Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “Don’t you dare. You stay in and rest for a few days. That’s important. Do you understand?”

  Sarah smiled. “Yes.”

  “This is a chance for you to listen to some ba-ad music.” She had bought the newest Pearl Jam CD, and Sarah’s eyes filled when R.J. gave it to her.

  “R.J., I’ll never forget …”

  “Never mind that. Now, you take care of yourself, sweetheart, and get on with your life. Is he still angry?”

  “He’ll get over it. He will. We’ll honey-hug and sweet-talk him.”

  “You’re a great girl.” R.J. kissed her on the cheek. She decided she had to talk to David without delay. She walked out to the barnyard, where he was unloading bales of hay from his pickup truck. “Will you please come to dinner tomorrow night? Alone?”

  He looked at her and then nodded his head. “All right.”

  The next morning shortly after eleven she was preparing to drive down into Greenfield to visit two hospitalized patients when her telephone rang.

  “R.J., it’s Sarah. I’m bleeding.”

  “A lot or a little?”

  “A lot. A whole lot.”

  “I’ll be right there.” She called the ambulance first.

  Sarah had been content to sit for hours like an invalid on the old stuffed rocking chair next to the jars of honey and watch what she could see, squirrels chasing pigeons on the barn roof, two rabbits chasing one another, their neighbor Mr. Riley driving by in his rusted blue pickup truck, a large and obscenely fat woodchuck browsing on the clover in the northwestern corner of the pasture.

  Presently she watched the woodchuck scamper clumsily to pop into its burrow under the stone wall, and a few seconds later she saw why, because a black bear ambled out of the woods.

  It was a small bear, probably born only last season, but its scent carried to the horse. Chaim’s tail came up, and he began to prance in terror and to whinny loudly. At the sound the bear hightailed it back into the woods, and Sarah laughed.

  But then Chaim’s shoulder hit the one bad post in the barbedwire fence. Most of the posts were newly split black locust and would fight moisture for years. This one was pine, and it had rotted nearly in two at the place where earth met air, so that when the horse went into it with his shoulder it had fallen with only the slightest sound, allowing him to leap at once over the suddenly lowered strands.

  On the porch, Sarah had set down her cup of hot coffee and risen. “Damn. You! You bad Chaim, you!” she had called. “You wait right there, you bad thing.”

  On her way across the porch to the stairs she picked up a piece of old rope and a feed bucket that still contained a little grain. It was a good distance to go, and she forced herself to walk slowly.

  “C’mere, Chaim,” she called. “Come and get it, boy.”

  She struck the feed pail with her fingers. Ordinarily that was enough to bring him to her, but he was still spooked by the bear scent, and he moved a little way up the road.

  “Damn.”

  This time he waited for her, turned so he could watch the edge of the woods. He never had kicked her, but she gave him no chance, approaching him carefully from the side and holding out the bucket.

  “Eat, you dumb old thing.”

  When he buried his nose in the pail, she let him get a mouthful and then slipped the rope around his neck. She didn’t tie it, afraid he would spook again and get it caught on something that could choke him. She wished she could have swung up onto him and ridden him bareback. Instead she slipped the rope over his ears and past his eyes and held the two ends together with her hands, talking to him softly and tenderly.

  She had to lead him past the break in the fence, all the way to the rude gate, and then lift the heavy poles out of their slots until the way was open for him to reenter the field. She was putting the poles back and worrying about how she could close up the fence until her father came home when she became conscious of the wetness, of the shining-leather redness of her legs, of the shocking trail she had been leaving behind her, and the strength went out of all of her and she began to cry.

  By the time R.J. reached the log house, the towels Sarah had fashioned into packs had proven woefully inadequate. There was more blood on the floor than R.J. would have imagined possible. She guessed that Sarah had stood there and bled, not wanting to ruin the bedclothes, but then had flopped back onto the bed, perhaps in a faint. Now her legs dangled beyond the crimsoned bed, her feet on the floor.

  R.J. lifted her legs to the bed, removed the soaked towels and put in fresh pressure packs. “Sarah, you have to keep your legs together hard.”

  “R.J.,” Sarah said faintly. From very far away.

  She was already semicomatose, and R.J. saw that she wouldn’t be able to control her muscles. R.J. took strips of cling bandage and tied the girl’s legs together at the ankles, and the knees, and then made a little pile of blankets and lifted Sarah’s feet onto it.

  The ambulance was there very soon. The EMTs wasted no time loading Sarah, and R.J. got into the back with Steve Ripley and Will Pauli and started oxygen therapy at once. Ripley did the workup and assessment en route, while the wailing ambulance rocked and swayed.

  He grunted when the vital signs matched the numbers R.J. had recorded in the house before the ambulance came.

  R.J. nodded. “She’s in shock.”

  They covered Sarah with several blankets, kept her feet raised. Behind the gray oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose, Sarah’s face was the color of parchment.

  For the first time in a very long time, R.J. tried to will every cell of her being into direct contact with God.

  Please, she said. Please, I want this kid.

  Please. Please, please, please. I need this clean, long-legged girl, this funny, beautiful girl, this possible daughter. I need her.

  She forced herself to take the girl’s hands in her own, and then she couldn’t let them go, feeling the trickling of the sand out of the hourglass.

  There was nothing she could do to stop it, to reverse what was happening. She could only fuss with the oxygen to make certain it was pouring out its richest mixture and ask Will to radio the hospital so that a supply of matched blood would be available and ready.

  When the Woodfield ambulance reached the emergency room, the waiting nurses opened the door of the rig and stood abashed and uncertain at the sight of R.J. unable to stop clutching Sarah’s hands. They had never before seen an ambulance arrive containing a broken doctor.

  32

  THE ICE CUBE

  Steve Ripley telephoned Mack McCourtney and asked him to get David Markus and bring him to the hospital.

  Paula Simms, the emergency room doctor, insisted on giving R.J. a tranquilizer. It made her very quiet and withdrawn but otherwise had no discernible effect on her horror. She was sitting frozen next to Sarah, holding her hand, when David arrived, his eyes wild.

  He didn’t look at R.J. “Leave us alone.”

  R.J. went out into the waiting room. After a long while, Paula Simms came to her.

  “He insists that you go home. I think you’d best do it, R.J. He’s very … you know. Upset.”

  Consciousness hurt unbearably. Sarah couldn’t be gone forever like that, just … gone. It was hard for her to face. It hurt to think, even to breathe.

  Suddenly the ice cube in which she had lived after Charlie Harris’s death was back.

  She made the first call to David that afternoon. After that, she telephoned every fifteen or twenty minutes. Each time she got his recorded business voice, so professional, so relaxed, thanking her for calling the Woodfield Realty Company and inviting her to leave a message.

  Next morning she drove to his house, thinking perhaps he was sitting there alone, not picking up the phone. Will Riley, David’s far neighbor from down the road, was putting a new fence post into the ground.

  “He home, Mr. Riley?”

  “No. Found a note from him taped to my door early this morning, asking me to feed the animals for
a couple of days. I thought the least I could do is fix the fence. Hell of a thing, isn’t it, Dr. Cole?”

  “Yes. Hell of a thing.”

  “That wonderful little girl.”

  Sarah!

  What was going on with David? Where was he?

  When she went into the house it was just as it had been when she and the ambulance crew had left it, except now the blood had dried to a paste a quarter of an inch thick. She stripped the sheets and the blankets from the bed and placed them into a garbage bag. She used David’s garden spade to scrape up the terrible pudding from the floor, then she carried it into the woods in a plastic bucket and buried it. She searched out David’s stiff brush and soap and scrubbed the floor until the successive rinse waters turned from red to pink to clear. Under the bed, she found the cat.

  “Oh, Agunah.”

  She would have liked to pet the cat, hug her, but Agunah stared at her like a cornered lion.

  She had to drive home fast in order to shower and get to the office in time to see patients. It was mid-afternoon when she met Toby in the hallway and learned what half the town already knew, that David Markus had taken his daughter back to Long Island for burial.

  For a little while she sat at her desk and tried to make sense of the next patient’s case history, but words and letters wriggled on the other side of a deep liquid glitter. Finally, she did something she had never done before. She told Toby to apologize and reschedule patient appointments. Sorry, terrible headache.

  When she got home she sat in a chair at the kitchen table. The house was very quiet. She just sat.

  She cancelled all appointments for four days. She walked a lot. Got out of the house and just walked, over the trail, over the fields, along the road, without knowing where, to start and look about her in surprise: How on earth did I get here?

  She telephoned Daniel Noyes, and they met for an uncomfortable, sorrowful lunch.

  “I gave her a good examination,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t see anything wrong with her at all.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Dr. Noyes. I know that.”

  He gave her a long, searching look. “It wasn’t your fault either. Do you know that, also?”

  She nodded.

  Outside the restaurant, he kissed her on the cheek before he turned away and walked toward his car.

  R.J. had no trouble sleeping. On the contrary, at night she sank into a deep and dreamless place of refuge. Mornings she lay under the covers in the fetal position, unable to move for long periods.

  Sarah.

  Her mind told her to reject guilt but she understood that guilt was hopelessly intertwined with her sorrow and from now on would be part of her.

  She decided it would be better to write to David before she tried to talk with him. It was important to her that he understand that Sarah’s death might just as easily have occurred following an appendectomy or a bowel resection. That infallible surgery didn’t exist. That it was Sarah’s own decision to have had the abortion and that she would have had it even if R.J. hadn’t agreed to help her.

  R.J. knew it would be little comfort for David to be told that some losses are incurred even in the safest invasive procedures. That in electing abortion over pregnancy, Sarah had been increasing her chances for survival, because in the United States, one out of every 14,300 women who continue pregnancy will die, while of women who are aborted—even after fourteen weeks of pregnancy—one in 23,000 can be expected to die. And that since everyone’s chances of dying every time he or she enters an automobile are one in 6,000, both pregnancy and abortion are extremely safe risks.

  So Sarah’s death as a result of a legal abortion was a rarity. A rarity.

  She wrote letter after letter, until finally she finished one that satisfied her, and then she drove to the post office.

  But instead of mailing it, she tore it up and threw the pieces in the Dumpster. She realized she had written it as much for herself as for David. Anyway, how could it make a difference. What did he care about statistics.

  Sarah was gone.

  And so was David.

  33

  INHERITANCES

  Day after day passed, and R.J. didn’t hear a thing. She called Will Riley and asked him if he knew when his neighbor was coming home.

  “No, I don’t have any idea. He sold the Morgan, you know. Did it by phone. I got a letter from him, overnight mail, asked me to be there yesterday at four o’clock so the new owner could pick up the horse.”

  “I’ll take their cat,” R.J. said.

  “That’ll be good. She’s out in my barn. I’ve already got four cats.”

  So R.J. picked up Agunah and brought her home. Agunah minced through the entire house, every inch a visiting queen, inspecting with disdainful suspicion. R.J. hoped David would come home and claim her soon. She and the cat never had established a meaningful relationship.

  She was chatting with Frank Sotheby at the general store a few mornings later when he wondered whether some other real estate person would move into town to take Dave Markus’s place.

  “I was surprised to hear he put his house on the market,” he said, regarding her closely. “I understand Mitch Bowditch is handling it, over in Shelburne Falls.”

  She drove down the Mohawk Trail to Shelburne Falls to have lunch and dropped in at the real estate office. Bowditch was a pleasant man, relaxed with people. He sounded truly regretful when he told her he had neither an address nor a telephone number for David Markus. “I just have a letter authorizing me to sell the place fully furnished, as is. And a New York bank account to send the check to. David said he wants to unload it quick. He’s a very good real estate man, and he set the price on the low side of fair. I should sell it pretty soon, I expect.”

  “If he should call, would you kindly ask him to contact me?” R.J. said, and handed over her card.

  “I will be happy to do that, doctor,” Bowditch said.

  In three days the cat ran away.

  R.J. roamed up and down Laurel Hill Road and walked the trail through the woods, calling.

  “AAGUUUUNAAAAAH!”

  She thought of all the critters that would consider a housecat a meal—bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions, large winged raptors. But when she got back to the house there was a message on the answering machine from Will Riley’s wife, Muriel, saying the cat had made her way through the hills back to their barn.

  R.J. picked her up again, and two days later Agunah left again and returned to the Rileys.

  Three more times the cat ran away.

  By that time it was late in September. Will grinned at her when she showed up to claim her unwilling guest. “It’s okay with us if you just leave her here,” he said, and R.J. agreed at once.

  Still, she felt a reluctance. “Shalom, Agunah,” she said, and the damned cat yawned at her.

  On her way back down the road, as she passed the log house she saw that a new blue Jeep with New York registration plates was parked in the drive.

  David?

  She pulled in behind it, but when she knocked on the front door, Mitch Bowditch opened it. Beyond him was a man with a tanned face, thin graying hair and a brushy mustache.

  “Hi, there. Come on in and meet another physician.” He introduced them, “Dr. Roberta Cole. Dr. Kenneth Dettinger.” Dettinger’s handshake was friendly but brisk.

  “Dr. Dettinger’s just bought the place.”

  She controlled her reaction. “Congratulations. Will you practice here?”

  “Oh, God no! I’ll just use it for weekends and vacations. You know.” She knew.

  He had a practice in White Plains, child and adolescent psychiatry. “Very busy, long hours. This place, it’ll be like heaven to me.”

  They all three moved out into the backyard toward the barn, past the half dozen hives.

  “You going to keep bees?”

  “No.”

  “Want to sell the hives?”

  “Well. You can have them, glad to have you take ’em aw
ay. I’m thinking of putting a pool and a deck out here, and I’m allergic to bee venom.”

  Bowditch cautioned that R.J. didn’t want to try to move the hives for another five or six weeks, until they had a serious cold snap that would put the bees into dormancy. “Actually …” He consulted an inventory list. “David owns eight more hives that he’s rented out to Dover’s Apple Orchards. You want those too?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “Buying the house the way I’m doing raises some problems,” Kenneth Dettinger said. “There are clothes in closets, bureaus to be cleaned out. I don’t have a wife to help me get the house shipshape. Only just divorced, you see.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.” He grimaced and shrugged, and then he grinned ruefully. “I’ll have to hire somebody to clean everything out of the house and get rid of it.”

  Sarah’s clothes.

  “Do you know anyone I could hire to do a job like that?”

  “Let me do it. No money. I’m … a friend of the family.”

  “Why, that would be fine. I would appreciate it.” He was studying her with interest. He had chiseled features. She didn’t trust the strength she saw in his face; perhaps it meant he was accustomed to getting his way.

  “I have my own furniture. I’ll keep the refrigerator, it’s only a year old. Anything you want, just take it. What’s left … give it away or ask someone with a truck to haul it to the dump, and mail me a bill.”

  “When will you need the house emptied of things?”

  “If it can be done by Christmas, I’ll be grateful.”

  “All right, then.”

  That fall in the hills was especially beautiful. The leaves turned wanton in October, and the rains didn’t come to buffet them off the trees. Everywhere R.J. drove—to the office, to the hospital, to make a house call—she was struck by color viewed through a prism of cold, crystal air.

  She tried to go back to living her life normally, concentrating on her patients, but it seemed to her that she was always one step behind. She began to worry that her medical judgment might be affected.