The Doctor Delivers

by Janice Macdonald

  She would come to her senses, of course. It was early yet, something would go wrong. As they’d eaten dinner, she’d half hoped he would chew with his mouth open, anything to give her an excuse not to like him so much, but his manners were fine. He’d even helped with the dishes. And the clincher, he seemed to really enjoy the kids.

  “Julie’s quite the little charmer.” He stretched his legs out in front of him, smiled as she slid down beside him. “I don’t think I scored any points with Peter though.”

  “Don’t take it personally.” She swirled her glass, stared at the wine inside. Firelight caught the edge of the glass, made golden fingers of flame. “Peter had a hard time with the divorce. He’s the man of the house now.”

  “Is he close to his dad then?”

  “I’m not sure close really describes the relationship. Peter’s always sort of hero-worshiped Gary, but…well, Gary loves scuba diving and rock climbing, physical things like that, and Peter just can’t keep up. He tries, but he almost always ends up with an asthma attack. I think he feels that Gary’s disappointed in him. Sometimes I think he blames himself for Gary leaving.”

  “Has he told you that?”

  “Not exactly, he’s not very expansive. I’ve just picked it up. Mostly he’s fine unless he thinks his territory is threatened. Fortunately that doesn’t happen very often.”

  “You don’t date then?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve pretty much ruled out getting involved. At least until the kids are grown.”

  “They’re still very young.”

  “I know.” She shrugged. “But they’re my first priority. The divorce wasn’t their fault, they shouldn’t have to suffer. I grew up with parents who didn’t put their children first. I know what that feels like.”

  “I know a bit about it myself.” Martin folded his hands behind his head, stared into the fire. “Different circumstances, but I ended up feeling there was no one who cared very much. My mother died when I was twelve, and my dad was so devastated that for years he just shut everyone else out of his life. Half the time it was as though my sister and I didn’t exist, the rest of the time he was just angry with me.”

  “How old was your sister?”

  “Fifteen at the time and boy crazy, so she was never around, which I suppose made it easier for her but harder on me.”

  “So what did you do to make him angry?”

  He gave a wry laugh. “Being around was usually enough to set him off. My hair was too long, my music too loud, I’d amount to naught, he was always saying. Either that or a rock-and-roll singer, which in his mind was the same thing.”

  She looked at him, his expression distant as though he was still remembering. It wasn’t difficult to picture the lonely boy in Belfast, grieving for his mother, estranged from his father. Other—more recent—images came into her mind. That first day in the lobby in his hospital scrubs; up in the unit, his tall frame bent over a bassinet; the expression on his face as he’d looked at her across the dinner table tonight. The way it somehow seemed so right to have him there.

  “Want some more wine?” she asked, suddenly scared of what she was feeling. “Coffee. More lasagna.”

  He caught her hand as she started to get up, pulled her back down next to him. “I’m fine. I was thinking of what you said about Peter blaming himself for the divorce,” he said after a moment. “I felt that way after my mother’s death. My dad was so devastated and so angry with me, there were times I’d almost believe it was my fault she’d died. I’d lie on the bed at night and imagine myself as a doctor, curing my mother and winning back my dad’s approval.”

  “Was that why you went into medicine?”

  “It might have had something to do with it, although Sharon was very keen on my becoming a doctor.”

  “Sharon?”

  “My wife.”

  His words seemed to hang in the air for a moment.

  “You’re divorced?” she asked finally.

  “My wife was murdered.”

  HE HAD BEEN in his last year of medical school at Queen’s in Belfast. They’d lived in a flat, just off the Malone Road. On the morning of their first wedding anniversary, Martin stood in the kitchen doorway watching Sharon cook breakfast. She had long curly brown hair and blue eyes heavily fringed with dark lashes. She was twenty-two and, in her fourth month of pregnancy, just beginning to show.

  He liked to just watch her sometimes. Marvel at the fact that she was his wife. Their marriage and all it entailed was still new to him. Having another person in his life. Waking beside her. Worrying about her. Surrendering a part of himself to her. They had very little money or material possessions. He cycled to the university, she took the bus to her job at the chemist’s. Entertainment was the cinema now and then. A pint or two and a game of darts. He’d never been happier in his life.

  “A year ago today, can you believe it?” Sharon smiled over her shoulder at him. Pale morning light lit her face. “Would you do it again then?”

  “In a minute.” He came up behind her, kissed the back of her neck. “I’m mad for you.”

  “Just mad is what you mean.” She let her body relax against his. “And what grand plans have you to celebrate?”

  “Whatever this’ll buy.” He pulled a few pound notes from his pocket. In fact, he’d stashed some money aside to surprise her with a dinner out. He ran his hands over the smooth, warm bulge of her belly. “A slap-up feast of fish and chips.”

  “Ah, well.” She unwrapped three rashers of bacon from a wax-paper package, dropped them into the frying pan. “One of these days, we’ll be rolling in the money. Sure, I can’t make up my mind whether I’ll have a Jaguar or a Rolls.”

  “You’d better decide soon then,” He nuzzled his mouth against her warm skin. “Mmm, you’re beautiful, Sharon. Let’s forget the breakfast, shall we—”

  “Ah go on, you daft thing.” She grinned and pulled away. “Beautiful, indeed. Look at this.” Lifting her red jumper, she stuck out her belly. “Fat as a cow I am. Can’t even get my skirt done up now.”

  “Take a load off your feet then.” He nudged her away from the stove. “I’ll finish this.”

  “You’re a good man, so you are.” Sharon kissed him and sat down at the table. She picked up a blue airmail letter. “Have you read this letter from my sister?”

  “I haven’t.” He broke a couple of eggs next to the bacon. In truth, he hadn’t wanted to. Sharon’s sister and her husband had emigrated to America the year before and quickly embarked on a vigorous campaign for Sharon and Martin to follow. Almost weekly came glowing reports of their new lifestyle. Dishwashers, a new car, new house. It was the one cloud on his horizon: Sharon wanted to go, he didn’t.

  Sharon, a convent girl, schooled by the nuns of the Sacred Heart, had become disenchanted with Belfast. There’d been an increase in terrorist activity in the past months: machine-gun attacks, sectarian murders, a bomb blast in the town center the week before. Security Forces had established checkpoints on all main roads and certain areas were considered dangerous. In Sharon’s view, the city was no longer livable.

  His father was a lapsed Catholic, his mother a Protestant. He’d grown up in the predominantly Protestant Castlereagh area, but had no particular political or religious leanings. For him, Belfast, with all its ugliness and contradictions, was home, the sectarianism part of the fabric of everyday life in Northern Ireland. It was inescapable, the clues all around. Along the Shankhill Road, graffiti said Fuck the Pope and God Save the Queen. On the Falls Road, in Catholic territory, it said Victory to the IRA. You said Londonderry if you were a British Protestant, Derry if you were a Catholic Nationalist. Even the landscape seemed sectarian. Protestant geography was low hills, rolling farmlands and good soil. Catholics had the mountain slopes, rugged terrain and small farms of stony fields.

  Evenings, the TV news would show the IRA events, the funeral processions and car-bomb attacks, but it all seemed remote and distant to him. At the end of their street,
they could see the Antrim hills. The Botanic Gardens were a walk away. In their small flat, or going around the corner for a loaf of bread, he felt they were safe, untouched by the bombs and guns and violence in other parts of the city.

  As he carried the plates of eggs and bacon to the table, Sharon gasped.

  “God, will you look at that, Martin?” She had the newspaper spread out over the table. “See there. That’s the place we were last night, isn’t it?”

  He read over her shoulder. A Catholic deliveryman had been shot to death at the wheel of his car, a few yards away from the Chinese takeaway restaurant where he worked. Two masked men had jumped out of a doorway, fired half a dozen shots at him and driven away.

  “What time did it happen?” She leaned closer to read. “Six. I can’t believe it. We weren’t out of the place five minutes. Five more minutes. We could have been dead ourselves. God, it’s terrible, so it is.”

  “There’s been trouble in that area for a while now, Sharon. We should have known better ourselves than to be there.” Martin sat at the table, filled now with a vague sense of foreboding. The mood of the morning had been shattered. Outside, he heard a lorry rumble down the road. The distant sound of a helicopter coming from the north. He knew where the conversation was headed.

  “If there was a vote tomorrow in Northern Ireland, the IRA wouldn’t get five percent of the Catholic vote, do you know that?” Spots of color appeared on Sharon’s face. She speared bacon on her fork. “What have they done for anyone, I ask you? Nothing but kill more people.”

  He said nothing.

  “And would you look at this?” She held up the paper for him to see. “There’s traffic queues at security checkpoints, so they’ve got tips now about what to do if your motor overheats.”

  “Ah well, look on the bright side.” He tried to jolly her. “At least we don’t have to worry about my bike overheating—”

  “I don’t know why we stay and put up with it, I really don’t.” Her eyes were bright blue, angry. “At least Loren and Patrick had sense enough to get out—”

  “Sharon.” Martin ran his hand across his face. “Don’t be starting that again.”

  She put the newspaper down, fixed her eyes on his face. “Loren says you could finish up at Boston University—”

  “We’ve already talked about this.” He picked up the newspaper. “I don’t want to go—”

  “You don’t.” She grabbed the paper out of his hands. “What about me? What about the baby? You’re living in a fool’s paradise, Martin. You think you can just carry on your life as though nothing is happening, don’t you? We’re surrounded by thugs. Thugs who know nothing except killing people.”

  “They’re thugs, I’ll grant you that.” Martin finished his tea. “But going to America isn’t the answer. I’m not letting them run my life and they’re not going to drive me away from my own country. This is our home, Sharon.”

  “Ah God.” She shook her head. “Will you listen to yourself? You’d stay here and be a martyr to the cause? You think it’s worth dying for? Getting yourself killed to make a political point? What’s the good of that? We’re not safe here and that’s the truth of it. A man was shot to death, Martin, right outside the restaurant we were at.”

  “And you think nothing like that can happen in America?” He carried their dishes to the sink, ran water over them. “They’re shooting each other on the streets there all the time. I don’t suppose Loren writes to you about that though, does she?”

  “Loren has her own car, Martin.” Sharon grabbed his arm. “She didn’t even drive when she was here. They’ve a four-bedroom house, three bathrooms and a big garden for the kiddies. What do we have? A wee flat—”

  “And now we get to the real issue.” He turned from the sink to look at her. “Belfast isn’t the problem, is it? Sure you can ramble on about the violence, but every reason you have for wanting to go to America has to do with money—”

  Her face turned red and she burst into tears. “We’re still lugging clothes to the launderette. What when the baby comes?”

  “Sharon.” He folded her into his arms and pressed her close. “Haven’t we talked about it? I’ll put in a washing machine. Come on.” He stroked her hair. “It’s difficult right now, with money being tight, but it won’t always be like that. Once I finish—”

  “I’m just fed up with this bloody place.” She sobbed against his shoulder.

  “Come on, love.” He couldn’t bear to see her cry. “Let me finish school, all right? I don’t have that much longer, and then we’ll look into it. That’s a promise.”

  She nodded and smiled at him through her tears. “I love you, Martin.”

  “I love you, too.” He held her against him for a minute. “Now get a move on or we’ll both be late.”

  HE WHEELED HIS BIKE alongside her down to the bus stop. Their breath rose in clouds of vapor in the morning air. Sharon was quiet and withdrawn, huddled inside her anorak, a red beret pulled down over her curls. The fight, even though they’d made up, hovered like an uneasy presence between them. He looked up at the sky, pale as milk, the leafless trees in black silhouette. At a pedestrian crossing, a beacon flashed, gaudy orange in the monochrome light. He sought words to break the mood.

  “See there.” He pointed to a woman pushing a pram. “That’ll be you in five months or so.”

  She nodded, shivering, and gave him a wan smile. “So. Here’s my bus now.”

  “Be careful, do you hear?” He caught her face in his hands, looked into her eyes. Blue like forget-me-nots, coal-dark lashes. “I’ve a surprise for you for later.”

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, fluttered her fingers and darted for the bus.

  He caught a fleeting glimpse of her red beret, watched until the bus rolled out of sight and rode his bike to the university.

  That night he stopped at a sweetshop and bought her a box of chocolates. Black Magic, her favorite. She wasn’t there when he got back to the flat. He put the kettle on for tea, walked to the window and looked outside. It had rained and the street was dark and shining, everything turned bluish-gray by the moon. He washed for dinner, looked at the clock, made the tea. Returned to the window. At half past five, he rang the chemist’s, then her parents. There was no answer at either place. At six he walked around to the bus stop, thinking she’d probably missed her bus and he’d meet her walking home. The later bus arrived, but she wasn’t on it.

  As he walked back to the flat, he saw, from down the street, the Royal Ulster Constabulary car pulled up to the curb. He watched the car door open. Watched two uniformed RUC men get out, one short, the other tall. The short one turned and saw him approaching. Martin looked up at the bare branches of the trees. A drop of rain fell on his face. Then another one. The tall policemen asked his name. He told them. The policemen looked at each other for a moment, then the tall one opened his mouth to speak.

  “Sorry to have to give you the bad news, son,” he said. “But, there’s been a tragic accident. It’s to do with your wife.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “A MASKED GUNMAN came into the chemist shop while she was working and shot her. Three times,” Martin added after a moment. “In the face. By the time they told me, she’d been dead two hours.”

  Catherine heard her own quick intake of breath. Words whirled in her brain, but she couldn’t speak. The enormity of the tragedy seemed unimaginable to her, the pain and anger too much to bear. Tears burned in her throat and she shook her head and squeezed his hand. For a few minutes they just sat there, bound together by his story, the noises around them distant and unconnected.

  “I remember this sensation of cold as though something had frozen inside,” he said after a while. “But I couldn’t seem to grasp what had happened. I had them tell me again because I thought I might have heard wrong. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The Ulster Freedom Fighters thought her brother was in the Sinn Fein, but they’d got the wrong person. She didn’t have a brother.”


  Catherine shook her head. A mistake. She looked at him, seeing him as the young husband in love with his wife. Happy, anticipating the birth of their baby. And then in an instant his world was literally shattered. Blown apart by a mistake.

  “I left Ireland the following year,” he said. “Right after it happened, I thought I would just stay in the flat, I wanted to hold on to her somehow, all her things were still there. At first they were a sort of comfort, then they became painful reminders. I just kept thinking that if only I’d listened to her, if we’d left as she wanted…”

  “So you blamed yourself,” Catherine said softly. “Just what you needed, guilt on top of everything else.”

  He shrugged. “Logically I knew better. But it seemed that a part of me had died with Sharon. For a long time I couldn’t imagine how I would go on with my own life.” He paused for a moment. “What I’m beginning to realize is that I can have a life again. I can be happy again.”

  She sat with her knees up to her chin and stared into the fire. After a moment, she got up, went over to the stereo and selected a Segovia recording. Then she sat on the floor beside him again, her back to the couch. He hadn’t moved. Notes of a classical guitar drifted in the air. The fire crackled. Traffic rolled by on Second Street in a low roar of sound. Martin reached for her hand.

  “It’s funny, I was torn when I came here tonight,” he said. “I wanted to see you, but my head was so full of what was going on at Western that I almost called you to cancel. Now none of that seems to matter quite so much. Eating dinner with you and the children, I feel as though I’ve come in from a cold place.”

  A moment passed and then they both spoke at once, grinning at each other as one waited for the other to start. And then they weren’t smiling and the air became very charged between them, and Catherine realized she was holding her breath because he was about to kiss her. And then he did. Tentatively at first as though to test her reaction. Then again, slow and sweet. Very sweet. Very slow. And they kept kissing, long, slow, sweet kisses. Somewhere in her brain a warning shrieked. It grew louder when he hauled her up on his lap. Stop. Red light. Stop now. But she couldn’t stop. Lost in sensation, she opened her mouth to his tongue, clutched at his hair. Felt the stir of his erection beneath her. Heard her own involuntary moan. He kissed her neck, her throat, held her so tight she felt her breasts flatten against his chest until she pulled away, out of her mind with wanting him.