With her coffee drunk, a yogurt eaten and dried cat food poured into Tom’s bowl, Laurie struggled into her trench coat. She then grabbed her purse, her lunch, which she had also prepared the night before, and her briefcase, and stepped out of her apartment. It took her a moment to secure the collection of locks on her door, a legacy of the apartment’s previous tenant. Turning to the elevator, Laurie pushed the down button.
As if on cue, the moment the aged elevator began its whining ascent, Laurie heard the click of Debra Engler’s locks. Turning her head, Laurie watched as the door to the front apartment opened a crack and its safety chain was pulled taut. Debra’s bloodshot eye peered out at her. Above the eye was a tousle of gray frizzy hair.
Laurie aggressively stared back at the intruding eye. It was as if Debra hovered behind her door for any sound in the hallway. The repetitive intrusion grated on Laurie’s nerves. It seemed like a violation of her privacy despite the fact that the hallway was a common area.
“Better take an umbrella,” Debra said in her throaty, smoker’s voice.
The fact that Debra was right only fanned Laurie’s irritation. She had indeed forgotten her umbrella. Without giving Debra any sense of acknowledgment lest her irritating watchfulness be encouraged, Laurie turned back to her door and went through the complicated sequence of undoing the locks. Five minutes later as she stepped into the elevator, she saw that Debra’s bloodshot eye was still watching intently.
As the elevator slowly descended, Laurie’s irritation faded. Her thoughts turned to the case that had bothered her most over the weekend: the twelve-year-old boy hit in the chest with a softball.
“Life’s not fair,” Laurie muttered under her breath as she thought about the boy’s untimely death. Children’s deaths were so hard to comprehend. Somehow she’d thought medical school would inure her to such senselessness, but it hadn’t. Neither had a pathology residency. And now that she was in forensics, these deaths were even harder to take. And there were so many of them! Up until the accident, the softball victim had been a healthy child, brimming with health and vitality. She could still see his little body on the autopsy table; a picture of health, ostensibly asleep. Yet Laurie had had to pick up the scalpel and gut him like a fish.
Laurie swallowed hard as the elevator came to a bumping stop. Cases like this little boy made her question her career choice. She wondered if she shouldn’t have gone into pediatrics, where she could have dealt with living children. The field of medicine she’d chosen could be grim.
In spite of herself, Laurie was grateful for Debra’s admonition once she saw what kind of day it was. The wind was blowing in strong gusts and the promised rain had already started. The view of her street that particular day made her question her choice of location as well as her career. The garbage-strewn street was not a pretty sight. Maybe she should have gone to a newer, cleaner city like Atlanta, or a city of perpetual summer like Miami. Laurie opened her umbrella and leaned into the wind as she trudged toward First Avenue.
As she walked she thought of one of the ironies of her career choice. She’d chosen pathology for a number of reasons. For one thing she thought that predictable hours would make it easier to combine medicine with having a family. But the problem was, she didn’t have a family, unless she considered her parents, but they didn’t really count. In fact she didn’t even have a meaningful relationship. Laurie had never thought that by age thirty-two she wouldn’t have children of her own, much less that she’d still be single.
A short cab ride with a driver whose nationality she could not even guess brought her to the corner of First and Thirtieth. She’d been shocked to get the cab. Under normal circumstances a combination of rain and rush hour meant no taxis. This morning, however, someone had been getting out of a cab just as she reached First Avenue. Yet even if she’d not been able to get one, it wouldn’t have been a disaster. That was one of the benefits of living just eleven blocks away from work. Many a day she walked in both directions.