Chapter Text
~^~
Jas clawed a squalling divot out of his ear when he pulled the bee stinger out of her foot. After she was cleaned up and discharged by Maru, Maru came into Harvey’s examination room and took over gauze-duty for him as she handed him a folder. “We’re getting a new patient.”
“Did Marnie end up coming to pick her up?” His coffee mug was empty and he was losing too much blood to prioritize that, but honestly only just barely. “I couldn’t reach her on her work phone.”
“She left piggyback with Shane. Thank Vincent for being a tattletale with no volume control. Last I saw her she was pretending he was a pony and hauling on his hair to giddy him up.”
“… was he sober enough to giddyup without falling down?”
Maru flattened her bloodstained hand and tilted it back and forth philosophically. “I should follow them,” Harvey said.
Maru shoved him back down. “You’re a crime scene. Just sit still and try not to bleed on anything else.”
“This is postmarked last week.” Harvey frowned at the contents of the folder, thumbing through the topmost sheets. Insurance information, occupation, allergies, list of medication, next of kin. The immunization records were on age-spotted cardstock and stood out from the rest, flip-flopping blue and black ink fading up the rows to the patient’s infant vaccinations twenty-seven years prior. “This didn’t just get here, did it?”
“It was in the intake this morning. The package looked pretty beat-up, so I’m guessing it did the usual rounds in Zuzu PO’s dead letter office before someone found it.” Maru squinted and unpinched the gauze a moment. She hurriedly re-pinched it. “Harvey, this is a geyser.”
“These are confidential patient records and they just slapped a shipping label on it. Why on earth didn’t they fax them?”
“Because our fax has been broken for two years. Harvey, I don’t understand how you can be so squeamish going five steps up a ladder to change a lightbulb but be completely indifferent to the fact you’re gushing blood. You know what, just hold this. Hold on.”
Harvey took over gauze-duty as Maru lunged up from the bed. From this angle he could just see a glimpse of the daylight outside the front windows: the only natural light the design of the compound allowed. He had four more appointments today, all spring physicals, and if he were upstairs right now he could be re-re-reheating linguini while he hung all his mental ellipses on the jet streams outside his window. “Stay with me.” Maru snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Oh my god, this is going to notch like a tomcat ear. It’s only Monday.”
“Caroline was supposed to deliver her insurance information today from Ferngill. Did you see her come by?”
“She left it in the intake box.”
“Did you pull up Robin's patient file for me?” Harvey thought about carpal tunnel and Eustachian tube dysfunction as Maru disinfected him. The butterfly bandaid she stretched between it to try to bridge the gap hurt abominably and probably wouldn’t do anything to help in the end, but it was a nice gesture. “She’ll be coming in a half an hour.”
“I’ve been just a little busy, Doc. You know. Geysers.”
“Thank you.” Harvey sheepishly reached over himself and accessed the nearest drawer so he could pull out a fatter bandage to fold over her work once she was done. He smiled at her hopefully. “How do I look?”
“Like you got attacked by an axe murderer and were too polite to go to a hospital.” Maru wasn’t a shy girl: she steadied his face between her hands and squinted him dead in the eyeballs to suss out whether or not there were lights on in his windows. “You want me to close the clinic?”
“No, but I’m a biohazard,” he said apologetically. “If you could clean up intake and make sure the doorhandles are disinfected, that’d give me time to change for Jodi’s physical.”
“I’m writing an incident report and you’re drinking some orange juice until you get some color back.”
“I own the clinic, there’s no one to incident-report to.”
“You have to report to me,” Maru murmured, crisp and terrifying, and Harvey took that as his clue to quietly sit there and drink some orange juice for a while as she slapped around the clinic with a spray-bottle and a red biohazard bucket to dispose of the wipes. When he was done, she took the empty glass and replaced it with a vial of his own tincture for him to chase it with. Distracted before, Harvey belatedly caught the intensity of strawberry perfume as he swallowed, and the unexpected combination of sour and sweet made his stomach violently lurch. “Are you sure you want to see patients?” Maru asked. “Everybody would understand if you didn’t.”
“Everyone would be thrilled if I didn’t.” He kept his palm pressed over his mouth and spoke his fingers. “It’s spring.”
“Are you thinking about the physicals?”
“I’d like to keep them as close to last year’s date as possible for continuity. It’s hard enough to coax people in here without canceling appointments for them.”
“I’m going to file this.” Maru hefted the new Zuzu patient’s folder. “I’ll take care of the incident report and send a copy off to Marnie.”
Harvey frantically flailed his free arm until Maru sighed and handed it back. “Don’t send it off to Marnie,” Harvey said. “Just… send it in to Ferngill so there’s documentation.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s fine. I’d rather you not document it, but if you feel you have to, don’t bother Marnie with it. It was an accident.”
Maru’s expression was a little fulminating, but she gave him a thumbs-up before ducking back out into the main office, red biohazard bucket in tow.
Harvey magnificently ralphed in the nearest trash bin. When he was done cleaning up, he eased himself back onto his heels and thumbed through the patient files again to give his stomach time to settle. Eleven minutes until his physical with Jodi. He calmed his brain with thoughts of upcoming appointments and his deep investment to crawl upstairs and brush his teeth so Jodi didn’t have to be polite about his landfill breath. “Maru,” he called.
Maru poked her head back in and now there was no doubt: she was definitely the source of the strawberry. Harvey had zero chutzpah to confront any female on the planet about the way they smelled but as far as allergens went it was aggressive. He’d have to quietly field his concerns through Demetrius to see if he could get her to tone it down. “Are you certain this is right?” Harvey asked, hefting the file up so she could see it.
“Is what right?”
“There weren’t any clerical errors?”
“I think so. I mean, there’s no reason I can think of that it wouldn’t be correct, right? I know as much as you do.”
“Would you mind giving Zuzu Primary a call and checking?”
She crinkled her nose at him but flashed him another thumbs up before ducking back out.
Harvey spent the rest of the day on paperwork with his ear throbbing and occasionally ringing. He blew past lunch and snacked on dried-out carrot sticks from the medication refrigerator instead. Jodi skipped out on her physical, but at four in the afternoon Alex wandered in off the street to ask him about protein supplements but also to insist that it was very normal for professional gridball players to bleed this much on Harvey’s floor. “A week off,” Harvey said firmly after he’d worked in the last stitch on Alex’s temple and bandaged it, ignoring Alex’s groan. “At least. And next time have a care where you’re running. If the contest is between you and a light post, the light post is going to win.”
“I wasn’t trying to win, I was just trying to complete the pass!”
“And did you complete it?”
“Like a pro,” Alex beamed.
“Congratulations.” Harvey finished scribbling the prescription and handed it out to him. “Your prize is a week off sports. I’ll tell your grandmother the good news so she can be sure to help you celebrate.”
“This clinic got bled in a lot today,” Maru observed after closing, nudging the mop bucket out of her way with her knee as she fetched the paper towels. “I’m going to close up. No after-hour appointments, okay? Promise? And call me if anything big rolls in.”
“You’re very protective today.” Harvey lifted his head up from his deskwork to smile at her, charmed if he was going to be honest. “I promise I have lots more blood still in my body.”
“Good. Keep it there. It’s not for show and tell.” Maru finished mopping up and changed in his bathroom. She poked her chaotic bob back in just as he was fishing up some stale crackers from his desk drawer. “Good night, Doc.”
“Just Harvey off-hours, Maru.”
“It’s too weird when we’re still in the clinic. Good night. Eat dinner.”
“Yes’m.”
She grinned. “That I could get used to.”
“Good night,” he called at her as she left. “Thank you for all your hard work. Be careful on the way home.”
She waved over her head.
Harvey ate three crackers and a packet of ketchup and wondered what kind of industrial equipment he’d have to rent from Zuzu to haul Willy in for his appointment. Pelican Town scattered like cockroaches as soon as the snow melted and it wasn’t unusual for him to walk into the bar on a Friday to find it suspiciously empty with the floors overhead creaking and shushing themselves. He couldn’t honestly discern whether it was him they were running from specifically or just the bald fact that over the years, as the town’s only doctor and de facto therapist, he’d fielded all of their manic and depressive episodes, prescribed donuts for hemorrhoids, performed all their quiet STD screenings, had been pooped on during childbirth and later peed on by those same children he'd delivered, knew what all their stool samples looked like, and knew their entire medication history down to their performance aids. Even if he could hang up his doctor’s hat off-hours, which he couldn’t, it was hard for any of them to dance with him at the spring festival without recalling that he’d had fingers up half their anuses and hands on just about all of their chests.
It would help, Harvey thought, finalizing the week’s calendar before heading upstairs, if I had a registered immunologist here. He was set to attend a conference that week in Zuzu but there was a limit to how much he could diagnose with his equipment. He could perform the skin prick tests but couldn’t mix the solutions up in-house. If he at least had an immunologist on staff it’d take the weight off him during allergy season. An endocrinologist would also be handy for conducting metabolic panels in-house, as Harvey’s ability to screen for certain conditions was limited.
He stared at his bathroom door for around forty minutes from his dining room table until he’d convinced himself to just scrub down in the kitchen sink. He’d just managed to get the sweat and dried flecks of blood out from behind his ear when a five p.m knock sounded on the door downstairs.
Jas was knee-height and miserable, fist under her eye as she hiccupped back tears. “Hi, Dr. Green,” she whispered.
“Hello, Jas.” He immediately performed a search and sure enough Marnie was standing a teaching-moment distance away, smiling ruefully at him. “What brings you here this evening?”
Jas shook her head. With a last glance at Marnie, Harvey devoted the entirety of his focus to her by squatting down to get eye level. “Does your foot still hurt? Do you need some more medicine from me?”
Jas said something. “Sorry, what?” Harvey angled his un-notched ear closer. “You want one of those little packages of veggie straws from my desk? Is that what I heard? Or the trail mix with the dried cherries in it, for being such a good patient? Or to have me help you sneak up and tickle-attack your Uncle Shane?”
Jas’ shoulders lurched. It might have been a laugh but little girls were stubborn. “I’m just fine.” Harvey cheerfully flicked his ear, which shouted at him for the insult. He’d pay off the debt later with some local anesthetic. “These things happen. I’m just glad you came right to me when you were stung. If you’d been allergic it might have been real trouble, so it’s good you didn’t wait.”
Jas nodded and started shuffling forward, head still downturned, seeking the refuge of his chest with her snotty face. “Please let her apologize properly, Dr. Harvey,” Marnie called, warning note warm and amused. “She won’t learn otherwise.”
Harvey held Jas at arm’s length with mock-severity. “I’m really sorry for hurting your ear, Dr. Harvey,” Jas whispered.
“Apology accepted,” Harvey said. “I always pack two anyway just in case.”
She dug around the front pocket of her overalls and pulled out a folded piece of paper at him. Harvey took it and unfolded it. It was a meticulous crayon-colored comic strip featuring the bee that she’d stepped on, her wailing trip to the clinic, a smiling mop-headed Dr. Harvey and then the side of his head pressure-hosing blood all over the clinic. The last panel featured him bandaged and smiling as she hugged him in a field of flowers.
Harvey thought he might bawl. “Can I please hug you now?” Jas asked in a rush.
Harvey spread his arms. She bull-rushed him so hard he had to scoot a hasty foot back to stop the tumble. Over her head, Marnie finally gave the transaction a nod of approval. “Let’s get you medicine to take home,” Harvey said, hoisting Jas up onto his hip and managing not to kill them both tripping over the threshold. A packet of trail mix and an extra tube of benzocaine for her throbbing foot later, Jas was piggybacking her way home, waving over her shoulder as Marnie navigated them through the town's square.
Harvey taped the drawing up on his refrigerator next to a four year-old letter from his deceased aunt, an expired coupon for fabric softener, and a faded bus ticket he’d ended up only using hypothetically.
He got stuck living life hypothetically then, glazing out at the refrigerator and trying to summon the mental energy to make dinner. He had bell peppers that needed to be used and green onions that had started to fade into brown onions. Red onions were purple and had always been. He could sautée them, sliver some potatoes, snip chives from his window box of herbs, and have spiced potatoes. He could sprinkle them raw over a black bean taco and fold them into homemade guacamole. They were excellent in quiche and he still had seven unused eggs. He could go outside, pick some edible mushrooms, and fold those into egg and spinach and encase the mixture in a pie crust.
In the corner of his loft where he’d built a shrine for the worst of his personal failures, the sky was static and honey in his ear.
Harvey took out a package of sugar peas, shut the refrigerator door, and ate the entire bag slowly while pressing the headphones against his good ear. The pilots ignored him when he tried to signal to him and this was fine because his imagination could do the rest. A lot of his life was lived hypothetically. A lot of his life was lived pathetically.
~^~
Harvey had accidentally became a small town doctor because he liked ocean sounds and had run away from his trauma surgeon position in Zuzu City despite being on call that weekend. He’d just put in a thirty-six hour shift subsisting on power naps in the lounge and endless coffee when the news of the traffic pile-up came through their radios. He remembered spending five hours painstakingly piecing together a professional gridball player's car-crushed femur and he remembered getting screamed at by the coach and family for admitting the low chances of them returning to the sport, and then he was on a beach two hours away with his pager in hand, utterly unable to recall how he’d gotten there.
He’d hurled the pager into the ocean with a yell and had regretted it so immediately that he'd dived in with his shoes. Down under the water where the sunlight was stingier, the world had felt smotheringly, shockingly, almost dickishly present. Harvey had passing thoughts like I might drown here actually but that was unlikely because the surf had been gentle kisses on his skin and he was near enough to the dock to grab hold if he wanted. It was possible but he would have to try very hard.
In that moment Harvey had surfaced for air and had gone back down, catching eddies, scrubs billowing, glasses hopefully still somewhere on his face, he'd mostly been occupied with physics. The Bernoulli principle kept planes in the air and he'd wondered the same thing about himself: if he could get a foothold on his own high pressure maybe he could gravitate towards the things that pressured him less. There had to be one place on the planet that would offer him equilibrium.
He’d found his pager and had dragged it up with him onto the beach. Drained of emotion, he’d fallen asleep on his back under a setting sun in waterlogged scrubs until Willy had found him and woken him up with the mayor of Pelican Town in tow. Two months later when Harvey had moved the last of his boxes into the defunct clinic's apartment, he still hadn’t gotten his anger back and in fact at this point had felt nothing even remotely resembling it for years. Just vague memories of something pressing ferociously in on his head before he’d lost track of up and down. If he smiled in the mirror, if he turned it upside down, if he found down and up in his head, if he pressed his eyebrows down with his fingertips to furrow them and deep in his head, Zuzu City stayed a murmur under a closed lid. Warm rain that washed the salt off him as he lay panting on the beach, wondering why he was so terrible at everything he even failed at drowning.
Tonight the town alarm was sounding the alert, and Harvey stayed in bed, sensing more than hearing Abigail spring out of her own on the other side of the complex’s wall. His bow sat unstrung in the corner, his emergency travel medical trunk next to it. The way he always did at times like this, he recalled the feeling of being flat on his back on someone else’s beach under someone else’s rains and forgetting how he'd gotten there. It was almost as pressing a question as why he’d never left.
The all-clear bell chimed sixteen minutes later. The tone for medical assistance stayed quiet.
Harvey surfaced and sank back down again, catching eddies, glasses hopefully not on his face, occupied with physics seven years later but not as occupied as he was with the sudden realization that alongside all the other personal tidbits of him currently missing: I have absolutely no idea how to get in touch with this man and there could be monsters eating him right now.
~^~
He’d been about to stumble out the door until a last-second call to Leah had reassured him that the newcomer had been warned and his house had been reinforced against intrusion. Leah wasn’t the only resident insomniac but she was easily the most useful west of town. He didn’t dog her about her physical but only because her friendly nosiness had just spared him an extremely hazardous trip through nettles and thirsty cave bats.
Now that his attention was on it, Harvey got up an hour early the next morning to get down to business. Whoever this remote soon-to-be-patient was he was desperately in need of whole milk and ham sandwiches with the crusts on. Only twenty minute’s reading had Harvey placing some preliminary calls to affiliate offices, harvesting a few outpatient clinic numbers just in case, and went on to spend the morning being chucked to voicemail as he tried and failed to set up the last of his spring physicals.
Evelyn came in near closing in an angelic cloud of lemon perfume with a tin of cinnamon cookies and he nearly wept. “I’m so very sorry I’m late,” she fretted as he gently helped her onto the examination table, relocating her purse from her with permission. “George has been absolutely in the direst of snits. I don’t know what’s the matter with him.”
“No, no, you can’t imagine how grateful I am you came. Believe it or not I’ve been stood up twice already and I’ve just started.”
“All the squeamishness over a little poking and prodding,” Evelyn laughed. “Get to be my age and you learn there are far worse things in life than a concerned doctor making sure you’re well. I remember needing an emergency doctor’s visit when I visited my daughter in the city a few years ago and I was appalled at how impersonal it all felt. You do a much better job here, young man.”
“There are good doctors in the city,” Harvey demurred, carefully rolling up her dress sleeves so he could fit her with a blood pressure cuff. “It’s just harder for those good doctors to juggle patients because their caseload it bigger than mine. I’m fortunate enough to have a smaller caseload that gives me the luxury of spending extra time on my patients. You say George has been acting out more recently?”
“It used to be only in the winters. It depresses him to not be able to get around well with his wheels. Now it seems like every time there’s a change in the seasons he’s barking up another tree.”
“I’ll talk to him. I’ve been looking into getting him a special lamp to help with that problem; this is as good an impetus as any.” He quickly but thoroughly did his rounds, entreating her for a blood sample to check her TSH and make sure her thyroid medicine was still adequate for the job. “I’m going to run these numbers by your endocrinologist when I’m finished just to make sure, but if you don’t have any new symptoms and your energy level hasn’t been suffering, I’m going to be cautiously optimistic we have you on the right dose. Let me test your balance and leg strength before you go.”
By the time Harvey had escorted his easiest and saintliest patient in the town out the door and got back to his desk to think about all the demonic ones, it was after closing and Maru was in his office with more patient files to frustrate him. “He’s got a rap sheet longer than a war criminal’s, at least as far as doctors are concerned,” Maru said, wedging it along the side of his desk and crinkling her nose at the four crusted coffee mugs in the way. “His family medical history’s no better. We should probably send out a new patient packet just to make sure no wires got crossed. This is a lot.”
“You haven’t had your physical.” Harvey leveled a pen at her like a sniper rifle. “Now’s as good a time as any, wouldn’t you say?”
“But you’re off the clock.”
“Excellent health care never takes a break. Come on, get it over with. Please? If you submit to it today I won’t even charge you. Employee privileges.”
“You haven’t seen him yet, have you,” Maru said ten minutes later, apropos of nothing as he checked her reflexes and she nearly beaned him in the nose. She’d been eyeballing the top of his head for a while but Harvey was used to being eyeballed, usually malevolently. At least this birds-eye examination of his flaws was kind, if patronizing. “Despite him being here a week.”
“Who.”
“Holt.”
“Is that what they’re calling him?”
“He’s Old Holt’s grandson staying on Holt Farms and his first name is hard to say.”
Harvey was distracted. He fetched her chart and jotted down the notes, then pulled on his gloves and thoroughly disinfected her inner arm to take a blood sample.
“So?” Maru said.
“So what, Maru.”
“Have you seen him yet?”
“I haven’t. It’s been busy and he hasn’t been at the saloon the times I’ve been there. Why? Does he need something from me? Is he all right?”
Maru was laughing. She’d been laughing through the blood draw too, which would’ve made things difficult for Harvey if Maru didn’t have excellent veins. “Not everyone who wants to see you ‘needs’ you for something, Doc. Sometimes people just want to talk to you when they’re not getting poked full of holes.”
He had her press down the cotton ball and hold her arm up while he fetched the tape to strap it down. When he was sure she’d suffered no emotional damage from his vampirism, he tagged and bagged the blood sample and ran down his checklist to make sure he’d gotten everything. “Dr. Harvey, I think you have a complex,” Maru said. “You know people aren’t avoiding you, right?”
“Maru, what are you talking about.”
“You know people don’t avoid you because they dislike you, right? They just avoid you because you remind them of things they don’t want to do.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“It’s not personal. You should try to meet him. He’s really something else. You’ll like him.”
All her vital signs looked very good and so did her blood pressure. She had solid strength in her arms and legs, her balance was excellent, her reflexes normal. He gave her a card to check her long and near vision, ran a peripheral vision check, and pronounced himself satisfied. “You’re not going to address any of those things, are you,” Maru said.
“What things.”
Maru sighed. “You know, you could charge for skipped appointments,” she pointed out as she slid off the table, grabbing her sweatshirt. “This is the only clinic in town. They’d be in real trouble if you decided to blacklist them and make them bus to Zuzu City for care.”
He shut the drawer with his knee and gave her a pleading look. “Fine,” Maru groaned. She shoved her sweatshirt down over her head and collected the handles of three out of four of his coffee mugs in the crooks of her fingers. “Fix nothing. I’ll keep trying to contact rogue patients from the front desk tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, Nurse Maru. You’re invaluable.”
“You let people walk all over you, Doctor Harvey,” Maru said. “Your time matters too. You should assert yourself more. I think you’d be surprised how willing people are to meet you halfway if you’re just more open about what you want. Just a thought.”
Jodi called his apartment phone after eleven that night in a sobbing panic. Crusty with sleep, Harvey house-called in a lab coat thrown over his sleep clothes and endured an endless left earful of Jodi’s anxious stream-of-consciousness and an endless right earful of Vincent’s mewling gasps of pain as Harvey palpated his abdomen. “Please don’t say it’s appendicitis,” Jodi pleaded for the fourth time, wringing her hands free of blood as she paced. “My grandfather died of it. I don’t know whether to call Kent at the base or—”
“I don’t think it’s appendicitis.” Harvey half-closed his eyes to concentrate, buzzing with the hasty cold coffee he’d knocked down before he left. He felt Vincent’s forehead again in passing, checked his pulse, tested for rebound pain and got no reaction. “It’s on the wrong side for one thing, and we’re missing all the other symptoms. What did you eat today, Vinny?”
Vincent gulped air. His eyes bugged wildly back and forth between Harvey and his mother. “It’s all right, no one’s going to get in trouble here,” Harvey said. “What’s most important is your health. If you tell me what it was you ate today, we might be able to avoid taking you to the hospital.”
Vincent’s gaze again wandered over to his mother. He beckoned Harvey close weakly, and Harvey obliged and leaned in while Vincent tremulously mouthed the answer at his ear. “Pink stalks,” Harvey repeated. He spread his hands in measurement, ignoring Jodi’s instant demand of what is he talking about, what red stalks, what did he eat. “Did they have nice curly, dark green leaves on top? Did it smell kind of tangy, like a sour candy?”
“They looked j-just like celery so I th-thought they’d be safe to eat,” Vincent whispered.
“In the right doses with the right cooking methods they most certainly are, and they’re delicious.” Harvey swept the sweat off Vincent's forehead. “No wonder you recognized them: your mother is famous for her strawberry rhubarb pie. You probably went out and picked them hoping they’d end up in a pie, did I guess right?”
“They tasted w-weird so I kept tasting them to t-try to get a yummy one for her.”
“Oh, Vincent.” Jodi looked halfway between grief-stricken and furious. “Doctor Harvey, it can’t be that, he has rhubarb all the time in meals, it’s packed with nutrition—”
“Fresh rhubarb isn’t tolerated by our bodies. It’s too high in oxalic acid – a poison to the kidneys. He didn’t poison himself,” he assured her hurriedly, seeing her remaining color plummet. “That said, if he’d eaten the leaves themselves it’d be a different story. By themselves, rhubarb stalks wouldn’t cause kidney failure unless he ate over ten pounds of them. The amount he ate was just enough to give him intestinal problems. I’ll bring him in for an ultrasound in the clinic to be sure, but this is more than likely trapped gas. Either way I promise you he’ll be just fine. Vinny, how many did you eat?”
Vincent gulped air ineffectually a while and held up four fingers. Ouch. Harvey’s own belly ached with sympathy. .”Let’s get you in and make sure, but I’m sure you’re going to feel a lot better in the morning after it passes through your system.”
“Trapped gas.” Jodi was still pacing, incredulous. “Something like that can put him in this much pain?”
“In my experience there are few things more painful. There are nerves clustered all around the intestinal region. Even minor bloat in certain areas can cause excruciating pain.” Harvey stood from the bedside and slung his medicine bag over his shoulder. “Would you like to carry him to the clinic, or would you rather I do it?”
Jodi’s mouth twisted. “Sam.”
Sam jumped in the doorway and honestly so did Harvey. Harvey hadn’t realized until now he’d been rubbernecking. “Would you please carry your brother?” Jodi asked him, weary but kind. “He’s gotten too heavy for me and I’m not about to ask Dr. Harvey to do it after a long day’s work.”
“It’s really no trouble either way,” Harvey said, but stepped aside when Sam rushed forward. Vincent clutched with raptor intensity onto Sam’s shoulder as he was shifted into his arms. “Just a formality, Vinny,” Harvey assured him hastily, seeing tears start wobbling out of his eyes. “You’ll be home in no time. Come on, let me show you how the equipment works. Smart as you are, I’ll bet you’ll get a kick out of it.”
A few antacids and a child-dose of painkillers saw Sam carting out a sleepy Vincent by two in the morning. “So there’s wild rhubarb by the forest,” Jodi sighed at the threshold. She looked wan and fed-up with parenthood in the pale tide of light spilling onto the street. “Anything else to expect?”
“Not really. It’ll be uncomfortable for him for a while, but there won’t be damage to any organs with that amount. He probably wandered over there with Jas and was fooled by the sweet smell.”
“Such a sweet boy,” Jodi murmured. “He’s always trying to help me out, ever since his father left. He was probably just trying to get me a present and got discouraged when he tasted how strong they were in their raw form. He must have been so disappointed.”
“On the bright side, this might give you a new adventure to go on together: having him help pick fresh ingredients for the pies you make,” Harvey said. “But I’d, ah… suggest bringing this up with Penny. She’s very big on teaching them about sustainability. She could incorporate dangerous plants into her next lesson.”
“I think that’s an excellent idea.” Jodi turned to him and clasped his wrist with both hands. “Harvey, thank you. How can I possibly repay you for this.”
“Rhubarb pie,” Harvey said, and Jodi obediently chuckled, which was nice of her. “There would be… one more thing actually, if you’ve got the time.”
“Let me guess: spring physical.”
“If possible. It’s necessary.”
“So your boon is asking for more work.”
“It’s the fate of a doctor,” Harvey laughed awkwardly. “It's actually... more work for me if you skip it, to tell you the truth. Like last time. Ha.”
“And you’re sure you need it for my records.”
“It would be very helpful, yes. And it would be beneficial for you too should you get sick this year.”
Jodi sighed to the sky. She seemed largely unrepentant about standing him up and Harvey briefly wished he had that level of disregard for time and schedules. It seemed very freeing. “Will tomorrow be all right?”
Tomorrow was an out of office day. “Yes,” Harvey said.
“Then I’ll come by for the physical in the morning.” Jodi reaffirmed her gratitude with another clasp on his wrist before letting go. “You have no idea how terrifying it was to wake up to him screaming. Even if it turned out to be nothing, I’m so grateful you made yourself available to bring him in.”
“Well, if this is what it takes to to get patients in, maybe I should ask Gus to sneak a handful of raw rhubarb into everyone’s dinner this week.”
Jodi looked at him with middle-distance judgment.
“Never mind,” Harvey said.
The next afternoon he detoured to the library to drop off his old collection of books and cultivate a new one. On the way out he caught sight of the fairytale section right before his usual stop at the history section, and on a whim cased the former, wondering which unspoken question his subconscious was harassing him with. Even thirteen books later, sweating with his bundle through town with an uncooperative nearly middle-aged body and spring air soupy enough to condense on his mustache, he wasn’t sure what had driven him that far out until he remembered the impish smile on Maru’s face. Somewhere in the mire of Harvey’s worst impulses had been the realization that going to work and going back upstairs again wouldn’t allow him to organically run across the newest resident of Pelican Town unless he came in for injury, which was a bad mental precedent to set.
He dropped his books off and made a rare non-doctor Wednesday night visit to the tavern. “Just missed him,” Gus reported, sliding him over a frothy glass of vegetable smoothie. Harvey tried to pay and flushed when Gus waved him off. Gus’ overblown generosity and the financial fallout from it was the cause of at least a quarter of his ulcers. “He made quite a stir by the jukebox. Wish you could’ve seen it.”
“He made a scene?”
“Oh, a ‘scene’ is understating it. Holt bullied Shane until Shane gave in and sang with him.”
Harvey choked pureed vegetables onto his collar. “Ope, got it,” Gus said, tucking a wad of napkins over the lip to soak it up. “Helped that Shane was already drunk, but never in my life thought I’d see someone able to do that. He’s usually a brick wall.”
“He convinced Shane to perform? In public?”
“Come to think of it, I have seen Shane with a camcorder on him before. He and Hailey have teamed up a few times to shoot nature docs on his sober days. Kid’s not shy, just angry. Still, it was something else. Not something I’d bet on in a million years, that’s for sure..”
“You say he bullied him?”
“Ehhh you know what I mean. Peer pressure. Goading. Ribbing? Whatever. It was friendly. Or at least as friendly as Shane can get. Helped that the kid brought him a red pepper recipe. No idea how he knew Shane liked them.”
Harvey was a little dazed. “He’s only been here a week.”
“Must have used it well.”
“What kind of person is this?”
“Hard to tell so far, but from what I can gather, he’s my kind of good trouble.” Gus directed him with friendly authority back to his drink. “If you let that get warm it’ll go down like a bucket of snot.”
Harvey climbed the stairs to his apartment and out-of-body showered. He combed through the file at his kitchen table a final time, elbows nesting in a sea of books. He went to the phone in a burst of preoccupation and remembered then that the farm likely hadn’t been hooked up to power or phone lines for years, that Old Holt’s number was likely long defunct, and at the same time realized this man has no way to call for medical emergencies.
He tapped the cradle and placed a call to Robin’s household for her psychological war counseling. “Okay, you are really obsessed with this guy and you’re being extremely unreasonable about this,” Maru said after the phone changed hands. “I know Mom already suggested it, but seriously, just walk out to the farm is you want to meet up with him so badly. He’s not going to mind. Plenty of other people do. Even my dad's already dropped off some kind of weird sea urchin. Guy doesn’t even have a refrigerator, what the hell was he supposed to do with it.”
“I’m not going to hunt him down. If you see him in the wild, please let him know the town doctor wants to check in with him. Let him come to me himself.”
“I’ve heard he’s spending a lot of time down at Willy’s, if that means anything. I’m guessing that’s his best source of food right now seeing as the farm’s lakes are clogged up with trash. It’s going to take ages for anything to repopulate in there and it’s too early for any edible crops to pop up yet.”
For heaven’s sake. Harvey’s heart sank further. “He’s foraging for food?”
“Or maybe not,” Maru emphasized. “I don’t know. And even if he is, Linus does it and does just fine, so it’s probably not a real huge issue. Dr. Harvey ,seriously, please try not to do this to yourself,” Maru said. “I know it bothers you if there’s even one person on this entire planet that you can’t help, but sooner or later we’ll nab him. He’s been seen hanging around the mines so it’s probably only a matter of time.”
Harvey’s headache spiked so hard he felt his eyeballs vibrate. “Aaand I shouldn’t have told you that so just forget I said anything about it,” Maru said in a rush. “I’m sure he's just sightseeing. Not venturing in where all the man-eating monsters live. He’s new, he wants to know the area. It’s probably completely harmless. Go check your blood pressure.”
“It's not harmless, hasn’t anyone told him how dangerous those mines are? We don't have a dedicated monster task force here like they do in the cities. He has no idea what he’s dealing with.”
“They haven’t even managed to get the entrance cleared yet. Trust me, unless he really goes out of his way, he’s not going to be down there anytime soon. He’s too hungry.”
He heard something clatter metallically in the background and knew she was likely consoling him with about a fourth of her attention while she was elbow-deep in the guts of a robot. He stared at nothing at all until he realized he was staring at his framed medical certificate on the other wall. It was covered with a layer of dust just like him and everything else. Outside his window was the steadily encroaching sound of a plane. He rubbed the sensation between his molars absently, feeling the blood continuing to rummage behind his eyes.
“Doc?” Maru said.
“Thank you.” It was a Cirrus SR22 or a Columbia 400. He could recognize the throaty growl of its propeller. “I’m sorry to bother you. That’s all I needed. Good night.”
“So that didn’t sound great,” Maru said. “How badly are you stressing out right now? Do you need me to call up Caroline so she can come next door with some tea? She’d be more than happy to.”
“I’m just a little tired from the house call last night. Maru, thank you for the advice, and thank your mother for her advice too,” Harvey said. The rumbling got louder. “I think I know what I need to do now.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t think so. I think I just lied.”
“Sinner,” Maru laughed.
He hung up and waited for the Cirrus or maybe the Columbia to finish tormenting him overhead, then buried himself in dinner prep away from the window to avoid having to watch the vapor trail fade.
He made up his mind. He wrote up the list meticulously, eschewing allergens wherever possible, and when he’d come up with a full working two week list of meals, he called up Gus and began to place his orders.
~^~
The town alarm went off again that night just before three. Harvey’s fingertips were an inch from the receiver before it rattled on the cradle. “He’s at my place,” Leah said. “He fell asleep on my floor about twenty minutes after I fed him egg nog and sandwiches. I moved him to my futon and covered him up. He hasn’t budged since.”
Harvey didn’t ask how she'd moved him. It was the same way she'd moved a massive pine-carved bear to the mayor’s house on foot last summer on commission. The best answer was just to not ask the question. “Did he ask for food, or did you invite him to dinner?”
“Neither. I needed a model for my new painting and nabbed him while he was fishing boots up from the pond.”
“Did he model before he ate the sandwiches?”
“No, but he’s modeling fine just now.”
Harvey waited.
“Just kidding,” Leah said.
Harvey moved her hypothetical physical up and added a note in the margins about seeking out a therapist.
~^~
Nobody came up missing or half-eaten that night either.