“Suzanne, I … I know that somethings bothering you,” he heard himself say. “I only wanted to say that whatever it is, I hope it comes out the way you want.”
He hesitated, expecting her to thank him politely for his concern and send him on his way.
She did neither.
“I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of not paying attention,” he went on. “I guess I was just too busy indulging my own fantasies. Look, I just want you to know I’m glad we’ve met, and I’m grateful as hell we’re becoming friends.” He opened the door to the van. “If you ever do want to talk about whatever it is, I’m available … no strings attached. In fact, for a modest fee I’ll even omit the coin tricks.”
He moved to kiss her on the cheek, but then thought better of it and climbed up behind the wheel of the camper.
“Zack, wait a minute,” she called as he began to back away. He stopped and leaned out the window. “There’s a spot halfway up the hill behind the house where you can see almost the whole valley. It’s really peaceful on an evening like this to sit up there and watch the lights of town wink on. If you’ll give me a minute to check on Jen and get a blanket and some wine, I’d like very much to go up there with you.”
“It’s okay not to, you know.”
She smiled in a way she hadn’t all evening.
“I know,” she said.
The soft evening air was filled with the hum of cicada wings and the chirping of peepers and crickets. For nearly an hour they lay side by side in the noisy silence, watching the mountain shadows stretch out across the valley. High overhead, a solitary hawk glided in effortless loops, its silhouette a dark crucifix against the perfect, blue-gray sky.
“The girls in the O.R. said you did a beautiful job on that woman’s neck this morning,” Suzanne said at last, sipping at what little remained of a bottle of chardonnay.
“You checked up on me?”
“Of course I checked up on you. Do you think you have a corner on the attraction-to-someone-you-just-met market?”
“No,” he said, trying to ignore the sudden pounding that seemed to be lifting his chest off the blanket. “I guess not.”
“Technique, high marks; speed, high marks; looks, high marks.”
He grinned. “Well, I’m glad I made a decent first impression on the nurses. After nine years in various O.R.s, and all that time on rock faces, there’s not too much that rattles me. This morning, though, I’ll admit I was a little nervous.”
“I can understand that. Doctors are always under a big magnifying glass of scrutiny, but never the way we are during the first few months at a new hospital. For a time after I arrived on the scene, I felt sort of like a new haircut. Everyone had to express an opinion.… The case you did is doing okay?”
“Pain free for the first time in a year, and moving all the parts that are supposed to move.” Zack held up crossed fingers for her to see.
“That’s super. You know, I’m curious. You seem like the type who would thrive on an inner-city madhouse like Boston Muni—all that action.”
“Actually, I loved that part of it. But not just that there were so many cases and so much trauma to work on. I loved the patients—talking with them; getting a sense of their lives; becoming important to them; even growing into friendships with some of them. But I never was comfortable with the pressure in big teaching hospitals to become the worlds expert in some little corner of neurosurgery.”
Suzanne nodded. “And if you don’t play it that way,” she said, “then you end up being the world’s expert at being passed over for promotion.”
“Exactly. I also confess that I was getting a little tired of the political bullshit—the empire building and back stabbing; having to grovel before a department head or administrator just to get a lousy piece of equipment that the hospital would have been able to purchase out of petty cash if it weren’t so damn inefficient.”
“So you thought corporate medicine would be more stream lined—more responsive to the needs of the hospital and the patients?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You say that as if your opinion’s already changed.”
Zack propped his chin on his hands and stared out over the valley.
“I don’t know,” he said. “A few things have happened since I arrived here that …”
His voice trailed away. Throughout the day, he had more and more come to realize that there was no way he could discount Guy Beaulieu’s claims. And if they were true—if Ultramed or Mainwaring or Frank had conspired, for whatever reason, to drive the old surgeon out of practice—then the situation in Sterling was more virulent, more frightening, more … unacceptable than anything he had ever encountered at Boston Muni.
He also knew that if his old mentor’s concerns about the ethics and practices of Ultramed proved accurate, there would be no way he could walk away from the problem. He had returned to Sterling to practice the best possible neurosurgery in the best possible setting, and that was that.
“Hey, Doc,” Suzanne said, “do you know that that last sentence of yours never quite made it out of the womb?”
He looked at her. “Fodder for another evening,” he said. “I believe that’s the established way out?”
“That’s it, Charlie. ’Nuff said, then.”
Suzanne rolled onto her side, resting her cheek on one hand. After a time, she reached over and ran her fingers lightly over his face.
“You really are quite handsome, you know,” she said.
“Thanks. I have trouble believing that, especially having spent my life in the shadow of a man with Frank’s looks, but it’s nice to hear.”
“It’s nice to say.”
Zack cleared his throat, which seemed to be getting drier and grittier with every passing moment. He was, at once, reluctant to touch her and even more reluctant not to.
“So,” he managed, struggling to pull his thoughts from her perfect mouth, “what tale of crisis and resolution brought you to this place?”
Again, she touched his face, this time allowing her fingertips to linger on his lips. “I guess I didn’t make the law of the mountain clear to you,” she said. “As long as we’re lying on my little overlook at the base of my mountain, I get to ask the questions. That’s the law. Take it or leave it.”
“But what happens to those unfortunates, like me, who don’t have a mountain?”
Her eyes, and the very corners of that exquisite mouth, formed the smile that was, perhaps, her most alluring.
“In that case,” she said, “you must adopt one. I’ll send you the paperwork in the morning and have our social worker come by for an interview as soon as possible. Meanwhile, we’ll save all that stuff from between the lines of my curriculum vitae until you get approved, okay?”
Zack shrugged. “It’s your mountain.”
“Exactly. It’s my mountain. Do you think I’m too forward, touching you like this?”
“No. Not forward. Maybe a little tough to read, though, considering that a couple of hours ago you were trying to rush me out of the house and down the hill.”
“Ah,” she said, “but that was before you said the magic word.”
“Oh, of course. The magic word. How stupid of me. Why, I’ve used that damned magic word approach so often, it’s become automatic.… In fact, it was so automatic this time that that ol’ magic word just slipped right past me.”
She took his face in her hands and drew him toward her. Again, as at the dinner table, he saw a strange sadness in her eyes.
“The magic word, Zachary, was ‘friend.’ ”
Her kisses, first on his eyes, then around his mouth, and finally over his lips, were as sweet and warm as the mountain air. For one minute, two, she held him, her tongue exploring gently beneath his lips, and then along his teeth and around the inside of his cheeks.
Finally, she drew away.
“Was that okay?” she asked.
Zack swallowed hard. “There are at least a hundred words I would
pick before settling for Okay.’ ”
“I’m glad. You look a little bewildered, though. I suppose I owe you some kind of apology—or at least an explanation—for being so inconsistent.”
Zack ran his hand through her hair, then down her back and over the seat of her jeans. Her body was fuller than Connie’s but tighter, and far, far more exciting to touch.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “Shaw wrote that there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get ones hearts desire, and the other is to get it. At the moment, I think he was wrong about number two.”
“Zack, out by the camper before you said, ‘No strings attached.’ Does that promise apply if we make love—right here, right now?”
“It applies.” He slid his hand beneath her blouse and over her breast. Her nipple hardened instantly to his touch. “Whatever’s going on, I just want to make it better.”
“You’re making it better,” she said.
Again and again, they kissed. There was an urgency and hunger in her lips and her touch. Zack knew that it was the secret of her sadness that was driving her into his arms. He knew that, this night at least, she needed him rather than loved him.
But this night, at least, it was more than enough.
She helped him slip off his shirt and nestled her face against the hair on his chest.
“Slowly,” she pleaded. “Just make it last. Please, just make it last.”
Zack undid the buttons of her blouse, pausing between each one to kiss her lips and her wonderful breasts, then eased off her jeans. He worked his moistened fingertips over her nipples, then down her belly, along the edge of her soft hair, and finally to the tense nubbin of her clitoris.
“Touch me here,” she murmured. “Two fingers. That’s it. Oh, God, Zachary, that’s it.”
Moment by moment, what questions he had faded in the smoothness of her skin and in her craving for him. With every touch, every kiss, he felt himself drawn closer to her.
He brushed his lips over her ankles and along the softness of her inner thighs, and then he drew his tongue over her again and again.
She dug her nails into the skin of his back, pulling him even more tightly against her. “Don’t stop. Oh, don’t stop yet.”
She was an angel—at once vulnerable and knowing, chaste and worldly wise. And making love with her was unlike anything Zachary had ever experienced in his life.
She drew his face to hers as she eased him onto his back, caressing him, then sucking on him until he begged her to let up.
“Now, Zachary,” she whispered, her lips brushing his ear. “You’re so wonderful. Please, do it now.”
They made love—slowly at first, and then more fervidly; each immersed in the other; each focused on pleasing, rather than being pleased.
Darkness settled in across the valley. Far below them, the lights of Sterling flickered like so many stars, mirroring the expanse overhead.
“Zachary, what time is it?”
“Midnight. A little after, actually.”
They were half dressed, bundled in the blanket against a slight, early morning chill. The connection between them had already transcended their lovemaking, and each minute, every second, it grew.
“Do you know,” she said, “that in my entire life I have never come like that? What a wonderful rush.”
He kissed her on the neck, then on the lips. “It must have been that chardonnay.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, buttoning her jeans. “How foolish of me to overlook that. Next time we’ll have to try it without the wine. A controlled experiment. Just to be sure.”
“My mountain?”
She laughed. “Your mountain it will be. You know, I keep saying it, but you are really a very kind and very sweet man.” She kissed him lightly on the mouth. “I only hope you’ll still respect me in the morning. Believe it or not, making love like this is a bit beyond my usual first-date fare.”
“Not to worry,” he said. “Doing what one wants in situations like this is a payback for all of the headaches and responsibilities of having to be a grown-up.”
Her expression darkened. “Zachary, I’d like you to know what’s going on—why I’ve been acting so weird all night. Well, almost all night.”
“Listen, it’s perfectly all right if—”
“No. I want to. Besides, by tomorrow night you’ll know anyhow.”
She rolled onto her back, took his hand, and guided it to her right breast. “The upper, outer quadrant,” she said. “Fairly deep.”
It took his fingers only a moment to find the lump—a disclike mass, the diameter, perhaps, of a half dollar, and as hard as the sidewall of a tire; which was to say, too hard. His first impulse was to reassure her, to label the mass a cyst. But he knew better. There was, without a biopsy, absolutely no way to tell.
Suddenly the whole night—her distraction, her mood swings, their passion, everything—made sense.
“How long since you first felt this?” he asked.
He ached for what he now realized she was going through. If, at that moment, the lump were offered as an exam question with only one correct answer, he would have to call it trouble, all the way down the line.
And so, he knew, would she.
“A month. Six weeks now, I guess,” she said. “There’s been no change over that time. Mammograms were equivocal. A needle biopsy came back normal breast tissue,’ and rather than go through that procedure a second time, I elected to go ahead with an excision, and, if necessary, a modified radical.”
“When?”
“I’m going in tomorrow evening. Surgery’s scheduled for Friday morning. And in case you couldn’t tell, I’m scared stiff.”
He held her tightly.
“I’m just grateful you didn’t send me away tonight, that’s all. You’ve made arrangements for Jennifer?”
“My partner in the gallery is going to take her. She has a son two years older than Jen.”
“Good. It’s going to be okay, you know.”
Suzanne nodded grimly. “Just keep reminding me. I tell you, being a physician, I just know too goddamn much. And I’ll tell you something else: no matter how much you read, no matter how many Donahue shows you watch, the prospect of what might happen just doesn’t compute.”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said again, forcing conviction into his voice. “You’ve got a friend who’s going to be with you all night tomorrow. Will they be doing the excision under local?”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “The anesthesiologist and surgeon both recommended general. And frankly, I was relieved.”
“Who’s the anesthesiologist?”
“Pearl. Jack Pearl.”
“Good. He did my case this morning. He’s a little on the weird side, I think; sort of like a character out of a Gothic horror novel. But he sure as hell knows what he’s doing in the O.R. And the surgeon?”
Suzanne sighed.
“It’s your friend from this morning,” she said. “Jason Mainwaring. Whatever you might think of him, Zack, he’s by far the best technician around.”
“So I’ve heard. Well, I only hope his skill in the O.R. is more highly advanced than his skills in interpersonal relations.”
“Oh, it is.”
“In that case,” Zack said, “we’ve only got one thing to worry about, right?”
8
Frank Iverson’s office was a spacious two-room suite on the ground floor of the west wing—the newest addition to the hospital. From his spot in one of three leather easy chairs, Zachary watched his brothers two secretaries go about their business with prim efficiency. One of the women was dark, with an air of sophistication and polish. The other was blond and wholesome. Both were young, well built, and remarkably good-looking—far beyond the run-of-the-mill in any setting, but near goddesses by Sterlings standards.
Gorgeous secretaries, a plush office, big-money business deals, a Porsche 911, a spectacular hillside A-frame—the man certainly h
ad style, Zack mused. And while that particular style was not one Zack had ever really wished for himself, Frank had clearly come a hell of a long way from fraternity beer blasts.
Fifty percent identical. With each passing year, it seemed, the two of them were becoming less and less a validation of that genetic truth.
Still, there was a time, Zack knew, when their drives and their goals were not nearly so divergent, a time when the two brothers careened through their world along virtually parallel tracks, guided only by the beacons of early success: trophies, ribbons, medallions, and adulation.
It had become something of a game for him—a recurring daydream—to imagine his life had he not fallen that winter day, had the ligaments of his young knee not shredded.
Accidents. Illness. The violent, uncaring acts of others. The daydream, as always, led him to acknowledging how fragile life was—how totally beyond control. A patch of ice, the fraction of an inch, and suddenly, in one agonizing instant, the blinders were stripped away from his protected view of life; his unswerving track was transformed into a twisting, rutted path negotiable only one uncertain step at a time.
Zack’s eyes closed as he drifted back to that day. He was in a perfect spot, racing after Frank. Three seconds was a lot, but nothing he couldn’t have made up—especially with his brother being so uncharacteristically cautious on his second run.
And he wanted it. He wanted it more than he would ever admit to anyone—even, he reflected, to himself.
The colors, the packed snow, the sudden disappearance of the steady crosswind that had been blowing all day—it was a moment frozen forever in his memory. The conditions were perfect for an upset, for a demonstration to all that Zachary Iverson had suddenly come into his own. The Judge, their mother, and most of the town, it seemed, were gathered along the slope, anticipating his run.
Waiting beyond the red and blue pennants marking the slalom course was a wonderful trophy, a savings bond, a trip to the Junior Olympics, and a huge piece of the praise and newsprint that he had watched being heaped on his older brother over the years.
It was time. It was, at last, his moment, his run.
He checked the course below. No problems. A few final seconds to mentally chart his line, and he lowered his goggles and glided to the electronic starting gate.
Flashback (1988) Page 9
