Oxygen (20 page)

When my cell phone
finally rings I’m in the shower and almost miss the call. I’ve left it perched on the edge of the counter and the vibrations shimmy it off to the slate floor, where it hums in a shallow splash of bathwater. I lunge for it, leaving the shower still running in the background, water streaming off my hair over the mouthpiece.

“Dr. Heaton?”

It’s Charlie Marsallis. I sit down on the closed toilet lid in a slippery puddle and try to sound collected and professional, or at least clothed. My heart rate must have doubled. “Yes. Hello, Mr. Marsallis.”

“Good morning. How are you? Are you in Texas now?”

“I’m in Fort Worth. At my sister’s house.”

“Hopefully with better weather than we have in Seattle today. Or at least warmer. Is it raining there, too?” I shut off the shower, grab a towel from the shelf above the toilet and drape it over my lap. “Did you call to ask about the weather, or to tell me the district attorney filed charges?”

“Actually I
really did
call to see how you were.” He sounds almost amused at my snippiness.

I picture him swiveling around in his desk chair with the telephone cord looping across my stacks of files, his hair probably raked in all directions. So different from Donnelly. Donnelly would never call just to see how I was. I bite my lip and hunch down over my knees, fighting an urge to cry. “Sorry. I guess I’m in limbo—that’s how I am. Have you heard anything yet?”

“I’m calling the district attorney’s office as soon as they open to set up a meeting. Things can move slowly in the public arena, though. Especially in the summer. It still might be weeks—or more—before we know any details.”

“Yeah. I guess murderers and rapists trump me for court time. I should be happy about that.” My voice catches at the end.

“Let me worry about this, Marie. That’s part of my job.”

I think of all the times I’ve told a terrified patient that same thing, “Let me do the worrying,” before I roll them into the operating room. I’d never appreciated how empty such a claim could sound. At least in my own profession I can wield the power of benzodiazapines and narcotics. Marsallis has to depend on words.

“OK,” I whisper, and then swallow and say it more clearly. “OK. Thank you—I appreciate your calling me.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I learn anything.”

Lori wants to take me to lunch at her country club. We wind through streets lined with sprawling brick homes; they loom monstrous behind juvenile shrubs and sticklike trees that swim in optimistically oversized rectangles cut through the sidewalks. The entryways rise two stories above cut-glass front doors, as if anticipating their owners will grow into giants over the coming decades. Bicycles and baseball mitts and Frisbees are strewn across grass lawns, abandoned to the midday heat. We drop the car with the club valet and walk through the chilled lobby to the blinding blue glare rippling off the pool. Lori shields her eyes to scan the deck and someone taps on the window from inside the dining room.

“Oh, it’s Charlotte.” She waves and takes my elbow to lead me back inside. I sink at the thought of making small talk with Lori’s friends but follow her to the table where three women sit, cool as summer sherbets in pastel dresses and lipstick that matches the color of their nails. She introduces me. “My sister—the anesthesiologist, from Seattle.”

Charlotte says, “Oh, you’re my favorite kind of doctor. Ever since I got an epidural with my last baby, I’d never been so glad to see anybody walk into my hospital room as that anesthesia doctor. I wish it had been a woman, though.”

“Thank you. I enjoy obstetrics.”

The woman to Charlotte’s left adds, “It must be wonderful to go home every night knowing you’d made somebody’s life better. I mean, everyone’s always so particular about choosing their surgeon, but it’s really the anesthesiologist who keeps you alive. My daughter wants to be an accountant—I wish I could get her to think about medicine.”

Charlotte says, “Lori is one of my favorite people in this town. She does half the work for the school PTA—if they paid her she’d be a rich lady! How long will you be visiting Fort Worth?”

“Just a few days. It’s great to be with her children again. Could you excuse me a minute?” I let Lori settle into conversation and wander down marble-tiled hallways to find the bathroom, where I run a brush through my hair and pray that she won’t ask me to sit through lunch with her friends. I don’t think I could make it through an hour avoiding any reference to the history of my recent working life. I lean toward the mirror to reapply lipstick and freeze with the tube halfway to my lips. I look so normal. It’s almost startling. I half expect to see my secret spreading like a stain across my face.

I can’t help wondering, if Bobbie Jansen had been born among these women, had attended their private schools and colleges, been included in their churches and their country clubs and their dinner circles, if her teeth had been straightened at the proper age and her hands had been regularly manicured, she might have discovered herself here, flowering in the heart of suburban America. Even now, these women would be kind to Bobbie, if they met her and learned of her loss. They would politely shift their glances away from her broken fingernails and dated hemlines, be kind enough to offer her work, perhaps, cleaning their homes or tending their gardens or caring for their robust children. And then I stop myself, hearing the callous judgment in my own mind.

When I return Lori has been seated at the other side of the room.

“I’m sorry, I probably embarrassed you. I feel like I’ve lost all my social grace,” I tell her.

She opens her napkin into her lap and studies me for a minute. “Have you always been this hard on yourself, or did it start in medical school? I wish you saw yourself the way other people see you.”

“Other people? Maybe we should ask Jolene’s mother how she sees me.”

Lori covers my hands with hers in the center of the white tablecloth. “Marie, you’ve been a doctor for, what? Eleven or twelve years? This is
one
event. One patient out of thousands. Don’t let this accident wipe out your faith in yourself. You’re a good anesthesiologist.”

“How do you know that? I know you’re saying that to make me feel better, because you love me. But how could you possibly know if I’m a good doctor or not?” I shake my head, almost challenging her to defend her trust in me. “I make mistakes. And even if I can’t figure out what it was, maybe because of her heart or maybe not, some mistake I made might have killed this little girl.” I untangle my hands from hers and clench them in my lap. I remember a professor I had in medical school, an oncologist. He was from India, and he had that musical British-Indian accent. His whole working life consisted of poisoning people with the hope that he could kill the cancer and then pull back in time to rescue the patient. I told him I could never specialize in oncology, I wasn’t brave enough to make those choices every day. He answered, “To be an excellent physician you must accept the possibility of failure. A doctor who considers himself infallible is a most dangerous creature.” So here I am, facing my own fallibility. I say to Lori, “God, if you only knew the latest turns this suit has taken.”

“I
would
know if you’d tell me,” Lori says, leaning back against her chair as if she had all day to listen.

“My latest lawyer asked me not to talk to anyone about it. I’m not sure that applies to sisters, but I’d hate to expose you to perjury charges.”

“Your
latest
lawyer?” Her eyebrows rise beneath her wispy bangs. “What happened to the guy with the great view of the Olympics?”

“I love the details you remember. But actually, now that he’s out of it, I wonder if that view wasn’t the best thing he had to offer.”

“So what’s the best thing about this new lawyer?”

“Maybe just the fact that his offices are closer to earth. Maybe that he seems to see me as a human being more than a yacht payment. He may need my case as much as I need his defense. Look, I’m not trying to be evasive. I’m just trying to get some distance from it. Try to keep me busy enough that I can’t think too much, OK?”

“Hardly possible, knowing you.”

The waiter comes and takes our order. Lori asks him to bring us each a glass of sauvignon blanc. When it arrives she lifts her glass and clinks it against mine. “Happy Anniversary.”

“Is this your anniversary? No, you got married in spring.”

“It’s Mom and Dad’s anniversary.”

I glance at my watch. “Oh my God. You’re right. I’d completely forgotten. Forty-seven years, is that right? It is. Forty-seven years. They had a good marriage, though, didn’t they?”

“They did. I’m envious sometimes.”

“Do you ever wonder if they would have been happier if they hadn’t had kids? Dad, at least? I know Mom needed us, but…they had a connection that went way beyond parenting.”

Lori looks thoughtful, perhaps maternally enlightened. “She’d be proud of you. I hope you know that.”

A desperate laugh escapes me, imagining the district attorney signing criminal charges against me.

Lori continues. “She would. You’re so much like her. Calm in a crisis. Private. Intent on making the world better. I’ve wondered, sometimes, if she might have become a doctor if she’d been born later.”

“Can you imagine Dad married to a doctor? Cooking his own dinners or doing his own laundry?”

“No. I guess not. But I know he’s glad to be the father of one.”

I take a sip of my wine and set the crystal glass carefully in front of my plate. “I needed him to be glad to be my father a long time before I was a doctor.”

“He loves you, Marie. He’s always loved you. He’s just not so good at showing it.”

“Well, maybe I got tired of having to work so hard to see that.”

“You know, you told me once—you’d just started practicing on real patients, was that your third year in med school?—you said you’d have to learn to be less sensitive once you were a doctor. That you would need to start compartmentalizing your feelings so you could take care of sick or dying people. And then, when Mom was so sick and you were with her, I remember wishing I could step back from how much it hurt. You were so strong for Dad during that time. For both of us. You got us through it.”

I remember talking to her about that, almost fifteen years ago. I remember the naive sense of power it had given me to imagine such emotional maturity. When I first started medical school we had a few lectures about the personal toll of mixing into the inevitably fatal consequences of biological processes—the perpetual unraveling and reorganization of chemicals as they evolve from life to mineral and back into new life. It would be a purely awe-inspiring miracle if love and loss didn’t have to be part of it.

I nod. “I was stupid enough to think it would be a voluntary thing, somehow. An emotional switch we could turn off and on. But you just wake up one day and discover new walls inside yourself.”

Lori watches me quietly for a minute. Then she says, “Maybe this is one of those times you need to figure out how to knock down the compartments, Marie. People can change at any age. Even Dad. But you’ll never figure that out if you can’t talk to him.”

Our food is delivered, the perfect excuse to shift our conversation onto easier topics. I take a sip of my wine and thank God I am left with this sister in my disrupted family, someone who can be honest with me. Someone who can believe in me more than I believe in myself right now.

After lunch, Lori hands the valet a folded bill when he pulls up with the car. “I’m going to miss this,” she sighs. “Maybe more than the maid.”

The metal buckle on my seat belt burns hot against my pelvis and the tires crackle across bubbling asphalt. The neon green of the golf course yields to end-to-end strip malls as we drive. “You have nice friends, Lori. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to them longer. I can tell they care about you.”

“I’m lucky, I know.”

“Luck doesn’t earn friends.”

“How’s your obstetrician friend? Is it Karen?”

“Karen Leece. She’s fine. I don’t see how she does it—she works at least sixty hours a week, and it’s not like her husband is home flipping pancakes.”

“I remember meeting her.” When Lori was pregnant with Lia she came up to visit me, and started having Braxton Hicks contractions. I took her to Karen’s office. “She had warm hands.”

“She’s a warmhearted soul.”

“No. I mean literally—her hands were unusually warm. I even remarked on it and she told me she holds her hands under hot water for a minute or two before each exam. Imagine in this day and age—she’s probably losing one whole appointment slot every day just so that her hands feel comfortable against your skin.”

Lori checkerboards through traffic with the unflappable agility required to survive the leagues of freeways that connect Dallas–Fort Worth’s burgeoning suburbs. She whips between two massive trucks to an exit ramp that I don’t recognize. Five turns later we park beside a field pocked with tumbled blocks of reinforced concrete and wooden stakes flying orange plastic flags that wilt in the late afternoon heat.

“Where are we?”

“In the middle of Fine Furs, Lord & Taylor—I think. This is Gordon’s last project. Looks like only the lawyers will get any payment for it, though. It’s bankrupt before groundbreaking.” She reaches down and scoops up a handful of loose rubble, then hauls back her arm and chucks bits of concrete at a metal sign announcing the coming glitz and glamour. “Bingo,” she says as a rock bounces square off the middle of the sign. “This one’s for college savings. And this one”—she throws a rock so hard I duck instinctively as it ricochets back toward us—“is for half of our retirement savings and a second mortgage.”

I bend down and pick up my own dusty pile, then toss the entire handful at the sign. Lori takes my hand and says, “I can tell you haven’t been a softball coach anytime recently. Wind it up, girl, this isn’t a bride’s bouquet. The harder you throw it, the better it feels.”

For the next onslaught I pick up a golf-ball-sized stone and cock my whole body back, then fling it with enough force that I skitter forward and am saved from falling only by Lori’s quick grasp. I am repaid by a sizable dent in the middle of “Elegant Dining.” The metallic whack makes me smile.