Strangers (7 page)

She was sitting straight up in bed now. Her heart was beating faster, and she was flushed with excitement. “When?”

“Next week. There’s a patient checking in this Thursday or Friday. Name’s Fletcher. We’ll go over her file together on Wednesday. If things proceed according to schedule, I would think we’d be ready to cut on Monday morning. Of course, you’ll be responsible for scheduling all the final tests and making the decision to go ahead.”

“Oh, God.”

“You’ll do fine.”

“You’ll be with me.”

“I’ll assist you…if you feel you need me for anything.”

“And you’ll take over if I start to screw up.”

“Don’t be silly. You won’t screw up.”

She thought about it a moment, then said, “No. I won’t screw up.”

“That’s my Ginger. You can do whatever you set your mind to.”

“Even ride a giraffe to the moon.”

“What?”

“Private joke.”

“Listen, I know you came close to panic this afternoon, but don’t worry. All residents experience that. Most have to deal with it early, when they begin to assist in the surgery. They call it The Clutch. But you’ve been cool and collected from the start, and I’d finally decided you’d never clutch up like the rest of them. Today, at last you did. The Clutch just came later for you than for most. And though I imagine you’re still worried about it, I think you should be glad it happened. The Clutch
is a seasoning experience. The important thing is that you dealt with it superbly.”

“Thanks, George. Even better than a drama critic, you’d have made a good baseball coach.”

Minutes later, when they concluded their conversation and hung up, she fell back against the pillows again and hugged herself and felt so fine that she actually giggled. After a while she went to the closet and dug around in there until she located the Weiss family photograph album. She brought it back to bed and sat for a time, paging through the pictures of Jacob and Anna, for although she could not share her triumphs with them anymore, she needed to feel that they were close.

Later still, in the dark bedroom, as she lay balanced on the thin edge of wakefulness, she finally understood why she had been frightened this afternoon. She had not been seized by The Clutch. Although she had not been able to admit it until now, she had been afraid that, in the midst of surgery, she would black out, plummet into a state of fugue, as she had done that Tuesday, two weeks ago. If an attack came while she held a scalpel, while she was doing delicate cutting, or while stitching in a vascular graft…

That thought brought her eyes wide open. The creeping form of sleep retreated like a thief caught in the middle of a burglary. For a long time she lay there, stiff, staring at the dark and newly ominous shapes of the bedroom furniture and at the window, where incompletely drawn draperies revealed a band of glass silvered by a fall of moonlight and by the rising beams of streetlamps below.

Could she accept the responsibility of chief surgeon on an aortal graft? Her seizure had surely been a one-time occurrence. It would never happen again. Surely not. But did she dare test that theory?

Sleep crept back again and claimed her, though not for hours.

•

Tuesday, after a successful trip to Bernstein’s Delicatessen, much food, and several lazy hours in an easy chair with a good book, her self-confidence was knit up again, and she began to look forward to the challenge ahead, with only an ordinary degree and kind of apprehension.

On Wednesday, Johnny O’Day continued to recover from his triple bypass and was in high spirits.
This
was what made the years of study and hard work worthwhile: preserving life, relieving suffering, bringing hope and happiness to those who had known despair.

She assisted in a pacemaker implantation that went without a hitch, and she performed an aortagram, a dye test on a patient’s circulation. She also sat in with George while he examined seven people who had been referred to him by other physicians.

When all the new patients had been seen, George and Ginger huddled for half an hour over the file of the candidate for the aortal graft—a fifty-eight-year-old woman, Viola Fletcher. After studying the file, Ginger decided she wanted Mrs. Fletcher admitted to Memorial on Thursday for testing and preparation. If there were no counterindications, surgery could take place first thing Monday morning. George agreed, and all the necessary arrangements were made.

Thus Wednesday progressed, always busy, never dull. By six-thirty she had put in a twelve-hour day, but she was not tired. In fact, although she had nothing to keep her at the hospital, she was reluctant to leave. George Hannaby was home already. But Ginger hung around, chatting with patients, double-checking charts, until at last she went to George’s office, where she intended to look again at Viola Fletcher’s file.

The professional offices were in the back wing of the building, separate from the hospital itself. At that hour the corridors were virtually deserted. Ginger’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished tile floors. The air smelled of pine-scented disinfectant.

George Hannaby’s waiting room, examining rooms, and private office were dark and quiet, and Ginger did not switch on all the lights as she moved through the outer rooms into the inner sanctum. There, she snapped on only the desk lamp as she passed it on her way to the file-room door, which was locked. George had given her keys to everything, and in a minute she had withdrawn Viola Fletcher’s records from the cabinet and returned with them to George’s desk.

She sat down in the big leather chair, opened the folder in the pool of light from the desk lamp—and only then noticed an object that riveted her attention and caused her breath to catch in her throat. It lay on the green blotter, along the curvature of light: a hand-held ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye. There was nothing unusual—certainly nothing ominous—about the ophthalmoscope. Every doctor used such an instrument during a routine physical examination. Yet the sight of this one not only inhibited her breathing but filled her with a sudden sense of terrible danger.

She had broken out in a cold sweat.

Her heart was hammering so hard, so loud, that the sound of it seemed to come not from within but without, as if a parade drum was thumping in the street beyond the window.

She could not take her eyes off the ophthalmoscope. As with the black gloves in Bernstein’s Delicatessen more than two weeks ago, all other objects in George’s office began to fade, until the shining instrument was the only thing that she could see in any detail. She was aware of every tiny scratch and minute nick on its handle. Every humble feature of its design
seemed abruptly and enormously important, as if this were not a doctor’s ordinary tool but the linchpin of the universe, an arcane instrument with the potential for catastrophic destruction.

Disoriented, suddenly made claustrophobic by a heavy, insistent, pressing mantle of irrational fear that had descended over her like a great sodden cloak, she pushed the chair away from the desk and stood up. Gasping, whimpering, she felt suffocated yet chilled to the bone at the same time.

The shank of the ophthalmoscope glistened as if made of ice.

The lens shone like an iridescent and chillingly alien eye.

Her resolve to stand fast now swiftly melted, even as her heart seemed to freeze under the cold breath of terror.

Run or die,
a voice said within her.
Run or die.

A cry escaped her, and it sounded like the tortured appeal of a lost and frightened child.

She turned from the desk, stumbled around it, almost fell over a chair. She crossed the room, burst into the outer office, fled into the deserted corridor, keening shrilly, seeking safety, finding none. She wanted help, a friendly face, but she was the only person on the floor, and the danger was closing in. The unknown threat that was somehow embodied in the harmless ophthalmoscope was drawing nearer, so she ran as fast as she could, her footsteps booming along the hallway.

Run or die.

The mist descended.

Minutes later, when the mist cleared, when she was again aware of her surroundings, she found herself in the emergency stairwell at the end of the office wing, on a concrete landing between floors. She could not remember leaving the office corridor and taking to the stairs. She was sitting on the landing, squeezed into the corner, her back pressed to the cinderblock wall, staring out at the railing along the far side of the steps. A single bare bulb burned behind a wire basket overhead. To her left and right, flights of stairs led up and down into shadow before coming to other lighted landings. The air was musty and cool. If not for her ragged breathing, silence would have ruled.

It was a lonely place, especially when your life was coming apart at the seams and you needed the reassurance of bright lights and people. The gray walls, stark light, looming shadows, the metal railing…The place seemed like a reflection of her own despair.

Her wild flight and whatever other bizarre behavior she exhibited in her inexplicable fugue had evidently not been seen, or she would not now be alone. At least that was a blessing. At least no one knew.

She
knew, however, and that was bad enough.

She shivered, not entirely from fear, for the mindless terror that had gripped her was gone. She shivered because she was cold, and she was cold because her clothes clung to her, damp, soaked with sweat.

She raised one hand, wiped her face.

She rose, looked up the stairwell, then down. She did not know whether she was above or below the floor on which George Hannaby had his office. After a moment she decided to go up.

Her footsteps echoed eerily.

For some reason, she thought of tombs.

“Meshuggene,”
she said shakily.

It was November 27.

6

Chicago, Illinois

The first Sunday morning in December was cold, under a low gray sky that promised snow. By afternoon the first scattered flakes would begin to fall, and by early evening the city’s grimy face and soiled skirts would be temporarily concealed beneath the white pancake makeup and pristine cloak of snow. This night, from the Gold Coast to the slum tenements, everywhere in the city, the number-one topic of conversation would be the storm. Everywhere, that is, but in the Roman Catholic homes throughout the parish of St. Bernadette’s, where they would still be talking about the shocking thing Father Brendan Cronin had done during the early Mass that morning.

Father Cronin rose at five-thirty
A.M.
, said prayers, showered, shaved, dressed in cassock and biretta, picked up his breviary, and left the parish house without bothering to put on a coat. He stood for a moment on the rear porch, breathing deeply of the crisp December air.

He was thirty years old, but with his direct green eyes and unruly auburn hair and freckled face, he looked younger than he was. He was fifty or sixty pounds overweight, though not particularly thick in the middle. On him, fat distributed evenly, filling him out equally in face, arms, torso, and legs. From childhood through college, until his second year at the seminary, his nickname had been “Pudge.”

Regardless of his emotional state, Father Cronin nearly always looked happy. His face had a natural cherubic aspect, and the round lines of it were not designed for the clear and easy expression of anger, melancholy, or grief. This morning he looked mildly pleased with himself and with the world, though he was deeply troubled.

He followed a flagstone path across the yard, past denuded flower
beds where the bare earth lay in frozen clumps. He unlocked the door of the sacristy and let himself in. Myrrh and spikenard blended with the scent of the lemon-oil furniture polish with which the old church’s oak paneling, pews, and other wooden objects were anointed.

Without switching on the lights, with only the flickering ruby glow of the sacristy lamp to guide him, Father Cronin knelt at the
prie-dieu
and bowed his head. In silence, he petitioned the Divine Father to make him a worthy priest. In the past, this private devotion, before the arrival of the sexton and the altar boy, had sent his spirits soaring and had filled him with exultation at the prospect of celebrating Mass. But now, as on most other mornings during the last four months, joy eluded him. He felt only a leaden bleakness, an emptiness that made his heart ache dully and that induced a cold, sick trembling in his belly.

Clenching his jaws, gritting his teeth, as if he could
will
himself into a state of spiritual ecstasy, he repeated his petition, elaborated upon his initial prayers, but still he felt unmoved, hollow.

After washing his hands and murmuring, “
Da Domine,”
Father Cronin laid his biretta on the
prie-dieu
and went to the vesting bench to attire himself for the sacred celebration ahead. He was a sensitive man with an artist’s soul, and in the great beauty of the ceremony he perceived a pleasing pattern of divine order, a subtle echo of God’s grace. Usually, when placing the linen amice over his shoulders, when arranging the white alb so that it fell evenly to his ankles, a shiver of awe passed through him, awe that
he,
Brendan Cronin, should have achieved this sacred office.

Usually. But not today. And not for weeks of days before this.

Father Cronin put on his amice, passed the strings around his back, then tied them against his breast. He pulled on the alb with no more emotion than a welder getting dressed for work in a factory.

Four months ago, in early August, Father Brendan Cronin had begun to lose his faith. A small but relentless fire of doubt burned within him, unquenchable, gradually consuming all of his long-held beliefs.

For any priest, the loss of faith is a devastating process. But it was worse for Brendan Cronin than it would have been for most others. He had never even briefly entertained the thought of being anything
but
a priest. His parents were devout, and they fostered in him a devotion to the Church. However, he had not become a priest to please them. Simply, as trite as it might sound to others in this age of agnosticism, he had been
called
to the priesthood at a very young age. Now, though faith was gone, his holy office continued to be the essential part of his self-image; yet he knew he could not go on saying Mass and praying and comforting the afflicted when it was nothing but a charade to him.