“Yes, now!” Naree yelled on the other end, her normally faint Korean accent thick with righteous anger. “Are you out of your mind?”
Lauryn winced and hunched farther into the cold train window, meeting the annoyed gaze of her own exhausted, brown-eyed reflection as she adopted her calmest roommate-soothing voice. “I wasn’t trying to—”
“Do you know how many asses I had to kiss to get you that interview? I sold you to the head of HR like you were the second coming! That job was as good as yours. All you had to do was show up and say yes. So why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want to work there!” Lauryn snapped, all attempts at calm abandoned. “I’m grateful you did this for me, Naree, I really am. But as I told you last week, yesterday, and this morning: I don’t want to work at a private hospital in the suburbs!”
“Why not?” Naree demanded. “The money—”
“It’s not about the money,” Lauryn said, pinching the bridge of her nose to head off the stress headache she could already feel building. “I could get a better-paying job anywhere, but I like working at Mercy.”
“Don’t feed me that martyr crap,” her friend growled. “No one likes working at a chronically underfunded inner-city hospital.”
“Well, I do,” Lauryn said stiffly. “They need me there. I became a doctor to help people, not treat rich ladies’ tennis elbows.”
“Rich ladies need help, too,” Naree reminded her. “And unlike Medicaid patients, they pay. You want to do charity work, join the Peace Corps.”
“Why should I go all the way to another country when there are people who need help right here in Chicago?” Lauryn argued. “I don’t fault you for using your new med degree to get a sweet job in a cushy private practice, but that’s not what I want for my life. Why can’t you understand that??”
“Because it makes no sense!” Naree said. “You need this job, Lauryn. I get your mail, remember? I know you’re drowning in student debt even with all your scholarships. It’s all well and good living on instant noodles when you’re a poor student, but we’re done with that. The only reason I graduated number two in med school is because you were number one. Number one from the University of Chicago—you know, one of the best schools in the world? You could get any job you wanted, so why the hell are you still hanging on at Mercy? Do you like being poor?”
“No,” Lauryn said. “But I like Mercy. And I’m not poor.” Mercy couldn’t pay its attending physicians what other hospitals did, but it was still doctor money, which might as well be millions compared to what many of her patients lived on. “I make enough to pay my bills, make my rent, and feed myself. That’s more than a lot of people have.”
Her friend snorted. “Maybe you can be happy just making ends meet, but what about your family? They scrimped and saved to put you through college and med school. You owe them payback. Isn’t your dad poor?”
“And we’re done,” she said, her voice flat. There were few topics that Lauryn liked talking about less than her father.
“You need to face facts,” Naree said. “Your dad could totally use—”
“Just leave my dad out of this,” Lauryn said. “He has nothing to do with my life now, and he wouldn’t take my money anyway. He’s a preacher. He works for a ‘higher reward.’”
“Like you’re any different, Miss I-Don’t-Like-Money-I-Just-Want-to-Help-People.”
“It is totally different,” she said, raising her voice as the commuter train’s breaks began to squeal. “I have to go. This is my stop.”
“This isn’t over,” Naree warned. “You’re too smart to be this stupid, Lauryn!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lauryn said as she pushed her way to the doors. “’Bye, Naree.”
She hung up right after, cutting off her friend’s inevitable attempt to have the last word. It was a childish move, not to mention a temporary fix—it was hard to escape your roommate, especially one as in-your-face as Naree—but after a twelve-hour shift, Lauryn just didn’t have the patience to deal with her inability to let things go. The fact that she meant well only made the situation worse. Naree was as good a friend as she was a doctor. So long as she thought Lauryn was hurting herself with this job, she’d never give up trying to save her. And that was the problem, because Lauryn didn’t need saving. She was already doing exactly what she’d gone to med school to do: helping the people who needed her the most. At Mercy, she routinely saw patients who’d never been to a doctor before her because they couldn’t afford to. And while it was frustrating and stressful and draining to work in a place that was always overcrowded and underfunded, it was also incredibly fulfilling. The way Lauryn saw it, working at Mercy meant making a difference, and that was more satisfying than any paycheck.
She just wished she knew how to put that deep satisfaction into a form her friend could understand.
Well, at least Lauryn wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout immediately. Even with her fancy new job, Naree would still be stuck at the clinic until midnight. Since it was only seven, that meant Lauryn had at least five hours before she had to have this argument again, and she was determined to spend as many of them as possible asleep in her own bed. That lovely thought was enough to send her racing down the stairs from the elevated train platform, but as she walked through the turnstiles and out into the icy street, something caught her eye.
Directly across from the train station, at the end of the narrow alley between the support beams for the L’s elevated track, a man was lying facedown on top of a pile of newspapers. He was clearly homeless, which sadly wasn’t uncommon in this area. What was uncommon was the fact that he was still outside this late on a November evening in Chicago. The sun hadn’t even set yet, and it was already below freezing. If he stayed exposed like that all night, he’d die.
Cursing under her breath, Lauryn hurried across the street, dodging cars and hopping over the frozen puddles. When she reached the alley’s mouth, she stopped to assess the situation. Working with the homeless was a delicate business. No one chose to live on the street in winter, which meant there were always complicating factors in a situation like this, generally drug use or mental illness. Or both. Either of those could make accepting help very difficult, but as Lauryn peered down the alley for clues to the homeless man’s situation, she spotted a familiar navy-blue veteran’s baseball cap lying beside an empty paper cup, and she relaxed—she knew that hat. She’d seen it in her ER just a few days ago, which meant the dirty man lying at the end of the alley wasn’t some unknown. It was Lenny.
Lenny was one of Mercy Hospital’s “frequent fliers,” people who used the emergency room as their one-stop shop. Most frequent fliers were pill poppers, opiate addicts looking to get more pain meds. That wasn’t Lenny, though. For all his other problems, he had never been a druggie. He was just confused, a Vietnam vet who’d never been able to leave the war behind. Years of poorly treated PTSD had left him unable to hold down a job and chronically homeless, but he’d always been a gentleman to Lauryn. But even if he’d been an ogre, she wouldn’t have left him outside in this cold.
“Lenny?” she called down the alley. “It’s Dr. Jefferson.”
She paused hopefully, but the man didn’t stir.
“Lenny!” she said again, louder this time. “It’s Lauryn from Mercy. The sun’s going down, buddy. We need to get you somewhere warm.”
Again, there was no reply, and a cold dread began to curl in Lauryn’s stomach. Pulling out her phone to use as a flashlight—and in case she had to call for an ambulance—Lauryn stepped into the dark alley beneath the tracks.