Pictures of You (40 page)

The whole first half hour of his drive, Sam’s head swam and he felt as if he had swallowed stones, which were now a sour lump in his stomach. He wasn’t even gone, and already he missed Lisa. He pulled down the sun visor. There, clipped inside, was his favorite photograph of her. She was drowsy, smiling, totally herself. He touched it, tracing her face, and then put the visor back up.

They had argued the night before. Lisa was on call and had to rush to the hospital to look at a patient with bleeding ulcers, but she couldn’t find a clean shirt in the closet. “God, if all my clothes were here, I wouldn’t have to go through this circus every time,” she said, and then she grew silent again. She finally pulled on a blue T-shirt of Sam’s and then pulled the V-neck top of her scrubs over it. “There, you look pretty,” Sam said, but Lisa, frowning, wouldn’t look at him.

She buttoned her coat and tied her shoes, snapping the laces. She finally turned back to him. “What are we doing?” she said quietly. “What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Really?” She lifted the newspapers from the couch. “Real estate section’s right here. You want to look? Here’s a three bedroom. Here’s a whole house. Belmont. Newton. Waltham. Back Bay. Anywhere we want.” She waited one beat, and then two, and when Sam didn’t move, when he stayed there, paralyzed, she flung the paper back down on the floor. “I rest my case,” she said.

Lisa turned away from him, shaking her head, refusing to meet his eyes. “I have to be at the hospital,” she said curtly, reaching for the front door. She turned to look at him, her gaze hard. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t love you,” she said. After she left, he sat on the porch with his head in his hands; and when she finally came back, two hours later, she just shook her head at him.

Sam turned onto the highway, merging into the left lane. What
was
he doing? He’d been with Lisa for five years. “Imagine us together for that long!” he exulted to her once.

“Imagine us married,” she said wistfully, and then she stroked his arm. “I know this is hard for you,” she said.

He brought Lisa flowers every week, jonquils, her favorites. He brought her funny little presents that he thought she might love, tucking them into places where he knew she’d find them. A wedge of smoked Gouda cheese. A piece of imported chocolate with orange cream inside. He called her four times a day, and every time she opened a present from him and he saw her face, bright and expectant with hope, he felt a line of guilt. “Are you happy?” he asked, and when she paused before answering, he shivered. “Of course I am,” she said. They were still good together, he told himself. He just wanted more time. He wanted her to be sure she wasn’t making a mistake with him.

Lisa sometimes chided him for being at the hospital too much, for getting up out of bed too many times to tend to other women, even if it was just to talk to one of his patients over the phone and soothe her because she hadn’t gone into labor yet. “But that’s what you yourself would want in a doctor!” he insisted.

“From my doctor, not from my boyfriend,” said Lisa, rolling over. “I want you to tend to me, too,” she said, and then she pulled the covers over her head so all that showed were the points on her dark hair.

Sam turned onto an exit ramp and was trapped in traffic. Summer was probably the worst time to travel anywhere, but there was no right time if you were a doctor. Sam had checked all his patients before he left. He knew their due dates as well as his own birthday, and he told himself that if he needed to, he could get back here in time for a delivery.

It was the end of June, and Sam rolled the windows down, resting his arm on the top of the door. There it was. After all these years, it still surprised him. His scar, a jagged line of silver all the way up his arm. For years he had worn long sleeves even in the hottest weather because he didn’t want people asking him why
his arm was so chewed up. He didn’t like feeling that people were staring at him.

A car honked and Sam merged into another lane. He and Lisa would go together to the Cape in another month, at the height of the season. They’d slather on sun block and swim in the ocean and eat enough fresh seafood to grow gills. They’d stay with his father and his girlfriend, Lucy, who would be insulted if they even thought of a hotel.

Sam opened up the thermos and took a swig of the coffee. It was sweet and black, the way he loved it. He opened the lunch Lisa had packed and took a bite. Spicy chicken, arugula, and peppers, on a seeded roll. A wake-up sandwich, Lisa would call it.

Lisa. The night he met her, it was three in the morning.

He’d just lost a patient, one of his favorites, a bright, cheerful forty-year-old woman named Eleanor who had gone into cardiac arrest just as she delivered her first baby, and though he had tried his best to save her, she hadn’t lived long enough to hold her own child.

Sam had sat with the stunned father until relatives appeared, and then he had gone to the cafeteria, sitting in the bright, florid lights. He felt like hell. He kept thinking he’d go back upstairs, make sure the father was okay. He’d make sure the baby was all right. Eleanor probably would have said, Well, at least I got to be pregnant. At least I got a chance to give birth. At least I got a chance to be this happy.

She was probably in the morgue by now.

He was draining his cup, the hospital coffee dark and sludgy from being in the pot too long, when a young doctor stumbled in. She wore a white coat over a turquoise dress, her short, dark hair matted. She looked as terrible as he knew he did. To his surprise, she sat right at his table and took some of his carton of milk for her coffee. “Don’t mind me, I’m having a nervous breakdown and can’t be trusted to sit by myself,” she said, swirling her spoon in her cup, making parabolas of milk.

“My milk carton is your milk carton,” he said. It felt funny to hear his own voice after being silent for so long.

“Okay if I stay?” she asked.

He shrugged, because really, what did it matter? He could use the company, himself, especially from someone who wouldn’t take it personally if he didn’t want to talk.

He glanced at the ID pinned to her lab coat. Lisa Jean Miller. He couldn’t remember seeing her around the hospital. She stirred more milk into her coffee and then told him that she was a gastroenterologist and she had just lost a patient. “Inoperable cancer. Stage four,” she said quietly.

Sam stopped drinking his coffee. “Me, too,” he said and she started. “I lost a patient, I mean,” he told her.

Sam had loved women in his life, but it had always been a cautious thing, like at the beach when he would splash water on his chest before he would dare to dunk in. But with Lisa, he fell in love instantly.

They talked quietly in the cafeteria, about work and then about life. All around them, people kept coming and going like a tide. Lisa told Sam how she had been at Mass General only two years now, but she liked it fine. She loved the city and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She was one of eight kids from a big Nebraskan family, the only girl, and her parents had been saving since she was a baby so she could go to college; she became the only one in the family who didn’t stay to farm. “My brothers all feel sorry for me,” she laughed. “They don’t understand how I could be happy living in a city.”

Sam’s heart was beating ridiculously fast. When Lisa got up to leave, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to get up, too. Not a word was said about it, but they walked out to his car, Lisa opened the door and slid into the seat without looking at him, and when he pulled up to her place, she simply took his hand and led him inside. He didn’t leave until the next morning, and even then the only way he could leave was because she was heading out
for the hospital, too. By the end of that month, they were living out of each other’s apartments.

“How did I get so lucky?” he asked her, cupping her face.

“Luck never has anything to do with love,” she said, and he thought of his mother.

“Luck has everything to do with everything,” he told her. “Especially love.”

Now, he grabbed the phone and called her, but got her voice-mail. He glanced at the road signs, made a right turn, and then he picked up the phone again. Another doctor was taking his patients, but still, he wanted to make sure everything was all right. He called his service but there were no messages.

Well. Sam had been a doctor for several years and he had never stopped marveling at how lucky his life had turned out. Isabelle used to tell him you could look at anything any number of ways and angles, so you might as well look at it the good way, the way that was most meaningful to you personally.

H
E WAS GETTING
tired now from driving. The winking lights of a diner shone up ahead: Tick Tock. The sign winked at him.

Sam stopped and got out of the car. The parking lot was full of cars. He needed to stretch his legs. He liked diners. They always reminded him of all those years when his mother used to take him on adventures, the two of them pretending to be all sorts of other people. He remembered one of the last conversations when they were driving. “Always remember,” she had told him. “When you’re grown up, I want you to take your girlfriend, or your wife, or boyfriend—whoever it is you love—and you make sure they know you so well they can read your mind. You don’t even have to tell them what you need, because they already know it. If they don’t—well, it isn’t love.”

Sam felt a sudden flash of sorrow. He hadn’t really known what she had been talking about back then, though he had tried to get
her to read his mind. In the car, sitting beside his mother that day, he had thought so hard, Go home, Go home, that it made his brain ache, and of course, she hadn’t. She had kept going forward.

Maybe he’d have some coffee and pie, soak up the atmosphere, have a story to tell later. Before he went inside the diner, he tried Lisa again on his phone. This time, she answered and he felt something switching on inside him. “I wish you were with me,” he said. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“When you come home, we’ll talk,” she said.

He went into the diner and ate a plate of fries and a burger—the worst thing for his health and the most delicious—and he over-tipped the waitress so much, she ran after him, asking if there had been some mistake. “Keep it,” he told her.

He got back in the car. He had another half hour before he reached Woodstock, where Isabelle now lived. Woodstock was full of old hippies and people who wanted lively shops and movies but not the buzz and hum of the city. He never expected Isabelle would have moved up here from New York City, and most of all, he had never expected he would see her again after twenty years.

She was the one who had contacted him. Her letter had been a shock. It came to the hospital two weeks after there had been a short piece about him in the paper, a series on the best doctors in Boston. A reporter had come to his office to talk to him because of all the patients who kept singing his praises. A photographer had posed him by the window, his white lab coat jauntily thrown open, his face laughing. “The Doctor Every Woman Loves,” the headline ran, and for weeks afterward, his colleagues teased him mercilessly.

As soon as he saw her handwriting, he had to sit down. His head was thumping and he couldn’t quite breathe. For a moment, he thought his asthma might have returned. “I read about you,” Isabelle wrote. “I wanted to call but I thought this would be easier for you.” Her handwriting was still the same uneven tumble, the
scrawl his father used to joke about because no one but Isabelle could ever read it. She was married. She had two children, one of them adopted from China. “It’s been over two decades. Do you think we could see each other?” she wrote.

No, he thought. Of course the answer was no. She had left him when he was nine years old. She had never called, never written, and gradually just vanished into the ether the same way his mother had. He tucked her letter into the pocket of his lab coat, unsure what to do. It had been so long. He felt the letter when he went on his rounds. He swore he heard her rustling when he leaned over a patient to check her heart. He felt it when he sat down to gulp some coffee, and he felt it when he came back home and told Lisa. “What could she possibly want, after all this time?” he said.

“Maybe she doesn’t want anything. Maybe you should see her,” Lisa said.

He startled. “See her? She vanished when I was a little kid. Now she contacts me with this letter.”

“You should at least call her,” Lisa said. She rubbed his arm. “Aren’t you at least a little curious?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said, waving his hands. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to do it
now
,” Lisa said.

It was like a mosquito bite that he couldn’t help scratching. He didn’t call, though he kept the number by the phone in the bedroom, and after he had picked up the paper so many times to look at it, he had the number memorized. He didn’t know if he should tell his father or not, so he kept silent.

Then, one night at the hospital, he had three deliveries and none of the mothers had really dilated yet. A few nurses padded down the hall, talking to one another. Patients were asleep. He passed the waiting room and a woman was sitting there, avidly reading a picture book,
The Runaway Bunny
, to a boy leaning against her. His mother had read him that book all the time, though she hadn’t been a fan of it. He still remembered the story, about a baby rabbit
that kept threatening to run away, changing into clouds or mountains or whatever he needed to be to escape his mom. The mom rabbit kept insisting that she would always find her baby, that if her baby morphed into a cloud, she’d become the sky. If he was a fish, she would be the ocean. She’d be anything, just so she could be with him. “Now that’s pathological,” his mother had said, but Sam had loved the book. He had asked for it every night.

Sam dug his hand in his pocket and there was Isabelle’s phone number. He couldn’t deny that he missed her. That she had been important to him. That at one point in his life he had thought she was an angel, a conduit between him and his mother. Well. People believed in angels when they were most in trouble, when there was nothing else they could do. His patients whose babies died comforted themselves with the thought that the babies were angels. But he was a doctor now, and he knew there was no such thing.