Mr peanut, p.25
Mr. Peanut, page 25
“What are you doing?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she simply faced forward.
He held the key to the light. The flat edge was sharp enough to grip the screw’s slot, though the metal seemed too thick—but it did fit, just barely. He removed the first two screws with little difficulty and placed the warped blade on the hood, refusing even to glance at Susan lest she feel any more haughty about her solution. The second blade looked good though its screw was welded with grit, so he used the key and tried prying it loose, but it slipped and dug into his thumb, hacking the skin back, the pain zinging down his arm. Sheppard dropped the ring and, when he heard the passenger door open, roared, “Just stay in the goddamn car!”
She did, at least for a while. He staunched the blood with his fist and then dressed the wound with his handkerchief, clenching the cloth with his teeth and tearing off two thin strips with his good hand. He’d come around the car and leaned against the hood, cliffside, to collect himself, and she joined him from the opposite direction, taking his throbbing thumb in her hands. She tied the bandage together over the knuckle, patted it, and said, “That was a bad idea.” They turned to face the ocean, the night moonless, the sky star-splashed through strands of fog, the crash of waves rumbling up the rock into the soles of Sheppard’s feet, the sound tracing both the height of this cliff and the vastness beyond. This, in the darkness, set him even more adrift and conferred the vaguest sense of threat—that he was somehow at risk of not surviving this night.
“It’s not so cold when we’re not moving,” Susan said, rubbing her arms with her hands.
He wondered again, Where had she gone? Where had she hidden her? The other Susan, the old Susan, was simpler, braver, and this one had made off with her. She was here just days ago, when Sheppard had arrived in Los Angeles with Marilyn. He and Susan had been corresponding since February, when she left Cleveland to move out here, after she and Dr. Stevenson had officially broken off their engagement. Sheppard had arranged this trip for intensive training and board certification in vascular and neurosurgery—a milestone, to be sure—under Chappie. But in truth it was to see Susan. “While I’m in Los Angeles,” he told Marilyn, “you could head up to Big Sur with Jo. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” They were in his bed together and Marilyn stared for a time at the ceiling. “Los Angeles,” she finally said. “Doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago?” It had been only four years, but he said, “Yes.” The trick, of course, was to make it tempting and unappealing at the same time, to imply that he wanted her there in spite of the many restrictions: a vacation together she’d have to enjoy alone. “We could leave Chip with Richard,” he said. “I’ll be in surgery round the clock, but you’d be free to roam.” She put her arms around his waist while he sat up against his headboard. Usually she started the night in his bed, then went back to hers after he slipped off. Suddenly, she hugged him, hard, and he stared at the top of her head, imagined her scalp was a screen and he could see her brain and know what she was thinking. He kissed her, smelled her hair—a scent so familiar and unique he might as well have tried to describe the odor of blood.
She lifted her head from his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “We could bring our racquets and play at the club again.”
“We could,” he said. “Maybe I could get away one afternoon.”
“We never play tennis anymore,” she said. “Why is that?”
“We’re busy.”
“We were busy then.”
“We will,” he said, smiling, scheming, remembering playing together back when he was a resident at Los Angeles Osteopathic, those gray clay courts at the Hollywood Tennis Club, the pleasure before they’d hit of sweeping them, smoothing away the previous match and dusting the lines to brightness, of watching Marilyn, who had real talent, whose racquet on contact made a sound he simply couldn’t generate, a ringing impact that was more report, the angle and pace she used to attack his forehand and backhand acts of supreme control that made his own strokes easier to hit, the whole rally an act of generosity that made him feel like he was dictating …
But that was long ago. Now—even as he remembered those days—his thoughts turned toward Susan, interpenetrating everything, Susan written over these scenes in invisible ink. Marilyn could come along for all he cared. He’d still manage to see Susan.
Every day of that shortest month became a countdown to March. Once things were set up with Chappie, those two weeks he’d x-ed out on his calendar became a lodestar drawing him on, beckoning him even now as he sat with his wife in bed remembering their early years together, some of the very best times, before he and Susan Hayes had ever met.
It was an event he recalled vividly. It was in Bay View’s pathology lab, his brother Richard giving Susan the tour of the hospital, where they’d hired her as a lab technician, their third addition to the staff in a month. He’d just come out of a routine appendectomy, and yet he felt anointed by the procedure’s efficiency, with the sense of order restored, the same tidiness and rectitude he felt when he changed his car’s oil and slammed the hood shut. He was naked under his scrubs—how he liked to work—and this contributed a kind of bedtime calm and comfort, a distinct libidinal alertness as he strolled the halls pendulant and free. He always felt most manly after scrubbing out.
Sheppard walked into pathology—Susan’s back was to him—and when she turned, Richard introduced her. Afterward, he reassembled her features in his mind: the strong, slender hand; the curly auburn hair; the golden brown complexion; the freckling across her cheeks and nose, so distinct it seemed tribal. He had to do all this after their introduction because the initial sight of her had somehow obliterated it.
“I hope you like being busy,” he’d told her.
“I do, Dr. Sheppard.”
“We start bright and early.”
“The bus from Rocky River’s always on time.”
“No car?” Richard said.
“I thought I got one when I was hired,” she joked.
They all laughed. Even Richard was smitten.
“Rocky River?” Sheppard said. “Where?”
“Fifty-nine oh three.”
“I’m only a block down.”
“We could take the bus together,” she said.
“I was thinking I’d drive.”
“Careful, Sam,” said Richard. “This is a nice girl. She still lives with her parents.”
“If Dr. Sheppard wants to drive the bus,” she said, “that’s fine by me.”
She talked like a movie starlet, Sheppard thought in his office later. And she was as pretty as one. She, of course, could be forgiven for the former. He put his feet up on his desk, his hands behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. Usually, he took a quick nap between his morning surgeries and lunch, but now he was wide awake. Before, with other women, he might simply be thankful that life had once again become interesting, but this was different.
You’ll see her tomorrow, he told himself.
She was waiting for him in his red MG the very next morning.
Sheppard came into the garage and there she was, sitting in the passenger seat as if she’d been there all night, so confident she didn’t even look up. It stopped him, cold and amazed, for a second, her presence genie-granted even before he’d made the wish. He’d decided on his blue pinstripe suit this morning, and for some reason he stopped and touched his tie, looking down at his chest and smiling to himself; then, collected, he walked over and opened the driver’s door. She looked at him, again with a directness that silenced any questions and nullified small talk, a gaze that he found wonderful and unsettling to return. He started the car, backed out of the garage, and drove to the hospital uncharacteristically slowly, though not once during the whole ride did they speak. The car was dying to climb out of third, and when he downshifted before a stop he could feel each of the gear box’s grooves. Once the light changed he accelerated gingerly, as if he were driving on ice. In the parking lot, she said, “Thank you, Dr. Sheppard,” and then waited; instinctively, he hurried around to open the door for her—something he never did for Marilyn.
He held the hospital door open for her as well, and she walked to the lab without saying as much as good-bye.
If he saw Susan today, whether in the halls or the cafeteria, he knew they wouldn’t speak. He was as certain of this as he was that she’d be waiting in his car the next morning.
She was, her hands crossed over her lap. He didn’t hesitate this time and again they didn’t speak; speak and something might change. It was mid-May, spectacular spring weather, the dogwoods sneezing, cherry trees flowering like cotton candy, the redbuds like newly popped corn, various colors humming like Susan there next to him, Sheppard afraid to look straight at her lest the same magic that had placed her beside him make her disappear. At work it was more of the same. When they had to talk, it was strictly professional and in her realm of basic pathology. He gave specific directives. Coworkers, seeing them interact, might think they despised each other. Often, she didn’t even look at him. Gone was the starlet’s repartee. He knew they had the same agreement, which was highly unsettling and odd but strangely kept him focused. Knowing she’d be waiting in his car tomorrow let him blot out all distractions. To alter anything—to proceed otherwise—would’ve been apostasy.
“Who is that?” Marilyn said to him the next morning. She’d just come in from the garage, still in her nightgown. Chip, now four years old, was fast asleep.
He took a last sip of coffee. “Susan Hayes. She’s a new lab technician.”
“What’s she doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s sitting in your car.”
“I’m giving her a ride to work.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“A ride or a car?”
“Either.”
Marilyn crossed her arms. “Is she getting one?”
“I have no idea.”
Marilyn shook her head in amazement. “Should we expect her tomorrow then?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Marilyn waited. There was only one thing to say in response, but for years now she’d been unwilling to.
“I have to go,” he said.
He got into his car. Again, Susan didn’t acknowledge him. No smile, no hello, not even a nod. Yet Sheppard found himself nodding at her impassively, as you do to someone taking the next seat on a bus or standing by an elevator. He turned his head, placing his hand behind Susan’s seat, and backed out of the garage.
“Was that your wife?” Susan said.
Startled, he had to stop at the end of the driveway to answer. “Yes.”
“She’s pretty.”
He said nothing. To answer would be to compare them, and in the strictest sense that wasn’t possible. When Susan didn’t continue, he drove on.
“She asked why I was in your car,” she said a few minutes later. “I told her you were giving me a lift to the hospital.”
Once again, Sheppard was driving so slowly that occasionally cars swerved around him.
“She told me you’d be late and that I should go on.”
When he turned left or right, his hands came together at the top of the wheel and then slid back, once he’d finished the manuever, to ten o’clock and two.
“I knew you weren’t going to be late.” She angled the side mirror toward her face and regarded herself. Satisfied, she readjusted it and sat forward. “So I said thanks and stayed right where I was.”
She was in control, Sheppard thought. Like Marilyn when they played tennis, Susan was dictating, and if he’d learned anything from that experience it was to realize that any effort on his part to wrest power from her would ruin everything. For two whole weeks she showed up in the garage. It was what he looked most forward to, opening the door and seeing her there, as much a part of the car as the wheels, as surprising as seeing a cat uncurl itself from the front seat and scamper across the grass. He would open the door and look at her. She had a long, lovely neck; arched, haughty eyebrows; a small mouth to which she applied no lipstick, the upper lip on the verge, it always seemed, of a snarl. He walked toward her slowly so he could take in as much of her as possible before he entered that zone of silence, of blindness. Her hair, auburn and curly, was still damp at the neck from her shower; her upper lip freckled near the twin peaks by the philtrum. He took his seat, put the keys in the ignition, started the car, released the brake, pulled the stick to neutral, moved the gear shift from side to side once before dropping it into reverse, this last action allowing him to regard her hands. She had long fingers, thickly veined, the metacarpals as distinctly visible as the delicate fingers that stretched taut the wings of a bat.
“I can’t drive you home this evening,” he said, cutting the ignition. They were in the hospital parking lot. “I’m on call.”
“That’s lucky,” she said. “I am too.”
It was a Wednesday. Twice a month, Sheppard did a twenty-four-hour rotation with a seven-to-seven shift. The weekends tended to be busy, a euphemism for bad, particularly now that spring was in full force, early June now, more boaters out on the lake, more accidents, mostly boys doing stupid things. They’d lost a sixteen-year-old last month who’d slipped off the back of an outboard. Unaware of this, his older brother gunned the motor and shredded his hands, arms, and right leg, severing six fingers as well as the superior mesenteric and internal iliac arteries, the blade dicing the cephalic and basilic veins. He’d lost nearly nine pints of blood by the time they got him on the table; and standing over this mess, the boy’s skin milk white from shock, Sheppard froze. The right side looked like it had been mauled by a mythical creature, the blooming gashes revealing veins, tendons, and muscles so grossly mashed that he concluded both limbs would have to be amputated in order to give the kid any chance of survival. But he died within minutes. Afterward, his brother’s face was contorted with calamity and his parents agape, absorbing the news with something near awe, their grief so palpable and strong and localized, their arms over each other in a scrum of protection and anguish, it was like the force field between opposing magnets, thin and utterly impenetrable. And it was with such sudden accidents, when death didn’t just appear out of nowhere so much as erupt, that Sheppard allowed himself to give thanks for his own safety, for a life free of suffering. For his own brilliant luck.
This night, however, had been so very quiet that Sheppard actually longed for disaster. He was bored. He did rounds he easily could have left to the nurses. He took a detour by pathology, walked as inconspicuously as he could past the door, and through the frosted glass he made out Susan’s gray form—like an outline shaded with the flat side of a pencil—just inside the room. He could hear her heels striking the floor, and when they turned toward the door, he hurried off down the hall, went back to his office, and took a nap.
Later, close to five, a man in his midthirties was brought in by the police. He was well dressed, wearing a suit. But he was also disheveled: shirt untucked, tie loose, coat wrinkled, pants muddy at the cuffs, the shoes splattered and flecked with grass. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his face and his eyes were glassy, the rims red, but Sheppard smelled no alcohol. “We found him walking down Lake Road,” the cop said. “He can’t speak coherently.” When Sheppard asked the man his name, he looked up, baffled, as if he’d heard only a distant echo. “Put it in there,” he said. “Please.” He held up both palms, then coughed violently, hunching over. A gob of green sputum hit the floor between his feet. Sheppard had the nurse bring him a container and scooped it up with a tongue depressor, then laid the patient on the bed. Happily, the man closed his eyes. Sheppard listened to his lungs, which sounded like a water whistle. The spleen was enlarged, the abdomen hot. When Sheppard touched it, the man winced alert. “How many times do I have to say it?” he said, looking around as if he’d just landed on Mars. His blood pressure was low and falling. Sheppard thought for a moment, then ordered IV fluids and drew blood, a procedure the patient regarded bemusedly before dozing off again.
“Have Miss Hayes do a CBC, please, and a urinalysis,” he told the nurse. “Tell her to bring me the results as soon as she gets them.” Then he went to speak with the police. The man had no wallet, no ID at all, though he was wearing a wedding band. Neither of the officers recognized him.
“Is he on drugs?” one said.
“I don’t think so,” Sheppard said.
“Is he sick?”
“Very.”
Sheppard returned to the room and waited with the patient, whose blood pressure continued to fall. He checked his watch; it had been almost twenty minutes. When Susan entered, he managed to remain calm.
“Is this him?” she said.
“Yes.”
She looked at the patient for a second, then handed Sheppard her chart. For a moment, each had a hand on the clipboard.
“His white count’s markedly elevated,” she said.
“How much?”
“Twenty-two thousand.”
“What’s his hematocrit?”
“Thirty-five,” she said.
The figures were right there on the page, but he wanted to ask. “What about the peripheral smear?”
“I noted vacuoles in some of the white cells.”
Sheppard took in her scent.
“He’s clearly septic,” she said.
“Do you have results on the sputum?”
“He’s gram positive.”
“Single population?”
“Yes.”
“What do they look like?”
“Lancet-shaped.”
“Go on.”
“I’d say diplococci. But you can review the slide if you’d like.”
He let go of the clipboard. She put her hand on her hip and pressed the page to her breast, looking at him as if he were about to correct her.
