Doing Harm (22 page)

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“Here, Steve. Left! Left here!” Sally commands.

I jerk the van over for a hard left.

“Again! Do it again!” Katie screams happily from the backseat.

“Where the”—Sally glances back at the girls—“H-E-L-L is your brain, anyway?”

“Sorry,” I mumble. “I was thinking about—something else.”

“No kidding,” she says sardonically. “You’ve been thinking about something else a lot lately. Not that I’ve had much of an opportunity to notice. You’re hardly ever home anymore. Is there something going on I should know about? Other than that sick patient?”

I swallow hard.

If she only knew …

“No. Just, you know. I’m trying to keep the bosses happy. “

“Oh? I didn’t know that keeping the bosses happy meant you had to abandon your family.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve been distracted. I had … a really bad week. I don’t want to talk about it. Is that okay?”

“It just seems—I don’t know. It just seems that you don’t want to talk about much of anything lately. Is it
really
that bad at work? I thought you already had the job.”

“I, uh, do. It’s just that there’s a lot of pressure on me still to perform. Even more than before, if anything.”

She turns toward me and places a hand on my shoulder. “Look, Steve. I understand that what happened in the OR with that lady is really bothering you. But what’s done is done. You’ve got to move on. Please. For me. And the girls.”

I would move on. Except now, after this morning, Mrs. Samuelson is the very least of my worries. But I can’t tell Sally that. “You’re—right, sweetie. I’m sorry. It
has
been on my mind a lot lately. And it’s not fair to you guys. I’ll do better. I promise.” I pat her hand, and she squeezes my shoulder. “So—who’s going to be at the barbecue?”

She brushes a stray strand of hair from her plain but beautiful face. “Nancy told me that lots of different people from the hospital are coming with their kids. Mostly surgery residents. Should be fun.”

With that last turn we wind deeper into the suburbs and climb higher up the socioeconomic ladder. Town homes and economical ranchers give way to staid colonials that glower at the shiny young upstarts in their midst: sparkling McMansions, many clustered together in gated neighborhoods with soothing names like “Bridgewater” and “Greenleaf.” Sally directs me into one of these gated communities. We drive through the open gate, past an empty guardhouse, and down the broad main street of the development.

“There,” Sally says, pointing to one of the houses, which sports a shiny collection of balloons tied to an ornate wooden mailbox out front.

“Wow,” I observe as we drive past the balloons, following the gentle curve of the cul-de-sac. “Pretty nice. And in Weston, to boot.” Set well back from the cul-de-sac at the end of a long driveway, the house is large and imposing, practically the size of an English country estate.

“Family money. Her family.”

Cars crowd the front of the house and driveway, an armada of minivans, SUVs, and family station wagons occupying every inch of cement around the circle, stretching along both sides of the cul-de-sac’s short stem and spilling out onto the main street. I troll along the rows of cars, looking to claim my own section of the curb.

“You weren’t kidding. This is a pretty big deal.”

“Well, from what I know about her, Nancy doesn’t do anything halfway.”

“No, I guess she doesn’t.”

After I finally find a spot, we walk with the kids along the cul-de-sac and up the huge expanse of driveway, past a large white catering truck, and up to the front door. Taped to the door is a sign, printed on a high-resolution printer, with a photo of three young blond children: two girls and a boy. The children are smiling in a blank, Teutonic, automaton kind of way.

We dutifully follow the instructions on the sign and walk into the foyer, Katie shuffling in front of us. The foyer is refreshingly cool and dark, in stark contrast to the brightness and oppressive humidity lying just outside the door. It reminds me of escaping into movie theaters for a summer matinee when I was a kid.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see that the inside of the house is just as new and nice as the outside. It smells like a museum. I wonder how we’re going to keep Katie from breaking anything.

As if in open defiance of my anxiety, a group of screaming children bursts into the foyer from one of the adjoining rooms, almost knocking into us. They ricochet about the foyer like silver balls in an old pinball machine, shouting and laughing. Katie wraps herself around my leg, looking apprehensive. I extricate myself from her and kneel, whereupon she throws her arms around my neck.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. You can play with them. Look how much fun they’re having.” Her gaze shifts from me, to the kids, then back to me. Determination replaces the trepidation on her face. She lets go of my neck, jumps up and down in place a few times as if warming up, and launches herself into the melee. The group moves en masse out of the foyer, out a sliding glass door, and into the backyard beyond, absorbing the odd stray child along the way, an inexorable, giggling tide.

I survey the situation in the opposite direction, where Sally has already walked into a living room. Men and women, mostly our age, stand around talking, many bouncing small babies in their arms. Some of them look familiar, faces seen in passing in the corridors of University Hospital, but I don’t know any of them personally. They acknowledge me with expressions that convey the same vague recognition and continue with their conversations.

Sally joins a circle of other moms and starts chatting. Bella is tucked in the crook of one arm, eating her foot with one hand and clutching a cracker with the other, her face a Zen mask of contentment. Sally sways from side to side, talking and nodding and smiling, effortlessly transferring weight from one foot to another with unconscious maternal grace.

I really don’t want to join the group or their conversation. I catch Sally’s eye from where I’m standing in the doorway. She absently waves me off, hardly turning from her conversation.

This unusual (and likely brief) double reprieve from parental sentry duty makes me realize how hungry I am. With everything that’s been going on, I haven’t eaten for over fifteen hours. The general surgeons have an old adage about how to make it successfully through a busy night on call in the hospital when you’re a resident.

Eat when you can, sleep when you can, and never,
ever
fuck with the pancreas.

I’ve always liked this axiom, which is more or less specific to general surgeons. The pancreas is an important, irritable organ that sits in the middle of the abdomen, tucked between the spleen and the liver. Bloated with its own self-importance, the pancreas is essentially a big bag of caustic digestive enzymes that is, among other things, responsible for regulating blood-sugar levels. A fickle, spiteful mistress, it can spit those digestive enzymes out at surrounding organs at the slightest provocation and make people sick as dogs. Hence the admonishment to treat it well.

In any event, now that I have the opportunity, I’m ready to eat.

So I wander through the house, indifferent to the chatting young parents and shouting kids, until I finally stumble upon the kitchen, a gleaming array of serious Williams-Sonoma hardware. A knot of women I don’t know stands in one corner next to a coffee service, talking and sipping from mugs decorated with Impressionist paintings. They don’t seem to notice me. They’re discussing their children’s bedtimes and the difficulties involved in coaxing reluctant toddlers to go to bed. I overhear one of the women say, “Well, I must be very lucky, because let me tell you: My children beg to go to bed. Absolutely beg.” The other women smile politely but look doubtful.

Meanwhile, I look around for food. There are glasses and silverware and napkins and place settings and the coffee service. But no food. In a kitchen. Whatever.

Before I can dwell on this fact, though, I’m distracted by a large dry board hanging from and completely dominating an entire wall over a large, wooden kitchen table. I walk over to study it. It’s about five feet wide and four feet tall and divided into four large rows and several columns. In the first column on the left side of the board, under the heading “Names” written by hand with erasable black marker in the top row, are three names—Connor, Emma, and Hannah—each hand-printed in neat letters with black marker.

No, neat isn’t the word to describe that lettering. The penmanship is absolutely flawless. How can a human being possibly write with such mechanical precision?

Each name takes up its own row in the first column. The rest of the columns stretch across the width of the board like a computer spreadsheet, each headed by a single entry in the top row printed in that same scarily precise hand: music class, soccer practice, karate class, Chinese class, yoga class (yoga for kids?), something called the Math-Magicians Club … The list stretches from one end of the board to the other, an impressive collection of after-school activities representing, as best I can tell, the sum total of all human endeavor.

“What do you think? That’s our master schedule,” a clipped female voice says from behind me.

I jump and turn to face its source: a rail-thin woman, pretty in a patrician kind of way. Her face is pale but not unhealthy-looking; Jane Austen might have described it as
alabaster
or
ivory
. She’s wearing a crisp white cotton shirt with the word “HARVARD” printed in discreet crimson letters over the left breast. Her shirt isn’t so much tucked into as fused with her stylish tan shorts, the two joined together in a seamless, wrinkle-free union. Her attractive legs are as pale as her face but look positively charcoal compared to the flawless white brilliance of her sneakers. She wears her long, straight, blond hair in a tight ponytail, which pulls her entire face back toward her ears, her prominent cheekbones supporting the rigid skin like tent poles. The ponytail reminds me of GG.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I startled you.” Her taut smile draws her face even tighter, the way a surgical glove molds itself over your hand when you pull it toward your wrist, the elastic material stretching itself over your fingers. I worry that her cheekbones might rip right through the skin. She offers me her hand. The gesture is effortlessly graceful. “Hi, I’m Nancy. You’re Steve, right? Sally’s husband?”

“Yes.” I take her hand and she squeezes back lightly. It’s like shaking hands with tissue paper. I feel her bones, light and delicate as a bird’s, slide just underneath the skin.

Her face relaxes as she draws her hand away with prim precision. “I just ran into the kitchen to pull my next round of appetizers out of the oven. Even with the caterers, I like to do a few things on my own.”

She produces an oven mitt, from where exactly I can’t tell, and rummages through the oven. She takes out a baking sheet covered with neat lines of flaky pastries, puts the sheet on top of the stove, and with the oven mitt and a spatula starts placing them on a serving tray. Meanwhile, my mind scrambles back to Sally’s prior briefings about our host today, which return to me in fits and starts. Nancy, Sally’s friend from book club … her husband is Dan, the general-surgery resident I operated with last night.

She spins back toward me, offering a tray of steaming flaky pastries. “Here. Help yourself. Please.”

I take one of the pastries off the tray. It’s hot, so I bounce it lightly from one hand to another, blowing on it.

“Ooops! Careful. They’re hot.”

“Thanks.” I take a bite. “Wow. That’s really good.” It really is.

The taut smile appears again, and the professional side of my brain idly wonders how often she smiles and how the skin over her cheekbones can take that kind of repeated tensile punishment and still look normal.

“Thanks. Only twenty percent calories from fat and very low-carb.” She places the tray on top of the stove.

I wave toward the board with the remains of the appetizer. “Your, er, scheduling board is very impressive.”

She beams at the board as if watching one of her children cross the finish line first at the Olympics. “Yes. Well. Just a little organizational habit I picked up at Harvard Law. Dan and I met at a graduate school mixer while he was at Harvard Med.”

“Oh, right. Right. I think Dan mentioned that to me.” Dan and I have had maybe two extended conversations over the last two years, neither of which involved our wives or where we went to med school.

“You have to be organized in my line of work.”

“Which is?”

“District attorney. I like to catch bad guys.”

My stomach flips over. I can think of one bad guy I would love for her to catch. “Oh, really? That sounds very—”

“I could have been a doctor,” she continues without pause. “In fact, I even took some of the premed classes my freshman year at Stanford. But it just wasn’t for me.” She wrinkles her nose like she’s sucking on a lemon. “Honestly, I don’t know how you people made it through organic chemistry.”

“Well, I—”

“But I love being a lawyer. Really. Very gratifying. It’s hard at times not being home full-time with the children, like Sally, and it’s hard to get ‘me time.’” She draws quotation marks in the air with the index and middle fingers of each hand while saying “me time.” “There are only so many hours in a day.”

I nod blankly. I don’t think she notices.

“The two girls are blossoming. Thriving, really. By the time she turned five, Emma was already reading at a second-grade level. Hannah, well, she just
loves
music and numbers. Only seven and already a genius on the piano.”

She frowns. “The only one of them that’s been giving me any problem at all is Connor. Emma knew all of her state capitals by heart by the time she was three and a half. But Connor? He’s almost four and I can’t get him past Annapolis. Oh well.”

She sighs and looks thoughtfully at the scheduling board. She’s finished arranging the crab things on the serving tray. “I’m thinking that if we hire a part-time tutor before prekindergarten classes start, we’re still on track to squeak him into one of the lesser Ivies. Or maybe Duke. He’s going to have to really want it, though. He’ll probably end up being our little athlete. He’s very coordinated.…”