by Mary Kubica
I find myself jogging to the door, plunging the key into the lock to let myself in. I push the door closed behind me, and turn the dead bolt before making my way inside. I move down the narrow hall and to the reception area, Emma’s domain.
Before I arrived, there was another doctor in my place, a longtime resident of the island who went on maternity leave and never came back. Joyce and Emma often stand and pass baby photos around and lament how much they miss having Amanda here. They hold me responsible for her leave, as if it’s my fault she had that baby and decided to give motherhood a go.
What I’ve come to discover is that the island residents don’t take well to newcomers. Not unless you’re a child like Tate or gregarious like Will. It takes a rare breed to choose to live on an island, isolated from the rest of the world. Many of the residents who aren’t retired have simply chosen seclusion as a way of life. They’re self-reliant, autonomous, and also insular, moody, obstinate and aloof. Many are artists. The town is littered with pottery shops and galleries because of them, making it cultured but also pretentious.
That said, community is important because of the isolation that comes with island living. The difference between them and me is that they chose to be here.
I run a hand along the wall, feeling for the light switch. The lights above me come to life with a hum. There, on the wall before me, sits a large dry-erase calendar, Dr. Sanders’s and my work schedule. Emma’s brainchild. The schedule is arbitrary and irregular; Dr. Sanders and I are not slated to work the same days from week to week. If there’s any method to the madness, I can’t see it.
I go to the calendar. The ink is smudged, but still I see what it is that I’m looking for. My name, Foust, written under the date December first. The same day Mr. Nilsson supposedly saw Morgan Baines and me arguing. The same day Mr. Nilsson says I savagely tore a handful of hair from the woman’s head.
According to Emma’s calendar, on December first I was scheduled to work a shift that spanned nine hours, from eight in the morning to five that night. In which case, I was here at the clinic when Mr. Nilsson swears I was outside the Baineses’ home. I find my phone in my bag and snap a photo of it for proof.
I sit down at the L-shaped desk. There are notes stuck to it. A reminder for Emma to order more printer ink. For Dr. Sanders to call a patient back with test results. One of our patients is missing her doll. Her mother’s phone number is on the desk, with a request to call if the doll is found. The computer password is there, too.
I revive the computer. Our files are stored on medical software. I don’t know for certain that Mr. Nilsson is a patient of the clinic, but nearly everyone on this island is.
There are any number of eye disorders that affect the elderly, from presbyopia to cataracts and glaucoma, all the way to macular degeneration, one of the leading causes of blindness in older adults. It’s possible Mr. Nilsson suffers from one of these, and that’s the reason he thought he saw me with Mrs. Baines. Because he couldn’t see. Or maybe he’s begun to exhibit the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and was confused.
I open the computer program. I search for the medical records of George Nilsson, and sure enough, they’re there. I’m quite certain this violates HIPAA laws, and yet I do it regardless, even though I’m not Mr. Nilsson’s physician.
I scan his medical records. I come to discover that he’s diabetic. That he takes insulin. His cholesterol is high; he takes statins to keep it in check. His pulse and blood pressure are fine for a man his age, though he suffers from kyphosis, which I already knew. Mr. Nilsson is a hunchback. It’s painful and disfiguring, an offshoot of osteoporosis seen far more often in women than men.
None of this interests me.
What I find surprising is that Mr. Nilsson’s vision is fine. Dr. Sanders notes no concerns about Mr. Nilsson’s cognitive abilities. As far as I can tell, he’s of sound mind. His mental facilities aren’t failing him and he’s not going blind, which takes me right back to where I began.
Why did Mr. Nilsson lie?
I close the program. I move the mouse to the internet, double clicking. It opens before me. I type in a name, Courtney Baines, and only as I press Enter does it occur to me to wonder if she’s still a Baines or if, after the divorce, she reverted to a maiden name. Or maybe she’s remarried. But there’s no time to find out.
From down the hall, the back door opens. I have just enough time to X out of the internet and step back from the desk before Joyce appears.
“Dr. Foust,” she says, far too much animosity in her tone for eight o’clock in the morning. “You’re here,” she tells me as if this is something I don’t already know. “The door was locked. I didn’t think anyone was here.”
“I’m here,” I say, more perky than I mean to be. “Wanted to get a head start on the day,” I explain, realizing she’s as easily put off when I’m early as when I’m late. I can do no right in her eyes.
MOUSE
Once upon a time there was a woman. Her name was Fake Mom. That wasn’t her real name, of course, but that was what Mouse called her, though only ever behind her back.
Fake Mom was pretty. She had nice skin, long brown hair and a big, easy smile. She wore nice clothes, like collared shirts and sparkly tops, which she’d tuck into the waistband of her jeans so that it didn’t look sloppy like when Mouse wore jeans. She always looked put together in a way that Mouse did not. She always looked nice.
Mouse and her father didn’t wear nice clothes except for when it was Christmas or when her father was going to work. Mouse didn’t think nice clothes were comfortable. They made it hard to move. They made her arms and legs feel stiff.
Mouse didn’t know about Fake Mom until the night she arrived. Her father had never mentioned her and so Mouse got to thinking he probably met Fake Mom that very day he brought her home. But Mouse didn’t ask and her father didn’t say.
The night she arrived, Mouse’s father came into the house the same way he always did when he’d been gone. Mouse’s father usually worked from their home, in the room they called his office. He had another office, in a big building somewhere else that Mouse saw once, but he didn’t go there every day like other dads she knew did when they went to work. Instead he stayed home, in the room with the door closed, talking to customers nearly all day on the phone.
But sometimes he had to go to his other office, like he had the day he brought Fake Mom home with him. And sometimes he had to go away. Then he’d be gone for days.
The night that Fake Mom came home, he stepped into the house alone. He set his briefcase beside the door, hung his coat on the hook. He thanked the older couple across the street for keeping an eye on her. He walked them to the door with Mouse trailing behind.
Mouse and her father watched them make their way slowly across the street and back home. It looked like it was hard. It looked like it hurt. Mouse didn’t think that she ever wanted to get old.
When they were gone, her father shut the door. He turned to Mouse. He told her he had a surprise for her, that she should close her eyes.
Mouse was sure her surprise was a puppy, the one she had been begging for since the day they walked past it in the pet shop window, big and fluffy and white. Her father had said no at the time, that a puppy was too much work, but maybe he had changed his mind. He did that sometimes when she really wanted something. Because Mouse was a good girl. He didn’t spoil her, but he did like knowing she was happy. And a puppy would make her very, very happy.
Mouse pressed her hands to her eyes. For whatever reason, she held her breath. She listened intently for the sound of yaps and whimpers coming from the other end of the room where her father was standing. But there were no yaps or whimpers.
What she heard instead was the sound of the front door opening and then closing again. Mouse knew why. Her father had gone outside, back to his car to collect the puppy. Because it wasn’t like the puppy was hi
ding in his briefcase. It was still in the car, where he had left it so he could surprise her with it.
As she waited, a grin spread across Mouse’s face. Her knees shook in excitement. She could hardly contain herself.
Mouse heard the door close, her father clear his voice.
He was eager when he spoke. He said to Mouse, Open your eyes, and before she ever laid eyes on him, she knew that he was smiling, too.
Mouse’s eyes flung open, and without meaning to, her hand shot to her mouth. She gasped, because it wasn’t a puppy she saw standing before her in her own living room.
It was a woman.
The woman’s thin hand was holding Mouse’s father’s hand, fingers spliced together in that same way Mouse had seen men and women do it on TV. The woman was smiling widely at Mouse, her mouth big and beautiful. She said hello to the girl, her voice somehow as pretty as her face was. Mouse said nothing back.
The woman let go of Mouse’s father’s hand. She came forward, bent down to the girl’s height. The woman extended that same thin hand to Mouse, but Mouse didn’t know what to do with it, so she just stared down at the bony hand, doing nothing.
Mouse noticed then how the air was different that night, more dense, harder to breathe.
Her father told her, Now go on. Don’t be rude. Say hello. Shake her hand, and Mouse did, mumbling a feeble hello and slipping her tiny hand inside the woman’s hand.
Mouse’s father turned and hurried back outside. The woman followed behind.
Mouse watched on silently, staring through the window as her father unloaded bags of the woman’s things from his trunk. So many things, Mouse didn’t know what to make of it all.
When they came back inside, the woman slipped a candy bar out from the inside of her purse and handed it to the girl. Your father says chocolate is your favorite, she said, and it was, second only to Salerno Butter Cookies. But chocolate was a sorry consolation prize for a puppy. She would have rather had a puppy. But she knew better than to say that.
Mouse thought about asking the woman when she was going to leave. But she knew better than to ask that, too, and so she took the candy bar from the woman’s hand. She held it in her sweaty hands, feeling it go limp in her grip as the chocolate started to melt. She didn’t eat it. She wasn’t hungry, though she hadn’t had dinner yet. She had no appetite.
Among the woman’s many belongings was a dog crate. That got the girl’s attention. It was a good-size cage. Right away, Mouse tried to imagine what kind of dog it might hold: a collie or a basset hound or a beagle. She stared out the window as her father continued to bring things in, wondering when the dog would come.
Where’s your dog? the girl asked after her father had finished unloading the car and come back inside, locking up behind himself.
But the woman shook her head and told the girl sadly that she didn’t have a dog anymore, that her dog had just very recently died.
Then why do you have a dog crate? she asked, but her father said, That’s enough, Mouse. Don’t be rude, because they could both see that talking about the dead dog made the woman sad.
Mouse? the woman asked, and if Mouse didn’t know any better, she’d have thought the woman laughed. That’s some nickname for a little girl. But that was all she said. Some nickname. She didn’t say if she liked it or not.
They ate dinner and watched TV from the sofa, but instead of sharing the sofa with her father, as she always did, Mouse sat in a chair on the other side of the room, from which she could hardly see the TV. It didn’t matter anyway; she didn’t like what they were watching. Mouse and her father always watched sports, but instead they had on some show where grown-ups talked too much and said stuff that made the woman and her father laugh, but not Mouse. Mouse didn’t laugh. Because it wasn’t funny.
All the while, the woman sat on the sofa by Mouse’s father instead. When Mouse dared to look over, they were sitting close, holding hands like they had when she first arrived. It made Mouse feel strange inside. She tried not to look, but her eyes kept going back there, to their hands.
When the woman excused herself to go clean up for bed, her father leaned in close and told the girl that it would be nice for her to call this woman Mom. He said he knew it might be strange for a while. That if she didn’t want to, it was okay. But maybe she could work her way up to it in time, her father suggested.
The girl always tried to do everything she could to please her father because she loved him very much. She didn’t want to call this strange woman Mom—not now, not ever—but she knew better than to argue with her father. It would hurt his feelings if she did, and she didn’t ever want to hurt his feelings.
The girl already had a mother, and this was not her.
But if her father wanted her to, she would call his woman Mom. To her face anyway and to her father’s face. But in her own head, she would call this woman Fake Mom. That was what the girl decided.
* * *
Mouse was a smart girl. She liked to read. She knew things that other girls her age didn’t know, like why bananas are curved, and that slugs have four noses, and that the ostrich is the world’s biggest bird.
Mouse loved animals. She always wanted a puppy, but she never got a puppy. Instead she got something else. Because after Fake Mom arrived, her father let her pick out a guinea pig. He did it because he thought it would make her happy.
They went to the pet store together. The minute she laid eyes on her guinea pig, Mouse was in love. It wasn’t the same as a puppy, but it was something special still. Mouse’s father thought that they should name him Bert after his favorite baseball player, Bert Campaneris, and Mouse said yes to that because she didn’t have another name in mind. And because she wanted to make her father happy.
Mouse’s father bought her a book about guinea pigs, too. The night she brought Bert home, Mouse climbed into bed, under the covers, and read the book from end to end. She wanted to be informed. Mouse learned things about guinea pigs that she never knew, like what they eat and what every single squeak and squeal means.
She learned that guinea pigs aren’t related to pigs at all, and they don’t come from the country of Guinea, but from somewhere high in the Andes Mountains, which are in South America. She asked her father for a map, to see where South America was. He dug one out of an old National Geographic magazine in the basement, one that had been Mouse’s grandfather’s magazine. Her father had tried to throw the magazines away when her grandfather died, but Mouse wouldn’t let him. She thought they were fascinating.
Mouse put the map on her bedroom wall with Scotch tape. She stood on her bed and found the Andes Mountains on that map, drew a big circle around them with a purple pen. She pointed at the circle on her map, and told her guinea pig—in his cage on the floor beside her bed—that was where he came from, though she knew her guinea pig hadn’t come from the Andes Mountains at all. He had come from a pet store.
Fake Mom was always calling Bert a pig. Unlike Mouse, she didn’t read the book on guinea pigs. She didn’t understand that Bert was a rodent, not a pig, that he wasn’t even related to pigs. She didn’t know that he only got that name because he squeaked like a pig, and because once upon a time someone thought that he looked like a pig—though he didn’t. Not at all. That someone, in Mouse’s opinion, was wrong.
Mouse stood in the living room and told Fake Mom all that. She didn’t mean to sound like a know-it-all. But Mouse knew a lot of things. She knew big words, and could find faraway places on a map, and could say a few words in French and Chinese. Sometimes she got so excited she couldn’t help sharing it all. Because she didn’t know what a girl her age was supposed to know and not know, and so she just said what she knew.
This was one of those times.
But this time when she did, Fake Mom blinked hard. She stared at Mouse, saying nothing, with a frown on her face and a deep wrinkle forming between her eyes as wide as a r
iver.
But Mouse’s father said something.
He ruffled Mouse’s hair, beamed proudly at her and asked if there was anything in the whole wide world that she didn’t know. Mouse smiled back and she shrugged. There were things she didn’t know, of course. She didn’t know where babies came from, and why there were bullies at school, and why people died. But she didn’t say that because she knew her father didn’t really want to know. He was being rhetorical, which was another one of those big words she knew.
Mouse’s father looked at Fake Mom and asked, She’s really something, isn’t she?
Fake Mom said, She sure is. She’s unbelievable. But Fake Mom didn’t smile the same way her father had. Not a fake smile, not any kind of smile. Mouse wasn’t sure what to make of that word unbelievable, because unbelievable could mean different things.
The moment passed. Mouse thought the whole conversation about rodents and pigs was through.
But later that night, when her father wasn’t looking, Fake Mom got down into Mouse’s face and told her if she ever made her look stupid again in front of her father, there would be hell to pay. Fake Mom’s face got all red. She bared her teeth like a dog does when it’s mad. A vein stuck out of her forehead. It throbbed. Fake Mom spit when she spoke, like she was so mad she couldn’t stop herself from spitting. Like she was spitting mad. She spit on Mouse’s face but Mouse didn’t dare raise a hand to wipe it away.
Mouse tried to take a step back, away from Fake Mom. But Fake Mom was holding on too tightly to Mouse’s wrist. Mouse couldn’t get away because Fake Mom wouldn’t let go.
They heard Mouse’s father coming down the hallway. Fake Mom let go of Mouse’s wrist quickly. She stood straight up, fluffed her hair, ran her hands over her shirt to smooth it down. Her face went back to its normal shade, and on her lips came a smile. And not just any smile, but one that was radiant. She went to Mouse’s father, leaned in close and kissed him.