Flashback

by Michael Palmer

  The Judge and Cinnie had checked in twice by phone, and around ten, Frank had stopped by. He seemed restless and irritable, and although he mentioned nothing of the episode, Zack sensed that he was still quite upset by the Judge's outburst and thinly veiled threat.

  Citing the need to be near the twins during the violent thunderstorm that had just erupted, he had left for home after only half an hour. But before he left, Zack had managed, in what he hoped was an offhanded way, to pump a bit of information from him regarding Suzanne Cole.

  Dartmouth-trained and a member of the Ultramed-Davis staff for almost two years, she was thirty-three or thirty-four, divorced, and the mother of a six-year-old girl. In addition, she was co-owner, along with another divorcee in town, of a small art gallery and crafts shop Zack had tried, with little success, for a more subjective assessment of the woman, but Frank, distracted and anxious to leave, had completely missed the point. Now, as he sat alone, Zack wondered if it was worth waiting any longer for the woman to finish her work in the unit and, as she had promised, stop by for "a hit of decaf." The nurses had told him that it was not that uncommon for Suzanne, as they called her, to spend the night in the hospital if she had a particularly sick patient, and this night — with Annie and her pacemaker case-she had two Who are you? What are you doing up here?

  The state of infatuation with a woman was not something with which Zack was all that familiar or comfortable. A bookworm throughout his college years, and a virgin until his junior year, he had had a reasonable number of dates, and a few short-lived romances after Lisette, but no prolonged relationships until Connie. He had once described his social life in college as a succession of calls to women the day after they had met someone special. Connie was five years younger than he, but possessed a worldliness and sophistication that he felt were missing from his life. She had an MBA degree from Northwestern, a management-track position at one of the big downtown companies, a condo in the Back Bay, a silver BMW, friends in the symphony, and an interest in impressionist painters ("Pissarro has more depth, more energy in one brush stroke, than Renoir has in a dozen canvases, don't you think? ") and foreign films ("Zachary, if you would stop insisting on plot all the time, and concentrate more on the universality of the characters and the technical brilliance of the director, this film would mean more to you"). Friends of his spoke to him from time to time of what they perceived might be a mismatch, but he countered by enumerating the new awareness Connie had brought into his life. Whether he truly loved the woman or not, he was never sure, but there was no questioning that he was, for most of their time together, absolutely infatuated with her beauty, her confidence, and her style. Her decision to break off their engagement had hurt him, but not as deeply as he first thought. And over the months that followed, he had spent what free time he had flying the radio-controlled airplane he had built in high school, exercising himself back into rock-climbing shape, hiking with Cheap dog, and horseback riding with friends along the seashore at the Cape-but not one minute at a gallery or locked in combat with a foreign film. "Hi."

  Startled, Zack knocked over his Styrofoam cup, spilling what remained of his coffee into a small pool on the veneer tabletop. "Hi, yourself, " he said as Suzanne Cole plucked a pad of napkins from the nearby counter and dabbed up the spill. Was there to be no end to his ineptitude in front of this woman?

  "It would seem you might have reached the limit of your caffeine quota for the day, " she said. She had changed into street clothes-gray slacks and a bulky fisherman-knit sweater-and she looked as fresh as if she had just started the day. "Actually, " he said. "I use caffeine to override my own inherent hyperness. I think it actually slows me down."

  She smiled. "I know the syndrome. I'm surprised to find you still here, what with tomorrow being your first day in the office and all."

  "I wanted to be sure Annie was out of the woods. She's been pretty special to me and my family. Besides, I just finished my residency yesterday. It'll probably be months before my internal chemistry demands anything more than a fifteen-minute nap in an institutional, Naugahyde easy chair."

  "I remember those chairs well, " Suzanne said, leaning against the counter. "There's an old, ratty, maroon one in the cardiac fellows' room at Hitchcock that I suspect would one day have a sign on it proclaiming, Suzanne Cole slept here-and only here… So, it's a progress report you're after. Well, the news is good. At least for the moment. Your Annie's awake and stable, with no neurologic deficit that I can identify, although you might want to go over her in the morning. In fact, I think I'll make her your first consult, if that's okay. You did say you were going to do neurology as well as neurosurgery, yes?"

  "Absolutely. I actually enjoy the puzzles nearly as much as I do the blood and guts."

  Her eyes narrowed. "You sure don't talk like a surgeon, " she said. "The ones I know have signs in their rooms like, To cut is to cure, and All the world is pre-op."

  "Oh, I have those, too. Believe me. Only as an enlightened, Renaissance surgeon, mine say, Almost all the world is pre-op." He pushed a chair from the table with his foot. "Here, have a seat."

  "Sorry, but I can't, " she said. "I've got to go. Mrs. Doucette was my third critical admission this weekend, and I have a full day tomorrow.

  You ought to get some sleep, too, so you'll be sharp for my consult.

  Good night, now." She slipped on her coat and headed for the door.

  "Wait, " Zack said, realizing even as he heard his own voice that the order was coming from somewhere outside his rational self-somewhere within his swirling fantasies. "Yes?"

  She turned back to him. The darkness in her eyes and the set of her face were warning him not to push matters further. He picked up on the message too late. "I… um… I was wondering if we might have dinner or something together sometime."

  Suzanne sagged visibly. "I'm sorry, " she said wearily. "Thank you, Zack's fantasies stopped swirling and began floating to earth like feathers. "Oh, " he said, feeling suddenly very self-conscious. "I didn't mean to… what I mean is, it seemed like-"

  "Zack, I'm sorry for being so abrupt. It's late, and I'm bushed.

  I appreciate your asking me, really I do. And I'm flattered. But I…

  I just don't go out with people I work with. Besides, I'm involved with someone."

  The last of the feathers touched down. Zack shrugged. "Well, then, " he said with forced cheer, "I guess I should just hope that a lot of folks show up at this hospital with combined cardiac and neurosurgical disease, shouldn't I?"

  Suzanne reached out and shook his hand. "I'm looking forward to working with you, " she said. "I know we'll be terrific."

  At that moment, from the far end of the emergency ward, a man began screaming, again and again, "No! I won't go! I'm going to die. I'm going to die!"

  The two of them raced toward the commotion, which centered about an old man-in his seventies, Zack guessed-whom the nurse, the emergency physician, and a uniformed security guard were trying to move from a litter to a wheelchair. The man, with striking, long, silver hair and a gnarled full beard, was struggling to remain where he was. Zack's gaze took in his chino pants and flannel shirt, stained with grit, sweat, and grease, and a pair of tattered, oily work boots. The old man's left arm was bound tightly across his chest with a shoulder immobilizer, the tissues over his cheek and around his right eye were badly swollen by fresh bruises. "No! " he bellowed again. "Don't move me. I'm going to die if I go back there tonight. Please. Just one night."

  "What gives? " Zack asked. The emergency physician, a rotund, former GP in town, named Wilton Marshfield, released his hold, and the old man sank back on the litter. "Oh, hi, Iverson, Dr. Cole, " he said, nodding.

  "I thought you two had gone home."

  "We were about to, " said Zack. "Everything okay?"

  He had known Marshfield, a marginally competent graduate of a now-nonexistent medical school, for years, and had been surprised to find him working in the emergency room. During a conversation earlier
in the evening, the man had explained that Frank had talked him out of retirement until a personnel problem in the E. R. could be stabilized.

  "Plucked me off the scrap heap of medicine and offered me a salary as good as my best year in the office, " was how he had put it. "Sure, sure, everything's fine, " Marshfield said. "It's just that ol' Chris Gow here doesn't understand that Ultramed-Davis is a hospital, not a bloody hotel."

  "What happened to him? " Suzanne asked. "Nothing as serious as it looks,

  " Marshfield answered, with unconcealed disdain. "He just had a little too much of the hooch he brews up in that shack of his, and fell down his front steps. Fractured his upper arm near the shoulder, but there's not a damn thing we can do for that except ice and immobilization. Films of his facial bones are all negative, and so's the rest of his exam.

  Now, we've got an ambulance all set to cart him home, but the old geezer won't let us take him off the litter without a fight. We'll take care of it, though. Don't worry."

  Suzanne hesitated for a moment, as if she wanted to comment on the situation, but then nodded and backed off a step. Zack, however, brushed past the portly physician to the bedside. "Mr. Gow, I'm Dr. Iverson," he said. The old man looked up at him, but didn't speak. His face, beneath the beard and the filth, had an ageless, almost serene quality to it, but there was a sadness in his eyes that Zack had seen many times during his years of caring for the largely indigent Boston patients-a sadness born of loneliness and hopelessness. There was also no small measure of fear. "Are you in much pain?"

  "Not according to him, I ain't, " the man answered, still breathing heavily from his struggles. "I wonder when the last time was he fell down the stairs like I did and broke his arm."

  "Who do you live with?"

  The old man laughed mirthlessly, wincing from the pain. Then he turned his head away. Zack looked to Marshfield for the answer. "He lives by himself in a shack at the endfof the old logging road off 219."

  "Do you have a phone, Chris?"

  Again, the man laughed. "How did you get here?"

  "How do you think?"

  "A trucker found him sitting by the highway and brought him in,"

  Marshfield explained. "Chris is no stranger here. He's a woodcutter.

  Periodically, he goes on a toot and cuts up himself instead of the wood." He laughed at his own humor and seemed not to notice that no one else joined in. "We sew him up and ship him back home until the next time."

  Zack looked down at the old man. Could there be any sadder state than being sick or badly hurt, and being alone-of hoping, against hope, for someone to come and help, but knowing that no one would?

  "Why can't he just be admitted for a day or two? " he asked. "Are there empty beds in the house?"

  "Oh, we have beds, " Marshfield said, "but ol' Chris here doesn't have any kind of insurance, and unless his problem is life-threatening, which it isn't, he either goes to Clarion County, if we want to ship him out there, or he goes home."

  "What if a staff doctor insists on admitting someone who can't pay?"

  Marshfield shrugged. "It doesn't happen. If it did, I guess the physician would have to answer to the administration. Look, Iverson, you weren't around when this hospital admitted every Tom, Dick, and Harry who came down the pike, regardless of whether they could pay or not, but I'm here to tell you, it was one helluva mess. There were some weeks when the goddamn place couldn't even meet its payroll, let alone buy any new equipment."

  "This man's staying, " Zack said. The emergency physician reddened. "I told you we had things under control, " he said. i, Zachan glanced down at the old man. Sending him home to an isolated shack with no phone and, as likely as not, no food, went against his evess instinct as a physician. "Under control or not, " he said evenly, "he's staying. Admit him to me as… malnutrition and syncope. I'll write orders."

  Marshfield's jowly cheeks were now crimson. "It's your goddamn funeral,

  " he said. "You're the one who's going to get called on the carpet by the administration."

  "I think Frank will understand, " Zack said. This time, Marshfield laughed out loud. "There are a few docs beating the bushes out there for a job because they thought the same thing, Iverson."

  "Like I said, he's being admitted."

  "And like I said, it's your funeral. It's okay, Tommy, " he said to the guard. "You can go on about your rounds. Dr. Social Sewice, here is hell-bent on learning things the hard way."

  He turned on his heels and stalked away. "Chris, you're going to stay, at least for the night, " Zack said, taking the old man's good hand in his. "I'll be back to check you over in a few minutes."

  The man, bewildered by the sudden change in his fortune, could only stare up at him and nod. But the corners of his eyes were glistening.

  Zack turned to Suzanne. "Come on, " he said, "I'll walk you outside. I can use the fresh air."

  They walked through the electronically opened doorway and out onto the ambulance platform. A steady, windblown rain swept across the coal-black pavement. "I guess I have a few adjustments to make if I'm to sunive here," he said, shivering momentarily against the chill. Suzanne flipped the hood of her trench coat over her head. "Do us all a favor, " she said, "and don't make any ones you don't absolutely have to. That was a very kind thing you did in there."

  "Insurance or not, that old guy's paid his dues."

  "Perhaps, " Suzanne said. "Yes, perhaps he has. Well, I'll see you in the morning."

  "Yeah."

  She turned and took several steps, then turned back. "Zack, about that dinner. How about Wednesday night? My place."

  Zack felt his pulse skip. "I thought you didn't date men you worked with?"

  "No policy should be without exceptions, " she said. "You just made that point in there yourself, didn't you?"

  "Yes. Yes, I suppose I did. But how about your… other involvement?"

  She pushed her hood back from her forehead and smiled at him, first with her eyes, then with her lips. "I lied, " she said. IVERSON stood by the glass doors of her bedroom balcony, wincing as half a dozen spears of lightning crackled through the jet sky over the Androscoggin River Valley. Far below and to the south, Sterling incandesced eerily beneath the strobe. A cannonade of thunder rumbled, then exploded, shaking the tall, hillside A-frame like a toy. She tightened her robe and then tiptoed down the hall to check on the girls. Mercifully, after two fitful hours battling the ghosts of the storm, both were asleep. Lisette had never done well with thunderstorms herself, and felt no small guilt at having passed those fears on to her children. God, how she wished Frank would come to bed, or at least talk to her. It was nearly one in the morning, and he was still downstairs in "his" den, staring, she knew, at the embers in "his" fireplace, and listening over and over to the album of morose, progressive jazz he favored when he was angry at her. And as usual, she also knew, he would take his own sweet time in telling her why. It was the job, the hospital, that kept him so tense.

  Lisette felt certain of it. For a year-no, much longer than that now, two at least-he had been a bear to live with. And with each passing week, each passing month, there seemed to be less and less she could do to please him. Silently, she cursed the day he had closed his business in Concord and moved back to Sterling, even if the little electronics firm was on the ropes. To be sure, his success with Ultramed had given them more than she could ever have imagined. But as she reflected on the dashing dreamer she had fallen in love with and married, Lisette told herself the price they were paying was far too high. For a time, she debated simply going to bed. If she did, of course, Frank would never come up. He would spend the night on the sofa in his den and would be in his office at the hospital by the time she and the twins awoke. With a sigh of resignation, she stepped into her slippers and headed down the stairs. There was no way she could outlast him. She cared, and he, for the moment at least, did not. The situation was as simple as that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Garfield Mountain Junior Olympic Time
Trials.

  Sparkling like neon against the sunlit snow, the crimson and white banner said it all. From his spot at the base of the main slope, Frankie Iverson squinted up at the giant slalom course-a rugged series of two-dozen gates marked with red and blue flags. One more run, he told himself. Just one more run like the last, and he would be on his way to Colorado. The trip, the trophy, evew, thing. After years of practice, years of frustration, they were so close now he could taste them. "Next year will be yours, " the Judge had told him during the agony and tears that had followed last year's race.

  "Next year Tyler will be too old to compete, and you'll be number one."

  Tyler. What a joke. Why couldn't his father understand that it was the shitty way the slope had been groomed-the goddamn ruts that had caught his skis-that had caused him to lose by half a second. Not Tyler. One more run. "Hey, Frankie, you sleeping or what?"

  Startled, Frank whirled. His brother, Zack, wearing black boots and a black racing suit, ambled toward him over a small mound of packed snow.

  "Just studying the course, Zack-o, " Frank said. "As if you needed to.

  You could ski backward and there's still no one in this field who could catch you."

  Frank jabbed a thumb toward the huge board where the times for the first run were posted. "You could."

  Zack laughed out loud. "Make up three seconds on you when I've never once beaten you on a run? You've got to be kidding. Listen, all I want to do is stay on my feet and get that second place trophy. There'll be plenty of time for me next year when you're racing Seniors."

  "Sure, Zack-o, sure. Lay it on any thicker and I'll slip on it. Since when did you get off thinking you could psych me?"

  And psyching he was, too, the little worm, Frank thought. They were just about two years apart in age, but Zack had hit a growth spurt just after his thirteenth birthday, and suddenly, over the year that had followed, the competition between them had intensified in all sports-especially in skiing, where the gap separating them had been narrowing all winter.