I decide on some peanut butter cups, and as I’m getting ready to drop my change in the machine, I hear footsteps coming from behind me. For a moment, I get my hopes up that maybe it’s Mason, but when I turn around, I see Rachel hurrying towards me. Rachel’s lipstick is smeared and isn’t hard to guess what she’s just been doing.
So much for the big break-up.
I’m not going to judge her though. All right, I’m going to try not to judge her. Or at least, I’ll try to try.
Any contempt I have for Rachel quickly fades though when I realize that the red on Rachel’s face isn’t lipstick—it’s blood. Fresh blood, not the old clotted kind that we find in the cadaver. And it’s all over her shirt as well.
“Oh my God,” I gasp.
Rachel is crying. She’s wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, spreading more blood onto her face. Oh God, where did all that blood come from?
“Ginny,” Rachel says in a low voice, “something terrible has happened.”
Yeah, no kidding.
“What happened?” I ask, sounding a lot calmer than I feel.
“Mason Howard…” Rachel’s eyes well up with a new batch of tears. “He… he shot Dr. Conlon!”
Oh God…
“Dr. Conlon and I were…” She lowers her eyes. “We were… you know, sort of seeing each other. I know it’s wrong but… it just sort of happened. And… and I was in his office when Mason came in and…”
Rachel collapses against the wall, sobbing hysterically. And that’s when I get a second jolt of shock. She wasn’t just sleeping with him—she actually liked him.
“Is he… dead?” I ask.
Rachel nods slowly.
Oh no.
“We need to get help,” I say.
Nobody can ever know what I’ve done.
Part 6: Dr. Conlon
Chapter 67
It’s weird what you think about when someone is pointing a gun at your face.
It’s happened to me twice now. While two is a relatively small number, it still seems way above average. I would guess most people have never even had a gun pointed at their face once. And it’s not like I’m some sort of drug dealer or gangster—I’m an anatomy professor. It’s not clear why this should keep happening to me.
The first time someone pointed a gun at me was the far more surprising of the two. I suppose once you realize such a thing is possible, it loses its shock value a bit. No offense intended to Mason—it’s still very scary to have him pointing his gun at my face. Especially since I’m pretty sure he intends to kill me.
I was twenty-two years old the first time. In retrospect, that seems incredibly young. So young that it’s surprising that I was even allowed to go out and live on my own and pay bills and make important life decisions. I was incredibly stupid at twenty-two. Well, no more stupid than the average twenty-two year old, but you definitely lack judgment at that age. Perhaps the frontal lobe isn’t fully myelinated yet.
And yes, I do realize the irony of my saying such a thing in light of the fact that I’m currently having sex with a twenty-two-year-old girl. I’m a hypocrite. I’m not going to make excuses for myself.
Anyway, back to Kurt Morton and the gun he so rudely pointed at my head. I was sleeping when Kurt’s mumbling woke me up. And there he was: sitting on his bed across from mine in the darkness, playing with that damn revolver.
“It’s all over, Matt,” he mumbled. “I’m fucked.”
“Shut up and go back to sleep,” I said brilliantly.
That was a dumb thing to say, right? But I was really tired and also I was too young to realize how bad this situation was. I thought I was immortal. If I had it to do over again, I would have definitely said something different. Maybe along the lines of, “Please don’t shoot me in the head, Kurt.”
“I’m flunking out,” he said, his voice cracking. “Did you know that?”
I shook my head. “Wow, man, that sucks.”
Again, not the most brilliant thing I could have said. I’ve had a lot of time to go over this in my head and highlight my mistakes. Could I have stopped him? We’ll never know.
“What do you care?” Kurt shot back. “Mister honors student.”
Yes, I was an honors student. I wanted to be a surgeon back then. But we all know what happened to that particular dream.
And that’s when Kurt went from playing with the gun to actually pointing it at me. I aged about twenty years in that moment. I stared down the barrel of the revolver, thinking to myself, “Holy shit, he’s going to kill me.”
Here’s what I thought about in those final moments:
1) I got into three other medical schools. Why did I have to choose this one?
2) My parents are going to be so sad when they find out I’m dead.
3) Who will go to my funeral and what will they say about me?
4) I’ve never been to Thailand. How can I die without ever having been to Thailand?
I’m not sure why I thought that thing about Thailand. I’d never wanted to go to Thailand before, so it’s not clear why I’d regret not having been there so deeply during what I believed to be my last few moments of life. But as I said, it’s weird what you think about when someone is pointing a gun at your face.
(Oddly enough, I still haven’t been to Thailand.)
The next thing I remember, it was about two weeks later. Someone was asking me my name, if I knew where I was, what the date was, and if I could remember three words. Also, they told me I’d been shot in the head and that Kurt was dead.
They called me “lucky” a lot. Kurt was aiming his gun right at my face, but his hands were shaking and he instead hit me on the left side of my skull. If he’d had steadier hands, I might have ended up like Ann, a girl on the rehab unit who was two years younger than me. Her boyfriend shot her through the eye and the bullet’s trajectory veered downward and severed her spinal cord. Aside from being blind in one eye and having a deformed face, Ann was paralyzed from the neck down, dependent on a ventilator to breathe for the rest of her life. It could have happened to me. Or more likely, I could have died.
Although I think once you get shot in the head, you lose the right to ever call yourself lucky.
What I lost was half my skull. It was smashed to smithereens by the bullet, so they just took it off. If you pressed your finger against the left side of my scalp (and believe me, I attempted this a few times during moments of boredom and/or itchiness), there was nothing but brain underneath the skin. I had to wear a helmet when I walked in case I fell. Well, not in case I fell. I couldn’t move half my body, so falling was fairly inevitable.
My right arm and leg got stronger though, although never even close to full strength. Good enough though that I could walk (more or less) and dress myself and bathe myself if you gave me half the day to do it. They gave me a new skull too. For a brief time, I deluded myself that I might return to medical school. This was probably quite hilarious to the people around me.
It was my neuropsychologist who set me straight. Dr. Watson. He spent hours doing tests of my memory and reasoning and problem solving. When it was over, he laid out the results for me in his office. He used a lot of big words, but the message was painfully clear: I’d never be able to go back.
Naturally, I argued with him.
“I read that I could arrange to get extra time on exams,” I said. “All I’d need would be your documentation.”
“Sounds great, Matt,” Dr. Watson said in a voice that made it obvious that my idea was not, in fact, great. “But what will you do when you’re doing surgery on a patient or performing a procedure? How will you arrange for extra time in that situation?”
We went back and forth for the better part of an hour. I don’t know why I bothered—I knew he was right. I couldn’t go back. I’d never be a physician.
Chapter 68
I won’t bore you with the details of how I managed to get a doctorate in anatomy, through a combination of taking advantage of every allowance
given to people with disabilities, as well as just studying my ass off. When you go from having a near photographic memory to not being able to remember what you had for breakfast that morning, it’s a tough transition. My memory improved though, eventually.
But I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. I’m sure what you’d really like to know is how it came to pass that I started having sex with my twenty-two-year-old student.
Rachel.
I’m fairly baffled by that one myself. Certainly, it wasn’t my intention going in to the school year. But these things do happen occasionally, even to people like me.
About a week before school year was set to begin, I got the call from Dr. Michael Hirsch. I was in my office, going over the syllabus for the upcoming year. I was debating in my mind what to get for dinner that night (who am I kidding—it was going to be a TV dinner) when the phone rang.
“Is this Dr. Conlon?” a deep voice wanted to know.
“Yes…” I said.
“Matthew Conlon?” he persisted. “The anatomy professor?”
As if another Dr. Conlon would be answering my phone.
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“My name is Mike Hirsch,” the man said. “Dr. Hirsch. I believe you have a former student of mine in your upcoming class. Rachel Bingham?”
I faced my computer and clicked on the class roster for the upcoming year, which contained each student’s name, a photo, and their undergraduate university and major. I searched under B and found a plain-looking brunette named Rachel Bingham who had majored in Evolutionary Biology.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“Dr. Conlon,” Hirsch said. “The reason I’m calling is to give you a heads up. Rachel is… someone to look out for.”
I raised my eyebrows at the innocuous-appearing photo of Rachel Bingham.
“Does she cheat?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Hirsch said. He paused. “Are you married, Dr. Conlon?”
It was an odd question, but I was intrigued, so I answered, “No.”
“Well, that’s good,” he mumbled. “And how old are you? You sound young. She’ll stay away from you if you’re too young.”
“Dr. Hirsch,” I said. I was still intrigued but simultaneously losing my patience. “Please tell me what this is about.”
“Rachel destroyed my marriage,” Hirsch said, his voice filled with anger. “And if you let her, she’ll wreck your life.”
The whole thing sounded completely ludicrous, of course. I laughed it off at the time. But then a week later, I saw Rachel in person and I got it—I completely understood how this girl was capable of wrecking a man’s marriage. She had a certain sexiness, a certain seductively dangerous quality to her—it was incredibly alluring.
Still, I had every intention of turning her down. Truly I did.
Then… well, I don’t really know what happened. I was giving her Patrice’s number and she was getting ready to leave my office, but then I made the dire mistake of peering down her shirt at those perky little breasts and I got to thinking about how long it had been since I’d been with a woman. Three years—three freaking years. So I thought to myself that I’d do it just this one time. Just once, and then I’d set her straight that it would never happen again.
Then somehow I fell in love with her. Usually I’m much more sensible than that.
You might be wondering why I fell for her, which is about what Patrice asked me. What am I—crazy? I’ve never been the shallow type, so I can assure you I didn’t fall for her perfect twenty-two-year-old body. If I’m being honest, I’d have to say that I genuinely don’t know how it happened. In many ways, Rachel is nothing special.
I suppose it mostly had something to do with the way she made me feel about myself. Who doesn’t want to feel desired by a beautiful young girl?
All I know is that I’ve been taking anti-depressants for over a decade, and the first time since Kurt shot me that I could remember being truly happy was when I was with Rachel.
_____
When I first met Patrice, I found her attractive. She is attractive, objectively speaking. As you get older, the chances of meeting an attractive, single person who is your age becomes infinitesimally smaller. (In actuality, I suspected Patrice was a few years older than me, but I wisely kept that particular revelation to myself.)
At the time, I was taking a break from the dating world. Previously, I mostly dated women I met online, aside from the rare set up from a friend or perhaps the daughter of a woman my mother met at church. My last date was two years prior with a woman I’d met on a dating website. Her name was Susan, and as always, I’d warned her that I walked with a cane. Most women weren’t bothered by that revelation—many even found it charming.
I was sitting in the waiting area of the restaurant when Susan arrived. She recognized me instantly by my face, and her own face lit up with a smile when she confirmed that my profile photo hadn’t lied—I wasn’t balding or fifty pounds heavier than what I had presented online. But the second I got up to follow the hostess to our table, I could see Susan’s expression change. The situation didn’t improve when I snagged one of the prongs of my cane on the leg of a chair. This wasn’t nearly as charming as she’d imagined it would be.
To Susan’s credit, she went through with the date anyway. Her disinterest in me was palpable, and about fifteen minutes later, I started hoping she’d get a friend to call her with a fake emergency. Somewhere around when the check arrived, I decided I needed a break from rejection.
I meant to only take a few months off, then try to get back into it, but the longer you’re out of the game, the harder it is. It started to seem more and more impossible that a woman could ever want to date me, much less want to be my girlfriend. I convinced myself that I didn’t miss women, that it was easier to just be perpetually single. That I wasn’t desperately lonely.
But then Patrice appeared, pretty and sleek, and presented this new opportunity. So I mustered up all my courage and asked her to go with me for drinks after work. I figured I could always backpedal and say it was platonic if she became flustered.
Patrice said yes to drinks. We went to a bar a few blocks from her house, where the conversation flowed easily, and after I had two beers in me, I had nearly worked up the nerve to make a move. Then Patrice glanced at her watch.
“I should probably go,” Patrice said. “I promised my boyfriend I’d make him dinner tonight.”
When I later found out that she didn’t actually have a boyfriend, I was just grateful that she’d spared me the embarrassment.
When Patrice walked in on Rachel and me, that was definitely a low point. I knew Patrice would freak out. She knew Rachel and didn’t much care for her, probably because she secretly suspected what was going on. It was a slap in the face to her that I’d be hooking up with Rachel, of all people. As soon as Rachel left, she laid into me.
“I’m really disappointed in you, Matt,” she said in her slow, therapist’s voice.
I hated when she spoke to me that way, like I was one of her patients.
“It’s not a big deal,” I mumbled.
“Not a big deal?” Patrice echoed my words. “Matt, you could lose your job. You realize that, right?”
“Yes, of course.” I leaned my head against the back of the sofa and stared up the ceiling so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“Tampering with grades is an incredibly serious offense,” Patrice said. “You’d never work again in academics.”
“I didn’t tamper with her grade,” I said.
Patrice appeared skeptical.
“I didn’t,” I insisted.
“Well, what are you giving her then?” Patrice asked. “The answer key?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not giving her anything. We’re just… in a relationship.”
I hated the sympathetic look that Patrice got on her face.
“Oh, Matt. Come on.”
It hurt that Patrice wouldn’t entertain even the
slightest possibility that Rachel could really like me.
“You have to trust me,” Patrice said. “This isn’t going to end well. For either of you.”
Part of me knew she was right, but I couldn’t admit it. “It might.”
“Trust me, it won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Just trust me,” she said.
I frowned at her. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No…”
I sat up straight and stared at her.
“Matt…” She shook her head. “I really can’t…”
I looked at her face and saw shame written all over it. I’d never seen her look that way before. She usually looked so confident and pleased with herself.
“For chrissake, Patrice, what the hell did you do?”
Patrice looked at me a long time, the crease between her thin eyebrows deepening with each passing second. Finally, she took a deep breath, and said, “I was sleeping with Jared Peterson.”
It took a second for the name to actually register, coming out of Patrice’s mouth. And it took another second for the impact of what she said to hit me.
“You what?”
Patrice flashed me a small sad smile, then stared down at her hands on her lap.
“I’m not proud of it,” she said. “It just… happened.”
I remembered Jared well—tall, lanky, darkly handsome. I could definitely see why Patrice might have liked him. Of course, now he was dead. He shot his girlfriend, then himself. So I guessed the affair was over.
“It was a mistake,” Patrice continued. “I wanted to end it, but I just couldn’t. And then, Jared’s ex-girlfriend Mary found out about us. Jared told me he’d take care of it, but I had no idea he’d…”
And that’s the story of how I found out the truth about what happened in the murder-suicide of Jared Peterson and Mary Chin.
“Oh Christ,” I said, feeling actually ill, not just fake ill like I’d told Patrice I was when she suggested dinner earlier. “Did you tell the police?”
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