Joe empties his cup and sets it on the round table beside the draped floral curtains, then turns back to study the view. I seize the chance to switch the subject. “That’s the Texas Medical Center over there. Those towers back behind Rice.”
“Wow. It looks as big as Seattle. I bet it’s doubled in size since I was there.”
“Yeah, it makes First Hill look pretty paltry.” We’re both quiet for a minute, and then the question burning at the back of my mind breaks loose. “How are things at First Lutheran, anyway?” He tenses his shoulders in a quick shrug. “Has anybody heard about…” I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold my breath for a second. “About the criminal charge?”
“Marie, there isn’t a criminal charge yet—if ever.”
So. It’s out. “How did you hear about it?” The words come in a hoarse whisper. I stare at his turned back and see his shirt stretch taut across his shoulders as he inhales and seems to brace himself. “OK,” he says. “There was something in the newspaper. Just a short clip—your name wasn’t even mentioned. They called Phil Scoble for a quote and he pretty much punted it. Just said the hospital was investigating.”
I fall backward onto the bed and draw my knees up. “It’s in the newspapers? The Seattle newspapers?”
“It was just a blurb on the inside pages. Nobody outside First Lutheran would ever know what it was about, that it involved you at all.”
“What did it say? Did you cut it out?”
“It just said the death of a child undergoing routine surgery was being investigated. That’s all. They didn’t name anybody except Phil, and he gave them some pablum shtick that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.”
I lie on the bed with my arms locked across my abdomen, closing my eyes to keep back tears. The light beyond my lids flickers as Joe walks over, the bed yields to his weight when he lies down next to me.
“Has your lawyer told you anything?”
“He’s meeting with the district attorney on Tuesday. Even then he might not know if I’m charged. I’d thought at least, if this got dropped, no one would hear about it.”
Joe seems to flinch. He says, hesitantly at first, “Maybe it’s worse for you to be here, with so much time to think about it. I mean, don’t you think the criminal charge is just a Darryl Feinnes gimmick? No jury’s going to be convinced you’ve done anything criminal. For Christ’s sake, you’re a doctor.” He turns my head toward his face. “Marie, go easier on yourself. You’re not the only doctor at First Lutheran who’s gotten hit with a malpractice suit. It’s like you’ve become a martyr for this girl.”
“Maybe she needs a martyr. Maybe I’m just the only one thinking about something other than the money,” I say, almost sharply.
“Or maybe your grief goes way beyond this one accident in your life.” He drops his voice down a notch. “Come on. Don’t get mad at me. I know the money seems like all Hopper and Scoble care about anymore, but try to look at it another way. That girl’s mother is about to walk away with more dollars than she could spend in a lifetime.” I start to get up off the bed and Joe puts his arm across my waist. “Wait. I’m not saying that fixes it. Don’t look at me like that. But she does have a future, at least. She can move. She can buy her own house, wherever she wants. She never has to work at a job she hates. She’ll have choices she never would have had.”
“It makes me sick to talk about it. It sounds so callous.”
“I don’t mean it to be callous. But even if you only half believe it, couldn’t you stand some relief from guilt? It’s OK to stop hurting for her.” He takes my hand in his and I feel the ridged texture of his fingertips, the rebounding, giving fullness of the veins crossing his tendons, their persuasive strength—and I relax against him.
“Sometimes I think hurting for her is the only part of me that’s still alive. People keep asking me how I am. I feel like they should be asking what I am. What am I if I can’t be a doctor? What will I be if they take that away from me? I used to know, before medical school and internship and residency. Before First Lutheran and its sixty-hour workweeks. My career, becoming a doctor, was supposed to be one stop along the way to a whole life—this great, altruistic job where I could help people live longer, or live better. Or at least live with less pain. All so they could go back to whatever truly mattered in their lives—their husbands and their mothers and their kids—the things that were supposed to be waiting at home for me, too, at the end of my workday. And now I don’t even have a workday. Oh God, listen to me. Don’t ever let me drink two lemon drops on an empty stomach. I drink too much when I’m with you, Joe.”
He rolls up on one winged elbow so his inky blue eyes are right above mine. “You’re beautiful when you’re drunk. You’re beautiful anyway,” he responds to my scowl. “Just…shinier, somehow, when you drink.”
“Shinier?”
He shakes his head and hesitates, then says, “You let more holes open up in your cloak.” He focuses past me, into some distant inner place. His cheek resting against his closed fist deepens the furrows at the corner of his eye and around his mouth, so that his face seems divided in two, one half etched with the inelasticity of age, the other half youthfully forgiven in the soft bedside lamplight.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“Hmmm,” he murmurs. “It’s this theory I have about death. About what happens when we die.” He refocuses on my face and brushes my hair from my throat, winding his fingers into the tangled strands, fanning it out onto the pillow around my head. “Haven’t I told you about the ‘Big Oh’ theory I have?”
I give a short laugh, glad to be distracted again. “The ‘Big Oh’? Great name!”
“It is a great name. When I was eight…I can’t believe I haven’t told you this before…. When I was eight I went to a Halloween party as a cigarette—give me a break, more people smoked back then. Anyway”—his eyes drift into space again—“I’d wrapped myself in a cylinder of cardboard and cut out eyeholes. I could hardly see. I forgot to cut a slot for my hands—couldn’t even put candy in my mouth, so you can guess the costume didn’t last very long. All the sounds were muffled through the cardboard. Couldn’t smell anything. And I remember, really vividly, how different my house looked and felt to me. Everything cropped down to a fragment of itself. My folks…I remember my dad’s belt buckle jiggling up and down while he was yelling at my mom, and the buttonhole just above it straining against his big old belly. And my mother at the sink washing the dishes. How every time she made some point to Dad in whatever they were arguing about—I couldn’t hear all the words—dribbles of soap streamed off her arms onto the floor. All I could see were these foamy globs dangling from the bony point of her elbow while she jabbed away at his chest.
“Then my father yanked the costume off over my head and all of a sudden the room, our kitchen, just exploded around me. Huge, and brand-new, and kind of…luminous. The light was so bright, everything looked almost crystallized. And the smells. Everything that had looked so splintered suddenly snapped back together into my whole, comprehensible world.” He leans over me, his fingers laced through my hair to press against my scalp, looking intently into my eyes, as if he had to transmit this concept of universal order directly from mind to mind without words. “And for that split second, in a house where nothing ever, ever made sense to me, I suddenly understood it all, at least for a moment. That was my moment of the big ‘Oh.’”
I try to picture his face as it must have looked at eight years old, without the rough stubble of beard, without the sun-and cigarette-creased lines of skepticism and self-reliant defiance, without the almost perfectly camouflaged shard of pain flickering in the deepest recess of those deep, deep blue irises. I want to shelter it, this exquisitely wrapped gift from his life, delivered from a time he never talks about. “And how does this become death, your moment of ‘Oh’?” I whisper.
“Well, that’s how we stumble around all the time, isn’t it? So cloaked and fettered we can’t really make sense
of any of it. Believing it’s so complicated. Here, alive, we have five senses. I think maybe there, after we die, we have…millions. Billions.”
It is such an uncharacteristically hopeful suggestion coming from Joe, to be honest. How gratifying it would be to have faith that all this muddling through we do—the missed opportunities and mistaken blame—might eventually worm its way out to an answer. Maybe with a billion senses unleashed I could understand why Jolene died—not just what caused her death, but for what reason, for what purpose. Maybe with a billion senses connecting us, Bobbie Jansen and I could explain to each other why our lives ever had to intersect, why she gave birth to the child I won’t have only to lose her in my hands. But how would a billion senses compensate an eight-year-old girl when she had yet to discover her own life? Even eternal bliss can be robbed by such brevity of experience among the living.
Joe cups his palms around my face and turns it back toward his. “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you? About Jolene.” I stare past him to the ceiling, finding pictures in the nubs of plaster like tea leaves—both of us are looking for answers outside ourselves.
“She’s everywhere I go.” I say it too softly for my voice to break. “She and her mother. She’s in every school yard I pass, in grocery lines and the car next to me at traffic lights. I didn’t just kill Jolene. I killed her mother. I killed her reason for being. All the money in the world can’t change that.” I reach up and put my hand on his cheek, making him listen to me as if he had to live inside my conscience. “Joe, I want you to find her. Bobbie Jansen. I want you to find out what’s happened to her. Where she goes, if she has any friends. I know where she lives—it’s in south Beacon Hill.” He is shaking his head. I push myself up from the bed onto my elbow and grip his shoulder. “It’s not stalking, Joe. It’s not illegal, or even immoral. I can’t go there myself anymore—she saw me once. I just…” He is looking at me as if I have tipped over some balance of sanity. “Oh God. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what the judges say. It doesn’t matter if I’m totally cleared if I know she…How can I go on with my own life when I’ve destroyed hers?”
Joe lifts my hand from his shoulder and brushes it against his lips; he sweeps tears off my cheeks and chin. “Sweet Marie. A death behind you and a death before you.” I close my eyes and try to will the tears to stop. Joe leans back on one arm and braids his fingers through my hair again, softly combing it away from my face. “You and your father don’t know each other very well anymore, do you?”
“I’m not sure we ever knew each other very well. Certainly not past adolescence. It always felt fragile, his loving me. As if it was an obligation instead of an emotion.”
Joe strokes the planes and curves of my face, tracing the lines of my forehead and the folds of my eyes, the arc of my jaw. Now the silence between us feels as patient as time. He starts to tell me something, then stops himself, plainly considering his words, and begins again. “Your dad said something to me about you this afternoon, while you were out. He said—” Joe hesitates and looks away from me, as if that might make it easier for him to keep talking. “He said he never understood why you hadn’t gotten married, that he thought you were too lovely and too smart to have so much trouble with love.” His hands are still now; only his breath brushes against my skin. “He said he blamed himself. It was his own fault.”
I curl away from Joe into a tight knot and he wraps himself around me, laying his head next to mine. “What?” he asks. “What happened?”
His mouth is so close his whispered question fills the room, floods my mind, unravels my life back to a place I’m still learning how to leave, a time I’ve spent twenty-two years apologizing for. He is so close I barely hear my own voice when I tell him, and the raw flesh of that year bleeds out of me again. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.” Joe doesn’t move, but I feel his arms grow stronger around me. My throat constricts and I have to consciously let go before I can keep talking. “I was a counselor at a summer camp and I met a boy there, another counselor; we both worked in the stables. He was from Arkansas—near your hometown. I didn’t have any experience with boys. I’d never even been asked on a date. I would have been too shy to go. And, I wanted to be liked by him. I needed him so much he couldn’t stand me by the end of the summer.” I’m quiet again for a moment, listening to Joe’s even breaths.
“I found out I was pregnant after I got home. There wasn’t any question about keeping it. Not in my mind. I told Mom—she drove me across two counties to a clinic just to be sure nobody would recognize us. There were protestors outside carrying signs with pictures of fetuses. Shouting at us when we went in. Something hit the back of my coat and my mother started crying behind her sunglasses—I’m sure she thought I didn’t see her.
“She wanted me to talk to my father about it—begged me to. She couldn’t stand it, having this ugly, hidden thing unspoken among all of us, but I made her swear not to tell him. And then about a week later I started bleeding. I must have had endometritis—I had a high fever and horrible cramping. They had to take me into the emergency room in the middle of the night. I remember my dad carrying me into the waiting room wrapped in this pink ruffled bedspread, his arms trembling under my weight when he lifted me out of the car. And as sick as I was, I still remember being terrified he’d find out.
“Before the doctor even came in, my dad asked me straight out. He asked me what I’d done. So I told him. I told my Catholic father about the boy from camp, and the clinic. And how sorry I was. I remember that examining room as clearly as if we were in it right now, a small white box of a room with this fluorescent light glaring down over us, and the smell of disinfectant everywhere, and my nightgown sticking to me with blood.” I hold my outstretched hand before my eyes, as if I could blot out that blinding light, then clutch it back across my chest. “My father didn’t speak to me for an entire year. Not one word.”
Joe lies still, curved along the length of my back. He brings his hand up to my face, haltingly at first, brushing his fingers across my brow, light as the shimmer of music down the strings of a violin, even the slight roughness of his skin like the singing of a musician’s calluses along the corded length of the frets. My face tingles where he traces my eyelashes, my eyelids, my temple and cheek, the ridged curve of my ear, the vermilion boundary of my lips.
I turn toward him, and now he traces each again with his mouth, dry and soft and breath warmed, my breath inhaling his, the eddies of our lungs intermingling. His fingers move over the buttons and bands of my clothing and slip them from my body, so I need him against me, crave his heat. His palm presses into the small of my back, lingers along the column of my spine to the nape of my neck, strokes the hollow between the twinned tendons there. The uncertainty of what we are together hums like an electric presence between us; the anticipation of becoming lovers again almost surpasses the act of physical connection.
His body is exactly the same temperature as mine, not varied by a tenth of a degree, blurring the planes of us, now moist and interlocking, rocking together, not penetrating one into the other, not conquering or yielding, but woven so that the coupling itself is complete fulfillment, with no climactic ending to separate the experience of uniting. This must be as close as two lives can come outside the realm of death. And for me it is both passion and forgetting. I am not exposed or vulnerable, but freed. How brilliant that this is the natural act to create a new life.
It is not even gray outside when I wake up. Joe lies next to me beneath the sheet, the crest of his shoulder dropping to the deep cleft of his waist, the rising slope of his hip and thigh like a landscape—a continent of a man, solid enough to sow and reap a crop of progeny and personal hope. And isn’t that what it takes to make love last? Taking the risk to say this may be all but this can be enough? Yielding to the finiteness of what is really possible? Declaring that this will be my allotted plot of earth to till and harvest over the startlingly short course of my life?
He stirs, stumbling to
ward the surface of sleep, the flickering of his lids and brow warn me he is close to waking. Then, like a sea creature, he sinks again into slow and even breaths, beneath even the level of dreams. And this time, before he can awaken and leave me, I slip out from under the sheet and quietly gather my clothes from the floor, leaving him before the next dream comes.
For one entire year my father and I walked through the same rooms, ate at the same table, drove in the same car and spoke to each other only through my mother or Lori. For one year my mother sat between us at every meal, linking our hands over grace and filling up the silence with monologues about my father’s research articles, and my track meet times or college application essays.
In that year of silence our house trembled with shrieks beyond the range of human hearing. Supersonic shockwaves ricocheted across the breakfast table, screeched through the living room over homework papers and Walter Cronkite’s “way it was,” screamed above the hiss, hiss, hiss at the end of a record album while my father hunched over his manuscripts engrossed in footnotes and bibliographies. The apocalyptic boom of that silence should have shattered the brick walls of our house, leaving us exposed to gawking neighbors as we sat in orderly oblivion around our dining table, replete with pot roast and mashed potatoes and perfect table manners.
It is amazing how something so abnormal can gradually blur into the background of day-to-day life so thoroughly that its cruelty is no longer apparent. The best of us are capable of selecting what we will see and what we will ignore. It would be inexcusable if it had been a conscious choice.
In the fall, quite near my seventeenth birthday, I won a scholarship to college based on SAT scores. My father congratulated me, and we proceeded with our lives as if the previous year had been imagined. In that same year I began making nearly perfect grades, my mother became noticeably weaker, and my father stopped going to mass.
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