“We’ll talk about this another time.”
“I’ve made up my mind, Adam. I’m sorry. It’s for the best. I’d never be a good doctor’s wife anyway.”
He couldn’t believe this was happening. This didn’t make sense.
But how many times had he done this to someone? This was the first time he had sat on the other side of the table and listened to the death sentence like this. He was supposed to be the one who made this speech.
“You said you loved being with me. You said I was like no man you’d ever been with.”
“And that’s all true. But I have to think of the future.”
She was so calm about it. He hated her, and he hated himself even more.
“You cheated on me?”
“I did not cheat on you!”
“You said you met someone else.”
“That’s not the reason we’re breaking up.”
“Yes it is, you said you met someone else. You’re cheating on me.”
“I’m not cheating.”
“Then what the fuck would you call it?” he said, and this time the whole room heard him. She sorted through her purse for a tissue. “Excuse me,” she said. She went to the bathroom.
He called for the check. He wondered at himself; just today a guy had produced a gun in the ER while he was working on a gangbanger bleeding out in Trauma 2, everyone had panicked except for him. He had stayed calm and clamped off the kid’s femoral artery, ignored the chaos even when the guy put two bullet holes in the ceiling. Eventually the two cops who brought in the gangbanger grabbed the guy and Tasered him.
He guessed his heart rate never went over eighty. Now his girlfriend said she was leaving him and he wanted to wreck the place.
He waited for her by the door. When she came out of the restroom they left without saying a word to each other. He knew that people were trying not to stare; he supposed they would be everyone’s topic of conversation when they left.
They got caught in traffic on Memorial Drive, there had been a pile up on the bridge. It was the rain, no one knew to slow down in this damned city. It was coming down harder now and the wiper blades couldn’t keep up.
“This is crazy,” he said. “You said it yourself. We were special. We are special.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, “I didn’t want to hurt you, Adam. But let’s face it, you’re just not the marrying kind.”
“Do I know this guy?”
She shook her head.
“Is it someone from work?”
“I don’t want to talk about him. What’s the point?”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Stop it.”
“I think I have a right to know.”
“Why? What difference will it make?”
“Is it the same with him as it was with us? Is it? Is he better in bed than me? Does he make you laugh like I did?”
“Just stop it.” The traffic was backed up, just a smudge of red lights as far as he could see. He had to shout over the rain hammering on the roof.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Nothing’s been going on.”
“But you want it to. Is that right? That’s why we’re breaking up? So you don’t feel guilty jumping into bed with some other guy?”
He knew this was crazy talk, he was just running off at the mouth now, saying any damned thing.
The wipers were driving him nuts, he couldn’t get the speed right, they were either too slow and he couldn’t see through the sudden squalls or they were too fast and made a scraping sound on the windshield.
“You can’t do this to me,” he said.
“It’s not just about you.”
“DID YOU FUCKING SLEEP WITH HIM?”
She jumped out of the car just as another squall hit. He swore and jumped out of the car after her. What the hell was she doing, she was going to get soaked in this. The traffic started to move and the cars behind him punched their horns, someone leaned out and yelled at him. He had lost her anyway in the rain and the tangle of traffic.
He stood there in the rain, in the chaos, in the dark, and cursed back, at the driver behind him, at Boston, at the whole fuck-you world. He got back in the X5 and slammed the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. This couldn’t be happening.
He loved her.
He wouldn’t let her go.
Chapter 14
When someone experiences trauma there is often no pain at first. The body goes into shock, which works as a kind of anaesthetic. It doesn’t last. The nervous system can transit from numb to agony very quickly.
At first he couldn’t really believe it was over, and his life continued as normal. He worked long hours and tried to forget about it. It was only when he got home and there were no CDs lying on the carpet, no g-strings on the floor of the bathroom, no breakfast dishes in the sink, that he remembered how much he missed her.
He started to self medicate with rye and bourbon, and once or twice he missed the alarm and got to work a few minutes late. Bill grumbled at him, but it was nothing to worry about.
He went on a couple of dates. He told himself some novelty sex was the best remedy. They both worked in the ER, Fi - Fiona - a pretty blonde scrub nurse, and Jackie her supervisor. That wasn’t smart. When it inevitably got ugly he got another dressing down from Bill.
He felt even lonelier than before.
He supposed he had to give it time.
Chapter 15
He had never imagined he could be this way. He couldn’t sleep, every time he closed his eyes he kept thinking about her with another man. On dates he found himself staring dreamily off into space. He found fault with every girl he took out. He couldn’t manage small talk on his coffee breaks, so he spent the time in the ambulance bay smoking cigarettes.
He found a blouse of Elena’s in the closet and he could have mailed it back to her or thrown it in the trash but instead he kept it in a drawer and sometimes he would take it out and hold it to his face and breathe in the smell of her.
This was getting out of hand.
He knew he had to pull himself together but he couldn’t seem to shake it.
He stared at her favourite window seat, imagined her there. He thought about the way she used to sit there with her knees drawn up and a pen between her teeth, chewing on the end while she did the Sudoku in the newspaper.
He missed her contradictions, how she would go to bed in a T-shirt with a pink rabbit on it and read Fifty Shades of Grey; how she might put on the hottest, shortest black dress to go out to dinner and then inhale her mojito through a straw so that it made a sucking noise like a little kid.
He told himself these were predictable emotional attachments. It was just chemicals, everything was chemicals. Love was a heady cocktail of hormones and he had simply become intoxicated. A break-up was like getting over a bad hangover. Tomorrow he would wake up feeling better.
Then one day he got in the shower and started singing “River Deep Mountain High” with the Ike and Tina voices, just like they used to do, and he started laughing because it was funny, and when he got out of the shower he was still singing and then he sat down naked on the cold tiles and cried because it wasn’t funny on his own and he was just so fucking lonely.
* * *
He was finishing up the paperwork on a three-year-old who had been brought in after a febrile convulsion. The next patient was in 2A, he looked at the chart: “Severe back pain. History of bone cancer.”
His vital signs were all normal. If he were in severe pain he would at least have an elevated heart rhythm. His personal details listed an address in Sacramento but no photo ID. He pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the room.
He sat on the edge of the bed in a scruffy t-shirt and jeans, holding a grubby X-ray folder. He wondered how someone with severe back pain could stand to sit like that.
He asked him what was wrong and the guy handed him the X-ray folder. About a year ago he had been diagnosed with b
one cancer and there was a tumour pressing against a nerve in his spine. He was on his way to visit his parents in Canada and had run out of pain medication. He needed enough for about a week, maybe ten days, including the drive back to Sacramento.
It was pathetic. The dilated pupils, the sweat-smell, the twitching in his limbs; the guy was a junkie. He even had the balls to lay out what he wanted: a shot of Demerol and then a ten-day supply of Oxycontin.
The X-rays were genuine; whomever they belonged to had a serious problem with a large tumour pressing on the lumbar spine around L5 and L4. But it was impossible to know whose X-rays they were, because the patient’s ID information was missing from the top right hand corner—it had been cut away with scissors. Instead, their patient had scrawled his own name along the side in black Texta. There was no date, no identifying hospital.
Just how low would someone sink to get another fix? He called down for security. What sad lives some people led.
He told Jay about it later. “No one ever gets off,” Jay said. “When they start down that road, it’s the end of them. Worst of it happened to an anaesthesiologistI knew once, he got hooked on his own junk. A fancy car and a white coat is not protection, Adam. You just got to feel sorry for guys like that.”
Yeah, he knew all about that. One of his father’s old friends, Jack Woods, he was an anaesthetist, he got hooked on pethidine, it ruined his life. The old man played golf with him--he had heard hearing him talking about it one day with his mom when he got home from school. He’d said, “He’s going to lose everything.”
Or there was their neighbour who’d had a house next to theirs in Dover. One day the For Sale sign went up, the guy had lost everything on the tables in Las Vegas, he had told his wife he was at work conferences. Why did people lose sight of everything they had?
Even his own father; twenty five years married to his mother, then one day she found out he was having an affair with another woman, not even a younger woman.
It had never made sense to him. He remembered the old man coming to his school when he was eleven—Adam had messed up, pocketed candy at a candy store near the school. “Think about what you do before you do it,” his father had told him. “God gave you a brain. Use it.”
What was his dad thinking when he’d banged his best friend’s sister? She was a part-time beautician when she’d met the old man, she spent all his money then walked out one day and cleared out his bank account.
Why didn’t he use his brain? How could a man like his father risk everything on a woman? There he was, just before he died, sixty, divorced, cleaned out and blacklisted from his golf club. Adam couldn’t let that happen to him. He had to get Elena out of his head before it was too late.
Chapter 16
Adam drove out to Newton and found his sister putting out lilies at the local church. He sat in one of the pews and watched her. The two boys ran up and down the aisle chasing each other. “Now, Matt, Jake, you stop that. You do not shout and scream in the Lord’s house!”
Adam smiled. “The Lord’s house.” That was what the old man used to call it, too.
“I can see you smiling,” she said with her back to him, and carried on putting lilies in a vase. “When you have kids you’ll know what it’s like.” She finished the arrangement and turned around, doing a double take. “For goodness’ sake. You look like Dracula on speed. What’s happened to you?”
He told her about Elena he wasn’t going to, he didn’t want to, he felt like such a damned fool. He didn’t do this; he was the one who gave advice. He wasn’t the guy who went looking for help, or for sympathy, least of all from his big sister.
“All this is over a woman?” she said when he had finished.
“Go ahead and laugh. I guess I deserve it.”
“I’m not laughing. You got your heart broken. Join the human race. Maybe it’s a good thing.”
“How can losing the only woman I ever loved be a good thing, sis?”
“Well, Adam, if you don’t mind me saying, you’ve always been so ... self-contained. From where I stand, seeing you lose control is almost a relief.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it. You’ve always been so rational, just like Mitchell.” Mitchell, their father; she never called him ‘Dad,’ it was always ‘Mitchell.’ “So finally someone has got under your skin. It means there’s someone alive in there.” She patted his chest.
“It’s not funny.”
“All these women you’ve had, all this money, all this perfection. It’s not good for a body.”
“I’ll get her back.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“If you want something, you don’t give up just like that. You fight for it.”
“Yeah, that sounds good if you’re training for the world heavyweight championship or coaching the World Series. But she’s made up her mind, honey, she’s gone.”
“I can’t let her go.”
“You dropped plenty of girls in the past. How many times did you change your mind?”
“This is different.”
“It’s not different. How would you have felt if they kept running after you? A few of them did, didn’t they?”
He didn’t want to hear this; he just wanted her to agree with him that Elena was crazy and that he had to find a way to make her see sense.
“Come back to my place, I’ll make you pot roast. Are you on roster tomorrow? You can have some beers with Denny and sleep over.”
“No, I have to get back. I’ve got graveyard shift tonight.” It wasn’t true. He wasn’t back on roster until the morning. He got up to leave.
“When I go to prayer group on Wednesday night, we’ll pray for you.”
“You think God will change her mind?”
“I will pray for a happy outcome for both of you, never mind how it happens.”
“You believe all that stuff, sis?”
“Sure I do. We prayed for Walt Sangster’s sister last week, she was in the hospital with a cardiac infraction.”
“Infarction.”
“Well, whatever. She got better from it, and I believe it was us praying for her that helped.”
“You see, that’s what needles me. The patient dies, the hospital and doctor get sued. The patient lives, God gets all the credit.”
“I’m saying you shouldn’t underestimate the power of prayer.”
“I bring people back to life every day, sis. It doesn’t make me a miracle worker, it just means the defibrillator’s working.”
“Always Mister Cynic,” she said.
“Always Mrs. Head up her Ass,” he said as a parting shot and went out, slamming the door behind them. Then he turned around and walked back in. “Sorry,” he said.
“You shouldn’t say ‘ass’ in the Lord’s house,” Lynne said. “I’m not offended, but He might be. Take it easy, little brother.”
“You too, sis,” he said and left.
* * *
He drove down to the Cape; couldn’t contemplate the idea of his own company, which meant his apartment was out of the question. He thought about calling up Jay and another of his beer buddies from Massachusetts General and heading into South End, but he didn’t want anyone to see him like this. After a couple of beers he’d start whining about Elena, he’d embarrass himself and he’d embarrass them.
He stopped off at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Templeton rye and just started driving. If he could drive far enough maybe he could get away from himself.
This didn’t make sense, he didn’t believe in Hallmark clichés. It was just that there were chemicals that went off in your body when you saw a woman, and for a while it was great, and then the charge faded and you went off to find someone else or, if you were ready and the girl ticked all the boxes, you married her.
But you didn’t lose your head like this. It was unacceptable.
Their two years was up. That was the maximum on a relationship, right? It was time to think about moving on, not obsessin
g like this.
He was not exactly inexperienced. As Lynne had dutifully pointed out, there had been plenty of others. She had liked Sandy, the woman he had been with before Elena, but Sandy wanted the white picket fence, the whole nine yards, so he’d ended it. He had always been honest with her about what he wanted. She was the one who had tried to change the rules.
When it was over he was not cruel, he still took all her calls, even picked up in the middle of the night when she rang him in tears. What do you have against marriage, she railed at him.
He told her he didn’t have anything against it. His own parents had been perfectly happy until they got divorced, but it wasn’t for him, at least not yet. Some men were not built to be monogamous, and he didn’t want to be trapped in something he didn’t want. And he couldn’t be one of those guys that plays on the side.
Hadn’t he always been honest with her?
Before her there was Angie, and Angie was the best he had ever had, she had shown him things in bed he had only dreamed about. But on the downside she wanted to be with him all the time. She started leaving her things at his apartment, and at first he didn’t mind. But soon she wanted to know where he was every hour of the day and night; she found photographs of some old girlfriends in a shoebox and tore them up. It was as if she wanted to own every little bit of him, even the past. So he ended that, too. Just walked away and never looked back.
Then there was Sophie; Sophie who had her own career and didn’t want to have kids either, didn’t want to move in with him, liked her space as much as he did. She was a medical researcher. They were perfect for each other, and for a while everything was perfect.
She was offered a major research post at UCLA in California and she asked him to go with her. He could have gone, could have found work at any of the big LA hospitals, but he’d said no, on principle. If he uprooted his life for her what would he be asked to give up next?
The Black Witch of Mexico Page 4
