by Kate Ledger
He woke, chilled by his own sweat, and turned toward Emily. In her night mask, she looked like she’d just stepped from a masquerade ball. If he told her about the pain treatment, even with all the patients he’d already helped, she’d still be skeptical. She’d quiz him about whether he was imagining the results. Wishful thinking, she’d say. In any event, she’d think a trial was impractical. Too time-consuming, she’d argue. It lacks good business sense. And how will you know, anyway, if the treatment’s working? That’s what she’d press him on: Where’s your proof? Pain is subjective—you can’t even calculate your results. You can’t say, for instance, pain was decreased by twenty percent. She’d be right. He couldn’t know any exact measurement, but the effort was still worthwhile, wasn’t it? You’re doubting your results, the astounding evidence you’ve already seen, because you’ve arrived at the threshold of success, he reprimanded himself. You’re about to reveal something significant to the entire world, and you’re pulling back. Was it possible he was wrong? No! He had no doubt. He’d seen what sulmenamine could do. If he had any reason to hesitate, it wasn’t because of the therapy. His own life mantra came back to him. They were words he’d used as long ago as medical school—no, maybe even before medical school: You can’t fear what you don’t know. You have to go with your gut. Trust yourself.
So what was it, then? He looked at the form of his wife’s body as she slept beside him, mounds under the twisted sheet. Why was his heart beating so hard in the middle of the night? The truth was, she might think her criticisms, but she would never voice them. She’d never challenge him, and he was left to wrestle with his doubts on his own. What had happened to them? They’d buried Caleb at the Chevrei Emunah cemetery outside of Baltimore, and since the day of the funeral, he’d waited for Emily to blame him for what had happened. Waited and dreaded. Why didn’t you know? He could ask the question of himself: How could you have missed such an obvious diagnosis? Why didn’t it cross your mind that he could die? He wasn’t sure if he’d been complacent, believing that since he was a doctor, nothing so terrible could possibly happen to them. Or maybe he’d just been too terrified to imagine the worst possible scenario. Or maybe, at the core, he really was a know-nothing with no skills, only puffery to offer. He glanced at Emily again. How could you have let me down, he imagined her saying. How could you have let all of us down? Even if she asked, he wouldn’t know what to tell her. The symptoms had been all wrong. He’d been too busy. He’d been afraid. He had no idea how he’d missed every relevant, important sign, how he’d never even guessed about them, and he could only hope that if the question were put to him, he’d finally constitute an explanation that would make sense. But there was no doubt the longer she refused to talk about it, the longer he suffered. In a way, he had to acknowledge, her silence delivered a kind of justice. He had no choice but to accept it.
She stirred and turned over, and he sighed into the dark. There was a nervous, spidery feeling that had crept under his breastbone, and he shifted sideways to quell it, pulling the sheet up to his chin. He had to force himself to think about the present. Think about the drug, the wonders it’s capable of doing, how much it’s going to help, he told himself. Think positive. The uneasy feeling in his chest subsided. The new drug would not make amends for what had happened, he knew, but if he were successful with it, he might make Emily look at him differently. He rolled onto his back, closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep.
The one unfortunate thing happened two days later and was sheer coincidence, a matter of plain bad timing. He was making calls to patients, allowing Rita to double- and triple-schedule the slots for patients to receive a sulmenamine injection. The number of people in his drug trial had climbed to eight. He had begun to think about writing up a case study, beginning with his father’s experience, and possibly including Jack Whitby. He’d undoubtedly include Maxi Bailey, whose results were perhaps the most dramatic so far. Her face had brightened, he saw immediately when she came in a week after treatment. She’d been out of the house twice with her son, and she had the gleeful, self-hugging energy of a girl with a crush. The other impressive case was the Jamaican housekeeper, who went on and on about his genius.
He figured he needed about twenty cases to make a persuasive argument for the drug. That many positive, unequivocal accounts of people who’d been healed, and no one at any university would care that he’d taken license with his research protocol. He was trying to decide on a medical journal to send the account of the case series. His main goal, he realized finally, was to get the academic community to take note. Only through that route would he be able to get attention for the therapy and establish himself as an expert on the topic. Take that, Guilford Medical Associates! If you hammer away at a problem for long enough—and without fear—just see what can happen. But twenty case studies would take time. Even getting a response from a journal would take time. All those people who might be helped sooner would lose out. He put a phone call in to the Baltimore Sun to see if he could get a health reporter to consider doing a piece for the public. His regular patients were delayed, the appointments jammed. Even the sick contended with standing-room-only around the koi pond. The waiting room sweltered like a sauna despite the air-conditioning.
And that was when the unfortunate coincidence occurred. The grapes he’d been waiting for arrived. They came in a white refrigerated truck from a local distributor that parked in the circular driveway. The driver hauled the coolers, stacked two at a time, into the waiting room on a two-wheeled handtruck. “Where do you want these?” he wanted to know, and he obligingly wheeled them through Simon’s office to drop them off in the basement to sit next to the waiting casks. He was young and awkward, with a long neck and hair that curled up at the back of his cap.
Simon pointed impatiently, directing. “Against the wall there.” He raked his hands through his hair, eager to get back to the clinic. Patients were already angry, having been forced to wait. They needed him. And this interruption was only a nuisance. Emily would have plenty of qualms about wine—and he’d have to persuade her about the mess and the investment of time and the space taken up in the basement. But the therapy, she’d acknowledge at once, was something different. It was an opportunity to make an impression on medicine as a whole. There was no telling how many patients’ lives would be affected by his discovery. And now that the trial had begun, those patients needed him more than ever. He was sorry he’d initiated the wine-making project, which now seemed frivolous. “I didn’t realize I’d ordered so much.”
“Six more coolers in the truck,” the delivery guy informed him. “Frozen. You got to keep ’em cold.”
More? Bad timing, and he’d also overdone it, he realized with anguish. “Just fit them,” Simon ordered with a loud, exasperated sigh. “I’ll take care of it.”
He turned to head back to the clinic when the door at the top of the basement stairs creaked open and light from the kitchen flooded the upper landing. Jamie must have heard the truck pull into the drive, he realized. She stepped down the first stairs. In her hand was a book she’d been reading, one finger holding open her page. She watched the driver unload, shifting the coolers sideways, fishtailing, to wedge them against the wall next to the oak casks. Then the driver wanted Simon to sign.
“Wow,” she said, looking down at her father. “You got a lot.”
She was waiting for him to say something. He looked from her to the delivery guy, who was struggling with the cooler. He raked his hair, feeling pulled back to the clinic where patients were waiting for him with serious concerns and where he was on the verge of what might be one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the century. His focus had shifted. She couldn’t possibly be expected to understand that. He made a noise that sounded like a grunt.
“When are we getting started?” she asked.
“Um,” he began. “Why don’t you empty out whatever’s in the freezer down here. Make room. ”
“The freezer?” she repeated. Then, as if
he were an idiot and she had made exacting calculations with her eyes: “All that’s not going to fit in the freezer.”
“Just see how much you can get in there,” he advised impatiently. He didn’t have time for a side project. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested—the idea of engaging Jamie in something still gnawed at him. The scheduling was simply off. He hadn’t anticipated the discovery of sulmenamine, but now he had articles to write, reporters to call. Not to mention the fact that he still had to recruit more patients for the trial, and that if he didn’t have results soon, he might find himself unable to get his hands on the drug.
“What about the rest?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
She rocked on her heels. It was a gesture that he recognized—he rocked that way when he had something important to say—and it made his heart ache. “So maybe we should get started tonight.”
But he had two appointments lined up for that evening, and there was no way he could get started. There were probably steps and steps of sterilizing wine equipment that had to happen.
“I wish I could explain this better,” he said apologetically, “but something’s come up. In the clinic. It’s very important. It’s almost too big to put into words. I’m onto something, a new treatment, and I can’t just put it off. Not when it’ll make a big difference in people’s lives.”
“Oh,” she said.
“So I can’t do the wine right now. I realize it may be a disappointment. And I know what you’re going to say—I told you so. But it’s really just a postponement. The grapes will keep. Most, at least. They’re already chilled. No worries, see?”
“So when?” she pressed him.
But it was impossible for him to estimate. He was standing in front of the crates with the tubing and the siphons, the large, handmade casks.
“I can smell them,” she said, her nose tilted upward.
He inhaled, but he detected nothing. “You can? I don’t smell anything.”
“Like summer, when you’re really young.” She breathed in deeply, her head tipping, her thin chest rising. “I think I’ll remember that smell my whole life.”
He smiled at her quizzically, apologetically.
“Your nose must be better than mine,” he said. “I promise we’ll do it. We’re just postponing. We can always order more grapes. You understand, don’t you?” She didn’t say another word as she turned to go back upstairs. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t care.”
There were patients ready for him in the exam rooms. Others had already grown bored with the magazines in the waiting room. The tension—the tug on his expertise—was palpable. That today would happen to be the day for the damn truck to arrive was unfortunate, but he would not be deterred. In fact, he took some satisfaction realizing the test of the new drug was the most important thing. He couldn’t be distracted right now by starting a new hobby. All the avenues of his life seemed to lead to this one moment, and he felt he had no choice but to focus. He had to know, for certain, whether he had stumbled upon a cure. “I have a responsibility,” he called after her, but she’d already shut the door at the top of the stairs.
PART FOUR
She tucked her hair behind her ear, just once, as she checked her reflection in the dark sheen of the windows. The luxury Acela, according to the brochure in the seat-back pocket, hit rates as fast as one hundred fifty miles an hour in its glide along the eastern seaboard.as The ride never seemed like what she imagined one-fifty should feel like. She always expected a rush, a burst of surprise, the outside world peeling away as it might from a space shuttle, the train itself as quiet and forceful as the interior of a bullet. Instead, in the dark, the Acela’s speed felt about as fast as a train should be. The high-speed line shaved only about ten minutes off the time of the regular Metroliner. She had departed 30th Street Station in Philadelphia at 8:47 p.m. on her way back to Baltimore, and she glanced at the brochure to see how Amtrak’s PR work had shaped up since Frith had allowed itself to be outbid in revamping the company’s image.
She’d been seeing him for six weeks, since she’d come back from Florida. For the second half of July and all of August, she’d contrived appearances at conferences in Philadelphia, meetings in Trenton, Princeton, Long Island. After each, she ducked out as quickly as possible to meet Will at a hotel. In Philly, she was able to see his new two-bedroom apartment on the second story of a brick rowhouse on Pine Street. All of the quick excuses, the short, cryptic phone calls from work, the furtive plans, seemed as unremarkable as they were necessary.
The Acela raced on in the dark. Emily considered getting up and walking to the club car, but she stayed so she wouldn’t lose her seat. She didn’t marvel about any of the details of having an affair—except regarding the fact that in seeing him, she had stumbled upon a sense of relief that felt something like pleasure.
In many ways, Will was the same as he’d been years ago. That first meeting, Thursday afternoon, as scheduled at the unassuming, low-key café in Dupont Circle, he’d arrived in his khaki garb, appearing nervous, running his palm over his head-stubble. She wasn’t sure yet what she thought of that gesture. He sat down at the table, and they ordered iced tea.
“So, twenty-four years,” she said. She had that feeling again of being the older one, the mature one.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“Where did you go?” she asked. “After.”
After they’d split, he’d fled New York and traveled around the world. “I was a little wrecked, you know,” he said with grim remembrance. Is this what this meeting is all about? she wondered with dread. Does he want to make sure I know the damage I did? Is he after some kind of apology? But he didn’t stop speaking for her to interject. He had wandered from one country to the next, taken trains to cities whose names he couldn’t pronounce, bunked in hostels with travelers who shared their wine but didn’t speak a word of English. He had his camera with him, of course, and photographed people he met, a Mulam baker’s family with whom he’d lived for a month in Mongolia. In Tibet, he watched young women carving flower sculptures out of butter for the festival of Chunga Choepa. But there was reason for everything, a destination in store for him. So like him to put it that way, she thought, as if things happened despite him, as if the breeze could carry him around. The first thing that happened, he said, was that the photographs, which became part of a show that hung in Amsterdam for a while, were reproduced in Geo, the German version of National Geographic. And then the second thing: In Morocco, he met Lindsay, who was teaching English, and with the money he’d made, they came back to the States together. They got married right away. She was a language instructor in the Philadelphia public school system. Their daughter, who was born soon after Will and Lindsay wed, was Rachel. Then came Anne. At home, he earned money as a designer of brochures and newsletters for nonprofits.
“You don’t photograph for those publications?”
“Never.” He grinned. “I still like to do my own thing.” No, it was clear he wasn’t after an apology. Here was a man who couldn’t conceive of regrets.
He was curious about her husband, so she bragged about Simon. She told him about Simon’s practice, located on the north side of the house, and how he’d been named among Baltimore’s Top Docs. She didn’t mention that he was still in Florida with his parents, too much detail, it seemed, but she painted him generously, describing his patients’ admiration and the gifts they brought back and how he’d once saved a patient on a plane. Will marveled at all of it.
“So tell me about Lindsay,” she said finally.
He cleared his throat. “Actually, we separated nine months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily said, embarrassed to have presented her life with such a glow.
“It’s okay. We’ve just gone different directions. There’s only the paperwork now.”
“Which direction did you go?” she asked.
“Wayward, I guess.”
Sh
e stared at him in surprise. “You were unfaithful?”
“Oh no. At least not in practice. I just felt like I didn’t understand anymore what our marriage was about,” he explained. His hand, running over the stubble again, stopped in its thoughtful caress, and he sat forward. “I’d lost the thread, you know? When we sat down to talk about it, she didn’t know what we were about, either. I wanted more intensity, I don’t know, more gut-wrenching honesty about where we were in our lives, the changes we were facing. What things meant. She wanted more living, less processing, and it just didn’t seem we were connecting. Or connected. I kept pushing, and she kept getting annoyed, and we just couldn’t get along.”
Emily felt again that shudder she’d felt years ago, when Will had seemed so startling and so dangerous. He could tell you about himself without worrying about judgment, ask a question that felt like it was tunneling right into your chest. And even though she had taken great pains to present herself, she could feel the way he looked at her, same as ever, with what felt like endless, bottomless admiration.
“How about you?” he asked. “It’s clear you’re at the top of your game. You’re a partner. That’s amazing.”
“Mostly a matter of showing up every day.”
“You and your Cal Ripken.”
“I hardly compare.” She laughed. “I did get to meet him though. Frith handled an account for a Maryland bank, and we wanted to use him as a spokesperson. He’s charming.”
