7 - All Doctors Have Made Mistakes

In the car, Bel stared out the window and said nothing. Lauren was talking. Bel knew she'd stopped crying from the way her voice sounded. Bel couldn't look at her. She heard words but they didn't make sense. Trees passed at intervals. She thought about the way the glass had smashed against the far wall. Lauren had heard that. The door had been open still. Her head ached.

"Bel." Lauren's hand was on her arm, tapping. "Bel. Hey." 

The car had stopped. They were in Lauren's driveway.

"Come on," Lauren said, grabbing Bel's bag. "You're okay. Come inside."

Deb opened the door as they walked onto the front porch, like she'd been waiting and watching. Bel couldn't look at her either. She wasn't sure why, only that it felt uncomfortable. Inside, the kitchen light was too bright. Bel sat down at the table because Deb told her to. Deb was moving around her, talking, putting a glass of water down in front of her. Steve was pacing near the counter.

Deb crouched down to Bel's eye level. "Bel, sweetheart, are you-" She stopped. Her eyes had caught on something. "Is that blood? Lauren, look."

Lauren came around to Bel's side. "Bel. Turn your head."

Bel was slow to move, so Lauren did it for her, tilting her head forward.

"Oh, Bel." Lauren's voice had gone strange. "You're bleeding."

Steve turned around and started moving towards Bel. "How did -"

Bel got up and went to the bathroom and shut the door. She looked at her head. She couldn't see the cut, but she touched the back of her head and saw a faint smudge of blood on her fingertips. Her head had caught the sharp edge of the door frame. While she washed the blood off her hands, Bel wondered where she could go that wasn't here.  

Bel thought of her older brothers. She couldn't turn to Raph about this. He always defaulted back to their father and had no spine of his own. Julian was completely out of the question. She'd avoided him for years. Her aunts had taken her in for a week when she was fifteen. It had ended with them saying, "Think about all he does for you, Isabella", as if the conflict would be resolved by gratitude on her part. Most of her other friend's families had done business with Caruso Finance at some point. Their parents all thought Riccardo a respectable man. Whatever they'd fought about with their parents was small in comparison.  She didn't want them to see her like this. She didn't want anyone to see this.  

Bel thought about the bridge nearby. There was a homeless guy she'd seen sleeping in a hammock strung up high between two beams. She'd understood, looking at it, why he'd done it that way. So no one could harm him or take his things while he slept.  

But Bel didn't have a hammock. She didn't have anything except her best friend, who she was about to become too much for. If she could just get out of this bathroom. Get to a fast food place somewhere, charge her phone, think clearly without trying not to cry. That was the start of a plan.

Bel straightened her posture and composed her face just before she opened the bathroom door. She felt Lauren and Deb look up as she made her way to the front door. Steve was there before she reached it. Bel looked at the floor.

"You're not leaving," Steve said.

Bel flinched back a step before she could stop herself. Her heart was going too fast. She stared at his hand on the door instead of at his face.

She couldn't answer. Her chest felt too tight to get words through it.

Deb appeared behind her. "What's the rush, love?"

"I don't-" Bel said. She made herself breathe. "There isn't one. I just feel like I shouldn't be here."

"Where would you even go?" Deb asked, gently, putting a hand on her shoulder.  

"I don't know."

She turned around. Lauren was sitting at the table with her eyes red-rimmed, like she'd been crying again and had mostly stopped. Look what you made her do, she scolded herself.

"None of this is your fault, Bel," Steve said. "Just sit down and calm down."

"I am calm," she insisted, her voice louder than she wanted it to be.  

"Just don't leave," Deb said. "Can I check your head, dear?"

"Why?"

"You bumped - it got bumped pretty hard, I heard." 

Bel wouldn't let her. But she did stay, because Deb looked frightened and Lauren was crying, and maybe sitting down would make that stop.

Later on, Bel sat on Lauren's bed cross-legged, while Lauren checked her head.

"You probably should see a doctor," Lauren said, shining her phone torch on Bel's scalp.  

"I am a doctor. And I only need to go to a doctor if it requires stitches. Take a photo for me."

Lauren took a photo and showed Bel.   It was hard to tell.

"I'm going to take that as it's bad enough."

"Lauren, leave it." 

"You were clearly dazed for a while."

Bel knew she should.  

"You don't have to tell them that your Dad did it," Lauren continued. "Just tell them you slipped over and hit your head." 

Bel had been sure Lauren had been outside and hadn't seen the worst of the fight. Hadn't she?

"So you did see it then?"

"No," Lauren said. "Did he get you anywhere else?"

Bel said nothing. She knew Lauren suspected there was another side to the Caruso family dynamic. There was the side that included overseas travels with Bel, all expenses paid. That was the side everyone saw. But then there was the shadier side. This was the  first time Lauren had said it out loud.

"I wish I'd seen it," Lauren said, "so I could report it myself."

"You'd just get yourself in trouble," Bel said, cross-legged on the bed.  

"What kind of trouble?" 

Bel thought of Lombardi, the man they were joking about on the yacht. She thought of her mother's confiscated phone, the cooking utensils strewn across the floor. Bel remembered her own head being yanked back, forcing her to look into his piercing blue eyes.  

"It's better you don't know," Bel said.

The next day, the police came over. Steve had called them. They had already done a welfare check at her parent's. Bel's heart sank. Riccardo would never forgive her for involving the police, even if she didn't directly call them herself.

One officer spoke to Bel in one room. Another spoke to Steve in the other.

"Your mother is okay. Have you had any contact with her?"

Bel shook her head. Matteo hasn't reached out either, she thought sadly.  

"Would you like to make a statement?" 

Bel shook her head again.

After the police left, a bank notification popped up on her phone. Bel went outside to the back porch to check it.

As she processed what she read, she heard a flock of birds flying overhead. She wished she was one of them.  

After a little while, she felt Lauren tap her on the shoulder.  

"Bel," Lauren said. "You're doing that thing again."

"Sorry."

"Wanna go get ice lattes? It might make you feel -" 

"Lauren." Bel swallowed. "He closed my bank account."

"Oh," Lauren said. She sat down on the step next to her. "Oh." 

For a moment, they sat in silence, the birds continuing to chirp, oblivious.

"I don't think I can go back home."

"I was thinking that. Just didn't want to say it in case you weren't."

Bel smiled. Lauren always had her back.

"I should have been more prepared," Bel continued.

"What do you mean?"

"If I'm honest, I always knew this was inevitable. That I might need to leave. I just didn't think it would happen this quickly."

Lauren flicked a leaf off Bel's shoulder. "You can stay here as long as you need, you know that. Mom said it, too. It's not so different from that time you just kept sleeping over in the summer holidays and then it had been two weeks when your mom called for you to come back home."

Bel half-smiled. "But this time, Mom's not  calling to tell me to come home."

Lauren squeezed her hand. "What do you need first?" Lauren asked.

"I need to update my resume," Bel said quickly. She'd been thinking about it since the car ride. "My laptop is charging."

"Okay, but how will you get paid with no bank account?"

Bel looked at her. "I'll need to set that up."

Lauren pulled out her phone and started a list.

"I'll be out by the end of the week," Bel said.

"You'll need at least two. But stay as long as you want. If you ever wanted to sneak move in, now's the perfect time." 

In the end, Bel needed two months. She kept herself small. She tidied up after herself immediately and stayed out of rooms she didn't need to be in. She knew Steve and Deb weren't really watching her.  

Her birth certificate was at the mansion. She spent two days working out how to get a replacement without going back. Then a bank account, now that she had proper identification. Then, the resume.

Bel submitted fourteen applications in one week. The hospitals were spread across the city. She wasn't fussy and couldn't afford to be.

In the end, three hospitals called back.  

The first interview went well until it didn't. The panel was polite. The questions seemed standard. And then there was an outlier.

"You completed medical school with Dr. Wheatley as your surgical mentor."

"That's right."

Bel tried not to look into the long pause.  

"That's a strong placement. So why the change to emergency medicine?"

"You don't lose skills," Bel said. "You have to stay flexible. Emergency medicine keeps you across everything."

The panel didn't react. One of them nodded more slowly than the others. Five hours later she received the email thanking her for her time. She was unsuccessful.

The second interview was almost identical. She gave the same answer to the same question and watched their faces do the same thing. Their pauses seemed longer. The email rejection came forty minutes later, when she was still on the bus back to Lauren's.

She began to doubt herself. The words I was saving you embarrassment arose unprompted, when she was awake and asleep. He would just love that, she thought, if he knew she was dwelling on it. I will prove him wrong.  

The third interview was where she met Gordon. He was shorter than her and wore glasses, with sandy hair and a beard. The way he entered and sat down without greeting her was a symptom of being in a rougher part of town. He read her application without looking up. Then he asked the pause-inducing question: why the switch to emergency medicine.

"The opportunity fell through." At this point, it was worth giving honesty a go.  

He looked up. "Were you not good enough?"

"Pardon me?"

"Were you incompetent?" He held her gaze.

She held his. "No. I never even started that placement."

"So, why?"

"The opportunity to secure rotations in cardiothoracic surgery fell through. I lost my connection."

Gordon stared at her. Like he was trying to see what words might tumble out to fill the silence.

"My father knows Dr. Wheatley. I annoyed my father. He severed it."

Gordon clicked his pen and wrote something down.  "Who is your father?"

"Riccardo Caruso. He's important to some people." She hated saying that to a stranger without knowing if the vulnerability would pay off.

"I've never heard of him," he replied.  

"Good," she said.

"Why would he sever your connection?"

The questions were getting uncomfortable. The same way her older brother Raph would ask inappropriate questions without realizing. Raph was harmless. And this was Bel's last chance.  

"Some people expect the world to spin around them." She looked back up. "I'm trying not to be one of them."

Gordon was quiet again for a long moment. He clicked his pen a few times, like it was helping him think. Then he said, "This place isn't for the faint-hearted. The patients here, they're very different from -" he checked her address on her resume, "- San Marino. Last night a guy came in with his pelvis in his chest. He was still alive." He closed her file. "But in a real emergency you might find yourself doing heart surgery." He looked at her steadily. "Can you handle that?"

"Yes," she said.

He hired her. The work was brutal and she loved it. Drug addicts, some in withdrawal. One had put his hand through a window. People would come in for nothing and get annoyed when she told them so. In her first week, a woman in labor who had come to them instead of the birthing ward. It was too late to transfer her. Bel delivered a baby.

When Bel got back to Lauren's after each shift, even in the middle of the night, Lauren would wake up and ask Bel to tell her about the shift. The funnier ones Bel told freely, and more serious ones she kept to herself.

"Was it like the Lion King?" Lauren asked about the baby.

"Exactly like the Lion King. With an umbilical cord, though."

One night a woman came in needing stitches in her scalp. She didn't say how she got it. Sometimes it was better not to know. Bel cleaned the wound and stitched it up. The curtain was drawn and Bel was finishing paperwork outside when she heard the woman on the phone, her voice quiet but loud enough for Bel to hear. He shoved me against the wall when I tried to leave. Split my head open.

Bel went home and stared at the ceiling. She felt the back of her head, where an egg had been a few weeks ago. She didn't want to think about it. She picked up her phone.

Sam had sent her a TikTok about every queer relationship on Grey's Anatomy.

This is your experience, right? Sam wrote.

I'll confirm the second I meet another gay doctor. Bel replied.

Lou was the senior physician on Bel's night rotation. She seemed friendly on shift and checked in each shift to see how Bel was settling in. She talked about her wife here and there, who traveled for work a lot. Part of Bel was curious to know more, but she spoke up only as necessary. She was smart enough to do that, and if her father knew she thought that, he would be telling her to thank him.

One shift, Lou asked Bel out to dinner, mentor to protege. Bel had a weird feeling, the same one she had around her father's friends. "I am a bit busy at the moment," she said. And to be fair, she actually was. "Suit yourself," Lou replied, apparently unfazed.  

But later that shift, Lou dropped her pen. Bel quickly picked it up. Lou said, "While you're down there..." and started laughing. Bel passed the pen back and pretended not to hear.

The next shift Lou's attitude changed again.  

Bel stitched up a patient's leg. She accidentally dropped a bit of gauze, and without thinking, said, "Oh shit." The patient freaked out, asked what was wrong, Bel explained, calmed them down.  

Lou had been watching. She expected Lou to pull her aside and talk about it with her, but she didn't. It was during handover the next day that she said, "Make sure you have a go-to phrase to say when something unexpected happens. Doctor on ward 4 unnecessarily panicked a patient yesterday."

One of the nurses looked at her notes. "That was Bel."

Lou didn't even look at Bel. "I didn't say names."

The nurse looked at Bel sympathetically.  

Even though Bel understood this was retribution for rejecting Lou's advances, she wondered if this meant she wasn't a good doctor. Over the next few shifts, she avoided Lou when she could, but often Lou would show up at the worst possible time and nitpick. "Why'd you do it this way?" And she'd talk over Bel when she was giving an answer.  

She's trying to break me, Bel thought. I won't let her. Bel took on every extra shift to compensate.

There was no one to tell, really. Gordon was on the day shift, and Bel didn't think complaining would get her far. These were genuine mistakes. And she didn't want to be seen as a difficult employee. Bel couldn't rely on her father's name anymore. And even with Lauren, Bel had made a conscious choice to only tell her the good stuff. The stuff that made Lauren laugh or pretend to throw up. Bel didn't want to become too much for the only constant left in her life.

One night, Bel prescribed penicillin to a patient allergic to penicillin. The patient developed a rash and made a complaint. Lou called her into the office. "I'm going to have to let Gordon know about this one," she said. "You're lucky the reaction wasn't serious. Maybe you're not cut out for this, Caruso. Daddy's money can't buy everything."

Bel was livid. When she switched back to day shifts, she was called into Gordon's office. She sat in front of his table nervously.

"Do you know why I've called you in?"

"The penicillin thing." 

"Yes."

"I know I fucked up, Gordon."

"All doctors make mistakes, Bel," Gordon said. "And anyone who says they haven't is a filthy liar." 

Bel wasn't prepared for that. She thought she would receive a written warning, or something similar.  

"That mistake happened when you'd been on shift for 36 hours," he continued. "You're doing too many extra shifts." 

"You're understaffed," she replied, arms crossed. She needed a convenient reason to be out of the house that wasn't really her home.  

"We always will be." He leaned back. "What do you do outside of work?"

Truthfully, she spent her free time sleeping. Looking for rentals. Trying to keep up with Lauren, which required copious amounts of caffeine. "Not a lot." 

Gordon looked at her for a moment, before he opened his desk drawer and slid a flyer across to her. Subsidized housing for early-career medical staff.

"One more thing," Gordon said, "If Lou's giving you trouble, there's something you should know."

Next shift, during handover, Lou mentioned a patient with allergies.

"Cooper, this patient's for you," she said, nodding at Cooper. "We can't trust Caruso to get it right."

This time Bel had ammo, courtesy of Gordon.  

"At least I never told a dying patient they were going to live," she replied, arms folded. "Then had to go back and tell them they had two months left."

There was a moment of silence. A couple of more experienced doctors, who may have known about the incident, looked at each other and smirked.

Lou pursed her lips together. She had no ground to stand on.  

After that she left Bel alone completely.  

The subsidized housing didn't take long to set up. The whole apartment wasn't much bigger than Bel's bedroom at her parent's house. First world problems, she told herself. Lauren and her parents helped Bel move. It didn't take long. She didn't have much. Deb and Steve filled up a freezer with food. On her first night, it felt too quiet.

In the weeks after, Bel would get home from work and her body would be finished but her mind wouldn't follow. Everything replayed. As she was falling asleep, she'd dream that she'd prescribed someone penicillin and they'd die. Her body would jolt awake.

Even though she'd stopped the extra shifts, Bel didn't have the energy to get off the mattress on the floor on her days off. She remembered being scolded by her father for saying she was tired. You think this is tired? You, who live in my house and spend my money? The apartment stayed unfurnished. She ate standing at the counter most nights. She'd told Lauren she would text her when she was ready to go furniture shopping but she never did.

She returned from a day shift to find Lauren in her apartment, doing the dishes. Bel had given her a spare key, in case she accidentally locked herself out.

"Bel," Lauren said. "You are living in squalor."

"I was going to clean it."

Lauren looked pissed off. "When you don't reply to my texts for that long I think you're dead."

It had been a week. "Okay. Sorry."

"Stop pushing me away."

Lauren tended to wear her heart on her sleeve. Bel had been like that at one point too. Lately it felt too risky. You needed to feel really comfortable to be like that. She felt glad Lauren still felt that comfortable around her. Bel didn't feel comfortable around herself.  

"This is temporary," Bel said. "I just have to adjust."

Lauren turned back to the dishes. "You don't do anything except sleep."

"I also rot in bed."

Lauren looked up at her, puzzled or sad. Bel wasn't sure. A week was too long.  

"You need things to look forward to besides work. You can't keep looking forward to people putting things up their rectum."

Bel laughed. "Depends whose rectum."

"Your next day off is Friday. What are you doing?"

When she had gotten the job, Bel had received her shifts for the next ten months. Hospital was weird like that. She had shown Lauren, who had taken a photograph on her phone. Lauren knew her schedule.

"It's too much to think about."

But Lauren dragged her to the zoo, anyway. She'd invited their other friends.

"I have nothing to talk to them about except rectums," Bel had protested.

"They'll love that, Bel," Lauren had replied. "You know they will."

And they did.

"More stories about rectums, please," said Cass, who had come with a couple of the others from their group. Someone said it was so random that they were at the zoo. They hadn't been since middle school. It was also fun.

Bel spotted someone she'd treated at the hospital across the path, standing at the monkey enclosure.

"A little while ago," Bel said quietly, "that person was naked and high on LSD running through the hospital."

The group laughed.

By the end of it Cass had her arm around Bel's shoulder. "We've missed you, Bel. Don't you dare disappear on us again."

On the drive home Lauren asked, "Now. What's the go with Sam?"

"We've been messaging."

"About what?" 

"Memes. TikToks."

"If you don't ask her out," Lauren said, "I will do it for you."

Bel typed: Are you going to be in town anytime soon? and hit send.

"Done," Bel said.

Lauren kept her eyes on the road. "And when she replies, don't pretend you were asking for the sake of it. Make a plan."