The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

  “You’ll be fine, sweetie,” Annie tells a tearful Rosie as she hugs her good-bye after breakfast. They’re standing in the foyer. Annie takes Henry’s shoulders because he does not seem to want to hug her. “I’ll find him, all right? I promise.” He nods, but she knows he doesn’t believe her—he doesn’t trust her. He thinks it’s all her fault.

  “They’ll be just fine,” her mother interrupts, flapping the back of her hand at Annie. Go! “Who’s going to help me make the pumpkin pie? We have a lot of cooking to do before Thursday.”

  Rosie immediately volunteers. As usual, Henry pretends he isn’t interested. Annie watches her mother guide the children through the swinging door of the kitchen. She peers through the oval window and watches as they begin to make the pie. Even Henry helps, scooping the sloppy seeds out of a pumpkin. Annie is grateful that her parents have this beautiful home, grateful that she could bring the children here, where they are safe.

  She steps outside and walks down the circular driveway to her car. As much as she has tried, she cannot seem to warm her bones. The air seems colder today, it cuts right through her. Her head hurts and her breasts ache. Her nipples feel raw. Even the hot tea her mother made for her and poured into a thermos does not warm her. If I begin to cry, she thinks, I will never stop. She does not mind the two-hour drive back to High Meadow. It is the first time she’s been alone for days, and it makes her sad and a little frightened. Where is Michael now? she wonders. A feeling of dread comes over her. She can’t help feeling as if God has taken him from her to teach her a lesson. Selfish wife, she thinks. He was selfish, too. They are both at fault, she argues to the heavens. And no amount of apologizing is going to change anything.

  Crossing the river under a dusting of light snow, Annie sees the gushing smokestacks of the chemical plants down by the port, fat yellow clouds rising into the sky. The river is black and the scrawny trees on its shore grieve for the distant sun. The streets of Albany are slippery at this hour, a pandemonium of school buses and pedestrians and early rush-hour traffic.

  When she gets to South Pearl Street it begins to snow again. She parks and enters the clinic, happy to see that Anya, the Russian receptionist who was injured in the bombing, is back at work. Anya puts down the phone and comes around the counter to greet her. “Annie.” They hug. “How are you?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Any word? Anything from the police?”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “How are the children?”

  “With my parents.”

  “Take a seat in the waiting room. Dr. James will be with you soon.”

  Annie waits in the crowded room, wondering how all these people can possibly be seen. Without Michael, she knows, they will have to wait longer than usual. She looks around at the faces in the room. A young couple sits across the room, each in headphones, plugged into a shared Walkman, moving to the same beat in exactly the same way, their eyes half-moons of tranquillity. Next to them, two women, a mother and daughter, jerk and twist with impatience. The daughter, a teenager in studded blue jeans and a Puma sweatshirt, holds a swaddled infant with pierced ears. The girl diligently chews on a wad of bubble gum, blowing bubbles for her baby. The baby stares blankly at the expanding pink bubble until it pops. “Pop!” the girl says. The mother, who wears a Proud Grandma T-shirt, irritably flips through Good Housekeeping magazine and continually glances at her watch. Good housekeeping, Annie thinks, that’s all anybody really wants. Shelter. A safe place to raise their kids. The package deal of American life—the way Rockwell had painted it—but there is no package deal, she thinks.

  She waits for over an hour. Then one of the nurses calls her name and takes her down to Celina’s office. “She’ll be right in, Mrs. Knowles.”

  “Thank you.”

  Annie likes the office with its cheerful yellow walls and jungle of plants. Celina enters the room wearing her professional smile. “Hi, Annie.”

  “Hi.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  Celina sits down behind her desk. They appraise each other coolly. It is obvious to Annie that the woman has never liked her. How ironic that Annie must come to her now, for help. “I like your plants,” Annie says to break the ice. “I feel like I’m in the Amazon or something.”

  “Yeah, this room’s my cheap vacation.” Celina smiles, shifting gears. “Any news about Michael?”

  “No. Nothing. They’ve got the FBI involved. They’re not telling me very much.” Her mouth dries up. “He did it for you, you know. He admired you. He respected you.”

  “I never meant for this to happen, Annie. I hope you understand that.”

  “But you knew it was possible, didn’t you? You knew how awful things could get.”

  “Yes,” Celina admits. “You saw that waiting room. Too many women depend on me. They don’t have anywhere else to go. Michael was all I had. I regret it now. You have no idea how much I regret it.”

  “Oh, I think I do.” A familiar envy whirls up inside her and she spits out her awful thought. “It should have been you.”

  “I wish it had been.”

  Annie feels a stab of guilt. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.” Celina opens Annie’s chart. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Annie nods. “Do you think I’m awful?”

  “It’s not my business to judge you.”

  “There’s been someone else in my life.”

  Celina affirms this information with a nod. “Is it his?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s over.”

  “Did you tell Michael?”

  “About the pregnancy, yes.”

  “What did he think?”

  “He wanted me to have it. He didn’t know, though, that it might not be his.”

  “Does it even matter?”

  Of course it matters, Annie thinks, but the question lingers on Celina’s face, and it makes her wonder.

  “You’ve got guilt written all over you, Annie, but let me tell you something. What you did happened for a reason, and Michael played a role in that reason. You don’t strike me as the casual type. You needed something that he wasn’t giving you and you went and found it. There’s no punishment in store for you, honey—the heavens aren’t going to open up and shower you with terrible things. You slept with somebody and it took. God gave you a souvenir for your trouble. Now you can pack it away up in the attic, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to forget it’s there.” Celina’s beeper goes off. “Look. You’ve been through a lot. I’m not convinced you’ve had enough time to think this over. I want you to be sure. I don’t want you doing this over guilt.”

  Annie nods and sighs with appreciation. For the first time she understands why Michael liked Celina so much.

  “You go home and rest. I can always work you in if you decide you want to go through with it. And if you need someone to talk to, you call me, all right? Anytime, day or night.”

  Annie nods. “Thank you, Celina.”

  “Don’t you dare mention it.”

  Driving home, Annie feels numb. She tries calling Simon on her cell phone but there’s no answer. She leaves a message on his office machine and even tries calling him at home, to no avail. The last time they spoke, he told her not to call him anymore. Well, she has a damn good reason now.

  Her house is dark when she arrives. It has always been a house full of noise and children and music, but now a piercing silence greets her. For a moment she stands in her kitchen, disoriented, as if she has walked into the wrong house, as if she has walked into someone else’s life and now faces a whole set of strange problems. A missing husband; an enigmatic lover; an unwanted pregnancy. It’s my life, she thinks incredulously. Wrapped in a blanket, she roams the rooms as if she is looking for someone, but she encounters only the furniture, inert and indifferent. Still, she can’t help feeling that someone’s been here. In her bedroom things seem to be missing. Her perfume, her lipstick. Even the bedsprea
d seems rumpled. She searches Michael’s drawers, looking for clues, answers, but finds none. Finally exhausted, she lies down on the bed and waits. She waits and waits, for what she does not know.

  At dinnertime, Detective Bascombe shows up with a bucket of fried chicken. “It’s no good eating alone,” he tells her and he’s right; she’s glad for the company. She likes the way he moves about the house—the burly intrusion of a seasoned cop.

  “You okay?” he asks gently.

  As if on cue, tears sprout from her eyes, but she ignores them and nods that, yes, she’s okay, she’s perfectly fine. He takes a folded handkerchief out of his pocket and offers it to her. She cries heartily into it for a while, then hands it back. “Feel better?” he says, refolding it, returning it to his pocket.

  “It’s a beautiful thing to carry someone’s tears in your pocket. Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He smiles almost bashfully. “I have some information for you about your husband’s car,” he says, getting down to business. “We found his gym bag in the trunk. The bag was pretty much destroyed in the fire, but some of the things survived.” He puts a heavy plastic bag on the table. It contains Michael’s stethoscope, a pair of sneakers.

  “Can I open it?” she asks the detective.

  “Please.”

  Rapaciously, she pulls out Michael’s stethoscope and puts it on and listens to her heart as if she might decipher a code that will lead her to him. She thinks about the tiny heart beating deep inside of her and new tears glaze her eyes. She takes off the stethoscope and puts it back in the bag.

  “We found this, too,” Bascombe says, revealing a gun in his open palms, a little black pistol.

  “Is it his? I didn’t know he had one.”

  “Not officially. It’s registered to a Marshall Sawyer. Does that name sound familiar?”

  “No.”

  “He’s one of the accountants for the hospital, lives a few blocks from it. I sent somebody down there yesterday, but the wife claims he’s out of town. Took a week off. We’ll keep on it.”

  “Can I see it? Can I hold it?”

  Bascombe hands her the gun. It feels cold in her hand. What else didn’t Michael tell her, she wonders. It’s clear he was in more danger than he ever let on. “It’s so cold,” she says.

  Cold and small, she thinks, like something dead.

  68

  SIMON WATCHES HIS WIFE from the bedroom window, loading up the trunk of her car. It is only half past six, a cold, gray morning, and she is up and dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt and rubber boots. The box looks heavy, full of cans of soup and tuna fish, boxes of saltines. And he sees other things, too: shaving cream, disposable razors, toilet paper. What is she doing with it, he wonders. She closes the trunk and hurries into the car and drives away.

  Later that morning, he calls McMillan & Taft and asks to speak to his wife. Her supervisor, Martin Banner, gets on the phone and tells him she’s been fired. “Fired? Why?”

  Banner tells him that she hasn’t shown up to work in nearly two weeks.

  Troubled by this news, Simon gets into his car and drives to St. Vincent’s Hospital to look for Reverend Tim, the one person who might know Lydia’s whereabouts. The lobby is crowded, people moving in all directions. “I’m looking for Reverend Tim,” he tells the woman at reception.

  “He’s up in critical care,” she says. “You can go on up. Ninth floor.”

  Simon takes the elevator. He does not like being in the hospital. He remembers the time he brought Lydia into the ER, doped up on pills. They’d made him wait outside while they stuck the tube down her throat. For a month or two after that, she rarely left the house. He’d done several drawings of her during that period, all of which she’d burned in a rage. Reverend Tim had come to town just afterward. Lydia had been vulnerable.

  Simon finds the minister with a patient, playing chess. He leans in the doorway and knocks on the door. Reverend Tim squints up. “Can I help you?”

  “Where’s my wife?”

  Reverend Tim excuses himself from the chess game and joins Simon in the hall. With his height and breadth, Simon towers over the disabled minister. “Hello, Mr. Haas. What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell me where my wife goes every day.”

  “Your wife is a committed member of our organization. She’s often involved with church events.”

  “My wife is a troubled woman.”

  “All of God’s creatures have qualities worthy of admiration, no matter how chaotic. Your wife has many. It’s a pity you don’t see them.”

  Simon contains the impulse to punch the man’s teeth out. “She hasn’t been home terribly much. I thought you might know where she is.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen her for over a week.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” Simon says. “You don’t fool me for a minute.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You set her up. She’s done all your dirty work, hasn’t she? And she’s still doing it.”

  Reverend Tim’s face reveals nothing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You sent her into that clinic with a bomb, didn’t you?”

  “Do I have to call security, Mr. Haas?”

  “Not to mention the other despicable things you did to Dr. Knowles? Where is he now? Did you kill him? Is that what you did? Or maybe you had my wife do it. Or maybe he’s still alive. Maybe you’ve got him locked up somewhere, is that it?”

  “Security!” the chaplain shouts. “I need security!”

  “You stay away from my wife, understand?” Simon says, a commotion brewing at the end of the hallway. “You leave her alone or I’ll kill you.”

  69

  THROUGHOUT THE DAY, the line of light around the cellar doors indicates the passage of time. Sometimes the shape of light resembles a cathedral and it makes him wonder if there’s a God. He admits to himself that he has little faith. His faith has been replaced by a wild terror that astonishes him. He does not know how it will serve him, but he knows, for certain, that it must.

  Contrary to his original prognosis, he is beginning to heal. His ribs are less tender and the infection in his eye is beginning to clear up. The cuts and bruises that cover his body don’t hurt so much now. Still, he feels weak, listless. Just walking to the toilet and back thoroughly exhausts him.

  “I brought you something,” she tells him on her next visit.

  “What is it?”

  She sets a photo album on the ground and shoves it toward him with her foot. “A little present. A tour of your life.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  She holds up his keys. “Where do you think?”

  “You have no right. You have no right to do that.”

  “I can do anything I want,” she says. “Don’t worry, no one was home. They’re off to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving.”

  “Please, just stay away from my family.”

  “Nice place. All those pretty stone walls. All safe and sound. It must have been terribly comfortable for all of you.”

  He watches her, amazed.