The upshot of all this, to me, was to emphasize how indescribably short and irrelevant the average human life is. But Sagan had managed to describe it; after reading his Cosmic Calendar, I realized I was living in the first fraction of the first second of the new New Year’s Day. Then my life would whiff out after an infinitesimally tiny blip on the timeline.
And if my life was barely perceptible, what of Graham’s? I would at least pass on my genes to the future, but Graham, the only son of an only son, would not. Even before Nick’s reappearance in my life, I still thought of Graham nearly every day and still experienced the physical sensation of shock when he crept unexpectedly into my mind after a lull: that feeling of being kicked in the stomach when memory assaults you anew with loss. And, in my case, guilt.
He had known, somehow, that I’d been unfaithful to him. The week before he died, I’d blown him off for a clandestine hookup with Nick. Graham had planned a picnic in Cherokee Park; we were supposed to meet at noon on Dog Hill so Baxter, Graham’s hyperenthusiastic golden retriever, could run joyously free.
That whole week was the loveliest of the fall. It was still warm enough for shorts, but the air had lost its humidity and everything was sharp, crisp, intensely focused. By the time I finally got to the park, the late-afternoon sun was pouring over the deep hills like liquid gold from a goblet, backlighting the slopes and lawns and forests of the park and turning everything a shade of rosy champagne. I saw them before they saw me: Baxter was racing around in frenetic circles, and Graham was sitting on his old Notre Dame blanket, next to an unpacked basket, his head turned to the side and resting on his knees, which were encircled by his arms. He was very still.
Baxter saw me first. He was overcome with emotion—another human he knew! Here! In paradise!—and he charged toward me but overshot, so he had to skid to a stop and double back. I scratched his ears, which sent him into paroxysms of seizurelike joy.
His owner was calm. Graham wordlessly shifted over on the blanket so I could sit. “I’m sorry I’m so late,” I began, but I stopped when Graham put his head back down on his knees. He still didn’t speak. “Graham?” I said. “What is it?”
He turned to face me. The dying sun caught him full in the face, suffusing his skin with glowing pinks and golds and transforming his hair into a soft halo. Even though his eyes were brown, they were very clear in the sunlight; I thought I could see right through them. The background noise of dogs yelping and trees rustling and the rhythmic feet of the joggers faded into stillness around us. We sat, hushed, in our pool of dimming molten light. He knows, I thought.
“Emma?” he asked.
“Yes?” I turned away, unable to face him.
“Will you keep Baxter for me next week?”
“Of course,” I said, relieved, not thinking to ask why.
“Thanks,” he said, and reached his arm around me. I settled into him, feeling the familiar comfort of his solidity, the softness and scent of his ancient T-shirt as soothing as a baby blanket. He stared ahead, as if at some unfathomable mirage, and then absently kissed the top of my head, his lips granting me a little jewel of absolution. Relief washed over me, even though I knew he knew. And even though I knew I’d probably do it again. I must be crazy, I thought.
It had been inexcusable madness. When I tried to reconstruct, later, what had possessed me to betray the two people I loved the most, it all sounded so diseased and feeble. I’d always been a good girl. I did what people—adults—expected of me, but I was never wholly comfortable in the world of my peers. I was awkward; I never laughed at the right things or said anything funny or enjoyed the easy camaraderie that seemed to come effortlessly to other girls. One-on-one, especially with Zadie, I felt fine, even comfortable and witty sometimes; but with a group, I often floundered. Boys had not flocked to me; they seemed to find something in me off-putting. When Zadie and I walked into a party, within five minutes there would be a swarm of boys around both of us, offering drinks and goofy charm and hopeful energy, but within five minutes more, all of it would subtly shift to Zadie’s direction, so all the eye contact and comments and laughter would exclude me. When Zadie spoke, it was to roars of approval; when I spoke, there was puzzled silence. So I stood alone in the crowd, an ice queen, always reacting a beat too late.
Graham had loved me, but Graham had been a little bit of a misfit too. He’d been a part of our circle, accepted, but he was quiet; he had a thoughtfulness and intensity marking him as different. And his devotion to me had made me uneasy. It seemed unearned. Why would anyone feel that way about me?
Nick, on the other hand, had been the epitome of cool. Everyone knew who he was and accorded him celebrity status. He could render you helpless with laughter and then just as easily turn around and cut you dead with the power of his scorn. People wanted his approval.
I harbored an unspoken fixation on him long before our fateful rotation on the trauma service. I’d first noticed him when I’d been a first-year med student, back in the days when first years were given about as much patient contact as the average janitor. Mostly, we were kept sequestered in a lecture hall where we were bombarded with clinically useless information about sodium ion channels and the histological characteristics of squamous cells. Every now and then, though, somebody would slip and bring in an actual doctor to lecture us on something interesting, and one Monday in January, this had been an associate professor in the general surgery department. I remembered one thing very clearly: he’d had a resident with him who had assisted in the slide presentation. This had been Nick, and he’d noticed me sitting in the front row. He’d caught me in an unguarded moment when I’d been staring at him, probably with an openmouthed longing expression. He’d grinned and cocked his first two fingers at me in a smug salute. I’d dropped my eyes and flushed with embarrassment.
Even though that encounter was minimal and slightly humiliating, it had led to a small obsession for me; I recognized from a wordless ten-second interaction that Nick had all the charisma I lacked. I didn’t know his name or nickname then, and thought of him only as the Hot Surgery Guy, but his face was the stand-in for my fantasies of a real boyfriend for the next two years. When my class progressed to more hospital interaction, it had been dismaying to realize everyone, male and female alike, had some form of crush on the guy called Dr. X. I had come to think of him as mine.
And then: trauma.
“Which team are you on?” Zadie had squealed, delighted to find we had the same rotation—trauma surgery—first. I had told her: B Team; the chief was Ken Linker. Then I asked about Zadie’s team.
“Mine says ‘A Team.’ Nick Xenokostas. Who’s that?”
It was completely irrational to feel hatred for your best friend for something she hadn’t even done yet. I’d looked at Zadie. She was wearing a long-sleeved button-down flannel shirt and jeans that tightly encased her slender figure; she also managed to be voluptuous, with curvy hips and a tiny waist. Her face was pleasingly symmetrical and somewhat mischievous, framed by her abundance of pale hair, and her round nose was wrinkled adorably. “Oh, hot damn!” she had bellowed. “Is that the dude everyone calls ‘Dr. X’?”
Like some ghastly self-fulfilling prophecy, it all unfolded exactly as my overactive worst-case imagination had envisioned. Nick had wanted Zadie, like I’d feared. I’d watched suspiciously during every joint meeting between our teams, but at first there was nothing to see; Zadie was her usual perky self, collecting covetous glances from males as disparate as Ethan—the pale and bookish fourth-year on the A Team—all the way to Clyde Bevins, the scarlet-faced, lecherous respiratory tech in the TICU. But she said nothing about any particular interaction with Nick, and I relaxed my guard a little. I feigned interest in a vapid but attractive future orthopedist so Zadie would not suspect me of having an obsession with Dr. X. I started dating Graham again.
And then. Out of the blue, one night Zadie had come dragging home from the hosp
ital and moped around our apartment, bothered by some unexplained event in the TICU that day, which I’d later learn had been a botched intubation. But of course, all I could remember of that night was the sickening revelation that Zadie was dating Nick.
I was sure Zadie must have picked up on my distress, since I was flushed and could control my breathing only with great difficulty. But she didn’t notice, distracted at first by her worries about the day she’d had and then by the pleasurable phone attention from Nick. She’d even joked about the impending evaluation Nick had to give her: Oh sure, he’ll say I’m the best student he’s ever had. Wink, wink.
Zadie might have been oblivious, but Graham was not. Known for his perspicacity, he must have immediately grasped the significance of my unusually heated reaction to the news my best friend was carrying on with her chief resident. “You don’t like that guy?” he’d asked after Zadie had gone.
“I like him fine,” I had answered uncomfortably, still conscious of my pink cheeks. “I just don’t want to see Zadie get hurt.”
Graham had given me a searching look. “You like him fine,” he repeated. Then, in a milder tone: “He’s not a good guy, though, huh?”
In spite of myself, I was interested. “I really don’t know much about him,” I said. “Do you?”
“Not really,” said Graham. “Bad vibe.” He’d settled on the sofa, turned the TV back on, and let the subject drop after one last lingering look at me.
So, warning signs abounded and harbingers of doom were everywhere, but I careened lemminglike toward the cliff’s edge anyway. I made eye contact with Nick during trauma rounds and tried to convey simultaneous desirability and aloofness, correctly sensing the thing Nick might most respond to in a female would be unattainability. The aloof part wasn’t much of a stretch. And I was unattainable—or seemed to be—by virtue of being the best friend of Nick’s current conquest. Of course, he would assume a true friend would never . . .
It worked.
Maybe I wasn’t consciously planning it. Maybe it began as an attempt to assuage my wounded pride—just seeking reassurance that it could have been me thrilling to the touch of the man I had mythologized. Certainly I had never carried the thought to its logical conclusion, that to obtain one relationship I wanted, I’d have to give up another. Two others, actually. I would never have made the decision, point-blank, to harm my friend. Or my loyal boyfriend.
Or would I? Looking back on it now, with the terrible gift of hindsight, I had to admit my justifications for my behavior were the most tremendous bullshit. At some point, the theoretical becomes the inevitable. You either cross the river or you don’t. I’d known what I was doing, even if I’d buried the knowledge under a toxic mountain of denial. Only the truly psychopathic among us lack the voice of conscience perched on our shoulders, whispering into our ears the words we don’t want to hear as we do what we shouldn’t. The rest of us simply swat the voice away and convince ourselves it was never there.
Things drifted, as they so often do, a little bit at a time, so on the day I found myself alone with Nick for the first time, it no longer seemed so shocking he would proposition me. The voice in my ear tried to stop me, but I stepped into the river and let it drown. It seemed to me that for once in my life I was throwing caution to the wind, seizing a chance to live dangerously, to really feel. As rationalizations go, these were lacking originality. I wanted him. He wanted me. No one would ever have to know.
If intensity could kill, I would not have survived our first kiss.
—
On the night Graham took our picture, I had no inkling what was coming. I’d gone to Nick’s call room, thinking I’d break it off, unable to stomach the deception anymore after the day in the park with Graham. By that point, I hated myself: my weakness, my unceasing self-destruction, the ease with which I’d learned to lie. Nick listened to me with absorption, one eyebrow half-cocked, until I’d finished a long-winded and unnecessary denunciation of our behavior, and then he simply said, “Okay, if that’s what you want, Emma.”
I nodded curtly, my words exhausted.
He caught me just before I opened the door. “Are you going to say anything to Zadie?”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible I could sink any lower into the muck, but it turns out there’s a lot of room at the bottom of the moral sewer. My first instinct was not to protect Zadie—or Graham, who was somehow always secondary on my list of people needing protection—but instead a flash of pain for myself. He liked her more; he’d always liked her more. He’d let me go without a second thought, but he cared about losing her.
I’d have taken great vindictive pleasure in outing him, but the problem was, I didn’t want to lose her either.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
His face changed. Something ugly rippled under his skin, distorting it, so for one brief moment I didn’t recognize him. Then he pulled me back.
I let him kiss me. Self-loathing thudded through me, but I didn’t stop him. “Do not tell her,” he said, kissing my forehead, undoing my shirt. I will never have this again, I told myself. I closed my eyes and shut off my brain, mindless and thoughtless and numb.
Until the flash of a camera brought me back. I’ll never know how Graham got a master key to the call rooms, or how he knew where to find me, or what made him decide to take our picture. I opened my eyes and saw him, his gentle face twisted in pain.
And that’s the last time I saw him alive.
—
After Graham died, I steeled myself for the worst self-flagellation I could envision, and I went to my bookshelf and opened The Screwtape Letters. Insightful even at the end of his life, Graham had selected that volume as our place to hide letters to each other. This time, there were two pieces of paper inside: a folded poem to which was affixed a photograph, which I could not bear to open, and a very short note, probably the last words Graham ever committed to paper.
Anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.
They were Carl Sagan’s words, spoken as he attempted to explain the nature of death to his young daughter. For a moment I stared at them until my tears blurred them into meaningless black marks on a sea of blinding white paper.
If remorse could kill, I would have died.
Chapter Forty-two
INHALING FIRE
Emma, Present Day
A lush darkness enveloped the city as I drove away from the Packards’ house, but you would never know it from the blazing streets of uptown Charlotte. I parked and got out, sidestepping happy drunks and couples on dates and late-working young bankers and the entourage of a world-famous former basketball player. Ahead of me I could see the Epicentre, a multistory conglomerate of outdoor patios, rooftop terraces, and restaurants nestled at the base of the skyscrapers like a toddler at the feet of giants. This was a late-night kind of place; under crisscrossing strings of lights, it thrummed with a stew of polyglot voices and thumping bass. I walked up the stairs, scanning the crowd.
I saw her when I reached the top floor. She sat on a boxy woven chaise, holding a small mason jar sloshing with ice and pale amber liquid. She’d found a relatively quiet corner of the courtyard, her chair tucked in among a bevy of potted flowering trees, a few seats away from the only other patrons, a trio of young guys in suits. A floaty cashmere sweater extended past her wrists in soft flares; her hair flowed around her giant hoop earrings in a frenetic burst of waves.
She looked up from her drink and saw me. I braced myself for reproach, or anger, or worse, indifference; but her face held no clue to her thoughts.
“Hi, Emma,” she said as I sat beside her.
I handed over her note as if it were an admission ticket. “Thank you for inviting me here.”
Anticipating my next question, she rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry. Drew doesn’t mind. He’s in our romantic hotel suite on a conference call with some guys
in Japan.” She waved at a passing waiter and held up her mason jar, which smelled gingery. “Another one?” she called. To me, she said, “It’s too summery of a drink, but I can’t get through this without bourbon. An homage to our homeland, right? But I know you won’t drink it neat.”
Her voice was slippery. I wondered how long she’d been sitting here, waiting for me to arrive.
“Zadie,” I said. “Thank you. I can’t believe you got Nick to help me.”
Curiosity lit her features. “Tell me. How did it go?”
She listened as I recounted the visit with the Packards, her face growing more animated as I talked. “That’s amazing! That’s so beautiful, Emma. I love it. And I’m so proud of Nick for helping you.”
I was fairly sure I knew the answer, but—“Did you tell him what I did?”
“You mean the little matter of impersonating me?” She was definitely tipsy.
“Yes,” I said.
She sighed. “No. I didn’t see the point in telling him that. Obviously, he’d have never agreed to help you. And it’s totally possible that he’d have burst into the OR and hacked you to pieces with a 10-blade.”
“So,” I said softly. “You protected me, after all I did to you.”
“Yes,” she said. “And Nick protected you too, for years, you know, letting me think he was married. If you hadn’t made him so angry at the Arts Ball, I might never have found out about any of this.”
“Was it weird, talking to him?”
“Uh, yes,” she said, and laughed. “He lives uptown, in the First Ward, not too far from here. I made up my mind to do it, and I ran to his apartment after I checked into the Ritz this morning. At first he thought— Well, I felt awful. But he agreed immediately to help you, and I could tell he thought the medical decisions you made were reasonable.”
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