The Devil You Know

by Freida McFadden

  I power down my phone and turn it on again, but it’s still not working right. That’s the only trick I know and now I’m out of ideas.

  “Ben,” I say.

  He doesn’t look up. “Yeah?”

  “My phone is doing something weird.” I hold it up, even though he’s too far away to actually see the screen. “The keyboard won’t come up. I tried restarting it, but it’s still not working.”

  Ben’s eyes are still pinned at his own computer screen. “Okay.”

  I raise my eyebrows at him. “Can you fix it for me?”

  Now I’ve got his attention. He lifts his brown eyes from the screen—he looks tired. “And you can’t fix it yourself because…?”

  “I don’t know how to fix this!”

  “And I do?”

  I glare at him. “Ben, you write apps for smartphones. That’s your job.”

  “Yeah, but you act like I know everything there is to know about these phones,” he says. “I don’t. How am I supposed to know how to solve every single problem with your phone?”

  “Well, you could look it up.”

  “Why can’t you look it up?”

  “Because you’re better at looking it up than me.”

  Ben gives me a look. “Come on, Jane. It’s not like you’re helpless. I’m just tired of you running to me every time something goes wrong with your phone or computer without even trying to fix it yourself.”

  Fine, he’s right. I do go straight to Ben every time something goes wrong with my phone or computer. But there was a time when he was happy to help me. There was a time when if I had an issue with my computer, he’d grab it from me and fix it before I even had to ask. He used to love helping me.

  When we were dating for about six months, I accidentally clicked on one of those email links that downloaded a nasty virus onto my computer. I was freaking out. Ben lived a subway ride away from me, but when I texted him about it at eleven o’clock at night, he came over immediately. He spent over an hour getting rid of that damn virus, all the while teasing me about not downloading so much porn.

  Finally, Ben says, “Try a hard reset.”

  “A hard reset?”

  He sighs. “Hold down both buttons at once.”

  I do the “hard reset” on the phone. And sure enough, after that, the problem seems to be fixed.

  I wonder where the hard reset button is on our marriage.

  _____

  Leah goes to bed without too much difficulty tonight, but by the time I get out of her room, my brain feels fried. All I want to do is veg out with Ben on the couch and maybe watch an Iron Chef or something. That would be nice.

  Except when I get down to the living room, Ben doesn’t have the television on. He’s sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead, a grim expression on his face. Oh my God, did somebody die? He really looks like somebody might have died.

  “Ben…” I venture. “Is… is everything okay?”

  He responds by rubbing his face with his hand. “Not really.”

  Somebody died. I knew it.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “I just…” He looks down at his lap. “Honestly? I feel like I barely know you anymore.”

  I shouldn’t be surprised by this statement. All the fights lately, that party in Ronkonkoma, him not returning with us from Reading… it was pretty clear he was unhappy. Yet the statement still hits me like a sucker punch in the gut. “What?”

  “We never talk anymore,” he says. “Ever. Our only interaction is you assigning me chores. And then not being happy about how I do them.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “Well, maybe that wouldn’t be the case if you did chores without my having to ask. And didn’t forget half of what I tell you.”

  “Right,” he says. “This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Well, what do you expect?” I fold my arms across my chest. “You’re home all day, and somehow you can’t even manage to wash one dish. You can’t even manage to change the toilet paper roll!”

  “Fuck the toilet paper roll!” Ben stands up now, his arms in angry straight lines at his sides. “I’m talking about us, Jane. Our marriage is… I don’t even know what it is anymore. I feel like I can’t even talk to you anymore. All we do is fight. I just don’t feel close to you anymore.”

  I glare at him. I can’t believe he’s bringing up all this bullshit when I’m exhausted from working all day. Of course, he’s got tons of energy to fight—he just sits around all day. “We talk all the time!”

  “Yeah, about what?” he shoots back. “How much you hate Leah’s teacher? About potty training, which you refuse to even do the right way? I don’t care about any of that. That’s not what I want to talk about with you.”

  I nod at the television. “We talk about Iron Chef.”

  “Great,” he mutters. “A television show. That’s all I have in common with my wife.” He shakes his head at me. “Those couple days without you at my mother’s house? It was like… a relief. I enjoyed being alone.”

  “Everyone likes being alone sometimes,” I say weakly.

  “No.” His lips set into a grim line. “It’s more than that.”

  I’m starting to realize this isn’t another one of our silly fights. This is something more. This is what’s been building over the last several years, and getting even worse over the last several months.

  He’s quiet for a minute, just staring at me. Finally, he lowers his brown eyes. “I’m not happy, Jane. I’m not happy with my life out here. And I’m not happy with… us.”

  “What are you saying?” I manage.

  Ben is quiet. He bites his lip.

  I take a deep breath. “Are you… are you saying you want to leave?”

  Please say no. Please say no.

  After what seems like an eternity, he says, “Yeah. Maybe.”

  I want to hit him. Whatever happened to “we love each other too much for that to happen”? It turns out that was bullshit, like everything else in our marriage.

  “I’m going out,” he says.

  “Where are you going?” I ask in a tiny voice.

  “Where can I go?” he mutters. “This is fucking Long Island.”

  It’s got to be below freezing out, but Ben tugs on his heavy winter coat and pulls on his hat. He’ll probably end up in his car at some point, because otherwise he’ll end up freezing to death. And while part of me feels like I don’t give a shit what happens to him at this point, the part of me that doesn’t want my husband to die hands him a scarf.

  “Thanks,” he says quietly as he accepts the scarf.

  “Are you coming back?” I ask in a voice so tiny, it’s almost a whisper.

  “I think…” He heaves a sigh. “I think I’m going to stay at a hotel tonight.”

  I watch him walk through the front door, slamming it decisively behind him. It’s only when he’s gone that I sink down onto the couch. My hands are trembling and my heart is pounding. I can’t even believe that just happened. Yes, I knew we’d been fighting a lot—okay, more than a lot. But I didn’t think we were getting to the point where Ben was thinking about leaving our family.

  But it’s not like this is my fault. He’s the one who isn’t pulling his weight around here. And now he’s pissed off when I ask him to pitch in? He’s upset because I wanted him to go to a stupid party? What the hell is wrong with him?

  If he wants to leave, let him leave. It’s not like he helps me with anything anyway. I managed just fine without him when he was in Reading. And right now, I’m not even sure I want him around.

  Chapter 25

  It took me three hours of tossing and turning in bed to fall asleep. In the beginning, I couldn’t sleep because I was too fired up with anger and adrenaline. I kept thinking of things I wish I had said to Ben, although I have a feeling that none of those things would have made the situation any better.

  Then after the first hour, the anger turned into concern. Where was he? What kind of hotel was he st
aying at? Was it some crazy Motel 6 where he was going to get himself murdered? He should have just slept in our spare bedroom.

  I kept looking over at Ben’s empty side of the bed. There have been very few nights in our entire marriage that we’ve spent apart. It’s hard to sleep without him next to me. Even though I sort of hate him right now.

  At some point, I must have drifted off into a restless sleep, and when I woke up in a cold sweat at five in the morning, the bed was still empty. I stared at the left side of the bed for several minutes, then closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

  When I finally got up in the morning, feeling like a truck had run me over, I discovered Ben asleep on the couch in the living room, snoring softly. I didn’t know when he had come home, but perhaps he decided not to abandon his family after all. Or maybe the hotel he went to had bed bugs.

  In any case, I decided not to wake him up. After all, there was nothing I had to say to him.

  Right now, I’m trying to do my job even though I feel (and certainly look) like complete shit. I’m avoiding Lisa, because I know the second she asks me what’s wrong, I’m going to burst into tears. But I’m not performing at my best. My shining moment of the day was when I was trying to call the lab to get the results of a urinalysis I ordered. The first time I called, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the phone menu, so I selected the wrong option. I called back, but this time I dialed the wrong phone number altogether. I called back again and listened to the message, but accidentally pressed the wrong option number again anyway. I called back again and this time didn’t listen to the message, but accidentally pressed the wrong option number once again. Finally, on the fifth try, I managed to get through to the lab.

  At some point, I started to wonder if none of this was real and I was dreaming the whole thing. That’s something that has happened to me before in dreams—I’ve been trying and trying to dial a number and just can’t dial it correctly.

  Maybe all of this is a dream. Maybe Ben never told me he was seriously considering leaving me.

  The worst part is that today is my evening clinic day of the month. Ben picks up Leah today because I have patients booked until eight at night. It’s horrible. I hope he actually picks her up—I should probably text him to make sure, but I figure that Mila will most certainly be contacting me if he doesn’t.

  The patient I’m seeing right now is sapping every last bit of my strength. His name is Sam Powell and he’s an OIF vet. I actually see a lot of younger men in clinic thanks to the most recent wars overseas. Operation Enduring Freedom was the war in Afghanistan that started in 2001 after the World Trade Center bombings. Then two years later was Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Between the two wars, there’s a huge influx of young veterans, many of whom are messed up in the head from their experiences watching their friends get blown to bits by Improvised Explosive Devices, also known as roadside bombs. Some of them are fine, but Sam Powell is not.

  Mr. Powell has a bad case of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. It’s not uncommon in vets who have seen some of the awful things that he’s seen. I think he had issues before though, and going off to war only made him worse. I don’t know everything that’s happened to him—that’s a matter for his psychiatrist to address. But I do know one thing: a lot more psychiatrists and psychologists are desperately needed here at the VA. There’s only so much I can do for this guy as his primary care doctor.

  “I need to be tested,” Mr. Powell tells me. “For, you know, STDs.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly. It isn’t an uncommon request in my younger patients. “Any STD in particular that you’re concerned about?”

  Mr. Powell takes a deep breath. He’s so thin that he’s scrawny, although I can’t imagine he was that way when he first went off to war. He keeps shifting on the examining table, unable to make eye contact. I’m convinced he’s got another psych diagnosis beyond PTSD. I’m no psychiatrist, but I know paranoid psychosis when I see it.

  “So here’s the thing,” he says. “I was in this public bathroom, you know? Like at a rest station. And they had no toilet paper. But I had to wipe myself. So I found this newspaper on the floor of the bathroom and I used that to wipe.” He runs a shaky hand through his short hair. “I think I might have gotten some disease from the newspaper. So I want to be tested. For everything. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, AIDS—everything.”

  “Mr. Powell,” I say as gently as I can. “You can’t get an STD from a newspaper.”

  “You’re wrong.” His fists clench. “I think I did. And I want to be tested.”

  “Okay…” If he wants to be tested, I’m not going to deny him that. Maybe this is all a story so that he doesn’t have to tell me about a recent orgy. Although I genuinely think he’s telling me the truth. “I can test you right now, if you’d like.”

  He shakes his head firmly. “No, not here. Give me the test and I’ll do it at home.”

  I’ve never heard of a full STD panel that can be run in the comfort of a patient’s own home. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. The tests have to be done in the office and also a blood test in the lab.”

  “No.” He grits his teeth. “I can’t do that.” His voice raises a few notches. “I want to do it at home.”

  I look at my patient, wondering if I need to be worried for my safety. Probably not. But wouldn’t that be a perfect end to my day? To get strangled by a crazy guy who wants a home gonorrhea kit.

  “How about this,” I say to Mr. Powell. “I’ll do a physical exam and if it looks like you have any signs of a sexually transmitted disease, then we’ll run the panel. Otherwise, I don’t think you need to worry. Okay?”

  That seems to placate my patient. His shoulders relax slightly and he lets me examine him. And there’s no discharge or suspicious lesions that would make me think that his encounter with the newspaper was anything other than benign. So I send him home with a clean bill of health.

  Just as Mr. Powell goes on his way, I get a page from Ultrasound, which has never happened to me before during my short tour of duty at the VA. When I call the number, a breathless voice answers: “Dr. McGill?”

  “Yes, this is Dr. McGill,” I say. Wow, they were actually waiting by the phone. Half the time when I return my pages around here, the person calling has taken off by the time I dial the number, probably having gone home for the day.

  “This is Liz—an ultrasound tech,” an unfamiliar voice informs me. “I have a patient of yours down here. His named is Ray Chambers.”

  “Yes.” I saw Ray Chambers early this morning. He presented with right leg pain and I noticed his calf was warm and tender. So I booked him for an ultrasound, thinking that the last thing I’d want to miss was a blood clot in his leg. He’d been reluctant, but finally agreed to get the test.

  “So he’s got clots in both his right femoral and popliteal veins,” Liz tells me. “They’re pretty extensive clots, going all the way up to the pelvis.”

  “Geez,” I breathe. Good thing I convinced the guy to get the study. A blood clot in the leg, also known as a deep venous thrombosis, is potentially fatal. The clot could travel up to the lungs, resulting in a pulmonary embolus, which could easily be fatal. He needs to be treated with a blood thinner, and my first choice would be to send him to the emergency room.

  “The problem,” Liz tells me, “is that Mr. Chambers is not excited to stick around the hospital—I definitely can’t convince him to go to the ER. He keeps saying he wants to go home, and he’s obviously competent to do so. We’ve convinced him to stay though, just to talk to you, and I’m going to have someone wheel him up to your clinic as soon as we have an orderly available. It will probably be in the next ten to fifteen minutes.”

  “Great, thank you!” I say. “That’s awesome. Thank you so much.”

  “It’s no problem at all.” Liz seems befuddled by my rush of gratitude. It just amazes me lately when the staff at the VA actually does something to help me. I’m genuinely shocked they’re not making me come down there to
retrieve Mr. Chambers myself. “Just have someone waiting there, because he’s a flight risk.”

  The problem with that is I’ve got a heavily booked schedule for the day. I don’t have time to be waiting around at the entrance to Primary Care C for Mr. Chambers to arrive. This is one that I’m going to have to count on Barbara to do.

  I sprint over to the waiting area, where Barbara is in the middle of putting a final coat of fire engine red on her nails. There are two patients sitting on chairs, and I think both of them are mine—I’m really behind. But I need to make sure Mr. Chambers is safe.

  “Barbara,” I say.

  Barbara finishes two more of her nails before she speaks to me. “Hang on.”

  She dips her brush back in the bottle of polish and finishes up the rest of the nails on that hand. I wait patiently, assuming she’s going to look up and talk to me after that, but instead she starts blowing on her nails.

  “Barbara!” I say, more sharply this time.

  Finally, she looks up. “Yes?”

  I glance at the two patients in the room. “I need to talk to you about a patient. Can we go outside?”

  Barbara sighs heavily, but reluctantly traverses the two yards to just outside the door. I lower my voice so that nobody can overhear. “There’s a patient named Ray Chambers who has a large blood clot in his leg,” I tell her. “Ultrasound is sending him up here in maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and I need you to pull me out of the examining room as soon as he arrives, okay?”

  Barbara frowns at me. “It’s not my job to get you out of the room. I just check in and schedule the patients.”

  I take a deep breath, trying not to get frustrated with her. “Barbara, this is really serious. I need you to get me from the room when he comes. It’s important. He could die if he doesn’t get treated.”

  She chews on her lip, thinking it over. I swear to God, I don’t see what the big deal is. I’m not asking her to walk to the moon—I’m right down the hall!

  “Actually,” she says, “I’m taking a break in a few minutes. So I probably won’t even be around when the patient arrives.”