“Why?”
Dr. Lucy sighed. She briefly sorted through her options. A little white lie. The truth. Declining to answer the question.
“He thought I was too . . .” The word stuck in her throat. So she chose an easier one. “Remote.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Distant. Hard to reach.”
Cold.
“Oh. You don’t seem that way to me at all.”
“Well, I am. But not as much as I used to be, I suppose. People change. Situations change. At the time I was in my internship, and I was working long hours, and when I got home I was exhausted. He resented me for it. His father worked long hours, too. But fathers are allowed to. It’s expected. I was supposed to be nurturing and always there. He was furious with me, and he chose his father.”
“Didn’t that make you feel terrible?”
She opened her mouth to dismiss him. To snap, even. To say, “I don’t like to talk about the way I feel,” the way she had when Pete asked a similar question.
Instead, to her surprise, she said, “It was devastating. It was the worst thing that’s happened to me in my adult life. Well. Second worst.”
“I’m sorry. Do you see him or talk to him? Can he live with you later?”
“No,” she said.
Then they just sat that way for a long time, with Lucy saying nothing. While she said nothing, she scanned the inside of herself for emotion, but everything felt inert. Dead.
“While he was living with his dad . . . he went to bed one night with a really bad cold. Or what his dad thought was just a bad cold. But it was pneumonia. And he stopped breathing in his sleep. And I never forgave myself for that, because I’m a doctor, and if he’d been living with me, I would have known. I would have known it was more than just a cold. I would have been listening to his lungs. And he’d still be here. I let him go with his dad to indulge his little temper tantrum. I figured we’d put our relationship back together later. But there was no later for us, and I feel like it’s my fault.”
“That’s really sad.”
“It is. I know. And I’m sorry it’s not a very good story to go to sleep on. But you asked.”
Justin opened his mouth, probably to ask another question, but she interrupted him with a stop sign of a hand. Then, not wanting to seem harsh, she reduced the signal to one shushing finger.
“I understand what you’re doing, Justin. You’re feeling a little scared because your father is away, and I know you don’t really want to go to sleep. And you don’t want me to leave. But you need your sleep, and I need to walk out of here sooner or later. So how about we just take a deep breath and be brave about this?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Justin said.
She looked both ways, up and down the dark street, for probably the tenth time since stepping out of her car. Then she took a deep breath and opened the door of Calvin’s tiny rented house.
She stepped in and closed the door behind her too quickly. She wanted to pretend to herself that she was not afraid, but it wasn’t working out well.
She pulled down the window shades on the street side, then turned on a lamp.
The home was clean and well tended. Decent, like the man who kept it. It was not fancy, and clearly it did not benefit from the money to buy nice things, but it fairly shouted of being lived in by someone determined to lead an organized life. It also struck her as fairly generic, a furnished rental that the new tenants hadn’t had time to personalize. To make uniquely their own.
The exception was one huge, healthy potted plant that sat on a table by the window, injecting a surprising amount of life into the room.
There was only one bedroom. She walked to its doorway and looked in at the two twin beds, side by side in the tiny room, with just enough space in between for one person to navigate at a time.
She thought, No wonder Justin is afraid to sleep alone.
On one of the two beds lay a stuffed animal, ancient and too well used. Too often held. It was a rabbit, its ears flopping with age, its eyes long gone, just an X of black thread left on each side of its face. If it had been a color at one time, it was no longer.
Her mind flashed back to earlier in the evening when Justin had started to ask for one other thing from the house but refused to finish his thought.
She picked up the rabbit and put it in one of the bags she had brought.
The closet had no door, but it was neatly arranged with Calvin’s clothes on the right, Justin’s on the left. Shoes sat straight on the hardwood floor underneath the hanging shirts. Pants lay folded on a shelf above.
She reached for Justin’s half a dozen shirts, then paused. Her hand moved to the right, and she pulled one of Calvin’s denim work shirts to her face. She breathed deeply, hoping it would have retained some of Calvin. That scent of clean male skin and something unique to him. But it was freshly washed and smelled faintly of laundry soap and nothing more. Chastising herself, she tucked all of Justin’s shirts, pants, and shoes into the bag. She found underwear and socks in the dresser drawer, and packed those up as well, careful to stay away from Calvin’s side.
As she worked, her eyes fell on a photo. It was in a wooden frame, carefully carved and sanded. Possibly homemade. It was a photo of Calvin and a woman she could only imagine to be his late wife. She was slight and pretty, with skin almost a perfect match for his, wearing a light summer dress and looking up at him with adoration. Which he returned.
She placed the framed photo in the bag as well.
Then, in the kitchen, she rummaged through the cupboards for a large mixing bowl, filled it with water in the sink, and set the pot of the poor plant in it. To give it half a chance to live until Calvin came home.
Her hand was already resting on the front doorknob when she remembered the toothbrush.
She had no way of knowing which of the two toothbrushes dangling from a rack in the small bathroom was Justin’s, so she took them both. She brought the toothpaste because he might like his own brand better.
She opened the front door and looked both ways. The dark street was still empty. She stepped out and locked the door behind her.
Halfway to the car the woman with the poodle appeared under the streetlight, fussing at her dog to “do potty” so she could go back inside. Dr. Lucy fairly ran the last few steps to her car before the woman could come close enough to recognize her. She needn’t have bothered. The woman never once looked up from her little white dog to see what else might be taking place on her block in that warm summer night.
Dr. Lucy tiptoed into the guest room and began putting the clothes away by moonlight. She supposed it could have waited until morning. But she couldn’t shake the image of the shirts becoming creased on top of one another in the bags after Calvin had obviously gone to the trouble to iron them so carefully.
She was placing underwear and socks in the top dresser drawer when Justin startled her by speaking.
“Thanks for doing that,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t wake me.”
“You haven’t been able to sleep at all?”
“No, ma’am. Sorry.”
The “sorry” struck her as a tiny bit of tragedy. In fact, it reminded her of Pete. No wonder those two got along so well.
She walked to his bed and turned on the light and sat with him. Neither said anything for a time. They just blinked at the sudden brightness.
“I brought back two things you didn’t ask me for,” she said, finally.
“Really?”
He sat up straighter in anticipation.
She pulled the stuffed rabbit from the bag and held it out to him.
“I thought you might want this. It was on your bed. So I thought maybe you were used to having it at bedtime.”
“Um. Not really, ma’am. I mean . . . I like him. But I don’t need him. When I was little I couldn’t go to sleep without him. But . . . you know. I’m eleven. I’m pretty big for that bunny st
uff now.”
He kept staring at the rabbit, but he still did not reach out to take it from her hands.
“Here’s what I was thinking, though,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I get upset, I don’t really want to be grown up. Not in that exact moment. It makes me feel younger when I’ve lost something, or I’m missing someone. So if you’ve outgrown that rabbit years ago, but you wanted to hang on to him while your dad is away, I just don’t think that would be such a bad thing. I really don’t think anybody would fault you for that.”
“Pete might think I was a baby.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But if it’ll make you feel better, we’ll keep it just between you and me.”
Slowly, with his eyes wide, he reached out and took the rabbit out of her hands. Then he set it on his pillow. As though he couldn’t imagine holding it with anyone watching.
“What’s the other thing?” he asked, his voice barely over a whisper.
She reached into the bag and took out the only item left. The photograph.
“I thought you might like to have a photo of your dad while he’s away,” she said, holding it out for him to see.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He took it from her and stood it up on its easel back on the bedside table. Adjusted the angle until it was just so. “I think maybe I’ll sleep better now. Thanks.”
She rose to her feet. She’d been tempted to kiss him goodnight. A little peck on the forehead. But it seemed too personal a gesture, and she hadn’t managed to follow the thought through.
“Goodnight,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re remote, ma’am. Not at all.”
She paused a moment, swaying slightly in the air. Then she ducked in and gave him that forehead kiss that had seemed so impossible.
“Goodnight,” she said, reaching over him and turning off the light.
“Dr. Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“Do you love my dad?”
Her scalp tingled as she geared herself up to speak.
“Now why would you ask me a thing like that, Justin? I only met your dad last week.”
“I know. But I was looking at this picture. I’ve looked at it a million times before, but I think this is the first time I’ve looked at it since I was here. Since my dad and I met you, unless maybe I looked at it since then but didn’t really notice I was doing it. The way my dad and my mom are looking at each other in the picture, you and my dad look at each other like that. Maybe not exactly the same. But the same. If you know what I mean.”
Dr. Lucy sank onto the bed again. She sat quiet for a moment, strangely aware of her breathing. She wondered, without actual words in her head, how one goes about answering a question like that.
She was glad to be having this talk in the dark.
“I know what you mean,” she said, realizing she was heading for honesty. Which was good, she decided. She owed the boy honesty. Or life did, anyway, but she was the only one here with him. “And I’m not saying you’re wrong about what you see. But love takes more time. I think maybe I could love your dad, if we had more time and we let ourselves get to know each other. But I’m afraid we never will. We don’t dare, because . . .”
She wondered how best to finish that sentence. Or if she even needed to.
“I know,” he said. “I know the because.”
She placed one hand on the top of his head briefly, her thumb brushing the bandages. Then she took her hand back and rose to leave.
She felt surprisingly drained inside, as if she’d run a marathon without ever moving her feet.
“Dr. Lucy?” he asked as her hand touched the doorknob.
She sighed, but only inwardly. She didn’t respond with words. Just stopped and waited.
“That was too many questions, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just try to get some sleep.”
She looked back at him, her eyes more adjusted to the dim room lit only by moonlight. The rabbit was no longer resting on the pillow. No longer separate from its boy.
In the middle of the night Dr. Lucy woke with a start, sitting up in bed. The dogs were barking and howling in their runs. It made her heart race. She hadn’t heard a knock, but she knew there must have been one. That or a prowler. Something had the dogs on full alert, and nothing short of a sudden nighttime visitor had ever drawn such a reaction.
Winston the greyhound, who had come upstairs again because the wolf-dog was outdoors, tipped his head back and let loose a spooky, unsettling howl.
One hand to her chest and trying to steady her breathing, she reached out for the drawer in the bedside table and found the pistol by feel. It added to the discomfort of the situation. It did not alleviate it.
It’s so easy to go out and buy a gun to feel secure. To feel you can handle what might come up. But in that moment the gravity of the situation felt far clearer. If you have a gun, and you’re holding the gun, you might shoot somebody. And that’s a real thing, with real consequences.
She almost left the pistol where it lay. But she thought about Justin in the next room, and she slid it out of the drawer and into the pocket of her pajama bottoms.
In the thin sliver of space under her bedroom door, she saw the light go on in his room across the hall.
“Stay where you are, Justin,” she said out loud but under her breath. Too quietly for anybody but herself to hear.
She crossed to the window, which was already open for air.
“Who’s there?” she asked, wanting her voice to sound steady and unafraid. It didn’t.
“Are you the doctor?” an unfamiliar male voice called up.
There was only one figure on her front porch. Looking up at her in the dimness. One tall man. The dogs recommitted to their howling when they heard him speak.
“I’m a doctor,” she said, still far more unsure than she used to be in these situations.
“I need a doctor,” the man said.
“Then why don’t you go to the county hospital like everybody else?”
“Well, see, that’s the thing,” he called up. Louder, if anything. “They ask too many questions. I knocked over that gas station out on the highway just north of town, and the night clerk had a gun. I don’t want a doctor who’s going to be asking how this happened.”
Dr. Lucy swallowed hard, and the fear she’d wakened up to settled thickly around her ears and in her heart. This situation was not right, and she could feel it. Something was off here.
Why come to a place like this so you won’t have to answer any questions if you’re going to volunteer the very information you claim you’re trying to hide?
She’d been in this situation maybe ten times over these past few years. And the men in question always played their cards close to their chests. What fool wouldn’t?
“What makes you think I don’t ask questions? Who told you I was even out here?”
Just for a moment she tried to calm herself. To convince herself that he was about to say Victor sent him. Maybe he was simply the dumbest criminal on the planet. That could happen. Somebody had to be.
“Well, you know,” he said. “You hear things.”
Her whole body buzzing with fear, she raised her voice and made it hard like steel.
“I’m calling the police right now,” she said. “Get the hell off my property before they get here if you don’t like answering questions.”
The man didn’t move. Just stood in the moonlight, leaning on her porch railing. Dr. Lucy wrapped her hand around the gun in her pocket.
A moment later the man jerked upright, shook his head, and turned away. He walked back down her pathway toward the road.
She collapsed onto the sill of the open window and watched him to be sure he kept moving. She worked hard at breathing normally until she heard a car start up and drive away. Then it was easier, and breathing happened more naturally.
Another knock made her jump so suddenly that she almost fell ou
t the window.
“Dr. Lucy?”
She pulled a huge breath and realized it was only Justin at her bedroom door.
“You can come in, honey,” she said, her voice audibly shaking.
The door opened slowly. Just a few inches. His silhouette appeared small and cowed, backlit by the lamp in the guest bedroom.
“What was that, Dr. Lucy? Did somebody come?”
“Yes, but it’s okay. They’re gone now.”
He padded across the room to her, cutting a wide path around Winston. She pulled him close, and he sat next to her on the windowsill, clutching his stuffed rabbit.
“Who was it?”
“Just somebody who wanted a doctor. But I’m not the right doctor for him.”
“What kind of doctor did he need?”
She opened her mouth to spare him with a lie, but the truth came out, almost on its own power.
“I don’t think he needed a doctor at all.”
“You said he did.”
“Well, he said he did. He said he’d robbed a gas station and the night clerk had a gun. He said he was looking for a doctor who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions.”
“Hmm,” Justin said. “That seems strange. If he already told you he robbed a place, then what did he not want you to ask about?”
Dr. Lucy smiled in spite of herself. She realized she had begun to calm some. Her heart and breathing felt nearly normal.
“You’re a smart boy,” she said. “That’s what I was wondering, too. That’s why I think he was lying.”
“Why would he lie about that?”
Then she regretted getting this far into the truth with the boy. Because it was a scary truth. He’d be better off not knowing it. He would sleep better without it.
But she couldn’t figure a way to back out of the situation again.
“I think maybe the police wanted to see if they could catch me doing something illegal. See, if I know that man robbed a gas station and I patch him up and don’t report it to the police, that would make me an accessory to the crime. I’m sorry to have to tell you that, and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the guy just wasn’t a very good thinker. But either way, don’t worry. They’re not going to catch me doing anything I shouldn’t.”
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