The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

  A week passed and she did not see him and she did not call him and he did not call her. For the first time in her life, she knew real depression. Like a drug addict, she ached for him, and it cast a hue of malaise over everything she did. Cooking meals, washing dishes, doing laundry, helping the children with homework—all became a cycle of oblivion. She felt enervated beyond description, and in the afternoon she would climb the stairs to her room and crawl into bed, shaking into her pillow. It was like mourning a death, she thought.

  “You sick?” Michael asked her one morning, his hand on her forehead. “No fever.”

  “Yes,” she told him. “I’m not myself.”

  “What are your symptoms?”

  My heart aches. “I’m sick. I can’t eat.”

  “Must be a virus.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “You going to work today?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Their eyes locked for a moment. What did her expression say to him? Did her eyes reveal that she had betrayed him? She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t wanted it, not any of it, yet it had come. Now consequence traipsed through her life like an interloper, leaving its sticky fingerprints on everything she knew.

  Somehow she clambered from the bed into her clothes and maneuvered the children through the morning routine. As she was driving them to school, Rosie asked, “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “Nothing, honey, why?”

  “You look different.”

  “What? No I don’t.”

  “You’re acting funny.”

  “Rosie! I am not.”

  “She’s right,” Henry said. “You are.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Annie pulled up to the school. “I want my old mommy back!” Rosie yelled, slamming the door and storming into the building.

  Henry stuck his head in the window. “I have soccer practice.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “We have a game on Saturday. Can Dad come? Coach says I’m gonna play.”

  “You know he works on Saturday, Henry. How about if we make him a video?”

  “Forget it. It’s not the same.” Henry trudged up the walk.

  “I’ll talk to him, Henry,” she called after him. “I’ll tell him he has to.”

  “Don’t bother.” The boy waved her off and disappeared inside. Annie sat there for a moment, disturbed by the fact that her son, at the age of ten, already understood the insult of compromise.

  48

  AT NINE O’CLOCK on Saturday a woman with a familiar face came to see Michael at the clinic. When he entered the examining room he was struck with her beauty and had to suppress his reaction. She had startling gray eyes and blond hair down to her shoulders. The nurse had prepped her for an exam, and she was naked under the white paper sheet. He had a moment with her alone, before the nurse came in. He was certain that he’d seen her before and glanced at her chart hoping to connect with a name, but they’d written Jane Doe on her file, which meant she’d refused to tell it to them. This happened on occasion, usually when a woman had something to hide. “Good morning, I’m Dr. Knowles. I see you’re a new patient.”

  The woman nodded, her lips tight.

  The assisting nurse entered the room. “We’re doing a routine checkup today,” she said.

  “I haven’t been to a doctor in ten years,” the woman offered. “I was fourteen.”

  Michael and the nurse exchanged a look. “Well, we’ll do a couple of tests just to make sure everything’s okay, and then I’ll give you a pelvic exam.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I examine you internally.”

  “Only takes a minute,” the nurse said.

  “Will it hurt?” the woman asked.

  “It shouldn’t,” he said. “I’ll do a breast exam as well.”

  The woman cringed noticeably.

  “Are you sexually active?” the nurse asked.

  She hesitated. “My husband likes it.”

  “Meaning?” Michael wanted more information. Her behavior was suggestive of a woman who had been abused. The woman went pale, discomfited as a nun in a bikini, and didn’t answer. “Do you have any other sexual partners?” he pressed.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Why don’t we just take a look, all right?”

  “Lay back. Put your feet right up here.” The nurse gently instructed the woman to place her feet into the stirrups. Michael sat down on his stool and turned on his headlight. He pulled on his gloves and inserted the speculum into her vagina. Her body went tight. “Just relax,” he said. “You have a bit of scar tissue here.”

  “I had an abortion once,” she blurted.

  “Not necessarily related.” He did a Pap smear while she lay rigid, as if she were holding her breath. “Just breathe,” he said. “We’re almost through.” He removed the speculum. “Are you planning on having children?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Are we done?”

  “Just lie back a second so I can check your uterus.”

  With his fingers up inside her, it came to him who she was. He had met her at Annie’s faculty party. This was the artist’s wife, Haas. Yes, yes, he was certain now. Perhaps she’d withheld her name because she was married to a famous man, he reasoned, but why hadn’t she reminded him who she was? Surely she recognized him. Well, he had learned over the years to respect a woman’s privacy. It was up to her to say something.

  He pulled out his fingers and ripped off the gloves. “You’ve got a tipped uterus.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, it’s no big deal, it’s just your anatomy.”

  “My what?”

  “The way you’re built.” Quickly, he checked her breasts. “Are you using birth control?”

  She shook her head. “They told me I couldn’t get pregnant.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A priest. He said I’d had my chance and squandered it.”

  Michael and the nurse exchanged another look. “I doubt God holds it against you.”

  “Jesus remembers everything,” she said.

  “But he forgives, no?”

  She shrugged him off. “My husband doesn’t want a baby.” “You’ve got time. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

  “He won’t.”

  “We’re all done here.”

  “Can I get dressed now?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Stop back and see us next year, all right?”

  She nodded and he left the room.

  49

  THE MOMENT Michael Knowles left the examining room Lydia got down off the table and dressed. She could just walk out, she realized. She didn’t have to go through with it. Still, her fingers fumbled in her pocketbook for the device. Walk out and never look back, she thought. Drive and drive till nothing looks familiar. Leave everything behind. Start over. No, she didn’t know how to start over. With trembling fingers she opened a cabinet and put the device inside it and set the timer, just as they had shown her. It made a little noise, and a red light began to blink. It was a small bomb, but according to Mack Johnson, a member of their church who had made it, it would take most of the building down. Johnson, who was an engineer by day, had constructed the bomb in the loft of his garage late at night when his children were sleeping. On her way out, she retrieved the doctor’s gloves from the trash and shoved them in her pocketbook, then walked to the front desk and paid for the visit with cash.

  Driving home, Lydia could still feel a pressure in her abdomen from the examination. When he’d been inside her, she’d concentrated on the image of his wife lying beneath Simon. It had filled her with a certain ticklish hatred. In a small way, unbeknownst to the good doctor, she had gotten even with Annie Knowles.

  The memory of her abortion swam around inside her head like a fat trout. A year after Simon became famous, his friend Grace had called a magazine and told them about Lydia’s abortion. She told them that Simon was a sick man who liked little girls. The pa
per wrote all about it. They called him a pervert. They said he’d exploited her, the poor dumb girl. They said he should be put away.

  The real truth was, he’d never even touched her.

  They left New York after that and traveled all over the country, living out of his car. On her nineteenth birthday he asked her to marry him. She shrugged and said, “Okay,” and he put a ring on her finger. It had been his mother’s.

  They were married in a wedding chapel in Fresno. It cost them forty-seven dollars. Afterward, they shared a plate of spaghetti and went skinny-dipping in a lake. They made love for the first time in the backseat of the car, her bare back getting stuck on the hot vinyl. It had been the first and only time she’d told him she loved him.

  Lydia turned into the parking lot of a Price Chopper and sat there for several minutes just watching people get in and out of their cars. The low sun was bright in her face. A dog barked wildly in the locked car beside her. She watched the barking dog for a long time, and she understood how it felt. All locked up. No way out.

  50

  SIMON HEARD THE NEWS on the radio on his way home. Briefly, he fantasized that Michael Knowles had been killed, imagining the entire dilemma in Technicolor splendor: the clinic in ruins, the doctor’s destroyed body, a hysterical Annie being pulled away. Of course, Simon would be there for her. Anything she needed. He’d escort her to the funeral, a dear family friend. Holding her hand, offering her handkerchiefs. Carrying her little daughter on his shoulders in the cemetery, holding the hand of her son. Picturing his lover in a black dress, glistening black stockings, he felt gently aroused. Did he even own a black suit? he wondered idly. Yes, yes, it was upstairs in the attic closet.

  But, as the news reported, Knowles had not been killed. Nor had his notorious associate.

  Arriving home, he saw his wife’s car parked haphazardly in the driveway. Seeing it made his head ache; he didn’t know why. The dogs were nowhere in sight. As he approached the house, he could hear them whining in the cellar. He unlocked the door and went inside and immediately let them all out. The dogs were relieved to see him, prancing about with their tails whipping the air and their snouts steaming. Back in the foyer, he called out for Lydia, but there came no reply. He climbed the stairs and found her in bed, delirious. A bottle of Valium sat on the nightstand. Yet her face was not at peace. She struggled, as if in a nightmare, twisted in the sheets, soaked in her own sweat. “Lydia,” he said, trying to wake her, but she only groaned. “Lydia, wake up.” But there was no rousing her, and he was momentarily startled by her deathlike stillness. Arms and legs thrown asunder, the creamy folds of her nightgown. With growing concern, he wondered if she’d taken too many pills. He held her head in his hands; he considered slapping it but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  It was only midafternoon, but he felt the need for a drink, a stiff one. He opened the drawer in the nightstand and helped himself to some whiskey. He noticed her pocketbook on the floor, beckoning his inquiry, and he picked it up and dug his hands into it, tangling his fingers in her rosary. Crammed in a side pocket were two neatly folded pamphlets from the Free Women’s Health and Wellness Center on South Pearl Street. One described various methods of birth control, and a second provided information on sexually transmitted diseases. Further inspection exposed a pair of plastic gloves, the sort a doctor wore.

  Had she been down to that clinic? Had she been to see Knowles? And then he imagined the unthinkable.

  Standing over his wife he suddenly felt dizzy. He staggered through the hallway as if crossing the deck of a reckless ship, and sought refuge on the bed in the guest room. He didn’t want to think anymore. His thoughts only brought him pain. Maybe he would just stay in bed for a while. Nobody would miss him. Not even Annie.

  51

  IT WAS HENRY’S big day on the field and Annie and Rosie were his loyal fans, even though the temperature had plummeted since morning. Now it was almost noon and they were huddled together on the bleachers under an old plaid blanket. Like the other parents, Annie belted out her support for Henry’s team, but under that wholesome, maternal facade her mind wound tight around her memories of Simon, the prickling reality that she had not gotten over him.

  Henry’s team scored a goal and everyone stood up, wildly cheering. Rosie climbed up on the bleachers and jumped up and down, clapping for her brother. Annie felt someone’s arms go around her and turned to see Michael, his face in silhouette with the bright sun behind him. “Michael! What are you doing here?”

  “Daddy!” Rosie threw her arms around him.

  “Rosie girl.”

  “What happened, Daddy? You’re bleeding.”

  There was blood on his forehead, dust on his clothes, and pieces of plaster in his hair. “Oh, my God. Michael, what happened?”

  “Somebody bombed the clinic,” he told her. “I’m all right.” He held her close with Rosie clinging on, the three of them locked in a huddle. For a moment they didn’t move, and she could feel him shudder slightly. “I had just finished an exam and this blast went off. It threw me across the room. The whole front of the clinic’s been damaged. Luckily, nobody was killed. Our security guard’s in critical care. Anya, the receptionist, got pretty banged up.”

  “And Celina?”

  “She’s already on the phone with contractors. The woman’s relentless.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I got out. I’m fine.”

  He didn’t look fine. He picked Rosie up in his arms and kissed her and squinted down at the game. “How’s Henry’s team doing? They gonna win this thing, or what?” Annie sensed that he couldn’t look at her just now because in looking at her he would have to admit how sorry he was for getting involved with the clinic. How sorry he was about what it had done to their lives. But then, incredibly, he said, “I’ll never give in to those bastards now.”

  The comment burned through her. His arrogance.

  Rosie shook the sleeve of Annie’s coat. “Mommy, look!”

  Henry had the ball. He was kicking it toward the goal, followed by a throng of players. Henry was not an especially good athlete, but, she had to admit, he had tenacity and at this moment in time it seemed to be paying off. “Go, Henry!” they all screamed at once, standing up and clapping their hands, and Henry miraculously kicked the ball into the goal. It was his first goal of the season. His teammates swarmed him, and all the people in the bleachers stood up and cheered. Michael and Annie joined in, shouting as if their lives depended on it until their throats were raw. They were shouting for Henry, and they were shouting because it was the only thing left to do that made any sense.

  52

  “I WONDER HOW your friend’s wife made out,” Michael said to her later that night in their kitchen. They were drinking a bottle of wine together at the table after the children had gone to bed. All the drapes in the house had been pulled, the shutters tightly closed, the doors dead-bolted. It was a terrible thing, not feeling safe in your own home. At his feet was his canvas bag, the one that contained the gun. He would use it, he decided. He would use it if it came to that.