“I just hope that, wherever he is, he’s fine. Let me see if I can get Tricia, Dr. Hayes’s nurse, for you. I wasn’t working on Monday, but she can tell you more about what happened that day. The last I saw, she was in with a patient, but maybe she’s through.”
The receptionist takes me to Jake’s office to wait, so that I don’t have to stand in the waiting room with patients. “Thank you,” I say as she unlocks the door and lets me in, and then leaves me alone with Jake’s things. His office is bland. The furniture—a desk, a slender bookshelf with books and potted plants that someone else must be watering and keeping alive—is laminate and ordinary. If I know Jake, he probably hates it. It’s nothing like his office at home, which is high-end and done by a professional designer. I haven’t been to this office of Jake’s before. I’ve been to the building only once to meet him for lunch, though Jake met me in the lobby that day. It’s not strange that I haven’t been here before, I don’t think. But it strikes me now how Jake and I have the life that we share, and then we have entirely separate lives.
It takes a minute, but Dr. Caddel finds Tricia.
“Hi, Tricia,” I say as she comes into Jake’s office wearing light blue scrubs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail with loose curly pieces that fall from her hairline. “I’m Nina Hayes, Dr. Hayes’s wife. I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes about Jake.”
“Sure,” she says. “What did you want to know?”
“Dr. Caddel tells me you were working with Jake on Monday.”
She nods. “I was.”
“Can you tell me anything about that day? Was it a typical day?”
She thinks back. “Yes, for the most part. Dr. Hayes worked Monday morning as scheduled. But then around, I don’t know, maybe two or two thirty, he said that he needed to run out for a while and that he’d be back.”
“Was that unusual?” I ask. “For Jake to run out in the middle of the day?”
She considers this. “Yes and no,” she says. Dr. Caddel stays and listens, leaned against the wall. Her tablet is gone now so that her arms are empty. She crosses them against herself, nodding slowly, listening intently. “He doesn’t do it often, but he’s done it before. He had a cancellation too, so there was a gap in his schedule. His next appointment wasn’t until four, and the morning had been so busy that neither of us had time for lunch. I didn’t think anything of him leaving. I thought he was just going to get a bite to eat or that he had an errand to run.”
“But then?” I ask, leading.
“But then,” she says, “the next thing I knew, it was four o’clock. Dr. Hayes’s patient was here, but Dr. Hayes wasn’t. The office manager, I believe, tried calling him, but as far as I know, he never answered. Someone told me he hasn’t come home.”
“No.”
“It’s so unlike Jake,” Dr. Caddel says.
“It is,” I say, because Jake is always so punctual and so conscientious. “How did he seem when he left?” I ask, my eyes going back to his nurse, Tricia.
“Fine,” Tricia says, “for the most part. He had a difficult appointment in the morning, a follow-up meeting with the family of a patient who died.”
Dr. Caddel says, “Those are never easy.”
“I can imagine they’re not. Was Jake upset about it?” I ask, looking to Tricia, but again it’s Dr. Caddel who speaks.
“With every surgery comes risk, which is why patients are required to give informed consent before we operate on them. Sometimes a surgeon can do everything right, the surgery can be incredibly routine, and still a patient dies. Despite his efforts, Dr. Hayes could not stop that particular patient from bleeding out. From what I’ve heard, the family was devastated and they took it out on Jake. For as hard as we try, it’s impossible for a surgeon not to feel shaken when something like this happens.”
“So he was upset, then,” I suggest, and she nods, though Jake is a master at keeping his emotions at bay, of not letting on to what he’s thinking or feeling inside.
After I leave, I drive to the hospital where Jake also works and where he operates on patients. The hospital, like most, has a parking garage and it worries me because parking garages have notoriously lousy security. Generally, they might have a camera at the entrance and exit, but within the garage itself, there are too many blind spots, too many obstructions to install cameras everywhere.
As I circle the multistory garage, climbing the endlessly round ramps, not finding Jake’s car, I think of everything terrible that could have happened to Jake.
My imagination is my worst enemy in this moment.
Friday afternoon, after work, I decide to call the florist to see who sent me flowers. They sat on my desk staring at me half the day. I tried not to think about them, but they were there, within my line of sight. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about them or wondering where they came from. I didn’t want to get rid of them—because what if they were from Jake?—but after lunch I moved them to a shelf on the other side of a tall cabinet, so that my view of them was obstructed.
The name of the florist is on the card. Cell phone service inside much of the school building isn’t great—it has something to do with the thick brick walls and the insulation; my classroom is practically a dead zone. I take my phone just outside, waiting until the student parking lot has emptied so that I don’t have to contend with the noise of cars and kids when I call the florist.
I dial the number and a woman answers. “Hello?” she says.
“Hi. I was hoping you could help me,” I say. “I received a flower delivery yesterday afternoon, but the card didn’t include the sender’s name. I’m wondering if you can tell me who purchased the flowers? I’d like to be able to say thanks.”
The woman is at first quiet. “There was no name on the card?” she asks, and I tell her no.
“There was a greeting with the card,” I explain, “but either the sender’s name was inadvertently left off the card or the flowers were sent anonymously. Would you be able to tell me who purchased the flowers?”