by Harry Kraus
“But what about your experience in Lafayette? Your chairman in surgery didn’t seem to mind knowing you were at risk for HD. He wanted you to continue in the program, didn’t he?”
“Sure, but being at risk for carrying the HD gene and actually carrying it are two different things.”
John didn’t reply. He squeezed her hand that he held in his, resting it safely on his knee away from the little ring box.
She closed her eyes and lay back against the headrest. The night before had been one of fitful slumber, tossing and rolling in anticipation of receiving the test results. The morning couldn’t pass soon enough for her. And now that she was on to John’s little engagement surprise, she was even more anxious to get on with it. She leaned over and snuggled her head against his shoulder. “What’s in the future?”
“The future?”
She hugged his right arm. “For us.”
John downshifted his Mustang to begin the climb up North Mountain and kept his eyes straight ahead. “How would I know?”
“Come on, John. If you were in control, what would it be like?”
He glanced at her, lingered, then quickly put his eyes back on the curvy road. “I wouldn’t let you suffer. I’d make you free of the HD gene, and free to pursue your career in surgery.” He smiled. “Of course, I’d want to be in the picture, maybe living in a doctor house in the country with a few horses, a dog, and a passel of kids.” When he said “doctor house” he lifted her hand with his to make a quotation-mark gesture with his fingers.
“You want to be in the picture? A doctor’s husband?”
He shrugged. She studied his face, delighted to see the edges of his mouth turning up.
She pulled her fingers free from his hand and stroked the side of his face with her index finger. “What’s that, a marriage proposal?”
“I didn’t say anything about marriage.”
“You said you wanted to live in a doctor house. I presumed I’m the one who bought it. And if I bought it, and you’re living in it, we’ll have to be married, so if that’s what you want for the future . . .” She softened her voice and leaned close to his ear, “. . . then it sounds like a proposal to me.”
John laughed. “I think you’ll know it if I’m proposing.”
She straightened, leaning back in her chair. “You’re no fun.”
“Maybe you should be the one proposing. I had to do it last time.”
Claire nodded and remembered what a disaster that had been. Right at a time she’d felt her heart attracted to another man, John had surprised her by coming to Boston and giving her a ring. So when she was supposed to be overjoyed, she’d run to the restaurant bathroom, locked herself in the stall, and cried. She shook her head and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about the last time.
She tried to watch him from the corner of her eye. He’d fallen silent, and she wasn’t about to just pop the big question herself. John turned right, left, and right again as the road wound along the edge of North Mountain. He wasn’t about to be rushed into proposing, even with an engagement ring so close at hand.
The rest of the trip, Claire closed her eyes, wanting to surrender to sleep, but wondering instead just what John had up his sleeve.
Forty-five minutes later, they arrived in Brighton. The day was already beginning to heat up, and John stopped for gas and bought a Diet Pepsi. The whole time, Claire stayed silent, occasionally checking her watch, and only once while John was getting gas did she sneak another feel of the little felt box.
When they pulled into the parking lot in front of the Brighton University Medical Center, Claire stalled, wanting to stay in the car to see how and if John would retrieve the ring. He looked at her, waiting for her to get out. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “This is it. Are you ready?”
“I feel a bit like a Peeping Tom.”
“What? How’s that?”
“Like I’m about to look into something, something maybe I shouldn’t, but I can’t quite resist doing it.”
John nodded.
Claire found her mind running from being a Peeping Tom to what her mother had said the evening before about not letting John look into her jeans. She put her hand on the door handle and hesitated. John was not budging. Finally, she surrendered, opened her door, and got out, but snuck a quick look back to watch him discreetly slide his hand beside his seat and close his fist around the ring box. He jumped from the car, his hand disappearing from view. He reappeared around the front of the car, his hands empty and in plain sight. But a subtle lump over the left front pocket of his pleated khaki pants provided the telltale clue. Now Claire was more convinced than ever. John was about to propose before she opened the letter revealing the test results. No wonder he had passed up his opportunity during their romantic evening. This would be even better. Why else would he bring the ring into the genetic clinic? If he were only going to ask her if she didn’t carry the HD gene, he could do it at a better time than after she got a negative result.
She pretended to look straight ahead, but snuck frequent peeks at John from the corner of her eye. Most people drop their middle name when they marry, but since I’ve always gone by Claire, I think I’ll just drop McCall. Elizabeth Claire Cerelli. She smiled. That has a nice ring to it.
They were early for Claire’s appointment with the counselor, so after registering at the window, she sat down and fidgeted through three women’s magazines in five minutes. The words passed without comprehension, the pictures a blur. She couldn’t have cared less about the contents which swung like a pendulum between elaborate recipes and articles about dieting secrets.
She lowered the magazine and looked at John and mouthed, “D day.”
“Elizabeth McCall.” The receptionist’s voice was distinctly nasal. Only people who didn’t know her personally called her Elizabeth.
She stood with John and took his hand. They walked together through a lime-green door into the clinic beyond. Virginia Byrd stood in the second doorway on the right. She brightened when she saw Claire and reached up to give Claire a hug. “Final session,” she said, leading them into the room.
Virginia, a genetics counselor, had spent hours talking with Claire over the past few months and had spent considerable time with Claire’s sister Margo last spring just after Claire had solved the mystery of the Stoney Creek curse. Margo wholeheartedly recommended Virginia as her choice for the sessions leading up to a genetics test for the HD gene.
Virginia’s friends all called her Ginny. She sat on a padded wooden chair and folded her hands in the lap of her denim skirt. She was just shy of five feet tall, and her gray-streaked blond hair was pulled back in a long single braid which nearly reached her waist. Claire estimated her to be about fifty-five years old, and thought she would look quite natural at an anti-Vietnam-war protest. Ginny’s office was neatly decorated with African art, small wooden carvings of elephants, Cape buffalo, and giraffe dotting the hanging shelves behind an old oak desk.
Claire sat next to John on a green flowered loveseat across from Ginny. She took a deep breath. This is it. She leaned forward and knotted both hands with John’s.
Ginny’s smile revealed a double row of full braces, a luxury she’d allowed herself when her youngest son graduated from college. A fine spray of wrinkles extended from the corners of her eyes when she smiled, the only evidence other than her streaky blond hair that she had lived before John Kennedy’s assassination. “Well,” she said, laying her hand on top of the couple’s, “we’ve been down a long road together.” She paused and looked at Claire, her blue eyes soft and searching. “How are you doing?”
Claire managed a little shrug. “A little scared, I guess.” She looked over at John. “And a little excited.”
John nodded his agreement.
“Both quite normal emotions at this time, I assure you.” She released their hands. “And you, John?”
“I’m okay. I’m ready for whatever you tell us.” John squeezed Claire’s hands a little tight
er.
Claire looked at the bulge over his left front pocket, then at her boyfriend, and forced a smile. You are ready for anything, aren’t you?
Ginny leaned back and reached over to her desk and picked up a file on her desk. It was labeled with Claire’s full name. “We have the test results. We have been over the implications of a negative and a positive test in some detail during our past sessions. Any last thoughts?”
Claire shook her head and looked at John. His thick curly brown hair had spilled over his collar since he moved away from his normal hair salon in Brighton. It framed his handsome face and offset his chiseled features with tenderness. You can give me the ring now. She’s going to hand me the envelope at any moment.
John shrugged. “God’s in control. It’s in his hands. Our place is to trust.”
Claire nodded. That was a conclusion she’d come to months ago, before making a decision to leave her surgery residency in Boston and return home to Stoney Creek to help with her father. At that point, she’d lost her twin brother, as well as a close guy-friend in residency. She was nearing the end of her ability to cope with being at risk for HD when she realized she didn’t need to be in control. It was a revelation accompanied by the gentle rain of God’s peace. She’d finally found the trust born from the knowledge that God loved her more than she could ever understand.
But over the months since that time, while Claire accepted the revelation in her head, she struggled to apply it in her life. She knew God loved her. She wanted to believe he was working everything in her life for the good, but every few weeks, she entertained a nagging doubt that God had been looking the other way when the devil scrambled up her ancestors’ genes. How could a loving God ever allow such indiscriminate suffering?
Claire cleared her throat and vainly tried to find a comfortable position nestled between that paradox of faith and doubt that provided her constant companionship. She was on the verge of knowing whether she had the gene for Huntington’s disease, and terror nipped at the corner of her mind. She looked at John, and her chin quivered as she spoke. “I want to trust.” She halted. “So why do I feel afraid?”
“It’s all normal,” Ginny responded. “And I want you to know that whatever the result, positive or negative, this office is at your disposal for counseling. Some of our most difficult cases have not been with those coping with a positive result. Some who are negative feel a horrible load of survivor’s guilt because they got off so easy.” She twirled the tip of her long braid. “Either way, we’re here for you.”
Claire nodded, aware that she was clenching her teeth.
Ginny opened Claire’s file and withdrew a white envelope. “Ready?”
Another nod from Claire, but this time she was studying her boyfriend. She released his hands and received the envelope Ginny was extending.
John’s left hand immediately felt for the ring box in his pocket. Claire watched him with anticipation. She was sure he’d brought the ring for this very moment. He was going to tell her he wanted her to be his wife regardless of her HD gene status.
She turned the envelope over in her hand and ran her index finger along the top. She’d waited so long for this moment. A revelation of her future was in her hand. She was about to peer into the crystal ball. She looked at John, studying him for a moment. Well? You can ask me to marry you now.
She slipped her finger under the lip of the envelope, popping it free. She glanced again at John’s left hand. It was draped casually over his thigh, covering the engagement surprise. He was drawing this out unbearably. She couldn’t open an envelope much slower. Ask me now, John. In a moment, I’ll have this paper open and you’ll have passed up the most romantic proposal opportunity.
She pulled the folded paper out of the envelope. She looked at John, desperately wanting him to drop to his knee. She squinted. “Do you have anything to say before I look at this?”
He shook his head.
Nothing? What about the ring in your pocket? What about confessing your undying love for me?
She watched as John dropped his head and closed his eyes. The realization crashed in: He was waiting for the result before asking. His head was bobbing slightly as if he were straining. He looked like he was waiting for the inevitable bad news.
Claire watched as the paper in her hand began to shake. As she began to unfold the paper, her eyes flooded with tears. Insecurity assaulted her full force. She’d asked John along, as her closest friend, for the support and love he’d provide regardless of the result. Since they’d gotten back together in Stoney Creek, John hadn’t hesitated to confess that he’d never stopped loving her. So what was holding him back from a real commitment?
She couldn’t focus. In her hand was the answer to the mystery, but if John wasn’t going to propose without knowing the result, what kind of love was that? Claire knew the answer. Love bears all things. Love that couldn’t make the commitment of “in sickness and in health” wasn’t real love at all.
“Honey?” John’s voice was soft. He waited a moment longer before squeezing her shoulder gently. “Claire?”
She was staring at the open paper in front of her, but couldn’t read anything. And even if the tears would have allowed her to see, she’d lost the desire to know. If John wasn’t going to propose, she wasn’t sure she had the will to know the future. The penultimate question of whether she carried the Huntington’s disease gene needed to be answered if Claire wanted to plan her future, but without the assurance that John Cerelli was part of her life, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“I can’t do this,” she stammered. “Not now.” She pushed the paper back in Ginny’s hands and stood up. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She held her forehead with both hands and released a sob. “I’m just not ready to know.” She wiped her moist cheek with her palm and sniffed, before turning her back on John and striding to the door.
She ran down the hall and through the crowded waiting room. Once she was outside, she kept her mouth covered until she was safely alone in John’s car. There, she dissolved into a fit of sobs, laying her forehead down upon the dashboard. She clinched her hands into tight fists and cried.
She had counted on love to get her through D day, only to doubt that the love John pledged was really love at all.
Chapter Five
John glanced at Claire without speaking before turning on a CD of classic Italian opera. It was an infatuation that Claire didn’t share. For John, it was a reconnection with his heritage, and an excuse to practice the Italian language he’d studied during college. Claire gave him “the look,” which in this case meant, “not now.” He snapped off the CD and took a deep breath. Claire didn’t speak on the way back to Stoney Creek, except when John slowed in front of Fisher’s Cafe in the small town of Fisher’s Retreat, and she mumbled, “I’m not hungry.” At that, John let out an audible sigh and drove on.
They stopped at the Stoney Creek Family Medicine clinic an hour early for Claire’s afternoon clinic. John leaned toward her, and she passively accepted his good-bye kiss on her cheek. Then she let herself out, slipped in the back door of the clinic and into her office, and closed the door.
She had to get her mind off John, her disappointment over her expectations, and her HD test. The best way was to immerse herself in patients and the challenges they presented. Here in her office, her desk groaned with the load of work demanding Claire’s attention. She smiled. Here there was work to do, people with problems bigger than her own. She sat at the desk and leaned forward. If she filled her life with solving other’s problems, she wouldn’t have to deal with her own.
Claire looked at a stack of charts in her in-box with labs and X-ray reports to review, and her dictated notes of previous office visits to review and sign. She lifted the first chart, a fifty-two-year-old diabetic woman who refused to watch her diet. Her glucose control was horrible, and she had come in with a pressure ulcer on the bottom of her foot at the base of her great toe. The entire digit was bright red
with streaks extending up to her ankle. Claire had urged immediate admission to the closest hospital in Carlisle for IV antibiotics and possible toe amputation. The patient, Mabel Henderson, was a lifelong resident of Stoney Creek. She refused admission, stating she’d never been to the hospital and wasn’t going to start now. After a twenty-minute discussion, Clair relented, warned the patient of the life- and limb-threatening consequences of her decision, and wrote her a prescription for oral antibiotics. “Don’t you have any samples? Dr. Jenkins always gave me samples. The pharmacy is all the way over in Fisher’s Retreat,” Mabel whined. Claire raided the sample closet and returned with a five-day supply of Cipro. She was afraid to give her more for fear she wouldn’t come back soon for follow up. Claire signed her note and prayed that Mabel would cooperate.
The next chart was Buzzy Alderson’s. Buzzy had a hernia the size of a cabbage, and hadn’t sought care until it started affecting the fit of his baggy bib overalls. Just looking at Buzzy’s hernia made Claire long to be in surgery again. She referred him to Greg Branum, a general surgeon who’d escaped a big-city practice and come to work in Carlisle a year ago. She smiled at her nurse’s notation of Buzzy’s chief complaint. “I’ve got a rupture.” Claire signed her office note and forged ahead.
The next chart belonged to Lena Chisholm. Claire couldn’t forget the girl whose one good eye danced with fear. Claire felt her stomach tighten, knowing that this patient also had ignored her advice. She wondered how many punches it would take until Lena would consider leaving. Claire knew it was only too hard for many abused women to leave, and for some, the result of staying was fatal. She shook her head and checked the face sheet. “Lena Chisholm. 82 Briary Branch Road.” She kept reading. “Spouse: Billy Ray Chisholm.” What a jerk. Why would Lena stay with a guy like that? Maybe he’s a real saint when he’s not drunk. She answered her own thought with a sarcastic whisper, “Yeah, right!”
She thought of her own childhood, and how crazy Wally got when he’d been drinking. And now, looking back, she didn’t know how much was the moonshine and how much was the early manifestations of HD.