Page 20 of Swerve
“Looks like you did your homework,” he says with little effort to conceal the sarcasm underlining his next words. “All your lovers get such thorough vetting?”
“Is that what you are?” she asks softly, kissing the side of his mouth. “My lover?”
He regrets the words as he places his hands on her shoulders to gently but deliberately push her away. “That would indicate something lasting beyond this morning, and believe me, you don’t want me past this morning.”
She considers the assertion, and then says, “Well, then. At least let me give you your birthday present.” She unties her robe and begins to slide it from her shoulders.
“Hey,” he says, walking her backwards to the open door. “I don’t think either one of us needs that kind of publicity.”
“Maybe not,” she says softly, one hand on either shirt lapel as she pulls him inside the condo’s master bedroom. “But I do need you. One more time. Because I have a feeling once I let you out the door this morning, I’m never going to see you again.”
He doesn’t bother to deny it. What would be the point? Right now, what they’d done could be called a lapse in judgment. No point in moving it into the category of an actual mistake.
She drops the robe fully then, standing before him with the complete awareness that few men had it in them to turn her down. He did have it in him. He understood all the risks associated with making the decision to go home with a senator’s wife.
But then when you’d watched people you cared about get blown into pieces too small to identify on their way out of country,well, risk became a relative term. And besides, any good plan of self-destruction required risk to end up even being worth the effort.
Emory
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I … I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
—Robert Frost
HOW MANY TV shows have I watched where someone’s loved one goes missing? How many books have I read about unsolved cases where a missing person is never found, or if they are eventually found, they have been dead for a long time?
Sitting here in the parking lot of Johns Hopkins Hospital, I feel as if the lightbulb of reality has been turned off, and I am now trying to function in a universe I have absolutely no understanding of.
How can I go in to work? Act as if all is normal when a trap door has opened in the center of my life and everything,everything, that matters has fallen right through.
Mia is all I have.
Both of our parents had been only children. Our grandparents all gone before them. Any relatives we have left are so distant that calling them would be the same as calling a stranger.
The utter unfairness of this hits me center in the chest, and a sob, painful and raw, tears from my throat. I lean forward, dropping my forehead against the steering wheel and cry as I have not cried since the night two policemen knocked at our front door and broke the news that our mother and father wouldn’t be coming home, thanks to the drunk driver who had hit them head-on as they were exiting I-66 on the way back from a medical seminar.
Then, I’d had no idea how to go on, how I would possibly raise my sister who was ten years my junior. I had just started college and she was still in elementary school. My parents had left me financially capable of taking care of her, and it was that and only that, which allowed me to move back home, but still continue going to college.
There have been times, looking back on it, when I have no idea how I managed to raise her, finish college and go on to medical school. But the years passed, with her now a senior in high school, me a resident, and now, how do I go on, not knowing where she is, if she’s safe, if I will ever see her again?
Rain pelts at my windshield, and I am grateful for its temporary curtain of protection against the curious glances of doctors and nurses heading in for their shifts.
“Go about your life, Dr. Benson,” Detective Early had said when she left the station. “We’ll contact you the moment we have anything at all promising.”
Go about my life? How? I wonder now what he meant by promising. Does that mean they’ll only call me if they think they’ve found her? What if they never do? What if they can’t come up with a single lead? Will I spend the rest of my life waiting for my phone to ring?
Fresh tears slide down my face. I think of the people I see every day in the enormous hospital before me. Of the utter hopelessness many of them have expressed to me. And how I’ve acted as if I understood. As if I could put myself in their place and predict that things would eventually be better. Hope would bloom as predictably as the daffodils in the spring. Just hold on. Don’t do anything rash. Time heals. It always does.
But does it?
Aren’t there some wounds that will never have the capacity to heal?
Have I been lying to every single patient I’ve ever tried to help with comforting words?
It is raining harder now, as if the clouds have increased their tears for me.
I cannot make myself leave the car. Go about my life. Somehow, in doing so, I will be conceding to the fact that life must go on without Mia. It’s not a concession I can make.
I have to do something. I have no idea what.
