Authors: Elizabeth Brundage
The Doctor's Wife (6 page)
Back in the car she drives behind the market to the Dumpster and tosses in the plastic bag that contains the doctor’s clothes. Fifteen miles north, where the snow is deeper and the roads have not been plowed, she finds a hardware store with warped wood floors and scrawny hovering cats who eye her suspiciously. In the musty silence she purchases several cans of kerosene, a new kerosene lamp, a Coleman stove, a heavy chain, and an expensive padlock. The burly clerk helps her carry the items out to the car. He coils the heavy chain into her trunk and slams it shut, the wind crawling up her neck.
Driving back to her father’s house she passes the graveyard where her mother lies, and the caretaker’s stone cottage, its windows covered with boards. She feels a rush of terror as she pulls around to the back of her father’s house and parks in a cluster of pines, hoping it will snow some more to cover her tracks. Scattered amid the glittering white powder she notices the splintered walls of a birdhouse, a dented beer can, a dead field mouse. She enters through the back door and puts the provisions in the kitchen. Stacking the canned food on the cupboard shelves, she reasons that there is no need for her to worry; the old Crofut house will seem exactly as it has been for the past ten years: vacant, neglected, aching with ghosts. Still, she can’t help worrying that someone will find out.
The stairs to the second floor wait like the long zipper down a woman’s back, a fancy woman like from the old movies, the way they always turn and wait:
Would you get this for me, darling?
Feeling drained now, impossibly weary, she climbs the stairs, half-expecting her mother to emerge from the lush pink folds of her past. On the landing she stands for a moment, hearing the windows rattle in the wind. The empty rooms wait blatantly, drenched in the red light of the setting sun. Her childhood room beckons her. Something stirs in her heart, and she lies down on the bed and weeps, she weeps and howls in the silent house, and she does not know if she will ever stop.
Would you get this for me, darling?
Feeling drained now, impossibly weary, she climbs the stairs, half-expecting her mother to emerge from the lush pink folds of her past. On the landing she stands for a moment, hearing the windows rattle in the wind. The empty rooms wait blatantly, drenched in the red light of the setting sun. Her childhood room beckons her. Something stirs in her heart, and she lies down on the bed and weeps, she weeps and howls in the silent house, and she does not know if she will ever stop.
5
OUT IN THE COURTYARD the hours fade away, and Annie begins to feel cold. People come and go, smoking in small groups. The nurses. The orderlies. “Come on, Annie, I’m taking you home.” She turns toward the voice of Hannah Bingham, one of the labor nurses Michael worked with; his favorite. Hannah stands there like an angel in her pink scrubs, with the murmuring sun at her back. “It’s getting cold out here, isn’t it?”
Annie stands up and lets Hannah put her arm around her. Together, they enter the bright corridor, the large lobby with its maroon chairs. The detective nods at her, a notebook in his hands. “I’ll be in touch,” he says, and she nods back. She doesn’t know how she feels about the detective, and she doesn’t want to think about it right now. Hannah leads her to the elevator and they ride up to the doctors’ parking garage. With her long silver hair and a crystal hanging around her neck, Hannah reminds Annie of a wizard and she is glad for her help now. The fourth floor of the parking garage is empty, quiet. Annie steels herself past Michael’s old space, searching the concrete for some scrap of evidence, but the floor looks swept clean.
“Come.” Hannah puts her hands on Annie’s shoulders and guides her to the car. “We need to get you home now. Your kids are waiting for you.”
The mention of her kids makes her heart prickle. She doesn’t know what she will say to them. They are home with Christina, her loyal babysitter, a student at the college. They will all be wondering where she is by now, waiting for an explanation. She will tell them the truth, she decides, because at this point that is all she has. They get into Hannah’s silver Pontiac, two baby shoes hanging from the mirror, a plastic Virgin Mary wobbling up on the dash. Annie stares at it, feeling contemptuous. There is no God, she thinks. Not for her. Not now.
“My kids put that there,” Hannah says. “They think she keeps me safe.”
“Maybe she does.”
“It makes them feel better, that’s all. Just knowing she’s with me.”
Annie nods, thinking about Rosie and Henry, what she will be able to offer them to ease their pain. Even she can’t soften this for them. She does not mind having the long drive to think, to gather more strength to face them. She is grateful that Hannah Bingham is taking her home, out to the country to their beautiful house. Only it’s no longer beautiful, she thinks. Without Michael nothing is beautiful.
Hannah pulls out of the parking garage and winds down through short, one-way streets toward the interstate. “What did the detective say?” Hannah asks her. “What do they think?”
“Suicide,” Annie blurts. “A morphine overdose.”
Hannah scoffs. “Michael? Morphine?”
“It happens, they said. Sometimes. It happens to doctors.”
“It may happen, but not to Michael. I can’t imagine that.”
It’s my fault,
Annie thinks. “Did he seem depressed, Hannah? Did he seem depressed at work?”
Annie thinks. “Did he seem depressed, Hannah? Did he seem depressed at work?”
“No, honey, he did not seem depressed. He loved his work. He always had, you know, a real good attitude. Unlike some of the other doctors. They get moody, you know, ’cause they’re so tired all the time. But not Michael. You never saw that in him. And his patients loved him, Annie, you should know that. They looked up to him. Especially in the birthing suite. They’d come in and they’d be all nervous and right away he’d get them calm. They’d be cursing and throwing things and he’d walk in and the whole climate would change and everybody would relax. He meant a lot to people. You could just see it, the way they’d look at him. Like he was their hero, you know?”
“It’s my fault,” Annie whispers. “We were having . . . problems.”
Hannah gives her a knowing look. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
“What?”
“The doctor’s wife thing.”
Annie shakes her head. She hates to admit it, but it’s the truth.
“Look, honey, whatever happened, nobody’s perfect.”
“He wasn’t home very much.”
“Didn’t even take a day off, did he? Good ole Finney plays golf every Wednesday, but not your husband. Oh, no. Not Michael.”
“You knew about the clinic?”
“They don’t call it Smallbany for nothing.” Hannah smiles. “And between you and me? What Michael did on his afternoons off is none of the pope’s business.”
Annie nods, grateful for Hannah’s admission. “We were getting threats,” she says. “They were giving Michael a hard time. Remember that doctor who got killed up in Buffalo? It’s the same group. And these people mean business.”
“I can’t imagine they got too far with Michael. As I recall, he wasn’t exactly open to other people’s opinions, especially when it came to medicine. Some people thought he was arrogant, but he didn’t care. He liked his power. He’d fucking earned it.”
“Well, it didn’t get him very far, did it?”
“I suppose not.”
They don’t talk for the rest of the way. Annie looks out the window at the red sky, the black trees. They drive through dreary towns where the people on the streets hunker under hats and scarves, hiding from the wind. A gray despair wanders in their eyes, the landscape sketched in gritty haste across the sky. At the Stewart’s in Nassau, they turn onto High Meadow Road, leaving the rest of the world behind. They pass the Hubbles’ dairy farm, winding down into the hamlet and past the post office, where Warren Hicks, postmaster, is closing up for the night. His buddy, Rudy Caper, waits loyally in his sheepskin coat, a boy in a man’s body, slow as winter sun, his feeble yellow dog sniffing at his heels. The same things every day, she thinks, like landmarks. Only today is not the same. Nothing will ever be the same.
They cross the old metal bridge into High Meadow, the wide creek purple with frost. The trees stand in solemn witness to the rushing cold. Annie directs Hannah down slippery unmarked roads, nothing but fields and trees and sprawling horse farms. “It’s the next one,” Annie tells her. “Turn here.” Halfway down the road their house appears, a strapping white Federal with black shutters. Over the wide black door, wrought-iron numbers declare its age: 1812. Their dream house, Annie thinks.
“I believe there was a war that year,” she remembers Michael saying.
“A war
and
an overture,” she’d replied.
and
an overture,” she’d replied.
They’d come upon the house that first afternoon by mistake, having gotten lost in a labyrinth of dirt roads. When they finally pulled over to consult a map, which did them absolutely no good at all, they saw a For Sale sign hanging in a bramble of raspberry bushes. “A little spit and polish” is what the real estate agent, a woman in a fake leopard coat and gum boots, had said when they saw the house that afternoon. “Spit and polish and a pile of dough,” Michael had whispered to Annie, but they’d made an offer right away, and the owner, who was in a nursing home upstate, had accepted it immediately, which, of course, had made them curious— happy, but curious. When all the pipes started leaking, and all the lights started blinking, they were not the least bit surprised.
Michael didn’t seem to mind. A true optimist, he always saw the bright side, the cup half full, and she was always the one to pour it out. Where she tended to be doubtful and suspicious, Michael had faith, he could wait things out. When they fought, he would avoid her for hours afterward, sometimes days, and the time would soften the harsh corners of their argument and suddenly there would be no more fighting and neither of them could even remember what had gotten them started in the first place. Thinking about it now, Annie starts to cry, and she wipes the tears hard and fast, not wanting the children to see. “Honey, you okay?” Hannah asks.
Annie nods, but she is anything but okay. “Do you want to come in?”
“Only if you want me to.”
Annie shakes her head. “No, it’s okay, you’ve done enough already. Thanks for bringing me home.” She leans through the window and hugs Hannah good-bye.
For a moment Annie stands in the driveway, watching Hannah pull away. She can hear the birds in the trees and a dog barking somewhere far away. It’s hard to even imagine walking through the door. It makes her body ache. But there is nowhere else to go, and she takes a deep breath and steps inside.
It’s warm in the kitchen and smells of cookies the children have baked. Annie grabs hold of the counter, feeling like the victim of a hurricane, her life strewn to pieces. Everything seems to be floating. “Are you okay, Mrs. Knowles?” Christina asks. Before Annie can even think about what to say, the children have run into the room and are standing right before her, noticing at once her distorted expression, her skin bleached white. Without words, they seem to understand, they seem to know, that something has happened, something too awful to utter. Words only make it worse, she thinks, pulling them close, her arms going round them, thinking,
ashes, ashes, all fall down.
ashes, ashes, all fall down.
6
IT ISN’T EASY leaving the doctor behind, when she has to go back to her life. She thought it would be easier, but now she’s trembling, praying he will survive. His face didn’t look right when she left, his skin like dull pewter and his blackened eye oozing pus. Without her, Knowles will die a desperate, tedious death, and she will have that on her hands. The responsibility of his care weighs heavy on her. It frightens her to death.
She calculates that it has been just over eight hours since she’d left the scene of the accident. It had been sunrise when the sky rolled up its tawdry yellow shade. She hadn’t planned on killing Walter Ooms, but he’d left her no choice, and when it was over a new plan had come to her, one that would only help her situation.
It is important to keep busy, she tells herself, to continue as if nothing has happened, nothing out of the ordinary. She doesn’t know what to do about her husband. He will ask questions; he will know something. Like a blind man, he knows things about her. He can smell her fear when they are together. The muscles in her belly grow tight. The reality of her marriage makes her weak.
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