When she stepped from the elevator onto the seventh floor, she expected to find him in his office, as usual, smoking out the window, drinking cans of Coke, holding court with whoever was around, and if no one was around, leaning in his doorway so he could read emails over the shoulder of his secretary, Mrs. Trevy. But she found him alone at his desk, his large head listing to one side and his eyes half-closed. His feet were propped precariously on the edge of the desk. When she knocked, he opened his eyes and swung his long legs to the floor, toppling a pile of blue exam books. “Cass, my dear—”
She picked up the exams. She’d seen him drunk at work, but never before noon. His gray hair was wild, sticking up on one side and flat on the other. He needed a shave. He pulled himself up from his chair and waved a finger in the air. “I’ve got something to show you.” He was wide awake now and cheerful. His wool tie swung loosely from his neck as he crossed the room. He opened a drawer in his filing cabinet and peered inside.
She tried to find a place to put the exams on his desk, gave up, and sat down on the couch by the window, her T-shirt tight across her belly. She set the exams beside her, on top of volume 4 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill.
“Let me find it…” His blue shirt was rumpled and missing a button at the top.
“I need to talk to you about my proposal. You’ve had the draft for weeks.” She ran her hands over her stomach and felt the pressure of a tiny foot or hand near her rib cage.
“Here it is.” Robby held up a red file folder with her name on it. With his elbow he pushed the filing cabinet drawer closed.
“Are those your comments?”
He opened the folder and began reading. He rocked back and forth in his loafers. “This? No, this is—”
“Because I need to finalize my topic before the baby comes.” A burning sensation was building in her chest, heartburn from the baby pressing on her diaphragm.
Robby closed the folder and sat back down at his desk. His face was suddenly sober. “About the proposal—” He laid his large hands on top of the desk. “It’s not ambitious enough.”
“It’s limited in scope but—”
“You’re playing it safe.”
“I’m being realistic about what I can accomplish given the circumstances.” She gestured to her stomach.
He waved his hand in the air dismissively.
“My due date’s in August. And Amar has an interview for a tenure track job next week. They’re talking about giving him his own lab.”
“Excellent. Well done, Amar.” He opened the red file folder and began reading.
“My husband Amar,” she prompted.
“I know who Amar is.” Robby tapped the folder with his finger. “Now, let’s get down to business—”
“If he gets the job, we’ll be able to move out of student housing. Buy a real house for when the baby comes.”
Robby leaned back in his chair and began talking about when he was a graduate student. About his dissertation, which eventually became the book Counterfactuals. She’d heard all this before. Out the window she could see the tops of cedar trees, their red trunks bright against the green lawn. The smell of freshly cut grass and cedar sap and gasoline drifted into the room and turned her stomach.
Robby waxed on. “When you have a once in a generation mind,” he was saying, “you have to make sacrifices. You owe it to—”
“The other committee members thought the idea was solid. They were excited about it.”
“Who cares what they think.” He made a face like he’d caught a whiff of something rank. “They’re idiots.” He was trying to get her to laugh, but she didn’t want to play along.
“I’m going to be caring for a newborn and trying to write a dissertation at the same time.” She struggled to keep her voice even. “Even with the topic I chose, I’m not sure I can do both.”
Robby reached for his Coke. “What are you trying to say, Cassandra? Are you planning to have a bunch of kids, knit sweaters, and make jam?” One of his overgrown eyebrows hung suspended on his forehead.
She thought of Robby’s house, its quiet rooms and dusty stacks of books and papers. The photographs hanging on the walls, of his late wife and his grown sons. “Not everyone wants to spend their life holed up alone with their books and their computer—”
“That’s true. But you do. At least you did when I met you.”
He was right. When she was twenty years old she wanted to be just like him, to devote her life to big ideas, to write an important, groundbreaking book. But that was before she met Amar. Before she got pregnant.
“A lot’s changed since then. I have a family now.”
“This is bigger than that. I’m talking about creating work that will outlive us all.”
“Let me start with the topic I chose—”
“It’s not good enough. Not for you.”
Her heartburn was worse now. “Do you hear yourself? You want me to write the book you can’t write yourself.” He’d been working on the follow-up to Counterfactuals for close to twenty years.
“That’s not true.” He pressed his thumb to the red file folder. “The very opposite actually—”
“Why can’t you finish it yourself?” Her chest was on fire now. She pressed her breastbone with the heel of her hand. “What are you so afraid of?”
There was a pause. Out the window the cedar trees swayed. “I’m afraid of failing,” he said, finally. “Just like you.”
She blinked. “I’m not afraid of failing.” She thought, again, of the stillness of his house, its silent rooms. “I’m afraid of ending up like you.”
A flush sprang to his cheeks. Then his eyes skittered away from hers, and all the parts of his face she knew so well—the heavy-lidded, intelligent eyes, the prominent chin—rearranged themselves into something more ordinary and sad.
He swiveled his chair to throw his Coke can into the recycling, and when he turned back he smiled stiffly. “I hoped to work together for many more years. But if that’s not what you want, I respect your choice.” He reached for a book from one of the stacks on his desk and opened it. “I wish you the best, Cass.”
She’s had a lot of time to think about that morning, but she’s mostly spent it trying not to think about it. That’s been easy enough since Leah’s birth, when her quick and agile brain turned into something entirely different, something soggy and slack. Except every so often, in the middle of the night when she’s nursing Leah, her head will clear and she’ll resolve to call Robby, as soon as possible, as soon as the sun comes up. But she never does.
She opens the padded envelope and smells tobacco and printer ink and old window casings, the scents of Robby’s office, and finds a single red file folder with her name typed across its label. Inside is an old term paper she wrote in the first class she ever took with him: “The Problem of Possibility in Leibnitz’s Metaphysics.”
She runs her thumb over Robby’s familiar scrawl in the margins. His comments were often academic, Have you considered the inverse argument? See page 24, other times emphatic, Yes, just so. Don’t stop now—follow this line of thinking to its conclusion, and occasionally cranky, I’m bored. On page 8 there’s a wrinkled watermark where he set his Coke can.
Although she’s forgotten the details of the paper, she remembers what Robby scribbled on the last page under the grade. I expect great things from you, Cassandra. In a way that comment changed her life. She switched her major to philosophy, became Robby’s research assistant, and in her senior year, applied to graduate school.
Then she notices something: on page 14 Robby wrote something on the bottom of the page she doesn’t remember. The color of the ink is blue, not black, and the handwriting’s even more illegible.
Cassandra, I was a fool to lose my temper with you today. But you weren’t listening. Will you listen now?
The rest of what he wrote must continue on page 15. But there is no page 15. She riffles through the whole paper, tips over the envelope, but finds nothing.
Bear stands up to shake himself and the air momentarily fills with tufts of black hair. He looks at Cass expectantly.
She could call Robby and ask him about the note. She should call him. She will.
She picks up her phone and dials his office number. After ten rings she hangs up and calls the department office. One of the secretaries picks up right away, and Cass asks if Robby has come in for the day yet.
In the background she hears voices and the thumping whine of a photocopier.
“Did you say Robby?”
“Professor Kells. Is he around?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Cass Stuart. He’s my dissertation chair. Or, he was my dissertation chair…”
“He’s taken a leave of absence. I’m sorry—that’s all I know.”
“Since when?”
“The end of spring term, I believe. Can I connect you to someone else?”
Cass tells her no, and hangs up.
She’s not sure what to think. She picks up her old paper, puts it back down. The day she and Robby argued was at the end of spring term. She should have called before now. She’s ashamed. He wasn’t in good shape the last time she saw him. He’d probably gotten worse.
The baby monitor comes alive. She stands up, her breasts full of pins and needles, and moves toward Leah, ready to pick her up and feel the weight of her in her arms, to press her nose to her warm head and smell her soapy scent. She’s eager, now, to settle herself in the rocker, offer up her sore breasts, and let her mind grow fuzzy and numb.
FOUR
GINNY RAISES HER head from her desk and rubs her cheek where it pressed against some papers. Her pager rattles against her metal in-box. Gray light shines from the window.
She grabs the pager and reads the number; she stands up and her Dictaphone, forgotten in her lap, clatters to the floor. The room sways for a minute, and she holds on to the sides of her desk until it stops. She takes a drink from a half-empty can of Mountain Dew, warm and flat. She rubs her face with her palms, vigorously, three times, clips her pager to her waistband, and plunges into the fluorescent-lit hallway.
She blinks, coughs, and propels herself toward the elevator, and then to the coffee kiosk on the fourth floor. When she gets there she stands in line and inhales the coffee bean fumes. She closes her eyes for a minute. It feels like she could fall asleep, right here in line, standing up. She thinks of Edith. The freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“Next,” the man behind the counter calls.
She holds out her ID badge to pay. Her intern, Seth Harper, is coming around the corner, waving his arms. She ignores him. She watches the woman behind the counter fill a paper cup with her Stumptown house blend. And then Dr. Harper’s in front of her, talking fast about a patient who’s “flipping out” on the surgical floor. His square, clean-shaven face is pink and animated. His hands gesticulate.
She takes her coffee and picks up a container of milk. She pours some into her cup. “Have her labs changed?”
“No…”
“So call for a psych consult.”
“She says she won’t talk to anyone but you. She’s throwing stuff.” His eyes blink rapidly. “Her food, her bedpan even. It was empty, but still—”
“Dr. Harper, are you a psychiatrist?” She shakes four Splendas into her coffee cup.
“No—”
“Am I a psychiatrist?”
He puts his hands in his pockets. “No.”
“You’re a surgeon. You cut people open and fix their insides. You’re not in charge of people’s emotions. Neither am I.”
She takes a sip of the too-hot coffee. Her phone beeps and she squints at it. Damn, the OR moved up her gallbladder. “What’s Professor Kells’s white count and lactate level?”
“I haven’t checked yet. I was dealing with Mrs.—”
“This is what’s going to happen. I’m going this way.” She points down the hallway. “And you’re going that way.” She points in the other direction. “I’m going to my meeting, where I have to explain to risk management why Ashmina Mehta died on the operating table, and you’re going to call a psych consult. Then you’re going to get Professor Kells’s labs.” She checks her watch—her meeting was supposed to have started five minutes ago. She takes a big gulp of coffee, and it scalds her throat. She hurries down the hall.
* * *
—
Mark calls out the window of the Jeep, “We’re going to be late,” and Peter and Noah hurry over.
“Livi needs a ride too,” Peter says, and Mark waves her into the car.
The two boys get into the backseat and put their seatbelts on while Livi lifts her instrument case into the trunk. But instead of getting in the front seat with Mark, she climbs over Peter to sit between the two boys.
Dots of rain mist the windshield as Mark starts the car.
“Livi’s my neighbor,” Peter says. “Her mom couldn’t drive her today.” Livi doesn’t add anything to this introduction. The zipper on her sweatshirt is pulled up to the very top in a way that looks uncomfortable. She whispers something to Noah, and he smiles.
They rattle past the Human Bean coffee drive-through, the Local Roasters café, and the Creative Cup coffee shop and gallery. The Natural Grains food co-op and the Flower Pot nursery. They’re running about two or three minutes late. If they get to the school later than 8:10, he’ll have to walk the kids into the office to sign them in, instead of just dropping them off, which means he’ll get to work with only a few minutes to spare before his talk.
The Jeep is forced to a crawl when they reach the SCHOOL ZONE, 20 MILES PER HOUR sign. Mark takes his place behind a queue of Priuses and Subarus. They inch forward. Flanking the school’s double front doors is a gaggle of bicycles: Strider bikes, pedal bikes, and low-slung recumbent bikes; Burley trailers and Thule tagalongs. Above the doors a banner reads PEANUT-FREE ZONE; another says LEARN TO LOVE TO LEARN. Just beyond the school the mountain rises up, misty green; its snowy split peak prods the gray sky.
The kids unclick their seatbelts and pull their book bags onto their laps. There’s a knock on the passenger-side window. Seneca’s mom hovers behind the glass. She wears a sweatshirt that says, KNOW YOUR FOOD = GROW YOUR FOOD. Mark rolls down the window.
Her face is exasperated. “You didn’t get it either.”
“Get what?”
“The text message saying there’s no school. Apparently we weren’t the only ones.” She gestures behind her, where her son stands on the sidewalk with some other fifth-grade boys, their backpacks a heap of brown and black on the sidewalk.
“What do you mean no school?”
“They’ve found mold or something.” She pulls out her phone and reads out loud. “Dear parents, Classes at Niels Bohr Elementary are canceled today, Monday, October third, due to the discovery of toxic mold in the reading resource room. The school will remain closed until proper mold remediation procedures have been completed. We regret any inconvenience this may cause. As always, your children’s health and safety is our number one priority. Sincerely, Jennifer T. Sloan, Principal.”
“School’s canceled?” Noah says from the backseat. He and Peter hiss the word yes simultaneously, and Noah flips the football to Peter across Livi.
Mark frowns. Peter’s mother works an hour away and his father travels during the week. He has no idea how to contact Livi’s parents. What is he going to do with these kids?
* * *
—
Ginny unclips her phone and pager from her waistband and sets them on the conference table. She sits down across from two administrators and a member of the hospital’s in-house counsel. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead.
“We just need to hear, in your own words, what occurred during the surgery.”
“Mrs. Mehta was in my care for ten months. I successfully removed a tumor from her colon in December, and when she presented in the ER with a suspected recurrence in August, we weighed the pros and cons of a second surgery. Her heart was a concern. After discussing the risks, she decided to go forward. I ordered a cardiac workup, and the results showed only minor evidence of an old myocardial infarction. Everything else was within acceptable limits—”
“Did you order a cardiac cath?” one of the administrators asks.
“The workup wasn’t strong enough to warrant it. She was in the ER with an apparent bowel obstruction, with bleeding, and time was of the essence.”
Ginny’s phone buzzes. She turns it over, sees her husband Mark’s name on the screen, and silences it.
“At what point in the surgery did her heart stop?” the lawyer asks.
“I had completed the resection and felt confident about the margins. It was going well, all things considered. I was nearly ready to close the fascia. Then her sats and pressure began to drop. Dr. Lee started pressors and a fluid bolus, but she was already going into v-fib.” Ginny pauses, and in her mind she hears the shrill ventilator alarm, and feels the jolt of Ashmina’s body under the defibrillator paddles. “Despite proper ACLS protocol and resuscitation efforts, we were unable to revive her.”
If, Then Page 3