Heroes of the Frontier (12 page)

AFTER THE BARBECUE THE KIDS CLIMBED
into the back of Sam's pickup, with Sam and Josie in front, and they drove back to Sam's house, passing young pines all the way, about a mile up a hill of tidy homes. The house, with a rolling lawn and orderly rows of shrubs surrounding it, had a clear view of the rest of Homer below. This was not some deep-country log cabin. This was a respectable and modern house, newly painted and sturdy and clean.

To be a bird-watching guide in Homer, wow. Sam had it right. She had gone up to Alaska and opened her bird-watching operation, no fuss, didn't ask anyone's permission. She had the run of the forest, some island off of Homer, and she had it figured out. Had she left society, as Josie wanted to? Yes and no. She ran a business, she had kids, the kids went to school, she paid taxes, she sent emails. She was as trapped as Josie was, but she had a boat, and wore boots, and her daughters were these holy outdoor creatures with long-flowing sweet-corn hair. She'd figured out a few things. She'd simplified.

Paul and Ana got changed and went upstairs, following the twins, and the twins said they would put them to bed. Ana was thrilled, Paul cautiously ecstatic. Josie had planned to tell Paul about Sam being his actual godmother, or announce this to Sam, but now she wasn't sure. She hoped Paul had forgotten.

“I have a surprise,” Sam said.

She'd been making her own whiskey and wanted Josie to try it. Josie had never developed an appreciation for brown liquor, and was fairly sure Sam's would not be good.

Sam brought out a medieval bottle and poured anyway, and poured too much, and worse, she poured it into a coffee cup. Josie smelled it, and the stench was stronger than regular whiskey—it was wicked and fathomless, a predatory smell. Josie feigned sipping it, pretended to grimace, pretended to swallow and enjoy it in the brave rugged way Sam expected.

“Damn,” Josie said.

Sam was pleased. The purpose of the whiskey maker, it seemed, was to make the drinker gag.

“So good,” Josie said. She hadn't tasted it yet.

They took their cups out to the back deck. Sam grabbed a heavy blanket and turned on a propane heater and brought it close. The night was cooling and the sky was grey with low cloud cover. They sat with their feet touching, their bodies making a V facing the dark trees.

Josie assumed deep talking was about to happen, and so took a long pull on the whiskey, wanting its effects without experiencing its taste. But the taste was inescapable and wretched. It burned. She thought of tennis shoes on fire. “This is awful,” she said.

Sam smiled and refilled her cup.

“So what the fuck are you doing up here?” Sam asked.

Josie laughed. Sam laughed. They laughed loudly, so loudly that an upstairs window opened and one of the twins, Josie couldn't tell which, leaned down and her dark face said, “Quiet out there, missies. It's bedtime for the little ones.”

The window closed and Sam turned to Josie.

“So Carl didn't want to come?” She was kidding. “Seriously. Are you in touch with him? He in the picture?”

Josie gave Sam an accounting of his participation in his children's lives, which took eight or nine seconds.

“Too bad,” Sam said. “Remember when he nicknamed Ana
Oh No
and then
My Bad
? He was funny. Actually pretty good with kids.” Both of these things had been true to some people at some point, but somehow his disappearance made him seem, to Josie at least, both less funny and less child-friendly. Whenever she heard Carl praised, she conjured his comical crimes. He had, more than once,
asked
Josie to fake an orgasm. She was ready to present this to Sam but Sam was moving on.

“And did I hear right, that you sold your practice? You're not a dentist anymore? And wasn't your face numb for a year or something? You're not planning on driving that RV off a cliff, are you? Stop me if I'm prying.”

“No,” Josie said. She couldn't think of anything else to say. She thought,
You, who fled to Alaska and is somehow married but not married—you're judging me?
But chose not to. There was no point. Josie took another long sip of the sickening whiskey and felt she could just let the night pass over her, an hour until she could claim exhaustion and go to sleep. The night air was warm, and the crickets or frogs were making their noise, and there was a breeze and far off, some road hummed a forgettable tune.

Sam topped off Josie's cup. “So you quit? You sold the practice? What did Sunny say about that?” Sam asked, and Josie was glad that Sam had stopped calling Sunny
Mom
. The last time she'd seen Sam, she was using that word, Mom. Neither she nor Sam had called Sunny by that name when they lived with her, and hearing her use it, twenty years later or whenever it was, was jarring—as if Sam had assessed what Sunny had been to her and had given it a name. Hadn't she once called her Sunsy? She had! Sam liked names, nicknames. These names did what—they helped Sam define, or redefine, what she and Sunny were to each other. They gave her some control, as if to call her
Sunsy
put her in her place, as a small and aging woman, whereas Mom had been a holy honorific. But now she was Sunny again. Sunny was just her name. The name as they'd known her. Let's settle on something and leave it alone, Josie wanted to say.

She sipped her whiskey, looked into the obsidian sky. This could be the cause of all modern neurosis, she thought, the fact that we have no immovable identity, no hard facts. That everything we know as foundational truth is subject to change. The world is running out of water. No, actually, there is enough water underground to cover the surface of the earth six hundred feet deep. So there's no water problem? Well, only six percent of that underground water is drinkable. So we're doomed? Well…The hedging and backtracking never ended. The scientists, the astronomers being the worst offenders. We are matter. No, we are surrounded by matter. There are nine planets. No, eight. We are exceptional, our planet singular in its ability to sustain life. No, there are billions of Earth-like planets, most of them bigger than ours, most of them likely to be far better developed. Sunny. Sunsy. Mom.

Sam was saying something. Josie focused on the words. “She must have been devastated.
De
vastated.”

Oh this. Josie had expected this. When she'd taken up dentistry in college, Sam was cruel. “You don't have to suck up like that, Joze.” That Josie had gone through with it, and had opened her own practice. Sam had been livid. Paralyzed. Then she'd moved up to Anchorage, then Homer, and there was an unspoken theory among Sunny, Josie, and Helen, that Sam had chosen Alaska as her way of ceding victory and territory to Josie. Josie had won, she'd secured Sunny's greater love, and thus could have her and have the Lower 48.

There was a thumping of Sam's unlaced boots. She put her feet, huge in their heavy wool socks, on the grey picnic table.

“Sorry, shit,” Sam said, and suddenly her face was directly in front of Josie's. Their noses touched. “I'm not mad at you. Or jealous,” she said. “I'm nothing. Nothing like that. But I know you've always thought I was bitter.” Josie remembered, suddenly, a time when Sam had accused her of positioning herself to inherit Sunny's practice. She'd been so nasty, so often, again using her excuse that it was all fucked up, so what. “I love you. We're sisters,” Sam said, and now Josie's eyes were welling and Sam was crying. “I want to hear about what happened. It helps to talk.”

Josie felt this a dubious claim. Usually it did not help to talk. It hurt like hell to talk. It was like saying
Standing still helps
to a person sinking in quicksand. In this case, Josie was sure the pain would be searing, that she would think about it more vividly that night, later, lying on Sam's basement pullout. She knew, in fact, that she would lie down there, cold and with a head full of bad whiskey, and run all this through her mind again, while also thinking of her children sleeping two floors above, who very well might wake up in the middle of the night and would not know where their mother was—they wouldn't guess the basement, and would find that terrifying, their mother asleep in a basement. Josie was sure talking about all this was a terrible idea—talking about horrors had not been helpful to her, she was better off forgetting, structuring her life around forgetting, but Sam wanted to know, and in a moment of whiskey-driven weakness Josie thought it a wonderful idea to open this wound.

She had such a gentle face. Her hair was white, her cheeks pink, anyone who met her would have thought of Mrs. Claus. How could a woman like that, a woman named Evelyn—Evelyn Sandalwood! A name to soothe the tired and weary!—how could this widow with five grandchildren become such a demon? Josie thought of the strange monuments in the desert, the hunched and hollowed shapes that wind and rivers had made of respectable mountains.

Evelyn had been Josie's patient. Years without a problem. She had a dirty mouth, yes, she was a smoker with soft teeth, two dozen fillings, poor gums. But nothing far out of the ordinary. Usually one could sense the troubled patients—they had so many worries, they would jerk around in the chair, grip the armrests, would look at you with resentful eyes before spitting into the sink. Afterward they would ask so many questions, would stay far longer than they should, they would ask for second opinions from her hygienists. Josie had broken up with so many of these patients in the past, sending them to cheaper or more expensive dentists, anywhere.

But Evelyn was one of the good ones. They talked about the creek near Josie's practice, how Evelyn used to take a canoe through its sulfurous waters as a girl. She occasionally mentioned her dead husband in a lovely way, nothing morbid, knowing he was gone, feeling lucky to have had him so long. She was not angry about anything, had no confrontational bones. She seemed an honest woman. And so why did she come at Josie like she did? Josie sensed forces around her. A son-in-law who was a personal-injury attorney. A niece who had seen some documentary about malpractice. Josie heard things but wasn't sure. It was a small town, Josie couldn't know what was true, what happened in her home, in her mind.

She did know that one day Evelyn Sandalwood's records were subpoenaed from her office. Christy, the receptionist, opened the letter, from an attorney known to be a holy terror, asked Josie about it, and Josie said of course send them, send the records, anything. But she couldn't breathe. She stared at the letterhead. This attorney was an animal. It was three in the afternoon, she had only one more patient, just a cleaning and checkup. She glanced at the letter, afraid to read it, but saw the words “gross negligence” and “significant delay in diagnosis” and knew her practice would not survive. She let Christy close, and stopped by the grocery store on the way home, getting herself an oversized bottle of prosecco. She got to the parking lot and went back for gin.

Josie should have seen the tumor. That was the claim. In any checkup Josie would do a standard oral cancer screening, and for someone like Evelyn, a smoker, she took her time. She lifted and examined that filthy tongue, the color and texture of a car's floormat. She remembered vividly doing so, remembered finding nothing, remembered marking
negative
on her chart.

But sixteen months later Evelyn had Stage 3 cancer and wanted two million dollars. Josie didn't know who to call. She called Raj. “Come see me after work,” he said. Raj had his own practice in town, and she and Raj talked frequently, gave second opinions on root canals and, for fun, sent each other their most annoying patients. He was a round man in his late fifties with a booming voice, given to dubious philosophizing at high volume. He would stand with his legs firmly planted, as if ready to withstand a sudden gust of wind, and say things like “I love my work, I cannot deny it, because I love all people!” Or, on a less happy day, “The only problem with our profession, Josephine, is the people and their terrible mouths.”

This time, Josie arrived at his office to find him standing in the empty foyer, arms outstretched. But instead of embracing Josie, he began one of his pronouncements. “I told my daughters, ‘Don't go into medicine!' ” It was just the two of them but he was talking loudly enough for an open-air political rally. “Can you imagine, an Indian man telling his daughters not to be doctors? It's these lawsuits! This constant blame. This culture of complaint! We are not the givers of immortality! We are fallible! We are human!” Josie asked him if he'd ever had a patient subpoena anything, and he said sure, back in Pennsylvania once, but he didn't know a good lawyer in Ohio. She spent the rest of an hour hearing him talk about his own problem patients, the dozen times he'd narrowly avoided lawsuits of his own.

When Josie finally found a lawyer, a young woman who had just left the district attorney's office in Cincinnati, she knew she was beaten. She'd hired a kid lawyer to defend her against a woman dying of cancer, a woman who happened to resemble Mrs. Claus. She did not stand a chance. It was a matter of settling and for how much.

The notion of giving the practice away came to Josie one day when she was arriving at the office. The moment her key turned the lock, the idea struck her with gorgeous simplicity. She would hand the business over to Evelyn Sandalwood. The woman had poisoned the business, and now it could be hers. Her lawyer was hinting at a settlement of two million dollars. Josie's insurance topped out at one million, and she thought the business could be worth about five hundred thousand, so she offered them a trade. She would hand over the entire thing, the equipment, the clients, everything, and walk away. They could get all that, a million and a half, now, or wait forever for less.

Evelyn's lawyer said it was ludicrous, no chance, until the former DA explained how long it would take for Evelyn to extricate the same amount from Josie in cash. Her house, even if they sold it, was only half hers, and after the sale and split and taxes and fees it might bring Evelyn one-fifty. The rest would come in wage garnishments for the remainder of Josie's life—and Josie had made it known she didn't plan to practice dentistry again, so that level of income was never to return. The business was Evelyn's to own. That was Josie's offer. And it was Josie's idea to give Evelyn's people seventy-two hours to decide. In those three days Evelyn's people sent experts through the building, assessing the value of the machines, the lights, the tools. In the middle of it all, Raj called. “I'll buy it for a million,” he said. Josie told him it wasn't worth that. “I think it is!” he said—he roared. He was somehow louder over the phone. Josie told him he was a saintly man. “I want happiness for you, Josie!” he yelled. “I want you to forget this ugliness and find serenity! You are now free!”