When we pulled into my driveway I wasn’t sure if he was going to come in or leave me at the door. The rules changed tonight. I willingly went somewhere with him. It felt datish or, at the very least, friendish. But when I opened the front door he followed me inside and turned the deadbolt. I was headed up the stairs when I heard his voice.
“I lost a patient today.” I stopped on the fourth stair, but I didn’t turn around. I should have. Something like that was worth turning around for. His voice was clotted. “She was only sixteen. She coded on the table. We couldn’t bring her back.”
My heart was racing. I gripped the banister until the veins in my hands popped and I thought the wood was going to snap beneath the pressure.
I waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t I climbed the rest of the stairs. Once I was in my bedroom I shut the door and leaned with my back against it. Almost as quickly I turned around and pressed my ear against the wood. I couldn’t hear any movement. I took seven reverse steps up until the backs of my knees were touching the bed, then I spread my arms wide and fell backwards.
When I was seven my mother left my father. She also left me, but mostly she left my father. She told me that before she carried her two suitcases out the front door and climbed in the cab. I have to do this for myself. He’s killing me slowly. I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving him.
I never had the courage to ask her why she wasn’t taking me. I watched her leave from the living room window with my hands pressed against the glass in a silent STOP. Her parting words to me had been, You’ll feel me in the fall backwards. She’d kissed me on the mouth and walked out.
I never saw her again. I never stopped trying to figure out what she meant. My mother had been a writer, one of the obscure artsy types who surround themselves with color and sound. She published two novels in the late seventies and then married my father, who she claimed sucked all the creativity out of her. Sometimes I felt like I became a writer just to make her see me. Consequently, I was very good at it. I’d yet to feel her in the fall backwards.
I stared at the ceiling and wondered what it would feel like to have someone’s life in your hands, and then to watch that life slip away like Isaac had. And when had I started to call him Isaac? I felt myself drifting off and I closed my eyes, welcoming it. When I woke up, I was screaming.
Someone was holding me down, I writhed left and then right to get away. I screamed again and I felt hot breath on my face and neck. A crash and my bedroom door swung open. Thank God! Someone is here to help me. And that’s when I realized that I was alone, lying in the residue of a dream. No one was here. No one was attacking me. Isaac leaned over where I lay, saying my name. I could hear myself screaming and I was so ashamed. I squeezed my eyes closed, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t make it go away—the feel of cruel, relentless hands on my body, tearing, pressing. I screamed louder until my voice grew fingernails and tore into my throat.
“Senna,” he said, and I don’t know how I heard him above the noise I was making, “I’m going to touch you.”
I didn’t fight as he climbed in bed behind me, and stretched both of his legs on either side of mine. Then he pulled me back until I was leaning against his chest, and wrapped both arms around my torso. My hands were curled into fists as I screamed. The only way to deal with the pain was to move, so I rocked back and forth and he rocked with me. His arms anchored me to what was real, but I was still halfway in the dream. He said my name. “Senna.”
The sound of his voice, the tone, calmed me a little. His voice was a slow thunder.
“When I was a little boy, I had a red bike,” he said. I had to stop screaming to hear him. “Every night when I went to bed I begged God to give my bike wings so that in the morning, I could fly away. Every morning I’d crawl out of bed and run straight to the garage to see if he answered my prayers. I still have the bike. It’s more rusted then red now. But I still check. Every day.”
I stopped rocking.
I was still shaking, but the pressure of his arms wrapped around my torso caused the trembling to taper off.
I fell asleep in a stranger’s arms, and I was not afraid.
Chapter Fourteen
Isaac breathed like he had trust. He pulled in his air steady and deep and exhaled it like a sigh. I wished I could be like that. But that was all gone. I listened to him for a long time, time enough for the sun to come up and try to press through the clouds. The clouds won, in Washington they always won. I was still wrapped in him, leaning against his chest—this man I didn’t know. I wanted to stretch my muscles, but I stayed still because there was something good about this. His hands were draped across my abdomen. I studied them since my eyes were the only things I dared move. They were average looking hands, but I knew that the twenty-seven bones in each of this man’s hands were exceptional. They were surrounded by muscle and tissue and nerves that together saved human life with their dexterity and precision. Hands could bruise or they could fix. His hands fixed. Eventually, his breathing lightened and I knew he was awake. It felt like a standoff to see who would make the first move. His arms left my body, and I crawled forward and stepped out of bed. I didn’t look at him as I walked to the bathroom. I washed my face and took two aspirin for my headache. When I came out he was gone. I counted the cards on the counter. He didn’t leave one that day.
He didn’t come back that night, or the next.
Or the next.
Or the next.
Or the next.
There were no more dreams, but not for lack of horror. I was afraid to sleep, so I didn’t. I sat in my office at night, drinking coffee and thinking of his red bike. It was the only color in the room—Isaac’s red bike. On January thirty-first my father called me. I was in the kitchen when the phone vibrated on the counter. There was no house phone, just my cell. I answered without looking.
“Hello, Senna.” His voice always distinct, nasally with an accent he tried not to have. My father was born in Wales and moved to America when he was twenty. He retained the European mentality and accent and dressed like a cowboy. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.
“How was your Christmas?”
I immediately felt cold.
“Fine. How was yours?”
He began a detailed minute-by-minute account of how he spent Christmas Day. I was, for the most part, grateful I didn’t have to speak. He wrapped things up by telling me about his promotion at work; he said the same thing he repeated every time we spoke.
“I’m thinking about taking a trip out there to see you, Senna. Should be soon. Bill said I get an extra week’s vacation this year because I’ve been with the company twenty years.”
I’d lived in Washington for eight years and he’d never come to visit me once.
“That’d be great. Listen Dad, I’ve got some friends coming over. I should go.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up, resting my forehead on the wall. That would be it from him until the end of April, when he would call again.
The phone rang a second time. I almost didn’t answer it, but the area code is from Washington.
“Senna Richards, this is the office of Dr. Albert Monroe.”
I racked my brain trying to place the doctor and his specialty, and then for the second time that day, my blood ran cold. “Something came up on your scan. Dr. Monroe would like you to come in to the office.”
I was leaving my house the next morning, walking to my car when his hybrid pulled into my horseshoe driveway. I stopped to watch him climb out and pull on his jacket. It was casual, almost beautiful in its grace. He’d never come this early before. It made me wonder what he did on the mornings of his days off. He walked toward me and stopped just in time to keep two solid feet between us. He was wearing a light blue fleece, pushed up past his elbows. I was shocked to see the dark ink of tattoos peeking out. What type of doctor had tattoos?
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said stepping around him.
“I’m a doctor.”
I was glad to be turned away from him when I smiled.
“Yes, I know. There are quite a few others in the state of Washington.”
His head jerked back like he was surprised I was anything but the stoic, expressionless victim he’d been cooking for.
I was opening the driver’s side door to my Volvo when he held out his hand for my keys.
“I’ll drive you.”
I dropped my eyes into his hand and snuck another look at the tattoos.
Words—I could just make out the tip of them. My eyes slid up the sleeves of his shirt and rested on his neck. I didn’t want to look in his eyes when I handed him my keys. A doctor who loved words. Imagine that.
I was curious. What did a man who had held a screaming woman all night have written on his body? I sat in the passenger seat and instructed Isaac where to go. My radio was on the classical station. He turned it up to hear what was playing and then lowered it back down.
“Do you ever listen to music with words?”
“No. Turn left here.”
He turned the corner and shot me a curious look.
“Why not?”
“Because simplicity speaks the loudest.” I cleared my throat and stared straight ahead. I sounded like such a chump. I felt him looking at me, cutting into me like one of his patients. I didn’t want to be dissected.
“Your book,” he said. “People talk about it. It’s not simple.”
I don’t say anything.
“You need simplicity to create complexity,” he said. “I get it. I suppose too much can clog up your creativity.”
Exactly.
I shrugged.
“This is it,” I said softly. He turned into a medical complex and pulled into a parking spot near the main entrance.
“I’ll wait for you right here.”
He didn’t ask where I was going or what I was here for. He simply parked the car where he could see me walk in and out of the building and waited.
I liked that.
Dr. Monroe was an oncologist. In mid December I found a lump in my right breast. I forgot about the worry of cancer in the wake of a more immediate and needier pain. I sat in his waiting room, my hands pressed between my knees, a strange man waiting in my car, and all I could think about were Isaac’s words. The ones on his arms and the ones that came out of his mouth. A red bicycle in a stark white room.
A door opened next to the reception window. A nurse said my name.
“Senna Richards.”
I stood. I went.
I had breast cancer. I could talk about the moment Dr. Monroe confirmed it, the emotions I felt. The words he said to me afterwards, meant to comfort, reassure; but the bottom line was, I had breast cancer.
I thought about his red bike as I walked to the car. No tears. No shock. Just a red bike that could fly. I didn’t know why I wasn’t feeling anything.
Maybe a person could only deal with one dose of mental atrophy at a time. I slid into the passenger seat. He’d changed the radio station, but he switched it back to the classical one before he put the car in reverse. He didn’t look at me. Not until we arrived at my house and he opened the front door with my keys. Then he looked at me, and I wanted to disappear into the cracks between my brick driveway. I didn’t know what color his eyes were; I didn’t want to know. I pushed past him into the foyer and stopped dead. I didn’t know where to go—the kitchen? The bedroom? My office? Everywhere seemed stupid. Pointless. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to die. I didn’t want to die.
I went to my barstool, the one positioned to get the perfect view of the lake, and I sat. Isaac moved into the kitchen. He started to make coffee and then stopped, turning to look at me.
“Do you mind if I put on some music? With words?”
I shook my head. His eyes were grey. He set his phone on top of the breadbox while he spooned grinds into the filter.
This time he played something more upbeat. A man’s voice. The beats were so strange I stopped my incessant ability to not feel and listened.
“Alt-J,” he said, when he saw that I was listening. “The song is called Breezeblocks.”
He glanced at my face. “It’s different, right? I used to be in a band. So I get a kick out of their beats.”
“But, you’re a doctor.” I realized how stupid that sounded when it was already out. I pulled an inch-wide chunk of grey hair free, and wound it around my finger twice, right by the roots. I left it there, with my elbow resting on the counter. My security blanket.
“I wasn’t always a doctor,” he said, grabbing two mugs out of my cabinet. “But when I became one, my love of music remained … and the tattoos remained.”
I glanced at his forearms where they peeked out of his shirtsleeves. I was still looking when he brought me my coffee. I caught the tips of the words that faced me.
After he handed me the coffee, he started making food. I didn’t have an appetite, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I didn’t want to, but I listened to the words of the song he was playing. The last time I listened to this type of music the boy bands had just taken the world by storm and filled every radio with their cliché-licked songs. I wanted to ask him who was singing, but he beat me to it.
“Florence and the Machine. Do you like it?”
“You’re fixated on death.”
“I’m a surgeon,” he said, not looking up from where he was dicing vegetables.
I shook my head. “You’re a surgeon because you have a fixation on death.”
He didn’t say anything, but slightly hesitated as he cut into a zucchini—barely noticeable, but my eyes caught mostly everything.