Something About Sophie (9 page)

“Billy, don't go,” Ava said, disappointed and pleading. “Stay. Stay and . . . be nice.”

Looking at his sister seemed to trigger an inner valve that caused his anger and aggression to physically drain from his posture. His connection to her was clear—and strong. He gave her a half-smile and glanced at his mother before turning back to Sophie looking almost ashamed.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Shepard. I've upset and offended you and I apologize. My family and I have diverse opinions—many of them—none of which have anything to do with you. I have behaved badly. I'd like . . . I hope if we meet again I can redeem myself. Good luck with,” he flipped his hand vaguely, “you know, everything.” He stalled a moment then blurted. “Good night.”

“Billy.” Ava reached out a hand to stop him and he gave it an affectionate squeeze as he walked past her.

“William?” His mother's voice cracked when he left the room without a blink to mollify her. She rose to follow him, but Drew stopped her with a simple and clearly well established, “I'll go.”

With both men out of the room, but not far away as the low peace-making voices in the foyer indicated, Elizabeth, Ava, and Sophie looked from one to the other in silence. They all spoke at once.

“Billy isn't always . . .”

“My son suffers from a . . .”

“I'm sorry I didn't get to meet . . .”

When they all stopped short, the McCarrens were happy to step back and let Sophie finish.

“I'm sorry I didn't get to meet the other Dr. McCarren tonight. I've heard so many good things about him.”

“Yes. Thank you, dear. He was sorry to have to miss meeting you, as well, but doctors don't always get to pick and choose their work hours.”

“Good thing, too, or they'd never be around when the rest of us need them,” she said, too cheery and upbeat . . . too kindergarten-teacher. “Though I'm sure it's very hard on them and their families—a lot of sacrificing on both sides.”

“Oh, yes. It can be quite a challenge sometimes. Especially when there are young children at home. In fact, that was my only concern when Andrew indicated he wanted to become a doctor like his father—that he'd never have a normal home life. It was such a relief when he chose to go into cancer research. I thought it would be more of a nine-to-five job like a dermatologist or a proctologist; but, no, he was at it for twelve and sixteen hours a day for months at a time between the hospital and the lab. His social life was pathetic.” She gave a sad, but dignified shake of her head. “Nonexistent really. But I recall one woman in particular, considerably older, who had a thing for Andrew . . .”

With Mrs. McCarren chewing on a tasty bone for the moment, Sophie took the opportunity to check on her friend, Ava, who also took that instant to assess her—and after a second or two they grinned, knowing Billy's behavior had changed nothing between them. So the uneasiness she might have felt when Drew returned to the room was minimal—and as his gaze caught and held hers, a swift easy flow of understanding and relief passed between them effortlessly.

“Oh, you're back,” his mother said. “I assume all is well with your brother?” He nodded, keeping his eyes on Sophie. “I was telling Sophie about that strange woman you worked with . . . Jade or . . . Jane? Julie?”

Frowning now, he turned to her. “Jasmine?”

“Yes! And when baking him cookies and knitting him scarves didn't produce the reaction she'd hoped for, she started following him around New York.”

“No. I told you. It was coincidence. And she wasn't strange. I was always glad of her company when she showed up. She was a nice, lonely woman. A friend.”

“Who appears out of nowhere while you're having dinner with your mother? Asks any number of personal questions about you? Fawns like a schoolgirl. She had the most grating giggle.”

“Mother.”

She sent Sophie the mother-knows look. “She was stalking him. Can you imagine it?”

“No. But lonely people can do odd things sometimes. It's a sad state to be in. Happens to all of us now and again.” She could see that the subject was annoying Drew. “I didn't know you did research. You didn't say.”

“Because I don't anymore. Haven't for a while.” And because her “oh” was soft and left hanging in the air, he added, “It wasn't for me. I did my residency at Langone—NYU Medical Center—in Internal Medicine and it seemed, in light of my interest in cancer, that my next logical step was to accept a hematology/oncology fellowship to the cancer institute there, with an eye toward being a research physician.” He shook his head slightly and his tone warmed to the subject. “The work was phenomenal, brilliant—the true scientists, the biochemists, the molecular biologists—their thoughts and ideas were so outside the box. It was like they had an entire universe of possibilities inside their heads. Even the failures, one after another, were considered minor successes because they eliminated each new hope-filled path as an option, steering the research in an alternate direction, down another hope-filled path. But. . . .” He shrugged.

“It wasn't for you?”

He smiled. “No. It wasn't. For a couple of reasons.” His pause was more comic than dramatic. “Is it wimpy for a man to admit he was homesick?”

“I don't think so.”

“I was. Horribly. I'd been up there almost seven years by then. I missed the quiet. Central Park had trees and grass and birds, but there were people everywhere and you could still hear the traffic and the sirens. Too many people; too much noise. The noise inside the utility closets at the hospital was subtle and muffled, but it was still noise. And not good noises like crickets at night and the wind in the trees and babbling brooks and—”

“I feel a yawn coming on,” Ava announced.

He made a face at her and then raised one shoulder. “Turns out I'm lousy at failure, too. I don't like to lose.”

“What. You mean lose to cancer?” Sophie asked.

“Well no, not cancer itself. I know it can be a killer and it'll take some of my patients no matter what I do. But I feel like I have a little more control of it by taking one patient at a time, doing everything possible to help him or her to survive—even if it's recommending them for a clinical trial at Langone when all else fails. But if nothing works, if I've exhausted every avenue, then I want to help them die. In peace and without pain.” He sighed. “But during the cancer studies . . . we wouldn't even start clinical trials until our hopes were so strong for each new therapy, we were sky high with confidence and dusting off places to put our Nobel prizes. And to lose, to fail . . .
again
?” He paused, humbled. “It takes a toll. On the patients, on the team. On me.”

And it wasn't hard for Sophie to understand his reluctance to pay the fee, having been on that roller coaster ride herself not so long ago. It was tortuous.

“Of course it does, darling.” His mother soothed him. “The medical profession is costly to everyone connected with it. It can be detrimental—devastating—particularly on the dynamics of even the strongest family ties and personal relationships.

“Why, I remember one time, very early in our marriage, before I entirely realized what I'd gotten myself into by marrying a doctor—oh my, I was young, barely twenty-one.” She gave a soft wistful sigh, smiled and shook her head. “And I was foolish. His life was erratic the whole time we dated, but for some reason that I must attribute solely to my youth . . . and love-blindness, too, I suppose . . . I truly thought it would be different, more stable, and more normal once we were married.” She laughed and gradually sobered. “This one time, early on, Joseph took me out to dinner. I'd been moping and complaining that he'd been neglecting me for weeks, so he planned this delightful evening out for us. He got someone else to take his calls. A lovely, lovely surprise for me. And a complete disaster. Halfway through dessert this other doctor calls, very apologetic, but they were getting ready to do an emergency surgery on a patient of his with some sort of problem that included the heart valves—someone perfect for a special repair technique Joseph and a group of surgeons were working on at the time involving the restoration of the patient's own heart valves as opposed to replacing them with pig or mechanical valves. Fascinating . . . but not to me at the time, naturally. Joseph didn't even wait for the check. He simply gave the waitress too much money when we passed her on our way out and drove straight to the hospital. He gave me money for a cab and left me sitting in the doctors' lounge in my lovely new cocktail dress.”

She closed her eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. “It's been, what,” she looked at Drew to make a quick calculation, “over thirty years and it still sets me off.
And
that wasn't the worst of it. While I sat there fuming, I developed the most ungodly headache. It felt like someone was trying to unscrew the top of my head. Understandable, right?”

Sophie nodded—as did Drew and Ava, who'd obviously heard the story before, as they looked bored.

“I became nauseous, wave after wave, and my stomach was cramping horribly. That's when I decided I needed to calm myself down before I had a stroke. But the harder I tried, the sicker I got. I felt dizzy so I lay down on the floor—much better than falling to the floor, in my opinion, but quite a bit more noticeable than sitting in a chair and suffering in silence. Anyway, when I finally vomited, Grace Levol was with me—she later became my pediatrician; a fabulous woman. She and a nurse got me a wastebasket to be sick in, stayed with me, called Joseph. It wasn't long before I wasn't worried about dying anymore . . . I
wanted
to. I was so sick and so embarrassed and so angry—and do you know what Joseph's response was from the operating room? He told his nurse to tell the other nurse to tell Grace to admit me to the medical floor, keep me hydrated with IV fluids, and he'd come as soon as he was finished. I cried. And
that's
when I knew where I was on his list of priorities.”

She nodded her head emphatically and laughed. “It was some time, let me tell you, before I could reconcile myself to the fact that his career and his family were equally important to him . . . like he and my children are to me. I don't love one more than another, but sometimes one will need more of my attention than the others. My husband's work is crucial to so many people and we all make sacrifices—me, the children,
and
him—so that he can continue to save lives. I often felt like a single mother—”

“Okay.” Ava interrupted, animated and astute. “Short story long, I think Sophie gets it, Mother. It's tough being a doctor's wife. But Drew hasn't even asked her to be one yet, so let's try another subject . . . like Egypt.”

Her mother's smile was closed lipped and crafty. “Let's talk about jobs first.”

Drew chuckled and bent toward Sophie to whisper, “I think that's our cue to move on. Are you ready?”

She gave a nod and sent Ava her sympathies. There were worse things than having to discuss the long-overdue necessity of finding a job with an overtaxed parent—but not too many.

“H
e's a crapshoot,” Drew said of his brother, taking the winding country roads at a moderate speed back toward town. His tone was not wholly apologetic; more simply stating the facts. “We hardly ever agree on anything, but he's the first person I'd call if I got in a pinch. The last one I'd try to borrow money from, though, piker.” He chuckled softly, fondly. “My mother and sisters like to say he has an artistic temperament because he's been high-strung and moody for as long as we can remember. But my dad and I are fairly certain it's a mood condition; we think he's bipolar. We've strong-armed him into taking medication from time to time for the depression, but he flat out refuses mood stabilizers. He says they interfere with his creative process. And they might; who'd know better than him?” He glanced at her briefly. “I've never known him to be violent—to himself or to others—but he can be cruel with that mouth of his. I hope—”

“No. It was okay.” He didn't need to make excuses for his brother. “I was angry at first but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle, and by the time I realized it wasn't . . . well, it was over and he'd left the room.” And thinking it once again, she said it out loud. “He's so unlike the rest of you—you, Ava, and your mother. Does he look more like your father?”

“Pam, Ava, and I look more like him than we do Mother. It's been generally decided that Billy looks like my grandfather's younger brother, Charles. Mother says they could have been twins when he was younger.”

“Uncle Chuckle.”

He laughed. “That's the one. Ava called him that when she first started to talk and it suited him so well, it stuck. Some of the people in town called him Uncle Chuckle—to his face even. He loved it. He died in his sleep, at least a dozen years ago—he was ninety-eight.”

“Gramma York, my mom's mother was ninety-six. Unfortunately, she didn't know who anyone was for the last seven of them. That's a horrible way to grow old—Alzheimer's. Can you imagine how confusing and lonely it must be for them? Mom was so worried about getting it herself.” A pause for thought. “That would be one good thing to know about my birth parents—their medical histories. Oh, and my nationality, maybe. We always said it was Irish. You know, because of the hair? But it could just as easily have come from Scotland . . . any of the northern or western European countries actually. Do you know there are Polynesian redheads? They've even found Chinese mummies with red hair.”

He squinted to see her in the low light from the dash. “I think I'd throw out Chinese and Polynesian right off the bat.” She sent him a look that said
smartass
. “And what if you're not Irish? That could really throw a wrench in your St. Patrick's Day plans.”