by Jodi Thomas
Dr. Early smiled. “Don’t worry. You weren’t pulled back in time. This was my father’s office seventy years ago.”
The doctor’s voice was tranquil as he prepared everything he would need. “I grew up watching him treat patients in this room. When he died, we closed it off, planning to move it intact to the museum. I live mostly on the second floor, and after I retired I never got around to calling the movers. I kind of like the feeling of home I get when I come in here. My father had a family practice in Austin for almost fifty years and though he updated the other rooms on the first floor, he never changed a thing in this first office.”
Blaine was hardly aware of his touch as he talked. His low, kind voice calmed her nerves and his thin hands had a gentle touch. She had little doubt that, in his prime, he’d been a great doctor.
“Now, I’m going to touch from your shoulder to your legs. Let me know if you feel any pain anywhere besides where the wound is.”
She tried not to jerk when his fingers moved over her abdomen, pushing slightly in first one place than another. Without commenting, he slid his hands up to her breast. “Have your breasts been tender, my dear?”
“Yes.” She hadn’t really thought about it much, but they had been.
The doctor’s hands moved slowly down along her ribs. She noticed he twisted both her arms slightly, probably looking for needle marks.
He talked as he worked. “A few years ago I decided to clean this place up and treat kids in the neighborhood with skinned knees and a few of the homeless who have nowhere else to go.”
Blaine held her breath as he cleaned the wound.
“Why don’t you tell me what you think is wrong inside you while I work. Maybe I could help. In my years I’ve seen about every illness you can think of and a few you can’t.”
A tear slid off the side of her face. Blaine realized she’d been trying to tell someone for weeks but had no one to talk to. “I haven’t had a period for over three months, but that’s not unusual. I’ve never been regular. But this time I’ve felt different. Sick to my stomach, tired, hungry. Something’s wrong. My whole body feels strange.”
She stared at the ceiling feeling her face warm with embarrassment.
“Is it possible you could be pregnant?”
“It’s possible but unlikely. I did one of those home pregnancy tests and it showed that I was, but a doctor told me when I had my first pelvic that he doubted I’d ever be able to conceive or carry a child.” She swallowed. She had to be honest about it all. “When my mother was my age, she thought she was pregnant and it turned out she had cancer.” Blaine closed her eyes. “She died.” She wanted to tell him how her parents never got along, how they separated and tried to get back together a dozen times. When her mother thought she was pregnant, the fights were worse than ever. When she found out she had cancer, Blaine’s father couldn’t deal with her and finally left for good.
Dr. Early dropped a bloody towel into a pan beside the bed and continued to work.
He reached for a bottle inside the cabinet. Blaine noticed, though the outside of the furnishings looked like outdated equipment, the inside seemed to have all the necessary supplies. He handed her two pills and a glass of water.
“I’d like you to close your eyes now. What I’m giving you won’t do any harm to a baby if one grows inside, but it’s going to make you feel sleepy.”
She swallowed and tried to relax on the table. For some strange reason sharing the secret she’d carried made her feel like a weight had been lifted. Even with all the fear and trouble this past week, the thought that she might be pregnant still whispered in the back of her mind. Maybe the test had been right, maybe it was a baby and not some cancer growing inside her. But that still didn’t solve the problem of Mark not wanting children. Maybe not ever, he’d once said, but definitely not now. Children weren’t in his plan.
Closing her eyes, she remembered how Mark had told her once that his parents blamed him for all the bad luck they’d had in their life. He’d been unplanned and unwanted. He swore he’d never bring a child into this world until he was ready. A few times over the years Blaine had thought of going to a specialist who worked with women who had trouble conceiving, but other things got in the way.
Blaine hardly felt the needle slide into her skin just above the wound. She tried to think of being home with her cat curled up in her lap. As the doctor worked, she thought of how much fun it would be to watch an old movie and eat popcorn. Rainy days are for old movies, she told herself over and over. Rainy days are for staying inside.
Like an old-time radio broadcast, the doctor’s velvet voice continued, telling her how Miller must have run ten blocks to get here. And how he would swear the man was as strong as he’d been thirty years ago in Vietnam. He told stories, but Blaine only half listened as, in her mind, she curled around her cat and slept the rain away.
When she awoke, the place where she’d been stabbed felt tight and warm. But when Blaine reached to touch it, bandages covered by soft flannel blocked her path.
Dr. Early sat a few feet away in a swivel chair. He’d propped his feet up on the bottom rail of the table she lay on and was reading a book. “You’re awake.” He smiled at her as he closed the book. “How do you feel?” He looked bone tired, as though he’d run a race all his life and now tried to keep going just a few more steps until he reached the end.
“Fine,” she lied. In truth, she wasn’t sure she could have stood if the building had been on fire. “Weak,” she admitted when she realized he was waiting for another answer to his question.
“That’s all right. You’ve been asleep for an hour. I finally sent Miller upstairs to one of the extra bedrooms. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t call him with any changes.”
The doctor’s words didn’t make sense. Blaine could not pull the corners of her mind together enough to reason.
“If you feel up to it, I’ve got a couch in the other room. It would make good sleeping for the rest of the night and I’d be right upstairs if you needed anything.”
Move, Blaine thought, that was an idea. She reached to pull the sheet up and encountered soft flannel once more.
“Sorry about the nightgown, but all Mrs. Bailey had was flannel. She helped me get it over your head after I pulled a few bits of glass out of your back. You slept like a baby, resting your head on her shoulder as I worked.”
“I fell on a bottle,” Blaine remembered.
“I figured that. Whiskey, I’d guess.” He offered her his arm and she pulled up slowly. The gown covered her toes and could have wrapped around her twice.
“Mrs. Bailey’s a good-size woman. She goes home most nights, but she keeps clothes in a spare bedroom, just in case the weather’s bad like it was tonight. Hates getting wet as bad as a cat. It was almost midnight when the rain lifted enough for her to head out.”
The doctor laughed. “She’d make two of you, and if you eat her cooking a few days, you’ll see why.”
Carefully, he helped Blaine to stand up. “Mrs. Bailey made up the couch for you to sleep on. It’s in the sitting room right between the bathroom and the kitchen, so you should be close to whatever you need. If I thought you could make it, I’d offer you a room upstairs.”
“This will be fine. Thank you. You’re very kind.” He’d not only doctored her, he now offered her a place to sleep.
“Any friend of Miller’s…” He paused, laughing. “Actually, we may be the only two friends of Miller’s. We should be kind to each other.”
They shuffled through a door and into a little room with tall windows along one wall and heavy drapes that looked as if they could shut out the world.
When he lowered her to the makeshift bed, he knelt on one knee.
Blaine pulled a quilt over herself, ready to get back to sleep, but the doctor didn’t move away.
“Tell me about your parents, child.”
Blaine didn’t want to answer, but she owed him too much to be unkind. “My father left sometim
e before my mom died. My mother dropped me with a neighbor who always felt she got stuck with me. Mom said she was going to the doctor and would pick me up soon.”
“She died of cancer?’
Blaine shook her head. “She drove her car into a truck. They ruled it an accident but the neighbor told me she killed herself because she couldn’t deal with her problems. The police told me she was dead and then for hours it seemed I had to listen to the neighbor calling her a coward for not thinking of anyone but herself.”
Early’s old eyes told Blaine he understood. “You’re afraid if this thing wrong with you is cancer, you might not be brave.”
Blaine swallowed. “I come from a line of cowards. My dad ran out when times got hard. My mother killed herself.”
He smiled. “I think what you did tonight, running through the rain to find Miller, was very brave. Do you have any other family, child?”
Blaine shook her head.
The doctor patted her hand. “Times like these it’s good to have family. I know how alone you feel, I’ve survived my wife and both my children dying. That’s not the way God meant it to be.”
She closed her eyes, preparing for what she knew he was about to tell her. He was right, she could survive no matter what.
The old man coughed in his handkerchief.
She looked up at him, holding her breath.
“A baby grows inside you, my dear. I’m guessing you’re almost four months along. So from now on you’ve got a family.”
“No cancer?”
“No cancer. It’s a new life.”
“Are you sure?”
He smiled. “It’s a baby. I’ve gone through this with a few hundred women over the years, but it still leaves me with a sense of wonder.”
When she didn’t answer, he patted her hand and whispered, “You rest now. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
Twenty-Two
The morning after he thought he heard Blaine’s laughter, Mark faced the day without interest. Life had leaked into his dreams. He’d listened for her most of the night. He woke thinking of the way she moved, the way her sunshine hair brushed her shoulders, the way she always smelled of spring. He smiled remembering how she jumped from bed in the mornings to brush her teeth and put on makeup as if he might love her less if she wasn’t perfect.
He realized nothing would have made him love her less, but he could have loved her more. Dear God, he could have loved her more. The realization made him angry at himself and at her for accepting so little.
While he showered, Mark decided he must have imagined he heard her laugh near the bus stop. Or there had simply been someone who sounded a little like his wife among the crowd huddled in the rain. Even though he told himself another woman couldn’t have laughed like her, he reasoned it was the only explanation.
Not impossible, he considered. But unlikely, his logical mind repeated.
Pulling on the only clean dress shirt left in his closet, Mark headed out of the front door. He took the stairs two at a time. He wasn’t healing, he told himself, he was adjusting to the pain of losing her. Like a ballet dancer or a bull rider, he had learned to live with the ache deep inside and there was no use dwelling on it.
When he stopped for gas and his usual breakfast of coffee, he noticed a dry cleaner’s sign on one of the doors of a strip mall across the street. Ten minutes later, he emptied the back seat of his car, leaving the lady in the cleaners sorting.
Walking into the office, he got the usual stares that silently said, “You’re late” and “Why don’t you pull it together,” but Mark was becoming an expert at acting as if he didn’t notice. In truth, he preferred those silent comments to the ones of pity a few kindhearted office workers sometimes allowed to show.
Pity was a punch in the gut. They felt sorry for him when they thought she was dead, but now they seemed to look more closely as if saying, “Poor man, he lost his wife. Wonder what was wrong with him?”
Or worse, he’d see in their eyes, “He’s slipping, and to think he was almost ready to run for office.” No one mentioned that dream now. No one had since Blaine disappeared.
Mark hurried into his private office, trying to remember if he had combed his hair after the shower. He ran his fingers through strands longer than he’d ever allowed them to be. No curl or wave ever appeared in his thick hair, making him look a little shaggy if he didn’t keep it cut short. But, he almost laughed, the hair went with the beard that framed his jawline.
“Mrs. Moore.” He leaned his head around the wall separating his office from his secretary’s. If Dell ever made a prototype of the perfect secretary, they’d model it after Bettye Ruth Moore. Efficient, calm and impersonal. She had to be about the same age as Mark, but she seemed like a thirty-year seasoned veteran of the office. When they retired years from now, Mark planned to ask her if she liked him, for she left no clue one way or the other.
“Yes, Mr. Anderson?”
She looked surprised and he tried to remember if he had bothered to speak to her for days.
“Would you make me a hair appointment?”
“Of course,” she answered quickly. “Anything else?”
Mark knew there should be more. Before Blaine died he used to give Bettye Ruth a list of what had to be done each morning. “The case I’m working on…” he started.
“It was passed to Hodges last week,” she answered.
“Oh.” Mark realized he didn’t care. He glanced at his clean desk, normally stacked with files. “And the other cases?”
She looked as if she didn’t want to answer. Her words came out in almost a whisper. “The others have taken them over. They thought you might like to handle a few pro bono cases and the walk-ins until you’re running full steam again.”
Mark wanted to tell her he might never be running “full steam” again, but none of this was Bettye Ruth’s fault. He walked back into his office and stared at his calendar, trying to remember how many days he’d bothered to come in last week. Two? Three? No wonder they’d passed his work along.
He leaned back in his chair, thinking about how long it had been since he’d handled walk-ins. With an old office downtown, his partners still hung on to some of the practices from their beginning years, like handling wills, and small legal problems for almost anyone who wandered in. They charged a base fee that would surprise most people. Mark figured the price hadn’t been raised in twenty years. If he handled walk-ins, he’d be giving his time away.
It had been almost two weeks since Blaine’s disappearance and he was the one who seemed to have died. Mark didn’t need an analyst to tell him he was falling apart. He was well aware of the fact. She’d been the marrow of his life.
“Mr. Anderson?”
Mark swung away from the window. “Yes, Mrs. Moore.” When had he stopped calling her Bettye Ruth? When had he become Mr. Anderson? He thought they’d been almost friends when he’d started, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe she wanted no part of his grief and was afraid if she was too friendly he’d unload all his problems on her. Bettye Ruth might never think of shortening her name, but she was smart. Maybe she was simply distancing herself from him. No one in the office wanted to be tied too closely with a man on his way down.
“An admittance clerk from the hospital is on the phone. She’s demanding to speak to you.”
For a moment Mark couldn’t move. All the memories of waiting outside the morgue for Blaine returned. It seemed as if he’d met the entire hospital staff that night. They’d all stopped by, asking him if he needed anything, hurrying on before he could think of an answer.
When Mark didn’t respond, she moved closer to his desk.
“She was told to call you. It appears to be an emergency.” Bettye Ruth picked up his phone and handed it to him as if he were a child.
“Hello,” Mark managed to say.
“Hello,” a voice finally returned, sounding busy and bothered at the same time. “Is this Mark Anderson, attorney-at-law?”
“
Yes.” Mark straightened and reached for a pen. This was business of some kind. He could handle that. His blood rushed like a racehorse stepping into the gate.
“We have a client of yours here at the hospital. A Lilly Crockett, age sixty-eight. Just admitted with what looks like a broken leg. She says we can’t touch her until you get here. She won’t even fill out the paperwork without her attorney present.”
“I’ll be right there.” Mark hung up the phone and laughed. It appeared his neighbor was expanding her territory.
He rounded his desk, wanting to get to the hospital as fast as possible. He didn’t like the idea of Lilly being in pain and, he admitted to himself, he didn’t like the attitude of the clerk who acted as if Lilly was a problem, not a person. If she was in trouble, they should be doing all they could, not complaining about her over the phone.
“Mrs. Moore!” he yelled, then realized she was three feet away. “I’ve got a client who needs me to come to the hospital. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She stood beside her desk, his briefcase in her hand as he passed. For the first time in over a week, she smiled. “I’ll be here if you need me, Mr. Anderson. I stuffed in a few general forms that might be helpful in a hospital situation. Standard wills, power of attorney, living wills.”
“Thank you.” He nodded, not bothering to ask how she’d guessed he might need the briefcase.
“I may be calling with instructions when I know more details.” It was a lie, but it felt so good.
Ten minutes later he entered Brackenridge Hospital’s emergency room. Just inside the sliding glass doors, the place splintered into a maze with the smoky glass of a police office watching over the mayhem. Several people sat against one wall wrapped in white blankets, waiting their turn while staff rushed past. The double electric doors opened and closed with a swishing sound as steady as a heartbeat.
Before he could ask where to go, he heard Lilly yelling. He pushed his way past a crowd in the waiting room until he could see his neighbor.
