by Jill Barnett
As afraid as she was of her pregnancy, she was more afraid of ending it, and she honestly didn’t think she could do it. Life grew inside her. Some other woman could choose that way, but she wouldn’t. So instead, she lied to survive; because she was scared and young and she knew if she ever let either Banning brother know the truth, it would shatter them all for a lifetime.
She even lied to herself as she tried to distance herself from the baby, tried to pretend it wasn’t as terrible a time as it was, that what she was doing was for the best. But the best answer wasn’t always the easiest one. At night she laid in bed, the baby kicking inside of her, and wondered which mistake was worse.
The adoptive parents were a nice couple, a district attorney and his wife in their thirties who had tried and tried to have a baby, but the woman had almost died with the last miscarriage almost five months into her term. Laurel met them once and saw something in the woman’s eyes when she looked at her distended belly. She saw a longing so intense it was almost unbearable to watch.
Laurel worked at the restaurant kitchen up until the last few weeks, when she sat alone in her apartment and talked to the baby inside her. She told it how good its life would be with the O’Hanlons, all the while trying to really convince herself.
The delivery was long—a punishment for her sins?—twenty-one hours of labor. There were marks on the wall from her fist, marks from the fake wedding ring she’d bought herself and wore in public until the last month of her pregnancy, when it stayed on her finger only because she was so swollen she couldn’t get it off.
The baby was a boy, nine pounds. He came out quietly, eerily so, almost as if after all the punishment, God was being benevolent. She would never have the memory of his cry. She put her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear his cooing noises. They asked her if she wanted to see him, but she closed her eyes and turned her head away, afraid that if she looked at him, she would never give him up. She loved him enough to do this. He deserved the O’Hanlons, who had been through so much and wanted a child in a way she couldn’t. Not now Not here. Not this way. He deserved a mother who could look at him the way Barbara O’Hanlon did.
After she signed the papers, her belly and between her legs still sore and tight from the delivery stitches, her signature safely made, the attorney handed her an envelope. “It’s from Barbara,” he said.
Laurel turned it over in her hands.
“You don’t have to read it.”
Detached, she studied her name beautifully written in indigo blue ink from a fountain pen. She could see the small bleeding vein marks on each letter of her name. The envelope was thick, cream-colored expensive paper. It wasn’t sealed closed. The flap was tucked inside.
Dear Laurel,
I don’t know if I can tell you in this letter what it means to us to have this wonderful gift of life. We named him Gregory Patrick O’Hanlon. We will cherish him.
When the time is right, I will tell him it takes a strong woman, one who loves her child more than herself; to give him up to a better life and let someone else love him every single day of his life.
And we will.
Barbara O’Hanlon
Laurel curled into a tight ball as she sobbed with the letter in her hand, and the nurses left her alone. One brought her hot chocolate and a copy of the latest issue of Glamour magazine. She opened the magazine and cried because she felt so much older than the models inside. The things they wrote about, college dates and parties, long hair versus short, my day at an antiwar rally, hot pants and suede boots, didn’t matter to her anymore. But she wasn’t certain what did matter.
That first day after the birth, she got up so many times and started for the nursery. Perhaps she just wanted to say good-bye. But she never made it there. Once, she made it to the end of the hall, where she could see the nursery viewing window but not the babies inside. The O’Hanlons stood there, arms wrapped around each other, both of them laughing and crying at the same time. She turned around and went back to her room, then went home the next day.
A week later she left Seattle. She packed up what she wanted to keep, not much: a fringed shirt, two sweaters, an alpaca poncho, and her patchwork jeans. She left the key to her apartment with the manager, gave her old maternity clothes to a shelter in the U District, sent money from her trust to an international bank account, and left.
At the airport, she flew standby on a plane to the East Coast, spent eighteen hours on a hard chair at JFK, uncomfortable because she was still bleeding. She went into the women’s room and changed her pads dispassionately, her back ridged, her eyes closed. At 11 P.M. she took a Pan Am flight to Paris. From her window seat she watched the lights on the ground disappear, leaving everything behind her as though it were someone else’s life.
26
Cale had never thrown a surgical instrument in his life, but a few days before, he’d lost control in the OR. Complications weren’t unusual—surgery was seldom routine. He had always had some kind of innate ability to switch gears. Enter an adverse event? Experience and calm method always kicked in.
The heart valve replacement hadn’t carried heightened risk: Dan Hardt wasn’t old, the organ wasn’t in failure, and it wasn’t a second open-heart surgery. But a mere artificial heartbeat or two on the machine was time that could have saved the patient. Cale had felt his freeze happening as if he were separated from his own body. After fighting the monster in his head for months, he’d carried that monster on his back into the OR on Tuesday, and a thirty-nine-year-old father of three died.
In the three days since, he did five successful surgeries. But yesterday, he walked in on a candid conversation among his team.
“Poor man,” one of them said. “He’s a lost soul.”
“Me?” he asked, interrupting them. “Or Dan Hardt?”
The women blushed and lied, the men grew stoic. But he’d heard them talking about the surgical tray crashing against the floor, months of his moody commands, the day he’d been so angry about rock music on the private sound system and ordered it turned off. Dr. Banning, who used to scrub to Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker.
He had never thought of himself as one of those physicians with behavioral problems, the men who were known as tyrants but geniuses. The world of medicine—even the laity—often believed temperament was tied to genius, so unacceptable behavior became acceptable.
Now Cale sat on a chair in the waiting room of a colleague, staring at the floor and seeing only that moment of devastation overcome the wife of the patient he had lost. Sally Hardt’s expression haunted him in the rearview mirror as he drove home from the hospital, on the backs of his eyelids when he tried to fall asleep, and he even saw it reflected in his dining room window while they okayed the catering menu for Victor’s birthday celebration.
“Come on in, Cale.” Rick Sachs held his office door open. The In door. The Out door led to the parking lot, so clients could come and go with anonymity. Sachs was tall and trim, a respected psychiatrist specializing in troubled physicians. Burnout, addictions, illness, senility, and some patients sent by their administrative boards because they were just plain bad doctors with too many lawsuits and complaints.
Rick sat down across from him. “So what’s this about?”
“My private M&M,” Cale said. Morbidity and mortality conferences were a weekly ritual at every academic hospital in the nation. During an M&M, all in the department discussed cases that had been problematic, had unfortunate outcomes, or were caused by procedural or diagnostic error. “I lost a patient on Tuesday, and blew up in the OR. I threw an instrument tray.”
Rick wrote on a notepad. “Is this something you’ve done before?”
“No.”
“You’ve lost patients.”
“Yes, but not for a long, long time. A few years.”
They talked about the procedure, about the circumstances, about his private life and more private pain, and Cale cried openly. Even if he could have stopped his tears he didn’t try. Tears wer
e proof he still felt something. Eventually, he’d eaten up over an hour with Sachs and discussed another appointment.
“You don’t have a reputation for problem behavior,” Sachs told him. “You’re well respected. But this incident can’t help the self-doubt you’re feeling.”
Cale listened to Rick’s assessment, and it almost killed him to ask the question he was most afraid of. “Would you recommend I stop practicing . . . at least, for a while?”
“The fact that you’re here on your own says enough for me. Certainly something has to change, but you’ve had subsequent surgeries this week. It’s not a skill issue, Cale. And you aren’t Jacob Wilson.” Wilson was a once well-respected local physician who refused to stop doing surgery and had his license pulled when his deteriorated mental state led to three deaths. “You aren’t taking drugs or drinking,” Rick said. “You’ve had a tough loss and feel your profession let you down.”
“Not me. Robyn.”
“Your profession let you down, Cale, when medicine couldn’t save your wife. Clearly depression is a problem here, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t understand. Depression isn’t something you can self-diagnose. We expect more from ourselves. But today’s world is one of Prozac, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin. You’re human, even though so often your patients look to you as more, and sometimes you ask yourself for the impossible. There’s a clear reason they call it medical practice; even the word suggests we’re far from perfect. Mistakes happen, but your reaction to them is what’s changed. And that’s what we need to address.”
They set another appointment and Cale stood to leave.
“There’s one important question I need you to think about and we’ll discuss your answer next week.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Ask yourself if you’re upset because you lost the patient, or because you ruined a statistic.”
Sunday night Kathryn dropped her suitcase on the entry floor of Laurel’s beach house and slumped into a chair in the living room. “It’ll be nice to not sleep in a hotel for a change. I always forget how much work these shows are.”
“I don’t know why you keep doing them,” Laurel called out from the kitchen. “I’m making us some herbal tea. The galleries would take your work sight unseen. You’re getting older, Mother.”
“Thank you for pointing that out. I couldn’t tell from my sore feet, bad eyes, gray hair, and crooked fingers.” She laughed to soften the edges of her words, but it was true. Her glasses were stronger, her hands often ached at night, and she made mistakes in glazes she’d been mixing for years. “I constantly lose my studio keys and sometimes I’ll just stare at the phone because I can’t remember your phone number.”
Annalisa touched her shoulder as she walked by. “I’m twenty-two and I walk into my kitchen and forget why I’m there. You’re not old, Mamie. The show was fabulous. It wasn’t even the opening, and yet tonight there was this energy in the room, almost as if the work vibrated toward you. I saw the sense of awe on people’s faces, the way your pieces make them think. They discuss the work.” She kicked off her shoes and hugged a throw pillow to her chest. “Think about it. You live alone. You create alone. The shows are the only place where you can actually see your work through the eyes of the outside world. Besides, I love this collection. It deserves viewing.”
“I’ll admit there is an addicting kind of energy to having a show,” Kathryn said. Which could have been the thing sapping something vital from her lately, because she didn’t get the same euphoric feeling she used to. Too often she felt empty and wrung out. Laurel could be right. She was old. “Maybe I’ll cut back. I don’t know.”
“And maybe you should do them more often,” Annalisa said with a lovely bit of stubbornness.
“Good God, don’t encourage her.” Laurel set the tea tray down but didn’t sit. “Shoot . . . I forgot the lemon.”
Over her shoulder she said, “Your grandmother will wear herself out.”
Annalisa winked at her. “Mamie doesn’t look used up to me.”
Her granddaughter was the first person to get the meaning of a piece; it was like watching the workings of her own mind. Some people ascribed to the theory that certain traits skip a generation—genetic hopscotch—and Kathryn liked to believe she and Annalisa were most alike, and that her granddaughter’s red hair came from her and not Beric King.
Certainly there was little friction between the two of them, and a bit of hero worship on her granddaughter’s part. No judgment. Laurel was a completely different story. Too often they tiptoed around each other. And Kathryn still had trouble forgiving her for running off to France, marrying, and raising Annalisa those first years in a place so far away. Lost years were evaporated time. You couldn’t open a can and pour the years back into your life.
Laurel handed Annalisa the lemon dish and sat down. “I wasn’t trying to be critical. But you look tired.”
“I am,” Kathryn admitted, her voice sounding as brittle as her old bones. Victor Banning’s comments had her tossing and turning, annoyed and running on no sleep. She didn’t like to think of herself as a stereotype. Her art did come from pain. Pain equaled art equaled meaning, and art without meaning was nothing but medium. The best work was organic.
But the idea that she could produce only from self-infliction disturbed her. It said something awful about her choices. Sipping her tea with lemon, she sank farther into the couch cushions. Pieces of her art were scattered around the room, on tables, on the mantel, in lit niches. A huge, more recent piece dominated the corner. “Interesting that I can sit here and see how my work has evolved. I’ve never kept enough pieces over the years to view it like this.” Before her was a retrospective of K. Peyton’s work. “He was right. I have grown.”
“Who was right?” Annalisa and Laurel were watching her.
She’d spoken aloud. “Just a critic on opening night,” she lied. “I wasn’t good in the early years.”
“That’s not true, Mother,” Laurel said quickly and with surprising vehemence.
It was so unexpected Kathryn gave pause, then laughed sharply. “Of course it is. I was talking about my earliest work. You were too young to remember anything I did before your father died.”
Laurel stood abruptly. “Follow me.”
Kathryn and Annalisa exchanged a puzzled look, but Laurel was already marching up the stairs. They caught up with her in the master bedroom, where the sharp scent of roses hung in the air.
“Look at those flowers. The roses are the size of my fist.” Annalisa moved toward a table. “Is that a Baccarat vase?”
“Looks like it,” Kathryn said. Dozens of white roses and deep greenery fanned out from a large vase on a table near the corner window. “I can barely see the beach.”
Laurel pulled a narrow piece of white pottery from the bookshelf and confronted them with it. “I wanted you to see this.”
“Who gave you the flowers, Mom?” Annalisa picked up an empty florist’s envelope.
“I ran into an old friend.”
“That’s some friend. What did the card say?”
Laurel froze, then spoke in a rush. “Good luck on your business venture.”
A mother could always hear her child’s lie. Kathryn understood that her daughter wasn’t going to discuss the flowers and she would snap at Annalisa if she asked another question.
“I hope it’s a man, Mom. You need some romance in your claustrophobic life.”
Laurel turned as pale as the glaze on the piece she held.
“That’s my work,” Kathryn said, somewhat astonished. It was an early vase and one Jimmy had liked. She could have walked right past it anytime over the years. In those early days she’d seldom sold much and was an artist dealing with failure and still searching for discovery.
“I love this piece,” Laurel said quietly. “Don’t tell me you had no talent, Mother. I’ve never seen anything equal.”
“It’s so different, Mamie.” Annalisa took the vase from her mother�
��s hand. “Even your signature is different.”
“My early work wasn’t well received. One critic—the kindest of the group—called me too sleek and easy.” She’d cried in Jimmy’s arms that night, when four years’ worth of work was slammed in the press. She was young and inconsolable, her skin thin and her wounds deep. Eventually he’d gathered a bunch of his negative music reviews, which were snobbish and caustic, read them aloud, acting them out until life seemed something ludicrously funny.
But now, all Kathryn felt was terribly confused. The vase was sleek, but never easy. She doubted she could produce something like it even with her years of technique and experience. The Kay Peyton who signed the vase could no longer experience a youthful purity of innocence and happiness. She was now K., not Kay, and she knew simple was the most difficult to create. Simple was, in truth, minutely complex.
Her earliest work flooded through her memory in a montage of forgotten, veristic images. A part of her past cracked open before her in a clarity that left her sinking with dread. She longed only to discuss Laurel’s flowers, but instead said, “I’m not that artist anymore.”
The ruined look Laurel gave her almost brought her to her knees. And Kathryn understood in that single, raw moment that this exchange had nothing to do with art.
Late that night, after her mother had gone to bed and Annalisa had gone home to her own place, Laurel dressed for bed and turned off the bathroom light. One foot into the bedroom and she could smell the spice of the roses over the herbal scent of her soap and shampoo. A surge of something really unfortunate hit her again. Longing, thrill, excitement. The feelings she’d had when she was seventeen, eighteen, the same feelings she’d had that afternoon when Jud’s flowers were delivered to her office. But she had no right to those feelings. There was so much between them, too much in the past.