Dollie the Doctor's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Dollie left the council chamber with the confidentiality order ringing in her ears. Four days. She drove back to the clinic and sat in the parking lot with the engine off. Every house on the old lines was still drinking from the tap. She could not print a flyer. She could not call a neighbor. The council had made that a crime she could lose her license over. But she had to warn them somehow. She unlocked the clinic and pulled the patient roster. Every address on the old pipe map had a chart in her files. That was the crack in the order. She could not announce a public danger, but she could see her own patients. She could offer a free wellness check. She called Harold Winters first. He picked up on the second ring. She asked him to come in that afternoon and to bring anyone on his street who was his patient too. He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked if the council had gagged her. She said she could not answer that. He said he understood exactly what she was asking. He arrived at two with a list in his cardigan pocket. Names, phone numbers, house numbers, all on the old lines. He set it on her desk in the exam room. "Retired pharmacist," he said. "I still know who fills what prescription on that block. I made calls on the drive over. They think you're offering a free check-up. That's all any of them heard from me." Dollie looked at the list. Twenty-three names. She could book them as patients. She could draw blood. She could tell each one, inside the exam room, what their own numbers meant. That was medicine, not a public announcement. The order did not reach across her own door. "I can see them one at a time," she said. "I can tell them to stop drinking the tap water because their bloodwork says so. I cannot tell them why the whole neighborhood is at risk." "You tell them their result," Harold said. "They'll tell each other the rest. That isn't you." She booked the first six for that evening and the rest across Wednesday and Thursday. She pulled a stack of blood test result sheets from the printer and clipped them to fresh charts. She wrote STOP TAP WATER at the top of each intake note in red pen. By six o'clock the waiting room held four people from Harold's list. She drew tubes. She asked about coughs and tremors. She said, inside the room, the sentence she could say: your water is not safe, stop drinking it tonight. At eight-thirty her phone rang. A council member. He had heard she was booking wellness checks on the affected streets. He asked her, flat, if she was working around the order. Dollie held the phone against her ear and looked at the twenty-third name on Harold's list. "I am seeing my patients," she said. "That is my job."