The Witching Hour (19 page)

It was a rare place, this. Better for her surely than some sterile hospital room, or vista of close-cropped lawn with no more variation than a synthetic carpet. And what made him think that he could have ever done for her what so many doctors had failed to do? Maybe she had never had a chance. Only God knows.

Suddenly he glimpsed a visitor behind the rusted screens, sitting beside the poor mad woman. Nice young man it seemed—tall, dark-haired, well dressed in spite of the wilting temperature. Maybe one of those cousins from away, from New York City or California.

The young fella must have just come out on the porch from the parlor, because a moment ago he had not been there.

So solicitous, he seemed. It was positively loving the way he inclined towards Deirdre. Just as if he was kissing her cheek. Yes, that was what he was doing. Even in the dense shade, the priest could see it, and it touched him deeply. It made the sadness well in him painfully.

But the window man was finishing now. He was gathering up his ladder. He came down the front steps and went around the flagstone walk and past the screen porch, using his ladder as he went, to drive back the banana trees and the swollen oleander.

The priest was finished too. He had done his penance. He could go home now, back to the hot barren pavements of Constance Street, and the cool confines of the rectory. Slowly he turned and moved towards the corner.

He glanced back only once. The screen porch was empty now save for Deirdre. But surely that nice young man would come back out soon. It had gone right to the priest’s heart to see that tender kiss, to know that someone even now still loved that lost soul that he himself had failed to save so long ago.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
she had to do tonight. Someone she was supposed to call. And it was important, too. But after fifteen hours on duty—and twelve of them spent in the Operating Room—she could not now remember.

She wasn’t Rowan Mayfair yet, with all Rowan’s personal griefs and concerns. She was just Dr. Mayfair, empty as a clear pane of glass, sitting here silent in the doctors’ coffee room, hands shoved in the pockets of her dirty white coat, her feet on the chair opposite, a Parliament cigarette on her lip, listening to them talk as neurosurgeons always talk, regurgitating in language every exciting moment of the day.

Soft bursts of laughter, voices overlapping on voices, smell of alcohol, rustle of starched clothes, sweet aroma of the cigarettes. Never mind the personal disgrace that almost all of them smoked. It was nice to remain here, comfortable in the glare of the lights on the dirty Formica table, and the dirty linoleum tile, and the dirty beige walls. Nice to be putting off the thinking time, the time when memory would come back to fill her up again and render her heavy and opaque.

In truth, it had been a damn near perfect day, which was why her feet hurt so much. She had been through three emergency surgeries, one following another, from the gunshot wound at six
A.M.
to the car crash victim brought in four hours ago. And if every day was like this day, her life was going to be just fine. It was going to be perfectly wonderful, actually.

She was aware of that just now, in a relaxed sort of way. After ten years of medical school and internship and residency she was what she had always wanted to be—a doctor, a neurosurgeon, and most specifically the new board-certified Staff Attending in Neurosurgery in a giant university hospital where the Neurological Trauma Center could keep her operating on accident victims almost full-time.

She had to admit she was glorying in it, glorying in her first week as something other than an overworked and critically exhausted
chief resident who still had to operate fifty percent of the time under someone else’s eye.

Even the inevitable talk today had not been so terrible—the endless running diatribe in the Operating Room, the dictating of the notes after, and finally the lengthy informal coffee room review. She liked these doctors around her, the shiny-faced interns opposite, Dr. Peters and Dr. Blake, who had just begun their rotation and were looking at her as if she were a witch instead of a doctor. And Dr. Simmons, the chief resident, who told her now and then in a heated whisper that she was the finest doctor he’d ever seen in surgery and that the nurses said the same thing, and Dr. Larkin, the beloved chief of neurosurgery, known to his protégées as Lark, who had forced her over and over again today to elaborate—“Explain, Rowan, explain in detail. You have to tell these boys what you’re doing. Gentlemen, behold, this is the only neurosurgeon in western civilization who does not like to talk about her work.”

Understatement. She hated talking. She was innately suspicious of language because she could “hear” with remarkable accuracy what lay behind it, and also she just didn’t know how to talk very well.

Now they were talking about Dr. Larkin’s virtuoso performance this afternoon with the meningioma, thank heaven, and she could drift in this delicious exhaustion, savoring the taste of the cigarette, and the awful coffee, and the lovely glare of the light on the beautifully blank walls.

Trouble was, she’d told herself this morning to remember about this personal thing, this call that had to be made, this something that really mattered to her. So what did that mean? It would come back as soon as she stepped out of the building.

And she could do that any time she liked. After all, she was the Attending, and she didn’t have to be here longer than fifteen hours, and she never had to sleep in the on-call room again, and nobody expected her to go down to Emergency just to see what was going on, though left to her own devices, perhaps, that is what she would have liked to do.

Two years ago, less than that perhaps, she would have been long gone by this time, headed over the Golden Gate at the speed limit, eager to be Rowan Mayfair again, in the wheelhouse of the
Sweet Christine
, singlehanding her out of Richardson Bay and into the open sea. Only when she had set the autopilot for a great circular course, well out of the way of the channels, would the exhaustion have conquered her. She would have gone down below deck into the cabin where the wood shone as brilliantly as the polished brass, and falling into the double bunk, she would
have lost herself in a thin sleep through which all the little sounds of the boat penetrated sweetly.

But that was before the process of working miracles on the operating table had become positively addictive. Research had still now and then beckoned. And Ellie and Graham, her adoptive parents, were still living, and the glass-walled house on the Tiburon shore was not a mausoleum filled with dead people’s books, dead people’s clothes.

She had to walk through that mausoleum to get to the
Sweet Christine.
She had to see the inevitable mail which still came for Ellie and Graham. And maybe even hear a phone machine message or two from an out-of-town friend who didn’t know that Ellie had died of cancer last year, and that Graham had died of “a stroke,” to put it simply, two months before Ellie’s death. She watered the ferns still in memory of Ellie, who had played music for them. She drove Graham’s Jaguar sedan because to sell it would be a nuisance. She had never cleaned out his desk.

Stroke. A dark ugly feeling passed over her. Think not of Graham dying on the kitchen floor but of the day’s victories. You saved three lives during the past fifteen hours, when other doctors might have let them die. To other lives in other hands you gave your skillful assistance. And now, safe in the womb of the Intensive Care Unit, three of those patients are sleeping, and they have eyes that can see, and mouths that can shape words, and when you hold their hands, they grip as you tell them to grip.

Yes, she couldn’t have asked for more. Would that she could always leave the tissue transplants and the tumors to others. She thrived on crisis. She needed it. She’d go home in a little while only because it was healthy to do so, healthy to rest her eyes and her feet and her brain, of course, and to be someplace besides here for the weekend; to be on the
Sweet Christine
, at sea.

For now, rest in this great ship called the hospital, for that is exactly what it felt like—a submarine, traveling without sound through time. The lights never went out. The temperature never varied. The engines never shut down. And we, the crew, are bonded together, in spite of anger, or resentment, or competition. We are bonded and there is a form of love whether we acknowledge it or not.

“You’re looking for a miracle!” the supervisor in Emergency had said to her at six this evening, contemptuously, glaze-eyed with exhaustion. “Wheel this woman over against the wall, and save your juices for somebody you can do something for!”

“I want nothing but miracles,” Rowan had answered. “We’re
going to get the glass and dirt out of her brain, and then we’ll take it from there.”

No way to tell him that when she had placed her hands on the woman’s shoulders, she had “listened” with her diagnostic sense to a thousand little signals; and they had told her, infallibly, that the woman could live. She knew what she’d see when the bone fragments had been carefully lifted out of the fracture and frozen for later replacement, when the torn dura mater had been further slit and the bruised tissue beneath it magnified by the powerful surgical scope. Plenty of living brain, unharmed, functioning, once she’d sucked the blood away from it, and cauterized the tiny ruptured vessels so that the bleeding would stop.

It was the same infallible sense she’d had that day out on the ocean when she’d hoisted the drowned man, Michael Curry, onto the deck with the winch, and touched his cold gray flesh. Yes, there is life in there. Bring him back.

The drowned man. Michael Curry. That was it, of course, that was what she had made a note to remember. Call Curry’s doctor, Curry’s doctor had left a message for her both at the hospital and on her machine at home.

It had been over three months since that bitter cold evening in May, with the fog blanketing the distant city so that not a single light was visible, and the drowned man on the deck of the
Sweet Christine
had looked as dead as any corpse she’d ever seen.

She stubbed out the cigarette. “Good night, Doctors,” she said rising. “Monday, eight o’clock,” she said to the interns. “No, don’t stand up.”

Dr. Larkin caught her sleeve between two fingers. When she tried to pull loose, he held tight.

“Don’t take that boat out alone, Rowan.”

“Come on, Chief.” She tried to free herself. Didn’t work. “I’ve been taking that boat out alone since I was sixteen.”

“Bad news, Rowan, bad news,” he said. “Suppose you hit your head out there, fall overboard.”

She gave a soft polite laugh, though she was in fact irritated by this talk, and then she was out the door, heading past the elevators—too slow—and towards the concrete stairs.

Maybe she should take one last look at the three patients in Intensive Care before she made her exit; and suddenly the thought of leaving at all oppressed her. The thought of not coming back until Monday was even worse.

Shoving her hands in her pockets, she hurried up the two flights of stairs to the fourth floor.

The gleaming upper corridors were so quiet, so removed from
the mayhem inevitably going on in Emergency. A lone woman slept on the couch in the darkly carpeted waiting room. The old nurse at the ward station only waved as Rowan passed by. There had been times in her harried intern days when, on call, she had strolled these corridors in the middle of the night rather than try to sleep. Back and forth she’d walked, covering the length of one floor after another, in the belly of the giant submarine, lulled by the faint whisper of countless machines.

Too bad the chief knew about the
Sweet Christine
, she thought now, too bad that desperate and frightened, she’d brought him home with her the afternoon of her adoptive mother’s funeral, and taken him out to sit on the deck, drinking wine beneath a blue Tiburon sky. Too bad that in those hollow and metallic moments, she had confessed to Lark that she didn’t want to be in the house anymore, that she lived on the boat, and sometimes lived for it, taking it out alone after every shift, no matter how long she’d been on, no matter how tired she was.

Telling people—did it ever make things better? Lark had piled cliché upon cliché as he tried to comfort her. And from then on everybody at the hospital knew about the
Sweet Christine.
And she wasn’t just Rowan the silent one, but Rowan the adopted one, the one whose family had died out in less than half a year, who went to sea in the big boat all alone. She had also become Rowan who would not accept Lark’s invitations to dinner, when any other single female doctor on the staff might have done so in an instant.

If only they knew the rest of it, she thought, how very mysterious she really was, even unto herself. And what would they have said about the men she liked, the stalwart officers of the law, and the heroes of the fire brigade hook and ladder trucks whom she hunted in noisy wholesome neighborhood bars, picking her partners as much for their roughened hands and their roughened voices as for their heavy chests and powerful arms. Yes, what about that, what about all those couplings in the lower cabin of the
Sweet Christine
with the police-issue .38 revolver in its black leather holster slung over the hook on the wall.

And the conversations after—no, call them monologues—in which these men with the desperate need so similar to that of the neurosurgeon’s relived their moments of danger and achievement, of moxie and dexterity. Scent of courage on their pressed uniform shirts. Sing a song of life and death.

Why that kind of man? Graham had once demanded. “You look for them to be dumb, uneducated, thick-necked? What if one of them puts his meaty fist into your face?”

“But that’s just it,” she’d said coldly, not even bothering to
look at him. “They don’t do that. They save lives, and that’s why I like them. I like heroes.”

“That sounds like a fool of a fourteen-year-old girl talking,” Graham had replied acidly.