We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  “I’ve always prided myself on my handwriting,” Dr. Sullivan says, still addressing the page. “Not like the chicken scratch of most of my colleagues. Too busy, too important to take the time to cross their t’s and dot their i’s. Nonsense really. All pretense.”

  She would photograph him from below. An unflattering angle. Highlight the softening jawline, the loose waddle of skin pouched between the protruding cords of his neck. Exaggerate his nose, the flare of his nostrils, ask him to smile, show off his snaggle of old teeth. With the money he makes, it is hard to imagine why he hasn’t had them fixed. A different generation. A different era. It’s hard to picture him young and loose. He was never young and loose. He was never a boy.

  Dr. Sullivan gathers the papers on the desk and closes the file. He immediately begins thumbing through a stack of identical manila folders, sneaks one out, an orange plastic SL tab clipped to its edge. “Right hand,” he mutters, scanning the first page, “preservation of full forearm. Successful reattachment of flexors and extensors to carpal bones, right, right, right, excellent, excellent.” He glances up. “Is he a leftie?”

  “He is now,” Mia says, and his eyes settle on her, unblinking, humourless. “So his handwriting won’t be so hot,” she says, “like most of your colleagues.”

  The furrows between his brows deepen. If he threw in a seed and some soil, he’d have a flower between his eyes by spring. “It will come. If he works at it.” He trails a long finger down the page, then snaps the file closed. “For the most part, we’ve found your son to be a rather stoic patient. And generally speaking”—he smiles cautiously—“we’re very pleased with his progress. He’s a strong young man—”

  “He was a hockey player. House league A. Right wing.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “And a skier. Downhill. He used to race but it got to be too much with the hockey. Summers, he longboards. Mostly around town, but also out at the Hills. Have you ever seen the kids out there?”

  “I’ve hiked in the provincial park many times, but no, I’ve never come across any skateboarders.” He glances again at his watch. “Now Mrs. Slate, we introduced a prosthe—”

  “I’ve dropped him off a few times. And I tried photographing them, but ended up in the forest, taking pictures of trees. They go so fast down those hills. It’s crazy. I thought he was going to get hurt, you know? I thought he was going to kill himself.” Mia is suddenly close to tears.

  “Mrs. Slate.” He pushes back from the desk and removes his glasses—dark, square, nerdy, hot now with the hipsters, although the doctor’s are probably original vintage. “Did you hear about the bonfire last night, out on River Road?” Beneath his white lab coat, a brown sweater vest, woven leather buttons up the front. The finely checked shirt underneath is done up to the neck. “Apparently it was a real wingding until some bright light took it upon himself to throw a can of gasoline into the fire, which exploded with quite a pop. Seriously injuring four boys. I spent my night in surgery with them. One after another after another. I am one of the city’s only trauma surgeons. Please believe me when I say I understand that an injury to a child is hard on a parent.”

  “And the child.”

  “Obviously, Mrs. Slate. Whatever we feel, they feel a thousand-fold. And these boys, because most of them are boys, most of them privileged, this is Old Aberdeen after all”—he places his hand on the stack of files—“come in night after night with blood toxicology that would make you cringe, and I do my best to patch them up. I can’t say I understand it, them, but I do my best.” He sets his glasses on top of the stack of files, so for a second Mia has the sensation there are two people watching her instead of one. “When we were kids, I don’t recall my friends and I being quite so hell-bent on killing ourselves. We had the war for that purpose.”

  “The war?”

  “Vietnam. I’m American. Crossed the Detroit-Windsor border in ’68. Had just received a full scholarship to Harvard Medical when I got my notice. Three months later I started at McGill.” He stretches up out of his chair. He’s a tall, long-legged man. Two long strides and he’s at the filing cabinet.

  “Can I offer you a coffee?” He opens the top drawer to reveal a small espresso machine. “Technically not allowed, but the stuff in the cafeteria is intolerable. My partner got me this little beauty last Christmas. A Nespresso. From France, I believe. The capsules cost a bundle and they’re hardly environmentally friendly, but the coffee!” He pops a small purple capsule into the machine. “Long or short?” he asks as he reaches past the skull and picks up a cup. “I take it straight so I have neither cream nor sugar.”

  “Long,” Mia says. The machine begins to wheeze and rumble. A slip of vapour undulates from the drawer like a charmed snake, along with a heady aroma. “I take it black as well.”

  “Perfect,” he says, wiping down the second cup, carefully, with precision, a thorough disinfection rather than a quick swipe. “I have no regrets,” he says, “about the war. I hurt no one. I compromised nothing in myself.” He glances over. Without his glasses, she can better see the soft brown of his eyes. “And I enjoy Canada. Country’s a little wilder and a lot colder, but I’ve always felt the people, the politics and the healthcare system are more my style. I’d make significantly more money in the U.S., of course, but, well, as they say, money isn’t everything.”

  She would shoot him in profile. Just a slight pouchiness to the neck. He has a fine nose. Good posture. “Have you been back?” she asks. “To the States? I mean, can you?”

  “Carter granted us full amnesty in ’77, his second day on the job. I’ve returned several times to visit family and whatnot, but, well, Canada’s home. We’ve got a cottage on Big Yirkie. You know it?”

  “Our friends”—she clears her throat—“have a place on the lake. The Conrads?”

  “Don’t know them, but I’ve seen the name on a mailbox. They’re on the main road in?”

  “Yes.” The doctor closes the drawer and picks both cups from the top of the cabinet.

  “We plan to retire up there. Sooner rather than later, although the hunt for my replacement has thus far been excruciatingly slow.” Dr. Sullivan hands her a coffee, then gently elbows the door closed behind her. “Can’t have anyone picking up the scent,” he says. “Could start a stampede.” Back in his chair, he raises his cup to her. “A little civility in the midst of the madness.”

  She stares into the cup, at the mocha-coloured crema within the round of white bone china that warms her hands. She feels the energy leaving her body, dripping from her wrists like blood. Her arms tremble from the weight of the cup. She wonders where Michael is at this moment, why he isn’t here.

  “Biscuit?” A sleeve of cookies slides across the desk. Arrowroots. Dr. Sullivan leans forward and gives the sleeve a rattle. The back of his hand is heavily veined, the skin mottled and purplish, but his nails are short and clean, his fingers strong and finely shapen, as if sculpted by a careful god.

  Mia works a cookie loose.

  “Take two,” he says, and one old brown eye winks. “And another for Mr. Slate. He’ll probably be tired when he gets home from the quarry.”

  This elderly man, his bald, beautiful head, his crummy teeth exposed as he chuckles over his lame Flintstones joke, his surgeon’s hand stretching across the desk, the sleeve of simple cookies, this is the shot she would take.

  —

  MICHAEL PICKS AN eight-by-ten from the high wooden table in Mia’s studio. A gorgeous picture of Frankie, and a recent one from the looks of it—the nose ring’s made the shot. “I hope you’re not going to give them this,” he says, tugging at his collar, trying to let in some air. His gloves are stuffed in his pocket, but he hasn’t unbuttoned his coat. The studio is always humid and smells of soap, even when the laundromat is closed.

  Mia glances up, a black Sharpie in one hand. “Give who what?” They’ve been at the hospital all night, it’s after eleven, but perched on a stool with her winter gear piled on the table beside
her, Mia looks more awake and relaxed than she has all week. She’s always been happy at the studio, such a change from her bland little box at the bank. Her office was on the executive floor but her windows didn’t open. She said the lack of fresh air almost killed her. That, and all the men.

  Michael holds up the picture. “This. Don’t give it to Peter and Helen.”

  She frowns. “Well, I might give it to Frankie.”

  “And she’ll give it to them.”

  “Oh, come on. She has nothing to do with this.”

  Michael sets the photograph down. The slight blur to Frankie’s shoulders suggests movement, but her face is sharp, her delight in perfect focus. Mia must have been telling a joke, or teasing her about some boy. “You know, she was there that night—at Eli’s party.”

  “And?”

  “I’m just saying. She was there.”

  Mia frowns up at him. She’s supposed to be making a sign for the door. So far she’s drawn a box around the perimeter of an empty page. “I think there’s some wine in the back,” she says, setting her marker down.

  “Christ, I thought you were only going to be a minute.”

  “I am. But still, I’d like a glass. You want one?”

  “No. I want to get going.”

  At the makeshift coffee station—a stainless steel Ikea unit along the back wall—Mia uncorks a bottle of red and returns with two glasses. She offers one to Michael.

  “I told you I don’t want it.”

  Mia nudges his hand with the glass. “Let’s be nice to each other, shall we?” Her manner’s light, coaxing. She’d also talked him into playing backgammon tonight at the hospital, although Finn had barely seemed to notice how easily Michael won all three games. The small dose of competitive spirit he’d been born with seems to have been vanquished along with his hand.

  Mia sets the glass on the table and practically sashays across the room in her fitted, low-slung jeans and her soft grey sweater. Michael had woken up feeling slightly off—no, way off—and has yet to recover. He’d dreamt about finding Finn in the snow. The panic on mental repeat. The terror playing all night long. How to explain what it was like to touch his icy body? To fail to find any sign of life?

  He tongues the cut on the inside of his lower lip. The way he’s feeling now, he can barely believe he had the energy, or the balls, to play it rough with Mia the other night. He thinks he might be depressed, that this is what depression feels like. Or maybe he’s in some sort of low-grade shock.

  “I talked to the surgeon today.” Mia dims the lights, then curls up on the settee, angled in the corner by the floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the room. “Dr. Sullivan. Mr. Rogers with a scalpel. He called Finn stoic.”

  “What Finn is, is a bad decision maker.” Michael yanks his gloves from his pocket and tosses them onto the table. They land on the photograph, partially covering Frankie’s freeze-frame laughter, which feels suddenly personal, somehow directed at him. “Boys his age, their frontal cortexes aren’t fully developed. Which is why they have parents. To protect them from themselves. To keep them from getting hurt.”

  “We’re good parents, Michael.”

  “I feel like we have to try harder,” he says. “That we can’t afford to make any more mistakes.” In the front window, his reflection appears bulky, misshapen by his navy woollen coat. His eyes look small and dull. Like a man you could rip off, he thinks. A man stupid enough to lose his child, to lose his capable wife.

  His hand trembles as he reaches for his wine glass. “Yesterday. I went to the office.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He can hear some of the air going out of her. “And?”

  “Peter was careful.” He twirls the stem of the glass slowly in his fingers. The only sound in the room the soft slide of glass over wood.

  “Did you get mad?”

  “I broke a picture.”

  “Only one? That’s not so bad.”

  He takes a long swallow of wine, feels its warmth in his belly. “You know I no longer have a job.” He sets his glass back down with precision. “That I won’t be getting paid. That we’ll have very little money.”

  “We can throw a couple mattresses on the floor up here. Wash up downstairs. Tumble ourselves dry.”

  “I like the house,” he says. “Our bedroom. Finn down the hall.”

  Mia’s head is now dropped onto the arm of the couch, much of her levity gone.

  “How is he going to manage?” Despite the wine, his throat is dry, his words come up pinched.

  “I bought him some of those one-handed flossers.”

  “Oh then, he’s all set.” He feels a choke building in his chest. He sniffs. Bangs the toe of one boot against the heel of the other.

  “Michael,” Mia says. “Come here.”

  Sitting on the floor, he unbuttons his coat and leans back against the couch, his head close to Mia’s knee. He concentrates on the light reflector across from him, a metallic umbrella blooming atop a skeletal base, like a flimsy satellite. “I can’t talk to him like you can,” he says. “I’ve never been able to talk to him like you.”

  “Finn adores you, Michael. You’ve always been good to him.” She gives his shoulder a squeeze. “All those hockey practices.”

  “You went to the games.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “but only to talk to the parents.”

  The studio is slashed with light and the wet slap of tires churning through slush—a car charging up Main. The silver umbrella flashes; the shadow of the tripod spider-slides across the wall. Once the car passes, the glow from the chandelier feels like darkness, the quiet a vacuum that settles in the cavity beneath Michael’s ribs. He has to measure his breathing to get the next words out. “It was close. I thought we lost him.”

  “I know.” Mia’s fingers brush his collarbone, a soft, steady rhythm. “But we didn’t.”

  He lets his head drop back onto her knee. “Once my father jumped into freezing water to save me,” he says. “He’d taken me fishing at the Ooze—this river an hour or so out of Montreal. It was late fall, probably off-season, but he never paid attention to that. I fell in. He was wearing these hip waders. When he jumped in they filled up and he was pinned to the bottom. He managed to get hold of me and put me on his shoulders so my head was above water. Somehow walked me back to the dock. I don’t know how long he was under, trying to get his waders off. It felt like a long time. When he finally got out, he lay on the dock, coughing and spitting up water. I was scared to death. Seeing him like that. Thinking he was going to kill me. Afterwards, he yelled at me, but it was pretty mild. I got in more shit for fooling around at the table.”

  “I always liked your dad,” Mia says. “He was a gruff man, but he was always sweet to me.”

  The things his father hit him with over the years: his hand, his belt, the shaft of a hockey stick once, when he ran in front of a car. It was a different time. Michael might have inherited his father’s temper, but he’s never laid a hand on Finn.

  “I wish I’d known your mom.”

  “I barely remember her. I only really remember Janice.” His father married her six months after his mother died of cancer. A year or so after the aborted fishing trip. They had another four kids together but they were so much younger than Michael. Janice was good to him, but he’d always felt like an outsider, as though there wasn’t a lot of room in the house for him. Last time he saw any of them was years ago now, at his father’s funeral. “My dad stripped me naked in the truck. Cranked up the heat and threw an old blanket over me. We stopped at this little bait and tackle shop on the way home and he bought me a hot chocolate.” He remembers how his dad’s hand shook when he handed him the styrofoam cup.

  “How old were you?”

  “Maybe five or six.”

  “Ah,” Mia says. “So small.”

  He was. All the way back to Beaconsfield, he’d concentrated on not spilling his drink and keeping the blanket from slipping off and holding back his tears, which would have anger
ed his old man.

  Michael reaches up and presses Mia’s hand to his shoulder. “Hey,” he says, then clears his throat. “You did a good job on Finn’s bandages today.”

  In the window, he watches her roll her neck first one way, then the other. “Thanks.” She pulls her hand from beneath his. “It was hard.”

  Can I tell you something, I say to my mom, surprised that my voice sounds completely normal.

  Of course. And she shifts my jacket to her other hand.

  She’s just signed me out. Thanked all the doctors, goodbyed all the nurses. She’s got my backpack and my jacket and a fistful of amputee literature and she’s holding the door to my room. Technically I’m ready to go. I’ve got the jeans on that she brought me, the shirt, my Vans. I got dressed in the bathroom. It wasn’t that bad, but you know. The buttons on the shirt. The laces on the shoes.

  I have to tell you something.

  Okay, she says, but I just keep holding on to the rail, and my gut is quivering, like if you put your hand on my stomach you could actually feel it quivering. The bandages are fresh, clean and white, but there’s that smell, the smell that’s coming from me.

  My mom wanders back to the bed, looking worried. Do you want to sit for a minute?

  No. It comes out loud.

  She sets my backpack down and puts her hand on my back and says, like so calmly, You know you can tell me anything, right? Anything at all. And she starts doing this really light figure-eight thing on my back that she’s done ever since I was a kid and I try to relax and concentrate on her hand on my back and I try to think about breathing and her breathing beside me—my non-hand on the rail next to my good hand—we just breathe together for a while.

  I want to tell her things. I want to tell her what really happened to me in the backyard. I want to tell her about Jess. That she only came to the hospital that one time. That I could never touch her with some fucking hook strapped to my arm. That I’ll never touch her with some reeking, mutilated stump. I want to tell my mom about love and fearlessness and how it felt when I was lying in the snow that night and how it feels to be walking out of here right now.