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Mel suspected Frank Langdon had been caught diverting benzodiazepines from the hospital. She did not wish to interrogate this further. She had no reason to believe he was still doing so. This was, in part, because he was dead.
Every week, after work, after Becca, after a too-hot shower that left her skin pink, she drove forty-five minutes to stand awkwardly before his tombstone. He had been buried at St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery.
***** on Google, one review.
She had written it to be considerate, and because it really was a nice place to be buried.
She had known him for one day and been visiting his grave for the past five months. There was no dignified way to reconcile this. It sounded absurd, in retrospect. She could recall what he had been wearing that day: the dark shirt, the slacks. His hands, bony and practiced, hours spent learning the motions of a scalpel blade or one-handed surgical knot. All this wasted. The warmth of his attention. How it lifted her as the sun lifts sleeping lizards from brumation. Giving them movement, giving them life.
His last words to her: in the flesh.
She wanted Langdon back. She felt orphaned by him, left behind, like baby Romulus on the banks of the ambulance bay. Orphan was the wrong word, of course. He was not her ancestor, and she was not his progeny. But there was no legal, biological, or socially acceptable name for what she meant.
Was there a casual way to reveal to a coworker that you were an orphan, something left to fend for itself? People either overreacted or reacted not at all. Sometimes Mel slipped it into workplace exchanges, her absent parents, just to see what category they fell into. It told her something, she suspected, though she wasn’t sure what. She committed a list to memory: they reacted or they didn’t.
She’d made no friends since Pittfest. No acquaintances, either, or even professional connections, whose importance Javadi emphasized at least once a shift. She was growing accustomed to holding entire conversations, lengthy ones, with herself. Softly spoken words of comfort, mostly. Sometimes what Dr. Langdon had said to her, or variations thereof.
People were beginning to talk, too, about her and around her. In the break room, the one she never ate in, Dana said she was a good egg and then paused, like that was it; that was the best thing she had to say about her. Whoever Dana was talking to—Mel sped away so she wouldn’t hear the rest—let out a rough laugh. She preferred the company of Santos, whose dislike of Mel, or at least indifference toward her, sat out in the open.
Looney tunes, Santos called her under her breath, after a particularly taxing shift. She directed this to Whitaker—Whitaker, who seemed like an ally at first, equally lost and lonely, but now circled Santos like the rings of Saturn.
Mel couldn’t bring herself to be mad at her: she was looney tunes. Santos didn’t know the half of it. Half of it. Half of what? Words and phrases lapped around her head, and she hardly knew what to make of them. She was only good at pretending, or at least she had been.
***
Mel wasn’t sure what possessed her to visit Dr. Langdon. It began with a Google search. She typed his name and hit enter: Frank Langdon. That was the first search, at least. More came after.
He had, disappointingly, little presence on the internet. Maybe always, or maybe he’d just drifted from social media and locked down whatever was left behind. Most people didn’t, and most people left, in their wake, a trail of internet ghosts.
Her mother’s RateMyProfessor reviews were still up online. Mel knew them well enough to recite them like scripture. Even the cruel ones, since those assured her that her mother had once existed in the world and failed a student in Biology 101. Had once brought her and Becca to class, as toddlers, the two of them causing such a commotion that proof of their existence would remain online for perpetuity:
professor brings her kids to class don’t reccomend.
one tried to eat chalk the other kept screaming.
not even jking but this class IS a joke. DO NOT TAKE.
Mel didn’t remember this incident, but it sounded plausible. She and her sister, in the early years before the diagnosis, had been absolute terrors.
She believed, increasingly, there was no way to revisit a memory without transforming it. Her memories of Pittfest, and Dr. Langdon, changed as readily as water pouring. The uncertainty scared her, but not enough to stop her from going back to that day, over and over and over again.
His obituary read as though it had been written by someone either unknown to Langdon or someone who wished they had been. It told Mel nothing new, other than the place he’d been buried, and the names of his children.
There were two of them. Tanner Langdon, six, whose name evoked the Tanner stages, and Penny Langdon, four. They were young. Penny, especially, might escape the worst of it, depending on how you defined worst: she would have almost no memories of her father, her brain unready, dedicated as it was to learning the complicated processes of walking and talking, to retain them. She would know his name and whatever stories her family cared to tell her.
She would, in a sense, be free from him.
Tanner, though, was closer to Mel’s age when her own father had died. He would likely remember Langdon or at least believe that he did. It depended on their mother, really, and what she told them, whether those small pieces of their father grew or shrank.
Mel went back and forth on which outcome she believed worse. Today, remembering was worse.
Her hands itched with nerves as she got in her car and thumbed the location into Google Maps. Knowing the coordinates felt sacrilegious. She did not want to bother him, even in death. She did not want to bother his family. His wife, his children.
At work she’d asked Perlah and Princess about them, bluntly, not caring that she had no plausible reason to want to know. The two of them—they were always together—told her everything they knew and then some. Langdon had married young. Maybe, the department speculated—Mel wasn’t sure whether ‘the department’ meant the department or whether they counted themselves as the collective voice of the ER—because he knocked Abby up.
There was her name: Abigail. An outdated, pleasant-sounding name, and one Mel associated with pioneering women from the 18th century, and the ghost twin from Don’t Starve. She didn’t know what to make of that.
Langdon had been Robby’s golden boy, prodigal son, the heir apparent. This detail was easy to swallow. He’d been self-assured, good-looking in that traditional way, not far from the lineup of boys from her childhood, all mixing now, who made retching sounds when she’d been assigned to them as a study partner.
Langdon had been smart, too, and capable, as were most people who made it this far in medicine. She couldn’t bring forth a static image of him, possibly because in her memories he was always moving around, from room to room, case to case, like an exuberant hound.
She had to admit she chased after him willingly.
Some of the things Princess brought up mattered more to Mel than others. Princess spoke at length about his crude—the word she’d used had been fuckboy—disposition, how he’d slept with half the female staff in the ER, though maybe not, there was no actual confirmation. That last part added by Perlah.
Mel threw this information aside.
She wanted to defend him: he wasn’t like that with me. And he wasn’t.
With her, he had been a saint. A saint for a day.
It embarrassed her, how little evidence she required to latch onto this version of events. A day. She’d known him for a day. The brain was, she knew, capable of outrageous distortions under stress. It could take kindness and, under the right pressure, make it holy. The Pittfest shooting, combined with her first day at the hospital. Surely this counted as stressful. Surely her obsession was understandable, if not healthy.
She brought the day up in therapy, a reoccurring theme, but always managed to sidestep what was now, in her head, taking up far too much space: The Issue of Dr. Langdon.
In every session he was simply the senior resident I was assigned to.
Oh, his name?
I don’t really recall.
Uh.
We didn’t interact, not much, no.
It was so hectic, that day. It blurred together.
At home, and with Becca, because Mel could not lie to her sister even if she wanted to, he became Dr. Langdon again. She tried to skirt past him as she recounted the Pittfest shooting in its entirety, for the first and last time, but he had a way of blocking of her path.
The truth was that their paths that day crossed frequently. He had been her mentor, after all, and taken her under his wing. Becca asked about him, and she told her what she had been forced to say about their parents: he was gone.
Mel had not understood addiction in a visceral sense, only an academic one, for most of her life. From a medical standpoint, loneliness was not addiction. But she understood wanting what made you feel tethered, and she understood the mind returning, against its own interests, to the place where it had last been warmed.
So she repeated his words until they rearranged themselves.
This... this is a tough place for sensitive people. But we need them badly.
We need them.
I need you.
You are needed.
You’re here!
In the flesh.
Except he wasn’t. His flesh was in the earth, receding. He had lied.
***
Mel’s concerns about his family, were, it turned out, unwarranted. No one else visited Dr. Langdon’s grave, or if they did, they kept different hours. She saw the same people, week after week, in the fields and on the pathways looping through the cemetery, some nodding knowingly at her with familiar, pain-ridden eyes, but always at other people’s graves.
Flowers, carefully arranged, rose up and wilted, as if by magic, beside his neighbors’ headstones. She learned their names too: Jeanne Calloway, A Life That Touched Others Lives On! Sadie Calloway, Always In Our Hearts. Stuffed animals appeared too, sometimes, and those made her cry. Bears, lions, dogs, an embroidered Monarch butterfly, once. These arrived with coal-black eyes and well-manicured fur and fell into themselves after hard rain, decaying in a different way. She’d thought of bringing Langdon something of his own, once, but her mind drew a blank at what.
FRANK LANGDON
BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER.
Husband, father, she reminded herself. Not mentor, not almost-friend. Certainly not senior resident who spent one day with second-year resident and unintentionally ruined her life.
***
The walk from car to path to grave had become so routine that Mel could do it in her sleep. Maybe she would, if she were sleeping on a regular basis. She’d turn in the sheets all night, willing herself into unconsciousness, or at least distance from the noise of living. Any sleep that came, came in fragments.
DROWSY IS DEADLY! proclaimed smoke-stained posters in the waiting room. Dutifully, every morning she tested her reflexes, so as not to be a danger to patients. Normal; hyperactive even. She told everyone she didn’t need much sleep, and she was beginning to believe it herself. Beginning to believe she possessed some supernatural power over the human condition, over basic animal needs.
Mel was on her usual schedule, the last stop of the day. For ten months, it had been her and the occasional squirrel. Maybe a pair of brazen rabbits, boxing each other on springy legs, if she were lucky.
Then, in June, Relaxing White Noise playing at full volume in her headphones, so loud it became numbing, she almost walked into Dr. Garcia. Who was more surprised, she couldn’t say.
Garcia and Langdon had been the hotheads of the ER, snapping at each other over a patient. Langdon had not seemed to mind the snapping. But Garcia was there, in front of her, with nothing smart to say this time. Staring. In her hands she held chrysanthemums.
Say something, Mel thought. I don’t care.
But Garcia didn’t speak, not on the way to Langdon’s grave, which took several minutes, or when they reached the stone itself. She bent down and draped the flowers against the slab.
Mel cried, which was, for her, ordinary. She did not look to see if Garcia was crying too, only stared at the ground and then, finally, the plaque.
1992. He had been a little boy when Mel came squalling out into the world, Becca already waiting.
2026. Thirty-four. He’d outlived Jesus, but only by a year.
She didn’t have long with this thought before she felt movement to her left: Garcia turning, squeezing her arm, gently. Garcia walking away.
***
The next day she avoided Garcia.
Naturally, by 11:45 a.m. they were in a room together, arms touching, a thing she didn’t like on any day but found unbearable on this one, stooped over a suspected appendicitis case. Mel tried to shrink into herself like one of those bedraggled stuffed animals back at the cemetery, but it didn’t work. Garcia had her well and truly pinned.
Mel had awaited, maybe even hoped for, some kind of reckoning: someone to shake her to her senses and tell her how wrong this all was. This affliction, sickness, for a person she’d never really known. Tell her that she was encroaching on grief she had no right to feel and would never get the chance to earn.
Maybe someone to commit her on an involuntary hold. That, at least, might break the spell.
Garcia looked at her once or twice as they worked, eyebrows raised and mouth open, as if she were about to speak but never quite got the words out right.
Mel looked back at her pleadingly.
Tell me I’m wrong for this. Tell me to stop. I will. Just tell me.
Garcia said nothing about seeing her at the cemetery. In fact, she hadn’t spoken of Langdon, as far as Mel remembered—and she jerked to attention like a Duracell bunny when his name was mentioned—since the news of his passing.
Mel took her silence as permission to continue.
***
“Uh, hi, Dr. Robby,” Mel began, hands against her hips.
Dr. Robby. He had known Langdon longer, and possibly better, than anyone else in the hospital. She did not want to pry for information, but she was, at this point, desperate.
“You know, Dr. Langdon—”
She stopped at the sheer force of expression on his face: anger, pain, remorse.
“Uh, I’m sorry, about Dr. Langdon. I know you were close—”
“It’s okay, Dr. King,” he said.
His expression solidified. She didn’t know what it was now. Something masklike.
“I know you made a good impression on him. He mentioned you. Said he thought you’d shown a lot of grit for someone at your stage.”
“Really?” Mel’s eyes went to his nose, the safe place, while she tried to process this.
She did not remember much about herself from that day. What she had done, what she had said. She suspected this was a protective mechanism. No one else who worked that afternoon remembered much, either. They spoke in generalities; the shooting, the bodies, the thickening blood in which she had almost slipped. Langdon’s disappearance and then his reentry and then his disappearance again, this time for good.
“Uh, I’m glad that I-I knew him,” she blurted out, which was all she could think to say.
***
A year since Frank Langdon had died. Three hundred sixty-five days. Long enough for his body to have entered some late stage of undoing.
As a teenager, Mel read Death’s Acre, a book about corpse decomposition, to occupy her mind and give her something, however grisly, to cling to about her father. The physicality of what happened after a death, every death, brought her comfort.
Her father shot himself: a messy death. For so many years, he had been a blank, empty space in her head; she never saw him in death, having been spared the burden of finding his body and seeing it, albeit misshapen, in a casket. In its place, she had only the blank space where he went missing, a day on which she rode the bus to school and returned to an empty house.
Learning about each stage of decomposition gave her something sacred: his decay. The knowledge that he was now, probably, a stirring of bones. Bones, yes, but tangible and certain. If his bones were in a grave, they were, at least, not somewhere else.
There was a reason, she thought, that hospital policy was to let people shuffle in from waiting rooms to stand mournfully over the bodies of the dead, the bodies of people they had lost, the bodies of people the doctors had lost. Bodies in various states of disarray.
***
A stray dog began, each morning, to visit Mel’s apartment complex. Long, shaggy fur. Black and white, piebald—Becca’s correction. Double dewclaws on the hind legs. A detail that stood out to her because Becca had gone through, as a preteen, a raging dog phase, and insisted Mel learn each breed with her, from Afghan hound to Yorkshire terrier. It helped Mel in Scrabble, at least.
She could say this dog had pitbull and Great Pyrenees in him and probably be right, if only because Pyrenees and pitbulls tended, more than other dogs, to find themselves on the streets. Dumped or wandered off. The same thing in the end, she guessed, for the dogs.
She volunteered at a local animal shelter once or twice a month—not because she had the time or energy to spare—but because she could sit with a dog on the sticky, bleach-scented floor of the building and pretend it loved her back.
In the dog’s presence, Mel felt a calm wash over her. She had always liked animals, though she’d never had one of her own. First because of the tumult of their household, then the ordeal of outliving both parents, then on moral grounds: she did not want to leave a cat or dog alone that long in an apartment while she was at the hospital.
Any living thing, really.
She had spent whole days off without speaking to anyone other than Becca.
“Hi, mister,” Mel murmured, letting her hand glide across the dog’s back.
She could hear Langdon’s voice now, and hers.
You’re here!
In the flesh.
Her voice that night, dumb and shocked and happy, despite all the blood.
I wish I never met you, she whispered.
Langdon. Why did you do it? Why did you die?
The dog said nothing. His tail thwapped the ground, rhythmically, like drums.