Shadow Garden

by Alexandra Burt

  His phone rang but he swiped the call away. Donna. Last night they’d settled it: no more back and forth half-hearted ultimatums and lax demands. They had finally agreed that Penelope had one more month to get it together. It was time to move out.

  “I’m not holding my breath on this one,” Edward told Donna, who was preoccupied with three packages of English muffins. He watched her ponder each bag—white, whole grain, and low fat—the way her eyes squinted at the labels. Penelope had specific preferences and most of the time Donna aimed to please her but usually Penelope took one bite and the rest ended up in the bin. Edward wanted Donna to stop indulging her every whim but who says that to a mother?

  Donna swept up the muffins and stuffed them in the fridge.

  “We should have done this a long time ago, maybe that’s what she needs. An ultimatum, a clear line in the sand. We are doing her a disservice by coddling her,” Donna said and checked her wristwatch. “She’ll be twenty-nine. At twenty-nine . . .” Donna’s voice trailed off but Edward knew what she was going to say. How they had to make do when they were young, make adjustments, and how this generation was pampered, carrying their anxieties with them like a designer purse, look what I got, expecting everyone to acknowledge and pander to their emotions.

  “I paid her credit card yesterday. You should see those charges,” Edward said.

  “What kind of charges?”

  Edward glanced toward the stairs but it was before seven, Penelope was upstairs asleep.

  “All retail. And restaurants. And cash withdrawals. Who gets cash advances on a credit card?”

  “Well, it is what it is.”

  But was it really? Edward wasn’t sure.

  His phone rang again and he let it go to voice mail again. Donna was going to give up eventually. He’d be prepping for surgery in fifteen minutes, he’d be in scrubs by now if it wasn’t for this accident, and any minute she would give up pestering him.

  Donna’s steadfast resolve to support Penelope had waned and he couldn’t blame her for it. Edward had been fed up for a while himself and finally they were on the same page. He had spent a fortune renting apartments and houses—had never seen the deposits back on any of those—had offered to pay for college, proposed to invest in a business (once she’d come up with a viable business plan) but Penelope had decided on a real estate license. She had, to both their surprise, taken all mandatory classes and certifications. Maybe this was the progress they’d been waiting for and the looming move might do the trick. And according to the credit card charges she had also rented an office at a real estate firm.

  “It’s not an office. More a cubicle in a strip mall,” Donna said. “It needs fresh paint and new carpet.”

  Edward imagined Donna dropping by the office in sunglasses high on the bridge of her nose, her coat collar popped up, asking to use the bathroom, snooping out the place. Office or cubicle, he was torn about the real estate thing. Penelope wasn’t a people person and it wasn’t what he wanted for her but it was an honest profession. He could live with that, had learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable when it came to his daughter.

  He saw Penelope at dinner every night. On the surface she seemed poised but there was something about her he couldn’t put his finger on. Like she was constantly on edge. He could tell by the way she turned into a know-it-all, had an answer to everything, and quarreled with Donna about unlocked doors and dirty laundry left in heaps for days on end. Penelope acted agreeable enough, promised to do better yet never followed through and argued afterward about what she had meant. It made him bristle, her flighty behavior, avoiding eye contact.

  “I said I’d do it. But don’t tell me when and how.”

  This teenage rebellion behavior she should have outgrown by now, Edward recognized it for what it was: neglect of anything not Penelope. That’s what he called it. If it didn’t directly benefit her, it was a low priority.

  It had been six months and Penelope living with them had begun to take a toll on Donna. She wasn’t herself—he could tell by the way she forgot things, mixed up dates, an overall state of decline— as if Penelope’s moods were rubbing off on her. A month prior, Donna had let the housekeeper go. She alluded to wanting to hire someone else but Edward knew without a doubt that she didn’t want any witnesses to the volatile mother-daughter relationship. She feared gossip and Donna did her best to keep up with maintaining order in the house but the pristine condition he was used to was long in the past.

  Edward had finally given Penelope an ultimatum. “One more month,” he had told her. Penelope hadn’t responded but got up and stormed out of the room, leaving Donna and Edward staring at each other.

  With all this on his mind, the traffic cleared and moved, first at a snail’s pace, but then the speed picked up. The scent of gasoline hung in the air and Edward fumbled with the recirculate function on the dash. The phone rang again. He almost answered it, his hand reached but then he decided otherwise. He refused to argue with Donna again. She went from let her stay to make her move to tell her to leave today and this morning there had been another quarrel right after, in which Donna once again doubted she was doing the right thing, never sticking to her guns when it came to Penelope.

  “We said we’d see it through, Donna. The ultimatum was she has one more month to move out. It’s only a few more days. Allow her that time, wait it out, and then we’ll get on with our lives.”

  “I can’t do it another day, Edward.”

  He wasn’t going to budge. He wasn’t going to answer his phone and argue about it, and a few more days weren’t going to kill anyone.

  As he got out of the car in the parking lot of his practice, there was yet another call. He ignored it. By now Donna was worked up about him not answering his phone, about not being able to get off her chest whatever had prompted her and Penelope to quarrel. He used to intervene but over the past few months their behavior had become increasingly difficult for him to navigate, and he was tired of walking around on eggshells in his own home and had a hard time shaking it all off and didn’t they know the pressure he was under? They’d understand if any of them had any responsibility, held the lives of others in their hands like he did.

  Once in the office, he checked labs and X-rays and prepared for the first operation of the day. A straightforward lipo followed by a mastopexy.

  Every surgeon he knew performed rituals, every single one, and he was no different. He had always found the following to be true above all else: there was tremendous solace in rituals, in symbolic behaviors. The entire preparatory activity calmed his mind in ways nothing else could. It created control and reduced uncertainty.

  Time to scrub in. A glance at the clock above the sink and he began timing. Tick tick tick. Leave nothing to chance.

  He focused on the antimicrobial cleanser turning from yellow into white suds as he scoured his left hand with a brush. Scrubbing each finger and in between, the back and front of the hand for exactly three minutes, he moved on to the forearm, consistently keeping the hand higher than the arm at all times. Time check. He repeated the process on the other hand and arm, envisioned cuts and proportions, sutures and muscle fiber, existing scar tissue, and then he imagined the perfect end result.

  Tick tick tick.

  The operating suite phone rang. He looked up in surprise. It was unusual for a call to be put through once they had all gathered and were prepping for a procedure. Some last-minute funky lab result? Once a patient’s husband had a heart attack in the lobby, such things happen.

  A nurse answered on the third ring. “Dr. Pryor, it’s your wife. It’s urgent.”

  The nurse was unrecognizable behind her mask and splash guard—Connie maybe, or Debra, he couldn’t tell—all he saw were raised eyebrows. The nurse glanced back and forth between him and his hands as she held out the phone.

  “Put it close to my ear,” Edward said and proceeded to
scrub the left arm to three inches above the elbow for exactly one minute. An emergency. He couldn’t deviate from the inescapable ritual, he had to adhere to his self-imposed constraints.

  Tick tick tick.

  “Donna. What’s going on?” he asked, keeping his ear a safe distance from the phone to avoid contamination. She was breathless. He only comprehended every third word. Here. Penelope. Come home. Need. How glad he was he hadn’t told the nurse to put the phone on speaker. “Focus,” he said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Hands in the air he stood, the nurse moving the phone in closer as she shifted from one leg to the other. He jerked backward. If the phone touched his mask, he would have to change his gown, would have to repeat the entire procedure. He rinsed his hands and arms with one single movement from fingertips to elbow by passing them through the water.

  He had lost his momentum. He was supposed to be draped in a yellow paper gown in the operating suite, yet there he stood, hands above elbows, not understanding Donna’s words. He glanced through the door into the operating suite where a nurse stood with a sterile towel in her outstretched hands, waiting to dry him off. A third nurse stood holding his gown and sterile gloves.

  “Start from the beginning. I don’t understand what’s going on.” He listened intently, even closed his eyes attempting to better concentrate on Donna’s breathy words. “What happened? Repeat that?” The nurse holding the phone looked past him as if to give him a semblance of privacy, while the others were clustered in a far corner.

  Much was made later of this phone call. Each nurse had a different recollection of his reaction. One said he seemed impatient, another said he was business as usual. One said he balled his hands into a fist. In reality he said—and these were his words verbatim—“I’m scrubbed in. I’ll call you back,” and all the while he attempted to maintain a sense of order. There were no balled fists, and it wasn’t business as usual either, but there were no harsh words, no gasping, no argument. Nothing of that sort.

  What he did do was tell the nurse to hang up the phone. Standing off to the side, waiting for the anesthesiologist to give him the nod to begin the procedure, he attempted to focus on the patient in front of him, her areas of perceived plumpness; the body lined and dotted by permanent marker in front of him like a rudimentary map. The man in him saw the body on the table as perfect, the plastic surgeon recognized areas for improvement.

  He couldn’t get Donna’s voice out of his head, winded words escaping her mouth, come home, come home, come home, the slurring of her words as if she couldn’t be bothered to enunciate each syllable. He felt his breathing become rapid and shallow and a primal urge to flee the OR came over him and there was a momentary silence in the room but for the beeping of the machines behind the patient when he thought he might lose control. He would remember this day with absolute clarity later: this epiphany, this moment of knowing something horrible was going to happen.

  How many times had he returned home from work and watched Donna set the table, impeccably dressed and poised and put together? They would have dinner and not until they went to bed would she tell him of something Penelope had done and he wanted to scream how did you just get through this dinner without telling me? How did you just sit there and eat and make small talk when your daughter has become unhinged again? How did she get through all this unscathed, at least seemingly so? And now this, a breathless stuttering phone call, her incoherent carrying on.

  Behind the blue drapes the anesthesiologist leaned to the left and glanced at him. The nurses became aware of his hesitation though he didn’t know what they were thinking of this entire affair. He cleared his mind, willed himself to concentrate on the task at hand. After all, attention to detail was second nature to him, just like compartmentalizing had become a strength of his, cultivated by all these years as a surgeon.

  “Let’s do this,” he said and nodded at everyone in the room.

  He worked quickly and with focus. He injected diluted local anesthesia to reduce bleeding and swelling. Once the tissue was swollen and firm and the epinephrine took care of possible bleeding, he made a series of tiny incisions around the navel and one on each side of the patient’s flanks. He inserted a thin hollow tube through the cuts and loosened the excess fat with a controlled back-and-forth stabbing motion. He reached farther and farther to the outskirts of the markings on the body in front of him while holding the tip of the tube down with his flattened hand so as not to puncture the skin. In a radiating pattern he pushed the cannula into layers of fat, creating tunnels, sucking liquid until the tube refused to give up any more blubbery secretion. The contents of the plastic containers, which were marked with lines and numbers, settled as the fat floated to the surface.

  By the time he completed the left side of the abdomen, tension began to grow in the back of his neck like a tumor spreading at warp speed. It wasn’t until the nurse was about to fit the compression garment, as he inspected the exposed chest of the patient, in that moment of mental easing that his mind produced images of his daughter: Penelope breastfeeding. Her first steps, first day in school. By then Penelope was elusive to him, no longer the small child holding on to his hand. He had maintained an image of her as being perpetually four years old with wispy hair blowing in the wind, cheeks flushed and hands sticky after a day at the beach, never as a grown woman. Did he want her to remain forever dependent on him or was it a wish on his part to return to happier times?

  Etched into his brain stem was Penelope’s perfect face with long lashes around green eyes the color of seaweed. So poised and graceful even at that age. She knows things about this world other children don’t, he thought. How composed she was. Donna had called her Pea back then, and told him proudly how unruffled she was, how Pea couldn’t be thrown off by anything. She’s so brave, Donna said. She never so much as grimaced when she got her shots.

  Donna’s pride was one thing, but Edward was taken aback by Pea; was it normal for a child her age to ask to use the restroom when children her age still had accidents or wore training pants at the very least? Pea sought out adults rather than children, who didn’t seem to be worth the bother. She was intellectually ahead, breezed through elementary school, picked up on reading and writing as if it was the most natural thing but Edward had always thought Penelope’s maturity uncanny for a child, saw how she observed other children as if taking clues from them, watched and studied their mannerisms and sometimes she did something completely out of character because she’d seen another child do it. And with every incident he became more alarmed, and it dawned on him that he wasn’t witnessing just his daughter’s copying others but also feeling bewildered about how to be in this world.

  Sooner than most children knew how to use their clumsy little hands, Penny insisted on using a fork, wouldn’t eat unless they handed it to her. Maybe they shouldn’t have allowed her such a thing—was that why she stabbed a child at a birthday party? Out of the blue, Donna told him, Penelope had raised a plastic fork and slammed the tines into a child’s forearm.

  How absurd it all sounded, melodramatic and removed from reality, and Edward caught himself ranting on in his mind like Donna had done earlier. Donna had just exclaimed to him the other day that she was no longer able to drive because of all the stress with Penelope and he didn’t know what that was all about and suggested she get her eyes checked, to which she responded, bless your heart, but it has nothing to do with my eyes.

  His stomach locked up tight.

  “Dr. Pryor.”

  The voice of the OR nurse pierced through his thoughts, as if she had been attempting to gain his attention for a while. “The patient is ready for the next procedure. Everything okay?”

  He wasn’t okay. He was worried and the truth was, he had been for a while. Donna was acting peculiar and she couldn’t be trusted. And Penelope. Her state of mind. He hadn’t had a conversation that made sense with her in a week or two. Good at
picking up on changes in her mood and variations in her verbal patterns, he had years of experience spotting something off.

  “Scalpel,” he said and reached for the shiny metal object but stopped just short of allowing it to make contact with his hand. There was a slight tremor in his left pinky finger. He wasn’t concerned—his father and grandfather both had the same tremor, it was a nonspecific tremble, nothing to worry about—but he had observed it lately while tying sutures, had cut himself shaving even. All this stress with Penelope and Donna didn’t help.

  Suddenly the marked body in front of him seemed like an abomination. This was a forty-year-old woman who looked like she was supposed to look; slight drooping of her breasts, a minimal amount of excess skin around the navel from three pregnancies, nothing he considered imperfect. But he would cut open her skin and stanch the bleeding, he’d tug and slice her breasts, had already ruthlessly stabbed her hips with a tube sucking out fat. It was a disgrace really, to spend his talent and his time with these surgeries when he could do so much good in the world. He would talk to the office manager as soon as he finished for today, would tell her to keep a week or so free so he could do some work abroad, like reconstructive surgeries, cleft palates, facial abnormalities, benign tumors disfiguring otherwise healthy bodies. Plastic surgeons had their root in postwar reconstructions of faces blown apart by grenades, skin grafts of mutilated bodies, the surgeon a tool of more than healing physical wounds, but restoring patients to their former selves. Not middle-aged men and women wanting to compete with a younger generation. He couldn’t help but draw parallels to his very own life.