by Harry Kraus
“Who’s she?”
“She’s a young woman I treated. Her husband hits her. Busted her eyebrow wide open and gave her a nasty sprained ankle when he shoved her down the stairs.”
“She told you this?”
“Didn’t have to. I could tell.” She hesitated. “We need to go out there.”
“What? Uninvited?”
“She could be in trouble. I told her to call if she wanted help.”
“You don’t know she’s in trouble, Claire. How long ago did she call?”
“Right before you knocked.”
“Okay, she probably couldn’t get to the phone or something. You said yourself, she has a sprained ankle. Call and leave a message.”
Claire thought about arriving unexpected at Billy Ray’s door. It might not be pretty. She picked up the phone and keyed in the number again. After listening through the message, she begin to speak slowly, praying that Billy wouldn’t answer the phone. “Lena, this is Dr. McCall. I’m just calling to follow up your clinic visit to make sure everything was working out—”
“Hello.”
Relief. It was Lena’s voice. “Lena! Are you okay?” She made herself slow down and lowered her voice, as though she was in the room with her. “Is your husband home?”
“No. I’m alone.”
Claire looked at John and passed along the message by shaking her head. “I was concerned about you. Are you okay?”
She sniffed. “I’m okay.”
“You called me. Has Billy Ray been hitting you?”
“William Raymond would never do that. He loves me.”
“Is he out with his friends?”
Lena sighed, then answered, “Yes.”
“Were you afraid, Lena? Is that why you called?”
“I got my stitches wet washing my hair. I wanted to know what I should do.” She paused. “But I thought it was stupid to bother you, so I hung up.”
She listened to Lena’s answer, knowing it wasn’t really why she had called. Then: “Listen, Lena, I know what it’s like to be with a man with a violent temper. My father was a different man when he was drinking.”
“William’s not like that. He only drinks a beer or two. He says it helps him bowl better ’cause he can relax.”
Billy had smelled like more than beer yesterday. Claire understood Lena was covering for him. She just couldn’t understand why. Maybe Lena was just too terrified to tell. “I want you to keep your appointment for next week. I need to look at your ankle and remove the sutures.”
“Okay.” Sniff.
Claire took a deep breath. “Listen, Lena. I keep this phone on all the time. You have my permission to use it anytime. Call me if you’re afraid.”
The line went dead again.
Claire turned to John and shook her head. “She’s in denial. Or just covering for him. She keeps saying he loves her, and he wouldn’t hit her.
Anyway, I think we can relax for now. She said she’s alone.”
“So she’s okay until this Billy Ray gets home.”
The thought hit her in the gut. “From what I saw in the chart, she seems to come into the clinic after a weekend.”
John nodded and Claire sat down at her desk and sighed. “I’ve still got paperwork to finish.”
“I can wait.” He walked around and sat in a second chair next to her bookshelf. “This was going to be a big day for us, Claire.”
She shook her head. She had hoped he wouldn’t bring it up. “D day.”
“D day,” he repeated.
“I really don’t want to talk about it, John. I just want to get my paperwork finished and go home for a nice long bath.”
“You can’t just ignore it, Claire.”
“Watch me.”
“Claire.”
“Can’t you leave it? I just want a normal life. Work, family, friends. I don’t want to spend my whole life thinking about ending up like Wally.”
“Claire, you said you wanted to know. We wanted to know, so we could plan the future, remember?”
“Maybe I’ve changed my mind. Getting some test result isn’t going to change the future. My DNA has been set ever since that fateful joining of Wally’s—”
“I know the biology, Claire. But we’ve been through this. A thousand times. We talked to Ginny at the center. We’ve talked to your mom. We prayed. The test won’t change anything, but at least we’ll be able to plan.”
And you can avoid a life of misery like Della. Lovely Della McCall, once the queen of the Apple Blossom Parade, now the nursemaid to a slobbering invalid.
The abruptness of her thought made her drop her head into her hands. Della seemed able to see the old Wally she loved through the HD. Sometimes all Claire saw was the drunk that drove her away. After a few long seconds, she held up her hands. “I know all this, John. And I above all people know the value of being able to plan for the future. But I’m just not ready, I guess. I know I’ve got to trust God regardless of the answer, but maybe I’m just not as strong as I need to be.”
“You’re strong, Claire. The strongest.”
“But maybe I’m afraid, okay? I’m afraid I won’t be ready to face what comes next if I know some ugly disease is just around the corner ready to pounce.”
“I’ll be there with you.”
“Maybe once you know what’s coming, you’ll feel different.”
“Claire, that’s unfair, you know I’m here—”
“Look, John, I don’t want to go into this. It’s been a rough day. I lost it in the genetics clinic, I blew up at a patient, I snapped at my nurse, and now you want to pressure me into finding out the future. Well, maybe I just don’t want to know!” she yelled. “Maybe I just want a normal life.” She pushed away a stack of charts. “There are enough problems here for me to fill my time. I just want to help these people.” She started to cry. “I just want to have one day where I don’t worry about ending up like my daddy.”
John’s mouth hung open, unspeaking. He walked forward and put his arms around Claire.
With some reluctance, she surrendered to his coaxing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” She wiped her eyes.
“Help me, Claire,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to do to help.”
She pushed free from his embrace. “Don’t try to find a solution, John. Just let me be. I don’t need a knight to rescue me.” She picked up a chart and opened it to the face sheet of intake information. “If you want to rescue someone, why don’t you rescue lovely Lena when her husband shows up drunk enough to kill her.”
“Claire, I’m—”
She held up her hand. “Listen, I’ve still got charts. Why don’t you go on? I’ll just call Mom to pick me up when I’m done.”
His upper lip stiffened like it always did when he was trying not to show his disappointment. He studied the chart in his hand for a moment, then handed it back to Claire. “Fair enough.” He nodded and walked slowly from the office. She heard the back door open, and then John’s voice. “Your maintenance man is sitting in his truck. He was there when I came in, too.”
Suddenly Claire remembered her promise to cut Cyrus’s hair. Was he just sitting out there waiting for her? “Oh dear,” she said, running out after John, “I forgot all about him.”
She made eye contact with John, who whispered, “Should I stay?”
She waved him on, and said Cyrus wouldn’t be any problem. She walked to the door of the truck where Cyrus sat in the heat without the AC. At least his window was down. “I’m sorry, Cyrus. Were you waiting for me?”
He nodded and lifted his dark curls from his collar.
“Come on back in. I didn’t realize you were waiting.”
“It don’t matter. I knew you were busy.”
She walked into an exam room and selected her tools, a sharp pair of scissors, and a number-twenty scalpel blade to shave his neck. Cyrus watched with interest until she snapped the blade onto a knife-handle. His eyes widened from lazy sli
ts.
“You’re not going to use that to—”
“Relax, Cyrus. It’s only to finish up. I’m going to use the scissors.”
She looked at his hair for a moment and decided that cutting it after a day’s work in and around the office had produced an oily challenge. She picked a little twig from his bangs. “You must have been trimming the shrubs.”
“The boxwoods are growing great.”
She looked at the little wash-up sink. “Scoot your chair over here and wet down your hair. I think I have some shampoo in my Nike bag. I keep it here in case I want to go up to the fitness center in Carlisle after work.”
“You work out?”
She smiled and admitted, “Well, I did once.” She shrugged. “But I’m ready in case the urge hits.”
She found the shampoo and turned on the faucet. “Tilt your head back. There.” She began massaging the lather into his curls. Cyrus seemed nervous, shifting first left then right in his seat.
“I thought you were just going to cut it.”
“You can’t expect me to cut it before it’s clean.” She continued to massage his scalp into a thick lather. The action brought memories of cutting her twin’s hair, something he’d let only her do until she left for Boston. It was always a moment of bonding for the twins. Clay and Claire McCall, so alike, and so very different.
Suddenly she didn’t feel like talking. And fortunately, Cyrus was too inhibited, or too put back by the treatment of having his hair washed. She cut it to fall above his ears, pausing only once to ask him if he approved of the length. Then she soaped and shaved his neck with the scalpel with light short strokes. She balanced the blade in her hand when she was done, enjoying the feel of the cool steel handle against her fingers.
“I’ll clean this mess up,” he said.
“And I’ll work on my charts.”
She watched as he studied himself in the mirror above the sink. He seemed okay with her job. He wasn’t smiling, but at least he didn’t faint.
A few minutes later, he stopped at her desk. “I’d better get going.”
“Not so fast. Now I need a return favor.”
“I need to be going.”
“Me too. Can you give me a lift? I’ll come in on Saturday and finish my paperwork.”
He agreed. At his truck he moved a toolbox and a collection of paper and foil fast-food wrappers from the passenger seat to make room.
“You were quite impressive helping me out with little Stevie like you did.”
“It was nothing.”
“Oh, yes, it was. I could have never controlled him to get the IV without you.” She studied his nonresponse. “And if the truth be known, you gave me the idea to relieve the vacuum in the bottle like I did.”
She watched as the corner of his mouth turned up. He didn’t look half bad with his new haircut. Her sister Margo would have called him “hot.” But somehow Claire hadn’t gotten used to calling handsome men “hot.” “Buff ” maybe, or even “hunk,” but not “hot.” She smiled at him, knowing his concentration was on the road. Yes, Cyrus, I think I’ll go with Margo’s choice of words here. You are hot, aren’t you?
She looked back at the road, and the lane coming up on the right. She lifted her hand to point. “Turn here.”
Surprise was evident in his response. “Here?”
“I live with my parents. My dad is ill. I help take care of him.”
Cyrus stayed quiet and drove up the lane, pulling to a crunchy stop in the gravel lane in front of the house. She let herself out. “Thanks.”
He pulled away as she paused on the porch for inventory. She hadn’t talked to her mother since the test, so she needed to be ready for the reaction.
She went straight through the living room to the kitchen, where she found her mother slicing potatoes to mash. It was one of the few dishes that Wally enjoyed and didn’t choke on or spit out. Della put her hand to her mouth. “I’ve been so worried—”
Claire held up her hand. “I chickened out. I didn’t get my test results. I’ve already been through this with John and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Della tried to protest, but Claire cut her off. “Why don’t you let me finish up? I’ll feed Wally. Go to a movie in Carlisle. You need a break.”
“I—well, I could use the time to get groceries.”
“Go,” Claire said, picking up a pan and putting it on the stove.
Della put her hands on her hips. Claire could feel her stare drilling into her soul. “Look, Mom, I’ll talk when I’m ready. I’m just not ready.”
Her mother nodded and pulled off her apron, the one she wore when she fed Wally. The one with a hundred stains from feeding fiascos, the result of trying to stuff a meaningful amount of food into a moving target.
Claire cooked, fed Wally, put on his extra-large nighttime diaper, and finally found solace in a wonderland of bath bubbles. She dried her hair, kissed her hand, which she transplanted to her father’s forehead, and retreated to her room.
There, long after Della returned from a rare moment without Wally, Claire lay staring at the ceiling listening to her father’s noises. Gentle thumping of his arms and legs against the padded rails, whistling sounds as his feet slid across the sheets. Grunting gurgling preceeded the coughing spasms that inveritably pulled Claire back from the brink of slumber time and time again.
“Oh, God,” she whispered in the darkness. “I wish I wasn’t Wally’s girl.”
Chapter Seven
L’amore é svanito. Il mio cuore non canterá mai piú.
John turned down the opera so he could concentrate and slowed down for another curve in the aptly named road. He doubted you could find a straight stretch of any significant length on a briar. He squinted at a mailbox as the light from his Mustang’s headlamps illuminated it. “Forty-four Briary Branch Road.”
I’ve still got a ways to go. Lena’s chart said eighty-two.
The hills leading toward the Allegheny Mountains south of Stoney Creek were sparsely populated with poultry farms with their long barns, which stayed lit long after sundown. But here, where the road began to wind up toward Blue Knob, the forest was too thick for agriculture, and the only clue that anyone populated the trees beyond the narrow roadbed were the uniform mailboxes that stuck out from the tangle of sweet honeysuckle and briars.
He passed another mailbox and then another a quarter mile up the road before he needed to downshift to a lower gear. With the grade getting steeper, the houses were even less frequent and John’s music more out of place.
He wasn’t sure what he should do once he got there. Or why he had convinced himself to try to find her on a lonely Friday night. But maybe that was just it, he thought. He was lonely, and he found solace in his music and in his convertible, driving in the country with the wind tangling his curls. At first his drive had been random, turning first right, then left, then heading toward the mountains, perhaps hoping to escape his wounded heart. He’d sat watching the sun go down from an overlook which gave him a view into West Virginia. There, he sang along with his music, and thought about Claire and the past that they’d shared.
After soothing his aching soul, John descended from the mountaintop and saw the lane that sparked the thought that he would at least drive by to see where Claire’s patient had endured such torture. There was nothing else to do. His Friday night plans for a celebration with his fiancée were trashed. Perhaps he should do as Claire had suggested—rescue Lena when her drunken husband returned home. The idea seemed almost ludicrous to him now, as he slowed his car to a stop a few hundred feet beyond a mailbox that said “82 Briary Branch Road.” There, it appeared that a logging road exited, a turn-off not much wider than his car. It disappeared into the thick woods just beyond his headlights. He pulled off the road onto the dirt logging trail and switched off the ignition. Then, listening to the night sounds, he trained his ear toward a faint light deep within the woods. He imagined it to be the house he was seeking, but the trees were too thic
k to be sure. The wailing, rhythmic braying of a hunting dog responded to the silence as the engine died.
Maybe this is a bad idea. Just what am I to do now? Sneak up on this house by the moonlight, and wait for some giant redneck to beat up his wife? And what if he does show up? Then how do I explain what I’m doing?
But John was unafraid of the dark, and intrigued by the thought of collecting some helpful social background for Claire. If nothing else, perhaps he could reassure her that he snuck a peek at a happily married couple playing Scrabble at the dining room table. Claire always felt more responsibility for others’ actions than she needed to. Perhaps this was just another example of her oversensitive conscience, a remnant left over from a life where she learned too young that fathers and husbands can be cruel. After all, hadn’t Lena denied it all?
The thought prompted him to slip out of the car, over his door, not through it, as he didn’t want to slam it shut and stir up whatever monster hound was waiting to sing again. He backtracked up the road, wishing he hadn’t left his keys in the ignition, but telling himself that no one would steal a car from the middle of nowhere. The moon was out enough to create dim shadows, so he stayed on the grass beside the road where the light was poor, but he was less likely to be seen by the hungry dogs. Besides, walking here was quieter than the gravel. He paused at the mailbox and squinted toward the light, which he could now see was on the apex of a detached garage. A steep bank fell off beginning three feet from the road’s edge, descending into a thicket of scratchy torture. If he wanted to get a better look at the house, he’d have to use the narrow yard on the other side of the lane. He dashed from tree to tree, pausing at each one to catch his breath and question his sanity. There were two vehicles in a gravel driveway, a Toyota sedan, circa 1992, and a fairly new red Dodge Ram pickup. It appeared Billy Ray must be home already and he drove a much nicer vehicle than his wife. The house was dark except for a single light in the front window. He studied the front yard and, hearing no monster dog, crept to a vantage point just beyond a large bush in front of the house. His heart pounded as he ventured a peek around the bush. He could see a young woman sitting alone on a couch with her foot propped up on a pillow. He quickly looked behind him, suddenly afraid because of the absence of the woman’s husband. If he wasn’t with her, then would he be coming home soon? He studied the garage, which was dark except for the single light at the apex of the roof. The house itself was a small ranch, perhaps two bedrooms, with pale aluminum siding that looked blue-gray in the moonlight. The only noise, beyond John’s own breathing, was a chorus of cicadas and frogs.