Flashback (1988) (15 page)

“Terrible, but true,” Frank said. “I had hoped to spare the old duffer any more humiliation, but after hearing his little speech the other morning, and seeing the way he’s gotten to you, well, it seems I have no—”

“Frank, does anything about this letter strike you as strange?”

Frank set his cigar aside and leaned forward.

“What are you talking about?”

Zack slid the letter back across the desk.

“Well, for one thing, this woman doesn’t substantiate her charges with one specific example.”

“Well, there’s no doubt she has them. Zack, don’t you think you’re grasping at straws?”

“And for another, the whole damn thing is just too … too sterile.”

“What?”

“Just look at it, Frank. Not one bit of sensitivity or poignancy. Not one indication that she understands the charges she’s making could quite possibly send a man’s life down the drain—a man who has practiced surgery in this town for thirty years. Christ, for all the awareness she’s showing, she might just as well be writing to complain that a neighbor’s poodle is shitting in her flower bed. The more I think about it, the more this letter smells. I think that woman should be spoken with, face to face.”

“You don’t think I’ve done that?”

“Well, then,
I
want to. It’s the only way I’m going to even begin to believe all this.”

“You go to her or anyone else about this business,” Frank said, jabbing a finger at him, “and you’ll be out on your ass quicker than you can say ‘scalpel.’ This is my affair—mine and Ultramed’s. You really have it in your mind to fuck things up for me around here, don’t you?”

“Frank, that’s nonsense.”

“Is it?”

For several frozen moments, Zack could only sit and stare at his brother. Despite his tan, Frank looked pallid, his expression a disconcerting amalgam of anger and—what? Fear? They had had their differences over the years, true, and from time to time, some magnificent arguments. But Zack sensed something far more powerful at work here.

“Frank, please,” he managed. “Stop sounding like I’m your goddamn enemy. I’m not. I just care about Beaulieu and I want to see that he gets a fair shake, okay?”

A margin of color returned to Franks cheeks.

“Okay?” Zack asked again.

Frank smiled.

“Sure, sport,” he said, far too amicably. “I understand. I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just leave it that I’ll keep you posted and you’ll keep an eye on things … from a distance. That way I get to do what I’m paid to do, and you get to keep from taking a fall. I promise you, Beaulieu will get every break that’s coming to him. Yes?”

Zack gauged the intensity in his brother’s eyes, and then nodded. Their session had gone far enough.

“So, that’s taken care of,” Frank said, tilting back in his chair and folding his hands in his lap. His tone and expression gave no hint of their disagreement. “Listen, how about we have dinner sometime this weekend? I’ll have Lisette give you a call.”

“Sure, Frank. That’d be fine.”

“Excellent. Oh, and by the way,” he added, getting up from his chair as Zack stood to go, “tell that new squeeze of yours that we’re all praying everything goes well for her tomorrow.”

Now Zack felt the color drain from
his
face. “How did you—”

His brother patted him on the shoulder.

“Sport, if someone who works for me so much as farts anywhere in this hospital, sooner or later I get a whiff. That’s worth remembering. Trust me on that one and you’ll be doing both of us a favor. She’s a terrific lady. I’m glad she’s finally coming out of her shell. I hope things work out between you.”

With that, he shook Zack’s hand and ushered him out the door.

9

Disturbed by a cart clattering past the door of her hospital room, Suzanne Cole rolled onto her back, floating in the twilight world between sleep and wakefulness.

For a time, she struggled to complete a dream she had been having—a romantic, storybook dream, in which Jason Mainwaring, dressed head to foot in ebony armor, sitting astride a coal-black stallion, was jousting with a knight clad equally spectacularly in gold. Again and again, the men sped past one another, their lances exploding off their opponents shield. With each encounter, one or the other came close to Edling from his mount, but each time, the stricken knight recovered and swung about for another pass.

Suzanne herself was seated in the grandstand, wearing a flowing gown of pink silk and clutching a single white rose.

Who are you?
she called again and again to the gold knight.
Who are you? What do you want from me?

As the dream faded, the knight turned toward her and lifted the visor of his golden helmet. Like flashing neon, the face of the man kept changing. One moment it was Zachary Iverson, and the next, Paul Cole—the pathologically self-possessed physiology professor who had picked her out of a crowded lecture hall during her second year in medical school and had swept her up in a whirlwind of flowers and parties and romantic weekends in the country.

Less than a year later they were married. If there were signs of the mans sickness during those months, she had missed them completely. Later, when the recreational drugs, and the erratic behavior, and the lies—“misunderstandings,” Paul had called them—began to surface, she had chosen to ignore them, to rationalize them away.

By the time she knew that her efforts to hold their marriage together had been a mistake, there was Jennifer. The years she spent trying to accommodate Paul for her daughter’s sake had
nearly cost Suzanne her career, and perhaps even more than that.

Why?
she pleaded again.
What do you want front me?

“Dr. Cole, it’s morning.”

Why? …

“Dr. Cole?”

The nurse’s gentle voice, and the touch of her hand, began to dispel what remained of the dream. The colors began fading into a sea of white.

How long had it been since Paul had last forced his way into one of her dreams?
The arguments, the guilt trips, the hangups when
she
answered the phone, the missing prescription pads, the visits from the glib, condescending drug enforcement agents … 
Why had she given the man so goddamn many benefits of the doubt?

“Dr. Cole …”

Suzanne opened her eyes a slit.

“Hi,” she murmured. Instinctively, she reached up and touched her breast, dreading the thick bandages she expected to find there.

“It’s seven-fifteen,” the nurse said. “Time for your pre-op meds.”

Pre-op
. Damn, she thought. It was not over at all. It was just starting. Why was this happening? Life in Sterling had been everything she had hoped it would be—so peaceful, so uncomplicated, so good for Jen. Now, suddenly, everything seemed to be unraveling at once. Why?

She opened her eyes fully.

“Seven-fifteen?”

“Uh-huh. You’re on call for twenty minutes from now. This is some atropine and Demerol.”

Atropine … Demerol
. One to dry up secretions, and the other to help one not give a damn about the prospect of being disfigured, or worse.
What wonderful potions we doctors have at our fingertips
, she thought acidly. What wonderful potions, indeed. She turned onto her side and winced as the needle pierced her buttock. Then she rolled onto her back and smiled up weakly at the nurse.

“Nicely done,” she murmured.

The nurse, a kind, elderly woman named Carrie Adams, patted her hand. “You’re going to do fine,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of cysts removed, and so has my daughter. The hardest part is the waiting to get it over with.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

Once again, this time in spite of herself, Suzanne reached up and touched her breast. It was all so crazy. This sort of thing happened to other people—to patients. She was trained to help them through their medical crises, not to go through one herself. She had bounced back so far, put so many pieces of her shattered world back together. Now this.

Helplessness … panic … rage …her emotions, held in check over the weeks since that terrifying moment of discovery, swirled about like windblown snow.

Where in the hell was the acceptance that the textbooks all wrote about?

“That Demerol should start to work in just a few minutes,” the woman said, as if reading her thoughts.

“Good.”

“And here are your earphones.”

“Oh, yes,” Suzanne said, taking the set and placing it on the bed beside her. “What’s on today?”

“I don’t know,” the woman replied, “but Dr. Mainwaring’s on channel …” She took a three-by-five card from her uniform pocket. “… three.”

The system—tapes picked by the surgeons to be played in the operating rooms and broadcast to earphone receivers—was designed to reduce patient anxiety levels. Over the few years it had been in place, the innovation had received high marks from surgeons and patients alike. Suzanne flipped the dial on the phones to 3, and held one up against her ear.

“ ‘Greensleeves,’ ” she said.

“Pardon?”

“ ‘Greensleeves.’ That’s the music. A really beautiful version of it. Here, listen.”

She passed the earphones up. The nurse politely listened for a few seconds, and then returned them.

“Very pretty,” she said. “Well, I’ll be back in a little while. Meanwhile, you just relax. Oh, by the way, there’s an envelope for you on the bedside table. Perhaps you’d better read whatever’s inside it before that medicine I gave you takes effect.”

Suzanne thanked the woman, and then waited until she had left the room.

The envelope, with the Ultramed-Davis heading and logo, read,
Dr. Suzanne Cole
. She peeled it open, knowing it was from Zack. Throughout much of the evening, he had sat there
with her, reading out loud from magazines and newspapers, laughing, sharing stories of his life, and, when there was nothing to say, just holding her hand. He had been as open, as tender, and as understanding as any man she had ever met.

She wondered if he realized the resentment she was feeling at his intrusion into her life. Silently, she cursed herself for using him the way she had. She had no intention of allowing a man close enough to ruin her life again—not now, at least. Possibly not ever. Zack had said they could make love with no strings attached, but she knew damn well that there were always strings. When the operation was over, regardless of the outcome, she would do what she must to put distance between them.

For a moment, the fear of what might be growing within her breast seemed pale next to the fear that she might never again be able to trust.

“I’m sorry, Zack,” Suzanne whispered as she slipped the note back into its envelope, tucking it between the pages of the novel she had been reading for the past two weeks. “I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger.…”

She settled back onto her pillow and slipped on the earphones. Her mouth had become uncomfortably dry from the atropine, but the Demerol, too, was having its effect, so she did not really care.

Carrie Adams and an orderly wheeled a stretcher into the room and helped her slide onto it.