The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  “Can’t they operate?”

  Emma shook her head in the direction of Silver’s chart, her usual incisive gaze blurred. “I don’t think he has the kind of brain bleed that can be fixed by neurosurgery.” She looked at his smooth young face, buried under tubes and tape.

  “Wait, guys,” I said, looking back and forth between Emma and Dr. X. “Wait. You mean he’s going to die? Right now?”

  The charge nurse, Val, glanced at the clock. “His mother isn’t going to make it here in time,” she said.

  We watched Silver’s heart rate fall. Val wrote down some numbers from one of Silver’s drains; one of the other nurses did something to an IV; someone silenced the shrieking alarms. Without a word, Dr. X picked up Silver’s hand and held it between his own. Silver’s heart slowed further, ebbing down to a few last lonely beats. Then it stopped.

  I thought about the geeky physics T-shirt he’d been wearing and his skinny broken leg and turned my head aside so no one would see me wrestling to control my expression.

  One of the nurses left and returned with a small bag labeled PATIENT BELONGINGS. She took out a wallet and opened it.

  “His name was Ryan,” she said.

  I felt a hand grip my shoulder. A low voice, in my ear: “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, not wanting to be so self-absorbed that the focus of a tragedy would shift—even for a moment—to my reaction to it, but also I didn’t trust myself to be able to speak. Dr. X leaned toward me, so close I could feel the warmth of his skin, and then gently, he reached past me to Silver’s sightless green eyes and closed the lids, leaving his hand cupped for a moment against the boy’s still face. Then, without looking at any of us, he turned and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Four

  BODY DYSMORPHIC DISORDER

  Zadie, Present Day

  I resented that I wasn’t the kind of woman who felt sickened by the thought of food when I was upset, because that would have been easier than the realization that I’d scarfed down an entire container of leftover lasagna followed by a huge bag of chocolate chips, which is what happened last night when I was thinking about possibly seeing Nick again. A full-on binge was bad enough, but back-loading meals at midnight was stupid. And the night before going to the pool—well, words failed to describe how regrettable that was. Now I’d have bathing suit trauma on top of the rest of it. Something horrendous had happened to my metabolism in the last year or two so that one tiny food indiscretion would result in the sudden appearance of a five-months pregnant abdomen. The only way to atone was to forgo all appealing food in favor of vile green smoothies and then exercise as if I were afflicted with ’roid rage.

  Despite this, I was looking forward to a day at the pool. One nice thing about living in the South: it was warm enough that the club didn’t close the pool until the end of September, or sometimes later. Since Emma was bringing her nanny, in theory we could enjoy our Friday-morning-off work by stretching out on the comfy padded chaises by the big pool and sipping iced drinks and generally indulging in pampered sloth, which was something we’d talked about doing all summer. Since she was a trauma surgeon, Emma had a tough work schedule. Her days off rarely seemed to coordinate with my Mondays and Fridays off. Throw in a total of five kids, two husbands, one obese pet, various school and volunteering obligations, and a multitude of errands, and it was a testament to our friendship that we hung out as much as we did. We were due some fun, actually. The last couple of times we’d seen each other hadn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs.

  Three weeks ago, my household had gone viral, and not in any kind of positive marketing way. Every member of the Anson family was spewing vomit except Drew, who promptly claimed a work obligation requiring his presence in China. While the rational part of my brain understood he had zero control over his travel schedule, the vindictive part of my brain hoped he’d come down with E. coli on the plane as punishment for leaving me on my own with our four hurling offspring.

  My immune system normally functioned like an impenetrable force field, bolstered by years of exposure to the germ factory of the hospital. But this time I went down hard. By the time the last of the kids got sick, a few days later, I was so feeble and demoralized I hadn’t budged from the playroom—the most expendable room in the house—in almost twenty-four hours, except to retrieve Gatorade and broth. I’d dragged in a couple air mattresses and papered the room in wall-to-wall beach towels. I also established vomiting outposts at all four corners of the beds, consisting of plastic planters lined with grocery bags, in case the vomiter in question couldn’t quite make it to the disgusting bathroom, which now resembled the seventh circle of hell. The kids and I languished on our beach-towel-covered air beds, moaning, occasionally raising our heads to check on the status of whatever was showing on Animal Planet.

  When someone tapped on the playroom door, the kids looked at me quizzically, but I had no idea who it was. My part-time nanny had taken one look at us and bolted a few days earlier. Maybe one of the neighbors was checking to see why our house was emitting sewer fumes?

  It was Emma. At least, I thought it was Emma; it was hard to say for sure, since the voice behind the door sounded weirdly muffled. “Can I come in?”

  “Don’t come in,” I said valiantly. “We have the plague. It’s like The Exorcist up in here.”

  “I’m coming in anyway,” she said, and pushed the door open.

  I took one look at her and burst out laughing. She was covered from head to toe in surgical bio-shield garments. Several layers of OR gloves covered her hands; her legs resembled blue sausages, encased to the knee in thick paper booties.

  “What the hell is that?” I said, wheezing from the exertion of having laughed. “Are you wearing a level-four biohazard suit?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said briskly. “I snagged this stuff from the OR.” She set down the bucket she carried, from which protruded the nozzles of a bunch of cleaning supplies. “I’m here to save you.” She gave me a closer look, peering out from under her bizarre hat. “Dear God. Do you think you could possibly make it to the shower?”

  You know you have a friendship more precious than rubies when the friend is willing to scrub your bathroom after the detonation of a gastrointestinal bomb. If I hadn’t been so dehydrated, I’d have crawled into her lap and wept tears of gratitude.

  So I owed Emma a relaxing day. But now, the anticipation of a lazy morning in the sunshine had evaporated in a flood of unease. Nick. I hadn’t seen or talked to him in well over a decade.

  The day started with the usual early-morning cluster. My second grader was an insomniac: something about her brain wiring prevented sleep, although she didn’t need much and generally bounced around loudly and annoyingly when everyone else was still trying to snooze. The six-year-olds were groggy, incoherent slugs in the morning. They didn’t want to be woken, and when forced to rise, they retaliated by acting as unpleasant and helpless as possible. They slumped over the back of the couch, their auburn heads and sturdy little frames motionless, whining because they didn’t want to put on their school uniforms.

  “I can’t do it,” Eli sniveled. “It’s too hard.”

  “Eli, don’t be ridiculous. Delaney can put on her shirt, and she’s three.”

  “Yah,” said Delaney in an uppity voice. “I can.”

  “Mom,” Finn said limply. “Delaney is antagonizing us.”

  “Please do not think that I will be drawn into this. Put on your shirt, or, or . . . or you will have to go to school shirtless.”

  Rowan piped up. “Mom, don’t say things unless you are prepared to follow through on them,” she lectured in my voice. “And you can’t follow through on that, because it will humiliate me to have half-naked brothers at school.”

  “That’s not— Oh, shi . . . oot, the eggs are burning!”

  A car horn sounded outside. “Mom, the carpool is here!”

>   “What? What? It can’t be time for— Mother of God! Put on your shirts! Has anyone eaten?” A quick glance outside revealed Betsy Packard’s idling black Suburban.

  “I have! Me! I have eaten!”

  “I meant, have any of the big kids eaten? Boys, where are your backpacks? Shi . . . oot!”

  I stomped outside, slamming the door after me, and then forced a smile onto my face as I apologized to Betsy. “Looks like I’ll have to drive them in late again,” I said lamely. Betsy, who had two children and an army of minions to help her, nonetheless gave me a commiserating look. Everybody’s been there.

  Once Rowan, Eli, and Finn had been successfully deposited at the Oak Academy, I turned my attention to getting ready for the pool. This was labor-intensive. Unfortunately, shaving my legs required putting Delaney in the bath too; otherwise she’d be free to roam the bathroom and plunder approximately eight zillion dollars’ worth of makeup, or plug up the toilet with scarves, or eat deodorant or something. Three-year-olds liked to imitate, investigate, and deconstruct, which led to all sorts of havoc when they were left to their own devices.

  Then I had to try on all the bathing suits I owned in order to determine which one most successfully hid the results of last night’s food debacle. (A downside to friendship with Emma: she was eight feet tall and weighed four ounces.) Delaney, of course, insisted on trying on multiple suits as well, and preened in admiration at her reflection. At least she hadn’t picked up a case of crushing body dysmorphic disorder yet; she thought her convex toddler tummy and chubby thighs and fat bottom were extremely desirable, probably because everyone else in the family was always trying to squeeze her.

  After the fashion show, the pool bag had to be located and packed. Delaney required ten pounds of gear for every pound of body weight in order to be able to leave the house. An hour later, we were finally ready to go. I had successfully avoided any troublesome thoughts during the hectic morning, but now, as I drove to meet Emma to continue yesterday’s conversation, the memories assaulted me.

  Nick had not been a nice guy. He was brilliant, he was gorgeous, he was never boring, but nobody would describe him as overly burdened with empathy, at least not most of the time. Even the worst tarantula on the planet has his moments—I could remember his kindness to the families of some of his patients, for instance—but overall Nick had been a black force of disorder and hurt, a swirling dark cloud raining volcanic ash onto a village of innocents. And there was another reason to avoid the thought of Nick, which still caused me to squirm with shame, even now, all these years later: the biggest professional error I’d ever made.

  The entrance to the club reared up in my visual field, forcing me to make a sudden turn without braking. “Whoa there, lovely dear!” hollered Delaney, her head swaying.

  You approached Emma’s club via a serpentine lane lined with sculpted trees and a median teeming with snapdragons. The golf course was visible on the left side, with its green hills undulating gently into the distance. As you got closer, the bright snapdragons gave way to orderly beds of pansies flanking clipped yew bushes. Twin wisteria-draped pergolas stood at the corners of the drive, bordering a white bricked guardhouse in the widened median, covered with climbing ivy and roses.

  I slowed to a crawl and rolled down the window. I did not belong to the club. As a part-time physician, I made less than your average plumber, once you factored in childcare and taxes and various work-related expenses. Drew’s income, on the other hand, was growing nicely. You might think that he’d be willing to live it up a little, but no. Allocation of capital in the Anson household was tightly regulated. Drew was parsimonious, adhering to a strict budget that did not include dropping 100K on club initiation fees. He had all these spreadsheets and projections for our household expenses and had calculated basically down to the minute when we would reach a level of financial comfort sufficient for him to start blowing money on things like country clubs or luxury cars. Meanwhile, we went to the Y or mooched off friends when we wanted to swim.

  The Colleys—Emma and Wyatt—were not subject to this degree of financial planning, or any degree of financial planning, as far as I could tell. Wyatt raked it in from his car dealerships and blew through it just as quickly. He was not one to overthink things, and he liked to roll large. Wyatt had joined the waiting list for the club even before he’d married Emma, and if he had any residual unease about having grown up as a dirt-poor kid in some blighted corner of Alabama, he hid it well. Hobnobbing with a bunch of old-money Southerners didn’t appear to faze him at all.

  The guard knew me because I’d been the Colleys’ guest frequently, and he waved us through with a big smile. The clubhouse, a rambling Georgian of the same white brick as the guardhouse, was visible directly ahead. The circular drive led to a porticoed entrance under thirty-foot white columns, but I veered off before reaching it, turning right toward the pool and tennis courts.

  The pool was old-school: a sky blue rectangle with a diving board at the deep end and stairs into the shallow end. There was a separate round bubble of a baby pool with a little fence around it, and an expanse of flat white concrete surrounding the whole thing. But what the pool lacked in zero-entry areas and infinity edges and flagstone terraces, it more than made up for in the sheer beauty of the view. It was built into a hillside, with a one-hundred-eighty-degree vista of rolling green hills and cerulean sky and weeping willows swaying gracefully into ponds. The club had bowed to modernity by adding an outdoor thatched-roof bar with a dozen flat-screen TVs built into the ceiling joists and a breezy open-air dining pavilion with the same stunning view.

  After dropping Delaney at the baby pool with Emma’s nanny, I found Emma in a chaise near the bar. She was immobile, eyes closed behind gold sunglasses, her legs bent slightly at the knees so that the long taper of her calves into her delicate ankles was accentuated. She wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and a fuchsia bikini top with a wispy sarong.

  She must have sensed me walking up, because she thrust off the sunglasses and sat up. “Zadie,” she said. “I thought you weren’t coming when you didn’t text back.”

  “No, no,” I said. “This morning was kind of a flail, and also I had a . . . a phone mishap.” I held out my ruined cell phone, which I’d dropped in the morning’s chaos.

  “Ouch,” Emma commiserated. “Did you text Marcus?”

  Marcus, a seventeen-year-old nerd in my neighborhood, ran a thriving black-market business in iPhone repair. He could replace a damaged screen in ten minutes flat, and he charged half of the exorbitant Apple Store rate, with none of the hassle. With four device-addicted children, I had him on my favorites list.

  “I did, but he hasn’t replied yet. Probably wasting time in high school or something,” I answered. I settled myself on the chaise next to Emma’s and kicked off my sandals. “Okay, Em . . . how did you find out Nick might move here?”

  “He applied for an opening with my surgery group,” Emma said. She furled her limbs into a knot, lanky arms encircling lanky legs, resting her head gently on her knees.

  “No way! When?”

  “It happened while I was at that trauma conference—he interviewed with the hospital admin people last month apparently, and then with our practice manager and a couple of the partners while I was out of town. I almost vomited when I realized who he was.”

  “But he’s not even a trauma surgeon. Is he?” I asked weakly, plucking at the untethered edge of my pool chair, where a plastic strap had worked its way loose from its binding.

  “No, but the hospital wants to add reconstructive plastics and hepatobiliary and vascular to the group,” Emma said. “Make us multidisciplinary, instead of all separate, and that way they can tell the Eastway Surgery guys to fuck off. They’ve been wrangling for years over call issues and reimbursement for uninsured patients and all kinds of stuff.”

  She paused and leaned back in her chair. Her once magnificent waist-lengt
h hair had been cut short into a stacked, sleek bob, but it flattered her, framing the planed bones of her face and her clear glowing eyes. She was lithe and smooth and perfectly maintained, every hair in place, not a single shaving nick or unsightly vein or blemish anywhere on her flawless skin. As long as I had known her, Emma had always managed to make everything look easy.

  “Did he— Does he know you’re in the group?” I asked.

  “I don’t—” Emma began.

  “Well, heyyy there, babe!”

  Emma and I both looked up, startled, as the chair next to me was suddenly occupied by a tiny blonde in a red one-piece. It was Mary Sarah Porcher, one of the pediatricians I worked with, who also had Fridays off. She grinned widely, curling her legs up under her and leaning in. “What the hell is going on?”

  Mary Sarah was a walking contradiction. She had a shocking gravelly voice—I suspected she smoked—and her accent was pure Southern, so that What the hell is going on? came out as Whut the hale is gowen own? She loved to curse, an odd quality in a pediatrician, admittedly. But she was a legacy at the club and her husband was a blue-blooded Virginian whose family could trace their lineage back to the landed gentry in Burke’s Peerage. She reminded me of my old med school friend Georgia, now a urologist.

  Ordinarily, there was nothing I’d have enjoyed more than hanging out with Mary Sarah and Emma at the pool, but now I was desperate to hear what Emma had started to tell me, and there was no way to explain the background situation to a third party when Emma and I could barely articulate it ourselves. We’d have to wait until Mary Sarah left.

  Mary Sarah was not showing any signs of movement, however. She was dug in like an Alabama tick, lounging on her chaise and lazily flicking through Vogue while commenting on the physical attributes of the men at the pool. Since it was Friday morning, there weren’t many of these, but that didn’t slow her down any.

  “Hot diggity dawg, would you look at those swim trunks? Mmmm.”