“Yeah?”
“Tell me why you said you might get fired.”
The clicking sounds stopped. For a moment she thought he might have hung up, but then his voice puffed into her ear, hale and disingenuous. “Nothing. Some hassle from the suits.”
“What kind of hassle? From who?”
He ignored the first question but answered the second. “The Cheerio.”
She stopped walking. John Beezon was the chief human resources officer for the clinic. People referred to him as The Cheerio because he signed all his emails with his job acronym—CHRO—rather than his name. This nickname was a bit of a misnomer: Beezon was about as cheery as a tarantula.
“Jonah. What did he do?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He still sounded untroubled. “I’m going to stop by before I go and see if I can get this sorted out.”
“Get what sorted out?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. A bunch of patient no-shows for appointments.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’ll handle it. You go get gorgeous and I’ll see you soon.”
She reversed course, spinning on one heel to face the stairwell again. A low pattering of voices emanated from Jonah’s end of the phone, followed by the sound of him greeting someone, muffled as if he had his hand over the phone.
“I’m coming to his office too. I’ll be there in five minutes,” she said, but it was too late: he’d already hung up.
* * *
—
Swanning into the HR offices, where everyone still seemed to be working, she put her game face on. Nodding with regal composure at a couple of agitated reception people as they tried to wave her down, she bypassed a little cluster of cubicles. Fact: if you assumed an air of authority, people often wouldn’t challenge you. Plus she still wore her white coat, potentiating the notion that she was very busy and important. After a short chase, the reception people gave up, and she entered the depths of the HR department, heading for Beezon’s lair.
Revealing the utter lack of imagination of its owner, Beezon’s office had been decked out in time-honored middle-management style: a desk veneered in faux-oak laminate; a creaky utilitarian swivel chair; an uncomfortable couch composed of right angles. A framed portrait of Beezon resided on the desk in a prominent spot. After one glance at it, you recognized his kind: a classic underdog prone to short-sleeved dress shirts and an occasional experimental mustache.
Neither Beezon nor Jonah was in the room, so Georgia plunked down in the swivel chair, idly leafing through the books and magazines. These ran the gamut from the boring gibberish of financial journals to the pontificating bureaucratese of HR manuals. Did he ever read anything for fun? On the one hand, one should not judge a man based on his taste in workplace reading materials—he undoubtedly kept the good stuff at home—but on the other hand, she was talking about Beezon here. She tried and failed to imagine him engrossed in a copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. She couldn’t even fathom Beezon having the intellectual curiosity to check out internet porn, let alone literature.
She turned from the small stack of books and nudged the mouse of Beezon’s computer. To her surprise, the black screen of the monitor instantly gave way to the white background of an email: Beezon’s computer was not password-protected, a striking lapse for a human resources officer in possession of sensitive material about employees. Any thoughts she might have had about not reading the document vanished when she saw the words typed across the top: Confidential: re Jonah Tsukada, M.D.
One sentence in, Georgia realized a showdown of epic proportions loomed in the future, because someone—the as-yet-unknown author of the email—was trying to make the case that Jonah was a substandard physician. This was bullshit; Jonah’s clinical skills were exemplary. Even his patient satisfaction scores—the dreaded Press Ganey surveys, which were often utilized as revenge by patients for factors beyond a physician’s control—were top notch. The key, Georgia thought, was his authenticity: he loved his patients with the kind of fervor that wasn’t easily faked. People knew when someone was shining them on and when someone genuinely cared. Jonah genuinely cared.
In the early days of their friendship, Georgia’d once seen him, an hour after his office hours ended, walking with a man through the exit to outdoors. Curious, she’d followed them. Dressed in an assortment of ill-fitting garments, the man gave off the emaciated, matted air of someone down on his luck; with his grimy skin and his ratty coat still damp from an earlier rain shower, he hardly seemed like the kind of company she’d have expected a fastidious, fashionable man like Jonah to keep.
They passed the porticoed entrance and then the parking lot, heading for a small natural area adjacent to the hospital dotted with a few hydrangeas and a solitary bench. By now, a frisson of worry struck her; was Jonah being coerced somehow? But his body language didn’t reflect alarm. He ambled along with unmistakable ease, making animated hand gestures, even once placing a light hand on the man’s shoulder. She came to the conclusion that she should stop spying. This must be a relative or something personal. It was no concern of hers.
Just as she turned, though, Jonah and the man took a seat on the bench and Jonah raised his arms to draw a series of rectangles in the air, his slight chest rising and falling with each exaggerated inflation and exhalation. Perplexed, Georgia turned back. After a moment of watching, she got it.
Jonah was teaching the man breathing techniques to manage anxiety.
Much later, she’d asked him about it, and he’d responded that the man was a homeless Army veteran. He had panic attacks, Jonah said, bad ones; and he’d taken to coming to the ER on a regular basis when they got overwhelming. Jonah, who’d encountered the guy during a volunteer shift at a free medical clinic, started meeting with him once a week to teach him meditation techniques.
Shaking her head at the absurdity of someone trying to imply that Jonah was a bad physician, she returned her attention to the document. She’d had only a brief moment to view it—long enough to read the first paragraph—when footsteps sounded in the hall immediately outside Beezon’s door. She shoved herself backward from the computer, grabbing and opening an HR manual off the desk as if she were reading it.
One of Beezon’s underlings stuck her head in the door. She wore a timid expression and profoundly unattractive glasses, steel-framed and masculine, like Georgia’s dad used to wear in the 1980s. Right away Georgia felt compelled to put her at ease.
“Hi there,” she said, surreptitiously lowering the manual under the table. “I’m Dr. Georgia Brown. Are you looking for Mr. Beezon?”
“No,” the mouse squeaked. “I was looking for some paperwork.”