The Instant When Everything is Perfect (12 page)

Something deep inside that man made him find a wife, and something in both the man and woman needed that baby, made them make it. It’s what people did, driven by an ancient clock that biology set for them, ideas of romance and true love getting mucked up in there in the need to procreate. As he watched them in the crosswalk, laughing, talking gibberish to the baby, Robert wonders what has been broken inside him. He’s never had those same urges. The nesting. The reproducing. He was missing not only peripheral vision but something very basic, very human.



It’s not until after a staff meeting with his colleagues and two patient appointments that Robert remembers Mia. He’s remembered her in tiny bits throughout the day, of course. Little bits of dialogue from
Sacramento by Train
have riffed through his mind. Like when Susan cries out, “What do you want?” to Rafael.

And he answers, “Does anyone ever know how to answer that question?”

Robert agrees with Rafael because he’s never known the answer himself, at least in the big, existential way. He’s wanted food and love and sex and a home and a job, but the bigger want? The ultimate want? Peace? Health? Satisfaction? Joy? He doesn’t know. He hasn’t bothered to find out.

It’s not until four in the afternoon—after the meeting and the appointments—that Robert has time to go up to Sally Tillier’s room. He doesn’t want to run into Cindy Jacobs, knowing she’ll wonder why he’s checking up on Sally when she’s really Cindy’s patient. Not his. Not yet.

So he’s glad when he sees Cindy walking down a hall and going through the door to the surgery clinic. He buttons his white coat and heads down the long connecting hall to the hospital building and then takes the elevator to the third floor.

Pushing his hair back, he walks down the middle of the hallway, nodding at a resident, a nurse, a respitory therapist. Then he slows, angles toward Sally’s door but then stops before walking into the room. There is a man sitting on the edge of Sally’s bed, holding her hand. In the second that Robert hovers at the door, he hears the man’s low, deep voice, can feel the reassurance in his words. The man is muscled and darkly handsome, his hair black, thick, and full. He must be Mia’s husband, Ford. In a fictional universe, he’s Rafael.

Robert moves closer.

“You look wonderful,” Ford says to Sally, his voice low and deep.

Sally murmurs something back, her voice sounding a little girlish, a bit flirty.

“Now don’t you start. I’m sure your girls will spoil you. You’ll be the queen of the manor for weeks.” Ford laughs.

Robert moves closer, his hand on the door, and looks into the room.

A similarly dark, handsome boy—a teenager—sits at the back of the room in a chair, slumped over a comic book. For a quick second, he looks up and sees Robert, blinking as Robert watches the scene on the bed.

Mia has done what he has been unable to do—create a family. Here is the product, a flesh and blood boy, a boy who looks exactly like his father.

Robert can suddenly feel all his bones, the slightness of his own body, the worthlessness of everything he’s ever done. Backing away from the room and the boy’s gaze, he almost falls over a clerk wheeling a stack of charts down the hall. Apologizing, he turns away from Sally, Mia’s husband, and Mia’s son, and walks back to the elevators, pushing his hair away from his face, trying to find his breath in the thinness of his lungs.

Back in his office, he dictates a chart entry, his face full of heat and blood. He erases what he’s said and tries again, knowing he must get everything right. Slowly, he details the outcome of the TRAM flap procedure he performed on Valerie O’Connor. At her final follow-up appointment, there was no evidence of abdominal weakness or hernia. Her lab tests show no recurrence of the cancer, her sonogram clear. He recommends that she continue the exercises shown to her by the physical therapist and come in for all scheduled follow-up exams.

Robert clicks off the recorder and then turns to his computer, clicking on to his email server. He’s going to write to Mia now and tell her he’s sorry. He can’t do this. Won’t. Jack would be amazed because for the first time in a long month of Sundays, he’s suddenly had peripheral vision. He can finally see what was to the left and right as well as in front and back. He saw what he didn’t want to—Mia’s husband. Mia’s husband and Sally’s reaction to him. A kind man, a good man.

The email program makes the sound that alerts him to mail, and there she is again, MAlden.

Dear Robert,

Have you
ever
killed anyone?

Mia

Robert stares at her words and then bends down over his keyboard, wanting to hug his desk, press his heart back into his body.

She’s asked the right question, the one he’s always wanted an answer to.



He’s had one last, late appointment, consulted with an ER doc over a long, jagged wound on a little girl’s cheek, and finished his charts. Mia Alden’s email is still on his screen, and since he’s been in his office, more email has arrived that he doesn’t dare look at. Maybe they are all from Mia; Mia with more questions.
Have you ever been in love? Can you be in love? What is your main, true problem? If you could list your top ten faults, what would they be?

Robert stares at the screen, his desk clock clicking quietly, the noise in the hall only an echo. It’s seven-thirty, and his medical assistant Carla and most of the doctors have gone home.

Robert pushes his hair back and stares at her eight words on the screen and then closes the email. He looks at the list of other email—some from colleagues, a few spam messages that have slipped through the firewall, and then MAlden again.

Dear Robert,

I’m sorry I asked that question. That was really inappropriate. I know that people die in hospitals all the time. No one can make all the right decisions at just the right moment. I can think of all my teaching blunders where I’m sure I forced someone on the wrong path or said an incredibly wrong thing that destroyed the student’s confidence or joy or hope. Doctors work with lives, and there’s no metaphor there. It’s literal, and of course people make mistakes. And then, of course, people die because they die.

So I just wanted to say that. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I wrote that after having had only two hours of sleep last night. Please forgive me.

Mia

Robert rubs his forehead but keeps his eyes on her words. The fluorescent lights hum above him. Outside, the crowded Walnut Creek street roars past his window, the beep of the crosswalk, the pulse of engines and wail of sirens headed toward the ER.

But it’s so quiet inside his body, he can feel his pulse, his blood, his hip bones slick in their sockets. He doesn’t blink for a long time, and then he does, forcing his eyes away from the screen. Then Robert turns off the program, the computer, and leaves his office, flicking off the overhead light as he goes.

Robert has always loved a hospital at night. The tension and drama are usually reserved for the ICU and the ER; orderlies and senior volunteers aren’t wheeling patients to and from radiology or x-ray; visitors who aren’t staying over have gone home; lab techs don’t whisk open curtains and knock on doors, their vials and syringes and tubes clattering in their baskets. The nurses seem more subdued, quieted by the darkness outside, safe under the lights, calmed by the lack of doctors wanting things. Doctors are reading charts, tiding up, ready to hand over information to attendings, who will drink dark, bitter coffee and wait until morning.

He slips down the hall and then looks into Sally’s room again, relieved when he sees that Mia’s husband is gone. In fact, no one is in the room but Sally.

The television is on, and Sally is awake, blinking at the screen. Robert knocks on the door and then steps in.

“Hi, Mrs. Tillier,” he says in his doctor voice, the one that is smooth and calm and slightly detached.

She licks her lips and looks at him as she tries to find her words, the morphine in her blood slowing her reactions.

“Dr. Groszmann,” she says. “Hello.”

“I thought I’d come by to check on you. See how you’re feeling.”

Sally shakes her head. “Thank god I didn’t have immediate reconstruction. This is bad enough.”

Robert walks slowly to a chair, touches the back with his hand and then pulls it toward him, sitting down. “You’re going home tomorrow?”

She nods. “I should have gone home today. But I ran a little fever. It’s gone now. Like everything.”

Breasts aren’t everything, he wants to say to her. He always wants to say this, but he never does. Long ago, he realized he’ll never understand how women feel about their breasts. Not in the way society expects them to have them, firm and ripe and on display. His breasts never determined a thing about him. But Sally? She may have known who she was by just looking down at them each day, her nipples pointing her forward, always, since puberty. First, they meant she was a woman; then a lover; then a mother.

“Dr. Jacobs was confident she removed it all,” he says instead. “And she was able to save a nice amount of skin for your reconstruction.”

“She’s a good girl,” Sally says, her eyes closing briefly.

There is a noise at the door, and Robert turns to see three women standing there, one of them Mia. He stands up, forces his blush down, and smiles. Mia moves past the other two women, and for a second, he imagines she will hug him. But she doesn’t.

“Dr. Groszmann,” she says. “Hello.”

He can’t look at her long because he wants to travel her face with his eyes, so he looks at the other two women, who, he can tell, are Sally’s other daughters. Both have her face and eyes, and the beginnings of her white hair.

“I thought I’d check on your mom,” he says, turning back to Sally, who is now looking at him. “She seems to be doing very well.”

One of the daughters walks to him, her hand outstretched. “Katherine Tillier.”

She must be the pathologist, he thinks, recognizing that she has never had to learn to modulate her voice, to skirt the truth, because she works with tissue samples and the dead.

“The pathologist,” he says, letting go of her tight grip and stepping back.

“The lab reports haven’t come back. How long do they take here? Is this delay normal?”

Robert begins to answer, but Mia moves in between them. “Can I talk with you in the hall for a moment?” she asks.

He nods and turns back to Sally. “I’m glad the surgery went well. We’ll talk later.”

Sally nods, tries to lift her hand, and then lets it relax on the bed. Something about her response makes him uneasy. She seems lethargic, depressed—and not just from the drugs and the effects of the surgery. He’ll have to keep track somehow, ask Mia later.

He pushes back his hair and then turns to Mia and her sisters.

“Nice to meet you,” he says to Katherine. She smiles a flat, irritated smile, and as he walks by the other sister—who must be the youngest—he stops.

“Robert Groszmann.” He holds out his hand.

“Dahlia Regezi.”

Of the two sisters, she looks the most like Mia, something about the shape of her eyes and the way her lips are raised at the corners. But unlike Mia and Katherine at least outwardly, she’s scared, worried, her eyes dark with mother-loss already.

“A pleasure.” He smiles again and then follows Mia out into the hall, his heart pounding.

As they walk, he notices how Mia’s shirt is wrinkled where she’s leaned against the chair in Sally’s room. Her hair is messy in the back, blond spikes going in every direction.

At the water fountain, she stops, turns, rubs her cheek, swallows.

“I just wanted to apologize,” she says, her eyes glazed with exhaustion. “I can’t believe I wrote that. Did you get my email?”

He nods. “Don’t—“

“It was a ridiculous question.”

“I started it,” he says. “I wrote the part before about not killing anyone that day. It follows.”

She shrugs. “It’s not even what I want to know.”

At the nursing station, a nurse looks up over the desk at them and then turns away. Down the hall, someone drops something metal, the clack and ping echoing. All around them are the sounds of machines, whizzes and beeps and whines.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

Mia looks up, and he allows himself the pleasure of watching her. In the darkened light of the hall, her eyes are dark. Her skin is flushed—as it always seems to be when they talk—her lips full, red, and slightly dry. For a second, he looks at her neck, smooth and solid, and then her breasts, round under her sweater. He forces his gaze back to her face, waiting.