by Jill Barnett
Now, suddenly, life just switched. Her mother was breakable. From somewhere deep and instinctive she moved out of her mother’s arms and held her instead.
“And next comes the hardest part.”
“The surgery.” Annalisa said knowingly.
Her mother laughed softly. “That too. But worse. I have to call Mamie and tell her Cale Banning is my surgeon.”
“No, Mom.” Annalisa straightened. “We have to call Mamie.”
Kathryn listened to the news from Laurel with a numb feeling, until she realized there was a horrible, almost frightened reluctance in Laurel’s voice when she told her Cale Banning was the man in whose hands she would either live or die.
Before Kathryn could find a single right word, Annalisa cut in, her voice harsh and warning. “Don’t be an idiot, Mamie, just because Cale’s name is Banning. He’s her surgeon, and apparently a damned good one.”
The rest of the conversation was oddly emotionless: she would take the first boat over; Annalisa would pick her up; the surgery was the day after tomorrow. She hung up the phone saturated in sweat that came from a natural, cold fear that she was helpless and could not protect her child. She sat down hard on a chair in the middle of her studio. The surgeon’s name didn’t matter. She held her pounding head in her hands. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
The angry things Laurel had said so often lately haunted her nights. It was difficult to understand what had gone so very wrong. How could she have been so very wrong? It had become clearer and clearer to her: the Bannings were pawns of fate, while the real danger, the real villain, was how she had chosen to live her life, the singular vindictive focus that turned her into someone her daughter couldn’t be around. What she had refused to forget turned into an obsession. Her artist’s statement had said it all. She used the pain of life to create works with meaning. Art wasn’t art without meaning.
And that was what Victor Banning had meant. If she could have lived in a garret, she would have. Instead she made her home into a garret, her life into the embodiment of human pain. She lived in blue rooms because then she wouldn’t forget the festering emotion that fed her art. K. Peyton, the artist who threw herself upon the thorns of grief and never got up, the same woman who lived only in a small, confined world so she could control her life.
Artists and writers locked themselves away for a reason, some odd kind of agoraphobia at its core, cocooned away because when you stepped outside into a huge, wide world everything bad could happen. When you left yourself to fate or God you could be driving down an LA street one minute and dead the next. So Kathryn spent years living other people’s lives, then created one where there was room for her art but nothing else. Not even Laurel.
All her mistakes played out before her, like some macabre documentary on how to ruin a life. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t speak, but Kathryn lost it and ran through the studio breaking pieces of art, which felt good when she heard the crash, even better when they shattered against the wall. She threw her work away, her art—the things that had become her life, the only things outside the cancerous vengeance she carried.
When there was nothing left to break, she stood in the aftermath of her own battle, panting, and began to count. Twenty-five pieces had left marks in the wall, like that alarm clock the night Jimmy died. Proof of grief. Proof of anger. Proof she had wasted a lifetime and alienated her own daughter.
By sheer adrenaline, she dragged the huge Espinosa painting out from the back room, tearing off the protective wrap violently. She hadn’t looked at it since it hung between the windows in Julia’s bedroom. Now K. Peyton looked at it, seeing the work through an artist’s eye. The meaning was all emotion, tangled dark lines and waves of turmoil, color so strong it was almost uncomfortable to look at. Unforgivable.
She had not known or cared about its title, but it was written boldly in the left corner: Obsession. She backed away from it, understanding all too well the message, and could have stood there facing the painting and the truth for a minute—or half an hour. Time held no consequences when you faced a ruined life.
The envelope Victor had left that day was in her desk, the check uncashed. She wrote a note to him, put it into the envelope, crossed her name off the front, and wrote his, then she called the movers.
It had been more than two days since Jud had walked away from Laurel. Tuesday night about midnight, he shrugged out of his suit jacket, pulled at the knot on his tie, and played his messages.
“Jud? This is Laurel. Would you call me when you get this? I need to talk to you.”
Call her when he got the message? At twelve fifteen? He lay on the bed and picked up the phone, hesitating. Hell, he was in so much trouble with her now, what did it matter if he called at midnight?
Her voice was almost a whisper when she answered. “Laurel? It’s Jud. I just got your message.”
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “But Annalisa is staying here tonight and I want to speak to you alone. Can you come over in the morning?”
“When?”
“About ten?”
“Okay.” He didn’t say good-bye because he was searching his mind for the right words of apology, and when she didn’t say anything else either, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“I need to explain about Sunday.”
He still wanted to strangle his brother. “I’ll be there at ten.”
“Thank you, Jud. Good night.”
He hung up when he heard the click on the other end, folded his arms behind his head, and pushed off his shoes with his feet. He’d gone bugshit the night before and ended up at the twenty-four-hour gym playing racquetball for hours. Still he couldn’t let go of the anger. He felt so damned helpless. Whenever he closed his eyes to go to sleep, he saw the expression of condemnation on her face when he’d hit his brother. After so many years, now he stood in Cale’s shoes.
At five to ten the next morning, he pulled up to her house and sat in the car for a few minutes, resisting the urge to merely drive away and keep driving. His palms were sweaty and his stomach in knots when he knocked on her door.
She answered quickly.
He’d forgotten in the short span of angry days what he always felt the moment he looked at her.
“Hi.” She opened the door wide. “Come in.”
He followed her inside toward the living room, where a tray of coffee sat on the table in front of the sofa. She handed him a cup and sat down. “I want to tell you why Cale was here Sunday.”
“Look, Laurel, I know I was an ass.”
“Wait. Please. Let me talk. This is difficult.” She held up a hand. “You owe your brother an apology. He’s my doctor, Jud.”
That was the last explanation he’d expected.
“He’s going to do surgery to repair my heart valve. He came by Sunday morning to break the news that he had scheduled the surgery and to see how I was feeling. I wasn’t in Chicago because I was in the hospital for tests, then intravenous antibiotics. I’m still on them. This is the shunt.” She held out her arm. “The surgery is Thursday.”
“Tomorrow?”
She nodded. “I have to check into the hospital tonight.”
“But Annalisa didn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t know until late Monday. I felt I needed to protect her. I had valve replacement surgery seven years ago. It wasn’t easy on her then, and I was afraid if I told her before the show she’d fall apart. I only found out the day before. My doctor had called Cale in for a consult and I had no idea. I went to my appointment and there he was.”
All he could see was the image of Cale with his bleeding mouth. Jud set his coffee down with a sick and guilty feeling. “Cale couldn’t tell me, could he?”
“Professionally? No, and frankly, after you jumped to the wrong conclusion I was too angry to tell you. I hated that you thought I would make the same mistake I made years ago. I’m older and I’d like to think I’m smarter now. But more than that, I hated that you didn’t believe
in us. Then you hit him.”
“I’m a weak man. When it comes to you, I run on emotion. I don’t like that about myself but I can’t deny it exists.” When she didn’t say anything, he apologized. “I’m older, too, and I can’t lose you again. I won’t lose you. Come here, Jailbait.” He pulled her into his arms and across his lap.
“I should have been honest with everyone, but that’s easier said than done.” She laid her head on his shoulder. “You must have been exhausted. Annalisa told me about you flying into Chicago.”
“I was going to surprise you.”
“Instead you got Beric.” She gave a short laugh. “I wish I had been there.”
“He and I understand each other. We both lost you. We have more in common than in conflict.”
“You haven’t lost me, Jud. I would never run from you again.”
“Just how serious is this?”
“Second heart surgeries are always more difficult.”
“That sounds like a canned answer, Jailbait.”
“It is. But still true.”
What neither of them said aloud hung heavily and unspoken between them. Irony was often cruel. What if they had finally found each other again and she didn’t make it through the surgery? All he said was, “I do believe in us.”
She put her fingers against his lips. “You don’t have to explain. I should have told you what was going on.”
“Where’s Annalisa?”
“She went to pick up my mother. She’s coming in from the island on the next boat. I have to check into the hospital later this afternoon.”
He understood they had only hours, and not much of that time would be them alone. But he told himself it was enough for now, sitting together on the couch, his chin resting on top of her head. Each breath wasn’t about the scent of her shampoo, but just Laurel. “Tell me what you’re feeling. Talk to me.”
And she poured out everything, what happened before, the risks, why she was afraid to tell anyone, that she had talked it out with Cale but somehow that was different from talking to him, not safe, but more like speaking to a friend. What she never said aloud was her strongest fear and his: that she could die.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
The words fit and gave a timelessness to the pain of human feeling. He knew them by heart, the poetry of love and loss that always reminded him other men felt the same things.
When she was quiet, he said, “Let’s not do this to each other again, sweetheart. Lean on me.”
“I will. Just hold me, Jud. I want to feel alive.”
34
His practice of medicine had become less about a shot in the dark and more about instinct. Cale’s lab coat didn’t feel like another team’s uniform, and he’d pulled into his garage twice and found his steth still hanging around his neck. Wednesday evening, the night before Laurel’s surgery, he left the hospital elevator and passed Elizabeth Madison, a colleague and the anesthesiologist he’d worked with for close to eight years.
“I just left our patient. Your turn, General.” She gave him an irreverent salute as she passed by.
“I want you on time tomorrow, Doctor,” he said, mimicking the unyielding, erudite voice and words every surgeon heard while in training. “And be sure to genuflect when I walk into the OR.”
“What?” She turned around, walking backward as she spoke. “I don’t have to kiss your ring this week?”
“No, but you can kiss my ass.”
“Everyone kisses your ass, Dr. God.”
“Everyone but you.”
“Someone’s got to keep you humble.” She laughed and paused in the elevator. “See you in the morning, Cale.”
The elevator doors closed and he continued down the hall on the habitual path he’d taken since he was a surgical resident, to visit his patients the night before surgery, answer questions, ease fears, even the unreasonable ones, and especially when their fear was justified. He found Laurel was justifiably scared; her daughter and mother were, too; and he talked to them, answered honestly, and tried damned hard not to be evasive, since he knew vagueness bothered her more than the truth ever could. But it was the silent terror he saw in his own brother’s eyes that haunted him even into the morning of surgery.
At 5 A.M. Cale opened his front door to get the paper and found Jud sitting on the ground, leaning against a potted hibiscus tree, and wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night before, his knees drawn up, his chin resting on them. When he looked up, the ravages of worry sapped any life or color from his face.
Cale was so surprised to see him there he lost his words.
Jud handed him the paper. “Got any coffee?”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to bring it to you. You’ll have to get up off your ass.” Cale went back inside but left the door open. He was eating a piece of toast and reading the headlines when he realized Jud was standing in the middle of the kitchen like a man with amnesia. “You know where the mugs are,” Cale told him. “Get some coffee and sit down before you fall down.”
He was still mad at himself for Sunday’s events, blaming Jud aloud for what were really his own mistakes. Why he had chosen to not see the truth in their relationship before was a hard question he’d asked himself. For as much as he had always felt trounced by his older brother, the truth was he was too busy trying to catch up and be like Jud to see who and what his brother really was, which wasn’t his brother’s problem, but merely himself trying to walk in Jud’s shoes.
After marrying Robyn, he hadn’t wanted or tried to be Jud. But now Robyn was gone and he was back living life in his brother’s shadow. No wonder he had doubts in the OR. He had lost himself. Who was Cale Banning—surgeon, father, brother? The husband Robyn left behind? He’d been thinking about little else until he realized it took Laurel and Jud and all those screwy moments in the past to bring him back to the present, and maybe give him back his future.
A few minutes later Jud sat across from him, uneasy, watching him the way a cat watched the neighbor’s dog. “How’s your jaw?”
“Sore, you asshole.”
“I’m sorry about the other morning.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I mean it, Cale. I was out of line.”
Cale set the paper down. “When it comes to Laurel, you always have been.”
His brother dropped his head into his hands and didn’t say anything for the longest time. When he looked up again, his face was taut and he choked out the words, “I love her.”
“I know you do, moron. It’s torturing you. It tortured you thirty years ago. I was glad then because I wanted to hurt you.” Until Laurel came back into their lives, Cale had never seen so clearly the emptiness deep inside his brother and understood what losing her all those years ago had done to him.
Jud rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What is the truth about this surgery? What are her chances?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Screw that professional shit and tell me.”
“It’s not confidentiality. I don’t know myself until I get in there. Her kind of surgery can be tough. I lost someone less than a month ago. It’s like operating blind.”
Jud swore and sat there, obviously hurting. “You have to save her.” Then Jud did something Cale had seen him do only three times. He broke down crying—loud, hoarse sobs like those when their parents were killed, like those when cancer devoured Robyn from the inside out, and now, when the woman he had loved since he was twenty-five was facing death.
In that moment Cale understood the gift of Laurel, that she had come back into their lives when they all needed something. She was as striking and appealing to him as she had been all those years ago, back in the days of summer, and there were moments—just one or two, at Victor’s party or in her kitchen before Jud showed up—when he could have fallen for her al
l over again. But Jud? Jud was locked in a kind of thirty-some-odd-year hell. He could love only Laurel, and that was the difference between them.
He let his brother cry it out. Men cry, but they don’t want anyone to acknowledge it, so he waited for Jud to get under control and said, “Go take a shower. Get something to wear from my closet. I’ll fix you breakfast and we’ll go to the hospital together.”
Two nurses and an attendant rolled Laurel and her IV pole from the hospital room toward the bank of elevators. She lay looking up at the anxious faces of her daughter, her mother, and Jud as they walked alongside. The nurses were angels, making small talk, silly jokes, and trying to ease the tension everyone was feeling. On the fifth floor they stopped near the surgical waiting area. Time to say whatever needed to be said at moments like this.
Jud leaned down and kissed her. She had asked him the day before to take care of her mother and daughter if she didn’t make it, and trusted he would. Nothing had to be said now. “I’ve always loved you, Jailbait,” he whispered in her ear before he stepped away from the gurney.
Her mother’s face was a stoic mask as fragile as the delicate clay pieces she created. She put her hand on Laurel’s forehead, exposed from the surgical cap that contained her bangs and hair.
“I’ll be fine, Mother.”
“I know you will.”
Even now they couldn’t speak the things they had to say to each other. Her mother just looked old, her pale mouth thin, her eyes darting and anxious.
Annalisa gripped Laurel’s hand so tightly it hurt her fingertips. “Mom. Listen. If anything happened to you, I would miss you, like my hands, like my feet and my heart.” The words, innocent and true, tumbled out rushed, as if in the only moment Annalisa could ever speak them.
Such words so profound from her child caught her off-guard, and all Laurel could do was reach up and place her hand on Annalisa’s hot and flushed cheek, knowing this beautiful young woman was the reason she existed, the most important thing she would leave behind if she died.