to do, and he really enjoyed hurting me. He did stuff, every appointment—I hadn’t had a kid before, and since I was so young none of my friends had either, so at the time I had no idea it wasn’t standard. It didn’t even occur to me to walk out and find another doctor. But when I was having Sallie I went somewhere else, because fuck him, and duhhh, revelation, apparently the shit he’d been doing wasn’t standard after all.”
“You never told me,” Leon said.
“It wasn’t exactly coffee chitchat. You really don’t want to hear the gory details.”
“I wouldn’t have cared. That’s awful, you dealing with that all by yourself—” He was bug-eyed stoned and looking really distressed. “Did you at least say it to Tom?”
“Nope. He had enough going on. So did I; I didn’t even really think about it myself, not then.” Susanna smiled up at him. “I was OK, Leon. Honest to God. I knew I could deal with it, once I got a chance.”
“And?” I said, reaching to take the joint off Leon; he had had plenty. I sneaked a glance at Melissa, who was presumably getting a lot more than she had bargained for here, but she was sitting quietly, cross-legged, with the blanket draped over her lap and her glass cupped in both hands, watching Susanna.
“And I dealt with it,” Susanna said. “Once Sallie was born and things settled down, I had a think about what I wanted to do. Obviously if this guy had done this stuff to me, he’d done it to plenty of others—he was in his fifties, he must’ve had thousands of patients. So I made an appointment with him, under a fake name so he couldn’t go after me—no way was he going to remember my real one, after three years. I told him I’d been a patient of his before and I was going to file a complaint. He laughed in my face—surprise. So I told him I’d tracked down a couple of dozen of his other patients through an internet mummy board, and we were all filing complaints, and eight of them had been recording their appointments on their phones.”
“Whoa,” I said. I could totally see her pulling it off: straight-backed and cool, ticking off points as meticulously as if she were giving a presentation. Susanna always had been a killer poker player. “What’d he say?”
“He lost it. Not scared; furious. That was the amazing part: he wasn’t putting it on, he was genuinely outraged. He was jabbing his finger right in my face, threatening to have me committed, call Child Services and have my kids taken away. I told him I could upload that footage to the internet faster than he could make phone calls, and I asked what was he planning to do about the other twenty-six women, have the whole lot of us committed? And all the ones I hadn’t found yet, but they’d come forward once they heard about it? So he threw me out of his office. And”—Susanna held out her hand to me for the joint—“five days later his death notice was up online. I don’t know if he had a heart attack or something, or if he did himself in. Either way, though, I’d say there’s an OK chance I had something to do with it.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Melissa said, although Susanna hardly looked in need of comforting. “It’s not as if you knew he had a heart condition or—”
“Well, I mean”—she held in smoke, waving a hand at us to wait, blew it out over the garden—“he was kind of fat, and he did get all red in the face a lot. But nah, I didn’t know anything for a fact. I thought probably the best I could expect was that he’d quit his job, and more likely he wouldn’t even do that but at least he might get spooked and stop pulling that shit on people. I was kind of hoping, though.”
“Why didn’t you just file an actual complaint?” I asked.
Susanna laughed out loud, and to my surprise Leon snorted too. Even Melissa was looking at me like I had said something regrettably silly. “Are you serious?” Susanna asked. “To a board of his mates? He’d have said I was a hysterical woman making stuff up, end of story. There’s a decent chance he genuinely would’ve got me thrown in a mental hospital, or had the kids taken away. I mean, I guess I could’ve actually tracked