I’m cross-legged on the floor, sitting on the side of the activity table that faces a shape sorter. I watch on as my hand drops a heart-shaped block into the appropriate opening.
There’s a girl on the other side of the table. At first glance, she looks to be about four years old. She wears a pair of crooked pigtails. Strands of blond hair have come loose from the elastics. They fall to her face, hang into her eyes where she leaves them be, not bothering to shove them away. Her sweatshirt is red. Her shoes don’t match. One is a black patent leather Mary Jane and the other a black ballet flat. An easy enough mistake to make.
My own legs have begun to ache. I unknot them, find a different position to sit in, one better suited for a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The waiting room chair catches my eye, but I can’t rise from the floor and leave, not yet, because the little girl across the table is watching me expectantly.
“Go,” she says, grinning oddly, and I ask, “Go where?” though my voice is strangled when I speak. I clear my throat, try again.
“Go where?” I ask, this time sounding more like myself.
On the floor, my body is stiff. My legs hurt. My head hurts. I’m hot. I didn’t catch a wink of sleep last night and am paying for it today. I’m tired and disoriented. This morning’s conversation with Officer Berg has rattled my nerves, made a bad day even worse.
“Go,” the girl says again. When I stare at her, doing nothing, she says, “It’s your turn,” pronouncing none of ther’s, but turning them tow’s instead.
“My turn?” I ask, taken aback, and she says to me, “Yeah. You’re the red, remember?” Except she doesn’t sayred. She sayswed.Wed, wemember?
I shake my head. I must not have been paying attention because I don’t remember. Because I don’t know what she’s talking about until she points it out for me, the red beads at the top of the roller-coaster table, the ones that go up and down the red wire hills, around the red corkscrew turns.
“Oh,” I say, reaching out to touch the red wooden beads before me. “Okay. What should I do with the red?” I ask the girl, her nose oozing snot, eyes a bit glazed over as if febrile, and I don’t have to think hard to know why she’s here. She’s my patient. She’s come to see me. She coughs hard, forgetting to cover her mouth. The little ones always do.
“You do it like this,” she says as she takes her dirty, germy hand and grasps a train of yellow beads with it, driving the beads over the yellow hill and around the yellow corkscrew turns.
“You do it like that,” she says when the beads finally reach the other end and she lets go of them. Her hands fall to her hips as she stares at me, again expectantly.
I smile at the girl as I start to move the red beads.
But before they’ve gone far, I hear“Dr. Foust”hissed at me from behind. It’s a woman’s voice, clearly annoyed. “What are you doing down there, Dr. Foust?”
I turn to see Joyce standing behind me. Her posture is straight, her expression firm. She tells me that my eleven o’clock appointment is here, waiting for me in exam room three. I rise slowly to standing, shake out my stiff legs. I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea to get down on the ground and play with the little girl. I tell her I have to get back to work. I say that maybe we can play again later and she smiles shyly at me. She wasn’t shy before but she’s shy now. She’s changed, and I think it has something to do with my height. Now that I’m standing, I’m no longer three feet tall like her. I’m different.
She rushes to her mama’s side, wraps her arms around her mother’s knees.
I say to her mother, “What a sweet girl,” and her mother thanks me for playing with her.
Around me, the waiting room is crawling with patients. I follow Joyce through the lobby doors and down the hall. But once there, I head the other way from the exam room, going to the kitchen instead, where I help myself to a sip of water from the watercooler, taking a moment to catch my breath. I’m tired. I’m hungry. My head still hurts.
Joyce follows me into the kitchen. She gives me this look, like I have some nerve to drink water at a time like this, when we have a patient waiting. I can see it in her eyes every time she looks at me: Joyce doesn’t like me. I don’t know why Joyce doesn’t like me. There’s nothing I’ve done that would make her not like me. I tell myself it has nothing to do with what happened back in Chicago, that there’s no way she can know about that. No, that stayed there, because I resigned. It was the only way a claim of negligence didn’t end my medical career. But whether I’d practice emergency medicine again, I didn’t know. It was a blot on my confidence, if not my résumé.
I tell Joyce that I’ll be right there, but she stands watching in teal blue scrubs and nursing clogs, with her hands on her hips. She pouts, and only then do I take note of the clock on the wall behind her where red numbers inform me that it’s one fifteen in the afternoon.
“Oh,” I say, though that can’t be. I couldn’t possibly have fallen that far behind schedule. My bedside manner is decent enough—I’ve been known to go on a tad too long with patients—but not like this.
I glance down at my watch, sure that it’s slow, that my watch is to blame for my falling behind schedule. But the time on my watch mirrors the time on the clock.
I feel a frustration start to well inside of me. Emma has mistakenly scheduled too many patients in not enough time, so that I’ll spend the rest of the day scrambling to catch up and we’ll pay for it, the whole lot of us, Joyce, Emma, the patients and me. But mainly me.
It’s a short drive home. The entirety of the island is only about a mile by a mile and a half wide—which means that on a bad day such as this, I don’t have time to decompress before I arrive home. I drive slowly, taking my time, needing an extra lap around the block to catch my breath before I pull into my own driveway.
This far north in the world, night falls early. The sun begins to set at just past four o’clock, leaving us with only nine hours of daylight this time of year, the rest of the day various shades of twilight and dark. The sky is dark now.
I don’t know most of my neighbors. Some I’ve seen in passing, but most I’ve never seen because it’s late fall, early winter, the time of year people have a tendency to hide indoors. The home next door to ours is a summer property only, someone’s second home. It’s unoccupied this time of year. The owners—Will learned and told to me—move to the mainland as soon as fall comes, leaving their home abandoned for Old Man Winter. Which makes me think now that a home like that could be vulnerable to break-ins, making for an easy place for a killer to hide.
As I go by it, the house is dark as it always is until just after seven o’clock when a light flicks on. The light is set on a timer. It goes off near midnight. The timer is meant to serve as a deterrent for burglars and yet so predictable, it’s not.
I go on. I bypass my own home and head up the hill. The Baineses’ house is dark as I drive past. Across the street, at the home of the Nilssons, a light is on, the soft glow of it just barely breaking through the periphery of the heavy drapes. I pause before the home, car idling, my eyes set on the picture window in front. There’s a car in the drive, Mr. Nilsson’s rusty sedan. Puffs of smoke spew from the chimney and into the winter night. Someone is home.
I have half a mind to pull into the drive, park the car, knock on the front door and ask about what Officer Berg told me. How Mr. Nilsson claimed he saw me arguing with Morgan in the days before she died.
But I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I do, it might come off as brash—threatening even—and that’s not the message I want to send.
