The Doctor Delivers

by Janice Macdonald

  “God, there’s so much I want to do.” He picked at the edge of the label on the champagne bottle. “It’s funny…for the last few days, I’ve been trying to do for Holly what I couldn’t do for Kenesha. Even though they’re quite different clinically, I think they’ve come to represent the same thing in my mind. Pain and suffering that, one way or another, might have been avoided.” His forehead knit in a frown and for a moment he seemed lost in his thoughts. “But if I take the Boston offer, I’ll be able to help all the Keneshas…” Suddenly he threw his head back and laughed. The sound seemed to linger in the air for a minute, then he looked at her, a huge grin on his face. “I suppose you can’t tell I’m just a bit pleased about it, right?”

  Catherine smiled across the table at him. How could she not be happy for him? Still, she didn’t trust herself to speak. The bar seemed suddenly cold. An image of herself as a child playing on the beach ran through her head. The damp sand at the water’s edge was the best kind for molding into shapes, so she always built her castles there, but just as she’d get the perfect castle built, a wave would inevitably roll in and demolish it and she’d have to start again. Deep down she tried to convince herself she’d really known that one day Martin would leave. First Ethiopia, now Boston.

  “You gave them an answer?” she finally managed to say.

  “All but…” He hesitated then reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a small brown paper bag. “I wanted to talk to you before I signed the deal.”

  She watched as he withdrew a black velvet-covered square. Attached to it was a brass ring with a green glass stone, the kind of toy jewelry Julie liked to wear to play dress-up. With one hand, he pulled the ring off the cardboard.

  “It’s just a symbol,” he said with a little smile. “It was all they had in the gift shop, but I promise we’ll go and get a real one tomorrow.” He reached across the table for her left hand and slipped the ring on her fourth finger. “I want you to go with me, Catherine. You and the children. Marry me and let’s start a new life together in Boston.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FOR THE SECOND TIME that day, she felt as though a gun had gone off at close range. All sound and movement stopped. Words tumbled around in her brain, but she couldn’t impose any order on them. She looked down at the ring on her finger. The glass stone glinted in the smoky air. Still the words wouldn’t come. Tears in her eyes, she looked up and saw the confusion in Martin’s eyes. Then she slowly took the ring off her finger and put it on the table between them.

  “I can’t do it, Martin.” Now she couldn’t bring herself to look at him, couldn’t bear the stricken expression she knew she would see. “I just can’t do it,” she repeated. “I can’t.”

  “You’ve said that. Three times. Now tell me why.”

  She dug her nail into a groove on the table and tried to sort through her thoughts. “First of all,” she said slowly, “I can’t just uproot the children to follow you across the country. If Gary didn’t fight it, which I know he would, there’s the whole issue of uprooting them again. They’re still adjusting to the changes from the divorce.”

  “Children adapt, Catherine.” He picked up the ring, held it in the palm of his hand. “As for Gary, I’m sure if he decided to move for some reason, he’d do it and you’d be left figuring out what to do about it. You can’t let him dictate your life. What else?”

  “I don’t know. I…” A panicky feeling hit her, and she looked around as though for an escape route. Because I love you too much? Because I’m scared to death that I’ll lose myself in you? Because I can’t let myself be rescued again? “It’s hard to explain.” She shredded the edge of the cocktail mat. “I guess it has something to do with proving myself. Figuring out who I am and making it on my own. I mean, I’ve just started to do that, I can’t risk everything I’ve gained.”

  “Your job you mean? Is that it?”

  Her heart racing, Catherine just looked at him.

  “Because if that’s the reason…” He hesitated. “When I told them about you, they offered to find a position in the public relations department. Not that I don’t think you could get a job on your own,” he added with a wry grin. “So don’t start down that road. Look…” He reached for her hand across the table. “You don’t even have to work if you don’t want to. You always worry that you’re compromising the children by working. Stay home with them. I’d love to come home to the smell of cakes baking. Maybe we could even have a baby,” he said softly. “What do you think?”

  Catherine swallowed. If the devil had dreamed up a way to tempt her, he couldn’t have found anything more compelling than what Martin had just offered. Damn him. She wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair. Hardening herself to the look in his eyes, she pulled her hands away.

  “What?” He shook his head. “Tell me.”

  “Don’t you see what you’re doing? I’ve tried to explain and you sweep it all away. What you’re saying is that my work isn’t important enough to really matter. Sure, just give it up, stay home and make cakes and babies, that’s what you do best anyway.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m bloody well saying.” His eyes were dark with anger. “God, Gary certainly did a number on you. What I’m saying is that I think raising children in the way you want them raised is the most important thing you can do. You’re the one who undervalues staying home, Catherine. Whenever you talk about it, you get this note of apology in your voice. What is it you call it, your Becky-Home-ecky role? Somehow you’ve convinced yourself that churning out damn press releases has more intrinsic value than being there full-time for your children. I don’t happen to feel that way myself, but it’s your choice. I’ll support you either way.”

  “Oh God, Martin.” She put her elbows on the table, held her head in her hands. “You’ll support me. That’s the whole problem. Someone’s been supporting me my entire life. Until now, I’ve never done it alone. You’ve had the freedom, the autonomy. You’ve been independent for a long time. It’s different for you.”

  He looked at her silently for a while. Then he said, “Let me tell you about my experience with independence. Sure, I had the freedom to go wherever I wanted. Plenty of autonomy. No one to answer to, no one to consider. No one to give a bloody damn what I did. They were the loneliest, bleakest, most desolate years of my life. Less than a month ago, I sat in the parking lot and thought about my independence and wasn’t sure I even wanted to go on with my life. I never want to know that kind of independence again.”

  Undone by the crack of emotion in his voice, by the light that had gone out of his face, she looked at him through a shimmer of tears. God, it would be so easy to bring that light back. Tears clogged her throat and her nose, trickled down her face and dropped onto the wooden table. A thick silence filled the air between them. She wouldn’t let herself say the words she knew he wanted to hear, the words she wanted to say.

  “Is it Boston?” Martin finally asked. “Is that the problem?”

  Miserable, she shook her head. She knew that as much as he wanted to accept the Boston offer, he would turn it down if she refused to go with him. Just as she had given up the Columbia scholarship for Gary. Willingly, she’d thought at the time, but it had changed her life, and the deep undercurrent of resentment never entirely went away. WISH meant too much to him and he meant too much to her to risk it.

  “Martin.” Catherine addressed her hands on the table, then risked a brief glance at him; all the eye contact she could manage without breaking down. “This is difficult advice for me to give you, but…I think you should take the Boston offer.”

  “Go without you?” he asked, his voice flat and expressionless. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I know how important the project is to you. Think about what you were willing to do to get WISH funded at Western. Talking to a bunch of yammering reporters, going along with all that puffery rubbish. Remember?” She’d hoped to make him smile, but when she risked another glance, she saw a wariness in his eyes
. Quickly, before she could give in to the urge to walk around the table and fling her arms around him, she looked away. “You already know that there aren’t many hospitals willing to make the kind of commitment you want.” Now she addressed the shoulder of his sweater. “It’s an opportunity I don’t think you should turn down.”

  “I thought we were in this together, Catherine.” His eyes lowered to the ring in his hand. “Isn’t that what we’ve talked about?”

  “I know…” She swallowed, unable to finish the sentence. “But I’m not ready for the kind of commitment you’re talking about. I haven’t even been divorced a year yet, this is my first relationship. I think what I need to do is take some time, maybe see other people and figure out my own life.”

  For a moment, he sat very still. His face did not change expression. He did not move. He did not speak. He just looked at her, his gaze steady on hers.

  “I’m sorry.” She bit her lip hard, but it didn’t stop the tears, so she got up from the table and pulled on her jacket. As she did, she saw, like a still life, the two untouched glasses of champagne, the ring and the braided pattern on the sleeve of his cream sweater.

  FOR AN HOUR after Catherine left Mulligan’s, Martin just stayed in the booth watching the bubbles go out of the champagne. Then he made his way over to the bar, ordered a pint of Guinness and watched that go flat. Leaning on his elbows, he stared into the glass and reflected that it was a pity that when Catherine made him promise not to break her heart, he hadn’t extracted a similar promise from her.

  Oblivious to the noisy cheer all around, he wallowed in morose contemplation. As a small boy, whenever he’d suffered some minor bump or scrape, his mother would preempt his tears by telling him it didn’t really hurt. It always confused him, her denial of his pain, but he never contradicted her, and after a while it really didn’t hurt anymore. After an hour or so he grew weary of the music and smoke and noise, threw some money on the bar and walked back to the medical center.

  In the lobby, carolers dressed in Dickensian costumes clustered around the Christmas tree. Martin punched the button for the elevator and when it didn’t come immediately, ran up the five flights of stairs to the unit, the notes of “Joy to the World” drifting in the air like mockery. In the locker room he changed clothes, scrubbed up, then started across the unit to look at Holly. On the way down the line of isolettes, he found Valerie Webb drawing blood from a baby girl. She glanced up at him as he approached, smiled, then turned her attention back to the baby.

  He watched as she lifted the tiny arm and swabbed it with antiseptic. When the first attempt was unsuccessful, she tried again and the baby’s stomach rose and fell spasmodically. Like most of the babies in the NICU, she had a tube between her vocal cords that prevented her from crying out. As he looked at the baby in her clear-walled isolette, he heard in his head her screams of silent anguish. As he walked away, he felt a wave of the old desolation. The black void seemed very real once more.

  THE RECITAL had already started by the time Catherine slipped into the auditorium on Friday evening. In the back row, she found an empty metal chair, sat down and located Julie’s blond head in the crowd of first-graders lined up on the stage. Gary had left a message on her machine at home to say he wouldn’t make the recital but he would pick up the kids afterward and take them out for pizza. He and Catherine could talk later after he’d dropped them off. The prospect had all the appeal of a root canal.

  As the final notes of “Frosty the Snowman” faded, and the kids launched into “Silver Bells,” Catherine dabbed at her eyes. Children singing always made her cry. The lisping, high-pitched voices. The toothy smiles. Whatever they’d been up to before—fighting, screaming, shouting, driving adults to distraction—once they opened their mouths to sing, they became little angels. Tonight, though, it wasn’t just the children making her cry.

  As cameras clicked and video recorders whirred all around her, two images kept appearing over and over. The happiness on Martin’s face last night when he’d told her about Boston and his face as she’d left. God, it would have been so easy to say yes. Determined not to start second-guessing herself, Catherine blew her nose into a tissue. She couldn’t marry him. Beneath the veneer of the new Catherine, the woman he loved, too much of the old needy Catherine remained. A self-sacrificing martyr of a woman who would slowly, inexorably, return. She couldn’t do it to him, couldn’t do it to herself. The decision she’d made had been the right one. Ultimately it would prove best for both of them. Like a mantra, she repeated that thought to herself throughout the recital, every time she felt her eyes fill.

  When she got home from the recital just after seven, she found a letter from Gary’s attorney. A custody matter, the note said. She needed to call his office. The mail also included a note from her landlord that her rent was to be increased by fifty dollars a month, and one from the bank informing her that her checking account was overdrawn by ninety-five dollars.

  Hoping for better news, she checked the message machine. It occurred to her that there might be a message from Martin, although why he would call after what had happened, she didn’t know. No message. Chilled, she wrapped her arms around herself. Action, that’s what she needed. In the bedroom, she changed into jeans and a sweater, tied her hair up in a ponytail, then took out the trash, washed and put away the dishes and vacuumed the living room. As she mopped the kitchen floor, she repeated the mantra. It didn’t help for long.

  She felt split in two. Part inconsolable child crying, unable to understand why she couldn’t have something she wanted, part stern parent doing what was best for everyone. The child wouldn’t be consoled though. Martin’s voice filled her head. Desperate for a distraction, she called Darcy. No one home. In the kitchen, she opened the fridge, closed it, made a batch of oatmeal cookies and wept into the mixture. While they baked, she turned on the Christmas-tree lights and sat in the twinkling house, her head back against the couch, tears rolling down her face. By the time Gary arrived with the kids, she was exhausted, cried out, but determined to stick by her decision.

  After the kids were in bed, she handed Gary the letter she’d received from his attorney. Aware of his eyes on her, she folded her arms across her chest. Her black sweater felt uncomfortably tight. Twice, he’d complimented her on her appearance, told her she looked good, that she’d changed over the past few months. As he sat on the couch, his jacket and tie off, he might have been a date relaxing after an evening out. “I take it you’ve seen this,” she said with a nod at the letter.

  A shadow passed over his face. Earlier, while she’d been supervising the children’s baths, he had built a small fire and poured two glasses of wine. When she returned to the living room, she’d found him sprawled comfortably on the couch, feet up on the coffee table. Since most of their contacts after the divorce had been conducted in public places, this cozy domesticity was something new. A little disconcerted, she decided to establish control by taking the offensive.

  “I can’t believe you really want to do this, Gary.” She perched on the edge of the couch. “I mean, the whole time we were married you hardly spent any time with the kids. How can you really think they would be better off with you?”

  He sighed deeply, leaned forward to put the letter on the coffee table and turned to look at her. “To be perfectly honest with you, Cath, I don’t think they would be. I guess I’ve always been more oriented toward business than family, but…well, I’ll level with you. It was Nadia’s idea. She likes the idea of a family and she keeps hoping we’ll have one together, but it’s not happening.”

  “Oh really?” White-hot anger burning away all traces of fatigue, she stared at him for a moment. “So she’s willing to settle for my kids. Breaking up my marriage wasn’t enough, huh? And you, of course, were willing to go along with it. Whatever Nadia wants, is that it? To hell with everyone else.”

  “Cath, stop. Look, can we take off the boxing gloves for a minute? I did go along with the idea at first, but now that I
’ve had some time to think about it, I can see it wouldn’t be the best thing for the kids. You’re a good mother, I know that.”

  Catherine met his eyes for a moment, then he gestured at the letter.

  “I’ll call it off tomorrow first thing, okay? I’m sorry, really. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, not just with this custody thing but all through our marriage. You were always so wrapped up in running the house, taking care of the kids. When Nadia came along I was just lonely and—”

  “Stop, okay? I don’t want to go into that. It’s all in the past. History.” Unwilling to look him in the eye, she picked at the frayed denim on the knees of her jeans. “All I care about now is that we come to an agreement on what’s best for the kids. And I don’t want to live under constant threats from you.”

  “I said I’m sorry, Cath.” He picked up the letter from the table and tore it in two. “Okay? No more threats.”

  She shot him a sideways glance, long enough to see the look on his face. The I’ve-been-a-bad-boy-but-how-can-you-resist-me grin that he’d used, usually with success, throughout their marriage.

  “Sometimes I miss us all being together, you know?” He put his arm along the back of the couch. “All the things we used to laugh about. Remember that time when my mother was visiting? All of us ready to go out, and then Julie got in the tub with her clothes on and she splashed all over your dress?”

  Catherine nodded. The event was memorable for more than the ruined silk dress. After removing Julie from the tub, she’d left his mother watching the kids and had dashed into the bedroom, stripped off the wet dress and underwear. As she stood there, nude, Gary came into the room and embraced her from behind. Then he carried her to the bed and made love to her. It had been one of the few moments of spontaneity in their marriage. Out of all the childhood anecdotes, she wondered why Gary had chosen this one.