by Frank Huyler
The flaps went down, and the sea grew nearer. Pleasure boats, some under sail, and the wing was starting its slow, pendulous heave, and then the gear was shuddering in the slipstream, and finally there it was, the skyline of New York City, sunlight glistening off the glass facades of the buildings, one by one, as if to say, this is the world we have made.
We were sailing over streets and apartment blocks, our shadow beneath us, a little sideways in the crosswind from the sea, the green grass flowing by, the skip and stutter of the first white stripes, and then the heavy drum-rolling cough of the wheels, on the ground at last, as the cabin shook and creaked once more, and the engines thundered in reverse. Braking, braking again, and they’d done it, they’d taken me all the way back.
Later, after baggage claim, after customs, after the scanned-in passports, after the police with their dogs, after the coffee stands, after all of that, I could not stop myself from shaking. I could not calm down. What’s come over me, I wondered, why am I acting this way? And for the first time I realized how afraid I was, and how terrifying it would be to fly on alone, back to my house, and all that I faced there. We were filing out through the last of the barricades to arrivals, one after the other through the gap. I was near the end of the line, pushing my cart, and out in the morning I could see a cluster of drivers standing just beyond the red rope, holding up signs with names on them. The line grew shorter, the gap grew nearer. I was looking everywhere.
And then I saw him. He waited just past the exit, and the rope, near a pillar. He was watching the line; his eyes flicked across their faces. He hadn’t seen me. He took a step forward. That was all—a solitary, expectant step.
I felt myself go calm for the first time. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a green tie, which was unlike him. He was searching for me like someone with news to tell, and in that moment he looked like everything I wanted him to be, young and handsome and full of life, with his dark hair, and his bright, alert eyes flowing over us, one by one, there at the end of the journey.
The line moved on through the gap, and then, finally, he saw me. His face lit up, and he came toward me exactly as his mother had done, when she was his age, and had opened her arms for me also.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to my family, Helena Brandes, Deke and Marina Huyler, Scott Huyler, Holbrook Robinson, and Tracy Hardister, to my friends Tim Steigenga, Johanna Sharp, Chris Bannon, Helen Beekman, Beth Hadas, and Jennifer Brokaw, and to those who generously read various drafts of this book even though we’ve never met—Stewart O’Nan, Maria Campbell, Michael Williams, Peter Cook, and Toby Tompkins. To my agent, Michael Carlisle, and to my editor, Jennifer Barth, I’m enormously grateful for your support, encouragement, and good advice.
Special thanks, again, to Janet Bailey and to David Sklar.
About the Author
An emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Frank Huyler is the author of the essay collection The Blood of Strangers as well as the novel The Laws of Invisible Things. He grew up in Iran, Brazil, and Japan.
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Praise for
THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS
“This is no hospital horror tale, but an earnest inquiry into the ambiguities of illness and the morality of the medical profession…. The intimate tone of Huyler’s elegiac voice invites us to…think again about the things we think we know.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A compelling, curious book with rewards on nearly every page.”
—The Economist
“Gripping…. Huyler writes such subtly forceful prose…that his novel takes on a cool, uniquely powerful sense of dread.”
—Chicago Tribune
“[We] had better hope that our caretakers have meditated on the wisdom and compassion of books like The Laws of Invisible Things.”
—Boston Globe
“A cunning meditation on faith and its loss.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Chilling, subdued, and scalpel sharp…deftly plotted, rich with psychological and ethical nuance.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for
THE BLOOD OF STRANGERS
“If Raymond Carver had been a doctor, these are the stories he would have written. There are no untarnished heroes here. This is the world as it is: lovely and disturbing all at once.”
—Atul Gawande
“Moving…. What characterizes each of these miniatures is the candor in which they are offered, and their authenticity.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Dr. Huyler’s short, intense book treats of only the most important matters: life and death. His prose is nearly invisible, and therefore it allows us to see what he is talking about. And once we see it, we are not likely to forget it. This is a young writer with a big mind—and an even bigger heart.”
—Paul Auster
“The author of these doctor stories is an ER physician as well as a poet, and his work shows the economy and sharp attention that both jobs demand.”
—The New Yorker
“In lyrical and beautifully controlled prose, Frank Huyler takes us into the world of emergency medicine and in the process manages to leapfrog over all our preconceptions, erase all the stereotypes that television and movies have given us.”
—Abraham Verghese
“He writes so beautifully, in that humble, simple way that is very affecting…It’s very compassionate, filled with detail and just splendid, lucid sentences.”
—Peter Carey, Entertainment Weekly
ALSO BY FRANK HUYLER
Fiction
The Laws of Invisible Things
Nonfiction
The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine
Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph by Yannis Behrakis/Reuters/Landov
Copyright
RIGHT OF THIRST. Copyright © 2009 by Frank Huyler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digtal Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-186431-5
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