The Surgeon Took My Badge Beside The Locked Sample Drawer

Dr. Rusk set three complaint forms on my paint bench. He placed them over the little card where I had written, River After Rain.

That was how I mixed a gray iris. Not just black and white. A little brown, a trace of blue, the color of the Zumbro River when its banks were wet.

"Three patients with sore sockets," he said. "All your work."

I put my brush down.

I was Maribel Santos, a forty-three-year-old Filipino American woman with brown skin, a broad face, and black hair cut straight below my ears.

I had painted artificial eyes at Bluffside Eye Restoration in Rochester for eleven years. I matched iris rings, laid tiny red fibers into the white, and helped turn a hard piece of acrylic into something a person could wear without thinking about it.

Quentin Rusk was a fifty-five-year-old white man with silver hair, a narrow face, and shirts so crisp their cuffs looked folded from paper.

He was our lead surgeon and owned most of the clinic. His shoes never squeaked. He could enter a room as quietly as a bill.

"Which unit numbers?" I asked.

"The important thing is your finish."

"The numbers let me check the finish."

He tapped the complaints.

"Don't turn this into one of your color lessons."

Outside, a city bus hissed at the curb. It was June 18. Rain had washed the street clean, and the lilacs by our rear door had gone brown.

Rusk pulled out a fourth page.

"You're suspended pending review. Sign here."

The page said I had failed to cure the final clear layer. It also said I accepted responsibility for an estimated $18,500 in repairs.

"That's a finding," I said. "You haven't done a review."

"I've examined the patients."

"You haven't examined the batch records."

He gave a small smile.

"Maribel, I buy the materials. You paint them."

I read the page again. The signature line was labeled Employee Acknowledgment and Acceptance.

"I'll sign a receipt for a suspension notice. I won't sign this."

His smile went away.

He held out his hand for my badge.

My bench had six shallow drawers. The bottom one held a brass key with a blue thread through its head. Across town, that key opened one lock on our sample cabinet. The records keeper at a rented archive held the other key.

Eight years earlier, after a shipping dispute, the clinic's insurer had asked us to keep a small cured sample from every clear resin batch. I had written the handling sheet. Rusk had signed it.

The samples carried unit codes, no patient names. The clinic paid for the storage. I was the named sample keeper, with permission to retain duplicate fabrication logs there.

Rusk had called it my button collection.

"The key stays under the retention agreement," I said.

"Take your little craft things. Leave everything medical."

I left the key in the drawer. I asked him to seal it in front of our office manager, Ellen Pike. She put it in an envelope and signed across the flap.

"Please put the unit numbers on my notice," I told her.

Rusk checked his watch.

"We have people waiting."

Ellen copied the numbers. E-209, E-214, and E-218.

I knew E-214. Brown iris. A thin gold ring. I had called the mix Prairie At Dusk.

"That one passed inspection on June 3," I said. "You initialed it."

"A surface can fail later."

"Yes. It can."

His eyes moved toward the service room behind my bench. The door was shut. A sign said Final Comfort Adjustments.

For the past month, our technician, Owen Bell, had taken finished eyes into that room after my inspection. Rusk called it a new comfort step. I had asked for its written method twice.

Both times, he had told me to keep my attention on color.

Ellen handed me a plain suspension notice. I wrote Received Only beside my name, added the time, and asked for a copy.

"Your pay stops today," Rusk said. "Cooperation could make this shorter."

My weekly pay was $1,380 before taxes. I thought of my rent, my car's worn tires, and the grocery list in my bag.

Then I thought of those three people.

"Have they been offered another examination?" I asked.

"Patient care is being handled."

He closed the file before I could ask by whom.

At home, I put the notice beside my water bill. I wrote down every word I could recall. Then I drew three small circles and put a unit number beneath each one.

I did not call a patient. I did not have their charts, and I had no right to go looking for them.

The next morning, someone knocked on my apartment door.

Anika Hassan stood outside with a school library tote and a folded invoice.

"They told me your paint made me sick," she said. "I need you to read something."