by Rae Renzi
“Joy Abercrombie, you just made the biggest mistake of your life.” Icicles hung on his every word. “Get out of my operating room. I don’t want to see your face again.”
I gulped air like a landed fish and desperately searched the room for Craig—the real Craig, not the inert lump of flesh and bones on the table. I couldn’t leave… not without him. I started to protest, to explain why I had to stay, but when a staff member moved purposefully in my direction, I realized resistance was useless. I stumbled out of the room and into the hallway, where I stripped off my surgical gown and gloves with shaking hands.
Any sane, dedicated medical student would be trembling in their bootie-covered shoes from the dismissal, but I had greater fears to deal with, and a world of confusion. Or maybe I wasn’t as dedicated as I had believed. Considering the past few minutes, one could also make a case for the sanity part, I guess.
I wandered through the hospital, disoriented and shaken, trying to understand what had happened in the OR, trying to understand where—or what—Craig was now. He’d been hanging by a thread when I’d been booted out, but only a thread.
Did he want to be alive? Apparently not, but if he were now locked back into his body, would he even remember his brief interlude as a spirit? And if he were now a spirit, where was he?
I stopped in my tracks and stared at a blank wall long enough to stiffen my spine. I needed to know where and what Craig was. I spun around and started the trek back the nurses’ station, only to round a corner and find the surgeon—the arrogant bastard who had held Craig’s life in his hands—leaning against a wall, receiving the passionate attentions of one of the new residents. She was lavishly kissing him, so his face was obscured, but the blue streak in his cap gave him away. He seemed exhausted, or ambivalent. She decidedly did not.
I must have made a noise, because his eyes opened and swept in my direction. When our gazes met, recognition bloomed. His eyes bored into mine, as if trying to give me a message, or possibly to extract one, but only for a moment.
“Cr—the patient—did he make it?” My voice trembled, but I got the words out.
A flash of triumph lit his eyes. “Yes—I saved him. Now it’s up to him.”
A wave of relief washed over me, and then abruptly ebbed. That last part…
“What do you mean, ‘It’s up to him’?” Craig had made it clear that were it up to him, he’d be gone. “Did you save him or not?” No tremble in my voice now.
The doctor glared at me. “There’s a limit to what medicine can do. He’s alive. He has to want to stay that way.”
“That is not—”
His impatient companion locked her hands on the side of his face, demanding his attention once again. He wrenched his gaze away from mine, and, with the slightest of shrugs, went back to accepting his hero’s rewards.
I turned away in disgust. So much for yet another part of the Hippocratic Oath: “… keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.”
I guess it’s like a crystal wineglass. If you’ve already broken the Oath once, re-breaking it in a new and different way doesn’t matter—it’s all shattered glass.
Suddenly a few things became clear to me. Those terrible minutes with Craig in the OR had outlined for me the close relationship between ignorance and ethics. I wasn’t sure I knew enough, or ever would know enough, to decide who should live and who should be allowed to pass on.
I was absolutely sure, however, that my carefully planned future was gone, as surely as if a flash flood had plunged through my life, leaving no trace of all I’d held dear. At this moment, I had no compass point, no reference, nothing to guide me but my pain and my fear.
So, although I had nothing to draw me forward, nothing to encourage me, I knew with the certainty of primal instinct which way not to go. That was a start.
Chapter 2
Two years later
In theory, life should reflect a nice distribution of joys and challenges, effort and reward, or so I thought. This comfortable concept was perfectly and symbolically captured in the yin-yang symbol: two fat, happy tadpoles, one light, one dark, snuggled against each other head-to-tail, symbols of harmony and stability, rounding out the edges of the world and keeping things moving with lazy little flicks of their zenny tails…
It was a nice picture, but I was finding life to be a little more like a teeter-totter on a playground: dizzying heights, then abrupt reversals. Whenever I managed to achieve balance, my momentary triumph was overshadowed by my awareness that the person on the other side could jump off at any moment and send me crashing to the ground. The other option? I could wait until I was high in the air and then jump off. That would be exhilarating—thrilling—and I would be in control. Until I hit the ground, of course.
I sat with a cup of tea at the worn oak table in Grandma Kit’s kitchen as the late afternoon sun sifted through the windows. For most people, it was probably nothing special to look at, that kitchen. The painted-white hardwood cabinets were the 1932 originals with more recent, small embellishments. The blue ceramic drawer pulls with tiny, painted-on daisies had been added when I was twelve—I’d sullenly helped Gran Kit pick them out to go with the new linoleum floor of pale-yellow-and-white-checked tiles. She’d said the house was now as much mine as hers, so it was only right that I have some say in how it looked. At the time, I’d been a little balky—a combination of residual grief and resistance to more change—but Gran insisted it was time to give the old kitchen an update and that we’d both be better for it. She’d been right, as usual, though I sometimes wondered what it had cost her to put up the curtains I’d picked out—blue with relentlessly cheerful daisies and demented ladybugs zipping all over them. Someday, I told myself on a regular basis, I’d take them down and put up something a little more refined.
I bent my head down to sniff the table, to take in the soothing scent of lemon and wood and the memories that went with it. Sunday dinners with my parents and Gran had happened here, with love and laughter passed around as freely as the mashed potatoes and gravy. Later, when there were only the two of us, when I struggled through my days of feeling lost and empty, Gran sat me in this kitchen, centered me, and filled me up again.
I wished she were here now. And I wished Craig were here, too. But these days, he seemed to come around only when it suited him.
A long white envelope sat on the table. It had been there for the past two days. I’d ignored it in the same way I ignored scrubbing the toilet—I knew I had to deal with it eventually, but everything else seemed more important.
Suddenly restless, I picked up my teacup and escaped into Gran Kit’s slightly neglected bijou garden, which, I suspected, missed her almost as much as I did. It seemed minor magic to me, how Gran had contrived to create so much beauty in this tiny place. I bent to run my fingers over a cluster of velvety, purple pansies and smiled at their cheerful, nodding faces. Even after all this time, even this late in the season, the garden still managed a few floral tokens of devotion, repaying Gran’s years of loving attention. Better than I had, it seems.
I let the fresh air and sunshine work their alchemy, and after a turn in the garden (or a pirouette, really, given its size), it was time.
The envelope was still there, brilliant white against the honeyed brown of the aged oak table, with the address in severe, black lettering and a logo that made my stomach lurch.
Somehow, in all my visions of what my life would be like, I’d never pictured this. I’d never pictured feeling like I was standing in quicksand. All the loans I’d gotten for med school? Sure, I had gone into debt—everyone in med school did—but I hadn’t worried. I’d known I’d end up with a degree that virtually ensured a good income, a great income, a stupendous income. My feet were solidly on the ground, or had been until I’d bailed out of med school with a pile of debt and no degree. And now this…
I slit open the envelope,
took a deep breath, and opened the letter.
Dear Ms. Abercrombie, it started. All very nice and civilized. In these difficult times, we know hardships befall families. Kind and understanding, even. The knot in my stomach began to unwind. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought?
We would like to work with you to help resolve your present financial difficulties. Well, finally! Someone on my side!
Please be advised that according to our records, you have not made timely payments as agreed in your loan contract. Ouch! Bait and switch, which wasn’t very nice. Besides, it wasn’t exactly true. I had made timely payments, once I’d figured out that there were payments to be made.
Gran Kit had failed to mention that she’d taken out a second mortgage to help with my med-school expenses, and I only found out about it during the long and drawn-out process of settling her estate after her death. By then I was a few months behind, and, to double my trouble, my med school loans had come due. So, okay, I was still a little behind…
A scratchy feeling crawled up my throat, and with it, the sneaking suspicion that these were not the good guys after all.
This letter serves as formal notice that you are in default on your loan. You may remedy your default by remitting the balance of $20,834.23 before July 15, 2015.
Twenty thousand dollars? My stomach did a dive into my shoes as I sucked in a sharp breath. I blinked my eyes and braced myself for the final assault.
If you do not make this payment by the indicated date, this matter will be referred for foreclosure proceedings.
The paper trembled in my hands. I couldn’t read any more—it was all a blur through the tears in my eyes. I dropped the paper and laid my head on the table, hoping all the comfort that had soaked into the table for years would relieve the pounding behind my eyes. And where was Craig when I needed him? I badly missed those days when I could just pull out my phone and call.
Default. Foreclosure. Such hateful words.
A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have given this a thought. I’d just have borrowed the money and paid up. It would have added to my debt, but only a little, in the broad scheme of things.
But now… ! On my trainee’s wages, I could barely pay the interest on the loan, much less come up with twenty thousand dollars in—I glanced at the calendar—sixty days. In any case, the point was moot: as I’d already discovered, with my current debt-to-income ratio, no one would lend me the money. I was stuck.
I stayed that way—half lying on the table, chin on folded arms, staring out the window—until the glowing colors bled from the garden, leaving only soft shades of gray.
How was it even possible that someone could take my home, mine and Gran Kit’s home? I resented the words this matter. As if this matter, the ripping of people from their homes, was a mere inconvenience, a tiny little hiccup in the machinery of life.
I breathed in, and breathed out. I breathed in again and let it out in a rush.
Okay, I was in a fix, but I wasn’t dead, and that was something. There had to be something I could do…
I gazed around the homely kitchen and through the door at the comfortable living room.
There were so many memories here that kept me anchored. And it was the only place Craig felt comfortable with me. If I lost it… would I lose him?
No. That wasn’t going to happen. This was my home.
I had calmed down a little by the next morning, a rainy Monday, and had set my mind to finding a way out of my quandary. As I set up for my day’s work, I made frantic mental calculations of my finances, trying to push the emotional factor to the side—a wasted effort, as it bulldogged back into my mental space with the smallest relaxing of my guard. Emotions, I’ve discovered, are mental bullies.
I had almost no savings—catching up on Gran’s bills when she died had taken care of that. I could sell the few pieces of jewelry I had accumulated, including my mother’s wedding ring—that was worth at least $10,000, maybe more. A stab of pain lanced my heart at that thought, but on the Richter scale of my life, it was about a 7 compared to the 10 of abandoning my home.
What else… ?
Books! I had tons of books. I could sell them all to a secondhand bookshop (Richter scale = 5). I could also sell my better clothes—the ones I’d bought in anticipation of being a surgeon—to a resale shop. That might yield another $500 (minor aftershocks).
That still left me with around $10,000 to drum up in two months. I had the sense of standing in two worlds at once: in my old world, it would have been an insignificant amount, hardly worth thinking about, something to idly add to a credit card. But that world—which had never actually been—was long gone. In the world I now lived, that sum sent a cold shiver up my spine, the harbinger of doom. Where would I get that amount of money? The bulldog of my emotions started nipping at my heart.
I shook my head to recover my composure. I had work to do, and qualifying for my license depended on my doing it well. And I needed that license.
Today I had a new client, a seventeen-year-old boy named Luke with hair that looked as though it had last been shaped by gnawing. Lots of my clients are teens or young adults, some of them a challenge. I guess that’s true for anyone in the business of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The trick is to find a balance between how clients want to see themselves and how everyone else wants to see them.
The room was soothingly dim, but strategically placed spotlights illuminated my workspace and the cheerful bouquet of daisies and bluebells on my desk. The tools of my trade, all neatly arrayed on my tray, gleamed in the light. I allowed myself a small sigh of contentment—here, at least, there was order in the world. I donned a pink smock and delicately picked up my favorite pair of scissors.
My friend Marybob sat on a nearby metal stool, twiddling her auburn ponytail and watching quietly.
I should probably point out that quiet is a relative term.
I’d met Marybob on my first day at Corell Institute of Beauty in my rebound from medical school and had quickly recognized in her the hands of a surgeon, the eye of an artist, and the interpersonal skills of a computer hack. We hit it off right away.
Our career paths had taken us in slightly different directions after beauty school. Marybob had found a job in a trendy salon, but that hadn’t appealed to me—too many noisy (and nosy) people around. Marybob was curious and had finally bludgeoned me into letting her observe my work today, on her day off. I had some doubts, but she had shamed me into it, saying, “Inquiring minds want to know,” or something along those lines.
“How about going a little shorter?” I asked Luke. “Not too short, obviously, because…” I lifted a lock of long, dark hair on his forehead to reveal a ragged gash punctuated with neat stitches just under the hairline.
“Shorter would be good,” Marybob said.
Luke considered a moment. “Yeah, don’t want that to show. Have to think about the parents. They’re, like, already totally disturbed about the whole thing.”
“Oh, we’ll have you spiffed up in no time, don’t you worry.” I lifted the hair and started snipping. (If only I could snip away my debt so easily.)
He leaned closer and examined his face. “Do you think I look sort of, you know, washed out or something?”
“Well, you know… you might be a tiny bit pale.”
Marybob’s eyes skittered around, as if trying to find something. “Pale? He’s freakin’—”
“I could give you some color,” I said, raising my voice. “Just a light dusting of earth minerals. Outdoorsy looking.”
In this job, I’d learned that context is critical. Most teenage boys would avoid makeup like the plague, but they wouldn’t mind a faint smudge of dirt strategically applied.
“Yeah, okay. But none of that girly stuff.”
“Absolutely not. No makeup. None.” I finished up the haircut. “How’s this?”
“Okay.”
I wasn’t too disappointed by Luke’s lack of enthusiasm. I suspected
that a nice haircut was not, and had never been, high on his list of priorities.
He pulled up a lid and peered at his eyeball. “My eyes are kinda bloodshot. Can you fix that, too? Eye drops or something?”
The clattering of furniture hitting the ground and an accompanying squeak sounded from Marybob’s corner.
“Holy freakin’ shit! He opened his eyes! He’s alive!” She rushed over and grabbed my arm. “He’s alive!”
“No, Marybob, he’s not. Not that part of him.”
“But, his eyes! Er, eye…” Doubt crept into her voice.
I patted her hand. “Really, he’s not. Trust me on this.”
She slowly released my arm, took three long steps backward, righted the stool, and perched on the edge of it. Nothing in her posture made me think she’d stay there for long.
Luke, who had been studying Marybob after her little outburst, asked, “Who’s she?”
I’d heard that very question lots of times before. It gets a little old.
Marybob was a magnet for male eyes, at least living males. Not so much for dead ones, although I’d noticed that the transformation from a purely physical state to a purely spiritual one was slower for some people than others. Adolescent boys especially seemed to have a kind of body-memory that required a little time to overcome. During this time they seemed confused, as if their mind had intentions their body (or lack of) couldn’t possibly accomplish. More or less a reversal of their usual state.
This, I’ve come to believe, is due to the fundamental difference between males and females in the mechanics of sexual attraction. The difference was displayed to me by a patient I once saw in medical school. This poor man had been in a deep coma for a week, and yet his bed sheet took on the appearance of a circus tent—a tall circus tent—whenever a female entered the room. Eventually I figured out that there’s a typical hierarchy of sexual attraction (and response).