The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

  The car rocks and shimmies as she drives over the bumpy field to the back of the house. She parks alongside the metal doors of the cellar, gets out of the car, and sweeps the snow off with her bare hands. A long time ago, her father had painted the cellar doors red, but now the paint has chipped and there are weeds all around them, brittle stalks poking through the snow. She unlocks the padlock and opens the doors. A cold mist rises up as if out of a tomb. She hurries down the stairs and brings out two planks of wood and leans them against the steps, creating a ramp. With that done, she returns to the car and opens the door and notices for the first time the awful wounds on the doctor’s face. The beating had been a hateful, awful ordeal and she is sorry, now, that she’d been part of it. She is sorry for so many things. But there is no time for regret. Now she must keep moving, she must get the doctor inside, where he will be safe. He won’t see it that way, she realizes. He will want to escape, and he is smart, smarter than her, and she will have to be careful.

  She sprints across the white field, takes the steps of the old porch two at a time. The key is around her neck, on an old shoelace, and she uses it now to open the door. A smell hits her as she enters the house, of dust and mold, and a draft swirls around her feet. She stands perfectly still for a moment, listening to the house—it was something she had done years before, when her father was sick, when she was waiting for him to die. With some trepidation she opens the hall closet, confronting dark wool coats like hanged men, a broken umbrella, various pairs of forgotten shoes, and the keen white handles of the wheelchair. They’d needed it at the end, her father so weak he could hardly get out of bed. She used to take him for long walks. She used to push him up the back hill to watch the sun rise over the cold field.

  Pulling out the chair she feels a strange confidence. I’ve done this before, she thinks, pushing it across the scuffed floors, clumps of dust skittering like young mice. Outside, the sky has turned an ominous shade of yellow. A small fox slinks across her father’s field, its red back rising and falling through the brown stalks that push up out of the snow. Her hands sweat on the cold metal, the plastic handles. She pushes the chair across the snow to the car. The field is empty, there’s no one around. No one but Jesus.

  Her father’s ghost whispers over her shoulder. She can almost see him sitting there, the bony blades in his back. The car waits expectantly. High in the black branches of the trees the crows jeer savagely. The doctor stirs in the weak sunlight. “I have a gun,” she warns him. “I will not hesitate to use it. I will bury you in this field and no one will ever know about any of this. Do you understand me, Dr. Knowles?”

  He doesn’t move.

  “You’re dead, Michael, they killed you. There’s no going back.” Gently pressing the barrel to his forehead, she cocks off the safety. “Now, I’ll ask you again. Do you understand?”

  He nods his head.

  “Good. Now, will you please try to get into this chair?”

  “I’ll try.” He grimaces, tears streaming down his cheeks, but she can tell he isn’t really trying and he makes little progress. “I can’t,” he spits.

  “You can,” she says, pushing the gun into his skin. “You can and you will.”

  “My ribs,” he gasps in pain.

  “Don’t be such a baby.”

  “They broke my ribs.” Now he is crying. “My hand, too. I can’t move.”

  “Why don’t I shoot you and put you out of your misery.” This shuts him up. She shoves the gun into her waistband and gets down real close to his ear. Even so close, she can see that he’s millions of miles away from her. The rims of his contacts catch the light, floating discs over dilated pupils. She hadn’t known about the contacts. They will have to come out. “Now, we’re going to get you into that chair, understand? It may hurt for a moment, but then we’ll be on our way.”

  He shakes his head again, fat tears falling out. “I can’t. Please.”

  She wraps her arms around him. “Ready? One, two . . .”

  An anguished howl curls out of him as she pulls him into the chair. He mutters obscenities, which she chooses to ignore. “There. See? That wasn’t so bad.” Pushing the wheelchair through the snow is hard work, all the way to the cellar doors. Her body runs with sweat yet she feels chilled to the bone. “You don’t seem to realize the favor I’ve done you,” she manages to tell him. “You don’t seem to get that I saved your life.”

  He doesn’t say anything now, but she can see that his face is all wet and a sound rises from his throat, more animal than human. At the cellar steps, she turns the chair around where he can see the bleak, snow-covered horizon, the watchful, indifferent trees. “Say good-bye to the outside world, Dr. Knowles—you won’t be seeing it for a very long time.” With the utmost care, she guides the chair backward down the makeshift ramp into the damp mystery of the cellar, a place where she would hide as a young girl, among the bulging sacks of potatoes and jars of canned peppers that her mama had made years before. They’re still here, covered with dust like specimens in a laboratory.

  “You’ll be safe here,” she reminds him. “No one will know, no one will suspect.”

  “They will,” he mutters. “They will.”

  “Never!” she insists. “They’ll never find you. You just do what I tell you and you’ll be all right, because I may just lose my patience with you and if that happens it’s not going to be pretty. You got that, huh? You got that?”

  He shows her no response, just droops in the chair. She wheels him over to the mattress, then dumps out the contents of her bag. Canisters of pills fall out like hail. She opens the canisters and makes a little pile in the palm of her hand. “I want you to take these pills, an antibiotic and something to make you sleep. I have a friend in the ICU. I can get anything you need. You just tell me what you want. You just tell me what to get. Here, come on, take these. It’s just some Keflex, and some painkillers—it’s good stuff, I’m told, four bucks a pill on the street.” He shakes his head wildly like a singing blind man, tears running down his face. “Here, Michael, look, I’m not trying to poison you.” She directs his face to hers and for a moment their eyes lock and he lets her feed him the pills and she watches them sink down his throat. Next she maneuvers him out of the chair, onto the mattress. Again he whines in pain. “There.” She fluffs his pillow. “Are you comfortable? Is the pillow all right?”

  He doesn’t answer her.

  “I’ll need your contacts now.” Without waiting for his response, she pinches out the warm discs and feels his tears on her fingertips.

  “I can’t see very well without them.”

  “I’m sorry” is all she says.

  “You’re not,” he whispers. “You’re not sorry for any of this.”

  “You’re wrong,” she says. “And I’ll find you some glasses, I promise.” She covers him with several wool blankets. “I know it’s damp. I’ll turn the heat up a little, but you’ll have to be strong. We can’t take any chances. I don’t want the oil company showing up unannounced. My husband pays the bills on this house; just enough heat so the pipes don’t burst. If I turn up the heat, he’ll know, see. He’s smart, he’ll figure it out. These blankets should do for now. Don’t fight the drugs, Michael. You need them now. Promise me. In a few days you’ll feel better, stronger. I know what I’m doing,” she says, her voice gaining confidence. I know what I’m doing. “I worked in a nursing home once, they taught me certain skills. I took care of my father when he was sick. For months I did it, in this very house. I’m at St. Vincent’s all the time; I’m a volunteer. I watch the nurses, I see what they do. I’m not stupid. I learn fast. I’m here to help you. You have to believe that. You have to trust me.”

  Soon the pills take hold of him and his eyelids flutter with sleep. Using scissors, she cuts him free of the wretched clothes. She fills a bucket with water and takes up the soap and a washcloth in her hands. Gliding the soap across his limbs reminds her of her father, in the very last days of his life, and she recalls with
tenderness how very close they were at the end, when it was just the two of them. When you walk somebody up to the great white gates you are their angel and there is no one else. This was what she’d done for her father. And she is willing to do it now for the doctor, if that is necessary, but she hopes it isn’t. The doctor is going to live, and they are going to get through this awful thing together, and she is going to help him, and he is going to help her.

  Tending to him she feels a sweltering intimacy. The cloth wanders down his chest, onto the concave plain of his belly, lingers just above the waistband of his undershorts. Gently, she tends to his cuts with alcohol preps and ointment, then dresses him as best she can in some of her father’s old clothes. An hour passes as she sits by his side, watching him sleep, whispering prayers. A calm falls over her, consumes her, as though she has swallowed a strange and wonderful pill, the effects of which she cannot predict.

  Driving north, winding through humble rural towns, she finds a supermarket. The long yellow aisles are drafty, smirking with the stink of boiled ham. Music drones overhead, distracting her from her thoughts. Randomly, she tosses items into her cart: canned meat, tins of sardines, canned salmon, crackers, shortbread cookies, cashews, chocolate. The cashier hardly looks at her, preoccupied with bagging the items, and she finds herself discreetly touching her wig to make sure it’s on all right.

  Back in the car she drives behind the market to the Dumpster and tosses in the plastic bag that contains the doctor’s clothes. Fifteen miles north, where the snow is deeper and the roads have not been plowed, she finds a hardware store with warped wood floors and scrawny hovering cats who eye her suspiciously. In the musty silence she purchases several cans of kerosene, a new kerosene lamp, a Coleman stove, a heavy chain, and an expensive padlock. The burly clerk helps her carry the items out to the car. He coils the heavy chain into her trunk and slams it shut, the wind crawling up her neck.

  Driving back to her father’s house she passes the graveyard where her mother lies, and the caretaker’s stone cottage, its windows covered with boards. She feels a rush of terror as she pulls around to the back of her father’s house and parks in a cluster of pines, hoping it will snow some more to cover her tracks. Scattered amid the glittering white powder she notices the splintered walls of a birdhouse, a dented beer can, a dead field mouse. She enters through the back door and puts the provisions in the kitchen. Stacking the canned food on the cupboard shelves, she reasons that there is no need for her to worry; the old Crofut house will seem exactly as it has been for the past ten years: vacant, neglected, aching with ghosts. Still, she can’t help worrying that someone will find out.

  The stairs to the second floor wait like the long zipper down a woman’s back, a fancy woman like from the old movies, the way they always turn and wait: Would you get this for me, darling? Feeling drained now, impossibly weary, she climbs the stairs, half-expecting her mother to emerge from the lush pink folds of her past. On the landing she stands for a moment, hearing the windows rattle in the wind. The empty rooms wait blatantly, drenched in the red light of the setting sun. Her childhood room beckons her. Something stirs in her heart, and she lies down on the bed and weeps, she weeps and howls in the silent house, and she does not know if she will ever stop.

  5

  OUT IN THE COURTYARD the hours fade away, and Annie begins to feel cold. People come and go, smoking in small groups. The nurses. The orderlies. “Come on, Annie, I’m taking you home.” She turns toward the voice of Hannah Bingham, one of the labor nurses Michael worked with; his favorite. Hannah stands there like an angel in her pink scrubs, with the murmuring sun at her back. “It’s getting cold out here, isn’t it?”

  Annie stands up and lets Hannah put her arm around her. Together, they enter the bright corridor, the large lobby with its maroon chairs. The detective nods at her, a notebook in his hands. “I’ll be in touch,” he says, and she nods back. She doesn’t know how she feels about the detective, and she doesn’t want to think about it right now. Hannah leads her to the elevator and they ride up to the doctors’ parking garage. With her long silver hair and a crystal hanging around her neck, Hannah reminds Annie of a wizard and she is glad for her help now. The fourth floor of the parking garage is empty, quiet. Annie steels herself past Michael’s old space, searching the concrete for some scrap of evidence, but the floor looks swept clean.

  “Come.” Hannah puts her hands on Annie’s shoulders and guides her to the car. “We need to get you home now. Your kids are waiting for you.”

  The mention of her kids makes her heart prickle. She doesn’t know what she will say to them. They are home with Christina, her loyal babysitter, a student at the college. They will all be wondering where she is by now, waiting for an explanation. She will tell them the truth, she decides, because at this point that is all she has. They get into Hannah’s silver Pontiac, two baby shoes hanging from the mirror, a plastic Virgin Mary wobbling up on the dash. Annie stares at it, feeling contemptuous. There is no God, she thinks. Not for her. Not now.

  “My kids put that there,” Hannah says. “They think she keeps me safe.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “It makes them feel better, that’s all. Just knowing she’s with me.”

  Annie nods, thinking about Rosie and Henry, what she will be able to offer them to ease their pain. Even she can’t soften this for them. She does not mind having the long drive to think, to gather more strength to face them. She is grateful that Hannah Bingham is taking her home, out to the country to their beautiful house. Only it’s no longer beautiful, she thinks. Without Michael nothing is beautiful.

  Hannah pulls out of the parking garage and winds down through short, one-way streets toward the interstate. “What did the detective say?” Hannah asks her. “What do they think?”

  “Suicide,” Annie blurts. “A morphine overdose.”

  Hannah scoffs. “Michael? Morphine?”

  “It happens, they said. Sometimes. It happens to doctors.”

  “It may happen, but not to Michael. I can’t imagine that.”

  It’s my fault, Annie thinks. “Did he seem depressed, Hannah? Did he seem depressed at work?”

  “No, honey, he did not seem depressed. He loved his work. He always had, you know, a real good attitude. Unlike some of the other doctors. They get moody, you know, ’cause they’re so tired all the time. But not Michael. You never saw that in him. And his patients loved him, Annie, you should know that. They looked up to him. Especially in the birthing suite. They’d come in and they’d be all nervous and right away he’d get them calm. They’d be cursing and throwing things and he’d walk in and the whole climate would change and everybody would relax. He meant a lot to people. You could just see it, the way they’d look at him. Like he was their hero, you know?”

  “It’s my fault,” Annie whispers. “We were having . . . problems.”

  Hannah gives her a knowing look. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

  “What?”

  “The doctor’s wife thing.”

  Annie shakes her head. She hates to admit it, but it’s the truth.

  “Look, honey, whatever happened, nobody’s perfect.”

  “He wasn’t home very much.”

  “Didn’t even take a day off, did he? Good ole Finney plays golf every Wednesday, but not your husband. Oh, no. Not Michael.”

  “You knew about the clinic?”

  “They don’t call it Smallbany for nothing.” Hannah smiles. “And between you and me? What Michael did on his afternoons off is none of the pope’s business.”

  Annie nods, grateful for Hannah’s admission. “We were getting threats,” she says. “They were giving Michael a hard time. Remember that doctor who got killed up in Buffalo? It’s the same group. And these people mean business.”