Never Say Never

by Taylor Holloway

  Seeing me idle and still, my cat Wallace decided to capitalize on the opportunity. He jumped up on my lap to demand his daily five minutes of affection from me. I scratched between his velvety-soft ears obediently and he purred like a happy motorboat. For a former stray tomcat, the big black fluff ball had adjusted just fine to the good life in my townhouse. Just as I began to feel comforted by the one creature who apparently liked and trusted me, his duplicitous nature made itself known. As abruptly as he arrived, Wallace turned around to sink his teeth into my forearm. Before I could react, he leaped off my lap and sauntered away like nothing had happened.

  “Ow! Dammit Wallace! You’re such an asshole,” I said to him, rubbing the new, shallow punctures on my arm. At least he hadn’t drawn blood this time. As usual, Wallace ignored me. Stupid cat didn’t give a shit about my opinions. In fact, I’d originally thought he was stone deaf, but the vet assured me that his ears worked fine. He responded to normal stimuli, but not the sound of my voice, because Wallace just fundamentally didn’t care what I said. The ungrateful, freeloading feline took a few bites of kibble and then curled up on my briefcase and went to sleep.

  Bereft of distractions, I picked up my phone again. It was time to make my move and ensure I’d have her help on the medical aspects of my project (as well as ensure I got to see her again). It’s not like I was asking her out. Right? Right. I mean, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. She was Dylan’s little sister.

  This was billable time related to a legal matter. Even if I spent an inordinate amount of time cyberstalking Eva this afternoon and found some excellent pictures of her on the Duke track team wearing just the world’s tiniest, tightest little shorts and a sports bra. And then bookmarked them.

  Giving up on texting Eva, I called her. No answer. Fuck. Awkward voicemail time. I’m honestly not sure what I ended up saying because it passed by in a blur, but it must have been good enough because she called me back thirty minutes later. I was looking at her college track photos again when the phone rang. I closed the lid on my laptop guiltily. At least looking was all I’d been doing.

  “Hello Charlie?” Eva’s sultry, feminine voice asked. Hearing her say my name in that sexy voice made my heart pound. “You left me a voicemail?” She sounded vaguely amused. “Is your fax machine broken or something?”

  Great, she was going to tease me some more about my age.

  “I didn’t know your pager number,” I replied. “Oh, and last week my cat ate my carrier pigeon.”

  “I was hoping you’d call actually,” Eva said, shocking me. “I’m sorry if I was rude this evening. That country club was something else and I was out of my element. A woman had just accosted me before those girls drove her off. I’ve never been to a country club before. I don’t think I like them.”

  I knew she was from a solidly middle-class background. Eva and Dylan were military brats raised by a single dad. Her father was an officer in the military police. I would also almost guarantee she would have had to have been a needs-based scholarship kid at Duke if her athletic and academic gifts weren’t enough to pay her way. Our armed forces don’t pay enough to put kids through private colleges.

  Still, she had a hell of a lot fancier pedigree than me.

  “Don’t be sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted while you were working. As for that country club, don’t let it get to you. Waterloo isn’t the real world. It’s like Disney World for rich people.”

  Her reply took a second and sounded a bit wistful. “Isn’t Disney world already for rich people? My parents could never take me.”

  I could sympathize. “Yeah me neither. I just meant that half the population are actually just freaks in masks.”

  Eva giggled. “I take it you didn’t grow up here? Dylan said you were from the area.”

  This conversation was already veering off course. Usually I did everything possible to avoid talking about my sordid background. Strangely, however, I found myself wanting to tell her things. Maybe because I hoped she’d share something about herself in return. Maybe just because I wanted her to like me.

  “God no. I’m not from Waterloo. I’m from inner-city Philadelphia. I only joined the Waterloo Country Club because the firm paid for it and we’re more or less expected to golf.”

  “You aren’t much of a golfer?”

  “Golfing is… well no, honestly I don’t enjoy it, but it’s a professional necessity. I only go to the clubhouse when there’s a good reason.”

  “What was your reason tonight?” A smile was obvious in her voice.

  “I was looking for you.” I had no doubt a smile was evident in my reply as well.

  “You went there to look for me?” Her voice sounded pleased and flattered. I wondered if she was blushing bright pink again like she had when I complimented her dress earlier that evening. Her blushes were adorable. Just like her freckles. Just like her everything.

  Distracted, my next words were not what I meant them to be. “Yes. I needed to get in touch with you for work.”

  “I’m work? I mean, what work?” Her voice was different now. Not sharp exactly but definitely guarded. Almost hurt. Shit. Well I had led her on. I hadn’t wanted to, but I kind-of had… either way it was too late.

  I rushed ahead before she got irritated and hung up on me. “I need your help interpreting Edith’s records. And I need help to find her missing ones.”

  Her reply took a long time. “Alright. Richard told me to help you. When do you want to discuss it? Right now really isn’t a great time for me. It’s kind of late.”

  Yeah, I could see how ten pm would be less than ideal. I felt like a dumb jerk for calling her so late.

  Real professional dumbass. No wonder you gave her the wrong idea.

  “Do you take lunch breaks? I could take you to a working lunch tomorrow.” I’m sure I sounded stupid and guilty. I felt stupid and guilty. I was stupid and guilty.

  A few seconds passed between my question and her answer again. I got the feeling she no longer wanted anything to do with me.

  “Ok. I go to lunch at eleven thirty.” Her voice was totally flat.

  “Sounds good. I’ll pick you up in front of the east entrance tomorrow.”

  “Ok. See you then.” Eva hung up the phone immediately.

  It’s a date.

  Not smooth, but then again, I was profoundly out of practice when it came to meaningful interactions with women. I actually couldn’t even remember the name of the last woman I went out with. Savannah? Georgia? It was something that evoked southern geography. Virginia. She went by Ginny. I think that was it. She was probably pretty and smart, but we hadn’t clicked. Hence the fact I couldn’t remember anything but her name, and even that fact was sketchy at best.

  Eva and I clicked right away. Even though it had been years, I could feel the connection was still there, despite the fact she just hung up on my dumb ass. Being near her made me feel all tingly and electric. It made stupid things come out if my mouth and dirty thoughts come into my brain.

  I wanted Eva badly, and I couldn’t imagine that she hadn’t realized it. I wanted her in her itty-bitty running booty shorts and sports bra. I wanted her in her tight little sheath dress with the heels and the panty-hose. I particularly wanted her in her goddamn ugly hummingbird scrubs, so I could tear them off her body and set a match to them.

  But if my act of self-sabotage was as effective as I suspected, Eva probably hated me now. I would deserve it. It wasn’t her fault I didn’t know how to keep my personal desire for her out of my professional life. Giving her mixed messages wasn’t fair. Professional boundaries exist for a reason. Getting close to Eva was a bad idea for a number of reasons: my eighty-hour workweeks, my complex familial obligations, that her brother was my best friend, and the fact that I wouldn’t know a functional relationship if it slapped me upside the head. The list was long.

  Unfortunately for me, I was just full of bad ideas tonight. I stumbled out of my fancy desk chair and made myself a cup of espresso. Espresso at
ten pm would keep me up all night, but it was tasty and provided a mental break from Eva that would help me concentrate on my research.

  I reluctantly resettled behind my laptop and closed the ten or so tabs I had open on Eva Martin’s twenty-three years of life. A new email from Richard had arrived in my inbox and it was going to require some serious digging before I could reply. Cracking my knuckles loud enough to cause Wallace to raise his lazy head up long enough to see what was going on, I started a new search on Edith. More specifically, on the recent arrest of the medical examiner who signed Edith’s death certificate a few weeks ago. It seemed he had developed a raging methamphetamine addiction over the past year, and now all his cases were being reviewed.

  Delightful.

  It was going to be a long night.

  6

  Eva

  “Oh, don’t be such a whiny little prick tease,” Alexander said when I admonished him for pinching my ass the next morning. “We both know you like it. You’re a dirty girl. I bet you have all sorts of nasty thoughts about me in that little head of yours.”

  It took every ounce of my patience and understanding to avoid backhanding him, let alone excuse his behavior.

  It’s part of his disease, I told myself firmly, fighting down my anger and disgust. He can’t help it. The past few weeks had been a mental and physical test of my ability to treat a patient like Alexander with the compassion and kindness that all suffering people deserved. In my heart of hearts, part of me wondered how much of Alexander’s awful, offensive behavior actually was symptomatic of his disease, and how much was just his natural, unpleasant personality.

  Dr. Matthieu had warned me that an inability to control impulses, particularly sexual or taboo impulses, was common in patients with Alzheimer’s. It was sort-of like Alexander was drunk and having a Mel Gibson-style racist, horny meltdown at all times.

  The one saving grace of Alexander’s antics was that they kept me very, very busy. So busy that I didn’t have time to think about Charlie. Our lunch date that was not a real date was ticking ever closer, and my stomach tightened every time I looked at the clock.

  “Where’s that colored fellow that’s usually hanging around here? You know, the one who’s a bit light in the loafers?” Alexander questioned next as I was taking his vitals, referring to Thomas.

  “He’ll be here in about ten minutes. He’s in a meeting with Dr. Matthieu,” I told him honestly. We were trading off watching Alexander this morning so each of us could have some one-on-one time with our boss.

  “Too bad,” Alexander replied snidely. “I was hoping he’d quit. I don’t like the idea of one of those people touching my food. I was also hoping you and I would have a bit of alone time.”

  Behind his thick glasses, Alexander raised a single eyebrow at me suggestively. I stifled my disgusted smirk and pretended that I didn’t catch his drift at all.

  I also managed not to ask whether he was more offended that Thomas was black or gay. Probably both, but it fundamentally didn’t matter. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that Alexander’s nastiness was all part of the disease, his underlying personality features, attitudes and general prejudices should be largely intact and unaltered by his overall senility. It was mostly only his memory and impulse control that were affected.

  Anything that entered Alexander’s brain, no matter how horrible, shocking, or obscene came out of his mouth. The offensive thoughts which at first had been mortifying to hear anyone putting voice to, now increasingly filled me with pity for Alexander. It was obvious from his face that he had no idea how thoroughly he embarrassed himself on a daily basis. The fact that everyone just humored or ignored him didn’t make it any better.

  “Your daughter is coming for a visit later this afternoon,” I mentioned to distract Alexander from any further discussion about Thomas. “Are you excited to see her?”

  “Spending time around Edith is too depressing, so I hope you’re talking about Deborah,” Alexander replied. His voice was snide and haughty. Alexander didn’t remember that Edith was dead, that sort of information wasn’t capable of implanting into his memory anymore, but knowing she was dead made his comments even more cruel.

  “Deborah is coming today, not Edith.” I shook my head at him with a disapproval that he could neither understand nor care less about.

  “Oh, thank goodness. Seeing Edith always gives me a migraine. Is Deborah bringing the boys with her?” Alexander’s expression was hopeful, and a small stab of pity reached me even though my irritation. The boys he was referring to were now men in their mid-twenties. Alexander might be crude, mean, and unfiltered, but he was constantly asking after his grandchildren.

  “I’m not sure,” I told him. Of course, I doubted that either David or Nathan would be accompanying their mother on her weekly visit, but there was no need to crush Alexander’s hopes. He’d lit up like a Christmas tree when I hadn’t said no.

  “Did you know Nathan and David are both learning French from a private tutor?” Alexander told me proudly. “All of my five grandchildren are going to grow up speaking French.”

  Alexander only had four living grandchildren. I didn’t know he was simply making a math error or if there had been a still-born child or another tragedy along the way. Naturally, I let it slide.

  “That’s wonderful. I’ve heard that bilingual children do much better in school. Particularly math and music,” I said instead.

  “Music is pointless,” Alexander said dismissively. “Children should be taught useful things in school. That’s one of the things I hate about America. In France, when I was growing up, we didn’t learn anything that wasn’t practical. Now children are taught all kinds of silly things like art and music. How is that going to help them? It probably just turns them into fags…”

  He continued to tell me about the dangers of exposing children to the arts for about twenty minutes. By the time Thomas returned and traded off with me to talk to Dr. Matthieu, I was more than ready to take a break.

  “Congratulations on making it to your two-week work anniversary,” Dr. Matthieu said happily when Thomas handed me the phone.

  “Thanks,” I said genuinely. It really did feel like an achievement. Especially considering that my boss was on vacation and I hadn’t even seen him once yet.

  “You’re now officially in the top quartile for live-in nurses when it comes to tenure in this position,” he added after a moment. “I know you’re doing a really tough job. You wouldn’t believe how many of your predecessors quit after less than a week. Some only made it one or two days. I still can’t believe Stephen quit the way he did. He was the longest tenured nurse we’d ever had. He made it a full year.”

  “Alexander’s certainly a very unique person,” I told Dr. Matthieu in a carefully diplomatic voice. The fact that Stephen left in the middle of the night was entirely reasonable to me after experiencing Alexander, and apparently, he wasn’t the first nurse to do so. Dr. Matthieu laughed.

  “Alexander’s an asshole, we all know it. I’ve known it for going on thirty years.”

  “Well, his disease—” I started.

  “Makes it worse,” he conceded, “but it doesn’t change the fact that Alexander’s an asshole. Obviously, we owe him the best care and most empathy we can provide, but I know you’re working hard every day with him and I just wanted to commend you for that.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Dr. Matthieu was an odd person to work for, and really an odd person overall. He’d treated the entire Durant family at one point or another and had a deep history with the family. Perhaps the prolonged exposure to the eccentric family had warped his brain somewhat, although he remained a fine physician.

  The majority of the rest of my thirty-minute check in with Dr. Matthieu focused on Alexander’s medications and supplement schedules. I had a few recommendations on the timing of some of his doses, and we worked out a few modifications that I thought would help Alexander to make it through the afternoons with few
er outbursts. We were just about to wrap up our call when he remembered something.

  “Richard mentioned to me that his attorney Charlie Townsend would probably be reaching out to you on the topic of Edith Durant. Have you met with him?”

  My anxiousness about seeing Charlie rushed back in an instant. I started imagining his warm, brown eyes and almost missed the fact that my boss had asked a question.

  “Y-yes, he came by yesterday. We’re meeting this afternoon as well.”

  “Good, good. Be sure you help him with whatever he needs. The topic of Edith is very sensitive for the family, so I’m sure wrapping up the sad business of her death is a high priority for Richard.”

  “I’ll help however I can,” I said, adding, “I’m surprised he isn’t coming to you directly for whatever he needs.”

  I could almost see Dr. Matthieu shrug through the phone and grinning owlishly, although we hadn’t actually met face to face. He’d interviewed me through Skype and although I knew he worked out of Philadelphia, he hadn’t stopped by the mansion yet. He was wrapping up a three-month sabbatical, so I did know he’d been travelling.

  “That could be because I’m in Grand Cayman right now,” he replied with a smile obvious in his tone. “I’ve tried to impress on Richard that I’m totally inaccessible, but it’s somewhat of a losing battle. Obviously, I’m always accessible to you though. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”

  So, he was completely inaccessible but also available if I needed anything? I really wished people would stop giving me mixed messages. Between my boss and my crush, it was definitely getting old.

  “Thanks. Well enjoy your time off as much as you can,” I told him. “We’ve got things under control here. I’ll let you know how things go with Charlie Townsend.”

  7

  Charlie