“Edwin?” she said, her voice rising to a squeak.
“Ma’am,” said Edwin, nodding his big head.
Her confusion must have shown on her face, because Edwin spoke up. “I’m here in a personal capacity, ma’am.”
“Oh,” she said, “how nice.”
“I regret that I did not keep Dr. Tsukada safe.”
“Jonah,” said Jonah. “Not Dr. Tsukada. Please.”
Georgia cast a sidelong glance at Jonah, who looked moony. “Jonah wasn’t, uh, attacked,” she said, uncertain of what Edwin thought had happened. “You must not blame yourself.”
A slow flush crept up Edwin’s neck. “I do blame myself,” he said.
What in the world was going on here? She looked back and forth between the two of them and noticed for the first time a batch of half-wilted dyed-blue daisies in a cellophane wrapper on the little wheeled table by Jonah’s bed. She set the shiitake bowl down beside the flowers and a thick creamy envelope, upon which the words DR. JONAH TSUKADA had been penned in a neat, militaristic hand.
“Ohhh,” she said, accidentally out loud, adding, after a moment: “Huh.”
“Thanks for dropping off the food, Georgia,” said Jonah, his gaze on Edwin.
“Well, yeah, I’m going to bop down to the cafeteria for a bit, so . . .” She edged toward the door. Jonah waved a careless hand in her direction, but neither Jonah nor Edwin actually looked away from one another as she backed slowly through the doorway and into the hall.
* * *
—
By the time she got back to Jonah’s room, Edwin had departed and Jonah had fallen asleep, his black lashes casting tiny fuzzy shadows across his cheeks. She stared at the DR. JONAH TSUKADA envelope. It brought to mind another item; under the strap of her handbag, her shoulder sagged as if the weight of its contents had suddenly become too much. She placed the bag in her lap and dug through it, shoving aside a glob of loose receipts, an emergency pair of underwear, and a tiny, broken umbrella before unearthing the thing she sought.
Jonah’s journal.
She’d been steadfast in not retrieving it from his house since the day she had found it and removed the poem. But tonight, as she’d been trucking out to Folly for Jonah’s food and the items he’d requested, it occurred to her that this might be the kindest way to ease him into the memory of exactly what had happened. If he’d written about it in his journal, he’d learn about it in his own words, rather than her having to tell him. But also: he’d be in the hospital, in a safe place if it disturbed him. He wouldn’t be home alone.
Once again, in the hours since she’d fetched it, she’d had to resist the urge to open it and read it, even though every time she opened her bag it glowed in the bottom like a radioactive coal. Suddenly, uncertainty assailed her. What if he’d written something awful, something that would tear open the tenuously stitched wound of his mental recovery? Maybe she should look through it, just to be sure it wouldn’t harm him, before she gave it to him. After all, she’d already read—and stolen—the poem from the last page.
She dithered, watching Jonah sleep. Finally, she lowered the journal from her chest, where she’d been clutching it with the passion of a child holding a favored book, and placed the journal on his bedside table.
A hand snaked out from Jonah’s bed, clutching her wrist in an icy grip.
34
A FULL-ON HEAVING MONSOON
She let out a small scream. “Jonah! You scared me.” She traced the path of his gaze to the diary.
“Did you read it?”
The shame in her voice was obvious to both of them. “I took the last page. The poem.”
“That’s it?”
“Mostly. I skimmed it a little when I first found it,” she said.
His eyes glittered. “Do you know about Donovan?”
“I do. But not because I read your diary. He told me.”
Jonah’s eyes went wide.
“Jones,” she said. “There are things I don’t know if you remember. And things that have happened since you got sick.”
He listened, completely still. She talked him through the things he’d missed: the discovery of the box in his office, the reactions of people at the clinic, Stewart’s maneuvering, Darby’s prayers for him, Donovan’s self-implosion, Beezon’s disgrace, and her own shame at what she’d done. She also mentioned the media coverage. A faint smile appeared when she brought up all the rights organizations to whom he’d become a hero, and an even bigger one blossomed when she let him know he’d been in People magazine. “I kept a file of all your media appearances,” she told him. “I’ll bring it in tomorrow.”
He shook his head a little, as if amazed, but his face went anxious again with his next question. “What happened with Beezon? Are they firing him?”
“No,” she said. “Stewart just told me Beezon’s probably getting transferred to another part of the state.”
To her surprise, Jonah laughed. “That’s perfect,” he said. “That’s about what I would have expected.”
“No bad deed goes unrewarded.”
“Speaking of that,” he said, “what are you going to do about Donovan? Now that you know everything.”
“You didn’t have to protect me, you know. I could have fought for my job on my own.”
“That’s pretty rich,” he said, “coming from you.”
“Touché,” she said. “I deserve that.”
He nodded, almost absently. “I wasn’t thinking clearly that night; it had already been a terrible day. I got into that fight with my neighbor, who smashed up my nose, and then I had to psych myself up to go to the hospital to make the video. I got there and I walked inside and I leaned against the wall, and I just couldn’t do it. Every time I started toward the med room, I thought, You liar. How does this make you any better than them? So I left and went back to my car.”
“But—” said Georgia, baffled.
“Wait,” he said. “I’d almost driven away when I saw another car drive up and park in the doctors’ lot. It was two o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, and this is the clinic, not the main hospital, so nobody was there. Plus, I recognized the Ferrari. I didn’t know what he was doing there, but I thought about what he’d done to you and I got so pissed I got out of the car and I followed him into the clinic. I was about to storm up and confront his ass when all of a sudden he just sat down against a wall outside the procedure room and put his head in his hands.”
He motioned to a glass by his bedside table and Georgia handed it to him. He took a long sip.
“He sat there for I don’t know how long and then he got up and started walking, very fast, down to the entrance to the med room. I followed him.”
“I still can’t believe it was him,” Georgia said, in a tone of wonder.
“There are physicians who have substance abuse issues, just like anybody else,” said Jonah. “Look at all these programs the state medical board has for troubled doctors. It’s been known to happen.” He raised his eyebrows. “Even with straight rich white guys.”
“I’m sorry. Of course,” she said, adding, “But why didn’t you tell me?”
Jonah, who had started to nod again at the beginning of her sentence, abruptly shook his head. “Oh hell, no,” he said. “They had a hit list. Donovan told me how hard they were going to go after you. They were going to use the case you had last year”—he tilted his head to indicate he understood the impact the case in question had had on Georgia—“they were going to use it against you.”
She had to force herself to breathe. “It must have been awful, trying to decide what to do.”
Jonah looked down at the bedsheet, gliding his hand along the top of it until every wrinkle had disappeared. “Yes, well.” He exhaled. “There was no way I was letting them take you down too. I told Donovan if he called off the dogs and never touched
the drugs again, I’d keep my mouth shut about what I’d seen.”
“You still should have told me. We could have turned him in together. How could they go after either of us after that?”
“Who was the clinic going to believe: the head of the anesthesia department, a member of their board, a respectable married guy; or you and me? In this day and age, people believe whatever fits with their worldview, no matter how strong the evidence against it is. They see me as a fag and you as a belligerent mutant with a nose ring. All I cared about”—his voice cracked a little—“was protecting you.”
“You protected me,” she said, “and my grand plan nearly killed you.”
She sank back into the chair and buried her head in his chest. He played with her hair, twirling it around a finger. “I’m so sorry for what I put you through.”
She tried to smile. “Thank God you didn’t have a gun.”
“I’d never shoot myself, George. Depressed or not, I’d still want to be a beautiful corpse.”
She reached a finger to his lips. “Don’t.”
He pushed the button on his remote and sat up even more. “Here’s the thing, George. Even though Donovan promised me your job was safe, I couldn’t stand what I’d become. A liar; a blackmailer. To say nothing of the fact that if he wound up harming a patient, I’d be complicit. But I couldn’t figure a way out. If I blew the whistle on him, I knew it would hurt you.”
“You did help me,” she said quietly. “They didn’t fire me.”
“Are you kidding? I screwed up everything.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not the one who screwed up anything. I’m the one who tried to outsmart the universe. You are the most fundamentally honest person I know and I convinced you to lie.”
He tried to say something and she held up her hand. “Let me finish. I wanted to protect you and protect our patients, but in the process I sacrificed whatever virtue I possessed. I was wrong. The only thing that matters—the only antidote for discrimination and corruption and every other evil that plagues our society—is integrity. Behaving with honor. Shining a light on the truth. Not gaming the system to suit your . . . aims.”
Inexplicably, Jonah had gone shaky with excitement as she spoke, causing her to trail off at the end of her sentence. He looked as if he’d like to leap from the bed, but instead he turned and fumbled in his nightstand, producing his cell phone, which he jabbed at her. Before she could take it, he snatched it back, reading aloud the words on the screen.
Lux, Honoris, Veritas
She stared at him. “Light, Honor, Truth. That’s . . . Latin.”
“Right,” he crowed. “It’s exactly what you just said. You said it! I didn’t even tell you to say it.”
“Yes,” she agreed, bewildered. “Why . . . why do you know that phrase?”
Jonah placed the phone back in the drawer and trained his eyes on hers. She tried and failed to read them.
“Mark,” she said. “Mark must have said that.”
He nodded. “He’s been calling me. Just to check up. And—to see how you are.”
She caught her breath. “He wants to know how I am?”
“Yes. Yes! I know—I understand what happened with you two. He was trying to explain it to me and he used that phrase, the Latin thing I just showed you. I looked it up. And now you just said the exact same thing, without even knowing it.” He beamed at her, delighted, his animation slowly fading at the expression on her face.
“He used those words because he wanted you to understand why he can’t be with me again. Those things matter to him, more than anything else. He believed they mattered to me too.”
“They do matter to you.”
“Ex post facto,” she whispered. She didn’t bother to provide the translation, but Jonah seemed to understand: Realized in hindsight.
Both of them went quiet. For a long time they lay, him flat with his head on a pillow, her with her head on his chest, listening to the hush of his breath and the steady thrum of his heart. The room grew darker, lit only by a sliver of yellow creeping in from under the door. Jonah wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and after an eternity, he whispered to her.
“Georgia?”
“Yes?”
“Your giant head is squashing what’s left of my liver.”
She sat up, blinking. “Oh. Sorry. I guess I should let you sleep.”
Jonah flipped on a bedside light. It must have been intended as a reading lamp; a beam of white fluorescence glowed behind his head, giving him the backlit glow of an angel, or, depending on your perspective, a vampire. “Wait,” he said. “Will you do something for me?”
“Of course.”
“Call him.”
“Call Mark?”
He made a dismissive flicking motion with his thumb and finger. “Yes, Mark, of course. Call him. Tell him everything.”
“He doesn’t want to talk to me, Jonah.”
“Do it anyway.”
“We just discussed this.”
He sat up straighter, leaning forward. “Tell him everything you just told me. Do it for me, okay?”
“I . . .”
Jonah’s face was unyielding.
“I’ll think about it.”
He slumped back against his pillow, his breathing accelerated. “Good. Thank you. You’ll see; this is going to work out.”
She squeezed his hand, knowing she’d never do it. If Mark had been inclined to forgive her, he’d have called her.
“You’ll see, George. He’ll come back.”
She stood and slung her bag over her shoulder, turning as she reached the door. “Sleep well, Jones. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”
He raised a hand to wave at her. “Love you, George.”
“Love you too.”
She shut his door gently and drifted past the nurse’s station to the elevators, where she waited in silence with a group of four or five other people. At the hospital’s main entrance, she walked past a giant holiday tree fashioned of poinsettias and through the front doors, which had been strung with yellow twinkling lights. Christmas, she realized, was under a month away.
Outside, in defiance of the holiday spirit, palm trees rustled in a warm gush of air. She walked through darkened rows of cars until she found the Prius. She retrieved her keys from her bag, belted herself into the car, and drove, slowly, toward home.
* * *
—
After another few days, Jonah was released from the downtown hospital into, of all places, the rehab facility at the clinic. He’d lost a startling amount of weight, mostly muscle, and despite his overall mental clarity, he still experienced occasional periods of confusion. He did well in rehab under Darby’s care, and after his eventual discharge, Georgia took a short leave of absence and moved into his house, bringing with her an overstuffed wardrobe bag, a giant stack of books, and one highly enthusiastic dog. If she’d owned Dobby before she purchased her city home, she’d have most likely moved to the beach from the get-go. There were few things in life as illustrative of crazed joy as a ninety-pound mutt loping down the shoreline to frolic in the surf.
Dobby’s humans tended to move at a slower pace. Georgia made Jonah get outside and walk every single day, no matter the weather. When she’d been off work they’d gone at midday, typically walking somewhere for lunch, but now that she’d started back at the clinic they’d moved their walks to early morning or late afternoon.
Except today. Today she’d been off work to attend the funeral of her patient Leonard Fogelman. He’d succumbed peacefully, at home, his jolly Santa-like frame withered from the cancer that had stolen what should have been at least another decade or two of his life. After the service and the burial, his tiny wife had stood, glassy-eyed, at his gravesite before being led away by two robust but somber men in their forties—her sons, presumably—and Georgia
hadn’t had a chance to hug her or whisper what a fine man her husband had been. Still, his service had been comforting: so many people touched by such a warm life; so much love in that church for a good man.
Now, at the beach with Jonah, she shivered. She still wore her black dress, and today, in late January, it was uncharacteristically cold. They shuffled along the sand like an elderly couple, bitching about the frosty air. Earlier in the month, Charleston had boasted temperatures in the seventies and even the eighties, but now a cold wind had swooped down from Canada—or from wherever cold winds arose—instantly deep-freezing any Southerner foolish enough to venture outside without a balaclava and a substantial coat.
“I feel like we’re those military guys who open the helicopter door in The Day After Tomorrow,” said Jonah morosely, flicking at an imaginary flake of snow above his head. “The ones who ice over with a startled look on their faces after a fast-moving glacier hits England?”
“Truth. This is intolerable.”
Jonah hauled his phone out of his pocket. “Oh Lordy, George, this says it’s forty-one degrees. How can people live like this?”
“They can’t,” she declared. “I pronounce enough fresh air for today. Let’s go back and make a fire.”
“Okay!” said Jonah, adding, after a moment’s reflection, “It would help if I had a fireplace, though.”
Jonah moved slowly but gamely toward the house. Every day, he seemed to be regaining a little strength, as evidenced by their walks: today, despite the cold, they’d made it all the way to the wooden pier near the Tides hotel. It took them longer than usual to get back, though: they were now walking into the wind. Despite their joking, Georgia began to worry the cold could be affecting Jonah. She could hear the sharp intake of each of his breaths over the hiss of the wind.
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