Chapter 18
Jake
T
he resemblance was uncanny—the slow twist of her hands as she spoke, the sultry tilt of her head when she laughed, the silky sweep of her hair, the button at the tip of her nose. A wave of melancholy washed over him, alternately drawing him to her, then pulling him away. It was as if Monica were here in the hospital cafeteria, sitting across the table from him.
It had been less than a decade since he last saw Monica, but it seemed like a millennium. He blinked his eyes and stared out the window. A cardinal flew away from the roof and into the sunset. He tried to erase the image of Monica in front of him. It wouldn’t go away.
The woman at the table wasn’t Monica, though. Her identification badge read B
ETSY
B
LOOM
, MD.
“Jake,” one of the other doctors said. “Meet Betsy, the new surgery intern.”
This woman, Dr. Betsy Bloom, was about the same age as Monica, back then. When she spoke, her voice bounced with the optimism of youth. Its tone, while discussing her patients, was competent, alluring: “Mr. Thornton’s hemoglobin is seven point two . . . And his chest X-ray shows heart failure . . . So I ordered one unit of packed red cells and forty of Lasix . . .” Everything about her was familiar in a distant, aching, haunting way. When he looked at her, he felt a fragrant autumn breeze blow across his face. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
How old would Monica be now? He calculated in his head: She was almost twenty-four when they first met. That was eight years ago. The effects of age would have changed her, deepened the lines along her nose, drawn delicate crow’s feet beside her eyes, nudged the flesh beneath her chin southward. Her skin had been soft as velvet. It would be even softer now.
“Where’d you say you’re from?” he asked. It was a dumb question, but maybe she was related to Monica.
“I didn’t say,” Betsy answered. “I’m from Oregon—graduated from med school in Portland, grew up in Pendleton.”
“Well, you remind me of a person I knew from the Thumb. Thought maybe you’re a cousin, or something.”
“Nope, no relatives in the Thumb or anywhere near Michigan, for that matter.”
He shrugged, raising only his right shoulder. How could two unrelated people be so similar?
He reached for the salt, she for a napkin. His hand, gripping the shaker, brushed against her wrist. The warmth of her skin lingered on his knuckles.
The other doctors at the table excused themselves. The second-year surgery resident gathered his empty food containers and then paused for a moment beside him.
“How’re things with your son? Off the ventilator yet?”
“Not yet, but he’s making progress in that direction.” Jake shoveled another forkful of lasagna into his mouth.
“Your son is ill?” Betsy Bloom asked. Her eyebrows were knit into her question just as Monica’s had been when she was wondering. “He’s on a ventilator?”
He stared at her, trying to anticipate her reaction to the story of Eddie and his illness. She wasn’t Monica. This was a woman he didn’t know at all, even though she seemed like a clone of Monica.
“Yeah, he has meningitis.” His fingers twirled a paper clip inside his pants pocket. She isn’t Monica, he told himself, again.
When he finished his dinner, he shoved his chair away from the table. “We’d better get back to work.”
Later that evening, he lay on the call room bed in his scrubs and stared at the slit of light from beneath the bathroom door. Soon the on-call OR crew would arrive and he would have to do an internal fixation on a man with a broken hip.
He wondered where Monica was, now. Last he heard, she was working for an HMO in Maine. At this very moment, somewhere out there, she might be wondering about him. The telepathy between them had been eerie. At times it seemed as if they were wired through the same fuse box. Maybe that connection, long idle, was still operating. Maybe she, too, yearned for the old days. Regrets about him might haunt her, cloud her reason, overwhelm her in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep.
He could try to find her. What was her name now? Was she still Monica Daley? Maybe she had a married name. He hadn’t tried to find her before—had decided the Book of Monica was closed forever, never to be opened again. But, things had changed. Eddie was desperately sick. Anna was going crazy. Monica could, as she had at one time, soothe every one of his raw nerves, could rub away the pain.
He shook his head against the pillow and turned onto his side. His knees nearly met his chest. Keeping the Book of Monica closed seemed a good idea. He was married, was a father. He had made a commitment to Anna and to the boys and he intended to keep it. Now, he needed to get whatever sleep he could before the OR crew arrived. He turned to his other side.
And yet, the touch of Betsy’s wrist still seared his hand. If only, somehow and somewhere safe, he could see Monica again, could bury his face in the willowy scent of her hair, could fold himself into the warm softness of her body.
They had been classmates in medical school, anatomy lab partners during their freshman year. He had first spoken to her as they pulled the waxy canvas off the stiff, naked body of their cadaver.
“I’ll take that,” he had said, referring to the smelly, heavy canvas she held in her hands.
For a long time, they had joked about those words. Monica had thought he meant something quite different, something more personal to her that he would take. “You’re right,” he had said many times, “I didn’t mean that stinky, formaldehyde-soaked tarp at all.”
Compared to the girlfriends he had had in college, Monica was completely different. The other girls were goals—rings on the merry-go-round of college life that he might successfully snatch if he was lucky enough, fast enough, tried hard enough, leaned over far enough.
Monica, on the other hand, wasn’t a distant target; she had been a part of him. In biochemistry class as they learned about DNA—two threads of nucleotides twisted together, building the scaffold upon which all manner of life emerged—he had thought, That’s us. The two of them seemed to be strings of organic mutuality, growing and swaying and turning, the dance of living. He considered them to be useless apart, capable of wonderful, amazing results together.
He rolled onto his back, straightened his knees. If Monica were here now, he could tell her about Eddie. She would understand. He wouldn’t have to explain the lab results or the medical lingo the doctors and nurses used. Unlike talking to Anna, he could talk to Monica about Eddie’s illness without being an interpreter.
That fall, on sunny Sundays, he and Monica took study breaks in Gallup Park. Hand in hand they wandered the paths along the Huron River, stopping on the footbridges to watch the water—it was the color of gunmetal—pitch and swirl and glide as it flowed relentlessly toward Lake Erie.
He told her about the toboggan slide he and his brothers rode during winter afternoons, about his love of rabbit hunting as a kid. She told him about her parents’ house in Bad Axe, about the Pointe aux Barques lighthouse near the tip of the Thumb. They imagined themselves as the doctors they would become, possessing the skills to heal people.
They imitated the squawks of the Canada geese that lived in the park, watched a gaggle of the smoke-colored, arrogant birds waddle away indignantly.
“What do you suppose we said to them?” he asked, slipping an arm around her shoulders.
“I think . . .” She leaned her body into his. “I think we said, ‘You’re losers.’ ”
For the first time in his life, he noticed wildflowers as she pointed to the yellow-as-an-egg-yolk goldenrod, the periwinkle chicory blossoms, the white umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace. Together they watched the hawthorn leaves turn from kelly green to straw to brown before dropping to the ground. They saw the crimson fruit that dangled like Christmas tree ornaments from the leafless branches of the high bush cranberry trees. When he was with her, the crows suddenly seemed blacker than black and the egrets whiter than white.
Although at the time he didn’t think consciously about permanence, he had assumed in an abstract way that the sense of wholeness between them would go on forever. It was like the developmental milestones of childhood. When kids have gained the neural and motor connections to walk, they walk and never stop walking. Same thing with talking. He figured loving worked the same way and he had finally gotten there.
Then it began to unravel. He wasn’t sure what happened. In looking back, he thought it might have started when Monica failed the final exam in gross anatomy. He had scored the third-highest grade in the class. She refused to discuss the test, but he learned about her failure from another classmate. Gradually, in little ebbs and swells, she turned away from him. When her father’s colon cancer relapsed, she didn’t want to talk about it. She said he’d surely respond to the chemotherapy, so there was no point in saying anything more.
On a Wednesday shortly after the beginning of the second semester, she didn’t come to class. Same on Thursday. That night he took a six-pack of 7Up and a bag of popcorn to her apartment, assuming she was sick.
He knocked on her door, using the syncopated rap they had invented. From behind the door he heard movement and then the click of the dead bolt sliding back. The door opened a crack, enough for him to see the pink patches on her face and her red, swollen eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Her voice was a whisper.
“What do you mean ‘nothing’? You look awful.” He pushed against the door, tried to open it wider. It didn’t budge. “Are you sick?”
Silence. She tried to shut the door, but he had wedged his boot against the frame.
“Can I come in?” On top of his confusion, he was now becoming frightened.
“No.”
He set the 7Up on the porch rail to free up one hand. “Monica, something is very wrong. Tell me.”
She pulled a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “I need a break from school. Need to figure a few things out. Please go away.”
He pulled his boot from the doorway and the heavy wooden door slammed shut. He sat on the porch steps, his head in both hands. She was on the other side of the door but seemed light-years beyond his reach. What was going on?
Later, she didn’t answer his phone calls, nor the doorbell, nor his impassioned letters. She had vanished like a shadow into the fog. Finally he called her parents. “Monica’s fine,” her mother said, “please don’t call her again.”
Permanent gloom enveloped him as if he’d been dunked in a pool of dirty oil. He couldn’t sleep, lay awake night after night and wondered where she was, what she was doing, what he could have done to help her, why she refused to talk to him. He felt like half a person, as if someone had torn off one leg and one arm, leaving him bleeding and unbalanced and alone. He wandered the paths of Gallup Park and secretly hoped she’d step out of the bushes. He no longer saw the birds or the flowers or the leaves. He saw only gray. The ripples in the Huron River no longer danced along the surface, but now seemed to drill downward, ever deeper into the murky water. Away. Always moving away.
He mentioned her to his brother.
“She’s pretty special, huh?” Luke had said.
“She is. And she’s pretty gone right now.”
Luke must have told their grandmother, because she sent him a flowery card, with a note in her wobbly script that read:
Jakey, girls are like streetcars . . . if you miss one, keep waiting at the corner, because another one will be coming down the tracks in just a little while.
He turned over on the call room bed. The plastic mattress cover crunched as if he had rolled on a mound of foam pellets. He looked at his watch. What was taking the OR crew so long to get things set up?
And where was Monica now? Several years after she left, he learned she had returned to medical school in Ohio, had completed her studies, and entered a pediatric residency in Boston. Was she still in Massachusetts?
His pager rang. Its jangle jolted him awake, the sound first lurching forward, then tumbling backward. Maybe it would go away. He rolled over. The pager rang again. He sat up in bed, pressed the answer button, pressed the light button, read the message. “READY IN THE OR IN TEN MINUTES. IS THE PERMIT SIGNED?”
He leaned back against the pillow, his mind aching for more sleep.
His pager rang yet again. Again, he fumbled to read the screen. This time it said, “YOUR SON HAD A SEIZURE. YOUR WIFE NEEDS TO SPEAK WITH YOU.”
He shoved the pager back into its holster. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, he clutched his head and then rubbed his ears. He didn’t want to talk to her. She’d be a basket case, wouldn’t listen to what he said, wouldn’t believe him if she did. He trudged out the call room door. First he’d stop in the pediatric ICU to check on Eddie, then he’d head to the OR.
“And, yes,” he called into the empty hallway. “Yes, the goddamned permit has been signed.”