The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  But she experienced no such negativity when Mark draped his arms around her. “Ah,” she said happily. And sleepily: within minutes she felt her eyelids dragging down. She gave in to the urge to sleep, her last conscious sensation a new and entirely wonderful feeling of contentment.

  * * *

  —

  The contentment was still there when she woke. They’d both slept hard, waking up in a state of disorientation to find it was the middle of the night. Mark turned on the light and she laughed at him: he sported a deep furrow across one cheek where he’d apparently been attacked by a seam in the pillow.

  “You don’t look good either,” he told her. “I’ve never seen such an acute and catastrophic case of bedhead.”

  “Please do not appropriate doctor vocabulary when addressing my looks.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll be forced to talk like a business dork.”

  “Oh God, no. I’ll behave.”

  She wanted to keep up the banter—she knew lots of bizspeak from a short-lived entanglement with a stockbroker last year—but a sudden realization struck her: she’d forgotten to text Jonah.

  She scrambled to the side of the bed, patting around for her bag. Her phone, once she found it, was dead, leading to more fumbling for the charger. Once it revived, a new bout of text messages and missed call notifications exploded across the length of the screen like a little shower of popcorn. She scanned them quickly, but they were innocuous messages, the kind Jonah sent her twenty times a day: someone too good to be true had reached out to him online; his next-door neighbor, plumbing the depths of bad taste, had painted his house a shade that could only be described as Booger Green; a confusing series of texts that turned out to be a plot synopsis of the Netflix adaptation of Caroline Kepnes’s novel You. Georgia mentally checked that one off her watchlist, since Jonah had just given away all the surprises. She debated whether to text back or to call: at this hour, he’d likely still be asleep. She sent an apology, telling him she was safe and fine and asking him for a status update as soon as he’d heard more about why his patients were leaving. As an afterthought, she tacked on an admission that she’d decided not to stay at the conference hotel, stating she’d found a more authentically Dutch place but neglecting to mention the authentic Dutch place came equipped with a man.

  Glancing at the man in question, she saw Mark had rolled back to his side. She started to get back in bed when an avalanche of needs struck: she was starving, thirsty, and in danger of imminent bladder explosion. Obviously she’d rather keel over from dehydration than wet the bed in front of a dude, especially right after a romantic interlude. Mumbling that she needed the restroom, she leapt up.

  And stopped in awe.

  Whoever had designed this apartment in Amsterdam had possessed a clear vision and an apparently unlimited budget. Even if you weren’t into mid-century modern, the room in which she stood was spectacular: a fifty-foot expanse of warm, wide-plank floors, boasting a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the canal.

  Despite her urgency to find the bathroom, she paused for a moment to take it in. Gauzy linen curtains rippled from the ceiling, presumably flooding the room with natural light in the daytime, but currently framing an aerial view of an army of bicycles parked on a dark, cobbled streetscape above the fluid black of the water. Partitions subdivided the space into functional areas: a bar separated the sleek kitchen from the lounging space, stuffed with Arne Jacobsen Egg chairs and funky chaises and huge, arcing lamps. Bright, trendy art graced the white walls; enormous banana leaf plants in silver pots dotted the floors. Only the bathroom, with its stand-alone tub just visible from where she stood, had doors.

  She looked past the table to the blackness outside. It struck her that all these lovely expansive windows were currently showcasing a view of her naked ass, so she scooted along. The smooth wood floors of the main room gave way to cool marble in the bathroom. She didn’t turn on the light—there was enough ambient moonlight from an oval window to make out the fixtures—but she did take the time to nudge the heavy wooden door closed. She might have just leapt into bed with a stranger, but she did have some sense of propriety.

  Ordinarily, you would not find Georgia and the phrase leapt into bed with a stranger in the same vicinity. She sometimes boasted (complained) to various friends about her single status, but in truth she was a serial monogamist who often lapsed into celibacy owing to a poor playing field. Even including the shorn surfer, she hadn’t met any intriguing men in ages.

  Everyone believed marriage rates were declining, but marriage rates in her particular demographic group—educated women—were actually rising. Her friends from medical school were all married: Zadie, a cardiologist, and Emma, a trauma surgeon, both lived with their husbands and kids in Charlotte; Hannah was an ob-gyn in California. She alone, among her female peers, fretted about the ever-dwindling pool of functional spouses out there.

  So now, as Mark called out from the bedroom, no doubt wondering if she’d fallen asleep on the toilet, something in her automatically responded to the sound of his voice. This clang of interest, this little surge of . . . pleasure zoomed through her synapses, lighting her up. You couldn’t force that feeling, and you couldn’t fake it.

  If you were lucky enough to find it, you recognized it right away.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, the apartment was even prettier: infused with sunlight, bright and crisp. Seated at a high desk fashioned from some sort of shiny metal, Mark hunched over a laptop, his forehead crunched in concentration, chewing on a pencil as he pecked. She watched him until he looked up and saw her.

  “Good morning,” he said, the pencil falling out of his mouth.

  She pointed out the obvious. “You can’t type.”

  “You are correct.” He replaced the pencil and mumbled around it. “I refused to take typing in high school because I was concerned that if I knew how, people might ask me to type things.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “It’s a bit boring. I’m lucky enough to work with some of the most original and innovative minds on the planet, but all I do is push the money around.” He closed the laptop with a snap. “Anyway, good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  “Well, I like to end on a high note, so let’s start with the bad news.”

  “Right. The bad news: I have to head to Munich.”

  A surge of ridiculous dismay enveloped her at the thought of him leaving. “What’s the good news?”

  “I don’t have to go until the weekend. So—I’m free to hang out with you until then, except for a meeting here and there. If, uh, you’d like.”

  Yeah, she’d like. Mark evidently picked up on that, because he walked over and gave her a kiss. A smooth warmth, like liquid sunshine, poured over her, producing a fizzy feeling. She wanted to stretch and purr, like a cat.

  Mark kissed her again, and then pulled back. “You know, you have—” he began thoughtfully. She waited for the compliment to land. She had what? She had glorious hair? She had an aura of sexy brilliance? She had an irresistible mind?

  “—the most devastating morning breath,” he finished. “I was going to offer you a coffee, but maybe you want to brush first.”

  Oh.

  * * *

  —

  Four days later Georgia found herself slumped at the edge of a metal folding chair in a vast meeting room, filled with physicians in various stages of terminal boredom. She, however, was not bored. Like Eloise, the impish six-year-old heroine of children’s fiction, Georgia believed that getting bored represented a character flaw. One should always be able to entertain oneself; that was what creativity and imagination were for.

  Her lack of boredom at the moment had little to do with either creativity or imagination, however, and plenty to do with fear. Or rather, imagination was inv
olved, but not good imagination. This was bad imagination.

  She hadn’t communicated with Jonah in three days. He’d called her and texted her and even emailed her, but she’d managed to miss all of the calls and most of the texts. She had tried calling him back, but truth be told, she hadn’t tried as hard as she could have. And of course she had texted, but when she did, he hadn’t responded. She had no idea why so many patients of Jonah’s were canceling. She had no idea what Jonah’s mental state might be. And now, she had no idea where he was or what he was doing, because the last time she’d heard from him had been more than twenty-four hours ago.

  The time change wasn’t helping matters any, but most of the problem had arisen from her preoccupation with Mark: since meeting, they’d spent nearly every moment together.

  Thinking of Mark was considerably more pleasant than worrying about Jonah. They’d spent the last few days doing all the touristy things: jogging in the Vondelpark, drinking beer on canal tours, gazing at art in the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum. Every night they stayed up until the wee hours, drinking and talking in atmospheric cafes and courtyard gardens, wandering hand in hand along the beautiful bricked streets like the stars of a picturesque rom-com. They went heavy, delving into science and politics and religion and philosophy, but also discussed their favorite TV shows (him: Breaking Bad, her: The Office), and whether or not it was acceptable to serve ham at Thanksgiving (her: yes, him: no). They talked about their jobs: his concerns that his company might be on the verge of a world-changing discovery without having adequately prepared for said discovery; and her concern that Jonah was in trouble at work.

  She’d have skipped the conference altogether but for a dutiful prick of conscience. The clinic had paid her a stipend, so she was attending the conference. Glancing up from a presenter droning something unintelligible about value-based modifiers, she spied a woman from Charleston in a row ahead, a physiatrist—a rehab doctor—named Darby Gibbes. Extending her leg to its utmost length, Georgia poked the back of Darby’s heel with her toe.

  Darby looked up, startled. She’d tucked a pencil into her fair hair, which, when combined with the pair of tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her delicate nose, gave her a cerebral air, like a lab scientist. Darby was tiny and wispy, as delicate as a glass bell. Georgia knew her only because they’d started running together last year after they’d discovered they both liked to go at the same pace at the same stretch of beach near Darby’s house in Isle of Palms. She was pleasant and bland and Southern to the core, the kind of woman who pulled back her daughters’ hair with bows so enormous they looked like they might take flight and pull off the child’s head. Outside of their occasional get-togethers to run or in the doctors’ lounge at work, she and Georgia had never spent much time together.

  “Want to bail?” Georgia mouthed.

  Darby scribbled something on the edge of her conference schedule and passed it back to her. Lunch as soon as this is over?

  I’ll meet you outside afterward, Georgia wrote back and passed the program up. Glancing up at the speaker, who was now gesturing toward some sort of complicated flowchart on reimbursements systems, she hastily gathered up her stuff and mimed apologies to the people seated between her and the exit.

  The venue, like all conference venues everywhere, was a cavernous hotel, bland and homogenized, with acres of abstract-patterned industrial carpet. Same folding chairs and white-clothed tables, same accordion panels dividing the spaces into smaller breakout chambers, same bitter coffee on pushcarts. Georgia wandered through the hotel’s main artery, studying the placards on the doors in case any of the upcoming sessions sounded more enticing.

  “Georgia.”

  A short distance away someone standing in a clump of men beckoned to her. She squinted: one of her partners, McLean Andersen. McLean sported brown hair sticking up in an honest-to-goodness cowlick, and that, combined with round blue eyes and a smattering of freckles, lent him the look of an earnest little boy, even though, as the clinic’s newest board-certified urologist, he couldn’t be less than thirty-one or so. “Hey there,” he said. “Haven’t seen you around.”

  “Oh, I’ve been around,” she said vaguely, adding, “Fun city.”

  “Too much fun,” agreed McLean. “Have you been to one of the ‘coffee bars’?”

  “Have you?” she asked, surprised. McLean looked too wholesome to be a pothead. Then again, he did have sort of a mischievous look to him.

  “I refuse to answer that,” said McLean, “on the grounds that it may incriminate me. Hey, Buck!” he bellowed suddenly. A stocky man in a blue sport coat—presumably a physician or an administrator of some kind—ambled up, munching on a flat pastry.

  “Andersen,” he said.

  “Georgia, this is Kyle Buckley,” McLean said, “our rival. Just signed with Palmetto. We trained together.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, realizing he was one of the new urologists at a hospital across town. If beefy, pugnacious guys were your thing, Kyle Buckley could probably be considered handsome. Short and barrel-chested, he was built like a keg on sticks, but he balanced that with wide-set blue eyes and nice teeth and a smooth helmet of brown hair. “Nice to meet you.”

  Kyle Buckley nodded to her and turned to McLean, punching him lightly on the arm. “Heard you guys have some shit going down at your clinic.”

  “What?”

  “I heard the juice has just been walking out of the med rooms on its own.”

  “Wha—oh, you mean the missing drugs. Yeah.” McLean nodded unhappily; ever since last year, when a nurse at the clinic’s urgent care had been found dead in a bathroom with a tourniquet around his biceps, they’d all been alert to the problem of illicit drug use among clinic employees. Now, apparently, it was happening again: the drug counts on some of the more dangerous controlled substances had come up short several times in the last few months.

  Kyle’s mouth opened, displaying overly white teeth. He leered in her direction. “It’s not you, is it, babe?”

  Georgia blinked. “What? No, of course not.”

  He kept his eyes on her for a beat too long, then returned his attention to McLean. “Probably a chick, though,” he said. He eyed Georgia again, his oily smile back. “Uh, no offense.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Whoa, ease up off me, babe.” He turned again to McLean and winked. “She looks like the fun type.”

  “I am standing right here, dude,” Georgia said. She took a step forward, keeping her eyes locked on his.

  He backed up, raising his hands with an expression of exaggerated calm, as if trying to defuse a hysterical person. “Sorry, Red. You looked like you could take a joke.”

  “Kyle,” said McLean, “don’t be a jackass. Why do you always have to irritate women?”

  “It comes naturally, man.” He shrugged. “Sorry. I digress. I was golfing with one of your docs a while back and he said your clinic is getting ready to fire some doctor. Maybe drug abuse.”

  “Which doctor? And what’s the guy’s name?” Georgia asked slowly. “The one you heard this from?”

  Kyle’s wide face lit up. “I don’t know who’s getting fired, but I heard it from a guy whose name, literally, is Dr. Right.”

  Georgia’s breath caught in her lungs, sticking there with a heavy, inert feeling, as if she’d inhaled water instead of air. She managed to produce a small sound, but fortunately Kyle didn’t seem to require a response; he’d already spied someone else he knew down the hall.

  “Let me apologize,” said McLean, oblivious to the change in the atmosphere as Buckley left. “He’s a fraternity brother of mine and, as you can tell, he never progressed beyond the Animal House mindset.”

  “WTF, McLean.” She knew she had to sound normal or she’d arouse his suspicion, but her voice came out wrong; too high. “That guy is single, right?”

 
; McLean’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t tell me you’re interested.”

  “God, no. I was just hoping he’s a lonely virgin.”

  McLean laughed. “He’s married and his wife is a very patient human being.” His smile died, replaced by a look of puzzlement. “Who was he talking about? Could he have meant Donovan Wright?”

  She studied him: his round eyes were guileless. “Have you heard anything about anyone being fired?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “No,” she said. “What about the drug thing?”

  He shrugged, but his face was pensive. “There are always rumors, but . . . is something going on with that family medicine guy? Jonah somebody?”

  Another hitch in her breathing. “Tsukada. Jonah Tsukada. He’s a friend of mine,” she said.

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know, it’s probably nothing.”

  Suddenly a rumble filled the hall: the session had ended. Both of them took a step back to avoid being trampled by the egress of freed physicians. Georgia spied Darby traipsing down the hall in her direction; she’d be at their sides in another thirty seconds. She touched McLean’s sleeve.

  “Are you saying the missing medications have something to do with Jonah?”

  He held up a hand. “I’m not. I don’t know anything. Somebody said he was the topic of an executive committee meeting and they were also discussing the missing medication issue. So I don’t know if those two things are related. I shouldn’t have said anything. Sorry.”

  She wanted to ask him more, but Darby had reached them. Her head tilted, she was rooting around for something in her handbag and did not appear to have gauged the tone of the conversation yet. There was a brief silence as they waited for her to look up. “Ah!” she said, raising her cell phone clutched in a triumphant fist. “Crisis averted. I thought I lost this!” She looked at them for the first time, her gaze shifting back and forth. “Y’all okay?”