctor?” said the son, whose tears were beginning to subside.

She nodded.

“She’s a neurosurgeon,” I said, with pride 

The two of them looked at each other with an expression I couldn’t place or define – not apprehension, and yet not admiration, either. 

“We don’t need your things,” said the father with a hostility I couldn’t quite place. My mother dipped her head and began to apologize, her face reddening. I clutched her hand, suddenly feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise, although I didn’t understand the tension.

“What’s your name?” my mother asked.

“Darrell Polinsky,” he responded. “This is my son, Ulysses.”

“Thank you,” Ulysses said quickly. His voice was feeble, and he glanced at me with a hostile expression.

Back home, we parked the car in our cramped garage and entered our house. There were no overhead lights, only tabletop lamps gathered from vintage and secondhand stores over the years that illuminated the rooms in amber, the lampshades shaped like flowers, like cubes, like spheres. Shopping for antiques together had become one of our shared hobbies over the years; I loved taking in something old and worn and giving it a new home, where it could serve as a receptacle for new memories. There was a small wooden table painted green with a vase on it that, in the winter, I had filled with marbles, since all the flowers were dead in this season, and ceramic vases we hung on the walls that I made and painted in my art classes. The outside of our house was barren and painted with generic colors, but the inside was filled with artifacts. My mother always told me it was best to live humbly; all of her remaining salary was sent to China to her parents, and to assist her three siblings financially, who had to take on less  I ran to turn on the heater, and Mom lay down on the brown couch next to the dining room table. “Will you cook dinner tonight, Clover?”

I began boiling water in a pot. We had set up a Christmas tree next to the couch; it was skinny and a little bit crooked, but we had cut up multicolored construction paper to make pink, purple, and green snowflakes that we hung up with fishing twine. On the couch lay my leotard and tights. 

Mom sighed. “What did you think of what Dr. Weiss said today?”

“I don’t really understand what he wanted you to do,” I said, stirring some marinara with salt and pepper in a separate bowl. In another pan, I poured oil and flicked on the stove. Once the oil sizzled with heat, I cracked two eggs, the runny whites dripping viscously until they solidified into gelled white masses. Flakes of snow spiraled down through the night outside, thickening into a white sheet beyond our garage. The warmth from our heater buzzed around us and settled over us like a swarm of fireflies beating their wings.

“They wanted me to stop operating on someone who couldn’t pay for his operation to save someone who could pay the bill – and more. He was right, in a way. The hospitals that have stayed open the longest are those that have done a good job catering to people like the governor.”

“It upset me,” I said. “The way he talked to you.”

“I don’t need him. He’s an unimportant and small man.” 

“But he controls you,” I said. “You can’t be free of him.” 

“I know that,” she said. “But he can’t take my choices away from me. That’s the worst thing.”  

“But what are you going to do?”  I frowned, confused by her words. The eggs fried into solid white masses, and the yolks in the center hardened. I prodded them with the spatula, and they remained firm. I spooned marinara generously over the spaghetti; the pot exhaled steam all over my face, plastering strands of hair to my forehead. I was nervous to make a mistake with the cooking; I could read my mother’s disappointment on her face easily. It was our first Christmas without my dad, who was the best chef in the family. I swirled the spaghetti in the marinara and sprinkled salt and pepper on top, then gently scooped the eggs onto the surface.

“I’ll continue to do my best to do the right thing, and if he can’t tolerate that, then there will be some other way for me to still work,” she said finally. “I want you to always remember that, if there’s one thing you can take away from visiting me at work today – that once you lose your freedom to choose, that’s when you know something is wrong.” 

I ladled the spaghetti into two plates and placed one in front of her and the other across from her. The smell was savory and rich, and the plate warmed my hands. “Are you happy?” I asked. 

She savored a forkful of spaghetti, licked her lips. “This is really good,” she said. 

I beamed. Now that she had begun to eat, I, too, could begin to eat. I had not realized how hungry I was after a day spent trailing after medical caretakers with only a sparse hospital meal of rice and beans to sustain me throughout the day, but the salty tang of the eggs reminded me of the desire to eat. I reminded myself to pace myself.  

“I think I am,” she said. “But it took some time for me to get here. I’ve never told you where I used to work, have I?” 

I shook my head. As far back as my memory reached, my mother had been a neurosurgeon at the Connecticut Central Hospital. I was secretly eager to learn more about the mysterious spread of her career – and life – that had rolled out before my birth, which she rarely ever spoke about unless it was wrung from her on nights like these, where the wind was bitter and the air inside maintained a warm, syrupy quality.

“Before you were born, I was a surgeon for the army. I was stationed in Afghanistan, which is all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. I did things I wasn’t proud of. I was told I was there to heal people, but instead they asked me to perform experiments on prisoners we had taken. It was sick, really – to take someone’s mind and experiment on it, on them, without regard for their well-being afterwards. But sometimes you don’t realize what you’re doing when someone else is telling you to do it.” She avoided my eyes as she rotated her fork harshly in the spaghetti, chewing methodically. “Does that make sense, Clover?” 

“I think so.” 

“Do you know why I’m telling you this?” 

I shook my head.

She sighed. “Your father and I did our best to shield you from many of the harsh realities of living in this country. With both of our combined incomes, we will be able to send you to a high school and a college that will give you a strong education – strong enough that one day, you might take a position of power somewhere in the workforce. I don’t want you to be a surgeon so that you don’t have the pressure of making choices like that every day, where someone’s life is in your hands. You don’t want that kind of blood on your hands, Clover. You’ll never be able to sleep at night.” 

Her words struck me as literal. I looked down at my hands and turned them over, wondering what it felt like to have the blood from another human stain my knuckles, drip down my fingertips. I stared in wonder at my mother’s deft, smooth hands, the fingers thin and long, capable of giving someone back their memory, capable of folding intricate origami crafts, capable of rubbing the back of my hair at night when I was having nightmares and putting me to sleep. 

“Does that make sense, Clover?” My mother’s harsh insistence jolted me out of my observations. I could feel her urgency, her desperation for me to understand, radiating over me, so I nodded quickly in agreement to show that I understood. 

I wanted to probe further, to demand stories of what it was like to go through the brutal training necessary to be a surgeon, of what it was like to split open a skull for the first time, but she sat back, clearly deep in thought, brow furrowed. I waited for her to speak again, and when she did, she asked what we should buy her parents – my grandparents – as holiday gifts. Next week, we were meant to drive down to Massachusetts to spend the eve of the new year together. We ate the spaghetti and nibbled on the fried eggs, steam swirling over her head. I noticed worry simmering beneath the surface of her face, but she wouldn’t – couldn’t – express it to me.

As I began to scrub the dishes in the sink, I finally gathered up the courage to ask, “Can I come with you again to work tomorrow?” 

“The day after Christmas, we’ll likely have a fair amount of patients. It will be chaotic,” Mom said. “I trust you to stay home alone if you want to.”

“I’m scared of being home alone,” I lied. I kept my eyes fixed on the oil melting off the dishes and dripping into the drain of the sink. The hot water turned my fingers raw and pink. I knew my mother was not one to hire a nanny; she always wanted me to be independent, and to make my own decisions. 

After a pause, she sighed. “If you really want to, I can bring you again. But be warned. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”

Before going to sleep that night, I checked all the windows in the house to make sure they were sealed tightly shut. My mother caught colds easily, and when she was tired from work, she easily overlooked small housekeeping tasks in her exhaustion. Back in my room, I tried to read a book before I went to sleep, but my mind raced, seized by images of the day. I faded into a troubled sleep fixed not upon thoughts of school, or ballet, but upon the story my mother had told me, of operating upon prisoners, and the fragile essence of someone’s life hinging upon the movements of your hands.

The next morning, my mother and I drove to work playing music from the radio, me singing along and her humming quietly. The snow was blindingly brilliant from the rising sun’s radiance, glittering so much that it hurt my eyes. I dug around in the glove compartment and found a pair of Dad’s old sunglasses he had left behind. They were too large for my face, but they covered my vision with a sheen of dusty gold, protecting me from the glare of the snow. The day after Christmas, the holiday decorations on people’s houses were no longer lit, but plastic red and green bulbs still hung from eaves, dim snowmen sat askew on porches. We arrived at the hospital when it was still mostly empty, a few nurses milling around. As my mother approached the front desk, two of the security guards who typically stood by the entrance, loosely flanked her.

“Camille,” one of them said with a sad, resigned expression. Her hands were tucked behind her back, as if in disappointment with herself. “Will you come with us for a moment?” 

My mother turned to her in surprise, then examined the two of them. “Melissa? I’m about to swipe into work. Is there something you need?” 

Melissa and the other guard, a short, cheerful man who had given me a candy cane yesterday with a wide smile, exchanged a look of sadness. “I’m sorry to do this, Camille. We’re under orders to escort you somewhere.” 

“I see,” my mother said. There was no hesitation in her step as she followed the two of them. She offered me her hand, and I held it. There was a steeliness to her face. We passed through the hallways, where nurses were wheeling patients out to operations, their sedated faces calm and blank, or else writhing in silent pain. Grim interns passed by, clutching clipboards, their coats soaring behind them like white capes. Sounds of murmured voices in heated discussion rippled through the hallways, both quiet and loud at once. The two guards stopped at a door, and then looked at me.

“I can wait with her outside,” Melissa said, gesturing to me.

“I want to go inside,” I blurted out. I turned to my mother, pleading with my eyes. I wanted to hear.

“She can go where I go,” she said.  

“Are you sure?” Melissa asked urgently.

My mother nodded. We turned into a room with a reclined chair clearly intended for a patient to be examined by a doctor. A hunched man with a shock of ginger hair and boxy green glasses was sitting on the doctor’s stool, sipping a cup of coffee. 

“Camille,” he said. “Come in.” He made no movement to stand up and gestured for my mother to sit on the patient’s chair. She folded her arms and remained standing.

“Good morning, Trevor,” she said. “Did you have something you wanted to discuss?” 

“It’s exactly that,” he said. “Your attitude.” 

“Did you invite me here to give me a lecture about my behavior? I feel like I’ve been called into high school detention.” 

“What makes you think you can act so disrespectfully towards everyone else here? Just because you can operate, does that mean you can decide who does what? This is an ecosystem, Camille. Ecosystems require order. You are out of control. You don’t understand what it takes to keep this hospital running. Your behavior yesterday cannot be repeated, and I have no idea where you acquired the audacity to believe you can proceed like that.” 

“Ecosystems are made up of individuals and their choices. The behavior of the collective emerges organically from the local rules that individuals abide by, that they choose themselves,” my mother said.

Dr. Weiss laughed. “I feel as if you don’t comprehend the consequences of your actions, and you seem to overestimate the amount of control you have over your future at this institution. I could easily remove you from the hospital right now.” 

“I’m aware of that,” Mom said. 

“I will give you an opportunity to redeem yourself,” he said. “The governor is coming back here today. I want you to apologize to him for making yourself unavailable.”

“Why?” 

Dr. Weiss’s neck flushed red. He sucked in his breath and exhaled it, visibly more and more frustrated. “Why?”

“If you can convince me why he deserves an apology, I will do it.” 

“For jeopardizing the life of his daughter. For disrespecting his contributions to this institution.” 

“I respect what you’re trying to do, keeping the hospital under control,” my mother said, “but I won’t apologize on principle.”  

I remembered what she had told me yesterday at the dinner table. 

Dr. Weiss’s face reddened with anger and frustration. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes vigorously, began speaking a few times, and then stopped, as if attempting to triangulate upon the most effective answer. Finally, he said, “My responsibility as the chief of surgery is to keep everyone else in line. Make sure you’re all doing what you need to be doing. I need you to remember that – ”

“What?” my mother said. “That you have control over me? I feel as if you have forgotten what it means to make decisions that sit right when you sleep at night. You know what you’re doing, deep down, isn’t truly power. Nobody should be able to tell you to abridge the principles you live by, especially not in a place where the consequences are quite literally life or death for other people. I learned that the hard way. I – ”

“Camille, just because you served in the army doesn’t mean you know better than all of us.” He looked at the two guards, who had been idling by the doorway, staring at the floor. “Can you take the child out? It’s distracting me.”

“Clover is not just a child. She’s a person. Don’t move her like a toy,” my mother said, and the guards hesitated. I could tell that they looked at her with respect. Sternly, Mom asked me, “Clover, what do you want to do?” 

“I want to stay here,” I said firmly. Watching the interaction unfold between the two of them had rooted me to the ground. I could feel the tension rising between the two of them, about to crash at any moment, but I couldn’t imagine any scenario in which my family didn’t escape unscathed. Somehow my mother felt invincible to me; anything shielded under her wings would remain safe from a disaster. 

“Are you sure?” the female guard asked me softly with kind and sorrowful eyes.

I nodded. I was fascinated by the dynamics. They intimidated me, too, raising the hair on the back of my neck. But I had never seen this side of my mother before. 

“Get her out,” Dr. Weiss seethed, his voice rising in volume, quavering. He stood up and crossed his arms. Although my presence initially went unnoticed, I still clung to shadows, and the initial hesitation of the guards to reach in and pluck me out into the harsh light seemed to spite him further “Out of the room.”

“Absolutely not. You don’t get to make orders like that,” Mom snapped back, her voice matching his for harshness. “You’re not her father.”

“This is my hospital,” he said. 

“Science doesn’t belong to you.” Mom put her hands protectively on my shoulders, as if to remind me that I had as much of a right to be here as anyone else. The air was still and tense. The guards approached me and looked at my mother with apology and with fear, and then down at me, with resignation. The shorter man took another step forwards, into my personal space, so that I could see the buttons on his uniform, and stared more pointedly at my mother, waiting for her to release her hands. She tightened her fingers on my shoulders before releasing them suddenly. I was shocked by the emptiness I felt. 

Mom crossed her arms and gazed steadily at the two officers. “I’m disappointed in you,” she said.

I saw the words sink in slowly – they flinched, as if someone had struck them across the face. Both of them froze. 

“Move,” said Dr. Weiss, his voice so cold that it chilled me. Desperation and fury laced his tone. 

“Sure,” Mom said, to the guards. “Go ahead. I understand. Protect your job, your ‘hospital,’ the ‘big donors.’ It’s what you have to do, isn’t it?” 

But the two guards shuffled forwards, and then stopped, again, not looking each other in the eyes, simply pondering their actions. There was a rawness, an unsureness, on both of their faces. Then they slowly looked up to Dr. Weiss with apology and apprehension. Their paralysis spoke for them before they even opened their mouths to pose a meek question.

“That’s it. That’s it.” Dr. Weiss tossed his clipboard onto the patient’s seat and let out an angry huff through his nose. “Both of you,” he said, jabbing a finger at the two guards, “are fired. And you” – now, an incredulous, galled glare at my mother— “take your name off of all the charts. You’re not operating for the next month. I’m cutting your pay.” 

“This is incredibly childish and excessive.”

But it seemed Mother had insulted Dr. Weiss’s pride. He took a giddy joy in wielding it now. “You’ll still be working for the hospital. I think it’s time you work as a caregiver in the nursing home, without pay, before you come back to being a doctor. Maybe a month. Maybe a year. It’ll be an important learning experience for you.” 

My mother took off her white doctor’s coat and neatly folded it on the countertop, next to the clay replicas of the brain and underneath the posters of the peripheral nervous system. I knew what she was about to do before she opened her mouth. I could see the finality that spread across her face. It was how she looked when she opened up the envelope that my father had left on our kitchen counter-top the morning of last new year’s day. She had already seen one of the cars missing from the garage, his shoes gone from the door-stoop. When she observed the envelope, its exterior marked with his artist’s scribble, frantically looping together the rounded letters of her name and mine, her mouth was as flat as a rope. 

She took off the lanyard around her neck with her badge and dropped it on top of the coat. 

“What are you doing?” Dr. Weiss grabbed her lanyard and observed it incredulously. 

He had to know. We all knew. 

“I quit,” she said. 

The words sat in the room with a life of their own. They would stay there, I was sure, long after we left the hospital, roaming the halls.

“You can’t do that,” Dr. Weiss said.

“I quit,” she repeated. All of a sudden, he looked frightened.

She readjusted the collar of her turtleneck and dusted off her black pants. Her slowness was purposeful. I wondered how she did not feel the immense weight upon her shoulders. It was invisible, but even I could feel it, the absorptive expectations of others pressing down upon her shoulders, attempting to insulate her against loneliness. She cut through it as if she did not feel the air’s tightening and offered her hand to me.   

I took it and tightened my fingers around hers. In her radius, I suddenly felt freed, too, as if I might be able to take the same flight. 

“It’s been a long morning, Clover. I think we deserve some hot chocolate.” 

“You can’t leave,” Dr. Weiss said harshly, mouth clenched. He stepped forwards as if to physically take her arm, but stopped, as if realizing his own desperation. He stared at the guards, but they, too, were frozen. 

She walked out. After we were already at the end of the hallway, Dr. Weiss burst from the doorway. “Camille!” he shouted. “Camille!” He was stuttering, as if unsure what he wanted to express or do. He gathered his hair in his hands. When we reached the front door, he broke into a run, seized the edge of her sleeve as we prepared to exit. With a look of utter shock, my mother tore her arm away. 

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “Don’t do this. Please.” 

“I can do anything I want,” she said. “You should rethink what – and who – you think belongs to you. Remember that any decision you make has a ripple effect. I am willing to accept the consequences of my actions. Are you?” 

He looked stunned, like she had struck him across the face. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. My mother and I walked out of the hospital. Other doctors had gathered by the doorway, asking Dr. Weiss questions. We could no longer hear their conversation through the barrier of glass and metal. We walked in silence to the car. 

“Sometimes, things don’t feel good,” my mother said as she sat down in the driver’s seat. She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. 

But me – suddenly, I felt as if the light that flooded the car was a thick, tangible soup. It was warm and real enough to drink – scooping viscous mouthfuls of it, the taste indescribably rich. Existing here, even in silence, together, as mother and daughter, was the cause. The chill air touched our skin and its essence was transformed. I breathed in lungfuls of it, my limbs softening, my joints becoming supple. Here I was, born from someone who was the island around which everything else flowed. I laid my cheek against the glass of the car, which hummed to life around me as my mother turned her key in the ignition with a loud click. 

The car was a vessel on the ocean, searching for a target to approach or attack. What the target was, I did not know, but our motion felt more imminent than whatever chased us. 

“I’m proud of you,” I said.

I rarely saw my mother genuinely surprised, but it seemed to shake her even more than what Dr. Weiss had said to her. She had never been an affectionate person, and so I wasn’t sure where I had learned how to use this phrase. It didn’t float within immediate reach of my normal vocabulary. 

“You’re starting to make your own definitions of the world,” she said. She moved the gear of the car and began to reverse out of the parking lot carefully, our tires skidding noisily over the lumpy, ice-covered asphalt.

I supposed I was. As we emerged onto the highway, I wondered if Dr. Weiss would return home to his wife and children tonight, and what they would think. I wondered if he transformed himself beneath their gazes to a kinder being. When he took off his white coat for the day and drove home, I was sure he was also a loving man in the realm of his own house. I wondered how he felt returning to work each day, allowing himself to be swept away by the gales of others’ words and expectations. If he ever wanted to hold his child’s hand. I remembered the wedding ring I had noticed on his finger, and the grainy photographs of himself, his wife, and a brood of sons of different ages gathered around them in a green garden. But as the car moved, and the hospital shrank to a point in the distance, before being gradually erased by the morning, I felt the light that touched both my mother and me setting into something like cream that buoyed both of us and moved us forwards.