What had she done wrong? Doris wondered, how badly had she offended God that her life should be this way? How could anyone possibly deserve such a bleak and hopeless existence?
* * *
‘I’m impressed, John,’ Rosen said, staring at his patient. Kelly sat on the examining table, his shirt off. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Five-mile swim for the shoulders. Better than weights, but a little of that, too, in the evening. A little running. About what I used to do back in the old days.’
‘I wish I had your blood pressure,’ the surgeon observed, removing the cuff. He’d done a major procedure that morning, but he made time for his friend.
‘Exercise, Sam,’ Kelly advised.
‘I don’t have the time, John,’ the surgeon said – rather weakly, both thought.
‘A doc should know better.’
‘True,’ Rosen conceded. ‘How are you otherwise?’
The reply was just a look, neither a smile nor a grimace, just a neutral expression that told Rosen all he needed to know. One more try: ‘There’s an old saying: Before setting out on revenge, dig two graves.’
‘Only two?’ Kelly asked lightly.
Rosen nodded. ‘I read the post report, too. I can’t talk you out of it?’
‘How’s Sarah?’
Rosen accepted the deflection with good grace. ‘Deep into her project. She’s excited enough that she’s telling me about it. It’s pretty interesting stuff.’
Just then Sandy O’Toole came in. Kelly startled both of them by lifting his T-shirt and covering his chest. ‘Please!’
The nurse was so startled that she laughed, and so did Sam until he realized that Kelly was indeed ready for whatever he was planning. The conditioning, the looseness, the steady, serious eyes that changed to mirth when he wanted them to. Like a surgeon, Rosen thought, and what a strange thought that was, but the more he looked at this man, the more intelligence he saw.
‘You’re looking healthy for a guy who got shot a few weeks ago,’ O’Toole said with a friendly look.
‘Clean living, ma’am. Only one beer in thirty-some days.’
‘Mrs Lott is conscious now, Doctor Rosen,’ the nurse reported. ‘Nothing unusual, she appears to be doing fine. Her husband’s been in to see her. I think he’ll be okay, too. I had my doubts.’
‘Thanks, Sandy.’
‘Well, John, you’re healthy, too. Put your shirt on before Sandy starts blushing,’ Rosen added with a chuckle.
‘Where do you get lunch around here?’ Kelly asked.
‘I’d show you myself, but I have a conference in about ten minutes. Sandy?’
She checked her watch. ‘About time for mine. You want to risk hospital food or something outside?’
‘You’re the tour guide, ma’am.’
She guided him to the cafeteria, where the food was hospital-bland, but you could add salt and other spices if you wanted. Kelly selected something that might be filling, even healthy, to compensate for the lack of taste.
‘Have you been keeping busy?’ he asked after they selected a table.
‘Always,’ Sandy assured him.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Off Loch Raven Boulevard, just in the County.’ She hadn’t changed, Kelly saw. Sandy O’Toole was functioning, quite well in fact, but the emptiness in her life wasn’t qualitatively different from his. The real difference was that he could do something; she could not. She was reaching out, she had a capacity for good humor, but her grief overcame it at every turn. A powerful force, grief. There were advantages in having enemies you could seek out and eliminate. Fighting a shadow was far more difficult.
‘Row house, like they have around here?’
‘No, it’s an old bungalow, whatever you call it, big square two-story house. Half an acre. That reminds me,’ she added. ‘I have to cut the grass this weekend.’ Then she remembered that Tim had liked cutting grass, had decided to leave the Army after his second Vietnam tour and get his law degree and live a normal kind of life, all of that taken away from her by little people in a distant place.
Kelly didn’t know what she was thinking, exactly, but he didn’t have to. The change in her expression, the way her voice trailed off, said it all. How to cheer her up? It was a strange question for him, considering his plans for the next few weeks.
‘You were very kind to me while I. was upstairs. Thanks.’
‘We try to take care of our patients,’ she said with a friendly and unaccustomed expression.
‘A face as pretty as yours should do that more,’ Kelly told her.
‘Do what?’
‘Smile.’
‘It’s hard,’ she said, serious again.
‘I know, ma’am. But I did have you laughing before,’ Kelly told her.
‘You surprised me.’
‘It’s Tim, isn’t it?’ he asked, jolting her. People weren’t supposed to talk about that, were they?
She stared into Kelly’s eyes for perhaps five seconds. ‘I just don’t understand.’
‘In some ways it’s easy. In some ways it’s hard. The hard part,’ Kelly said, thinking it through himself as he did so, ‘is understanding why people make it necessary, why people do things like that. What it comes down to is, there are bad people out there, and somebody has to deal with them, ‘cuz if you don’t, then someday they’ll deal with you. You can try ignoring them, but that doesn’t ever work, really. And sometimes you see things you just can’t ignore.’ Kelly leaned back, searching for more words. ‘You see lots of bad things here, Sandy. I’ve seen worse. I’ve watched people doing things -‘
‘Your nightmare?’
Kelly nodded. ‘That’s right. I almost got myself killed that night.’
‘What was -‘
‘You don’t want to know, honest. I mean, I don’t understand that part either, how people can do things like that. Maybe they believe in something so much that they stop remembering that it’s important to be human. Maybe they want something so much that they don’t care. Maybe there’s just something wrong with them, how they think, how they feel. I don’t know. But what they do is real. Somebody has to try and stop it.’ Even when you know it’s not going to work, Kelly didn’t have the heart to add. How could he tell her that her husband had died for a failure?
‘My husband was a knight in shiny armor on a white horse? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘You’re the one wearing white, Sandy. You fight against one kind of enemy. There’s other kinds. Somebody has to fight against them, too.’
‘I’ll never understand why Tim had to die.’
It really came down to that, Kelly thought. It wasn’t about great political or social issues. Everyone had a life, which was supposed to have a natural end after an amount of time determined by God or Fate or something men weren’t supposed to control. He’d seen young men die, and caused his share of deaths, each life something of value to its owner and others, and how did you explain to the others what it was all about? For that matter, how did you explain it to yourself? But that was from the outside. From the inside it was something else. Maybe that was the answer.
‘You do some pretty hard work, right?’
‘Yes,’ Sandy said, nodding a little.
‘Why not do something easier? I mean, work a department where it’s different, I don’t know – the nursery, maybe? That’s a happy place, right?’
‘Pretty much,’ the nurse admitted.
‘It’s still important, too, right? Taking care of little babies, it’s routine, yeah, but it still has to be done the right way, doesn’t it?’
‘Of course.’
‘But you don’t do that. You work Neuro. You do the hard stuff.’
‘Somebody has to -‘ Bingo! Kelly thought, cutting her off.
‘It’s hard – hard to do the work, hard on you – it hurts you some, right?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But you do it anyway,’ Kelly pointed out.
‘Yes,’ Sandy said, not as an admission, but something stronger.
‘That’s why Tim did what he did.’ He saw the understanding there, or perhaps the beginnings of it, just for a moment before her lingering grief pushed the argument aside.
‘It still doesn’t make sense.’
‘Maybe the thing doesn’t make sense, but the people do,’ Kelly suggested. That was about as far as his mind stretched. ‘Sorry, I’m not a priest, just a broken-down Navy chief.’
‘Not too broken down,’ O’Toole said, finishing her lunch.
‘And part of that is your doing, ma’am. Thank you.’ That earned him another smile.
‘Not all our patients get better. We’re kind of proud of those who do.’
‘Maybe we’re all trying to save the world, Sandy, one little bit at a time,’ Kelly said. He rose and insisted on walking her back to the unit. It took the whole five minutes to say what he wanted to say.
‘You know, I’d like to have dinner with you, maybe? Not now, but, well -‘
‘I’ll think about it,’ she allowed, half dismissing the idea, half wondering about it, knowing as Kelly did that it was too soon for both of them, though probably not as much for her. What sort of man was this? she asked herself. What were the dangers of knowing him?