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smiling. “Life is too short for levity,” I could imagine her saying. She nicked a glance at her watch, stopped her finger tapping momentarily, and then, with a puff of breath—the sigh of the rushed—said, “I see you haven’t heard of us. Means you haven’t needed us—yet.”
    “And us is?”
    “Look, you get sick, you go into your HMO like a lamb to pen or slaughter, as they wish. When you get a diagnosis, you don’t know if it’s the right diagnosis, much less what competent treatment is.
    “Look, if their choices are, treat you aggressively and expensively and cure you in a week or send you home to suffer for a month and then get well on your own, what do you think they’re going to do? Right. Doctors are pressured to cut costs. You have a doctor who orders ‘aggressive and expensive,’ he’s taking money out of not only his own pocket but the rest of the white pants around him. I grew up with money, until my father married his trophy wife”—she shrugged off that misfortune—“so I know what good medical care can be. But now, with HMOs, it’s not all malice; a lot of times it’s ignorance. Or sloth.”
    “How—”
    “How’d I get into this? I had a sharp metallic taste—” She waved off her words with a brusque flip of the hand. “I don’t have time— Briefly , I had a medical problem. My doctor decided it was nothing serious, gave me a palliative, didn’t answer my calls, referred me to a department that didn’t handle the condition. Bottom line was she couldn’t be bothered.”
    “But you’re okay now?”
    She smiled.
    I didn’t look away, but I wanted to.
    She held my gaze. “You’re better than most. It’s only a crooked smile now, not the grotesque sneer pulled halfway across one cheek, as it was in the beginning. People don’t gasp anymore. But then I’ve trained myself never to smile.”
    “If the HMO—”
    “If my doctor had treated me right away, would it have averted the paralysis? I’ll never know. What help I got is from time and friends.”
    If her father hadn’t remarried and she’d still had his money, would she still have a working face? Surely she had wondered that. What had she been like before? Had this stolid little warrior grinned over shared secrets, laughed explosively, smiled at a lover? I shivered, peeking into the black void where humor is the enemy and slamming the door to it so quickly Margo herself would have been impressed.
    My face must have betrayed me. Margo Roehner cringed—but only momentarily—then plunged on. “Everyone doesn’t have knowledgeable friends, but everyone can have Patient Defenders. We’re there—free of charge because when you’re too sick to fight, you’re too sick to decide whether a defender is a sensible expense. We go with you to emergency or urgent care, and we stay as long as needed. When we go home, we’re on call. Medical care’s real ‘life or death’; you make the wrong decision, you wait and see, and you can die. I could tell you stories.”
    God forbid .
    “I’ll tell you, they don’t send my clients home ‘to see how things go.’ ” Another woman might have smiled in satisfaction. True to her word, she didn’t. Her lips merely pursed together and even in that motion pulled crookedly to the right.
    Again I didn’t look away. Nor did I run for a mirror to check that my own face was still normal, though I was desperate for that reassurance. “This,” I said, motioning toward the mess of papers in the storage unit, “will it affect your work?”
    “It’ll cost me time, time I don’t have. If I don’t get the grant application finished—I gave them our bank statement and signed the papers yesterday. Their money will pay the salaries of my new coordinators. Then we’ll be organized enough so we’ll never have to turn down a sick person.”
    “Can you think of any reason why someone would break into your locker here?”
    “None. It’s insane. It’s going to take me hours to clean