Oxygen (25 page)

I pull under the awning
at the Sheraton and Joe squeezes my hand. “Come up.”

“All right.” I return the pressure of his hand and smile at him. The valet approaches my window and I nod, then pop open the trunk for Joe’s bag. The glass doors of the lobby, wide as a wall, swoosh open, and refrigerated air pours out into the night with oil-rich Texan abandon. As soon as we step through the entryway the sticky glaze of humidity evaporates from my skin.

“Wait in the bar for me and I’ll check in.”

I sit at a small table in the corner and try to look upscale enough to pay the bill, despite my cotton candy and grease-stained blue jeans and shirt. I should have at least brushed my hair. The waitress doesn’t even bring the drink menu until Joe joins me.

“I’ll just have sparkling water, thanks,” I say, pushing the menu across to Joe.

“Really? I want a good, crisp martini. I love these dark hotel bars. Make me feel like Humphrey Bogart.”

The minute the words are out of him a lithe woman in skintight black sequins taps the microphone on a small corner stage and sways into a torch song. She has a fluid, chesty resonance that could express the anguish of sexual longing even without words.

“‘Pretty Strange.’”

“What’s strange about her?” I ask.

Joe smiles at me. “‘Pretty Strange.’ It’s the name of the song.”

“Back when you were in your prime/Love was just a waste of time,” she sings, holding the microphone close to her mouth. The piano player behind her is crinkled with age and cigarettes.

Joe reaches out and taps the waitress as she’s turning away. “Vodka martini. Stoli. And a lemon drop.”

“I’m driving, Joe.”

“One is legal. Man, she’s got this song nailed. Listen to her timing.” He leans back, lost in her throaty spell, his fingers unconsciously drumming the beat against the bar table. Our drinks arrive at the end of the song, and he lifts his glass to toast me. “Hey, cheers. To your first fearless roller-coaster ride.” He clinks the rim of his glass against mine and looks over the icy vodka into my eyes. “May it be the first of many.”

Two lemon drops later I follow him into the elevator and up to a plush room that looks out over the city lights, wrapped like a sparkling package in ruby and platinum ribbons of roads. In the distance, lit up like a city unto itself and crowned with a jet of blue flame, a refinery churns the carbon of ancient swamps into jet fuel and gasoline.

Joe stretches his long frame across the window. “OK, I am completely disoriented up here. Is that where your dad’s house is? Isn’t that over near Rice?” He nods toward the farthest cluster of lights within the beltway.

“No, it’s just beyond those towers, in the darker area.” I tuck my hands into the front pockets of my jeans. “So what
did
you and my dad talk about while I was at the store?”

“Music, mainly. And airplanes. You, a little.”

I look up at him. “Anything I wouldn’t want to hear about?”

He scowls briefly, almost as if the question were irritating, but then winks at me. “Nah. All safe stuff.” He walks over to the mini bar and comes back with two plastic cups and a miniature bottle of Beefeater.

“No thanks, I’m spinning as it is,” I tell him when he holds a half-filled cup out for me.

He takes a sip of his own and asks, “What do
you
talk to him about?”

“Oh, things get pretty quiet once we venture beyond food or weather. Can’t you tell?”

He smiles and raises his glass as if to toast my honesty. “It’s palpable, the tension between you two. Is he just getting defensive about needing more help?”

“Oh no. This has nothing to do with his eyesight or his health. We’ve been like this since I was in my teens. Even now, with me here to take care of him, we have the same stiff conversations we had when I was young. It’s so ingrained it takes over when I talk to him, like some automatic motor memory, the way your hands can play a piano piece you haven’t thought about in a decade.”

Joe empties his cup and sets it on the round table beside the draped floral curtains, then turns back to study the view. I seize the chance to switch the subject. “That’s the Texas Medical Center over there. Those towers back behind Rice.”

“Wow. It looks as big as Seattle. I bet it’s doubled in size since I was there.”

“Yeah, it makes First Hill look pretty paltry.” We’re both quiet for a minute, and then the question burning at the back of my mind breaks loose. “How are things at First Lutheran, anyway?” He tenses his shoulders in a quick shrug. “Has anybody heard about…” I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold my breath for a second. “About the criminal charge?”

“Marie, there
isn’t
a criminal charge yet—if ever.”

So. It’s out. “How did you hear about it?” The words come in a hoarse whisper. I stare at his turned back and see his shirt stretch taut across his shoulders as he inhales and seems to brace himself. “OK,” he says. “There was something in the newspaper. Just a short clip—your name wasn’t even mentioned. They called Phil Scoble for a quote and he pretty much punted it. Just said the hospital was investigating.”

I fall backward onto the bed and draw my knees up. “It’s in the
newspapers
? The Seattle newspapers?”

“It was just a blurb on the inside pages. Nobody outside First Lutheran would ever know what it was about, that it involved you at all.”

“What did it say? Did you cut it out?”

“It just said the death of a child undergoing routine surgery was being investigated. That’s all. They didn’t name anybody except Phil, and he gave them some pablum shtick that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.”

I lie on the bed with my arms locked across my abdomen, closing my eyes to keep back tears. The light beyond my lids flickers as Joe walks over, the bed yields to his weight when he lies down next to me.

“Has your lawyer told you anything?”

“He’s meeting with the district attorney on Tuesday. Even then he might not know if I’m charged. I’d thought at least, if this got dropped, no one would hear about it.”

Joe seems to flinch. He says, hesitantly at first, “Maybe it’s worse for you to be here, with so much time to think about it. I mean, don’t you think the criminal charge is just a Darryl Feinnes gimmick? No jury’s going to be convinced you’ve done anything criminal. For Christ’s sake, you’re a doctor.” He turns my head toward his face. “Marie, go easier on yourself. You’re not the only doctor at First Lutheran who’s gotten hit with a malpractice suit. It’s like you’ve become a martyr for this girl.”

“Maybe she needs a martyr. Maybe I’m just the only one thinking about something other than the money,” I say, almost sharply.

“Or maybe your grief goes way beyond this one accident in your life.” He drops his voice down a notch. “Come on. Don’t get mad at me. I know the money seems like all Hopper and Scoble care about anymore, but try to look at it another way. That girl’s mother is about to walk away with more dollars than she could spend in a lifetime.” I start to get up off the bed and Joe puts his arm across my waist. “Wait. I’m not saying that fixes it. Don’t look at me like that. But she does have a future, at least. She can move. She can buy her own house, wherever she wants. She never has to work at a job she hates. She’ll have choices she never would have had.”

“It makes me sick to talk about it. It sounds so callous.”

“I don’t mean it to be callous. But even if you only half believe it, couldn’t you stand some relief from guilt? It’s OK to stop hurting for her.” He takes my hand in his and I feel the ridged texture of his fingertips, the rebounding, giving fullness of the veins crossing his tendons, their persuasive strength—and I relax against him.

“Sometimes I think hurting for her is the only part of me that’s still alive. People keep asking me how I am. I feel like they should be asking
what
I am. What am I if I can’t be a doctor? What will I be if they take that away from me? I used to know, before medical school and internship and residency. Before First Lutheran and its sixty-hour workweeks. My career, becoming a doctor, was supposed to be one stop along the way to a whole life—this great, altruistic job where I could help people live longer, or live better. Or at least live with less pain. All so they could go back to whatever truly mattered in their lives—their husbands and their mothers and their kids—the things that were supposed to be waiting at home for me, too, at the end of my workday. And now I don’t even have a workday. Oh God, listen to me. Don’t ever let me drink two lemon drops on an empty stomach. I drink too much when I’m with you, Joe.”

He rolls up on one winged elbow so his inky blue eyes are right above mine. “You’re beautiful when you’re drunk. You’re beautiful anyway,” he responds to my scowl. “Just…shinier, somehow, when you drink.”

“Shinier?”

He shakes his head and hesitates, then says, “You let more holes open up in your cloak.” He focuses past me, into some distant inner place. His cheek resting against his closed fist deepens the furrows at the corner of his eye and around his mouth, so that his face seems divided in two, one half etched with the inelasticity of age, the other half youthfully forgiven in the soft bedside lamplight.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Hmmm,” he murmurs. “It’s this theory I have about death. About what happens when we die.” He refocuses on my face and brushes my hair from my throat, winding his fingers into the tangled strands, fanning it out onto the pillow around my head. “Haven’t I told you about the ‘Big Oh’ theory I have?”

I give a short laugh, glad to be distracted again. “The ‘Big Oh’? Great name!”

“It
is
a great name. When I was eight…I can’t believe I haven’t told you this before…. When I was eight I went to a Halloween party as a cigarette—give me a break, more people smoked back then. Anyway”—his eyes drift into space again—“I’d wrapped myself in a cylinder of cardboard and cut out eyeholes. I could hardly see. I forgot to cut a slot for my hands—couldn’t even put candy in my mouth, so you can guess the costume didn’t last very long. All the sounds were muffled through the cardboard. Couldn’t smell anything. And I remember, really vividly, how different my house looked and felt to me. Everything cropped down to a fragment of itself. My folks…I remember my dad’s belt buckle jiggling up and down while he was yelling at my mom, and the buttonhole just above it straining against his big old belly. And my mother at the sink washing the dishes. How every time she made some point to Dad in whatever they were arguing about—I couldn’t hear all the words—dribbles of soap streamed off her arms onto the floor. All I could see were these foamy globs dangling from the bony point of her elbow while she jabbed away at his chest.

“Then my father yanked the costume off over my head and all of a sudden the room, our kitchen, just exploded around me. Huge, and brand-new, and kind of…luminous. The light was so bright, everything looked almost crystallized. And the smells. Everything that had looked so splintered suddenly snapped back together into my whole, comprehensible world.” He leans over me, his fingers laced through my hair to press against my scalp, looking intently into my eyes, as if he had to transmit this concept of universal order directly from mind to mind without words. “And for that split second, in a house where nothing ever, ever made sense to me, I suddenly understood it all, at least for a moment. That was my moment of the big ‘Oh.’”

I try to picture his face as it must have looked at eight years old, without the rough stubble of beard, without the sun-and cigarette-creased lines of skepticism and self-reliant defiance, without the almost perfectly camouflaged shard of pain flickering in the deepest recess of those deep, deep blue irises. I want to shelter it, this exquisitely wrapped gift from his life, delivered from a time he never talks about. “And how does this become death, your moment of ‘Oh’?” I whisper.

“Well, that’s how we stumble around all the time, isn’t it? So cloaked and fettered we can’t really make sense of any of it. Believing it’s so complicated. Here, alive, we have five senses. I think maybe there, after we die, we have…millions. Billions.”

It is such an uncharacteristically hopeful suggestion coming from Joe, to be honest. How gratifying it would be to have faith that all this muddling through we do—the missed opportunities and mistaken blame—might eventually worm its way out to an answer. Maybe with a billion senses unleashed I could understand why Jolene died—not just what caused her death, but for what reason, for what purpose. Maybe with a billion senses connecting us, Bobbie Jansen and I could explain to each other why our lives ever had to intersect, why she gave birth to the child I won’t have only to lose her in my hands. But how would a billion senses compensate an eight-year-old girl when she had yet to discover her own life? Even eternal bliss can be robbed by such brevity of experience among the living.

Joe cups his palms around my face and turns it back toward his. “You’re thinking about her, aren’t you? About Jolene.” I stare past him to the ceiling, finding pictures in the nubs of plaster like tea leaves—both of us are looking for answers outside ourselves.

“She’s everywhere I go.” I say it too softly for my voice to break. “She and her mother. She’s in every school yard I pass, in grocery lines and the car next to me at traffic lights. I didn’t just kill Jolene. I killed her mother. I killed her reason for being. All the money in the world can’t change that.” I reach up and put my hand on his cheek, making him listen to me as if he had to live inside my conscience. “Joe, I want you to find her. Bobbie Jansen. I want you to find out what’s happened to her. Where she goes, if she has any friends. I know where she lives—it’s in south Beacon Hill.” He is shaking his head. I push myself up from the bed onto my elbow and grip his shoulder. “It’s not stalking, Joe. It’s not illegal, or even immoral. I can’t go there myself anymore—she saw me once. I just…” He is looking at me as if I have tipped over some balance of sanity. “Oh God. Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what the judges say. It doesn’t matter if I’m totally cleared if I know she…How can I go on with my own life when I’ve destroyed hers?”