by E. G. Scott
“Yes, you are. That is a great start.” I put my clipboard down. “Why don’t we start with some basic work.”
“Sounds good to me.” I see his smartwatch illuminate, and he looks at it. “What do you need me to do?”
“Let me take a look at your tongue.”
Now it’s his turn to try to conceal his grin. “You move fast, huh?”
I glance at him sideways. “It can tell me a lot about what is going on inside.”
He sticks it out against his obvious skepticism. It’s pale and coated.
“Have you been feeling cold easily? Lost your appetite? Been experiencing weakness?”
His eyes widen. “Yes, actually. You can tell that by looking at my tongue?”
I grab a hand mirror from my shelf and hand it to him. “It isn’t magic; take a look.” I lean into him while he extends his tongue in the reflection. He smells good. Like recently showered-and-shaved good.
“Tho thow than u thell wuh ith . . . ?” He tries to talk with his tongue still outside of his mouth and we both laugh.
“I can tell that you are yang deficient by the color and coating on your tongue. The most common symptoms that go along with that particular stasis are the ones I asked you about, and a few others. Panic, anxiety, worry.” I’m don’t mention impotence, but it’s also another hallmark of male yang deficiency. I’ll let him bring it up if he wants to.
“You can close your mouth now.”
He retracts his tongue, closes his mouth. “Very cool trick,” he says. “What now? Are you going to tell my future from the lines in my hand?” he teases.
“I’ll treat you faceup today and get a sense of how your qi is flowing overall. We can talk more when you are on the table, and I’ll be able to tell a lot more about what’s going on in your body. I will step out and have you undress down to your underwear and give you a towel to drape across yourself.”
He nods, winces, and quickly moves his hand up to his shoulder and rubs.
“What’s going on with your shoulder?” I ask.
“I play tennis, and this shoulder’s been giving me some trouble lately.”
“Well, I can do some needles to get the energy flowing, and try some Reiki on that spot.”
“Rakey who now?” He chuckles. His relentless condescension is getting old.
“Or my partner Rachel does massage, which you might be more comfortable with. She’ll be here by the time our session is out if you’d like to speak with her.”
Again, I pick up the same weird energy from earlier, when he was asking about her office. “Would you like to talk to her instead? I know you have surgery in a few hours, but she might be able to do something this morning to help with anything acute.” I don’t know this to be true, but I’m curious to see how he reacts.
“No, that’s all right. I’ll see my usual girl. Thanks.” I roll my eyes when I turn away from his line of vision.
“Okay, then.” I look back at him and stand. “Let’s get you on the table. I’m going to step out now. I’ll give you a few minutes to undress and then I’ll knock before I come back in. I can put a bolster under your knees if you have any lower-back issues.”
“And if I’m not wearing any underwear?” I can’t tell if he’s joking. I crack a small smile and hand him a small folded washcloth.
“That is what this is for.”
He blinks a few times and I laugh before reaching for a normal-size towel. He laughs loudly and grabs it from me playfully.
I shut the door behind me tightly, feeling good that I’ve made him laugh—and immediately bad, because I feel giddy.
* * *
I’m barely in my chair before the light mood drains out of me. I see an email slide into my inbox from Henry. Just the sight of his name conjures a fist-size knot in my solar plexus. I feel nauseous as I open the message.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: IMPORTANT
Charlotte,
I’m taking care of it.
Consider this matter closed.
Don’t contact me again.
Henry
Before I have a chance to process, the door behind me opens and Jack walks through, fully clothed, pulling his jacket on.
“Everything okay?” I ask him as I swivel in the chair in his direction and stand.
“Something came up with my patient. I’ll need to cut our appointment short and rain-check becoming a human pincushion.”
“Okay,” I reply.
“I’ll pay you for the whole time, of course.”
He fumbles in his back pocket and withdraws a fat wad of cash secured with a gold money clip and speedily peels off three hundreds.
“I hope everything is okay.”
“I’ll call when I can make it back in.”
He is already out the door before I have a chance to say goodbye.
ELEVEN
WOLCOTT
“Give me a minute, Detectives.”
Silvestri and I stand near the entryway of the Pilates studio where Julie Merrill has just finished teaching class. The last of the students have exited. She towels off her face and hair, then drops the towel next to a large tote bag and returns her attention to us.
“Sorry,” she says. “Tough class today. So, how can I help you?”
“We understand you volunteer at the same community garden as Brooke Harmon?”
“I do, yes.” Her smile drops as her eyes toggle between Silvestri and me. “What’s this about?”
“Were you aware of anything unusual going on with Miss Harmon as of late?” I ask.
“What’s . . . is she okay?”
Silvestri clears his throat. “I’m sorry to have to inform you that Miss Harmon was found dead.”
Julie drops into a squat and rests her palms on her knees. She closes her eyes, breathes deeply, and returns her attention to my partner. “Oh God. I’m so sorry to hear that. I can’t believe . . . Jesus. What happened?”
“We were hoping you could help us figure that out,” he says. She starts to let out tears.
“We’re very sorry, Miss Merrill,” I say. “We understand that the two of you were close outside garden hours?”
“Yeah,” she says, in disbelief. “We had gotten to be friends over the last couple of months. I felt like we were really getting to know each other.”
Silvestri maintains eye contact with her as he drops into a squat. “We understand this must come as a shock. Would you be up for answering a few questions?”
She looks at a clock on the wall. “There’s another instructor starting a class in a couple of minutes. Can we sit and talk somewhere else?”
* * *
“Thanks, Detective.”
I hand cardboard cups of tea to Julie and my partner as I join them at the table. The coffee shop we’re sitting in is slow with the midafternoon lull. I sip my coffee as Silvestri leans forward. “You were saying . . . ,” he continues.
“Well, things had been going really well with her lately. She’d made the decision to go back to school to study child psychology, and she’d begun applying to programs. She was excited. Then, over the last week or so, she just seemed short-tempered and on edge. I tried to ask about things, but she kind of deflected. I got the feeling that she was touchy about whatever was going on, so I didn’t push things.”
“Did you have a sense of Miss Harmon’s personal life at all?”
“So, she and I had just gotten to the point where we were starting to open up about our love lives,” she muses.
“And what did hers look like?” I ask.
“About the same as mine.” She laughs. “Although I’m really amazed at how well adjusted she seemed about it. Especially considering the divorce.”
“Miss Harmon was divorced? Was that rece
nt?”
“A year or so ago, I think.”
“And you didn’t know her to be dating anyone, it sounds like?”
“No. But again, she seemed really happy alone. And she was doing a lot of work on herself, so that was cool. She had a tight circle of friends that she mentioned, outside of our crew from the garden, and I think they really helped her through a lot, with the divorce and everything.”
“Had you met any of these friends?” asks Silvestri.
“Not yet, no. But we only recently started hanging out outside of work.”
“You mentioned that,” I say. “And you hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary with her that you can think of?”
“Hmm.” She looks into her tea. “Aside from her being kind of stressed last week, not really.” Her eyes widen. “Gosh, I should have pushed her more about whatever it was. Maybe I could have helped.” Her chin drops.
“Miss Merrill,” he says. “There’s no use wondering what if, believe me. We’re sorry about your friend.”
“Thank you,” she says, doing her best to pull a smile.
I remove a card from my pocket and set it on the table in front of her. “Please let us know if anything comes to mind. And we may be in touch if we have any more questions.”
“Of course,” she says. “Thank you, Detectives.”
As my partner and I rise from the table, I lay a hand gently on her shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”
TWELVE
CHARLOTTE
With Jack’s abrupt departure, I have a few minutes to absorb Henry’s email before I need to rouse Cameron. I feel stung by his curt tone but hugely relieved that he’s taking care of things. I know that I don’t have it in me to go through anything else with the hospital lawyers, or my own lawyer. I don’t want to think about going through any of that painful process again.
After I close the message, I shift my worry to the flowers. With a pounding in my head and chest and sweaty palms, I discard the outer cellophane casing in the wastebasket and scrutinize the arrangement. The bright orange and white splashes of tiger lilies surround a smattering of purple flowers and baby’s breath. There is no personalized card included, and none needed. It is undeniably Peter. My heart sinks like a stone. The purple means he has to stay away longer. The orange means that he’s been compromised, so communication will be extremely limited. The baby’s breath means he’s safe, which is a sliver of comfort amid the disappointment of his extended absence. Originally, I’d found the game of learning his floral codes fun and exciting, but his quizzing me on the code of flowers for a week straight became tedious and struck me as incredibly unecessary. He’d been very unhappy when I suggested it was bordering on paranoid, and I was given the silent treatment for ten days until I acknowledged how smart it was that he’d come up with the system.
My mind is a hundred worries all mixing together. Peter’s flowers. Jane Doe. Rachel’s strange behavior. Henry’s email response. Peter’s whereabouts. Jack Doyle. I feel like I’m sliding into the calm crisis mode of my medical internship days in the ER, when there was too much input to focus on one particular emergency for too long. My mind moves to practical matters, a reflexive mode in times of emotional deluge. I get up and start straightening the office space, even though nothing is out of place. I stretch my arms up and side to side. I move to my computer and start a spree of deleting junk mail. I need to try to sit still and meditate. I move back to the couch and set my meditation timer for five minutes, the amount of time Cameron has left in her treatment, and shut my eyes tight.
I think about Cameron. Disappointment in love is one of the most common complaints on my table, and the brokenhearted store that hurt in so many places aside from the heart. So many of my patients talk about how they are preoccupied with what their partners are doing when they aren’t together, and with more interest and energy than when they are. There’s no time left to spend self-reflecting, so their complaints and worries are wrapped around other people’s lives. It’s a wonder that anyone can have a healthy relationship with all this access to one another.
The office is silent except for the white noise machine. Cameron is likely hovering in that lovely middle place between awake and asleep, hopefully calm. I feel lonely and jarred by the last couple of days, and the familiar obsessive longing for Peter. Before the flowers, his silence lasted four and a half weeks, the longest yet in our relationship. I know this is part of being with him, although coming to peace with it is one of the harder adjustments in my life.
Peter was between assignments when we met, so the first months of our courtship he was always around. It seemed like all I had to do was think about him and he’d light up my phone or be waiting in my inbox. We had an instant, uncanny connection. He knew what I was going to say and where I was going to be without my telling him. He predicted things happening before they did, and he made me feel completely safe with his seeming omniscience. Before I fully understood his job, I joked and maybe believed a little that he was psychic.
We were communicating constantly, to the point that I felt like I was losing myself, and breaking my own rules about boundaries in relationships. He told me he loved me on week four. He texted me every hour and got concerned if I didn’t reply quickly. It was exciting at first, and then too much. It had been two months of nonstop communication and I told him I needed to come up for air. He said he understood and then he was gone without a trace. When I reached out to let him know how much I missed him and wanted to resume, there was only radio silence.
I didn’t know if he’d completely misunderstood what I meant, or if something bad had happened to him. We were in a relationship gray area. We hadn’t intertwined our worlds enough for me to know his routines or how to find out if he was hurt or missing. And we were definitely not prepared for major life events. I had a vague sense of where he lived, but driving across state lines and telling him “I was just in the neighborhood” seemed excessive and clingy. The original number I’d had for him was going straight to a generic voicemail, and my texts were unanswered. I’d already googled him when we first connected, so I knew there wouldn’t be anything about him online. He’d explained to me that his employer made it so he would be absolutely untraceable online.
By the time he resurfaced three weeks later, the only communication I’d gotten from him was one answered text from a number I didn’t recognize. He’d simply responded, Alive, weeks after I’d asked him if he was. I was crestfallen but resolved to move on as quickly as possible.
I mooned over him silently for a few days, finally admitting to Rachel what had happened. We analyzed and dissected and ultimately concluded that I’d dodged a bullet. But when he wrote me one of the most heartfelt apology emails I’ve ever gotten, along with images of travel documents, photos of some of the locations he’d been, and a forwarded email from one of the people whose life he had apparently saved, I was reeled in again. I felt reassured and proud of him. We communicated every single day after that.
Eventually, he became vague and evasive about his job again, and there were more than a handful of tense and frustrating exchanges between us. I began to lay down ultimatums about having more specifics about what it was he actually did, or I would end things between us. Once he explained what he did and I believed him, I understood that his omniscience wasn’t precognition; it was professional.
Instead of the meditation app gong sounds bringing me out of my meditative state, the door buzzer jolts me back into the room. I jump up and make my way to the door, unlock it, and find two men standing on the sidewalk outside my office. One is Detective Silvestri, and the other is a man I’ve never seen before but I assume to be his partner. They both have neutral expressions, although Silvestri seems to be suppressing a smile.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Knopfler. This is my partner, Detective Wolcott.”
Wolcott nods, but his gaze is on the flower arrangement. “Nice to meet you.�
�
“Hello.”
“Mind if I use your facilities?” Silvestri asks.
“Sure.” I point him to the bathroom and he moves toward it, leaving Wolcott and me alone.
“Nice to meet you, Dectective.” He accepts my outstretched hand, his attention still on the contents of the vase. Wolcott is taking in every inch of my office. His energy is even more grounded than his partner’s, and I can tell that he is highly perceptive.
“Needles, huh? I’ve never had the pleasure.” He smiles.
“I’d be happy to get you on my table if you have any complaints,” I respond lightly.
“Just this one right here,” he says, as Silvestri rejoins us. “Don’t think you have enough needles for that, though.”
Silvestri smirks. “Thanks for the hospitality. Too much tea. By the way, that’s a beautiful tapestry hanging in the bathroom.”
I laugh. “Thanks. It is more utilitarian than decorative. It’s covering an unsightly door that leads to the China Panda. Unfortunately, it causes the bathroom to have a constant and apparently permanent odor of lo mein.”
Both men chuckle. I turn to Silvestri as Wolcott continues to survey the space.
“I was wondering when I’d see you again. Have you learned anything about Jane Doe? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her.” Out of habit, I put my hand on Silvestri’s arm, which he registers with an unsure smile before quickly looking at Wolcott, who has also noticed the gesture. I have to remember not to touch everyone in the familiar way I do with my patients.
“That’s why we’re visiting. Would you be free to talk with us right now?” His cadence is different than it was during our first meeting. He seems more clipped.
“Sure. I have a patient on the table. Let me finish with her and then I’m all yours.”
As I head for the room to remove Cameron’s needles, Wolcott meets my eyes and chimes in, “Beautiful flowers. What’s the occasion?”