Authors: Elizabeth Brundage

The Doctor's Wife (52 page)

BOOK: The Doctor's Wife

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He went outside with the garbage. As she sponged down the countertops it occurred to her that he’d been out there for a while. When he finally came back inside he looked pale.

“Any mail?”

“Just junk.” He tossed the pile into the trash.

“You all right?” she asked. “You look pale.”

He said nothing.

“Is it cold out there?”

“It’s cold.”

She stood there. “Want to go to bed?”

“No.”

“Michael?”

He seemed suddenly distant. “I’m going to stay up for a while. I’ve got things to do in the study.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. He turned, and left her standing there. “I’m going to bed,” she said to his back.

“Go ahead.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

At the study door he looked at her and nodded, but his face remained cold. Without another word, he went into the room and closed the door. Annie climbed the stairs like a child who’d been sent off to her room without dinner. She felt empty again. Lost.

An hour or two later, she woke up to the remote sound of his beeper. Where was he, in the study? He hadn’t come to bed. Annie sat up, listening. He was in the study on the phone. It was after one A.M.

Then she saw it.

Tacked to the wall was a drawing of her. Simon had done it one day at the motel. She was sitting in a chair naked. “I’ll call this one
Just Fucked,
” Simon had said, and now she saw those words scrawled in Simon’s hand on the bottom of the page.

Her heart began to pound.

Now he was coming toward the door. She jumped and slipped back under the covers and closed her eyes as he entered the room. He was pulling on his scrubs and a heavy sweater, tossing things noisily into a bag. He was going in.

Why, she wondered? He wasn’t on call. Why were they paging him?

She didn’t dare open her eyes, terrified of what he might say to her. She could feel him standing there, watching her, and she could sense his anger in the way he moved. He jerked open the nightstand drawer, scrambling for a pen; he was writing her a note. He turned off the light. And then he was gone.

Panting with shame, she began to cry, gulping the air. She ran downstairs hoping to stop him, to tell him she had made a mistake, a terrible mistake, and she’d felt nothing for Simon Haas, nothing! But she was too late. He had already pulled out of the driveway and turned onto the road.

Weak with apprehension, she gripped the banister and climbed the stairs to her room. Annie ripped the drawing off the wall and crumpled it up. She crawled back into bed, weeping, turning in on herself, unable to find comfort in the soft pillows, the warm quilt. Her whole body ached with fear, sensing danger like an animal keen to its scent, tasting it in her throat, on her teeth, expecting it yet having no idea of how to tame it.

PART SIX

Extremities

TWO DAYS HAVE PASSED and now it is the third. Something has happened to his eyes. The world comes in a blur. There are no windows, no lights, only a smear of daylight. His body is heavy and dense, like he’s been covered with stones. A grave, he thinks, shivering. He did not think it would be like this, his death. From time to time he would imagine it as he does now, picturing himself in a room with a bed, a pink blanket, perhaps, a window where the wild sun beckons him, the distant sound of children running through the house—not his children, but his children’s children. And music, of course. Italian opera filling up the halls, roaming into rooms with unmade beds. Something delicious cooking on the stove, the tantalizing smoke rising up through the banister to his waiting nostrils. A hand turning a wooden spoon, contemplatively, knowing that his death will arrive at any time. And waiting for it. The whole house waiting for it. The chairs in the living room waiting for it. The piano with its grinning white keys. The bowl of pears on the table. Even the dripping gutters waiting for it. Sensing it like a disastrous storm. He has imagined his old man’s hands like the gnarled roots of a lilac bush, quivering a little, covered with liver spots. And Annie’s hands, he has imagined them, too, graceful and warm, unhindered by age. In his dreams, he has seen her taking up his hands like summer earth, the way she knows to turn the soil, and he remembers her now in her big straw hat, making the flowers come up all around the yard. She would come to him, he thinks now, she would hold his hands, she would wait with him to face the worst.

He imagines his house in the country in total disarray, Annie trying to cope with her ordeal. She will take the kids to her parents’, he knows; that’s where Annie goes when she needs to hide. He pictures his kids sullenly playing chess on the priceless Sarouk carpet in the living room. Henry will be angry when they make him tuck in his shirt, and Annie’s mother, perennially obsessed with order, will insist that Rosie brush her hair. No taming
his
children, he thinks a little proudly. The image brings him a surge of relief, but it doesn’t last, and he is almost too frightened to think.
Your life is over.

The wind mutters all night long. He can hear the wind rippling the window screens. He can hear the wind groaning like a man with a broken heart. Something drips. He hears the tidy scuffling of squirrels and wonders if they’ve gotten into the cellar. In his dreams he sees their long furry tails. “Squirrels,” he tells the woman when she comes to tend him, but she refuses to admit it, hastily wiping the feverish sweat from his face. She comes and goes like a vision in a nightmare. She keeps him drugged, but he does not refuse her, taking the warm broth into his mouth, bitter with codeine, dense with salt, his head in her lap like a child’s. His pain is voracious. There is nothing he can do but accept her care. She is the healer now, this strange woman whom destiny has cruelly paired him with.

The room is damp, insalubrious, and makes his throat sore. The mattress upon which he lies is wet under his back, but he will not tell her this. The old wool blankets stink of mothballs, but he has convinced himself that it will keep away the squirrels, because he knows they are there, fussing in the dark, an ominous vigil with their tiny yellow eyes.

Like a blind man, he tries to read the subtle variations of the dark. Once, he asks her to turn on a light, but the question enrages her. “Don’t you
get
it, Michael? There’s nobody here. There’s nobody
living
here. Why would I turn on a light if there’s nobody here?” She starts to pace nervously, lighting a cigarette. “Do you want someone to show up here? Is that what you want? Because the minute that happens, you’re dead, understand?”

She takes out a little box of pills. “I’ve got to
calm down.
You’ve gotten me all upset.” Swallowing a few of the pills, she comes up close, standing over him. “You think this is easy for me? Huh?” She kicks his leg and he recoils, turns inward. “You think I
like
being here?” Another kick, only harder. “You think I like the fact that I had to do this?”

Shaking, he braces for another kick. A moment lingers between them. He feels her watching him, making up her mind, sensing her power over him. The kick does not come, and he turns slightly to see her circling the room, mumbling to herself. Round and round and round in a tight circle. She crouches down, hugging her knees. “I’m sorry I kicked you. I’m
sorry, okay?”

She looks at him, waiting for him to forgive her, but he does not and she starts to cry.

“Nobody sees me,” she whispers. “I’m a ghost. I’m invisible.”

“I see you,” he answers at length. “You’re right there.”

Flashes of the accident come back to him with visceral clarity. He remembers her voice, insisting on the seat belt.
He wouldn’t drive without one,
she’d told the men.
It will look suspicious to the police.
Now that he thinks of it, that seat belt was what saved him. There was the deafening slam of the car door, the man’s farewell—
See you later, asshole
—and then the rolling car, the bristling feeling in his belly, the anguished uncertainty of a carnival ride as the car soared through the air then dropped to the ground below.
Let it go,
he remembers thinking, feeling his body fall through space.
Let it all go.

Numb is what he is, he thinks, in a state of shock. A womblike sensation of nothingness. A state of being—empty. He gives himself up to it. He gives himself up to it because there is nothing else.

Time drifts. His head fills with snakes. Now they are spiders. His head spins a web of fury. He doesn’t know.
I want my wife,
he thinks.
I want my Annie.
The floors squeak overhead, back and forth and back again. There is the sound of heavy rain. No, it is not rain. It is the woman crying. She frees his hands and he brings them to his face, he covers his face like a shield. He cups his hands together, he braids his fingers, he whispers to his thumbs.
Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people.

She has chained him to the furnace. There are two separate loops around each ankle, old-fashioned bicycle locks attached to steel cables, the sort he had as a boy, encased in thick yellow plastic with cylindrical combinations. The cables are locked to a larger chain, the sort you’d use to tow a car, which snakes across the floor and is padlocked to the furnace. The chains dishearten him; he has no idea how to free himself of them. Yet if he could find something sharp, a pair of pliers even, he might be able to cut them. In the dark, gasping and spitting, he crawls across the cement floor, hoping to encounter something he might use to cut through the plastic, but the cellar floor is a vast wasteland and he encounters nothing. On his hands and knees he is a wounded animal, an animal shot in the leg, an animal whose hand had been severed by a trap. It makes him think of poor Molly. He finds himself overcome with a fierce rush of anger. The feeling depletes him, and suddenly exhausted, he drags himself back to the mattress. He begins to shiver, his teeth chattering. A fever coming on, he realizes. Before long, his body simmers in the dampness. He must stay focused, he thinks desperately; he must methodically plan his escape.

She comes down later with her usual tray. He isn’t interested in the food. What he wants are the drugs. Something to temper his pain. Something to stop the infection. “I need an antibiotic,” he insists.

“You’ve been taking one.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Are you all right? You’re shaking.”

“No, I’m
not
fucking all right. I’ve got an infection! I’ve got a broken fucking hand!”

“Here.” When she hands him the pills, their skin touches. Hers is softer than his, and warm, and it alarms him. It alarms him because he was not ready for her. He was not ready to grab her wrist, her arm, her fucking neck. He was not ready to throttle her senseless. He takes the pills and drinks down a glass of water that tastes like rust. He wipes his mouth, looking at her, trying to figure out where she’s put the gun.

“It’s right here,” she says, answering his thoughts. She takes out the gun, proficiently opens the cartridge, then snaps it back into place. She just stands there watching him. “I’m a very good shot, actually. In case you’re wondering.”

“I don’t care about your gun,” he lies. “I’m not afraid of you.”

She flashes a bitter smile. “Shucks.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want. What is it you want? There must be something. Is it money? Tell me. I can get you money.”

“No one can give me what I want.” She sulks.

BOOK: The Doctor's Wife

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