Nobody's Laffin (a short story)

It’s Thursday afternoon. I’m wearing black slacks, a white polka dot shirt, black leather flats, a small red handbag, a long red beaded necklace, and red lipstick. Laffin always said that red is the color of power, and I need Yvonne at the temporary staffing agency to see that power. “I’ll take any job for now,” I told her as we were getting ready to wrap up our meeting. I grabbed my bag from under my chair thinking I had managed to evade the question. Alas as I stood, she said “So what happened with your last job” I felt a lump form in my throat and my eyes widened. I couldn’t think of a lie on the spot, “I Umm, It’s a long story.” She sits back down and tells me to grab a seat. She says that if she’s going to help me find new employment, she’ll have to know some of my background. I sink into the grey fabric seat wishing I could sink all the way through it, through the floor, and straight into the underworld to evade this question.

I start by telling her about my last relationship with Laffin. I had stumbled across his dating profile on a whim one evening after finishing the 50 Shades of Grey series. His profile said something that piqued my newly developed kinky curiosities. After conversing with him for a few weeks he told me his name was Laffin because “If you can make a woman laugh you can get her to do anything you want.” That should’ve been a red flag. That or the fact that he was nearly 30 years older than me. But I’m an impoverished fat woman with freckles and glasses. I haven’t had a lot of relationships, or situationships. I was longing to make any type of connection. After just three months I moved in with him. Only a few weeks after moving the mental abuse started and I decided it was best to pick up more hours at the hospital. I started working 60 hours a week, and before long I noticed that I was doing things outside of my job description. This came with more money and more responsibilities. One evening during a particularly boring shift I was sitting in the room of an elderly dementia patient. She was an escape risk. Someone had to sit in her room, but I worked the graveyard shift, and she was sleeping peacefully. Normally in my free time, I’d browse the patient records. We were allowed to look through the entire record of our patient. When I found a term, I didn’t know I’d look it up in the medical charts. By doing this within a year I knew something about every mental health diagnosis I had ever heard of, which made my job a lot easier. I later found out I had over 6,000 hours of medical research not pertaining to my position. After reading all about dementia and the decline of Mrs. Rosenthal, I still had 4 hours before my shift would end. I decided to search for my own medical records. I wanted to see what things had been said about me. I wanted to see if the doctors had really cared. After all, I had read some harrowing medical notes in my time at the hospital. This led me to wonder about my parents who were already deceased, I looked them up too. Then I looked up my daughter who had been taken from me as a baby. I looked up friends, enemies, my boss, old teachers, local celebrities, and politicians. I found out Bernie Sanders came in once from an infected boil. I took a photo with my phone and sent it to my best friend Sadie, I had sent her other photos in the past, patients with open wounds, patients who looked ghostly while walking the halls, patients headed to the morgue, the sexy nurse assistant on the cardiac unit. I knew the photos were wrong, but I didn’t realize that looking at the medical charts was necessarily wrong. They had given us all unrestricted access, and they were read-only files. Nothing could ever be changed or edited. “I swear I didn’t know the harm I was doing until they told me the severity of the situation.”

I got called into the office on a Monday morning, about three weeks after I had accessed all the files. My boss sat me down and pulled out a file that had a huge stack of papers in it. She sat them in front of me and asked if they looked familiar. I skipped through and noticed the names of all the files I had accessed. It was a log of every chart I had seen the week prior with red lines going through the top of every chart belonging to a patient that wasn’t mine. She explained that it was a violation of company policy, a HIPAA violation, and I could be criminally charged. She was sympathetic towards me looking at my own chart, and the charts of my family members I had lost. Because it was my first offense they wouldn’t press charges, but they had to let me go. Per policy, they also had to notify all the people on those files that their data had been breached. She assured me they wouldn’t disclose who accessed the files, but if anyone knew I was employed there they might figure it out. I lost several friends that week.

When I went home, I had to tell Laffin what happened. It was at this point the mental and emotional abuse turned physical. He came up behind me and wrapped his arm around my neck, he pushed me down on the bed and started beating me on the head. I pretended to pass out. I didn’t wince or make a noise. I lay there totally limp, and he got up. After a minute I had planned to get up, turn around, and run straight out the door. I wouldn’t grab anything; I’d just run down the hall and exit the penthouse. I stood up, turned around, and caught a baseball bat to the face. The next thing I remember after that is the EMT waking me up and being covered in blood. The following weeks were filled with police interviews, a restraining order, dental surgery, me having temporary access to the penthouse while Laffin was in jail. I didn’t want to linger though; I had checked myself into a domestic violence shelter where they said I could stay long enough to put my life back together. I did that, and now that I’m settled in a new place, I’m looking for a new job.

The lady at the temp agency was just staring at me with a blank face. I let out a deep sigh, my hands were sweating, and shaking from recalling the trauma. I grabbed my bag. I looked into her eyes and thanked her for her time. I then got up and left the building and walked back to my apartment. It’s 15 blocks. It was so cold I could see my breath. I was cold in the areas of my body that had been sweating during the interview. The leaves were crunching under my feet. I could smell exhaust fumes as cars passed me by. The sound of traffic seemed miles away, even though I was steps from it. When I got home, I flopped down onto my bed exhausted. I wondered if I’d get a job, I wondered if I’d be able to keep my apartment, I wondered how I’d escape my current reality. I decided to write a note addressed to Laffin. You took me in when I had nowhere to go, you said you’d take care of me, but you took away everything I had. I survived though, and you’re still in jail Who’s Laffin’ now? Instead of sending the letter I let it burn in the flame of my cinnamon-scented candle. I grabbed an apple and a handful of chips. “It’ll have to do,” I muttered. I browsed social media from my bed trying to fall asleep, the headlines read: Breaking news, Bernie Sanders medical charts leaked by an ex-hospital employee. “I feel like I’ll never recover from this” I mumble to myself as I drift off to sleep. I’m awoken a few hours later by Yvonne calling to let me know that she found me a job and that I start Monday morning. I let out a sigh of relief. I know I’m not out of the woods yet, but this is my chance to start a new life for myself. When I get off the phone, I call a therapist as well. I have a lot to recover from, and I don’t want to fall into my past destructive patterns. New Apartment, New Job, New Therapist, New Me.