Borrowed Horses (14 page)

I picked another forkful. In spring, I would turn this manure in with the soil of my mother’s vegetable garden, seed it for her and weed it for her, taking my turn feeding our family with produce that wasn’t trucked miles across the country with the oil that men were dying for. Filling this bucket was a small act, physically and politically, but it was satisfying and purely good. My thoughts meandered as motes in light, pulverized dust looking to become part of the whole again. Land, silence, and time offered solitude without loneliness. They always had. If I could make myself believe that the time spent with Dawn and Jenny had not somehow made this moment possible, I could give up all desire for love and the company of others.

That Sunday morning, I made my manure delivery and ran Moscow Mountain, enjoying the familiar roads and the cool air of a mountain morning. The crunch of each footstep on gravel brought memories of my first clumsy attempts at running, all those years ago, back when my mother was in remission and I had nothing to worry about except my calculus homework and the sudden loneliness that came when Mouse started dating that guy. The pain of running was infinitely preferable to the loss of my closest friend. Out there, only my own body could betray me, and I soon found that it would not. Once I’d built a little leg and lung strength, I was good for miles. Foxfire too was young then, and together we made a strikingly athletic pair.

I drove back to my apartment tired, planning to spend the afternoon watching television, but once I showered, I was restless again. I wanted to ride—to jump. I could almost feel the measured cadence of Foxy’s collected canter, the power collecting, ready to explode in flight, but that feeling was no longer possible. Bored, my mind wandered to salmon swimming upstream, the explosive power of their bodies jumping against the current: I’d crack that puzzle of a man.

Clouds lined the horizon and hid the mountain, but I was too stir-crazy to drive. I walked through the old part of Moscow where a few Victorians still stood, painted conservative greys and tans that obscured the gingerbread and lace of their architecture. Between them, newer homes had sprouted like mushrooms in subdivided lots. Mouse had lived in one of these—a post-war bungalow that her grandparents sold years ago. Mouse and I had often walked this stretch together, complaining about our government take-home final or laughing at Vince Johnson, an MHS linebacker, whose eyebrow had been shaved off one night when he fell asleep on the return trip from an away game. I hadn’t thought of him in years. Rumor had it that he’d raped a girl at an Idaho State frat party his freshman year—roid rage, I’d been told—but I hadn’t seen him since the night we tossed our mortar boards and marched into our separate futures.

A summer breeze and the rumble of thunder brought me back to myself. Maples leaves danced around me, losing their green but not yet yellow. An older couple cleared up from a yard sale, tarnished silver and a broken Remington still on the card table. On the corner, lanky kids with flopping hair pushed skateboards, trying to jump the curb. They failed. Over and over, they failed, laughed or cursed, and made another doomed attempt. Jumping against the current. What strange creatures we are. I crossed the rim of broken down apartments, old sheets serving as curtains, to Main Street.

My checker was not working today. Instead, I waited to buy elbows and Tillamook cheddar in a line made long by the slowness of another new checker. She was a blonde ringleted, pudgy girl who giggled and chatted constantly while she looked up code after code to peck into the register.

Her face lit up as she turned to my groceries. “Mmmm, macaroni. You’re totally making me homesick—all I can make is Stouffers, which is O.K., I guess, but it isn’t like homemade.” She didn’t stop for me to agree. “Man, my mom makes the best. All creamy and cheesy, you know what I mean. Oh, and she’d always slice tomatoes on the side, fresh from the garden. There’s nothing in the world like a home-grown tomato, especially with macaroni and cheese.” Even if I could find a pause in her mac and cheese monologue, how could I segue to Not-Jed? “I could go for a huge bowl right now, but like I said, all I can do is frozen. It comes out all gluey, you know? Even the expensive kind. The one in the black box?” She talked on and on, but in the wrong direction. “Hey! Now that I work here, I bet the deli ladies would hook me up, don’t you think? They seem nice, and the stuff in the case isn’t bad. It’s still not Mom’s, is it?”
The name?
I wanted to blurt, but her thoughts trundled one into the next unceasingly, a current I couldn’t fight. “Real cheddar, browned crust. All I’ve got today is PB and J, but I just don’t think it’s a PB and J kind of day.”

The name! The name!
She was ruining it. I couldn’t get a word in; she didn’t even pause to give me my total but seemed to slide it in edgewise as she prattled on. I stood there, slack-jawed and un-speaking in a sort of verbal hypnosis. She’d handed me my change and turned to the next customer. I hadn’t uttered a word and felt no strength in this silence.

The First Showdowns

M
onday was back-logged with pre-op patients awaiting x-rays of their barium-white guts, mixed in with assorted surprises: a hung-over city worker who’d slid off a pothole’s metal ladder for a compound leg fracture; an adulterous Deary man who drove himself to the hospital with a serrated bread knife in his thigh to the hilt; a two-year-old who’d tried to swallow his brother’s race car, which was now lodged between tooth and palette. I did my best to soothe each as I moved them under the lights with a firm but slow touch, attuned to feel the smallest flinch, listening for the faintest catching of breath. They’d come to me hurt, but I would not add to their pain if I could help it.

I gave attention to each person, a far more important part of my job than aiming machinery and pushing buttons. It was too easy to allow a patient to become a name on a chart or a diagnosis to be treated. As I met them, I tried to gauge what else they needed besides the x-rays. In the case of the city worker, he needed his shell of silence preserved. Rather than chat or smile, I kept a hand on his shoulder each moment I could. The Deary man, on the other hand, flirted continuously but seemed reassured when I laughed off his advances. He needed to know he was still a man, even if it wasn’t the time for a fresh romance. The child needed a good view of his mother at all times and a lot of soft touching and smiles, and his mother needed my good cheer, optimism, and sincere confidence that everything would be all right.

For each patient, experience helped me find the type of treatment required, but when Dave walked into Room One, I was at a loss. Cheryl should have stopped him. He had no right to be there, disrupting the flow of the sick and injured. He paced a full minute before speaking.

“You found someone. Jenny told me.”

Under the door, a shadow slid across the narrow band of light. Cheryl.

“I’ll leave Jenny,” Dave said, his voice breaking.

I felt hit, gut punched. Dave’s breath filled the silence. I couldn’t seem to breathe at all. If there was a word to offer in return, I was not capable of voicing it. This reality cleaved from the one I’d known, in which such things didn’t happen. And yet, I understood why he was here, because in that hotel room and for the weeks afterwards, I too had been as happy as I’d ever been before.

Silence made him desperate. He sank down to a crouch, pressing his hands against his face as if that was all that would hold his head together. “I need you, Joannie. My life is empty without you.” His haunted eyes never moved from mine.

Audacity. Audacity!
The thought grew from my feet upward, bringing me back into myself. I was no counterpart. I was no missing piece. A woman is an entity unto herself, and I had already rejected this as a possible life. I would not waste myself spackling the gaps of an insufficient man.

I wanted to kick, to punch. My hands balled to fists, the skin stretched taut over a ridge of knuckles, fingers kneading my palms. To fight would be to unleash a passion I could not stem. I met his gaze, and my anger melted, leaving only pity. “Dave.”

His eyes dropped, a small but consequential victory.

“I don’t even know the guy’s name.”

He looked almost gaunt in the dim light of Room One. “Talk to me,” he pleaded. “Tell me that there’s a way out of this.”

“You’re married,” I said, as much to myself as to Dave.

He seemed to come to a little, looking around at the machines, “You must think I’m totally psychotic, coming here.” I didn’t, though; I saw him only as a failure. I was a failure myself.

“We’ll talk later,” I tried.

“It will only make it worse.” He turned and paused only briefly before pushing through the door and walking away. I stood for a moment, staring at the space where he’d been, before signaling for the next patient.

I struggled for focus. Doreen led in a wire-haired woman who scowled, holding her wrist. I attempted a smile. In her faded floral shirt, she looked like a farmer’s wife with little patience for hospitals. “I’m betting this is the last place you wanted to be today,” I said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She grunted in reply, but already her expression had softened.

Half an hour later, Dr. Rivers stormed down the hall, white coat billowing in the wake of his self-important striding step. “I need a word with you, Joan,” he said. I was in reception, helping an eleven-year-old girl back into a wheelchair, but he did not wait for the nurse to wheel her away.

“Yes?”

“I understand you had a personal visitor this morning.”

The child’s mother looked from him, to me, to the nurse, who gave a little start and suddenly remembered to push the chair back toward the emergency room. The mother hurried behind them, gripping the plastic bag that carried her child’s shoes.

Dr. Rivers wasn’t my supervisor; he took Glenda’s job upon himself—all in the best interest, he felt, of keeping a smoothly running hospital.

“It was not my intention to have any visitors,” I replied. Anger clipped each syllable between my teeth.

Dr. Rivers ignored the words, tone, and defiant stare. “This area is for patients only, not your current lover. People here are in critical states, and we have to be ready to serve them.”

Current lover. If I had felt indignation at Dave’s assumptions, it was nothing to what now seethed. All morning, I had been quickly, efficiently, and most importantly,
caringly
serving patients. How long had I served them, without ever having a visitor so much as ask for me?

The gold clip of the Montblanc pen in his pocket flashed under the fluorescent like the shining saber of his self-righteousness. What moral high ground could I claim? I’d slept with a married man.

My jaw locked tight. I determined to stay silent, to have this done with quickly. Dave had been there—my mistake—the rubber band collar I’d pulled over my own neck, now festering.

Dr. Rivers crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if your personal life is beginning to affect your job. Moving one place, then another, your mind someplace else, always distracted.”

I broke. “You think all this is affecting my work?” I glanced at Cheryl as she feigned deafness at her keyboard. I wondered how much she’d heard, how much she’d constructed, and what picture of events she’d offered.

“I am wondering if it might,” he said.

“This is horseshit.”

Cheryl gasped at the reception desk, but I didn’t acknowledge it.

Dr. Rivers’ lip curled into a sneer. “I hope you don’t use that language around our patients.”

“And I hope you don’t reprimand all hospital professionals in public when they have patients to attend to.”

Dr. Rivers’ cheeks burned red, a stark contrast to the gel-slicked hair starting to turn prematurely grey at his temples. He was no more than five years older than me—still very young for a doctor—but that was easy to forget.

I quivered with ill-suppressed rage. “My radiographs are good—better than good—and you know it. Clear, detailed. Without them, you’d only be guessing at ailments I let you
see
.” I paused there, letting him remember that. “I most certainly do not invite people back here to visit. I never have. The man who came by today was particularly unwelcome, as I made clear to him. I asked him to leave, and he did. I hope the visit will not be repeated. If it is, I hope someone,” I shot a glance toward Cheryl now, “will do her job and call security.”

Dr. Rivers, now confused, looked from me to Cheryl. Whatever she’d told him, this wasn’t the cast she’d put on the affair. I could only imagine her story: me and my lover in the darkness of Room One doing Lord knows what on the x-ray tables. He cleared his throat and said, “As long as we’re on the same page.”

“I believe we are.” I stared, unflinching, daring him to say more.

He put his hand on my back, guiding me into the darkness of the x-ray room. Once there, he said, “Joan, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you privately. I should have.” His silvering hair looked darker here, erasing the illusion of age. Here, he looked sincere and incredibly young. Liable to make the mistakes we all make.