I phone an attorney, and the discovery process begins, though we won’t go to court, the attorney tells me, because juries have been known to award upward of a million dollars for legitimate malpractice suits, whereas out-of-court settlements are usually less. I have malpractice insurance, which covers me up to a million dollars, though it doesn’t cover the cost of attorney fees, the loss of patients while I’m trying to save my reputation and practice. But whether or not to settle will be up to the insurance company to decide. If a jury awards Ms. Grey more than a million, or if the settlement demand exceeds that amount and I’m deemed to be at fault, the difference is mine to pay.
And then there’s the fact that my malpractice insurance rates will soar steadily, sky-high until I can no longer stay afloat. The fifteenth of the month draws near, meaning I owe the landlord rent. I still don’t have it, and I’m running out of time. I need to make quick decisions now, trying to turn an easy profit, and so I place the maximum I can on the Warriors in tonight’s NBA finals, though they’re in a do-or-die situation—down two games to one. I figure it’s fitting because I am, too.
More patients disappear, having caught wind of the referral giveaway across town, I tell myself, trying hard not to take it personally. It’s about the grill, notme. But maybe it is me.
Each day another poor rating appears online, and I try to convince myself that Melinda Grey and Connor are not in cahoots, putting their heads together to think of ways to ruin my life. I call Connor, once, twice, three times a week to try to talk this out, but he doesn’t answer his phone. The office ladies seem upset that the congenial Dr. C is gone. They don’t tell me directly, but I hear them talking about it when they think I’m not in the room. We never talk about the scene they observed in the hallway, me threatening to call the police on Connor if he didn’t leave. But we’re all still thinking about it, especially me. I hear them talking to clients on the phone. “No, I’m sorry,” they say to a patient who’s called to make an appointment. “Dr. Daubney is no longer with us. But I can schedule an appointment with Dr. Solberg, if you’d like,” and then inevitably the conversation drifts to quiet as the patient decides whether I’m good enough for them to see. Connor was always the more charming of us, the more witty and gregarious. The children loved him; he made dental exams fun. But not me. Sometimes these patients schedule an appointment with me, but other times I hear Nancy or Stacy explaining how they don’t know where Dr. C has gone or if, wherever he is, he’s taking new patients. There’s nothing in his contract that prevents him from usurping patients of mine, not that I could blame him if he tried.
At night, I find it harder and harder to sleep, my rest obstructed by the thoughts that fill my mind, that and Clara’s body pillow that lies between us like a third spouse. I end up spending half of my nights on the living room sofa or the floor. Halcion is my only saving grace, two pills before bedtime, swallowed secretly with a swig of water from the bathroom sink, to help cross that bridge to dreamland. I take the pills from work before I leave, not bothering to make a note on the inventory log. Since I’m the only one dispensing drugs these days, no one will know that it’s missing. It’s a lifesaver for many of my phobic patients, making them oblivious to what happens in the dental chair, and yet fairly alert by the time they go home, though someone else always has to drive them there. They’re never allowed to drive home alone.
The little pills sedate me deeply but only for a short time—creating an amnesiac effect, the hours between eleven and two lost to thin air—so that when I awaken in the middle of the night to Clara’s agonizing cries about another leg cramp, I easily come around to massage the pain away. And then, when the pain passes, I watch as she settles back in for sleep, my fingers tiptoeing down her back, slinking around her swollen midriff and along her inner thigh, in the hopes that she’ll turn to me, drawing my attention away from the thoughts of delinquent payments and professional misconduct that fill my mind. “I’m so tired,” she drones, slipping away from my advance, legs woven around the pillow instead of me. “Another time, Nick,” she purrs into the pillowcase, and like that, she’s asleep, breaths flattening, a restful snore.
And I’m left alone to think, swallowing two more pills so that I stop thinking.
One morning a few days later I receive a text from Clara while I’m at the office, hands buried deep inside a patient’s mouth. 2 cm dilated, 40% effaced, she says, and only then do I remember an appointment with the obstetrician. I told her I’d try to make it, but I didn’t make it.
You’re almost there, I type into the keypad after my appointment is through. Soon I will be a dad. Again. Though I’m debilitated by a sudden pang of guilt, seeing the world into which my baby will arrive, one that is clearly not up to snuff.
I don’t have much time left to get this right.
And then later in the afternoon my cell phone rings, and I answer the call, expecting Clara, but am surprised instead by the melodious voice on the other end of the line.
“Nick,” she says, “it’s me. Kat.” My heart rises and falls all at the same time. I had hoped I’d heard the last of Kat, and have the sudden sense of swimming upstream, of digging myself into a deeper and darker hole. It isn’t about Kat, but right now I don’t need any more complications in my life.
“Hi, Kat,” I say, and it’s then that her voice catches, and she says, “I need to see you, Nick,” and I know I’m in a jam here, having seen Kat two times now without ever telling Clara. I try to put it off, to tell her I’m swamped at work, that I don’t have the time. But Kat, oddly reminiscent of eighteen-year-old Kat, begins to cry.
“Please,” she begs over the phone. “Just for a few minutes, Nick. There was something I should have said the other day,” she says, her words hard to hear through the tears.
And so I say okay. I say it so that she’ll stop crying. I tell her that I can meet for one quick drink, but then I have to split. We make plans to meet at a little bar down the block after my last patient is through, and after I apply sealants to a seven-year-old’s teeth, I make haste and leave. I don’t want Clara sitting at home, wondering where I am. From the parking lot, I send a text to Clara that I’ll be home soon. Be there in an hour, I say, and scurry in to join Kat, wishing and hoping that I could wake up from this nightmare of mine, and that it would all be a dream. A bad dream, but still a dream. I wish that I could forget somehow—the sad state of my finances, the feud with Connor, the medical malpractice suit. I wish that I could get away from it for a while, that I could take a breather. Drown my sorrows in a bottle of booze or find something else to take my mind off of this shit storm that is now my life, if only for a while.
And that’s when I spot Kat sitting all alone in a corner booth, waiting for me.
She looks stunning as always, and for one split second she takes my breath away, there in the dim bar lights, wearing this gauzy pale pink dress that, in combination with the blond hair and fair skin, makes her look angelic. A tress of hair falls across a single eye, and she leaves it there, a lock of hair that is undeniably sexy and appealing.
My knees buckle for one quick moment, and just like that we’re eighteen years old again, wild and reckless, living only for the moment, not caring what tomorrow may bring.
CLARA
At eight in the morning the doorbell rings, and of course I’m expecting flowers, the poor deliveryman waiting with his idle van parked outside, about to greet me in my pajamas for the forth time this week.
But it’s not a delivery of flowers.
Standing outside on my front porch is Emily, dressed in black running shorts and a fleece half-zip hoodie that is certainly too thick for a day like today. On her feet is a pair of pricey running shoes, and she jogs in place, warming up for a run, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, strands escaping here and there and falling into her face. It’s only 8:00 a.m., and already the heat and humidity rush in to greet me, fusing together with the inside air, which is already hot. Maisie bounds down the stairs at the sound of knocking—a hungry Harriet hot on her heels—her sweaty hair stuck to her forehead. “Why don’t you go turn on the TV?” I tell her, and she nods her head a sleepy okay, as Emily and I step outside and I gently pull the door closed. The sun is brilliant this morning, dazzlingly bright, and I curse it for having the audacity to show its face after everything it has done. It’s the sun’s fault that Nick is dead.
Or maybe not.
The first thing I see are the red marks singed into Emily’s skin, reaching from the edges of the fleece hoodie, which is doing a piss-poor job of concealing them. That is its purpose after all, not to keep Emily warm on this hot day, but rather to hide the red marks, as she tugs indiscreetly at the zipper to make certain it’s up as high as it will go, which, as luck would have it, isn’t high enough. There are bruises there, small but visible to the naked eye, discolored skin from bleeding beneath the surface where her husband’s fingers pressed on the windpipe, paring down the oxygen supply, making her gasp for air. She tugs again at the hoodie, trying hard to shroud the bruises, but she cannot undo what has been done. It’s too late; I’ve already seen. The fleece is two inches too short, and we’ve had this conversation before, Emily and me, her wine-induced disclosures of how during intercourse Theo would throttle her from time to time until she felt a tingling sensation throughout her body and an overwhelming sense of vertigo, coupled with the all-consuming fear that she was about to die. And then he’d release her. It was meant for pleasure, hers and his, but only one of them thought it was fun.
She confessed this to me long ago, a year or more, one afternoon while Theo was traveling—Cincinnati that time—as she and I sat together in her backyard watching the kids play a game of chase. Teddy wasIt, and he sprinted quickly and clumsily after Maisie, who clung to a nearby tree that they’d deemed to be base. Emily and I were drinking that day, a day not so different than this one—hot and sunny—some kind of cooler she’d concocted with peach juice and pineapple juice, but also a long pour of Moscato wine. I’d confessed something trite about Nick—how he left his gym shoes lying around, how he mislaid used articles of clothing here and there, somehow or other unable to locate the hamper in our master bath—and Emily countered with this: how Theo had a fetish for asphyxiaphilia, a word she had to explain to me because I couldn’t imagine such a thing would ever exist. It sounded primeval to me, violent and heathen, something ancient Vikings might do when they weren’t pillaging others’ homelands. It was the stuff of high school house parties when parents weren’t home—reprobate teenagers without a clue about the fragility or the sanctity of life, getting blitzed and taking part in madcap sex games as if they were immortal—and not what middle-class suburbanites did while their children slept soundly in the room next door.
That day, I took in the coral-colored bruises left behind by Theo’s aroused hands, and I could see in Emily’s eyes that she was scared. After I’d left, I spent days trying to imagine it, Theo near killing her and then bringing her back from the dead. Again and again. For pleasure and fun, as well as something else, I assumed. Dominion and control.
“I thought Theo was traveling?” I say now, standing outside on the front stoop beside Emily. “Massachusetts for an auto show.”
She nods her head and says, “He is. He was. He came home last night, early. He wasn’t due until tomorrow afternoon. It isn’t what you think,” she says quickly then, one concurrent thought, as her hands move to her neck and she feigns excuses: she lost her balance, took a nosedive down the basement stairs, Theo tried to break the fall. She knows how I feel about this custom of theirs, this strange tradition.You should leave him if he scares you, I’d told Emily once, twice, three times, and every time she looked at me despairingly and said how she’d never be able to support herself without Theo around, how Theo would take Teddy from her. Emily had worked for years as a pediatric nurse, a position she left upon marrying Theo, and in the subsequent years her nursing license expired. She was no longer able to practice as an RN.
I told her once that if she didn’t leave him I would call the police.
Emily called my bluff.
