The Devil You Know

by Freida McFadden

  “Well, Dr. McGill,” he says. That’s the other thing—he never calls me “Jane.” It may be a sign of respect, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I worry he’s forgotten my first name. “As you might recall, you have volunteered to take part in the organization of our weekly Veteran’s Administration Hospital Grand Rounds.”

  Yes, I “volunteered.” That’s one way to put it. “Right…”

  Dr. Kirschstein tugs on the lapel of his white coat. Ninety percent of doctors at the VA don’t wear white coats on a daily basis, myself included, but I’ve never seen the man without one. “Tomorrow, we have a very special speaker at our grand rounds. He’s a vascular surgeon who just joined the staff.”

  “Wonderful,” I mutter.

  Surgeons—not my favorite. The last surgeon I’ve known well was the one I dated through most of residency, although I haven’t seen him since. That guy thrived on making his interns cry, and probably, I don’t know, tortured puppies in his spare time. He wasn’t exactly a nice guy.

  I wonder what Ryan is up to these days…

  “Yes, it is wonderful.” Dr. Kirschstein doesn’t appreciate sarcasm. Maybe it hadn’t been invented yet when he was born. “And we would be appreciative if you could show up fifteen minutes early to help him with any questions he has about the AV equipment.”

  So I’ve got to set my alarm for fifteen minutes earlier, and confirm with Mila that Leah’s daycare will open promptly on time tomorrow. I file it all away on my endless mental checklist, between picking up more baby shampoo and buying a present for an upcoming toddler birthday party.

  “Can’t the AV people do that?” I ask hopefully.

  Dr. Kirschstein shakes his head. “This surgeon has specifically requested a physician to be available to help him.”

  I don’t think this surgeon is going to be my new best friend.

  “Let me remind you, Dr. McGill,” Dr. Kirschstein says, “that this man is a highly skilled and highly respected vascular surgeon.”

  “Then what’s he doing working at the VA?”

  Oops, did I say that out loud?

  “Dr. McGill!” Dr. Kirschstein looks absolutely horrified by my comment. He’s probably the worst person I could have said that in front of. He’s actually a veteran himself, a fact that he’s reminded me of many, many times. I can’t seem to remember what war he fought in—The Great War, maybe? I don’t know. “Let me remind you that the Veteran’s Administration Hospital serves our greatest and most needy population in the entire—”

  “Okay, okay,” I say quickly. I’ve probably heard this speech five million times. I think I’ve memorized it—it ends with the Pledge of Allegiance. “I’ll be there.”

  It’s only fifteen minutes less sleep. I’ll live.

  _____

  “Jane.” Mila the Preschool Nazi is frowning at me with her arms folded across her chest. “We must speak.”

  Mila runs the preschool that Leah has been attending for the past year. She’s speaks with a thick French accent, has a stout and matronly frame, and is at least a head shorter than I am (and I’m not tall). She looks like she is somebody’s grandmother. Ben and I are both absolutely terrified of this woman.

  Mila has a lot of her own children, all of whom are now grown. She has about seven-thousand children. Or maybe just seven. In any case, there are a lot of them. I can’t imagine having seven children. I can barely manage one.

  “Yes?” I say.

  She gestures at Leah, who is playing happily with a set of blocks. Leah is absolutely inconsolable when I leave her every morning, clinging to my clothing and making me feel like a neglectful mother. Yet somehow when I pick her up, she usually refuses to leave. Sometimes I think her purpose in life is to infuriate me.

  “Leah’s clothing,” Mila says. “She is wearing a nightdress to school today, Jane. No. This is not acceptable.”

  I knew it! Damn you, Ben.

  “Oh?” I say.

  “What sort of school allows you to wear a nightgown?” Mila continues. “It is completely inappropriate, Jane!”

  “I understand,” I say. “I mean, I wouldn’t have picked that out for her. But she just really loves that nightgown and she wanted to wear it.”

  “She wanted to wear it!” Mila snorts. “This is so ridiculous! Who is the boss, Jane?”

  “You?” I venture.

  Mila gives me a funny look. “No, Jane. You are the boss. She does not tell you what she wears. You tell her.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Right.”

  I’m fairly sure that I’m not the boss. If it isn’t Mila, it’s probably Leah. Anyway, it’s definitely not me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “She won’t wear it again.”

  Mila seems to accept this. I retrieve Leah’s hated pink coat from her cubby and walk over to where she’s playing. She’s really having fun with her friends. It makes me sad that she doesn’t have any siblings at home. She’s always telling me about all her friends’ brothers and sisters, and saying wistfully that she wishes there were a baby in the house.

  That isn’t exactly our choice though. Ben and I have been working on it for two years. So far, no luck. We’ve been tentatively discussing whether we want to see a specialist or resign ourselves to having only one child. After all, it’s not like our lives aren’t full enough with just Leah. Who isn’t even out of freaking diapers yet.

  When I approach Leah, she’s started singing to herself: “Twinkle twinkle little Mommy, how I wonder what you Mommy.”

  “Leah,” I say, “it’s time to go home.”

  She looks up at me and smiles with a perfect row of baby teeth. They’re so white, even though I’ve been admittedly negligent about making her brush them every night. “Up above the world so Mommy, like a Mommy in the Mommy.”

  Let it never be said that I’ve never had a song written about me.

  “Leah,” I say more firmly. “We have to go home.” I add, “Now.”

  I am the boss. I am the boss.

  “The itsy bitsy Mommy climbs up the water spout,” she continues, going back to the toy car she was playing with as if we have all the time in the world, “down came the rain and washed the Mommy out.”

  I glance over at Mila, who is watching me and shaking her head.

  I am the boss. I am the boss.

  Oh, who am I kidding? I am so not the boss.

  Chapter 4

  Somehow I manage to get Leah home. It involves Mila coming over to have a brief but stern word with her. At which point she instantly puts on her hated pink coat, and promises to never wear her Frozen nightgown ever again. I have never felt like such an incompetent parent.

  When I get Leah into the house, I find Ben sitting on his recliner in the living room, his laptop planted on his legs, looking cute in his boxers and an undershirt. To make up for the fact that I forgot to kiss him this morning, I lean in to give him a peck on the cheek, but he turns his head to catch me on the lips with a peanut buttery kiss.

  Ben has a big jar of chunky peanut butter tucked into the crook of his arm. Leah has Frozen and my husband has peanut butter. I’ve never seen a grown man who could just eat peanut butter straight out of the jar the way he does. I’ve seen him polish off an entire jar of Skippy in an hour.

  Of course, he doesn’t just eat plain peanut butter. Our cabinets are stacked with an assortment of gourmet peanut butters: chai spice peanut butter, maple bacon peanut butter, blueberry vanilla peanut butter… you get the idea. Whenever he finds an interesting new peanut butter online, he’s got to have it. On his last birthday, he went totally crazy over this toffee crunch peanut butter I bought for him. Right now, I can make out the label on the jar of peanut butter he’s holding: coconut lime peanut butter.

  Coconut lime peanut butter? That can’t possibly taste good.

  “Ew,” I say as I drop my purse on the floor of the living room, which is its official place in the house. “Coconut lime peanut butter? You’ve lost your mind.”

  “It’s good,” Ben i
nsists. He scoops out a hefty spoonful and holds it up. “Try some.”

  “No way.”

  He raises his eyebrows at me. “Don’t make me chase you around the house to make you try this. Because you know I’ll do it.”

  I clamp both hands over my mouth. “Do your worst.”

  He gets off his chair and makes an attempt to get the spoonful of peanut butter past my lips, but just succeeds in smearing it on my fingers. After that, he gives up, which makes me feel a twinge of sadness. Back in the old days, before Leah, Ben really would have chased me all over the house to get me to eat that spoonful of peanut butter. He would have tackled me on the sofa and tickled me till I opened my mouth. He gave up far too easily. It makes me feel like he doesn’t even care that I’ll never experience coconut lime peanut butter.

  “Were you home all day?” I ask Ben.

  “Oh.” He smiles sheepishly. “It was cold out and I didn’t feel like going in.”

  Well, great. If he knew he was going to do that, he could have helped me out by bringing Leah to preschool. But I don’t feel like starting that argument right now.

  “I got yelled at by Mila,” I tell him.

  Ben settles back down into his chair. “For what?”

  “The nightgown. I told you she’d go crazy over that.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? She yelled at you because Leah was wearing a nightgown?”

  “I told you she’d freak out.”

  “Mila is completely nuts,” he mutters. “Why do we send Leah there? We should have sent her to that other place. The one with the gourmet lunches. Where they teach kids Japanese.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I notice that Ben is doing a crossword puzzle on his computer. He’s a crossword puzzle addict. Back before we had Leah, we used to spend our Sunday afternoons at Starbucks, drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzles from the New York Times on his laptop. For those of you who don’t know about New York Times crossword puzzles, they get harder as the week goes on. So the Monday puzzle is fairly easy, whereas the Sunday puzzle is damn near impossible.

  Ben can do the Sunday puzzles. He’s the Crossword Puzzle Master. But he used to save the earlier week puzzles for the two of us to do together at Starbucks. I remember shoving him out of the way to take over the computer because he would fill in the blanks too quickly—he would tease me for being too slow.

  After months of doing crosswords, one Sunday we decided to write our own. We learned something that day. As Ben said, “Writing a crossword puzzle is freaking hard!” It really is.

  Even though crossword puzzles are something that Ben has always done and will likely always do, it irritates me to see him doing it now. I mean, I’ve been working all day and then I picked up Leah (and got yelled at because of him). And what has he been doing? Sitting here in his underwear, eating peanut butter, and doing crossword puzzles.

  “Did you put away the dishes in the dishwasher?” I ask him.

  He lifts his brown eyes from the crossword puzzle. “No. I’ve been working all day.”

  “You’re not working now.”

  “I’m taking a break.”

  I stare at him.

  “I am.” He frowns at me. “You know, just because I’m home all day, that doesn’t mean I’m not working hard. You can’t expect me to do chores around the house just because I’m here. Do you do dishes while you’re working?”

  No. But I did clean about three examining rooms.

  “I’m just saying,” I mutter, “it would be nice if when I get home after a long day of work, the dishes would be put away. I’m the one who cooks, so you should handle the dishes.”

  He rolls his eyes. “I’ll do it later, okay?”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Later.”

  “But I need the dishes now.”

  “So take out the dishes you need and I’ll put away the rest.”

  “Never mind,” I say. “I’ll just do it myself.”

  I stomp over to the kitchen, where I fling open the dishwasher. Ben and I never seemed to fight over things like the dishwasher when we first got married. I’m not sure why because we obviously used dishes back then. But somehow, in the early days of our marriage, we were like a well-oiled dishwashing unit, in which I would load up the dishwasher and he’d empty it without coaxing. Somehow during Leah’s first year of life, our dishwashing unit disintegrated.

  I remember when Leah was about ten months old, I exploded at Ben because I could not find one even one of those plastic multicolored baby spoons that was actually clean. And that was no small feat, considering we owned no less than two million of those spoons. (I was constantly finding them in the crevices of the couch, caked with dried mashed peach cobbler.) Ben’s excuse was always something along the lines of, “I was about to do it.”

  That’s his excuse for everything. He’s constantly on the precipice of doing every single chore in the house. Meanwhile, how am I supposed to feed my family with zero clean dishes?

  After a few minutes of putting dishes away, making as much noise as I can possibly manage, Leah comes into the kitchen to watch.

  “Why are you being so noisy, Mommy?” she wants to know.

  I feel a twinge of guilt. I’m too old to be throwing a temper tantrum.

  “I’m putting away the dishes,” I explain.

  “You’re hurting my ears.”

  I take a cleansing breath, preparing to do a more zen-like putting away of the dishes, but then Ben ambles into the kitchen with his peanut butter.

  “Come on, Leah,” he says to her as he shoves his peanut butter in the cupboard. “You and I are going to put the dishes away together.”

  I nod at him. “Thanks.”

  “By the way,” he says to me. “Because I stayed home today, I’m going in tomorrow.”

  I frown. “What about the Winter Concert?”

  He looks at me blankly. Ben, I swear to God…

  “The concert at Leah’s preschool,” I remind him.

  “Oh right.” He scratches his head. “When is that again?”

  For the tenth time: “Tomorrow at three.”

  “Yeah, I could probably leave early,” he says.

  “Don’t come exactly at three,” I warn him. “The parking is going to be difficult, so give yourself enough time.”

  “I know,” he says irritably. “What is this thing anyway? Is it like a play or something?”

  “Daddy, it’s the Winter Concert!” Leah pipes up. She tugs on his boxers. “We’re gonna sing songs about snow!”

  “Songs about snow?” he asks.

  She nods emphatically. “Like Frosty.” To demonstrate, she sings, “Frosty the Mommy was a very happy Mommy, with a corncob Mommy and a button Mommy and two eyes made out of Mommy!”

  Ben grins at me. “I’ve got to see this snowman.”

  I roll my eyes. I’m sure she’ll sing the right words at the actual concert. After all, she’d never dare disobey Mila.

  Chapter 5

  Thanks to the VA’s new star surgeon, I have to get out of the house a good hour before I usually do. Grand Rounds are forty-five minutes before my first patient is generally scheduled, and then I have to show up fifteen minutes earlier to babysit His Greatness. I barely know how to use the AV equipment as it is. He’d be much better off having Ben here.

  Admittedly, when lectures are given at the VA, the AV people do tend to leave you hanging. When I gave my first lecture here, I had five minutes to figure out how to load my PowerPoint and get it on the overhead screen all by myself. So it isn’t entirely ridiculous that the surgeon requested my presence. But he doesn’t know how bad the AV people are—he’s just being a jerk.

  Last night, I was tempted to Google this surgeon, but I realized I’d forgotten his name. Or else Dr. Kirschstein never told me in the first place. Anyway, it was probably better I didn’t.

  When I get to the small auditorium where we hold our rounds, Dr. Kirschstein is waiting for me by the door
in his long white coat with his name stenciled on the lapel. He’s got his arms folded across his chest. “Dr. McGill!” he booms. “You’re late for your tour of duty!”

  Dr. Kirschstein always refers to my hours at the VA as my “tour of duty.” Like I’m a soldier serving on the front lines rather than just an outpatient doc treating vets for high blood pressure.

  I look down at my watch. It’s ten to eight. “I’m five minutes late.”

  Dr. Kirschstein blinks a few times because one of his gray eyebrow hairs has descended into his field of vision. He has the longest eyebrow hairs I’ve ever seen in my life—so long that they’re nearly bangs. Lisa and I call them “eyebangs.” I generally find excessive eyebrow grooming to be ridiculous, but Dr. Kirschstein could definitely use some eyebrow grooming.

  “Dr. Reilly is very upset in there,” he tells me.

  The Great Surgeon is having a tantrum. He probably needs his diaper changed. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Leah was… she was being difficult this morning.”

  As opposed to every morning.

  “My wife will send you a book about raising children,” Dr. Kirschstein says. They’ve got four kids, from all accounts I’ve heard.

  “That’s okay,” I say quickly. “No need.”

  “It’s a good book!” he insists. “I’ll bring it for you tomorrow. My wife says it helped her a lot.”

  “Okay,” I mumble.

  Hey, maybe it will help. His wife has not only raised four kids and put up with Dr. Kirschstein all these years, but she’s also a physician herself. Probably one of the first female physicians in the country.

  “You’ll need to apologize to Dr. Reilly though,” Dr. Kirschstein says. “He’s quite upset.”