Beyond the Pale (7 page)

True, her skin was too pale, but there was nothing she could do about that. She spent far too much time in the fluorescent glare of the ED, far too little under the Colorado sun. She promised herself next summer she would try to get outside more, even as she knew she would not. Why should she, when all she needed was here?

TEEN STUDIES MEDICINE
, the headline had read,
RECALLS PARENTS SHE NEVER KNEW
.

Newspapers adored that sort of stuff. Human interest, they called it. Grace still had the clipping, crisp and yellow, folded between the pages of a high school scrapbook she was too cynical to take out of storage and too sentimental to throw away. The photo showed a gangly sixteen-year-old wearing a too-big lab coat, her shorn hair looking like it had been hacked off with a scalpel. She held a human skull and stared at the camera with an earnest expression that couldn’t quite conceal the spark of grisly mirth in her eyes. But the pretty reporter had been squeamish of the skull, and it was a weakness that, even as a child, Grace had found funny and—more importantly—contemptible.

“So, honey,” Colleen Adara of the
Denver Post
had snapped around an apparently delicious piece of gum, “you never knew your parents, is that right?”

“No, I didn’t,” Grace had said. “That’s because, when I was a baby, they both … 
died.
”

With that last word, she had thrust the skull at the reporter for dramatic effect. A look of horror had spread across Ms. Adara’s perfectly made-up face like a webwork of cracks on a sun-baked mud pan. It was a minor victory, but one Grace had relished all the same. That had been in the foster home days—the five years she had referred to at the time as one long game of Pass the Orphan—and she had needed all the small triumphs she could get.

In the end, of course, Ms. Adara’s article had been hopelessly wrong. It wasn’t the regretful ghosts of her parents that propelled Grace onward. No, if Grace was haunted by anything at all, it was something very much alive.

She had studied premed at the University of Colorado with fierce abandon and was accepted to the prestigious medical school at Duke University. Packing everything she owned into her primer-gray Mustang, she had traded the bright dryness of Colorado for the damp and shadowed green of North Carolina. It was her first time in the South, and, as a semiarid Western child, she had not been prepared for the rank lushness of it all. Everything here was alive. Not just the rhododendron and dogwood and moss-speckled pine, but the rocks, the soil, the rivers—all were choked with life. Even her shabby Georgian apartment, with its high ceilings and sloping wood floors, seemed to breathe and grow, and it wasn’t just because of the cockroaches, or because of the mold in the bathroom, which she had renamed the Terrarium. For on steamy August nights, when she lay awake and naked beneath a rattling metal fan, the walls would sweat and groan as if they too felt the heat.

During her four years of medical school, Grace displayed a hunger for knowledge that disturbed her professors as often as it impressed them. While other students dissected human cadavers with delicate disgust, she dug into hers with such intensity, determined to discover how every bit of bone and tissue and nerve was strung together, that one of the anatomy professors dubbed her Michelangela. She merely gave him a tight-lipped smile and kept cutting. When she graduated, it was eleventh in her class, not first. To rank higher required someone more personable, someone less intelligent
and disarming. Of course, not all specialties required bedside manner, and her advisor, Dr. Jason Briggs, had expected her to place well. Then she informed him she had turned down an internship in radiology, the dream specialty of every medical student with country club aspirations, and had accepted one in emergency medicine instead, at a public hospital to make it worse. Furious, he had told her she was making a foolish mistake. Grace had nodded, then had returned to her apartment, packed her belongings—everything still fit neatly inside her old Mustang—and had headed back to Colorado. Saying good-bye had been easy enough. She had made no true friends, and she would not miss the roaches.

Now she was in the third year of her residency at Denver Memorial Hospital, and the occasional letters from Dr. Briggs had dwindled and, finally, stopped. Of course, Briggs had been as dead wrong about Grace as Ms. Adara of the
Denver Post
. Not that she cared. This was where she had to be, and that was all anybody needed to know. Healing was a strange and bittersweet revenge.

Grace left the rest room and headed down the hallway to the ED’s admitting area. It was nearly deserted. A few people attempted to doze on plastic chairs while they waited to hear news of a friend or relative. A heavyset nurse floated by, silent in her angel-white crepe-soled shoes. Grace checked, but there were no charts—no more patients to see. She moved through the door near the ambulance entrance, taking a shortcut to the lounge, then she saw a crumpled form on a gurney. There was one more who needed her after all. She took a step forward.

A hand closed on her shoulder to stop her.

“That one is mine, Grace.”

Startled, she turned and found herself looking into quiet brown eyes. They belonged to a lean black man with a salt-and-pepper beard.

If Grace had anything resembling a friend at Denver Memorial, then it was Leon Arlington. Leon was the swing shift manager of the hospital’s morgue. He had been working with dead people so long that, over the years, he had picked up a number of their habits, from his slow calm to his placid and slightly disconnected gaze. These days few of Grace’s patients
made the final elevator ride down to see Leon. She was shooting for none.

Leon nodded toward the gurney in the corner, and Grace glanced over her shoulder to see a nurse pull a sheet over the still shape. She let out a shuddering breath. The adrenaline rush that always propelled her without thought from patient to patient evaporated and left her weak and empty.

“Come on,” Leon said in his husky voice. “Let’s get some coffee.”

“I remember her now,” Grace said a few minutes later. The two sat in a bank of green vinyl chairs. She took a sip from her foam cup: The coffee was hot and bitter. “I examined her myself. She was one of the apartment fire victims. One look, and I knew her lungs were gone. She knew it, too.” Grace shook her head in wonder, then looked at Leon. “How is it people always know when they’re about to die? We spend years trying to learn how to read the signs, but they just seem to know. I could see it in her eyes. And you know what I did? I smiled at her, and then I turned away and moved on to someone I had a chance of saving. Any of the other residents would have done the same.”

For a moment she remembered the woman’s eyes, so blue, like two jewels in the fire-darkened ruin of her face.

She shook her head. “Whatever happened to our hearts, Leon?”

Leon just shrugged. “You did what you were supposed to, Grace.”

“I know that.” She searched his lean brown face, hoping to find a bit of that easy calm she could keep for her own. “But did I do what I
should
have?” She took another swig of her coffee, winced as it burned her tongue, and swallowed it all the same. “Sometimes I wonder if all I’m doing is prolonging the pain. I let that woman suffer so I could keep alive a man who will have to undergo at least a half-dozen skin grafts, and who will spend the rest of his life horribly scarred. Pain for pain. Is that a fair bargain?”

Her voice trailed off. For a long time Leon’s face was expressionless, and when he finally did react it was not as she had expected.

He bared his white teeth in a grin. “I don’t know, Grace, but you might be surprised at the number of folks who, if
you gave them a choice, would stick with good old suffering. What do you think that man you just sent upstairs would choose? To suffer the pain of staying alive? Or to sleep in one of my drawers downstairs?” Leon let out a hoot of laughter. “I sure know what I’d choose.”

Grace wondered if she could be so certain. She glanced at a wall clock. Five
P.M
. Her shift had ended an hour ago, not that official starting and ending times meant much around here. She stood and rubbed the back of her neck with a hand.

“I’m going to get out of here while I can. Have a good night, Leon.”

“Oh, I always do,” the morgue manager said and tipped an imaginary hat toward her.

On her way out, Grace stopped by the office she shared with some of the other residents to shrug off her white coat and pick up her briefcase and beeper, then she headed down a hallway toward a back exit. If she really wanted to escape this place it was best not to be seen. An automatic door slid open, and she stepped outside into the late-autumn evening. The light of the westering sun warmed her cheeks, and she breathed in cool air. Traffic buzzed past, like a line of shiny army ants cutting down all that stood in their path. Grace was on foot. She headed down the tree-lined tunnel of a side street and for the next twelve blocks tried not to wonder if she had made the world better or worse that day.

Twenty minutes later, Grace walked up the steps to her second-floor studio apartment and unlocked the peeling door. Inside, she groped in the dimness until her hand found a light switch, then flicked it on. The electric glare of the overhead lamp was not kind to the space it found. What had been fresh and modern in 1923 when the San Tropez was first constructed had become dingy and ugly in the intervening years. The white paint slapped on the plaster walls had turned the yellow of an old wedding dress, and the green shag carpet was so worn in places that the original linoleum tiles—probably made of compressed asbestos—showed
through. Grace’s meager possessions did little to brighten the place. She saw that the last of her houseplants was withered and brown. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about watering it anymore.

She headed to the apartment’s afterthought of a kitchen, rummaged in the rusty refrigerator, and came out with a carton of Chinese takeout. She sat cross-legged on a futon on the floor—it was the one piece of furniture she owned—and ate cold rice while she watched the evening news on a blurry television set almost as old as she was.

But she wasn’t hungry, and the news was the same parade of disasters and violence it was every night, and suddenly she did not want to be there, in that dim little apartment, alone and brooding and trapped. She stood and looked around, as if seeing the place for the first time. It didn’t seem real. Was this where she lived? She knew it was, and yet it couldn’t be. How could it, when she felt so disconnected from it all? This place—none of this—was hers. It was an irrational feeling, and yet so strong and certain she could only believe it was true.

Grace did not belong here.

She left the greasy carton of food on top of the TV set, stood, and grabbed a jacket. The door shut behind her, and only as she started down the steps did she realize she had not locked it. She almost halted, almost turned to head back up the stairs. This was not the best of neighborhoods. Until that moment she had always been obsessive about locking the door. Now giddiness rose in her chest, and along with it an odd sense of premonition. Somehow she knew, if she left this place now, she would not come back again, and if that was true, whether she locked the door or not mattered nothing.

Grace hesitated only a heartbeat, then descended the steps. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and walked into the gathering twilight.

After a few blocks she found herself on the edge of an expanse of green-brown grass speckled here and there with trees. City Park. She started down one of the park’s asphalt trails. Soon she found herself humming. It was a half-remembered song, from her childhood perhaps. The melody
came easily to her lips, although she did not know its name, and she could recall only a few snatches of murmured lyrics:

The words made little sense—she supposed they had been transmuted in her mind with time—but they were comforting all the same. As she often did when she walked, Grace reached up and drew out a silver necklace that hung around her throat. On the end was a pendant, a wedge-shaped piece of metal incised with an angular design. Like the song, the necklace was a thing of her childhood. She had been wearing it when the people from the orphanage had found her, although she had been too young to remember. Still, it was a link to the parents and the life she had never known, and although it was a sad reminder, it was precious as well.

Grace walked on. It felt good to distance herself from the oppression of the city’s buildings. The air was lighter in the park, pearl instead of gray, and she could feel a hint of the vastness of the world that lay beyond. The mountains stood in silhouette on the horizon, as sharp and flat and black as if a child had cut them from construction paper for an art project. The first stars glimmered in the sky. She drifted on through the park.

It was the girl’s eyes that caught her.

Grace nearly did not see her at all, for the child’s old-fashioned dress was the exact shade of twilight, and her hair was a shadow floating about the pale-moon oval of her face. However, her purple eyes glowed in the dimness, and when Grace saw them she froze in mid-step. The girl appeared to be no more than eight or nine years old. She stood quietly beneath the slender ghost of an aspen tree to one side of the path, small hands folded neatly before her, fingers soft and pink as the petals of an unfurled rose.
Come to me
, Grace thought she heard the child whisper, although that would have been impossible. All the same she moved toward the girl, responding to that instinctual power children sometimes have over adults. In moments she stood before the child.

“I am not lost,” the girl said in a clear voice.

Grace snapped her mouth shut, for that was the question she had been about to ask. She stared down at the girl in wonder, then shivered. There was something extraordinary about the child, something sorrowful, and knowing, and even ancient. All at once Grace felt that
she
was the one who was lost. The bare limbs of the aspen tree made a forlorn music in the breeze.