“Good.”
She swiveled to address Beezon. “Why is this happening?” she asked.
He raised his hands in a Who, me? gesture. “No one is dying,” he said. “Dr. Tsukada could have made a different decision, but he chose what he chose, and we chose what we chose. Not to mention we have other informatio—”
The lawyer interceded before Beezon could say something terminally stupid. “Dr. Brown. I assume you are close with Dr. Tsukada. Who is his legal representation?”
“I’ll tell him to get back to you on that.”
She’d almost reached the exit when another thought occurred.
“Beezon. Do you know a patient named Frieda Myers Delacroix?”
He flicked his eyes upward; the sign of a positive tell. But Claude, who hadn’t spoken once up to this point, suddenly took up the mantle on this one, swiveling in his seat to better view her. Unlike Beezon, his face gave away nothing; he might as well be a stone carving, he was so self-contained.
“I know who he is.”
“What happened to her after you got rid of her? Did she find another doctor?”
Claude didn’t blink. “Not to my knowledge,” he said.
12
THE UNITED STATES OF GEORGIA
MARK
He’d just fallen asleep when his phone woke him up. It took him a second to recognize the sound: the distinctive staccato trilling of a FaceTime call. Rolling to his side, he grabbed the phone and swiped it on, holding his breath during the slight delay as the picture established itself. Then Georgia’s features swam into focus, her forehead and nose magnified by the angle of the phone into elongated blobs. Perhaps it wasn’t her best look, but upon seeing her a swell of pleasure engulfed him nonetheless, until he realized she’d be unlikely to call him this late his time unless something was wrong.
“Georgia,” he said. “What happened?”
He’d had a long week, mainly spent drilling down into the financials of a company that Rolly, the CEO of their firm, wished to acquire. The vast majority of this sort of work was tedious: analyzing balance sheets, trying to discern hidden liabilities, teasing out overvaluations in assets. While he wouldn’t exactly describe these tasks as enchanting, they were satisfying enough. Or normally they were. But this week, since Georgia had left, he’d been restless and blue and—uncharacteristically for him—bored with his work.
“It’s Jonah,” she said. “They fired him.”
She spent the next ten minutes recounting the events of the day. Mark listened, occasionally interjecting to clarify something but otherwise remaining quiet, allowing the story to pour from her. He fought to keep his face impassive as she spoke, not wanting to distract her with his shock that such a thing could be happening in the present day.
“Are they going to fire you too?” he said quietly, once she’d finished.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“How’s Jonah taking it?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “He vanished after the meeting.”
He listened to her for a few more minutes, her voice growing more agitated as she talked about the patients who were being forced to leave the clinic. Before he could ask another question, she abruptly switched gears.
“Didn’t you tell me you have some pretty good IT guys on staff?”
“We’re a biotech firm based in California, Amsterdam, Munich, and Hong Kong. We have nothing but computer geeks. Well, and science guys. And, you know: finance guys.”
“I don’t need a science guy or a finance guy,” she said slowly, “but I might have a question for one of your computer geeks. I’m still thinking about it.”
“Is it something to help your patients? Or Jonah?”
She moved the phone closer to her face, briefly transforming her eyes into two bulging fishbowls, before the view shifted again. She’d set the phone down, presumably propped up against something, and settled back against a couch. From this distance, he could see the fine bones of her face and the hollow at her throat and just a hint of the swell of her breast, moving subtly as she breathed. She’d pulled her hair back into a knot and secured it with two crisscrossing chopsticks. He was overcome, suddenly, with the urge to pull them out and watch her hair tumble down her back.
“Maybe,” she said. “I have an idea.”
“Want to tell me?”
“No,” she said, and her expression changed. “You’re better off not knowing.”
He hesitated. “That doesn’t sound good.”
She offered a small, sad smile. “So do you know somebody or not?”
“I’ll put you in touch with Olin Dortch. He’s basically a computer himself.”
“Thank you, Mark,” she said.
“Georgia?”
“Yes?”
“Fair warning: Olin can be a little weird.”
“I’m a fan of weird. You’re possibly the first normal guy I’ve ever dated.”
“I can’t decide if that’s good or not. Plus, Jonah warned me that you’re hell on men.”
To his relief, she laughed. “Only if they deserve it. And really, I haven’t dated anyone seriously in a long time. I had a dry spell in med school, where any attempt to sleep—let alone date—was met with literal bloody carnage, and then I was engaged to the world’s biggest narcissist, and then I was a surgeon with a real jo—”
He blinked. “You were engaged?” He thought about their long talks in Amsterdam, trying to recall the exact structure of her words as she’d described her past to him. “To who? Angus? I thought he was just a boyfriend.”
“Angus? Yes, well, the boyfriend phase preceded the fiancé phase. He’s neither one now, as you may have noticed.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing unusual, anyway,” she said. “He had this strange aversion to monogamy, as it turned out. He also found my career choice unseemly: all the cock-doc jokes, maybe; or maybe it was that time I shared too much detail about how sex can cause penile fractures. Anyway. He’s happier now. And I’ve learned I’m not great at relationships.”
If this loser Angus had been standing in front of Mark at the present moment, he’d have been tempted to punch him in the head, despite a lifelong commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution. Having been raised by a man who’d knocked him around plenty, Mark had vowed never to raise a hand to anyone in anger himself, but surely an exception could be made in this case. He pictured this satisfying image for a moment and then wrested his thoughts back to a more productive zone. “Georgia,” he said. “I was hoping to come see you in a week or two.”
She took a moment to answer and, immediately, doubt assailed him. Perhaps he was making much more of their fling than she was. Plenty of applicable adjectives existed to describe the notion of thinking you might have a meaningful thing with another person after such short time: premature, foolhardy, delusional—take your pick. He had a gallon of milk in his refrigerator older than whatever this thing was he had going on with Georgia. (Granted, cleaning out the refrigerator was not his forte.) And it wasn’t as if they’d discussed it: when they’d been together those seven days in Amsterdam, neither of them had mentioned the future. They’d delved into the past, sure, but their shared experience had existed mainly in the realm of the present. It hadn’t even been a representative present: they’d been enveloped in a bubble, wandering the streets and museums and landmarks of Holland, more or less free of responsibility.
Still, Mark had the sensation Georgia understood him in a manner few people ever had. It was embarrassing, actually, how much he’d enjoyed himself with her. He might as well have opened up his skull, unfurled a tangle of neurons, and exported the contents of his mind into another body, so great had been his ease in her company.
Mark had never considered himself overly competent with women. High school, a dim and tragic period in which
he had ceaselessly mourned the death of his mother, was best forgotten. He’d graduated a virgin, which in ordinary circumstances might have embarrassed him, but in the throes of his prolonged, bewildered teenaged bereavement, the fact that he wasn’t scoring barely registered.
His mother had been named Earla but everyone called her Early. The nickname suited her; she had been prompt, arriving for everything with time to spare, but also with a sparkly, resolute cheer that added luster to even the most mundane events, like picking Mark up in the afternoon carpool or attending the incessant, stultifying, sweltering baseball practices of his older brother. Early’s luminosity defined her. Her expression, at least in Mark’s memory, shone with perpetual delight: the face of a mother gazing with adoration upon her son. It wasn’t until she died that Mark realized no one would ever greet his arrival with that expression again.
In their family, Early had been both the sunshine and the glue, lighting up and drawing together her taciturn husband and her introverted sons. After her death, they fractured like repelled atoms, shooting farther and farther away from one another until they barely cohabited the same universe. His brother, Todd, a good athlete, coped by turning with single-minded determination to the pursuit of a baseball scholarship; and his father, Ed, a gruff and basically vile alcoholic, coped by pursuit of Old Milwaukee beers at Nan’s, the closest thing they had to a neighborhood bar in their particular section of suburban Cincinnati, ignoring everything his shattered sons did. It had been a lonely, sad adolescence.
Things got better in college. Mark had an affinity for numbers; by the time he graduated, he’d taken as many upper-level math courses as he could and somehow had gotten himself admitted to the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Despite—or maybe because of—his geekiness, he appealed to a certain subset of girl there, the sort who appreciated a subtle Handsome Nerd vibe. Of course, most often, his vibe resulted in his being “friended,” but he still had racked up a halfhearted girlfriend or three by the time he graduated.
No one would claim this track record as one of overwhelming success, but, all things considered, Mark wasn’t complaining. Or at least, he hadn’t been complaining until lately. Now, at age forty, a few insidious doubts had begun to worm their way into his consciousness. He was reasonably interesting and reasonably handsome and unreasonably tall; shouldn’t he be committed to somebody by this point? He didn’t know exactly what he sought in a woman—until now, he hadn’t come across it—but it wasn’t any of the women in his past. Personality-wise, they ranged across the spectrum: some of them were breathy-voiced dingbats and some were sharp-eyed social climbers and some were ultra-ethical angry vegans, or whatever. It didn’t matter. He liked them—he tended to like everyone—but he didn’t feel any overwhelming pull toward any of them.
So it was with total surprise that he’d realized he felt something more for Georgia, despite the fact that they’d only just met. She hadn’t reared up and slapped him when he’d kissed her in the hall outside his flat. In fact, she’d kissed him back, so hungrily and with such abandon that it was only with Herculean effort that he had been able to tear himself away from her to get inside. Even getting through the doorway in that state had been no small feat either; never in his entire life had he experienced such lust.
“Look,” she said, breaking into his reverie. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time for me to warn you what you’re getting into here. I do not have a gift for maintaining relationships. Some might say I’m a deeply flawed human being.”
“As opposed to the many perfect women out there?”
She leaned toward the screen, blowing up her nose again. “I just want it on the record: my dating game starts out strong, but usually by the end of it, the man has been reduced to a sniveling heap. You need to know this up front.”
“Caveat emptor,” he said.
“That’s exactly right,” she said, smiling. “Buyer beware. You’re assuming the risk that I may fail to meet expectations or have defects. You’ve been warned.”
“So why do you do it?” he asked. His hand reached toward the screen and he pulled it back. “Destroy these poor men? I’m assuming they don’t deserve it?”
“No, Angus aside, they’re mostly pretty nice,” she admitted. “I mean, occasionally one turns out to be a jackass, but the majority of them have been decent guys.”
“So what happens?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Jonah says I need to spend a little time working on the United States of Georgia.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he thinks I have a hard time reconciling my emotional state with my logical state, or something like that. The part of me who wants a functional relationship continually gets taken down by this control freak who is afraid to get too close to anyone.”
She said it lightly, as if Jonah had been overthinking things, but in truth Mark knew exactly what he’d meant because he’d experienced something similar himself. He recognized that the fault for his unmarried status should be assigned to him, since, in some perverse and ultimately self-defeating mechanism, he’d been known to lose interest in things if he thought he liked them too much. He wanted to protect himself from the pain of losing people, so he lost them intentionally.
Even thinking about this now activated some subterranean warning system in his mind: he worried mentioning this aloud to Georgia would jinx him. In one way, this was about as dumb as it was possible to be; there was no malignant cosmic force hovering above his head, alert for the faintest sign of happiness in order to squash it. But in another way, it wasn’t so stupid. For the first time since losing his mother, he truly cared what a woman thought of him.
“I’ll take my chances,” Mark said.
“Anyway,” she said. “That’s my stupid hang-up. I’m sure you have plenty of preferences when it comes to women.”
“Not really,” he said. “I like smart women. And funny ones. There’s only one absolute deal-killer for me, and that’s women who wear purple lace bras. I hate those.”
“I’m guessing there a story there . . .”
“Yep.” He could feel himself grinning sheepishly. “Let’s just say it involves a humiliating incident from my youth and leave it at that.”
“I don’t own any purple lace bras, so you should be safe. Anything else?”
“No,” he said. “Oh, wait, yes; there is something. Dishonesty. I guess that’s the only thing I truly can’t abide. I don’t want to be with someone who lies or who hides something major from me. Ever.”
He was quiet for a second and shook himself. “Anyway. There’s a story there too, but you don’t want to hear it.”
Softly: “You know I do.”
His mother’s death had come as an earth-shattering shock. Out of a misguided urge to protect her sons, Early had hidden her illness from them, and, wrapped up in the blinding narcissism of adolescence, Mark had failed to register her weight loss and weakness and near-constant nausea until it had been too late. One day he came home from school and she was simply gone.
This event—a pretense that everything had been fine, followed by the tragic, brutal, unanticipated loss of a parent—left him with a lifelong horror at the possibility of being deceived; deception, in his young mind, became inextricably linked with crushing grief. But this wasn’t a conversation he could face via a transatlantic data cable. He’d talk to Georgia about this in person.
“Later,” he said, softening the word with a smile at her.
“Whatever it is, I’m sorry. So: no lace bras and no lying. You’re safe with me.”
He laughed. “I didn’t say no lace bras,” he said. “Just no purple ones.”
13
THE DELECTABLE ONION
In theory the temperature should have cooled—it was mid-October, after all—but the air, devoid of an ocean breeze, baked her the
moment Georgia set foot outdoors on Saturday morning. Jonah had texted her that he’d “gone out for a bit” and he’d stop by afterward. He didn’t say where he was—maybe his favorite coffeehouse near his home in Folly Beach or one of the parks—but her money was on a sail. Maybe he’d taken his boat out at sunrise, tacking through the swells until his arms ached. Or perhaps he’d gone for a drive. He often did this when something plagued him; filling up the tank and driving aimlessly, crossing the Ashley River and paralleling the coastline toward Kiawah Island and Edisto Beach. She pictured him behind the wheel, music throbbing, the odometer on his boxy old Volvo clicking off the miles until finally he looked up and realized he was halfway to Savannah, at which point he’d turn the car around and head home. He’d drive carefully; he’d be safe.
She hoped.
If ever a situation called for peeling out of the parking garage, yesterday afternoon had been it. She’d left the meeting, staggered to the garage, and fired up her Prius—or rather, she pushed a button on the Prius, which started without a sound, thus depriving her of the satisfaction of revving the engine and screeching out in a fit of macho indignation. Instead the car had drifted like a giant innocuous bubble down the spiral of the garage, hovering briefly on the edge of the roadway before she was able to gun it to pull into traffic.
Rolling down the windows, she’d allowed the swampy humidity and carbon dioxide–laden exhaust fumes to seep into her lungs. It barely registered as uncomfortable, however, because she was generating plenty of hot pollution of her own. She felt the self-control she’d summoned during the meeting explode and then contract, transforming into a knot of incandescent fury lodged somewhere in her skull. It wouldn’t have been surprising if it had blown out of her ears in a volcanic eruption of steam, like a choleric cartoon person, lifting her off the ground. She thought of the expression seeing red. In her case, that was literal, and it wasn’t just because her hair was falling across her face.
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