“Where you going?”
“Making a phone call.”
“To who?”
“Old girlfriend,” I said.
“We’re working,” Bubba said, “all he’s thinking about is getting some.”
I met Grace Cole on Francis Street in Brookline, in the heart of the Longwood Hospital district. The rain had stopped and we walked down Francis and crossed Brookline Avenue, worked our way down to the river.
“You look…bad,” she said, and tilted her head, considering my jaw. “Still doing the same work, I take it.”
“You look stupendous,” I said.
She smiled. “Always the flirt.”
“Just honest. How’s Mae?”
Mae was Grace’s daughter. Three years ago, the violence in my life had driven them into an FBI safe house, almost derailed Grace’s surgical residency, and pretty much slammed the door on what remained of our relationship. Mae had been four. She’d been smart and pretty and liked to watch the Marx Brothers with me. I couldn’t think of her without it eliciting a scraping sensation under my ribs.
“She’s good. She’s in second grade, doing well. She likes math, hates boys. I saw you on TV last year, when those men were killed near the Quincy Quarries. You were in a crowd shot.”
“Mmm.”
Water dripped from the weeping willows along the river path, and the river itself was a hard chrome in the wake of the dull rain.
“Still mixing it up with dangerous people?” Grace pointed at my jaw, the scrapes on my forehead.
“Me? Nah. Fell in the shower.”
“Into a tub full of rocks?”
I smiled, shook my head.
We stepped aside for a pair of joggers, their legs pumping, their cheeks puffing, the air around them filled with fury.
Our elbows touched as we stepped back, and Grace said, “I took a job in Houston. I leave in two weeks.”
“Houston,” I said.
“Ever been?”
I nodded. “Big,” I said. “Hot. Industrial.”
“Cutting edge in medical technology,” Grace said.
“Congratulations,” I said. “I mean it.”
Grace chewed her lower lip, looked out at the cars gliding past on slick roads. “I’ve almost called you a thousand times.”
“What stopped you?”
She gave me a small shrug, her eyes on the road. “News footage of you near corpses in the quarries, I guess.”
I followed her gaze out onto the road because there was nothing to say.
“You with someone?”
“Not really.”
She looked in my eyes, smiled. “But you’re hoping?”
“I’m hoping, yeah,” I said. “You?”
She looked back at the hospital. “A fellow doctor, yeah. I’m not sure how Houston’s going to affect it. It’s amazing what it takes.”
“How’s that?”
She raised her hand to the road, then dropped it. “Oh, you know, holding down a career, holding down a relationship, second-guessing your choices. Then one day your path is decided, you know? Your choices have been made. For better or worse, it’s your life.”
Grace in Houston. Grace gone from this city. I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly three years, but it’d been comforting, somehow, knowing she was around. A month from now, she wouldn’t be. I wondered if I’d feel the lack like a tiny hole in the fabric of the cityscape.
Grace reached into her bag. “Here’s what you asked for. I didn’t see anything odd. The girl drowned. The fluid in her lungs was consistent with the fluid from a pond. Time of death was consistent with a girl that age who’d fallen in icy water and been rushed to us.”
“She die at the home?”
She shook her head. “In the OR. Her father resuscitated her at the accident scene, got her heart pumping. But it was too late.”
“Do you know him?”
“Christopher Dawe?” She shook her head. “Only by reputation.”
“And what’s his reputation?”
“Brilliant surgeon, weird man.” She handed me the manila folder, looked down the river, then out at the street. “So, okay, well…Look, I…I have to go. It was nice seeing you.”
“I’ll walk you back.”
She put a hand to my chest. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t.”
I looked in her eyes and saw regret and maybe a kind of wild nervousness over the uncertainty of her future, a sense of the buildings that rose behind us closing in.
“We did love each other, didn’t we?” she said.
“Yeah, we sure did.”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it?”
I stood by the river and watched her walk up to the light in her blue scrubs and white lab jacket, her ash-blond hair damp with the moisture that still hung in the air.
I loved Angie. Probably always had. Some part of me still loved Grace Cole, though. Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.
As she disappeared in the throng of medical people and medical buildings, I found myself agreeing with her. It was too bad. It was a fucking shame.
Bubba had placed his bullets in stacked white cases beside his chair by the time I got back to the apartment. He and Angie played Stratego on the dining room table, shared some vodka, and had Muddy Waters playing on my stereo.
Bubba’s rarely good at games. He gets frustrated and usually ends up dumping the board in your lap, but at Stratego, he’s tough to beat. Must be all those bombs. He places them in the last place you’d suspect, and gets downright kamikaze with his scouts, wading into certain death with glee in his baby’s face.
I waited till Bubba took Angie’s flag, studying the intake and birth and death forms on Naomi Dawe, and finding absolutely nothing unusual.
Bubba shouted, “Ha! Now take me to your daughters,” and Angie swept her hand across the board, knocked the pieces to the floor.
“Man, she’s a sore loser.”
“I’m competitive,” Angie said, and bent to pick up the pieces. “There’s a difference.”
Bubba rolled his eyes and then looked at the papers I’d spread across my side of the table. He got out of his chair, stretched, and looked over my shoulder. “What’re those?”
“Hospital records,” I said. “Mother’s intake when she came to give birth. Daughter’s birth. Daughter’s death.”