by Susan Wiggs
“Quit being such a… a doctor. I want you to tell me the right thing—”
“Just stitch the damn thing up.” A small, annoyed voice crept out from under the draping.
Both Sam and she looked down at Cody. “Really?” she asked.
“Yeah. I want to get it over with. A drive to Missoula doesn’t exactly sound fun.”
“How big a scar?” she asked Sam.
“You can see where it’ll be. A thin line. Red at first, and eventually it’ll fade to white.”
A shiver eddied over her. It was an accident, yes, but Cody was going to be marked by this incident, marked for life. He’d never be the same.
“Go for it,” Cody said miserably.
“All right.” Her voice was soft. “Go ahead and finish, Sam.”
He held himself very still for a few moments. He didn’t move, though she sensed an odd calm settling over him. It was invisible, yet she could see it happening, like some new sort of medical Zen.
True to his word, he took tiny stitches, working with a needle and silk so fine she had to squint to see it. During the procedure, she sat holding Cody’s hand as he lay silent and still.
Despite what Sam said about not being a specialist, she could tell one thing for certain. He was a good doctor. He worked smoothly with the nurse. The two of them had a comfortable rapport as if they’d known each other a long while. From time to time the attending clerk came in, and he answered her questions without so much as glancing up or breaking his concentration. His hands moved with a precise, mesmeric rhythm.
Through it all, Cody lay motionless and admirably calm, his hand in Michelle’s.
As Sam was finally finishing up, she decided to say what was on her mind. “So I guess this means you know about my father.”
“I’m a family practitioner.”
“But you know about his illness.”
“My partner, Karl Schenk, is his primary-care physician. Gavin didn’t tell you?”
“It’s all I can do to keep up with the nephrologists and surgeons.”
Sam tied off a stitch. “He’s getting good care in Missoula.”
“He’s getting one of my kidneys.”
He hesitated for a beat, then took another stitch. “That’s really something, Michelle. I figured they’d eyeball him for a transplant.”
“How did you figure that?”
Without even looking up, he seemed to sense her getting defensive. “Now, don’t turn all prickly on me. Gavin’s general health is excellent. Nonsmoker, nondiabetic. Physiologically, he couldn’t be a better candidate. That’s all I meant. No doctor I know would use Gavin’s fame to make a transplant poster boy of him.”
He removed the draping. Cody looked pale but relaxed, his eyelids heavy.
“Okay, cowboy?” Sam asked.
“I guess.” He took his hand away from Michelle’s. He seemed embarrassed that he’d been clinging to it the whole time.
Sam beamed a pen-sized light in Cody’s eyes, first one, then the other. “You’re not going to kick me in the head like your last patient did to you?”
“I’ll decide after I see the stitches.”
Michelle liked Sam’s ease with the boy. He’d only known him two days, yet his manner was open and natural. Sometimes she wished Brad would—
Alice, the nurse, held up a hand mirror.
Sam grinned. “Take a look, Frankenstein.”
Cody grimaced. “Nice haircut.”
“You can have Hazlett fix it. He’s the local barber, does house calls at the hospital. Or you could wait until you’re discharged,” Sam said.
“Hey,” said Cody. “Do I have to stay?”
Sam’s gaze was level and direct. “Yep. Just overnight, okay?”
Michelle studied Cody’s dubious face, then Sam’s. Dear God, she thought, they look alike. The similarity was apparent now that Cody’s long hair had been cropped. He looked almost exactly like Sam did, back when Sam had been the beginning and end of her world.
She got up quickly. “I’ll stay with him.”
“Oh, no you don’t, Mom,” Cody said. “I can handle spending one night in the hospital.”
She patted his leg. Again she felt that dark hollow of loss, as if her little boy had disappeared before her eyes. “Tonight’s going to be a lot harder on me than on you.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mom.”
“I’ll always worry about you.” The lump in her throat swelled. “Thanks for holding my hand through that.”
He lifted half his mouth in a crooked grin. Sam’s grin. “Right, Mom.”
Chapter 13
When Sam left the hospital, he found Michelle sitting in the dark outside, cradling a Styrofoam cup of tea and crying.
The sight of her on the concrete bench, looking so small and alone, stopped him in his tracks. “Hey,” he said, easing down next to her. “Have a Kleenex.”
Nearby, the door opened and Alice O’Brien came out, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She had that weary sort of prettiness common to a lot of nurses, and she regarded him with more kindness than he deserved, given their history together. “ ’Night, Sam,” she said.
“See you tomorrow, Alice.”
Michelle’s gaze followed her until night cloaked her in darkness. “She doesn’t call you doctor.”
At some point he’d have to explain about Alice. But not now. There were other things to discuss now. “To these folks I’m just Sam McPhee. One of them. One of the tribe.” He turned to her, noticing the silvery track of a tear on her cheek. He wanted to touch it. Taste it. Make it go away. Christ. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “You okay?”
She wiped her face with the tissue. “A little overwhelmed, I guess. It’s been a long day.”
“You held together like a champ in there,” he said, and he meant it. If she was like other mothers of injured kids he’d treated, her insides were a train wreck. Yet outwardly, like so many of those steel-spined mothers, she had been calm and efficient while helping Cody get settled into his room. She’d bought him a paperback Anne Rice novel and a kit of toiletries from the gift shop, sat with him for a while, then left after dinner was served and a Bruce Willis movie came on.
“I can always hold together for Cody,” she said.
“He’s never seen you lose it?”
“No.” She scrubbed away the last of her tears. “I told myself right from the start that I’d be the Rock of Gibraltar for him.”
His heart heard what she would not say. That she had been all alone. That in two-parent families, one had the luxury of the occasional breakdown while the other took over. That during all her parental crises, no one had ever been there to hand her a Kleenex.
He couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be in that picture with her. Couldn’t help wondering what this strange grown-up Michelle was like. Did she still cry when she heard a sad song on the radio, still get the hiccups when she laughed too hard? Did she still make that funny sound in the back of her throat when she came?
He stood up, his head spinning with anger, frustration, loss—and a lingering fascination with this woman who, despite years of separation, had never quite left him. “Let me buy you dinner.”
“No.” Her refusal came swiftly, automatically.
“Wrong answer, ma’am. Remember, I’m your ride home.”
“But—”
“No buts. Stay right there. I need to change out of my scrubs, and then I’m taking you out to Trudy’s for a steak.” He walked toward the automatic doors. “People from Seattle eat steak, right?”
She lifted her face to him, the parking lot light carving graceful shadows on her cheeks. And finally, fleetingly, she smiled. “I guess people from Montana would be insulted if we refused, right?”
Sam tried not to make too much of her acceptance as he headed inside, but the light warmth in his chest was the most pleasurable thing he’d felt all day. He went to his locker in the lounge, thinking how unreal it had been to treat
his own son. To know that the fragile flesh and bone beneath his hands belonged, at least biologically, to him.
He thought about the day he’d decided to become a doctor. He’d been eight or nine years old, riding in a beat-up old car along a straight, flat road. It was a Valiant with a fake Navajo rug covering the torn upholstery. A bag of Cheetos and a bottle of something red lay on the seat beside him. His mother was smoking a cigarette and singing with the radio.
His mother knew the words to all the rockabilly songs, because for one amazing year she had been the vocalist for a Denver band called Road Rage. Sam was too young to remember it, but she claimed it was the best year of her life. They’d traveled all over the country, and their hit single, “Dearly Departed,” had rocketed to number one on the Country Billboard charts.
Finding success even harder to deal with than failure, the band had broken up, its members scattered. Still, his mom sang along with the radio, her voice harsh with the static of drinking and cigarettes.
Sam had sat silent, watching bugs squishing on the windshield. After a while, he told his mother he had to pee, so she pulled off at a rest stop. By the time he finished in the men’s room, Tammi Lee was asleep in the car. So he climbed on top of the hood to wait.
There he was, a towheaded little kid sitting alone on the hood of a beat-up old car, watching people pull off the highway to rest. Whenever he saw families, he felt a funny tugging sensation in his gut. A mom, a dad, two or three kids, a dog. Doing stuff as simple as having a game of catch or sitting at a concrete picnic table, eating sandwiches and pouring Kool-Aid from a plastic jug. These things—these simple, unremarkable rituals—were things he wanted so bad he ached inside.
On that particular day, he twisted around on the hood of the car, stared at his mother, and wished for some magic spell to make her wake up, smile at him, ruffle his hair, ask him if he wanted a glass of milk.
Her eyes flickered open and just for a second, he thought the spell was going to work. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, dug in her pocket, took out some quarters. She held a trembling fist out the car window and said, “Get me a Tab, will you, hon?” in what he thought of as her tired voice. Later he figured out it was her hungover voice.
And even though she wasn’t like the mothers pouring Kool-Aid, he loved her. Kids, he found out later when he became a doctor, loved their monster parents, no matter what.
On the way back from the vending machine—cold can of Tab held in both hands—a boy and his dad ran past, tossing a softball back and forth. The kid almost slammed into him, but sidestepped at the last minute. He never looked at Sam. Just sort of moved on by. They drove a nice car with M.D. plates. Sam was on the road so much he knew about M.D. plates.
His mom was acting funny when he got back to the car. Her face was white and shiny with sweat, her eyes glazed and rolled back in her head. She arched her back against the seat of the car and a thin, terrible noise crawled from her throat. Sam dropped the cold can on the ground and raced for the man with the softball. “Hey, mister,” he yelled. “Are you a doctor?” When the man nodded, Sam said, “My mom’s sick.”
The doctor came over to the car and put his hand on her forehead, lifting her eyelid with his thumb. “Ma’am?” he asked. “Ma’am, can you hear me?” His wife came over with a bag. The doctor asked some questions—what had she been drinking, how long had she been like this—and Sam babbled out the answers. Rummaging in the bag, the doctor went to work. A short time later, Tammi Lee lay groggy but calm, acting sheepish as she spoke with the doctor, assuring him she’d seek help in the next town.
Sam decided right then and there he wanted to be a doctor. He wanted to be the kind of guy who drove a nice car and played catch with his son and when someone got sick, fixed her.
That little kid seemed a distant stranger now, and many years passed before Tammi Lee kept her promise to get help. Sam hurried, getting into his street clothes in record time, worried that Michelle might change her mind, disappear like a bursting bubble from his life.
Sort of like he’d disappeared from hers.
He shoved his feet into his boots, combed his hair, and slammed his locker shut. When he got outside, she was gone. He stood there, a curse forming on his mouth.
She came out of the hospital behind him. “I went to check on Cody one last time.”
He exhaled, the curse unspoken. “And?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“Good. Best thing for him.”
She bit her lip uncertainly. Sam took her hand, feeling the shape of it through her winter glove. She pulled away, and he didn’t try again. “He’s going to be fine. I’m on call all night, and Raymond’s on duty.”
“Raymond?”
“Raymond Bear, the head nurse. We call him the Shaman. He can sense a patient in distress even before the monitors, I swear it. Damnedest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Is he the guy reading Soldier of Fortune magazine at the nurses’ station?”
“That’s him. If he’s reading a magazine, that means he’s not worried.” His hand flexed, remembering the shape of hers. “Come on. My truck’s over here.”
Only four of the eighteen tables at Trudy’s were occupied, but that wasn’t unusual for a cold Monday night. With its red vinyl tablecloths, gold plastic tumblers, and longhorn salt and pepper shakers, the place resembled a garage sale from the seventies. What it lacked in elegance it more than made up for in good, simple food.
“Just stick with the straightforward stuff, and you can’t go wrong.” Sam opened his menu.
“I see the wine list is a no-brainer.” She cracked a smile that did funny things to his insides. “Red, white… I assume Rosy means rosé?”
“Welcome to Crystal City.”
Her smile lingered. “Still pretty provincial around here.”
She was a stranger to him. She was a vast, uncharted continent. Mysterious, but something he wanted to explore.
“You can find all the glitz and sophistication you want in Kalispell and Bozeman. Your old man was one of the first to move up here from Hollywood, but he sure wasn’t the last. In downtown Whitefish you can buy a Tiffany bracelet and millesime cognac.”
“You could have made a lot more money setting up your practice in one of those towns.” She closed her menu.
“Why do people always assume doctors are in it for the money?”
“All the doctors I know are.”
He thought of Karl, and of Dr. Brower in the Yucatán. “Then you know the wrong doctors,” he said. “There used to be three of us in the practice here, but one defected to Kalispell.” He didn’t say so, but the third partner made a fortune writing prescriptions for Valium and Zoloft.
“So why didn’t you follow the money?”
“I belong here. Karl and I work for the tribe up at the Flathead reservation. It’s not about money, Michelle. If it was about money, I could make fifty grand roping calves for a week in Vegas.”
“You’re not only a doctor, but you’re noble.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I think you came back here just to give everyone an inferiority complex.”
He laughed. “Right.”
“Why did you pick this particular town?”
No one had ever asked him that before. His credentials were good enough; he’d gone through a six-year combined degree program, and his training from UT was first-rate. He could have gone anywhere.
“I started thinking about a small-town practice when I was working in the Yucatán, mainly with Mexican Indians. I learned more than medicine there. A child is born with a cleft palate? You fix it, and the kid has a better life. A man suffers from hepatitis? You treat him, he survives, and you immunize his family. That’s the beauty of working in third-world countries.”
“So why not stay in a third-world country?”
“Because we have those right here in our own backyard. Small towns, Indian reservations, depressed areas that can’t support a
lucrative practice.” He studied Michelle, noting the understated elegance of her gold watch, the French designer earrings. “I know what it’s like to have money—I had that in my rodeo days. Well, some of the time, at least. I know what money can and can’t do for a man.”
“See? You are too noble.”
He thought about the early days when he’d slept in his horse trailer or the back of his pickup truck, and how he’d lie awake nights on fire and in agony from wanting what rich folks like Gavin Slade had. It had been a sickness with Sam, that need to feel he could measure up, and it probably explained why he drove himself so hard, both in the arena and in the clinic. Only time, and the deep self-knowledge that came of healing people, had cured him of the sickness.
“I’m not noble, Michelle,” he said. “I’m just a guy.”
They ordered steak dinners and a bottle of wine from a waitress who knew Sam by name. When she departed, Michelle watched her from the corner of her eye. “Are we fueling gossip?”
“In a place this size?” he asked. “Are you kidding? You’ll probably read about this dinner on the front page of the Towne Tattler.”
“I didn’t know the paparazzi were so vicious here.” She smiled with an old mischievous sweetness he remembered well. Too well. He was getting dizzy gawking at her. It should come as no surprise that the daughter of Gavin Slade turned out to be even more of a knockout at thirty-five than she had been at eighteen. But then again, she had always surprised him.
She watched him with an expression that made his gut churn. Dewy eyes and moist lips. Total absorption in what he was saying. “And so you chose Crystal City,” she said.
“Yeah. I knew Edward Bliss from the circuit, he needed a partner for Lonepine, the town needed a doctor, so it all worked out.” What the hell, Sam thought. He might as well level with her. He wanted to be in the place where he had been with Michelle, where his dreams had been born and where hope had lingered in spite of everything. “And I figured I’d see you again.”
She had no reply to that, but contemplated it with a silence he couldn’t read.
While they ate, he thought about the night he’d left. The old Valiant had puttered through the quiet streets of Crystal City, passing the Truxtop and the feed store and the Lynwood Theater, the one-screen cinema where he and Michelle had sat holding hands in the dark. He remembered the yellowish beam of the headlights, the cigarette smell of the blanket covering the seat, the tinny sound of the radio playing a cowboy song, the too-quick rasp of his mother’s breathing.
