If the Fates Allow

by Zoe Kane

  Aunt Vera took the children home to stay with her after the funeral; she thought, and Annie agreed with her, that a little change of scenery might be good for them. And the sea of flowers in the house, with their heavy, intoxicatingly sweet scents, seemed to trigger something in them, some new and unspecified terror. So she had left Annie and Michael to take care of the house, while she took the kids back with her to her apartment. (Secretly, though she knew it was unfair, Annie would not have been disappointed to make this arrangement permanent.)

  The reception at church had lasted into the late afternoon, and Marcus had unexpectedly stayed afterwards, offering to help her clean and haul all the leftover food and flowers back home. They had had little conversation with each other, but the silence had been amiable, and Annie found herself thinking that it might not, in the long run, be such a terrible thing to have an extra pair of hands around the house.

  It was dark before six p.m. that day; a rainy, gray, depressing Oregon evening turning into a cold, black, wet, depressing night. By the time the last bag of cold cuts was packed away in the fridge and the last heap of floral arrangements packed in Michael’s trunk to be driven out to the cemetery – Annie thought she could add lilies to the list of things she’d learned to hate this week; really just white flowers in general – it was after eight and she was starving.

  “I’m going to crack into one of these frozen casseroles,” she called to Marcus, who was carrying a box of leftover funeral programs out to the recycling (because apparently somebody thought she’d want to keep an extra three hundred of them herself). “Do you have dinner plans?”

  He stopped short in the back doorway and turned back to her, as if unsure whether or not it was a trap. “I – no, I don’t,” he finally responded, uncertainly.

  “Stay, then,” said Annie, surprising them both.

  “For dinner?”

  “Yes. And for the night, if you want.” He looked at her curiously and she found herself fighting back an unexpected blush. “I mean I know you have a hotel, so, if you’d rather –“

  “I’d love to stay,” he said. “I think you being alone in this house tonight of all nights is . . . not a great idea.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone either,” she told him, pulling a frozen pan of macaroni and cheese out of the jam-packed freezer and turning on the oven to pre-heat. It was somehow easier to be nice to him when they didn’t have to look at each other. “It’s been a hard day for everyone.”

  He didn’t respond, just silently pulled down two wineglasses from the cupboard. Annie wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that he already seemed so at home, before reminding herself that the papers were all signed, and technically he lived here too. So instead of fighting it, she pulled a bottle of red wine from the rack where Danny kept the good stuff, uncorked it, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Marcus sat down across from her. They both seemed to feel that the awkward tiptoeing around each other could only continue for so long before one of them broke the ice, and for a long moment they just sat there with their wine, wondering which of them it was going to be, before Marcus finally spoke.

  “I don’t know quite where to start,” he said, “but since I think we’d better get to know each other, maybe – why don’t you ask me a question, and I’ll ask you one.”

  “You want to play Truth or Dare?” she said skeptically, and he laughed.

  “No dares,” he said, “I don’t trust you. You seem like the kind of girl who would draw moustaches on kids at slumber parties for fun.” Against her will, Annie laughed. It was a wildly inaccurate characterization, and he appeared to know it.

  She took a long drink of wine. “I’ll go first,” she said. “Did you ever want children?”

  “Honestly, no,” he said, and his candor was refreshing. She liked that he didn’t apologize for it.

  “Neither did I. I love them – I mean of course I love them – but this was never the plan.”

  “Well, we have at least one thing in common, then,” he said encouragingly. “That’s good. That feels like progress.”

  “I suppose it does,” she agreed. “Now you.”

  The oven beeped just then and he got up without being prompted to put the frozen casserole in the oven. "How long?”

  “Seventy minutes,” said Annie. “So go easy on the wine, you won’t have anything to soak it up for a little while.”

  “That’s not true,” Marcus corrected her, a conspiratorial tone in his voice, “there’s cake in the fridge.” He raised a questioning eyebrow, and stared her down until she relented.

  "Oh, fine," she said. “Get the cake.”

  He returned a moment later with a white pastry box and two forks.

  “We’re not bothering with plates?” she asked skeptically. “Or cutting the cake into pieces, like civilized humans?”

  “There are no kids watching, Annie,” said Marcus. “You can eat cake out of the box. You buried your sister and brother-in-law today. You can do absolutely anything you want.”

  And for just a fraction of a fraction of a second she thought he might not be talking only about the cake.

  She shook it off abruptly. “Your turn,” she said, her mouth full of frosting roses. “To pick the question.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.” He thought for a moment, dug a huge chunk out of the side of the cake with his fork, popped it in his mouth, and regarded her with great interest. “He talked about you guys a lot,” Marcus began. “The whole family. I feel like I know you all, at least a little. And there was one thing I always wondered about – mostly, I guess, because he didn’t know either.”

  “What’s that?”

  And then Marcus asked the only question in the entire world that Annie had no answer for:

  “Whatever happened between you and that doctor?”

  * * *

  Annie had lived with a fellow neurosurgeon named Malcolm Burke for four years – had, in fact, been his fiancée. Her family did not know this. While they were together, she had forborne to tell them for a whole host of slightly complicated reasons even she was not fully able to articulate. After it ended, she had kept quiet out of embarrassment. It was such a cliché, after all. He had been the chief of neurosurgery – handsome and charismatic and so brilliant that he was spoken of throughout the halls of Saint Elizabeth’s with hushed reverence. She had been bright and lovely and phenomenally gifted, and thirteen years his junior. It was the oldest story in the book.

  Except not at all.

  Annabel Walter had walked into her first-year internship at Saint Elizabeth’s with impeccable credentials and a first-class mind. She had been at twenty-three – as she was now, at thirty-eight – quick and clever and indisputably impressive, but with a brittle, tensile air that tended to put people off. She came from a noisy, close-knit family, and at work she kept mostly to herself, relishing the quiet. She was widely recognized as one of the most promising young doctors the hospital had ever seen, but was difficult to get to know. When she met Malcolm Burke, she was a focused and disciplined first-year resident. He watched her on her rounds, watched her in the operating room, watched as others in the neurology department peeled off for less demanding programs or quit altogether. But nothing fazed Annabel. Her focus and intellect were astonishing. He approached her before the end of her first year with an offer to serve as his research assistant.

  If Annie had been a friendlier person – if she had let her guard down – if she had ever, even once, gone across the street to the pizza place where the other young residents tended to congregate and let off steam at the end of their shifts to join her peers for a drink – someone would probably have told her what everyone assumed she knew. As it was, she was taken entirely by surprise when Burke began to show an interest in her, but she naturally assumed that when he said “assistant,” he actually meant “assistant.”

  Annie was serenely confident in her status as the smartest person in the room; but the pretty one in the family had always
been Grace, and the charming, warm, likeable one was Michael, so Annie had just instinctively assumed that “smart” was the only card she had to play. It was the one thing she knew she could rely on. So it genuinely never occurred to her that the legendary Malcolm Burke – with his smoldering eyes, his hair going perfectly, aristocratically gray at the temples, and his rumbling baritone that turned the hearts of weaker interns to jelly – might possibly have seen anything in her other than the logical first choice to help him spend that $1.2 million research grant.

  Burke had been running a clinical trial to test whether electrocorticography sensors implanted in the cranium could interact with brain signals, allowing someone with motor disabilities to operate a computer cursor or simple communication device; the Department of Health had recently handed the hospital a huge pile of money to expand their base of test subjects to see if the ECoG sensors could be successful with a task as large and complex as operating a wheelchair or prosthetic. Annie had read all of Burke’s field research and was thrilled to be asked to take part in such a career-making project. With the exception of the fact that phase one of the project involved subjects in the pediatric epilepsy wing – meaning children – it was a dream come true.

  And so she showed up early in the morning and left late at night and her notes were always prompt and thorough, and she was a perfect assistant. (And if the children and her parents found her chilly demeanor a little terrifying, it was a small price to pay for her skill with monitoring and assessing the brain sensors.) She never let her regular rounds slip either; she continued her work as a resident full-time, and worked with Burke between shifts. She was competent and professional and so completely unaware of Burke’s interest in her that his attraction transmuted to a kind of obsession.

  All his usual moves crashed and burned, and he tried so many new ones he ran out of ideas. She never wanted to go get dinner or a drink after work. She thanked him politely when he brought her coffee and always immediately reciprocated the following morning, as though unwilling to be even four dollars in his debt for longer than a day. She brushed off compliments about anything other than her work. If he moved closer, discreetly, trying to find an occasion to subtly bump up against her and make some kind of physical contact, she assumed he needed to be standing where she was standing and would move to the other side of the table. He began to wonder if she was willfully misinterpreting him.

  Other pretty young first-year residents came and went, women who a year or two ago would have caught his eye in a heartbeat, but Burke had lost interest, focused on the single-minded pursuit of the one woman in the entire goddamn hospital with absolutely no interest in sleeping with him. Burke had no particular qualms about keeping business and pleasure separate, so it never occurred to him that anyone else would – that when Annie came to work, work was the only thing she was thinking of. He never quite saw her clearly enough to understand that. Instead, he wondered if she was gay, or asexual, or frigid or prudish or traumatized, or whether sex was something that simply . . . never occurred to her. For a man who made his career studying the complex inner workings of the human brain, Burke was frustrated to find himself day after day after day so very much out of his depth.

  Seven years went by like this, and Annie became invaluable to him. Her critiques were gentle but incisive, her research impeccable, her insights occasionally astonishing and always apt. She became, in a way, his partner. He began to treat her as an equal. (Well. Almost. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

  It was when this shift took place – when Burke finally began to defer to Annie, to show genuine interest in her ideas, when he began to encourage her in her own research and throw his support behind her own career, that she began ever so slightly to view him in a different light. She was thirty now, and faint simmering questions about what else besides work her life might have to offer – questions she had effectively silenced while the research study was her life’s top priority but which began to seem more time-sensitive now that the study was drawing to a close – were bubbling up in her mind. And in looking back over the course of the past several years it finally clicked into place that Malcolm Burke had, all this time, been pursuing her. That even though she had never considered herself in a relationship with him, he had certainly been in some kind of one with her. Certain thresholds had been passed. They had traveled to conferences together and stayed in the same hotel rooms and learned that they shared space easily and well. They had pulled countless all-nighters without ever trying each other’s nerves. He had taken her to lunch with his mother. They had spent nights on each other’s couches and cooked breakfast for each other in the morning. They were already a unit – which was, after all, sort of like a couple. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the next step was inevitable.

  And so, one night in her thirtieth year, as she helped him haul file boxes full of research notes out to the trunk of his car, she asked him:

  “What if we got married?”

  The box in his hand dropped to the asphalt and files spilled everywhere. He didn’t notice. He turned back to her and took a step closer, leaning in, trying to read the expression on her face.

  “Married.”

  “Yes.”

  “To each other.”

  “Oh. Yes. That’s what I meant. I’m sorry. I should have said.”

  “You –“ He stopped. “Annabel, you – you want to marry me?”

  “The papers are blowing away, Malcolm,” she said, leaning down to begin gathering them up. “And yes. I do. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It makes sense,” she said simply, reassembling the pages of a case study that had spilled loose from its folder and handing it back to him. “Doesn’t it make sense?”

  “It does,” he said, feeling a surge of elated joy in his chest. “It does make sense.”

  They were engaged for four years – three good ones and one bad one. Annie was now the department’s second most-respected neurosurgeon, after Burke, and the success of their ECoG study had put them both on the map. They traveled all over the world, presenting their findings. They worked and wrote and lived together in relative contentment, with only one significant relationship issue, which started out minor and then blew the whole thing apart.

  Annie did not like sleeping with him.

  Burke had never wanted for female attention before Annie Walter came into his life, and his reputation as a player was at least in part founded on the hushed, giggling rumors that he was – to put it simply – amazing. He had spent seven years in celibate, single-minded pursuit of this woman who had entirely bewitched him, and the thought of finally being able to possess her drove him nearly wild. But it never quite seemed to work out as planned.

  After the engagement – which she was peculiarly insistent upon keeping quiet about – she had given up her apartment and moved into his house. He made more money, was older, had been settled longer; he explained that it just made more sense for their married home to be at his place. Annie conceded with little fuss, and told herself that the pang in her heart for the peaceful sanctuary of her pre-war two-bedroom apartment that looked out over the rose garden in Ladd’s Circle was a reasonable price to pay for adult stability. She was the oldest single woman she knew, and getting married seemed simply like the next step in adulthood. But the transition was not without its emotional toll.

  Burke tried to be understanding. She did move into his bedroom, though he waited a few weeks until the dust had settled before he attempted to push things any further. But time went on, and she still showed no interest. Finally, after she had been sharing his house and his bed for three months, he turned to her one night and asked her if something was wrong.

  “Of course not,” she said, without looking up from her reading.

  “Is this a Catholic thing?” he asked. “Waiting for the wedding night?”

  “Waiting for the – oh!” she said, with a small laugh he found inexplicably infuriating, and
set aside her book. “You want to have sex.”

  “I – well – yes.”

  “Sure,” she said agreeably. “That’s fine.” An answer which, while infinitely better than “no,” still was not anywhere near the ballpark of what Malcolm Burke was used to.

  If young Annie Walter, back in her resident days, had ever gone across the street with the others to the pizza place for a drink, she would have been unable to avoid hearing the stories about Burke’s bedroom prowess. The way his voice sounded when he whispered in your ear, how attentive and persistent he was, the things he could do with his mouth and hands that would ruin you forever for idiot boys your own age. Burke was that irresistible temptation, The Older Man, and the myth of his decades of experience in pleasuring the female body was the only reason that girl after girl, who all knew better, threw themselves into the path of a broken heart anyway.

  But Annie knew none of this. She simply took off her reading glasses, stripped off her cotton camisole and panties with the businesslike efficiency of a woman used to changing into and out of scrubs in rooms full of people, switched off the light, and waited.

  It was . . . not good.

  It was fine – but it was not good. He was hard already – achingly so – but it took him so long to get her ready that he nearly gave up. “How is that?” he kept asking her, as his hands and mouth ventured between her legs, trying to find a spot that would unlock her pleasure and make her wet and ready for him. And each time her answer was always the same.

  “That’s good.”

  But her tone of voice was flat, almost toneless, and – most irritatingly – civil. As though she were trying to reassure him. As though she were patting him on the back. Finally he gave up.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get there,” she said encouragingly as she rolled over and switched off the light, and in that moment there was a tiny piece of Malcolm Burke that began to hate her.

  They tried again the next night, and the night after that, and many nights after that, and only eventually climbed up the step from “bad” to “fine” when Burke discovered that things went better when Annie closed her eyes.