Every Hospital Visit

Every Hospital Visit

The living room had the air of a hearing held off the record. The desk lamp put out a thin yellow light and pushed our two shadows out to the walls on either side.

I stood with my back against the edge of the desk and my hands in my pockets, the dried blood cracking across them. Emily stood opposite me with the length of the oak table between us. Between us the notebook lay open, and the four cassette tapes sat beside it like a set of small bones.

My head had gone cold. Fear, panic, anger. All of it had drained out, and what was left ran level.

"The meeting in the lecture hall at Albany. Twenty years ago." I kept my voice flat. "Was that chance, or was it arranged?"

Emily didn't answer right away. She stood where she was in the half dark with her eyes down, looking at the floor between us. Three seconds went by.

Outside, the wind took the storm window and let it go, and took it again. I counted the passes. Six, then a long gap, then two more. Emily did not look up through any of it.

"There was no chance in it," she said. The wind at the window almost took the words. "I was sent."

The first one landed clean.

The rainy afternoon in Albany, the girl who slipped on the stairs with an armload of course books, the embarrassed smile, the hot coffee under the awning. All of it written out in advance and run for 20 years.

I didn't blink. I pushed my hands deeper into my pockets and left them there.

"Sent by who?" I asked.

She waited two seconds before she let the words go.

"The organization behind your family's research," she said, dropping her voice. "The project never stopped, James."

"To do what?"

"To make sure Subject B never got outside their control." She raised her eyes to mine, and they held nothing. "You needed someone close. Someone to hold you in the present when the side effects came up, and to write the reports when you went under. They paid me to do that, James."

The corner of my mouth moved. Nothing else on my face did.

"Eleven years," I said. I took a step forward, into the yellow light. "The care, the patience, the oil every night, a wife waiting me out. All of it was contract work?"

She took longer this time. The woman who had held my hand through the nights the dreams took me apart stood there and gave me one small nod.

"At the start," she said. "It was a job."

Half the truth does more damage than a lie. She admitted she was a jailer somebody had hired, and the level way she said it took the last thing I had, which was the standing of the man it had been done to.

I had thought I would win this. I thought that when I put the tapes on the table, when I put the basement on the table, she would fold and ask me to forgive her.

I was wrong.

She didn't deny anything, didn't explain herself, didn't come apart. She had the whole picture and she was calm holding it, and that calm flattened everything I had walked in with, which came to a handful of pieces. I had thought I was the one running the investigation. I was a lab animal that had worked its way out to the edge of the cage.

I counted the floorboards between her feet and mine. Nine, and part of a tenth under the table leg. My hands stayed in my pockets. The dried blood across the knuckles had cracked into plates, and one came loose against the lining.

Her hands were flat on the table on either side of the notebook with the fingers apart. On the pad of her right thumb was a callus, small and flat and shiny, and there was one to match it on the left. She told me years ago they came from the pestle she ground her herbs with. She had never ground anything in front of me.

"And A?" I dropped my voice. "The kid on the floor. Who is he? Where is he?"

Emily looked at me, and something came up in her face for the first time since we had started. Pity. The kind you have for a man who doesn't know what he is asking for.

"You don't want to know, James," she said. She let a few seconds go by. "You think you listened to four tapes and now you have all of it? You're seeing what they want you to see."

"Say it," I said.

"A isn't in this house anymore." Her voice was almost nothing. "A has been gone 31 years. Since the night you were 15. The night you think you forgot everything."

I stood still. The room went unsteady for a second and then settled.

"Gone where?"

"Where you put him," Emily said, and each word went in. "You've always wanted to know whether you were the one it happened to or the one who did it. If you want the answer, ask the next book you're planning to write."

I took my hands out of my pockets and set them on the table, one on either side of the tapes. The oak was colder than the room. Down the hall the furnace came on and ran.

Emily stepped back and leaned against the wood doorframe at the edge of the room. She didn't leave. She stood in the half dark with her shoulders going into the shadow, watching me, and she did not look finished.

I let her stand there. I treated her like furniture, and I knew I had lost.

I stayed where I was with my hand closed on the edge of the oak table. I was not getting my memory back and I was not getting the truth, and the last thing holding me up was gone. The woman who had been next to me for 20 years was a jailer drawing a paycheck. My childhood was a lab, and what was in front of me was a line of questions with nothing attached to them.

I looked down at the notebook open on the table.

The line "This will be the greatest novel I have ever written" sat there in my own careful hand from an hour earlier. I had lost everything, and the rotted reflex in the writing part of my brain still had my fingers closing around the pen.

The desk lamp dipped, and came back.

A tear came down onto the wood and spread out beside the notebook.

It went into the grain and stopped, about the size of a nickel. I stood where I was and watched the edge of it dry back in toward the middle. It took less than a minute. Neither of us wiped it up.

Emily's head went down. Whatever had kept her level all night came apart at once. She put both hands over her face, and her shoulders moved with her breathing.

Nothing about it was performed. A woman who had carried something for 20 years had run out of what it took.

"I'm not denying it," Emily said. Her voice broke and came back in pieces. "At the beginning it was an assignment. But 20 years, James. Duty and caring about somebody were never mutually exclusive. I fell in love with you. That part is real."

I stood there and went looking for the lie in her face. Her eyes were red and running and there was nothing behind them but the pain.

Pieces I had carried separately for years slid up against one another and made a picture.

Why did we get married so fast that year?

Back then I couldn't see the shape of it. Twenty years ago, in the first weeks after we met in Albany, Emily had already started taking me places.

She took me to the dental office on the corner for a cleaning, to an acupuncturist whose rooms smelled of dried herbs for the headaches, and then signed me up for a course of therapeutic spa sessions because I had mentioned strange dreams.

I believed for a long time that it was a woman looking after me in detail. Now, with it torn open: every one of those offices, the dental work, the needles, the spa, was a reason on paper to take me somewhere, draw blood, and run the first set of numbers on me.

Once we were married the hurry made sense.

When ordinary health reasons started to wear thin, Emily played the card she had been holding: wanting a child.

She used my wanting a family to make hospitals part of our week. In January, when the clinic opened a file on us, the appointments stopped needing any excuse at all.

The lab sheet with "Low sperm count" on it was manufactured. I had spent nine months holding that against myself. The specialist with the calm warm smile who walked us through all of it this year was theirs.

Forty-some hospital visits across 11 years of marriage. Hundreds of vials of blood, the hours I spent alone under the MRI, the marrow draws, the nerve panels. Every one of them was a collection date, an index check so the machine could follow how Subject B was developing. Treatment never came into it.

One of them was a storefront allergy clinic on Route 9 outside Poughkeepsie, a Tuesday in March, the waiting room warm and smelling of coffee that had been sitting on the burner since morning. Emily said the panel was covered and would take 20 minutes, and that she would sit with me. The tech used a butterfly needle in the left arm and filled nine tubes, and I watched the color run darker down the rack as it went. At the counter on the way out I signed two pages on a clipboard without reading either of them, and Emily took the carbon and put it in her bag.

I closed my fist, and the blisters across my palm opened and stung.