You Again

by Peggy Nicholson

  ONCE JESSICA REACHED her office, there was no time to consider the question, or any question outside of medicine. Her dance card was full with scheduled appointments, and three work-ins before noon.

  Though the doctors of Diagnostics, Inc., also accepted their own patients, the partnership specialized in referrals from primary-care physicians. With a rheumatologist, a cardiologist, an oncologist and Jessica—the generalist—on staff, they consulted on the mystery cases of internal medicine, where a diagnosis had yet to be reached. But to keep those referrals coming, you had to make your referring physicians’ worries your own. That often made for a hectic schedule.

  For lunch she ate yogurt at her desk, the history of her next patient spread before her, her favorite reference book to one side.

  Her phone rang. “Call for you on line four,” Caroline Hardy, the office receptionist, said when Jessica picked up.

  “Who?”

  “Wouldn’t say. A woman.” Caroline clicked off.

  Jessica punched the blinking light.

  “What do I have to do to get you to come out and play? Slash your tires?”

  Raye Talbot. As with Sam, there was always a current of amusement flowing through her voice. But with Raye somehow the effect was dark, self-contained, not open and sunny like Sam. It wasn’t laughter, ready and waiting to be loosed on the world, but a purr of private satisfaction.

  Slashed tires—that was why Jessica had gone to supper with Raye in the first place. It had been raining when Jess left the office late—only to find that the back tires of her car had been slashed.

  With RI Gen’s inner-city location, vandalism was a frequent problem in the parking lots. Acres of poorly guarded cars were a sure invitation to roaming delinquents. Jessica had counted herself lucky that was all the damage they’d done. And she’d been lucky Raye had happened by just then, in that driving rain, to offer her a ride home.

  Though the ride had turned into more than she’d bargained for…

  “Jessica?” Raye prodded, still amused. “Supper? Tonight? I want to hear all about your adventures in New York.”

  It was Raye who had adventures, not Jessica. For the life of her, Jess couldn’t see why the psychiatrist would seek to befriend someone as tame as herself. That was part of her uneasiness, that and Raye’s persistence. Jess had given her no encouragement—had dodged her at every turn—these past few weeks. Yet she kept on coming.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  “No—oh, no. You just surprised me. I was trying to think if I had any…” She didn’t want to go out to supper. For one thing, she didn’t drive with people who.drank, and Raye had sucked it down that last time. Afterward Jessica would have insisted on driving, but Raye owned a gleaming black Corvette with half a city block of engine under its hood, a car of unnerving power. And even if she’d dared take its wheel, Jess didn’t drive a stick shift.

  And calling a cab had been out of the question. The part of the city where Raye had taken her, cabs didn’t venture after dark. So the drive home had been hair-raising.

  “Any plans? You have a hot date tonight, Jessica?” Amusement and disbelief curled around the words.

  “Well, actually, there is some work I need to catch up on, and—”

  “All right. Then what about tomorrow?”

  “Ahh…” She’d never been good at lying. And she needed friends. Shy as she was, she was always slow to make them in a new setting, but was this the friend she—

  “Good. I’ll pick you up at eight, then on to the bon temps. I have a new restaurant to show you—Oops, call on line one. See you tomorrow.”

  Jessica sat, listening to a dial tone. Why me? And remembering the perfume she’d smelled back there in the closet…

  Groping for something to talk about early on that evening they’d gone out, she’d asked Raye about her perfume, a nose-stirring blend of musk, cinnamon and something more exotic. Raye had pulled a vial from her purse. “It’s called Adventuress.” Uncapping the vial, she’d upended it against her fingertip. Then, abruptly, she’d reached across the table to touch the back of Jess’s wrist, leaving her scented for the night. “Like it?”

  “Very nice.” Jess had hidden her shock behind her wrist as she sniffed. But somehow the gesture hadn’t felt nice. Oh, she knew she was too touch-me-notish. Far too inhibited. Knowing Sam for almost a year, she’d learned that much of the world touched each other in spontaneity and friendship, sometimes simply to make a point. Had learned to love it, when it was Sam doing the touching.

  But what was the point here? Animals marked their territory with scent, to claim it. Perhaps her revulsion was on as instinctive a level. She didn’t care to be…annexed.

  Or perhaps it was simply that she preferred florals. Her own scent was the cool, clean sweetness of freesias.

  Musk…Then the page Jon had received down in the dining room—that must have been Raye. She’d summoned him for a quickie in a closet.

  And he hadn’t gone smiling—

  The phone rang again. “Mrs. Dabney’s ready for you in room one,” said Caroline. “Mr. Mendoza just walked in, and when you have a minute…”

  She didn’t have a minute again until eight-thirty that night. She would have stayed later—there was one case in particular she needed to read up on—but there was a certain cat to consider. Jessica might have saved her from life in a Dumpster, but having done so, she was obliged to provide companionship and amusement to replace the outdoor stimulation Cattoo had lost.

  They played Cat in a Box—black, starfish paws groping frantically from within the cardboard den while Jessica’s fingers crept mouselike across its sides—until Cattoo purred with contentment and Jessica was bored silly. Then they holed up on the couch, Jessica reading, with Cattoo draped across her stomach.

  The phone rang, upstairs and down. Both of them turned to look. “For you?” Jessica suggested. “That orange tom you’ve been ogling?” She’d caught Cattoo last week perched on a bedroom windowsill, crying and doing her best to butt her way through the screen, while the orange tom sauntered a good sixty feet below. The tom might be to die for, but—given the sheer drop onto rocky ground, to say nothing of the wrought-iron fence—Jessica was keeping that window shut till she found a way to reinforce the screen.

  The phone stopped ringing. Upstairs her answering machine would take a message, if there was one. Jessica sighed and set Cattoo to one side. It was her night on call.

  The message was a long time rewinding. The tape clicked to a stop, then started rolling. “Listen to me,” Sam insisted. “We’ve got to—”

  “No.” She hit the button, sat for a second, then fell backward on the bed, rolled onto her stomach and dragged a pillow over her head. No, we don’t, Sam. Couldn’t he understand this wasn’t a game for her? That she couldn’t do it—couldn’t be friends, couldn’t stay in touch? Sure, he probably worried about her, wondered if her life was going well, but she couldn’t help him.

  Because she was the little Dutch boy and he was the ocean. The only way she could live, at all, with Sam Kirby in the same world was to build a dike between them—a dike high as the sky, wide as all creation.

  But breach that dike with one pinhole, let even a drop of water seep through, and all would be lost. The hole would grow and grow till the dike collapsed and she was swept away.

  Talking to him was the pinhole; she couldn’t do it.

  But this isn’t much better, she thought, rubbing her face back and forth against the bedspread. I can’t spend my life with one thumb stuck in the dike. Blast him!

  A weight landed on top of the pillow. Cattoo padded across, then stepped off the other side. “Mrr?”

  “Go ’way!” Jessica hugged the pillow to the back of her head. What had set him off the past year, after seven long years of silence?

  The last time she’d seen Sam, before yesterday, was the time he’d talked his way past the doorman of the apartment she’d rented near her med school a month after she’d left him. H
e’d pretended to be a pizza deliveryman. She could still see him standing outside her door, his hawk nose made enormous by her fish-eye peephole, a pizza box in one hand, a bouquet of red roses in the other, a wide, uncertain grin on his face.

  Instead of flinging open the door, she’d run down the back stairs, left town, hadn’t stopped running till she’d reached Guatemala, where she’d obtained her quickie divorce. After she’d sent him the papers, he hadn’t bothered her. Until those two cards this past year.

  Soft scrabbling along the edge of the pillow—Cattoo trying to push her nose beneath.

  “Beat it! No, I didn’t mean that.” Jessica tossed the pillow aside and rolled over. Eyes closed, she reached for the cat.

  Whiskers brushing her face, so different from a man’s whiskers. Sometimes he’d scratched her raw making love in the mornings, and she’d loved it.

  God, stop it! Think of something else—anything else. The cat squeaked a protest as she hugged her.

  Raye, think of Raye, then, if that was all there was. Raye and a young man with fear and loathing in his face…Jessica focused on the problem, replacing that laughing, wicked grin with a boy in trouble. Focus. It was the one thing she did really well. She could aim her mind like a laser, shutting out everything beyond its beam. She never would have survived the past eight years without that gift of concentration. Some people were brilliant—Sam, her brother Winston, both her parents…Jessica regrettably was not, but oh, she could concentrate. On Jon Cooper…and Raye, who was a tall, sleek brunette, not a mousy blonde…On Jon, who’d gone to Raye on Jessica’s advice and was therefore her responsibility…And then there was Robert Coffman, the first hint she’d had that something might be wrong.

  “If you’re a trained hypnotist,” she’d asked Raye the first time they met, out in the corridor that separated their offices, “can you cure smokers?”

  “If the motivation is strong, certainly,” Raye had assured her.

  And so Jessica had sent Raye Robert Coffman, who was flirting with emphysema. A head of a corporation here in the city, an educated, intelligent man with a young family and a wife who begged him to quit, Coffman was surely someone who could stop smoking with a little help. Given the right patient and the right hypnotist, hypnotherapy could work wonders.

  But something had happened. Coffman had kept his appointment with Raye, then he’d canceled his follow-up with Jessica. When she’d called him to find out why, he’d laughed—not a pleasant laugh—and slammed the phone down. She hadn’t been able to reach him since.

  So she’d called Raye.

  “Couldn’t help him,” Raye had explained briskly. “The first thing you do, Dr. Myles, once you’ve taken someone under, is to simply ask: why do you smoke?”

  “And he told you?”

  “Oh, yesss…” Again, that undercurrent of amusement. “He said he wanted to kill himself.”

  “He what?”

  “Oh, it’s not that uncommon, Dr. Myles. Or may I call you Jessica? I’ve run across it before. Some smokers smoke for pleasure, some for…darker reasons. But if that’s the reason, hypnotism isn’t the answer. You just say thanks very much, and you bring him back out of trance.

  “Now if Coffman wanted to try long-term therapy…if he wants to get to the root of his problem…”

  But Coffman wanted nothing more to do with either of them. A letter requesting the transfer of his medical records to another internist had followed a few days after that.

  The incident had been troubling, but such things happened. Patients got into snits. Or sometimes the chemistry between doctor and patient simply wasn’t there. But usually the break was a matter of polite disinterest—a drifting apart, not a bitter rupture.

  A few days later, Raye had given her that ride home, by way of a tiny, cockroach-ridden café in Providence’s most blighted and dangerous slum.

  Sam would say—No! Concentrate…on Raye, who came from Alabama, according to the dean of her med school. Raye, who spoke without a trace of a Southern drawl. Jessica set the cat to one side, rolled over and reached for the phone book.

  The area code for Decatur, Alabama, was 205. And information listed only five Talbots in the city. The first two weren’t home; the third was.

  “Anne R. Talbot?” the man drawled above the background babble of a TV set. “Annie’s my sister. No, she doesn’t live here. Who’s this?”

  To explain would take half the night. “Jessica Myles. A friend of mine knew her in med school down in Grenada. He was just wondering if…” Jessica stared at the ceiling. “He was wondering if she ever became a psychiatrist, the way she was planning to?”

  “Annie?” Talbot hooted. “Annie wanted to be a headshrinker? Now that’d be the day! No, she’s an ophthalmologist. Practices down in New Orleans. You sure you got the right Anne Talbot?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Jessica admitted. “Butcould you tell me one thing more?”

  “Sure, if you make it fast. It’s Auburne’s third and ten on their twenty-yard line.”

  “Oh, sorry. Is Anne’s middle name Raye, by any chance?”

  Her brother snorted. “It’s Roberta, after our grandmother. You’ve got the wrong doc, honey, and now— Oooooo, shi—ugar! Damn! Excuse me, ma’am, but that’s the ball game. Butterfingers!”

  With a hasty thanks, Jessica hung up. Slowly she sank back to stare at the ceiling. Anne Roberta Talbot, mousy little blond lab rat, now practicing ophthalmology in New Orleans, could not be stretched to become tall, raven-haired psychiatrist Raye Talbot of Providence, no matter how you tugged at her. They were two different people.

  Both had gone to St. George’s in Grenada, both had graduated from there in ’84, though neither the dean nor Toby remembered Raye Talbot, a woman whom no man, in his right mind, would ever forget. “Makes no sense, cat.” Not a good kind of sense.

  The phone rang. She should hit the mute button. Instead, her head turned slowly, her hair rasping against the bedspread till she stared at the answering machine. Her message tape rolled. Somewhere, water spurted through a pinhole, tearing chunks away…So speak, then, damn you.

  “Jessica?” said her mother’s voice, cool and hard as cultured pearls. “If you’re there, will you pick up, please?”

  So much for that! She wanted to laugh, needed to cry, couldn’t do either. Jessica reached for the phone, then her hand fell back to the bed. The best way to hide your feelings was not to talk when you were feeling.

  From half a continent away, her mother’s little hiss of exasperation came clearly across the line. “Jessica, I have a message for you from Sam—Sam Kirby?”

  As if there’d ever been any other Sam. Jessica shook her head, kept on shaking it. He was shameless—when he went for something, he went all out.

  “It was so nice to hear from him after all these years.” Her parents had loathed Sam for the first six months of her marriage, seeing him as Jessica’s academic downfall. Her father had been appalled when he found that, at twentynine, Sam was only just completing his dissertation. Once it was published and Sam’s portrait appeared on the cover of Time, along with a strand of DNA, they’d adored him.

  For his part, Sam had remained steadfast in his distaste for her parents, though he’d always managed to be polite. Their late-coming approval hadn’t changed his opinion at all.

  “He said he was having trouble reaching you, and that he wanted me to give you a message.” Her mother laughed uncertainly. “I believe I have it right. He said you should think about uncles and falcons, whatever that means. And his number is 415-555-6846. That’s San Francisco. He’s giving a paper out there at some conference. He said you could reach him any time at all tonight—he’s given up sleeping.” She chuckled indulgently. “I presume that’s a joke. Or maybe it isn’t? Einstein only slept three hours a night, they say, so—”

  Jessica’s finger came down on the mute button.

  Uncles and falcons… “Tired? Who’s tired?” She’d been so sure of herself those first few m
onths with Sam. Somehow he’d made her brave. She’d sat up, turned onto her knees, slid a leg across him to kneel astride, her fingers spread on his hairy chest. “I’m going to love you, Sam Antonio Kirby, till you holler uncle!”

  “Oh, yeah?” He’d reached for her breast.

  “Yeah!” She’d caught his wrist, caught the other one, swung his arms over his head to pin them to the mattress.

  Laughing, he’d let her have her wicked way. They’d ended half an hour later in a tangle of bedsheets, heads off the foot of the bed, Jess on the bottom, back arched, her breasts pressed to his damp chest, her hair sweeping the floor. Only Sam’s braced arm kept them defying gravity. “Uncle?” he panted.

  “Uncle,” she admitted, cupping one hand to his hip. Content to be dropped on her head if it pleased him. Content…

  “’Bout time you learned, babe, what they say in Texas,” he drawled, nuzzling her ear, already half-asleep.

  “Wha’s that?” she murmured, drifting herself into darkness.

  “Don’t f…um, fool with a falcon, till you learn how to fly.”

  Startled awake, she’d laughed, and they’d slithered right off the bed. The tenant downstairs, old crabby Mr. Hadley, had started thumping his ceiling—their floor—with his broom. They’d had to press their mouths to each other’s shoulders to stifle the laughter.

  Goddamn you, Sam. Damn you for making me love you, when you couldn’t keep loving me yourself. If I wasn’t happy before you found me, at least I was…whole.

  His message…uncles and falcons…Arrogant as ever, he was telling her he could make her cry uncle. Make her talk to him.

  “Not anymore, Sam,” she whispered, and wondered if he could hear her three thousand miles away. “Not this time. I’m a big girl now.”

  And no longer a fool. With the mark of talons still striping her heart, she’d sworn off flying. And falcons.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SHE FELL AGAIN in her dreams, this time with a falcon diving beside her. Woke to the sound of purring; Cattoo liked to sleep on her pillow, nose jammed in Jessica’s ear, one of their few points of disagreement. Ran five miles through the dawn-lit streets, her breath smoking—autumn was coming fast. Saw five patients for morning rounds, though Richard, the diabetic, would go home that day.