The Doctor's Wife (2 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
They find me on the ground, drooling in the dirt, the river howling in my ears, my mother’s red wool coat twisted up my hips. I can taste blood in my mouth, and can see a little bit of my yellow hair on the ground and my
hand is like a dead bird, and I can see now that the gun is there and it is dead, too. The gun is a dead skunk. And my hand is just a white bird. And the skunk has made a bad smell. I wish my husband had tried harder, because then we would have had a chance. I wouldn’t have done any of this. I just wanted to lead a good Christian life. But I was the Devil’s wife, that’s the truth of it. And even Jesus can’t save you from that. For years I have tried to overcome my weaknesses. For years I have told myself that it didn’t matter, what he did to me, all those years ago. That hot summer day when he knocked on my father’s door. I was just this little girl, a black taste like tar in my mouth when I picture the real truth to that. And he was already a man, he had hair on his face, a well-defined Adam’s apple, a deep voice. I was just a small skinny girl with cuts on my knees and burrs stuck to my dress. He took that from me. He stole it. And I want it back now, pathetic as it may sound to you. I want it back.
hand is like a dead bird, and I can see now that the gun is there and it is dead, too. The gun is a dead skunk. And my hand is just a white bird. And the skunk has made a bad smell. I wish my husband had tried harder, because then we would have had a chance. I wouldn’t have done any of this. I just wanted to lead a good Christian life. But I was the Devil’s wife, that’s the truth of it. And even Jesus can’t save you from that. For years I have tried to overcome my weaknesses. For years I have told myself that it didn’t matter, what he did to me, all those years ago. That hot summer day when he knocked on my father’s door. I was just this little girl, a black taste like tar in my mouth when I picture the real truth to that. And he was already a man, he had hair on his face, a well-defined Adam’s apple, a deep voice. I was just a small skinny girl with cuts on my knees and burrs stuck to my dress. He took that from me. He stole it. And I want it back now, pathetic as it may sound to you. I want it back.
The detective’s name is Bascombe, a windswept man in an old hunting coat, with a face unaccustomed to smiling. He takes off the coat and throws it onto the couch across the room. Now I see his shirt, a simple white button-down, and the worn blue jeans held up by suspenders. He is nearly fifty, a patient man, a hunter. I can tell by his face that he is alone, unmarried, and carries a deep sense of regret. It is his talisman, regret. It keeps him safe. He is a man, I realize, with little faith, and I tug on my cross to remind him of my own. Because even a jaded detective knows that a man without faith is lost.
A cop comes in with some coffee, places the paper cup in front of me, then leaves the room. The detective sits in his chair behind his cluttered desk. The rain batters the window behind him and it is almost dawn and I can tell they’ve gotten him out of bed and that the coffee is a necessary stimulant. Scattered across his desk with alarming clarity are the photographs of my father’s house, large black-and-white prints that portray an aspect of the awful things I’ve done, but only an aspect. There is the body of the man I’ve shot. The bullet wound on the upper flesh of his thigh. The hole that has burst and ripped through the legs of his pants and the blood splattered like paint around it.
I don’t realize that I’m shaking until I take the cigarette. The detective
reaches across the desk and lights it and I meet his eyes and he smiles a little. It is an appealing gesture, and as we smoke together it is as though we are friends sharing the quiet emergence of morning, and not bitter enemies. His eyes, gray as wet slate, tinted with the history of all he has seen, watch me relentlessly, without even a glimmer of mercy. He seems immune to my beauty, which normally spreads like a viral rash across the skin of a man. “Are you comfortable?” he asks, pushing the ashtray across the desk. “Is the coffee all right?”
reaches across the desk and lights it and I meet his eyes and he smiles a little. It is an appealing gesture, and as we smoke together it is as though we are friends sharing the quiet emergence of morning, and not bitter enemies. His eyes, gray as wet slate, tinted with the history of all he has seen, watch me relentlessly, without even a glimmer of mercy. He seems immune to my beauty, which normally spreads like a viral rash across the skin of a man. “Are you comfortable?” he asks, pushing the ashtray across the desk. “Is the coffee all right?”
I haven’t even tasted it. “Yes, it’s fine, thank you.”
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
I drink to avoid answering. The coffee tastes like turpentine; I wonder if they’ve put something in it.
“Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Dr. Knowles,” the detective says.
I try to think. I don’t understand the word relationship. “He’s my friend.”
“And his wife?”
I look at the detective directly. “What do you want, Detective? What do you really want?”
“What do I want?” He looks surprised. “I’m interested in your side of things.”
This makes me laugh, but then the tears run down my face. He takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and hands it to me and I wipe my eyes and smell the square of white cloth. It smells clean and fresh, like laundry detergent, and I am reminded for a moment of my mother. It makes me cry, it makes me cry and cry while the detective sits there and watches. He isn’t in any hurry. He doesn’t make me feel bad. “Take your time,” he tells me and I stutter to catch my breath, spitting and gasping and stuttering, and I imagine it is a good performance for the detective, who is the type who cries secretly at movies, who is easily betrayed by women, and I think perhaps it will make him feel sorry for me, it will make him care. He gives me another cigarette and I smoke it gratefully and I remember my husband the day we met that hot afternoon on my father’s porch. Simon Haas was a nothing then. A bumbling artist. He wanted to do my portrait. He’d been watching me all afternoon, hiding behind the brambles. But I saw him; I knew. I was
playing with the cats, one was orange, the other calico. He knocked on the door. Portraits for sale, he said with his lips trembling. I stood there. I could feel him wanting me. My father, who was on the couch, moldy with disease, hired him. Money’s no object was what he said, a plan already festering inside his twisted mind. When Simon went out to get his paints, my father told me to fix my hair. I raced up to Mama’s room, used her tortoiseshell comb, dabbed on her lipstick, which was ruby red and crumbled like an old crayon when I pressed it to my lips.
playing with the cats, one was orange, the other calico. He knocked on the door. Portraits for sale, he said with his lips trembling. I stood there. I could feel him wanting me. My father, who was on the couch, moldy with disease, hired him. Money’s no object was what he said, a plan already festering inside his twisted mind. When Simon went out to get his paints, my father told me to fix my hair. I raced up to Mama’s room, used her tortoiseshell comb, dabbed on her lipstick, which was ruby red and crumbled like an old crayon when I pressed it to my lips.
That was the day I smoked my first cigarette.
“Have you ever been in love, Detective?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“I was just a stupid kid. I didn’t know anything.” The words tumble out slowly, as if I am reciting a poem, a child’s nursery rhyme. “He saved my life, you know.”
The detective shifts, a confused expression on his face. “Who did, Mrs. Haas? Who saved your life?”
But I am crying too hard to answer.
The detective reaches across the table and takes my hand and for a moment I enjoy the warmth of his flesh, the rough care he shows me. But then I pull away, I have to. I don’t want his pity. “No,” I say, shaking my head, the tears rolling out. “I can’t tell you, I won’t.”
But this isn’t true. I’m bursting to tell. Bursting.
PART ONE
Bones
1
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT Michael Knowles wakes to the sound of his beeper and picks up the phone. “You want Finney,” he tells the page operator. “I’m not on call tonight.”
“You are now, Dr. Knowles,” the operator says officiously, and puts him through to the ER. A nurse comes on and brings him up to speed in a voice shrill with hysteria. The patient, she explains, a thirteen-year-old girl from Arbor Hill, is in labor, four months premature. “Boyfriend dropped her off about an hour ago and split. No prenatal care, no insurance. Now she’s bleeding all over the place and I can’t get anyone to give me a consult. Your partner’s puking his guts out in the men’s room. I’m told it’s food poisoning.”
“Give me twenty minutes,” Michael mutters, and like a man called to the service of war he grabs his coat. He had fallen asleep on the couch in the study. He climbs the stairs quietly, feeling strangely like a guest in his own home, wary of the light that burns on his wife’s bedside table. He enters the room uneasily, dreading a strained encounter, but Annie is asleep and all the lines of discord have vanished from her face. For a moment he marvels at her beauty, her glorious brown hair, the fleshy protrusion of her upper lip, her T-shirt twisted appealingly across her breasts. His heart begins to pound. She has squandered her beauty, he thinks. He does not know what will happen between them now. But no matter how much he rationalizes what she did, and he
does
rationalize it, no matter how much he tries to talk himself into hating her, he finds himself loving her more. His love for her is ripe in his mouth. The fruit has rotted perhaps, but he refuses to spit it out. With routine compassion he picks up the book at her side and sets it on the nightstand. For a moment he stands there, half-expecting her to wake, almost hoping that she will. Not to fight anymore, but to find each other inside a single, wordless moment. To find each other and remember what brought them both there in the first place, and why neither has left. But it’s too late for that, and she doesn’t wake, and they’re paging him again. He writes her a note, GOT PAGED, and leans it against the base of the lamp, where she will find it in the morning. Then he switches off the light and steps into the hall, listening to the yearning silence of the big house. It makes him think of his kids and he looks in on them now before he goes. First comes Henry, his ten-year-old son, sprawled across the mattress amid blankets and toys and forgotten stuffed animals. The boy’s hamster, Harpo, spins obsessively in its cage and for a moment Michael just stands there, contemplating the creature’s useless exertion. In the room next door, Rosie, who is six, sleeps with perfect stillness, maintaining the meticulous hierarchical positioning of her dolls at the end of her bed. Michael can’t imagine loving anything more than his children and feels a pang of guilt because he rarely sees them.
Quality time,
that’s what he’s resorted to. All part of the failed equation, he thinks, heading down the crooked stairs of the old house and out into the cold night, where it has begun to snow again. The flakes are thick and white like the feathers of birds. He takes a moment to zipper his jacket, to pull on his hood. The night is quiet, the sound of snowfall a comfort somehow, and he pushes himself on, cursing himself for wasting time.
does
rationalize it, no matter how much he tries to talk himself into hating her, he finds himself loving her more. His love for her is ripe in his mouth. The fruit has rotted perhaps, but he refuses to spit it out. With routine compassion he picks up the book at her side and sets it on the nightstand. For a moment he stands there, half-expecting her to wake, almost hoping that she will. Not to fight anymore, but to find each other inside a single, wordless moment. To find each other and remember what brought them both there in the first place, and why neither has left. But it’s too late for that, and she doesn’t wake, and they’re paging him again. He writes her a note, GOT PAGED, and leans it against the base of the lamp, where she will find it in the morning. Then he switches off the light and steps into the hall, listening to the yearning silence of the big house. It makes him think of his kids and he looks in on them now before he goes. First comes Henry, his ten-year-old son, sprawled across the mattress amid blankets and toys and forgotten stuffed animals. The boy’s hamster, Harpo, spins obsessively in its cage and for a moment Michael just stands there, contemplating the creature’s useless exertion. In the room next door, Rosie, who is six, sleeps with perfect stillness, maintaining the meticulous hierarchical positioning of her dolls at the end of her bed. Michael can’t imagine loving anything more than his children and feels a pang of guilt because he rarely sees them.
Quality time,
that’s what he’s resorted to. All part of the failed equation, he thinks, heading down the crooked stairs of the old house and out into the cold night, where it has begun to snow again. The flakes are thick and white like the feathers of birds. He takes a moment to zipper his jacket, to pull on his hood. The night is quiet, the sound of snowfall a comfort somehow, and he pushes himself on, cursing himself for wasting time.
The Saab starts with a lusty roar that makes him grateful that he owns a good car, even though he does not consider himself a man of attachments or possessions. The car smells of leather and promise and his own pathetic gratitude and it comes to him that he’s been a fool in his marriage, that what came between him and Annie is his own goddamn fault. It’s about him, not her, he realizes. It’s about everything he’s not.
Angry now, he pulls out of the driveway and speeds down the road, blowing past the squad car parked on the corner. Ever since he delivered the sheriff’s babies none of the cops pull him over for speeding. They know people are waiting for him, people in pain, and they respect that. One of the benefits of living in a small town like High Meadow, he thinks, gunning the engine, winding down the hill past Slattery’s cow farm, the fields dark and dense and silent, veiled in a dusting of fresh snow. Too early in the season for snow, he thinks, just a couple of weeks shy of Thanksgiving, but the weather is always unpredictable in upstate New York, and after all these years he’s no stranger to it. Ordinarily in weather like this he’d take Route 17 down to Bunker Hill, but he’s worried about the girl in the ER and decides to take Valley Road instead to save time. Under ideal circumstances the shortcut is dangerous, complicated with tight, snakelike turns, but it takes fifteen minutes off the trip. Tonight Valley Road shimmers with ice. The naked trees seem to tremble in his headlights. The sleet comes out of the dark like millions of pins and he is forced to decelerate, taking the curves slowly, methodically. The suffering girl will have to wait, he tells himself; nothing he can do about it now. At the end of Valley Road he turns onto Route 20, streaming into a line of traffic behind a behemoth snowplow, then onto the interstate, the city of Albany like a white blur before him.
Downtown, the streets are deserted except for a few homeless stragglers. The green neon cross on St. Vincent’s Hospital blinks and buzzes like some divine Morse code. Only now, as he pulls through the mammoth jaws of the doctors’ parking garage and climbs the labyrinth of concrete to his spot on level four, does it occur to him that something may be amiss. That perhaps the phone call had been a hoax: the bleeding girl, Finney being sick. Now that he thinks about it, he hadn’t recognized the nurse’s voice and he knows all the nurses at St. Vincent’s. The garage is deserted. The hanging fluorescent lights move in the wind, squealing slightly on their hinges. He knows he’s paranoid—
Comes with the territory,
they’d told him when he’d first started at the clinic, and he’d been more than willing to accept that, but now, tonight, he senses danger and he hesitates getting out of the car at all. He looks up at the glass doors a hundred feet away, where a nurse passes by in her pink scrubs, and the sense of routine comforts him. His beeper sounds again—
I’m coming, hold your fucking horses
—and he grabs his bag and opens the door and they’re on him, three or four or even five men, dragging him across the concrete into the dark. Cursing him, shoving him, laughing a little with their raised fists, taking turns splitting open his face, pushing him from one man’s arms into another’s. A greasy terror sloshes through his head. And then he’s down on his knees, someone throttling him, wrapping a cord around his neck, and as the air leaves his body like a pierced balloon he wonders if they are finally going to kill him. The fat one speaks in a cold, even voice, sweat splashing off his lips: “We’ve had enough, Dr. Knowles, we’ve had enough of your bullshit,” and then a shock of pain in his balls, excruciating and dense, and he doubles over and pukes—and he is glad for a moment, puking, because he thinks they will leave him alone, but they don’t, they kick him again, and again, and he is down on all fours like a dog amid chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette butts and shattered glass and his own puke and he suddenly begins to cry. Where is the guard, he wonders now—why hasn’t anyone seen them, some nurse, some technician, some doctor? Why isn’t someone calling the police?
Comes with the territory,
they’d told him when he’d first started at the clinic, and he’d been more than willing to accept that, but now, tonight, he senses danger and he hesitates getting out of the car at all. He looks up at the glass doors a hundred feet away, where a nurse passes by in her pink scrubs, and the sense of routine comforts him. His beeper sounds again—
I’m coming, hold your fucking horses
—and he grabs his bag and opens the door and they’re on him, three or four or even five men, dragging him across the concrete into the dark. Cursing him, shoving him, laughing a little with their raised fists, taking turns splitting open his face, pushing him from one man’s arms into another’s. A greasy terror sloshes through his head. And then he’s down on his knees, someone throttling him, wrapping a cord around his neck, and as the air leaves his body like a pierced balloon he wonders if they are finally going to kill him. The fat one speaks in a cold, even voice, sweat splashing off his lips: “We’ve had enough, Dr. Knowles, we’ve had enough of your bullshit,” and then a shock of pain in his balls, excruciating and dense, and he doubles over and pukes—and he is glad for a moment, puking, because he thinks they will leave him alone, but they don’t, they kick him again, and again, and he is down on all fours like a dog amid chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette butts and shattered glass and his own puke and he suddenly begins to cry. Where is the guard, he wonders now—why hasn’t anyone seen them, some nurse, some technician, some doctor? Why isn’t someone calling the police?
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