Right of Thirst (2 page)

Our home is an old two-story clapboard farmhouse twenty miles outside of town. We bought it many years ago, straining our budget at the time. Despite the bad plumbing and the wires, which took years to replace, and the constant work on the grounds, we both loved it, and it's odd to think that a material thing, a house, would resonate as it did through our lives. It was something we could not have afforded elsewhere, and though there were many times when Rachel wished the town was larger, and the fields were smaller, and that we had family nearby, the house at least was something we could agree upon.

It's white, with a dark shake roof, and green trim, and flower boxes at the windows, and it sits on eight private acres at the end of a narrow lane. There are trees around it—pines and willows and oaks—and sheets of green grass, and a small stream, and a few winding paths I put in. A wide porch at the back opens to several hundred open acres of cornfields, and though the land around us eventually filled up with equally expensive homes, even now, no other house is visible from the property. I don't think there's ever been a time, driving in, pressing the automatic button in my car to close the gate behind me, when I didn't feel blessed to have it. It was exactly what my mother always dreamed of, and never had,
and never let my father forget. It made me feel like a man of substance, that all my efforts had been for something in the end. And yet it was only a house.

But in the days and weeks that followed Rachel's death, with nothing to do but live there, to wait for the bell of the microwave—
ping
, you must eat—the house became something else; peaceful and sustaining on the one hand, shadowy and unearthly on the other. It was late spring, with the first of the cicadas beginning to shriek in the trees, and the earliest fireflies opening and closing over the wide lawn stretching out to the white gravel driveway, which shone for long minutes as darkness fell.

When people die, there is work that must be done. There are phone calls to make and to receive, and documents to sign, and there are closets to be emptied and bags to be packed, as if one is moving away. That, at least, I understood. I gathered up her dresses, her shoes and slippers, her coats, her jackets, her underwear, her nightgowns and mittens and jeans, her ice skates and cross-country skis, her bicycle, her lipstick, her gauze and plastic sheeting, her syringes, and every prescription in her name. I did it over one long day, and divided it all in piles on the porch—Goodwill to one side, trash to the other. When I was done only her studio was left.

But then the funeral had been held, the guests had come and gone, the casseroles trickled off, the cards were fewer, and the attention of even our closest friends started to turn away. I was alone with my dog, an elderly Labrador retriever I've had since he was six weeks old, who used to run with me and Eric through the fields beside our house when he was young. And though many people were kind to me during that period, he was my single true source of comfort, steady and gentle in the background, heaving himself up onto the bed beside me in the
guest room where I slept. In the afternoons, when it rained, he would rise at the first clap of thunder and ease himself under the bed. I'd get on my knees, and stroke him, because even then, or perhaps especially then, his fear never failed to touch me.

I went to work. I fed us both. I couldn't read. A few times I tried to exercise on the treadmill in the garage. I went for drives in the countryside. I'd roll the windows down, and let the manure-laden air of the farmland pour in against me for an hour or two, past miles of soybeans and corn and sleek cattle, with tractors in the fields, and during that time I felt like a stranger in a waking dream, as if each day had become an elegy to a world I would never see again. Sometimes there were trains to stop for—boxcars and grain carriers, battered and dignified and identical, their brown iron wheels spinning slowly enough to see. They were going from granary to granary, I suppose, and it was animal feed, mostly, for the stockyards, but they seemed like something more, something stately and wise and redeeming. Then the gates would lift, and I'd drive on.

 

Eric had left the morning after the funeral. I'd driven him to the airport. We said little to one another, but I'd embraced him before we got into the car, and for a moment, as we drove, I'd reached over and gripped his hand.

“I don't understand why you didn't tell me she'd gotten so much worse,” he said, turning to me, his face thin and pale, his green eyes shining. “You said she was going to make it until summer.”

I watched the line on the road before me.

“I'm sorry, Eric,” I said. “It was very sudden. I didn't expect it to happen when it did.”

“I wanted to be there,” he said. “You knew that. You knew how important it was to me. I told you a hundred times.”

“Please, Eric,” I said.

“I never got to say good-bye to her,” he continued. “I always thought I would be with her at the end. I was thinking about it all the time.”

A moment passed.

“How can you just sit there and not say anything?”

“I don't know what to say.”

“She called me. She left a message on my answering machine the night before she died. She must have known how bad she was. You should have told me to come home.”

He was crying in earnest then, wrenching sobs, for the first time. During the service, and afterward, he had contained himself, but now, with the last of his childhood passing through the windows on either side of the road, he let himself go, which he had never done before in my presence. I reached out again, and put my free arm across his shoulders, and pulled him close to me. Finally, he gave in, and leaned against me like a child.

When I was just starting out as a cardiologist, I used to wear a bow tie, round gold-rimmed glasses, and a starched white coat, and I let my childhood accent flower in my voice again, and as I led my little cluster of residents and students on rounds I must have looked both ridiculous and affected. I felt a thrill, a flush of pride, standing there outside the door on rounds, claiming the power behind it, and there is no denying that I took pleasure in grilling the medical students and residents before we all entered the room. Tell me, Mr. Jones, what are the laboratory findings that one would expect in hyperthyroidism? Is that what this patient has? And what might you find on physical examination? Dr. Smith, what are the cardiac effects of hyperthyroidism? And the treatment? Is it the same as the treatment for other kinds of heart failure? And so on.

Mr. Jones, the medical student, and Dr. Smith, the intern, might fumble with their papers, or hesitate and stammer, or they might speak up boldly, with confidence, and either way I would stand there and watch them and make sure they understood that my judgment was upon them, as if to say—these are important questions, and we are important men and women, and no part of that rheumy-eyed supplicant behind the door, not his eyes, his ears, his throat, his skin, not his chest, not his belly, his arms, his legs,
not even his gray withered haunches, will go unexamined or overlooked.

In my bow-tie years, the stammerers and fumblers both wearied and annoyed me. It was only much later, when I'd long since lost the bow tie and the fountain pen, and only the round gold-rimmed glasses remained, that I began to sympathize with them. Increasingly, when I cut them off and made them start again, blushing and flustered and shuffling their notes, or asked them questions I knew they could not answer, and impressed upon them again that the stakes were real, and this was not a game, I felt myself the lesser for it. Perhaps that sympathy, in the end, was what experience had brought me. And those who stood up straight, and reeled off all the answers, those to whom I would grant my highest recommendations—even as my pen checked the boxes, even as I took them aside, as I did on occasion, and urged them to consider a career in cardiology—even as I did all of the things that were expected of me, in my heart they began to annoy me more and more. They exhausted me, with their tedious narrow energy, so young and strong and full of the pretense of confidence. I knew that I was looking at my former self, that I'd been no better, but the game wearied me by then. All that posturing—the fumblers were more honest by half. But that world has never been a place for honesty, and fumbling got you nowhere. The confident ones would do well, and move on, like me, and they would go to conferences, and present their research, and stud their offices with plaques, and the engine would move forward just as it had done for a hundred years, and then it would wash over them, and it would be their turn to look back at those lining up without reflection in their path.

 

My appointment with the chairman of cardiology was at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, the only opening in his schedule that week. I made the appointment on Monday morning. I wasn't entirely certain, then, what I would say to the man, or what I expected from him in return.

But during that week, as I stood on rounds, and tried to listen, and tried to guide them as I always had, as the world of the hospital flowed around me—the laughter of nurses in the break room, the lines at the coffee stands, the dozen or so nods I made each day to acquaintances in the hall, and all the many patients to see, filing in and out through the clinic doors with their worries, with their breathlessness and palpitations and their swollen ankles that felt like clay—as all of that passed, I realized that it was the knowledge of the meeting that kept me going. All week I felt its presence, and as it drew nearer I somehow grew lighter. The meeting felt like a secret, like a small dark stone in my pocket, cool to the touch, mysteriously reassuring.

 

The chairman of the department had been recruited from an elite institution only a few months before, and he was my junior by half a decade. New blood, the dean had said, will be good for us. A year or two earlier it would have been a bitter blow, but by then I cared only a little.

“Charles,” he said, standing from his desk in welcome. He looked the part, with his smooth black hair, his pressed white coat and immaculate blue tie. His office had a fine view of the town. I didn't know him well, and had not invited him to the funeral.

I asked if he'd finished for the day. He said that he had. He sat down behind his desk again, and gestured to one of the overstuffed chairs in front of him. I sat as well. There was a penny
of a coffee stain on the cuff of his coat, a single sign of imperfection, and I stared at it.

“Thanks for fitting me in,” I began.

“Of course.”

It struck me that I was looking at a slightly more successful, slightly younger version of myself. His walls were full of honors—framed diplomas and certifications and prizes, which sooner or later would be taken down and replaced with someone else's. In another time, I thought, they might have been flags, or the heads of animals.

There was a folder on his desk. It had my name on it, bold and black, and I realized he'd been reviewing my file.

“Were you reading my CV?”

He smiled, quickly.

“I always do that before I meet with faculty,” he replied. “It helps me keep track of what everyone is doing.”

I nodded.

“Yours is very impressive,” he continued. “You've given a lot to this department.”

He shifted in his chair. A moment passed.

“So, Charles,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I didn't know how to answer him.

He had started to watch me closely. Past him, through the window, I could see the spire of the nearby church over the rooftops. Leafy streets, handsome brick buildings, the haze of green fields in the distance.

“Are you all right, Charles?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, finally. “I don't think I am.”

“I see,” he said, looking down at his hands for a moment, then up at me again.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

I didn't reply.

“My father died recently,” he continued. “I thought I was prepared for it. But it was much harder than I thought.”

He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, then put them back on.

“Losing a parent is hard,” he said. “But he lived a full life. He was eighty-four.”

I remained silent, but he carried on nonetheless.

“I know that you kept your wife at home and took care of her yourself.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of your clinic nurses.”

“I had help. We had hospice care.”

He shook his head, dismissively.

“I don't think I could have done that.”

I shrugged, and looked away.

“Tell me why you wanted to meet with me, Charles,” he said, gently. “Do you need some help? Do you need to take some time off?”

“I thought working would help me,” I said. “The structure. It's always helped me before.”

He nodded, slowly, as if considering.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes that's true. But sometimes it's not. Have you reached that point?”

“Yes,” I said, finally, admitting it at last. “Yes, I think I have.”

I could see his mind working—call schedules, lectures to be given and clinics to be staffed, consultations to be done.

“Well,” he said. “Then we'll need to get you some time off. How much do you need?”

“I don't know,” I said. “A few months, I think.”

“You don't have to decide right now. We can see how it goes.”

“Thank you,” I said, and suddenly realized that I was blinking back tears. “Without pay is fine. I'm sorry I've put you in this position.”

My words must have pained him, because he grimaced and looked down.

“Please don't apologize,” he said. “You've nothing to apologize for.” After a while, he added, “You'll get through this, Charles. And there will always be a place for you here as long as I'm chairman. I want you to know that.”

It was his decency that did it. Had he been otherwise, had he been faceless, bureaucratic and indifferent, I'm certain that I could have kept my composure. But his kindness undid me. I tried as hard as I could, and for a brief moment the effort alone sustained me. Don't give in, I told myself, because then your weakness will be there forever. But it was an irresistible wave nonetheless, followed by the cold recognition that this was what I had been waiting for all along, that this, of all things, was the stone I had been carrying in my pocket for the last five days. And something else came to me as well: I thought of Eric, in the car beside me.

I broke down, right then, in the chairman's office. For the first time in my adult life I wept publicly, and I've never been able to think back on those minutes without a sense of deep and bitter humiliation. Had I spoken, I might have said that my life was in ruins, that I had failed those closest to me, and that my hopes had come to nothing. But I didn't speak, and I was thankful for that. I felt as if my only strength—my restraint, my discipline and determination—had snapped with a single sharp report beneath me. And why it happened there, in that office, with that man, instead of with Eric, I could not understand. It was the place, after all, where I'd done the best in my life. It was the place where I'd never had doubts.

Later—how much later I could not exactly say—I was standing. His face was pale and troubled, and he was offering to drive me home. But the worst of it had passed by then, and I was shaky and cool and felt as if I had been swept clean. The recriminations I would later unleash on myself had not yet begun.

“Are you sure you can drive?” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said. I did not apologize again. He watched me like the doctor he was, and I must have looked all right, because he let me leave. But to my astonishment, as I turned toward the door, he took a step forward, and gave me a quick, awkward embrace. It shocked me, to feel his arms around my shoulders, and to smell his aftershave, which lingered as he stepped away.

I cleaned myself up in the bathroom down the hall. I washed my face, and dried it with paper towels. I gripped the sink in my hands for a while, looking down at the silver button of the drain, and then I straightened, and combed my hair with my fingers in the mirror, and when I left I looked almost as if nothing had happened.

I walked down the carpeted hall, and out of the offices, into the main hospital. People passed me: residents in scrubs, nurses, a cluster of giggling high school girls, with handwritten name tags—Charlotte and Crystal and Wendy—on what I assumed was an after-school field trip. I walked past them to the elevator bank, and pressed the button, standing in my white coat with my name and title embroidered in blue beneath the pocket, and my plastic hospital ID dangling from its clip beside it, and the black coils of my stethoscope draped around my neck.

The elevator doors opened, and a handful of medical students, in short white coats, stepped out together. The elevator behind them was empty.

“Hi, Dr. Anderson,” a young woman said, smiling cheerfully at me—a medical student I'd supervised the year before, whose
name escaped me. She had that Scandinavian hair common in the Midwest, so light and fine it was nearly translucent. A chubby, friendly girl, with a wide, open face, who intended, if I remembered correctly, to do a residency in family medicine. An average student at best.

“Hello, Mary,” I said, with the briefest flick of my eyes to her name tag.

She smiled again, and passed me, and as I stepped into the elevator I heard her talking to the other students around her.

“He was my cardiology attending,” she said, in a proprietary way.

It was a casual comment, but alone in the elevator, descending toward the parking garage, her words nearly undid me again. I couldn't find my car, and for a while I wandered through the rows, until finally I held my keys up in the air, pressed the button, and let it blink and chirp and lead me to it.

As I sat in the car, I thought of my file lying naked on the chairman's desk, written down in black and white—all the papers I'd published, the conferences I'd attended, the committees on which I'd served. The truth was that nothing I'd done had changed the practice of cardiology in any way. Yet the man was correct; it was an impressive CV. It spoke to decades of blind, relentless work. It spoke to a thousand sleepless nights.