The Bullet

by Mary Louise Kelly

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  For my mother, who has always believed I could do anything.

  And for my father, who has worked hard his whole life, to give me ­opportunities to try to prove her right.

  And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  You think you know people when you grow up with them. When they’ve been beside you your whole life. You know their voices, the curves of their hands, what makes them laugh. You know their hearts.

  But it turns out you don’t know their thoughts. Not truly, not in full. All people have their secrets, and not just things they keep from you, but secrets about you. Things they hope you’ll never learn. You can share your home with someone, share all the silly, little details of life, share the soap, the sugar bowl, shoes—and you would never guess.

  You think you know someone.

  Then one day you find yourself running. Really running, lungs burning, legs churning. Too frightened to stop and look back. It turns out I have been running my whole life. I just never knew it.

  Let me tell you what it’s like to run.

  Let me tell you a story about fear.

  PART ONE

  Washington

  One

  * * *

  My name is Caroline Cashion, and I am the unlikely heroine of this story. Given all the violence to come, you were probably expecting someone different. A Lara Croft type. Young and gorgeous, sporting taut biceps and a thigh holster, right? Admit it.

  Yes, all right, fine, I am pretty enough. I have long, dark hair and liquid, chocolate eyes and hourglass hips. I see the way men stare. But there’s no holster strapped to these thighs. For starters, I am thirty-seven years old. Not old, not yet, but old enough to know better.

  Then there is the matter of how I spend my days. That would be in the library, studying the work of dead white men. I am an academic, a professor on Georgetown University’s Faculty of Languages and Linguistics. My specialty is nineteenth-century France: Balzac, Flaubert, Sten­dhal, Zola. The university is generous enough to fly me to Paris every year or so, but most of the time you’ll find me in the main campus library, glasses sliding down my nose, buried in old books. Every few hours I’ll stir, cross the quad to deliver a lecture, scold a student requesting extra time for an assignment—and then I return to my books. I read with my legs tucked beneath me, in a soft, blue armchair in a sunny corner of my office nook on the fourth floor. Most nights you will also find me there, sipping tea, typing away, grading papers. Are you getting a sense for the rhythm of my days? I lead as stodgy a life as you can imagine.

  But it was by doing just this, by following this exact routine, that I came to schedule the medical appointment that changed everything.

  For months, my wrist had hurt. It began as an occasional tingling. That changed to a sharp pain that shot down my fingers. The pain got worse and worse until my fingers turned so clumsy, my grip so weak, that I could barely carry my bags. My doctor diagnosed too much typing. Too much hunching over books. To be precise—I like to be ­precise—he diagnosed CTS. Carpal tunnel syndrome. He suggested wearing a wrist splint at night and elevating my keyboard. That helped, but not much.

  And so it was that I found myself one morning in the waiting room of Washington Radiology Associates. I was scheduled for an MRI, to “rule out arthritis and get to the bottom of what’s going on,” as my doctor put it.

  It was the morning of Wednesday, October 9. The morning it all began.

  Two

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2013

  The waiting room for Washington Radiology was a strange place. It featured the standard doctor’s-office rack of well-thumbed magazines, the usual box of tissues and oversize pump bottle of Purell. But because of the radiation in use, the door leading to the exam rooms was constructed of solid steel. A large sign read DANGER! RESTRICTED ACCESS—STRONG MAGNETIC FIELD—SERIOUS INJURY MAY RESULT. Just to make sure you got the point, this was accompanied by an illustration of a huge magnet surrounded by sizzling lightning bolts. Sitting there waiting to be called felt a bit like waiting to be escorted into a nuclear power plant.

  I leafed through a brochure. The clinic offered mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, and something ominously named nuclear medicine. And then there was magnetic resonance imaging. What I was here for.

  “Ms. Cashion?”

  I stood up.

  A young woman in scrubs ushered me past the steel door and into a changing room. “Take everything off,” she instructed. “It ties in front.” She handed me a folded paper gown and bootees, then disappeared.

  I began to unpeel my clothes. Layers of cashmere and suede. An old boyfriend once told me I was born to wear winter clothes, that even naked I moved as though I were wearing velvet. He had a point. I dress year-round in shades of plum and tobacco and wine. Rich colors. I don’t do pastels.

  The technician reappeared and explained how the procedure would work. I would lie back on a narrow cot, she would slide me inside the giant tube of the scanner, and then I was to stay still for forty minutes. No squirming, no blinking. I was to resist even taking a deep breath. She handed me earplugs and a panic button in case I felt claustrophobic.

  No need. Getting an MRI was heavenly. What’s not to like about stealing forty minutes from a weekday morning in order to rest motionless in a warm, enclosed space? The machine hummed with a loud, rhythmic, tapping noise. I nearly drifted off to sleep.

  Afterward, the technician showed me back to the changing room. She cleared her throat and stared at me. “So, we’ll get those images sent over to Will Zartman. He’s your regular doctor, right?”

  I nodded. She was still staring, naked curiosity on her face. “Was there anything else?”

  “No, no.” She giggled shyly. “I just—I mean, how did you get it?” Her hand reached up to brush the back of her neck.

  “Get what?”

  “The . . . you know, here.” Again, the hand reaching up.

  “Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “The bullet,” she said. “How did you get that bullet in your neck?”

  • • •

  EXTRAORDINARY, ISN’T IT? How your life can change, just like that, with a few words from a stranger? Later, you look back and think—that was it. That was the moment when life cleaved into two chapters, “Before I Knew” and “After.”

  But I wasn’t there yet. I was still firmly living in “Before.”

  I was walking up K Street, back toward campus, a nice stroll on a crisp autumn day. It would take half an hour to get back to the library. No hurry. I didn’t have class until after lunch. The encounter with the MRI technician had left me more amused than concerned. Because, obviously, I did not have a bullet in my neck. That would require my having been shot. Which had, obviously, never happened. It’s not the kind of thing you would forget. The technician must have been inexperienced. She must have mistaken a shadow on the image, or something like that. Still, it would make for a great story one night at a dinner party.

  I pulled out my phone to share
the news with my doctor. I liked Will Zartman. He belonged to a rare breed of physicians: he took my calls, listened carefully, and most of the time phoned in a prescription without ever making me come see him. It probably helped that I was never sick and thus rarely troubled him. Before this pain in my wrist started, I hadn’t talked to him in months.

  Now he did his usual careful listening, then he asked me to wait. When he returned to the line a few minutes later, he sounded thoughtful. “I’m looking at your MRI now. They already e-mailed it over. There is . . . she’s right, there is something there.”

  “Like a shadow, you mean?”

  “No, like a . . . like something metal.”

  “There can’t be. “

  “It’s lodged up against your spine. Bit tricky to make out. Did you ever have surgery on your neck or shoulders?”

  “What? No.”

  “Things get dropped, you know. Surgical instruments, clamps, that sort of thing. The surgeon never even notices and stitches it right up. Happens occasionally. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. We’ll be able to get a better idea from the X-ray.”

  “I need an X-ray now?” I sighed.

  “Think we’d better. I’ll set it up.”

  I thanked him and said good-bye. My wrist ached; I rubbed little circles against my inside pulse point as I walked. It was a nuisance to carve out time for another medical visit. Appointments that were supposed to last an hour could somehow expand to eat up half your day. Still, I wasn’t teaching a terribly heavy course load this semester. I could find the time. And despite myself, I couldn’t help but feel curious.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT I went to my parents’ house for dinner.

  That happens more often than it probably should, for a grown woman of thirty-seven years. My parents and I are close. We speak every day, sometimes more than once. Most mornings I call my mother as I potter around my kitchen, brewing a first cup of tea. We swap views on the day’s headlines and whatever book we fell asleep reading the night before.

  You see, I live alone. I am a spinster. The word is not fashionable, but it is accurate. I’m not married, never have been. I never found anyone I liked enough. This state of affairs is fine by me; I keep my own counsel. I am not shy, on the contrary. But I am an introvert. Few people understand the difference.

  Instead of a husband, I have cultivated a close circle of girlfriends. I take lovers when I feel like it. Another old-fashioned expression, I suppose, but again—accurate. And I see my parents. They live nearby in Cleveland Park, a neighborhood of wide sidewalks and genteel old houses that’s home to journalists and lawyers and other members of Washington’s chattering classes. My parents’ house is yellow clapboard, with a shady porch and views out over the stone towers of the National Cathedral. It’s the house my brothers and I grew up in, one block from the school where all three of us learned to read and write. My brothers are in their forties now, my parents well into their seventies. But they show no signs of wanting to downsize. I think they like watching my brothers’ children rampage around the house, cracking lacrosse sticks and baseball bats against the same scarred doorframes that bore my brothers’ abuse. An upstairs bathroom counter has a burn mark, from my own teenage years, when I incinerated a curling iron by cranking it to high heat before absentmindedly sailing out the door to a sleepover party. My parents’ house, in short, still feels like home.

  There’s that, and there’s the fact that I enjoy their company, but a not insignificant reason that I eat dinner there several nights a week is my mother’s cooking. She cooks with flagrant disregard for cholesterol warnings or calorie counts, serving large helpings of casseroles from recipe books that went out of print in the 1970s. Tonight she pulled from the oven a chicken potpie. I knew from long experience that it contained both an entire bag of frozen carrot-and-pea medley and lashings of Crisco, and that it would taste divine.

  I waited until we were seated and the wine was poured before launching into my story. “So, you won’t believe what happened at the doctor’s office this morning. The strangest thing.”

  “Oh, not for your wrist again, was it?” asked my mother. “Is it feeling any better?”

  “No. But they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, why the splint didn’t help. I got an MRI this morning—”

  “Which wrist is it again?” my father interrupted.

  “The right.” I held up my hand. “But they take the MRI of your whole upper body, to see where there’s swelling, what’s out of alignment, that type of thing. And when I got up to leave, the technician came running after me, all excited. She asked me—how crazy is this?—she asked, ‘How did you get that bullet in your neck?’ ” I paused for dramatic effect. “A bullet in my neck. Can you imagine?”

  You would have to know my father well to have noticed him flinch. His jaw tightened, the faintest flicker of a movement. I glanced at my mother. She was staring down, intently focused on her potpie, chasing peas around the plate with her fork.

  They were silent. Not the reaction I’d expected.

  “Goodness,” my father managed finally. “What did you say?”

  I gave him a strange look. “I said she must be mistaken, of course. You’re supposed to stay still while they scan you. But I must have twitched. Maybe that shows up as a blur or a shadow on the image.”

  He nodded. “Right. Well, sounds like you had an adventure.” He turned to my mother. “Chicken’s delicious. Pass me a bit more?”

  They sat chewing.

  “That’s it?” I demanded. “That’s your reaction? I thought you two would be falling over laughing.”

  “Well, you said yourself, the likely explanation is the technician made an error,” said my father.

  “Darling, we’re just concerned,” my mother added. “I don’t like the idea of you being in pain. I keep hoping this whole wrist issue will go away.”

  I sighed. “So do I. And now I have to go back and get x-rayed. I’ll be in a full-body cast before they’re through with me.”

  My parents exchanged a look.

  “That was a joke. I’m fine.”

  My mother opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind. Dinner proceeded. The conversation turned to an old Brando movie they’d just watched. But my father’s hand trembled as he topped up our wineglasses. He saw me register it and pretended to lean down to pat the dog. “Old age,” he said, grimacing as he sat back up. “Senility will set in soon.”

  As we stood up from the table, another look passed between my mother and father. Long-married couples develop a language all their own, one that requires no words to communicate. I couldn’t decipher everything they were saying to each other. Just enough to know that they were choosing not to tell me something.

  Three

  * * *

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2013

  The X-ray was striking.

  Unlike my older brothers, I had been a calm child, not prone to broken bones and late-night emergency-room visits. I do not ski or mountain bike or ride horses or, indeed, partake in any dangerous activity whatsoever, if I can avoid it. I told you, I’m no Lara Croft. And so—aside from dental checkups and the resulting blurry images of my molars—I had never been x-rayed, never glimpsed the interior architecture of my body.

  I found it fascinating, the play of dark and light, shades of silver and charcoal and chalk. You could see the long, forked roots of my teeth. They were outlined more sharply than in the images I’d viewed at the dentist’s; this must be a superior-quality machine. Farther down came the fragile curve of my neck, vertebrae stacked neatly. The soft tissue of my skin and muscles appeared as a ghostly haze. The X-ray, in its way, was lovely.

  It was also unambiguous. I had still not set eyes on yesterday’s MRI, so I couldn’t compare the two. But that MRI technician had been utterly, unassailably correct.

  The bullet glowe
d. It glowed bright white, brighter even than the metal fillings in my teeth. The denser an object, the brighter it appears on an X-ray. And the bullet was presumably made of lead. It looked about half an inch long, tapered at one end. The tip pointed down ­toward my shoulders. The flat end was lodged near the base of my skull.

  I studied the image in disbelief. It simply was not possible. Over and over I blinked, looked away, looked back—and there it still was, glowing luridly. My mind flailed through loops of Cartesian logic. That’s the French scholar in me: Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am. I doubt the bullet is there, therefore it must be. No, that wasn’t right. But I was too addled to figure it out. René Descartes never tried to practice philosophy with a bullet embedded dangerously close to his brain.

  A bullet. Good God. I was sitting on an examining table on the second floor of a medical-office building on M Street. It’s the same building where Dr. Zartman practices; he had called a radiologist friend and wangled a lunchtime appointment for me. Now the radiologist was glancing back and forth between me and my X-ray, illuminated on a flatscreen monitor hanging on the wall. His eyes were wide, his face lit with a mixture of excitement and horror.

  “You really had no idea it was there?”

  “No.”

  “Did you say you got an MRI already? Do you have that image with you?”

  “No.” I frowned. “Dr. Zartman has it. We can ask him to—”

  “Come to think of it, don’t do that again.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get an MRI again. The machine’s a giant magnet. That’s what the M stands for. And you’ve got a slug of metal in your neck. Then again . . . lead isn’t magnetic.” He cocked his head, considering. “Still, if it’s an alloy . . . or if you’ve got metallic fragments . . .”