The skin prickled on his scalp.
Lisa had said she was a primary-school teacher.
The last notes Janice had written said that due to Lisa’s poor response to treatment and the severity of her endometriosis the only answer was a hysterectomy. Dan sensed Janice’s frustration and reluctance to perform such a final procedure on a young woman.
I have discussed a hysterectomy with Lisa. She is understandably reluctant to proceed with this unless absolutely necessary. States she had always thought she would one day have children. Explained it is now the only way to manage her chronic pain. Lisa’s general health continues to decline…
Dan read the blood results that Janice had noted, which revealed that Linda had been severely anaemic. He read on: Conservative management of her endometriosis has proven ineffective.
Dan sat back in his seat, his fingers spread across his mouth as he stared at the glowing neon type on the computer screen. Poor Lisa, he thought wretchedly, it wasn’t fair. Everything she had told him about herself was there in Janice’s notes.
Janice Millar had pretty much avoided him since the accident. She’d visited him once briefly in his office when Linda was still in Intensive Care to offer her broken-hearted apologies for what had happened. Dan had felt sorry for her. She was just another woman who had been sucked in by Jack Millar’s practised charm and commitment to his own selfish pleasures. Janice was a shy, awkward woman with a nervous manner. Her looks were pleasant but nothing out of the ordinary, and she wore a perpetual worried frown. She was besotted with Jack and devoted to their three children.
Dan recognized a fellow introvert when he saw one, particularly one who hadn’t found a way around their inherent shyness. By all accounts she was an excellent doctor and highly thought of by both her patients and colleagues. But with a shallow bastard like Jack as a husband and competition like Linda, Janice hadn’t stood a chance.
She looked shocked when Dan knocked on the door of the consulting room she was using in the out-patient’s department in the main hospital the following day. A nurse had told him that Janice had just finished her last appointment for the morning. Looking up from the lab forms she had been tapping into a neat pile in front of her, Janice started when she saw Dan standing in the doorway with the knuckles of one hand still resting on the wooden door.
‘D-Dan!’ she spluttered in her pronounced Texan drawl, her brown eyes round in her angular face.
He smiled reassuringly. ‘Hi, Janice. Sorry to bust in on you like this.’
She blinked and shook her head. ‘No…no, that’s OK.’ She fidgeted in her chair. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘You’ve finished your appointments?’
She nodded apprehensively.
Stepping into the room, Dan closed the door behind him. Leaning his shoulders against the door, he crossed his ankles and loosely clasped his hands together, tucking them between the door and his back. Janice’s eyes flickered to him and away again. He could tell she was dreading what he would say, so he decided to come straight to the point.
‘Janice, were you treating a young woman called Lisa Jackson for endometriosis?’
It was obviously the last thing she expected him to say. ‘Yes.’ She eyed him warily. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I looked up her records.’
‘Oh. Why do you ask?’
‘Lisa Jackson was the driver of the other car in the accident.’
Janice’s fingers began nervously rearranging the lab forms on the desk. ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘She died.’
Dan flinched and wondered why he found it easier to cope with the idea of Linda’s death than the thought of Lisa being dead. Clearing his throat, he continued, ‘I know you probably think I’m being morbid, but I want to know what she was like.’
She blinked at him. ‘What she was like?’
‘Yes.’ Dan wondered how he could begin to explain and settled for, ‘It’s been bothering me.’
Janice sighed heavily. ‘It’s been bothering me, too.’
He waited silently.
‘Damn, I want a cigarette!’ she exclaimed suddenly, lines of misery etched deeply into her face. ‘I keep trying to give up but I never seem to be able to make it.’
‘It’s tough,’ Dan murmured, thinking anybody married to a weasel like Jack Millar would have to resort to nicotine, booze or Class A drugs to dull the pain.
‘I don’t suppose I have to be concerned about patient confidentiality under the circumstances.’ Janice raised a questioning brow.
He nodded reassuringly.
‘I’d been treating Lisa for several years for her endometriosis. She was a difficult case to manage, the endometrial tissue was all through her pelvic area and she suffered a lot of pain. I’d tried all the usual conservative treatments and an IUD, but she only improved for a brief period of time. She’d had to give up her job as a full-time teacher and do relief teaching. I’d reached the end of the line and a hysterectomy was all that was left to manage her pain.’ Janice gave Dan a wry smile. ‘Not one of my success stories.’
‘We’ve all been there,’ he murmured. ‘What was she like?’
Janice smiled. ‘Sweet, cute, nice. I really liked her. She had a great deal of charm with a really offbeat sense of humour. She used to floor me with the way she managed to stay so positive. It wasn’t until I told her that she’d need a hysterectomy that she fell to pieces. I remember her saying that last day that she’d always believed she’d end up with a husband and the 2.4 kids. Lisa loved her job, but she wasn’t a new millennium career woman.’ Janice shook her head and bit her lip. ‘God, she was only twenty-seven when she died, Dan. She’d been handed so much shit, but she kept coming into my office each month determined to see her life as a bunch of roses. Don’t get me wrong: she wasn’t stupid, but she was very determined.’
The description pretty much fitted the Lisa Dan knew.
He hesitated. ‘What did she look like?’
Janice’s brows rose in surprise. ‘She was small—only a couple inches over five feet and very petite. She wasn’t beautiful, but pretty in a cute kind of way.’ Gesturing to her own hair and eyes, Janice continued, ‘She had short, very curly fair hair and blue eyes. She was born several months premature and had to have corrective surgery for talipes.’
Dan could only nod as he remembered Lisa’s comment in the supermarket about how great she thought it was to be tall.
‘Dan?’
He brought his wandering thoughts back to Janice. ‘Yes?’
‘Is it true that Linda has been suffering from amnesia since she regained consciousness?’
‘Uh…yeah.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Janice said sincerely. ‘That must be dreadful for you…and her,’ she added belatedly.
Dan straightened abruptly. ‘We’ll get by.’
When he went home that night he wanted to tell Lisa that he had read her notes and spoken to Janice Millar about her, but instead he said nothing. The whole idea of her being Lisa Jackson and not Linda was still too preposterous to contemplate. His head told him so—even if his heart said otherwise. The awkwardness Dan had felt before when he was with Lisa was multiplied a hundredfold. At least before he had believed that, despite her bizarre behaviour, Lisa was still Linda and the truth would eventually out. Even if she didn’t remember him, he had memories of her. The past few days had shot that theory to hell and back.
He had a complete stranger living in his house. They hadn’t had any time to get to know each other except in the most superficial sense before being thrown together in an unnatural intimacy. Dan pitied Lisa when he realized it had been like this for her right from the moment she woke up. The only way he could keep his sanity was to keep the hell away from her, which nagged at his instinctive urge to protect and support her. He made a point of setting the table for their evening meal so he was no longer forced to sit beside her and relive in excruciating detail the night he nearly had sex with her on the counter. If he came away from
the table with heartburn or a bad bout of indigestion from bolting down his food, it was a small price to pay for keeping his hands to himself. In fact, Dan went out of his way to avoid touching her.
He no longer strolled through the house from the garage dressed only in his Speedos when he got back from windsurfing. Instead, he wore his wetsuit inside and showered it clean along with himself in the bathroom. He relied on the old-fashioned manners his mother and father had taught him and became so polite to Lisa that she could have been his maiden aunt.
Dan hated the whole thing; he missed her quirky sense of humour and her laughter.
Lisa looked like she hated him. She hid in her room and hardly spoke to him. From what Dan could see, she had longer conversations with Slade than any she shared with him. He knew he was bungling the entire thing, but didn’t know how to make things better. It was a huge relief when he spotted the A5 sheet of paper by her purse one evening a few days after the police officer’s visit. He went looking for Lisa and found her ferociously scrubbing a pot in the kitchen.
‘Lisa?’
She jumped and looked at him over her shoulder, her arms elbow deep in soapy water. ‘What?’ she asked rudely. Dan had noticed that her rudeness had increased in proportion to his politeness.
‘I see you have an appointment to have your cast removed.’
She shrugged. ‘Yes.’ She turned back to scrub the pot again, her slender hips swaying with the movement.
Dan stared at the curve of her bottom beneath the long denim skirt she was wearing. He didn’t recognize the skirt as one of Linda’s. In fact Lisa had been wearing a few things lately that he’d never seen before—simpler, more functional items of clothing that suited Lisa but would never have been Linda’s taste. Dan knew what expensive women’s clothing looked like after eight years of living with his wife, and he knew the denim skirt and the other new things hadn’t cost even a fraction of what Linda would have spent on just one item of clothing. What astounded Dan was how Lisa somehow managed on the tiny amount of money she accepted from him.
A ‘V’ of irritation appeared between his brows. ‘It’s tomorrow morning.’
She refused to look at him. ‘I know.’
Dan gritted his teeth. ‘How were you going to get there?’
She shrugged again, her dark head bent to her task. ‘I dunno. Shanks’s pony.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Walk, bus, whatever. Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’
‘I’ll take you.’
She stopped scrubbing the pot to look over her shoulder again. ‘The appointment isn’t until ten-thirty. You leave by seven most mornings.’
‘You could sit up in my office until your appointment is due,’ Dan insisted stubbornly.
Lisa looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why?’
He frowned. ‘Why what?’
‘Why the sudden urge to escort me? Don’t you think I can be relied on to turn up? Believe me, I’m dying—’ She winced, and Dan did too. ‘I really want to get this thing off.’
Damn her. Why couldn’t she just accept his offer in good faith? Because he’d been behaving like a total asshole, that’s why.
‘They won’t give me another one, will they?’
‘Pardon me?’ Dan asked distractedly.
‘Another cast?’ Lisa asked anxiously. ‘I won’t need another one, will I?’
‘No. I shouldn’t think so.’ He narrowed his eyes and added, ‘But just in case you do, you should have a ride home.’
Her face fell and he felt like the worst kind of a heel. It was highly unlikely the cast would be replaced. Her injury had been a very straightforward undisplaced fracture of the tibia and fibula. The callus formation, which was the first step towards repair of the broken bones, would be well and truly in place by now and the rigid cast would no longer be required to immobilize her leg.
‘I am not having another bloody cast! I don’t care what anybody says!’ Lisa exclaimed, looking upset.
She reminded Dan of one of the kids at the hospital throwing a tantrum about their treatment and crying, ‘I don’t want another plaster, Dr Dan! It itches and I hate it!’
Dan could usually talk them around.
‘I’m sure you won’t. Just be ready to leave at seven.’
‘Alright,’ she reluctantly agreed and returned to her pots and pans.
21
The car drive in the morning was accomplished in almost total silence.
Lisa stared out of her window at the slow-moving rows of traffic fighting to get down the Northern motorway and across the Harbour Bridge into Auckland city, thankful they were travelling at a crawling pace.
Dan had hoped they might be able to get back on their former easy footing and enjoy the kind of lively conversation they’d had in the past. Unfortunately he’d forgotten his dream about Lisa sitting stark-naked in his car on the journey into work, but now he remembered every little detail that had woken him at two o’clock in the morning with an erection and his breath rasping in and out of his lungs like an old asthmatic.
He could barely think coherently, let alone speak.
After depositing Lisa in his office amidst the mess of his desk, he left to go to the operating theatre. He’d asked her to wait for him after her appointment so that when he finished his theatre list he could drive her home.
‘I can get the bus,’ Lisa insisted.
‘There’s no need,’ Dan snapped and disappeared.
Lisa surveyed the mess on his desk and tried not to smile. It looked a lot like his bedroom used to.
Her smile faded. She felt deeply hurt. Dan kept blowing hot and cold. Lisa regretted ever telling him her story. Ever since, he had treated her like an alien being; he was as twitchy as a drug addict going cold turkey around her, and she hated it. She wanted to hate him. But every time she saw his blunt, square-jawed face with its wary expression, every evening when she heard his car drive into the garage and heard his low, gruff voice call her name, every time she remembered how he had held her and shielded her from pain and ridicule, Lisa’s heart seemed to turn over in her chest.
And God knows the roaring desire she felt whenever she imagined getting herself wrapped around his tall, beautiful body was driving her demented. Lisa had never been so horny in all her life.
And so completely stumped as to what to do about it.
Bugger Sherry, she had been onto her straight away.
‘Sleep with him.’
Lisa had tried to arrange her expression into a look of outrage. ‘I will not! What do you take me for?’
‘A horny, pathetic slapper,’ Sherry replied bluntly. ‘Sleep with him.’
Lisa stopped pretending. ‘How? He wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.’
Sherry snorted. ‘Maybe not a pole but I’m sure there’s something else he’d be happy to touch you with.’
‘You are so crude sometimes, Sherry!’
‘And sexually satisfied,’ she replied coolly. ‘I sleep well at night, Lisa. Do you?’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
Sherry was incredulous. ‘Beg your pardon? You don’t know what to do? Are you serious?’
‘He goes hot and cold, Sherry,’ Lisa explained miserably. ‘He can be as unreachable as Mount Cook when it suits him.’
‘For God’s sake, Lisa!’ Sherry cried in exasperation. ‘Work it out, girl!’
Lisa looked at her helplessly. ‘What do I do?’
‘Take a look in the mirror, Lisa!’ Sherry snapped. ‘I’m sure if you stripped off and climbed into bed with the man during the night he wouldn’t exactly fight you off. You’d soon get over him once you realized he’s just the same as any of the other men you’ve gone to bed with. Both of them.’
Lisa scowled. That would teach her for confiding in her sister. ‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ she said glumly, wondering how she could be having this conversation, even if it was with her sister. Where had her pride gone? Up in smoke the moment she had taken a good, long look at Da
n Brogan.
‘Please shut up,’ Sherry said sweetly. ‘You’re starting to piss me off. Just remember one thing.’
‘What?’
‘A condom.’
Lisa almost laughed herself sick whenever she imagined creeping—well, maybe not creeping, more like thumping with the plaster cast on her leg—into Dan’s bedroom stark-naked. She pictured herself sliding into bed beside him—which was really nice, she usually lingered over that bit—and running her hand down the warm skin of his naked shoulder—did he sleep naked? She let herself linger a long, long time over that part. He always seemed to have something on when he rescued her from her sleepwalking episodes. ‘Dan?’ she would husk. ‘Dan?’ Husking sounded so much better than her Kiwi twang.
It was about now that Dan would rear up and look over his shoulder at her with an appalled expression on his face. Lisa would reach out and stroke a foil-covered condom teasingly down his arm and husk again, ‘I’ve come prepared, Dan. Prepared to come.’ Right about then he would jump out of bed and tell her to fuck off, and Lisa would come to the rapid conclusion that that would be the only one she would be receiving that night.
Preoccupied, Lisa found her way from the children’s hospital to the main block to see Rob the plaster technician at the appointed time and waited an extra three-quarters of an hour because the clinic was running late. After Rob had cut off her plaster, they sent her around to the radiology department to get in the queue for an x-ray, and then she had to wait for the orthopaedic surgeon to look at her films. By then, Lisa was sweating at the thought of being told she would have to have another cast put on.
When she was called in to see the surgeon, the first thing he asked her was, ‘How’s Dan?’
‘Er…fine,’ Lisa muttered. What about her? What about her leg?
‘Haven’t seen him for a while,’ Boneman continued, pushing the x-ray films onto the light box and squinting at Lisa’s leg with its bright white bones.
Bonkers Page 23