The Dog Year (6 page)

“Clearly you got Dad's genes, Charlie.”

Phong turned to Lucy then. “All this nostalgia is nice,” he said. “But more important, Lucy, what are you going to do?”

“I'm going to attend the minimal number of therapy sessions they've mandated, and then get back to work. I'm going to get over my anxiety and clean out this room. I'm going to . . .” She stopped and considered what would be next on the list. “Well, I don't know what else.”

Charles said, “Try and meet new people. Work through the grief and loss from Richard's death. Move out of the guest room and back into the bedroom. Think about doing something other than just working all the time.”

Lucy shoved a bag of unopened chocolate away and said, “You just don't understand, Charlie. I don't want any of those things. I want Richard. I want to have his baby. I want to talk about our jobs together and hold his hand. I don't want a new life. I want my old one.” She put her head back on the couch and two tears raced each other to the tip of her chin.

Phong said, “It is going to get better, Lucy, but you know what they say: Sometimes it's gotta get worse before it gets better.”

Lucy sighed. She thought about Stewart from frozen foods. “Blue flies are coming,” she said.

I
n the U. S. of A., if you wake one morning and need confirmation that the lump in your breast, newly discovered in the shower, is only a non-cancerous fibroid and not cancer, or if you decide that you could leave your abusive husband if only you were able to talk to someone with letters after his name, you can call a clinic and wait, for what could be months, for an appointment. But if you are a plastic surgeon with sticky fingers, you are shoved, against your will, to the head of the line. Getting in to see a particular physician at a health-care clinic is like trying to train a cat to come: It will only come to you on its own time. In Lucy's unfortunate case,
its
own time was a week, and the clinic was housed in the very place Lucy wanted to avoid: the hospital she stole from.

With her head down, avoiding eye contact, she scuttled through the parking structure, veering away from the broad front doors and over to a side entrance.

In the hallway, trying to look inconspicuous, she heard someone calling her name.

“Dr. Peterman?” Lucy turned to see the approaching Mrs. Hallorman, the last patient she'd seen before being discovered as a thief. “Your staff called. Said I have to have another doctor. That you aren't my doctor anymore.” Becky Hallorman's normally luminous skin was now tinged with worry and fear.

“I'm on leave for a time, but I'll be back.”

“How long? Will you be back for my surgery?”

“I don't know. I—”

“I don't want anyone else. I feel like you understand what I'm going through.”

“I do. I do understand.”

Becky Hallorman touched Lucy's hand. “Did you know you were leaving? Why didn't you tell me?”

There were many things Lucy hadn't considered when she repeatedly slipped a syringe or a hemostat into her pocket and walked out the front door of Med One Hospital and Clinics. She hadn't considered the word
theft
, for one thing. Nor did she really consider medical paraphernalia separate from herself or her position at the hospital. The hospital, her job, seemingly owned her. If she had to work hours well past a traditional workweek, giving most of her time to the hallways and patients who walked them, she never asked for extra dispensation. So, honestly, when she took a roll of tape without thinking, it seemed petty for the hospital to call it stealing. It had also never occurred to Lucy to consider the existence of security cameras, or the cost of replacing missing supplies. And it had
really
never occurred to her to consider the impact on her patients of being discovered a crook.

“I'm so afraid,” Becky said with desperate eyes.

Lucy stopped. She gripped Mrs. Hallorman's arm. “Don't let that fear take root, Becky. Pry it loose. Cancer and fear feed off each other. Here.” Lucy rummaged in her purse and found her business card. With a Sharpie, she penned her home phone number. “Call me any time, day or night.”

Then, using her master key, she slipped inside the side door and started up the stairs to the tenth floor. On the fifth-floor landing she stopped. Breathing heavily, she unbuttoned her gray wool jacket just as the door to the pediatric floor swung wide. She jumped back, narrowly missing a collision with Charise Schaefer, Junior Leaguer, hospital volunteer, and self-appointed mascot.

“Look who it is!” Charise crowed. “What a surprise. I haven't seen hide nor hair of you since the Halloween party. Shame on you for missing my after-party and keeping my doctor friend waiting.” She wagged her naughty finger at Lucy and gave her the look of a superior mommy.

“I went home pretty early. I ate something that didn't agree with me.”

“Drank something, I heard. But no matter, I forgive you. Are you on your way up or down? I always take the stairs. That way, I can eat whatever I want and keep my girlish figure.” Charise spoke with a definite nasal twang, a holdover from her rural Minnesota roots, which she tried to hide by wearing clothes from DKNY and BCBG and keeping her tanning packages up to date.

“You go ahead. I'm catching my breath.”

“Gotta keep moving if you're going to increase your fitness,” Charise said, at which point she linked arms with Lucy. “So when can we get you to meet my guy? He's divorced. Married a real witch, if you know what I mean. No kids, which is ideal, don't you think?”

Lucy pulled her arm free. “Charise, I'm not dating yet. I only just lost my husband a few months ago.”

“Oh, I know, sweetie. And I can see why you'd want to wait, but I've read that a date within the first year as a widow is directly associated with successful bereavement and subsequent marriage. I Googled it.”

“Successful bereavement?” Grabbing the door handle, Lucy said, “This is my floor.”

“Urology?”

Lucy read the plaque:
SIXTH FLOOR
. Urology. She nodded. “I haven't had a good pee since my husband died. Maybe I should clear this up before I meet your guy. They think polyps or a despondent bladder. Something to do with grief, I guess.”

Charise pulled her arm free and said, “Polyps?”

“Yeah. Viral polyps.”

Watching Charise evacuate the stairwell as if Lucy had threatened to wipe a bladder polyp on her immaculate silk shirt almost made the whole exchange palatable. Hoping the last four flights, which would take her to mental health, would be less like an obstacle course, Lucy slipped her coat off and counted the stairs. The offices on that floor weren't much different from the plastic surgery suites. Maybe a few more plants. Definitely a lot more brochures: OCD, anxiety disorder, depression; one-stop shopping. The bathroom Lucy visited in order to wipe her sweaty hands featured signs with contact numbers for abuse hotlines.
DO YOU FEEL SAFE AT HOME?
one read.

In the waiting room, she took a seat in the comfortable, calming, plum-and-gold upholstered chairs. A coffee machine perked in the corner next to several current magazines offering ways to get “Your Best Self.” One article featured a kitchen renovation that would allegedly bring a family together, reunite loved ones, and heal all hurts. Another hawked the ten-pound solution to all troubles, including a slow economy: “Eat less—Spend less
.
Lose it and Live Again.” Lucy considered the energy it would take to rifle through each magazine, find the right article, and read up on the various keys to happiness, and decided, quite possibly, that doing so was just too grueling. Besides, in her experience, once you lost it, it was hard to live again.

The door to the clinic's offices opened and a strikingly beautiful girl walked in. Lucy examined her with the unabashed scrutiny that was the province of women who don't think they are pretty. This girl's blond hair was thick and blown flat as a paint stirrer, her makeup flawlessly applied. As Lucy stared, she realized the girl was actually a woman, considerably older than Lucy had first thought.

The woman took a seat. She had an almost perfectly symmetrical face with cheekbones that could part hair. The lip gloss and mascara she wore ran interference, distracting onlookers from her clearly sagging spirit. She was dressed in a soft, loose sweater and jeans that made her look like a casual starlet waiting for the paparazzi to snap her photo. Lucy caught sight of a wrist, more bone than flesh. Aware of Lucy's eyes on her, the woman tugged her sleeve down, inadvertently exposing a collarbone that jutted out like a fracture. She was a gorgeous bag of angles covered with luminous pale skin and fine, downy hair.

Lucy had certainly seen her kind before. Plastic surgeons, even the ones who dealt with reconstruction, as she did, saw their share of eating disorders. When starving, purging, and exercise didn't get rid of the inevitable consequences of life, whether due to aging or the birth of a baby, they would come to her, unwilling to live with any evidence of entropy, weakness, lack of control, or imperfection.

Lucy caught the woman's eye and smiled. A soft breath escaped from her lips. Then she leaned over and said, low-voiced, “I steal stuff I don't need.”

Something sparked between the women. They were team captains of their respective pathologies. Without a smile the woman said, “I won't eat what I
do
need.”

The assistant at the check-in desk signaled for Lucy to enter the counselor's office. Before doing so, she pulled a business card out of her purse and said to her waiting-room companion, sitting on what had to be incredibly uncomfortable pelvic bones, “If you want to come over some time and not eat . . .” She left the sentence unfinished. The woman's spider-like fingers unfolded and grasped the card. She nodded, offered a brittle smile, and said, “Okay, thanks. I'll bring something you don't need.”

*   *   *

Lucy's therapist didn't look like anyone she'd met in her short-term experience with grief counselors. Historically, she found therapists to be overly personal people prone to making generalizations and wearing clogs. But this one, Dr. Tig Monohan, wore
normal
around her shoulders like a shawl. She didn't have the kind of eyebrows that Lucy associated with therapists, the ones that conveyed sympathy or disapproval with a twitch, but she did have glossy brown hair and she wore nice pants.

“So this is how it works, Dr. Peterman. We start here with an evaluation. I'll ask you some questions. Please answer as honestly as you can and then we'll decide what kind of therapy would be the best for you.”

She sat with her hands in her lap. The little girl in the principal's office. The bad girl from the playground. She'd worn black pants and a cashmere turtleneck to show how seriously she took her situation.

“Here's the thing,” she said as she glanced around. “How am I going to get here every week for therapy without running into everyone I know asking unanswerable questions? Yes, I stole a bunch of incontinence pads. No, I don't want to come to the Christmas party. No, those two things are not related.”

“That's part of the deal. You have to own this. No more denial.”

“I don't deny that I did it. That would be hard to do, given the video surveillance camera and amount of stuff in my bedroom.”

“Denial comes in many forms. But we'll get to that.” Dr. Monohan riffled through the papers on her desk.

“I don't know why I do it.” Lucy's stomach did a flip. “I mean, I'm not so far gone that I don't know it's wrong. I'm actually a pretty good person. I just want to go back to work.”

Tig stopped shuffling papers and trained her gaze on Lucy. “Your status as a good person isn't at issue here, Dr. Peterman.”

“Stealing is bad.”

A smile flashed across Tig's face and she nodded. “Stealing
is
bad,” she said with measured humor and raised eyebrows. “The bible tells me so. Shame on you.”

Lucy met Tig's eyes. Nonjudgmental acceptance. She felt her throat close with gratitude.

“May I call you Lucy?”

Lucy nodded.

“Look, Lucy, I've got people in here who can't live without multiple addictions to pain pills, alcohol, and weed. One of my doctor patients smells women's feet while they are under anesthesia. Yesterday, one of our higher-ups admitted to asking strange women to lick his balls. You're the light at the end of a long week.”

“Seriously?”

“Serious as a breast lift. That's plastic surgery humor,” she added. “I thought you'd appreciate it. Being a therapist is all about knowing your audience.”

Lucy blinked. “So are you saying this is just a formality?”

“Ha! Don't you wish. No. You've got issues, Lucy. We're gonna check those issues out, hopefully get you to stop taking IV bags, and reinstate you into medicine where you belong. Make no mistake, though: You've got some work to do.”

“Okay. But I think I can stop stealing anytime.”

“Oh, I'm sure you do,” Tig said kindly. “I've been an alcohol and other drugs therapist for ten years; I know intention is a great short-term fix, but I don't want you stealing tampons from a gas station in three months. We're going for a long view here. You're getting a tune-up that includes working on your impulse control and working through your grief. That's going to take some time.”

“How long?”

“That's up to me. And, to some extent, you.” She met Lucy's eyes. “You'll work in this office, and go to regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“What? No . . . I.”

“We're a small town. That's all there is for easily accessible group therapy that deals with addiction.”

“Forget it. There is no way I'm going to AA.”

“Then you'd better find a new job.” Tig looked her straight in the eye. The women faced each other like two brick walls, one intact, the other crumbling. Lucy's glance faltered and Tig spoke again, this time more gently. “I'll be there. It's part of my clinic commitment. Since we send all kinds of people to the meetings, we find it's helpful to have a therapist there, at least some of the time. Now some questions, just to get the details out of the way, an assessment for the record. Have you ever stolen things that you really didn't need?”

The question worked like a stun gun on Lucy. She was a thief, a crook, and a robber. This last word made Lucy grimace. She thought of a masked face, a striped suit, a filled sack, the Hamburgler.

Tig answered her own question, consulting her notes. “Unless you're planning on opening a clinic, I'm assuming you didn't need the twenty-two suture kits and fifteen packages of latex gloves.” She looked at Lucy over her reading glasses and Lucy nodded. Tig continued, “Did you feel a sense of pleasure or relief right after you stole these things?”

“No. Sometimes, I didn't even notice what I was doing. I'd come home with a pocket full of two-by-two pads and not remember taking them.”

“So no sense of pleasure or relief? No feelings of anger?”