Probably at the bottom of the class
. Lily mustered up a response: “Go Trojans.”
Finally Dr. Help-Me clamped the last staple and yanked her company’s instruments free. The scrub nurse shut down the taping equip-
ment, and Lily heard the whirring sound of it rewinding. “By the way,” he said. “You’re both full of it when it comes to beach vaca- tions. Hands down, it’s the Cook Islands. Otherwise you might as well go roast hot dogs at Huntington State Beach with the masses. Well, she’s finished. Clean her up and send her to postop.”
The assistant surgeon stepped in as Dr. Help-Me strode toward the OR doors. “Lily?” he said. “Our lunch?”
The assistant surgeon cleared his throat. “Doctor? Could you step back here a moment?”
“Are you deaf? I said, she’s ready for postop.” “No offense, sir, but I—”
Lily turned to look at the patient. The woman’s color had gone as pale as bone, shocky, really, and her abdomen seemed more disten- ded than could be due to the pumped-in gas used to inflate the cavity. What was the problem?
Then her pressure dropped, and the anesthesiologist began to scramble. Frantically he forced air into her lungs. “Oh, my God, Charles, I think she’s bleeding out.”
Dr. Help-Me pointed a finger. “I’m the surgeon here.” “Then start behaving like one!”
He yelled out an order for plasma, and Lily’s knees felt as if someone had loosed them from the hinges. The smoke doc was right on target: That was exactly what was happening. Dr. Help-Me had probably sent a staple through the aorta. Contrary to what the gen- eral public believed, the aorta did not end at the heart but, like a tree trunk, extended down the abdomen and then branched into major arteries serving all the organs. This one-hour routine surgery was going to end in a funeral.
Lily swallowed hard, watching them try to save her, never once looking away. Those were her instruments; this was her job. And that was—or had been—a woman’s life.
When situations turned critical, the OR became increasingly frantic, and now the patient had a real incision, but this last-ditch surgery was nothing like that television show on Thursday nights. Lily couldn’t understand why Blaise had loved to watch it. Medical scenarios made for compelling anecdotes, but those episodes were about actors reenacting real-life tragic events. She bowed her head, wanting to say a prayer, but beyond
Santa María, madre del Creador
, a phrase she’d
memorized at the age of eight only in a futile attempt to please her grandmother—who always favored Rose—she couldn’t remember the words.
The heart monitor was flat, and had been for forty-five minutes. The sound of surgical gloves snapping off filled the air. The patient lay dead on the table, the airway tube sticking out of her mouth like an albino snake.
The anesthesiologist ripped his mask from his face. “Call it, Charles. Just fucking call it so we can get out of here.”
“Time of death,” the surgeon announced. “Eleven fifty-two
A.M.
”
Lily filled out her paperwork with trembling hands. It wasn’t the first time that a patient had died in her presence, but this time it shouldn’t have happened. Her company would throw this fiasco to the corporate lawyers, and probably nothing would come of it be- sides a cash settlement, but Lily would never be able to forget it. The bottom line was that the inept surgeon would still get paid, not to mention go on to operate again. He could live with killing people even if Lily could not.
She turned off the radio and drove the speed limit all the way out to the stables. Once there, she couldn’t seem to make her legs stop shaking. What in hell was she thinking, going riding in a straight skirt? She waved to the rental guy, turned her car around, and stopped at Cook’s Corner, the last of Orange County’s true road- houses. Now it was a trendy place to go country-and-western dan- cing, frequented by a few authentic bikers and far too many aspiring ones. She and Blaise had danced there a couple of times. She ordered a Corona and fries. At the furthest picnic table out behind the saloon, she sat pinching the greasy potatoes into inch-long segments, feeding them one by one to the crows. Like teenage boys dressed in dark clothing, they fought and scrapped over every single piece. They tore feathers from one another to get to the food, but half the time they didn’t even eat what they’d won. She wondered if they had avian MBAs, or drove Dodge Vipers, or called their girlfriends fucking bitches.
There was a time in her life, not so very long ago, when leasing the luxury car, owning her own condo, and pulling down 150 grand a year seemed like the perfect plan. All that college, which at the time seemed so annoyingly tedious, had finally parlayed into something functional.
She had a fat 401K, a stock portfolio with bloodlines like one of her father’s best horses, investments that were paying off her mortgage. From her family’s viewpoint she was successful and had moved up in the world. How many thirty-five-year-old women could say that? Certainly not the one lying on the morgue table. Lily shuddered. But the last couple of years, what with Rose not speaking to her, Southern California going down the toilet—the crowds, the cost of living, and men like Blaise—as her pop used to say,
Lily, my darling, this does not look like a path even a mule could hack
.
She watched the assortment of leather-clad bikers down their bottles of American brew. They didn’t fool her into believing they were outlaws. Leather and sunglasses and those imposing, pointless silver chains: They wore uniforms as blatant as any Catholic schoolgirl’s. One tough old broad, as weathered as beef jerky, stood under an awning by the creek entrance selling jewelry. Her skin under the leather vest was so tan that Lily wanted to walk over and deliver a lecture on melanoma. Not today, though. Today she couldn’t even tell herself what to do. Speaking of uniforms, her pantyhose were causing rivers of sweat to run down her thighs. And her crotch—well, didn’t that feel like the loneliest rainforest on the whole spinning planet? She looked at her calves and noticed a run creeping upward. She had frozen her pantyhose, soaked them instead of washing them, dripped them dry all over her damn bathroom, but from costly Anne Klein to supermarket L’eggs there wasn’t a brand that lasted more than twenty-four hours. They really should market the evil things as a single-use, disposable item. She wanted to strip them off and throw them in the creek that ran alongside the bar, but that would be unfair to the little bit of natural water Califor- nia had left to offer.
At home she sat on the couch hugging Buddy Guy, ignoring the jingling telephone. She had turned the answering machine way down, so whoever kept calling was reduced to a whisper. Probably telemarketers. They were relentless in their pursuit to get her to subscribe to the
Orange County Register
. Like a silver charm fallen off a bracelet, she fingered the key Blaise had left on the counter. She left her mail unopened; it was all bills, anyway. The sun descen- ded in a blaze of orange and violet she knew was due to smog. Lily’s own private term for California sunsets was the “southern lights.” Maybe food would
help, she thought, and nuked a Lean Cuisine penne dinner. She took one sniff, gagged, and fed it to Buddy. She poured herself a glass of costly Merlot, which after one sip, tasted sour. “Good” wine versus ordinary wine was like comparing racehorse manure to that of an old nag; call it what you want, it was still the same old
caca
.
Summer was definitely not fireplace weather, but had that ever stopped the Wilders from enjoying a meditative blaze? She didn’t have any of those Duralogs, however. Struck by an idea, she ran around the condo gathering up her pantyhose. Buddy, certain this was a new game, ran alongside her. When she had them all in hand, and was sure there were no more hiding in drawers or the hamper, she took them outside and deposited them in the barbecue. She lit a match and threw it in. In a whoosh that singed her eyebrows and caused her to crow-hop backwards, the stockings ignited. The flames leapt up, caught a drooping palm leaf, and raced up it. Lily clapped a hand over her mouth as the fiery frond bent under its own weight and touched the wooden shingle roof of her condo. She couldn’t bear two disasters in one single day, so she punched 911 on her cordless and waited for the firemen.
Being handsome and growing a mustache seemed like requirements for the firefighting profession. The four men who answered her call extinguished the flames rather quickly, and the cute red-haired one issued Lily a ticket for burning trash without a permit.
He took her aside. “Miss?”
“You don’t have to say it again. I know it was a reckless thing to do.” She waved the citation. “I have my ticket here to remind me.” In the background Buddy Guy yipped and scratched behind the garage door.
The fireman smiled and touched the corners of his mustache. “I’m glad no significant harm was done. I was wondering if you might want to go out sometime, have a drink with me or something.”
He was ten years too young for her, handsome beyond his poten- tial for intellect, and all she wanted to do was throw him down on her bed and screw her way out of this miserable day. But there was Buddy to think of, and she thought maybe she should allow at least a week to elapse between boyfriends. “Thanks, but maybe in another lifetime. These days I hardly ever get thirsty.”
“Too bad. See you around?” Lily hoped not.
Around midnight she got up out of bed, hungry, opened the refri- gerator, and studied its contents. The Tupperware container her sister had given her one Christmas was half full of the
posole
she’d made for Blaise last week. When Lily popped the lid, a fierce stench met her nose. She replaced the lid and threw it in the trash. Then, as she turned to shut the fridge door, an urge overcame her, and her hands began grabbing anything and everything that could possibly rot. Out went the fat-free peach yogurt, half a head of lettuce, some questionable cottage cheese, three pears not quite ripe enough to eat. When she was down to individual jars, Lily opened the sun- dried tomato pesto and sank down to the kitchen floor. She ate it off her fingers until she caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the oven door: pathetic, single, and looking like she was going to stay that way. Buddy Guy sat hopefully at her feet. Her chubby blue dog never begged, but he was always grateful for whatever came his way.
“What do you think,
amigo
? Should we have an adventure?” Buddy Guy woofed, and she offered him the last fingerful of pesto.
Never a picky eater, and always eager to use his tongue, he lapped her hand clean.
“Okay, then. Go find your toys.”
Lily packed her good jeans and her little Calvin Klein tops. She tore her closet apart until she located her old English riding boots, which needed a good polishing. She left behind every vile vial of makeup, left hanging in the dry-cleaning wrap the costly suits that graduated from taupe to charcoal to funereal black. She dug through the drawers in her office until she found her maps, then drew up a plan that would include two days’ driving. She finished packing the Lexus just as the sun was coming up.
Gazing to the east, she could hardly wait to put miles between herself and this moment.
Look out, Floralee
, she whispered.
Your prodigal daughter is on her way back
.
fter dashing home for lunch, running errands that included buying cups for the complimentary coffee in the front office
and toilet paper for the restroom, Rose drove the red Bronco up the oval driveway toward the territorial-style adobe that housed the veterinary office. She navigated the wide curve around the small patch of green lawn, shady under the single gambel oak someone had planted decades before. Beneath the tree various brave and heroic police dogs were buried. Small brass plates marked their graves: Kit Carson, Tecumseh, and Hobson’s Choice. On patriotic holidays people left little American flags, poking them into the earth. Sometimes passing schoolkids stole them, but otherwise no one ever bothered to take them down. The sight of the fading Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze always touched Rose’s heart, made her feel American in a way that voting failed to.
Employee parking—a wide swath of gravel—was located behind the building. Rose dutifully parked there, but rain or shine she walked around to the front of the building to enter, because the back door led through the freezer room. Inside, stacked like so much kindling, dead pets awaited pickup for mass cremation. In a separate refrigeration unit, various animal corpses were scheduled for nec- ropsy. Since the days when she could toddle upright, Rose had brought home abandoned magpie nestlings and nursed them with eyedroppers. Orphaned kittens grew fat and happy under her care. The cool scales of garter snakes didn’t repel her the way they did other girls. Horses trusted her the same way they did Pop, sensing that Rose’s consistently quiet nature was something they could rely on.
Animal lives were so brief. She understood that not every client passing through Austin’s veterinary clinic would receive a clean bill of health or necessarily make the exit. Responsible doctors sometimes had to cut into corpses to find answers, but the blood-and-guts stuff gave her the shudders. It haunted her the same way Philip’s accident did. In the freezer room once, she’d encountered—spread out on a tarp—what looked like miles of intestines from some poor horse who’d died of sand colic. On the back counter Austin had a collection of enteroliths he’d removed from various equines whose owners could afford the surgery. The “stones,” which formed around undi- gested material in a way similar to the creation of a pearl, graduated from the size of a child’s fist all the way up to a pygmy boulder. Like colic, an enterolith blockage was a painful way for a horse to go. Or there might be dog brains packed in dry ice, waiting to be sent to the county to rule out rabies. Rose had worked at the clinic seven years, and in that entire time she’d only used the back door twice.
She passed the bulletin board offering free cats and ads seeking homes for puppies, parrots, boa constrictors, whatever animal someone once had to own but it seemed could no longer be bothered with. In the front office she nodded hello to Paloma, who was on the phone. Three people with dogs were waiting on the wooden benches for the low-cost vaccination clinic. The tile floor smelled strongly of antiseptic and faintly of cat pee: Business as usual.