Forever Sheltered (16 page)

I opened the door to head back to my rounds. But I’m pretty sure a big part of me stayed behind.

Chapter 29: Tina

The doctor had me snared. I’d have to run with it for a bit. That was the problem with getting involved with someone at work. You couldn’t just walk away and never see them again.

I was in trouble with this one.

I put the markers away and got out the canvases I’d bought for my time with Albert. I had called the psychiatric ward to ask after him, but he’d been transferred out to a regular hall. No one was sure where just yet.

I would be ready in case he came.

Meanwhile, all I had to do was wait and brood over Darion. I had planned all along to do this one-and-done, and then I had stalled to avoid having to dump him before I was ready.

But now I could tell that neither was going to happen. I wanted to see where this was going to go, and I was fairly sure I wouldn’t leave after.

Yep, I was done for.

I pulled out a sheet of construction paper and began the rough sketch of the painting I had planned after seeing the sunset at Torrey Pines. The water line, the cliff, the mother, the shadow of the boy.

I realized the boy was too tall and erased him and tried again. Even with just an outline, I felt a wave of grief as I outlined his sleek hair, his shape, the bulge of a sagging sock. I knew none of those things about Peanut. If he would have been tall or short. Curly haired or straight. Pudgy or a weed.

My wrists ached like they sometimes did when I thought of him. It was psychosomatic. I knew this from the quack docs I’d been forced to talk to after I got out of the hospital. Thankfully the social worker for my case decided that I could go to a pregnancy loss support group instead.

Those women had been great. I sometimes talked to Stella, the leader. She still ran the group even though she was long past having babies, and never had one herself. They had gotten me through a really rough time. When I was on the suicide talk circuit, lots of times I’d pull up things they told me to pass on to people who were hurting, or thinking of hurting themselves.

The right person seemed to come along when you needed them. You just had to open your eyes and see that they were there. Then open your ears and listen.

Both of those things were hard to do when you were buried in pain, though. I understood that too.

The door opened, and an aide in pale pink scrubs wheeled Albert in. I was so relieved to see him, I wanted to cry.

Albert waved. He wasn’t in his usual jeans and flannel anymore. He had on pajama pants and a hospital gown. His arms were exposed below the short sleeves, and the angry gashes on his wrists stood out like someone had stitched them with garish thread.

“I missed you yesterday,” I said.

“Mr. Al got moved to a new room,” the aide said. “He’s on six now.”

“That means I can visit you!” I said.

Albert looked up at the aide. “See, I told you. All the women are going to show and keep me up at night.”

The aide patted his shoulder. “I bet you’re right, a fine catch like yourself.” She headed for the door. “I’ll be back for him in an hour.”

“What are you working on, Miss Tina?” he asked. “I see you’ve graduated to real canvases.” His shaky finger pointed at the stands.

I turned the sketch around so he could see it. “I went to a cliff the other night and saw this scene. Well, I saw the sunset. I imagined the scene.”

Albert examined the sketch. “Very nice.”

“It’s not right somehow.”

He nodded. “You’re using one-point perspective here.” He pointed at the woman and boy. “The point of view is another human behind them.”

He picked up a blue pencil from the table. His tremor was noticeable today, but he sketched anyway. “If you shift to three-point, the bird’s-eye view, then it becomes another vision altogether.”

Now, instead of the woman’s back, we also saw the top of her head, just the tip of her nose. And the shadow was even more pronounced as different from her.

“It’s God-like,” I said.

“Exactly. But not really God, necessarily. Just viewed from a broader point of view, something more all encompassing.”

“I was terrible at three-point in school,” I said.

“Never let a technicality stand in the way of doing a painting the way it demands to be done. Learn what you need to know.”

I pulled out a fresh piece of paper. I sketched the scene again, but this time, when I got to the shadow of the boy, he was no longer just an outline filled with shadow. He became three-dimensional too.

“I’m losing my idea,” I said.

Albert shook his head. “No, you are finding the truth in your work. Start again.”

I set aside that sketch and pulled out another piece of paper.

This time I brought the view back down, somewhere in the middle between directly behind, as though I was standing at their backs, and above, as if I was flying over their heads.

“Fill in a bit of the scene they are looking at now,” Albert said.

The cliff was more pronounced from this angle. The rocks were craggy, and the ground below was visible, unlike from the other view, which focused on the happiness and light of the sunset.

I looked up at Albert, astonished. “I wasn’t just supposed to draw the beauty of the sun, but also the danger of the fall.”

He nodded. “Now you see the true power of bringing together your technical skill and your artistic vision.”

The sketches spread before me. Not in four years of college had I learned something so important so fast. Who was this man? And why was I meeting him now, when it was almost too late?

My own thoughts from earlier rushed right back at me.

People came along when you needed them.
 

And, I amended,
you should learn from them
.

Chapter 30: Darion

Cynthia was sitting up and drinking a little broth when I visited her again at the end of the day.

“Hey, Dary,” she said. “Did you find the Pokémon for Andrew?”

“I did.” One of the volunteers had picked it up for me since I hadn’t been able to get away.

“Did he like it?”

“I don’t know. I left it with his nurse.”

“Dary!”

“I’ll ask.”

“Can I go back to art tomorrow?” Cynthia asked.

“Are you feeling like throwing up?”

Cynthia frowned. “Maybe a little.”

“Well, we’ll see how you feel when it’s time tomorrow, okay?” I pressed a hand against her forehead. She was a little warm. The monitor read 99.6. “Angela, can you take her temperature manually in a bit?” I pointed at the screen. “I don’t trust these things.”

Angela nodded. “Will do. You going to actually go home tonight?”

Cynthia’s eyes got big. “Did you sleep here?”

I sat next to her on the bed. “I slept in the operating room,” I said. “I used the little blue paper sheets for a blanket.”

“You did not!” she said.

“Did too!”

Angela laughed. “You two kids are something else.”

I patted Cynthia on the shoulder. “You call me if you need me, okay?”

“I will.”

It wasn’t easy leaving. But I did have to go home, at least for a while. I needed clothes.

Plus, I was going to see Tina.

I stopped at the desk to see if Cynthia’s blood test results had come in. Once again I had to separate the clinical side of myself from my feelings as I pulled up the report.

WBC less than 0.1 (out of range)
Hgb 11.2 (out of range)
Platelets 32 (out of range)
Lymphocyte 73 (out of range)
Monocyte 14 (out of range)
Eos 13 (out of range)
ANC 0 (out of range)

I didn’t expect anything to look normal. We were just establishing a baseline. I’d order her a transfusion for her platelets and a G-CSF to boost her white blood count. Hopefully her ANC would bounce back this time. She’d been immunosuppressed for so long.

I scrolled to the second page. This was more telling, if there were still cancer cells in her blood.

No atypical or immature lymphs detected.

No blasts in her blood. No cancer. I let myself relax, just a little.

I wouldn’t order a bone marrow aspiration for a while yet. I didn’t want to put her through it until I was certain her cells were rebounding. Nothing was more discouraging than a hypocellular draw, which told us nothing.

But this was a start. No blasts. The cancer was not circulating.

We would beat this thing.

I powered down the iPad. Fatigue threatened to set in, but I pushed it aside, something I had mastered during my first residency. I pulled off the lab coat, and laid it over my arm. Official duties were done for the day.

Now I could see Tina.

When I arrived at the window, she was partially obscured by a large canvas on a wood frame. I could only see the back of it, propped on a metal stand. On the table, she had mixed a rainbow of reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows in a palette.

I rapped twice on the door, then opened it. Tina looked up at me, her gray eyes standing out from her pale face. She had a small smudge of pink on one cheek.

“You’re working,” I said.

“Having fun.” She stuck the paintbrush between her teeth as she squeezed a bit of white onto the palette. When she took the brush in her hand again to blend it in, a touch of orange transferred from the handle to the tip of her nose.

“I am almost at a stopping point,” she said. “Just let me get this last color down.” She dipped the brush in the white and added it to orange until she achieved a pale melon. When she touched the brush to the canvas, I walked around to see what she was doing.

Along the top third of the canvas, the colors of a sunset radiated across a translucent sky. The center was almost pure white, moving to a yellow gold, then shifting to all the colors from orange, to pink, to a dusty red.

I let her work, admiring the set of her jaw, the concentration in her eyes. She moved the brush smoothly across the canvas, dipped and mixed and blended, then cut through one color with the other.

She stuck the brush in her teeth again, an endearing habit. I sat next to her and picked up a clean brush. A piece of unused children’s construction paper sat at the end of the table. I slid it over.

I had never taken formal art classes past high school, when my father stepped in to ensure that my education would veer back toward premed. But dipping the brush into paint had a sensuousness I always appreciated. And the slide of color across the textured paper felt like a caress.

At first I mimicked the sunset of Tina’s, then ventured off, realizing the pinks and pale oranges had the appearance of skin kissed by a late afternoon sun. The strokes took on more shape, a waist and a hip. I had filled the page with the lines, so the form was close up, an indentation of a belly button, a hint of a shadow of the thigh propped up. The knee disappeared up beyond the page, but I brought in the darkest color to shadow in behind a calf as the leg came back into view.

Now the image began to emerge. A woman, lying on her back, her leg bent.

I chose a pale color, imagining the light coming from near her head. The tension of the day began to unfurl as I took a chance and painted the woman’s arm across her face, revealing a breast. Only after I had touched the brush into a pale pink and swirled in a delicate nipple did I realize I was painting Tina.

I set down the brush.

Tina had stopped working, watching me. When she realized I had stopped, she looked up at me with wonder. “I didn’t know,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly. That I could paint. Or that I had this image of her in my head, sensual and naked.

Her hand slid over mine, her fingers barely grazing the surface of my skin. “You have more secrets than I would have guessed.”

This made me tense up a little, but as Tina continued to run her palm over the back of my hand, encircling my wrist with her fragile grip, it dissipated again. I should tell her about Cynthia, soon, before it became too big a lie. Before she sensed it and felt alienated by my lack of trust in her.

I glanced up at the viewing window. The halls were quiet, but the evening staff would still walk by occasionally.

“Where should we go?” Tina asked. “I assume you have a place?”

Filled with images of Cynthia and our family, I thought. But here Tina was, making this move. I remembered her on the beach, so passionate, so lost in the moment before she withdrew. What would she do this time? And if she got angry with me again, what could she do with my secret? To Cynthia?

“I do. It’s not close, though. Is yours?” She might have a roommate. If so, I could take her to a hotel. We could be decadent.

“It’s not far,” she said. “Just don’t get eaten by the Pink Monster.”

“Are you referring to your —”

“No!” Her eyes got big. “Oh my God.” The spell was broken, and Tina became more of herself, laughing instead of intense. “Although I do like the thought of my girl parts as a force of destruction.”

She let go of me. “Maybe you can paint those next time, all flowery like Georgia O’Keeffe.” She stood up. “Or go full-on Gustave Courbet.”

 
I didn’t know Courbet’s work, but I could guess. “That sounds like a fascinating idea. You’ll model for me?”

She sat back down, mostly obscured from the hall window by the canvas. She lifted the edge of her skirt slowly, up the striped stocking, above her knees, past the elastic edge, and finally revealing a long expanse of thigh. “You choose the lighting,” she said.

I was going to have to put my lab coat back on.

Chapter 31: Tina

He painted.

He
painted
.

The whole drive to my apartment, this wouldn’t leave my head.

He was an artist.

Who was this man?

I still felt in a fog as we walked up to my door. Then I remembered the furniture. As I unlocked the door to my apartment, I turned to Darion. “I wasn’t kidding about the Pink Monster.”

“Really?” Darion asked. “Is it like Godzilla or more Oscar the Grouch?”

“Worse than either.”

I stood back to let him in.

He held the pizza box over my head as he passed. I knew the moment when he saw the fuzzy sofa, because he said, “Good God.”