Free Dante's Poison by Lynne Raimondo Page B

had failed to add anything to our inventory of facts, Rusty had let the psychiatrist go, telling him not to worry, we’d get the case straightened out without much trouble. But beneath the gung-ho demeanor, I could tell Rusty was concerned.
    â€œBased on what we know right now, I’d say he’s pretty clean. I’m not happy that he left the boy’s homosexuality out of his notes—or about his excuse. Since Danny was over eighteen, his parents could be denied access to his medical records, so why the worry? But I suppose if my young patient begged me, I might have taken my chances and done the same thing. The trouble is we now only have Levin’s word for it.”
    Rusty agreed it wasn’t a helpful fact. “Plus the parents’ attorney will surely try to make it sound like he was hiding something. Does the fact of the boy’s sexual orientation matter from a medical point of view?”
    I shrugged. “It’s definitely another risk factor. There’s a lot of evidence that LGBT adolescents attempt suicide at a much higher rate than their peers, especially when they’re facing stiff disapproval at home. It adds to the mix, but it doesn’t tip the balance one way or the other. The trouble is, these situations are always so nuanced.”
    Rusty sighed. “I expected as much. Well, we’ll work with what we have. The biggest problem will be getting him to relax enough to testify on his own behalf. You couldn’t see it, but he had a face on like he’d just eaten a sour cherry the whole time, especially when we were talking about Carpenter senior. That’s not going to go over well with a jury. And he barely took a bite of his sandwich.”
    â€œUgh,” I said. “I thought so. It’s typical of physicians accused of malpractice to experience extreme stress: they usually blame themselves more than they blame the party suing them. There’s even a name for it—Medical Malpractice Stress Syndrome. If you can, try to get him into therapy. I can give you some names.”
    â€œPlease do,” Rusty said. “And I’ll do my damnedest to get him to agree. I’d hate to see the poor fellow wrap his own car around a tree.”

When I got back to my office, there was an e-mail waiting for me from Melissa. I wasn’t sure I could control the shaking of my hand long enough to tap it open, so instead I went over and flopped on my couch, taking belly breaths to slow my heart rate. All it did was remind me of long-ago Lamaze classes, which resurrected the reason I’d volunteered for this insanity in the first place.
    I thought once more about my conversation with Josh. How exactly would I feel if nothing happened? And was I really doing it for Louis’s sake? Now three and a half, my son seemed remarkably unfazed by my blindness. Like most small children, he hadn’t yet been conditioned to think that disability was strange or scary, and appeared to accept me as if all fathers came that way. The situation would probably change as he grew older, but weren’t all adolescents embarrassed by their parents’ shortcomings? And according to the library I’d collected on the subject, sighted children were no worse off for the experience of having a blind parent. If anything, it made them into more tolerant, well-rounded human beings.
    Annie, of course, was an entirely different story, but given our history she had every reason to be suspicious of my parenting skills. And therein lay the crux of the problem. How much of my eagerness to be a test subject came down to the one thing I could never fix or make better? Was healing myself physically just a way of paving over the guilt that had stalked me like a velociraptor since the day our first son died? No matter what way you looked at it, I was responsible, if not for causing the infection that killed Jack, than for not diagnosing it in time.
    Harvey, my therapist, thought I