Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Page 12

  They’d made love three times last night. The first time they’d done it desperately, tearing off only what needed to be torn off. He’d taken her up against the wall by the door, with her skirt bunched around her waist and her underwear twisted around an ankle. She told herself it was because of a physical hunger she’d suppressed for so long. She told herself it wasn’t to beat the rising of his conscience or to commit the sin before either of them could think. The second time they made love, staring at one another in the darkness and breathing heavily, they had abandoned all pretenses. They’d stripped off each other’s clothing and rediscovered each other’s bodies. The third time she woke to feel him pressing against her, Colin her lusty demon in the darkness, as if they were young again and the rain thrummed on the thatched roof, and before them stretched hours and hours of languid South American time.

  And now, with daylight seeping in between the blinds, she intended to remind Colin what it was like to have her warm and willing in his bed. She’d always been wanton with him. In Paraguay, she’d often wondered if Pombero, the lustful, mischievous imp of the night, had taken hold of her spirit. But in her heart, she admitted there was more to this urgency than passion. In this strange situation with her and Colin and the ghost of that other woman, she found herself—the minister’s daughter—in the odd position of acting the aggressor.

  It didn’t take her long to notice his stillness. His hands on her waist didn’t roam. The kisses she gave him coaxed no response. She paused, tracing his nose with hers, only to pull away far enough to see his expression.

  Then she wished there wasn’t so much light in the room.

  He eased her aside, and rolled up in one fluid motion. The muscles of his back tensed as he rifled through the clothes on the floor, found his underwear, and pulled it on. Sarah pulled up the sheet, but there weren’t enough blankets in the world to stave off the chill.

  “It’s nearly nine.” He spoke in a brisk, husky voice. “I’m due at a symposium in thirty minutes.”

  She curled into herself as if each word were a blow. She willed herself to be calm and remain quiet. He’d flown halfway across the world to take part in this conference. She couldn’t expect him to drop everything—busy doctors, needy patients—just to be with her.

  But she was never good at lying, even to herself. Colin could be speaking a Zulu dialect and she would still understand the international body language of a man feeling guilty after spending a night with another woman.

  “I can’t get out of it,” he continued, avoiding her eyes as he wrestled into his pants. “I’m on a panel of two.”

  She stretched over the edge of the bed, letting her hair shield her face as she searched the floor for the coral splash of her skirt. She seized her bra. On the long plane ride to Bangalore, with Kate whispering encouragement in her ear—All is fair in love and war—she’d conveniently ignored the fact that Colin was a good man, an honorable man, a man whose word could be trusted, and who would naturally feel guilt over infidelity, even outside the bonds of marriage. Would she have wanted him any other way?

  “It’s a damn thing.” He found his shirt, tugged it on, and fumbled intensely with the buttons at the wrist. “I’m doing something for the conference every day this week. A surgical demonstration this afternoon, a lecture on—”

  “Colin, enough.” With a swipe of her forearm, she pushed her wild hair off her face. “I don’t expect you to change your schedule for my sake.”

  With a frustrated sigh, he stopped fussing with the buttons. He swiveled on one foot and walked to the windows, feigning interest in the dust on the closed blinds. “For God’s sake, Sarah, you think I wouldn’t, after this?”

  She crumpled her skirt in her lap. She could take almost anything except his anger. “I ambushed you last night. I know that. I am sorry—”

  “Don’t.” He raised the back of his hand in the air, as if to swat back her words. “Don’t apologize.”

  “I know there were better ways to contact you. I could have called your office in California. I could have e-mailed you—”

  But I needed to see your face.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered.” He planted his hands on his hips. “Seeing you last night was like a shot of adrenaline. Any way it happened, the result would have been the same.” He turned abruptly and fixed his gaze on her, across that terrible distance. “The timing is just unbelievable. Why now?”

  She shifted the sheet up higher, knowing that the fine cotton didn’t do much to hide her freckled nakedness. She searched her conscience, painfully aware of how careful she had to be. She sensed that if she mumbled her mantra right now—I have loved you forever—he would retreat deeper into this angry confusion.

  “Do you remember my friend Rachel?”

  His brow furrowed, then he shook his head. She was surprised he didn’t remember. They’d had so many long, lazy conversations in Paraguay. She was sure she’d mentioned all her friends and family, especially the girls of the rock-climbing club, especially the wildest of the bunch.

  Then again, when she and Colin had been together, conversations had a way of melting into more visceral, more physical forms of communication.

  “She was one of my best friends. She died.” She told him about the fateful envelopes and how her task had been to seek him out. “I couldn’t say no, not to a friend’s dying wishes.”

  “That’s it? That’s why you hauled yourself across the world?”

  “You left me, Colin.” She spoke without reproach. “I had to assume it was because you’d lost interest.”

  “I didn’t. Lose interest.” He paced in a tight circle. “Obviously.”

  The little hairs on the back of her arms danced.

  “It’s just…” He scraped his fingers through his hair. “Once I left Paraguay, and started my surgical residency, there wasn’t an easy way back.”

  “I’m not digging for an apology.”

  “Oh, but you deserve one. That, and a hell of a lot more.” He stopped pacing, leaned against the corner, and sank into a crouch. “Sarah Pollard, after all these years. Showing up in India, of all places. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  She needed to find her blouse. She scanned the carpet, but he’d cleared it of all garments. Sweeping up her skirt and bra, she frantically sought the white muslin amid all the tangled white sheets. She told herself she would leave this room—Colin’s room—in a moment, just one more moment. Dressed and out of his sight, she would acknowledge her guilt, she would succumb to the trembling, and she would catch the next flight to… to someplace. Anyplace. Not here.

  “I followed your career, you know.”

  His voice stopped her short.

  “After you left the Corps,” he said, rubbing the bristle along his jaw, “you earned your nursing degree at New York University. I couldn’t imagine you in that big city.”

  A tingle walked up her spine.

  “You joined Doctors Without Borders. I remember thinking—that’s just where you belong.” He shifted his weight, sprawled against the wall, and tilted his head back to face the ceiling stucco. “Do you know how many times I thought about you, working all alone in that muddy village in Paraguay, picking up Guaraní like you were born to it? You slipped right into their world. Never once did you get pissed off that nothing ever worked, and nobody ever showed up on time, and there was never any money.”

  The tingling spread, and a new weakness threatened her senses.

  “At the hospital, I’d be watching surgery and I’d tell the guys in my residency, This is nothing, you should try surgery in a mud hut. I’d tell them, Go work in the third world, you’ll get more surgery practice in two weeks than you’ll get in two years here. I’d tell them, There’s this girl I met, she’s got a face like a Botticelli but she’s got a backbone of iron, didn’t even flinch picking leeches out of a kid’s shredded muscle—”

  “That boy—Werai—he’s married now,” she interrupted, needing to stop him for a second so she coul
d breathe. “Last I heard, he had two kids. He named his oldest son Colin.”

  “So he did.” Colin managed a breathy gust of a laugh, then raised his face to meet her gaze. “I still can’t believe you’re here. It’s like you’ve been sent.”

  Her blood pounded. Black spots threatened at the periphery of her vision. She had been sent. By Rachel. And maybe, through Rachel, she’d been sent by a higher power. Her prayers had been answered once, when Colin arrived to save Werai… and now she and Colin were here, together.

  Maybe, after all, Kate had been right about fighting for love.

  Then, suddenly, he slapped his hands on his knees. “I can’t think about this now.” He glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “As awkward as this is, I am telling the truth about the nine-thirty panel.” He eased himself up, the edges of his shirt billowing open. “I have to wash up, gather my notes, prepare.”

  Sarah nodded, trying to regulate her breathing. She sensed his mind working, triaging the issues so they could be dealt with in the proper order. “I’m on temporary leave from the camp,” she said, wanting her turn among his priorities. “I can stay here two days… or two weeks.”

  Or two months. Or more. Her supervisor, at Doctors Without Borders’ satellite office near Bujumbura, had made that clear. He understood what it was like to live in a refugee camp. Furthermore, he knew about the wounded girl, the one with the crooked braids, the broken little girl that Sam had pulled from that dirty alley and brought to the clinic for Sarah to nurse. So, when Sarah requested leave to attend Rachel’s funeral, the supervisor told her she could take what time she needed.

  How much time, she now realized, depended on Colin.

  He walked to the edge of the bed. His gaze slipped over her bare shoulders, a touch as hot as a hand. It followed the hollow of her throat, then cascaded down the pattern of freckles to the edge of the sheet that she’d let slip, perilously close to her breasts, where he’d scraped his cheek against her last night, until she’d moaned.

  “If I were a better man,” he murmured, “I would tell you to go home, right now.”

  She held her breath, watching the struggle on his face, watching his features settle—just as she remembered they did whenever he made up his mind about something important.

  “The day after tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to a village about eighty miles from here. Just a couple of the local doctors and myself. There’s a clinic, and we’re operating on three kids. We’ll be using a new craniofacial technique—” He cut the air with his hand, stopping his speech mid-sentence. “Anyway. What I’m trying to say is… we could always use an experienced nurse.”

  She drew in a slow, careful breath. It was a strange invitation, a working invitation, but an invitation nonetheless.

  “Yes, Colin. I’ll go.”

  chapter ten

  India?! Sweet Holy Mother, what do you mean, she’s in India?”

  Across the doctor’s waiting room, a mom with a pageboy haircut gave Jo the hairy eyeball. Jo cradled the cell phone against her shoulder, grabbed her purse, and headed for the privacy of the hallway.

  “Paul,” she said, as she closed the waiting-room door behind her, “you’re not making a lick of sense.”

  “Of course not. It doesn’t make any sense. I was the one raised in a hippie commune, remember? I’m the one who should be taking off to India—just like my father did, taking off to study under some guru in Nepal.”

  “Paul—”

  “Instead, it’s Kate dumping me—Kate, from the stable Midwestern home, for God’s sake!” In the background, a child squealed, and something fell hard. “Michael, take that basketball outside now. Jo—she didn’t tell you?”

  “Not a word.” Kate went to India? Without the kids? “When did she leave?”

  “About fifty years ago, on Tuesday. Find the cleats, Tess. You wore them. You took them off. Find the damn cleats yourself.”

  Jo leaned against the wall. She hadn’t wanted to make this call at all. She’d jettisoned a boatload of pride just to punch in the damn number. But she was in a doctor’s office, seeking medical help for the second time in a week. She couldn’t let pride get in the way any longer or Grace would end up in the morgue. So here she stood, ready to concede defeat, to admit she’d been a clueless jerk to Kate for eleven straight years, ready to prostrate herself before the Great Mother and bow to her superior wisdom, and Kate wasn’t even there to gloat.

  “… If you didn’t lose the cleats the last time you wore them, then we wouldn’t be late for your soccer game.”

  “Paul, when is she coming back?”

  “Good question. She’s got a return date of a week from Wednesday, but she’s going to see ‘how it goes.’ She hasn’t yet seen the Tipu Sultan’s Palace. And you never can tell when old flames get together—Sarah might need a little more moral support.”

  “A week from Wednesday.” Jo’s big presentation was in six days. She’d yet to find a nanny after Grace’s explosive fit. She couldn’t even get a service to return her calls, leading her to conclude that nanny services were networked like IBM. “Paul, I can’t wait until a week from Wednesday.”

  “Neither can I. That’s when my mother goes back to the commune, laughing all the way. I’ll have to quit my job to take care of these kids, because when I work from the dining room Lola the Mistress of Kundahar ends up throwing frying pans instead of balls of flaming gas—Tess, what do you mean, it’s our turn to bring the snacks? Look in the pantry and see what’s in there. Anna, I’ll make your sandwich in a minute, so don’t stick your finger in the peanut butter—Look, Jo, I’ve got to go—”

  “Wait! Do you have her phone number? In India?”

  “Don’t bother. Last time I called, she cut me off. Told me if I couldn’t find a bar of soap in the house I could ‘bloody well go out and buy it.’ Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Now, you just give me that number, Paul. She’ll take my call.”

  “She’s staying at The Chancery in Bangalore. Sarah had tried to book her at some dump with bedbugs and no flush toilets. I’d rather she took up skydiving again.” He rustled some papers while yelling at Tess to get the cleats on and get into the car. “And if you get through to her,” he said, after he reeled off the phone number, “ask her where she keeps the lightbulbs, and where’s Anna’s sock puppet, and why the hell are we out of laundry detergent?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, wait a minute—Jo?”

  “Still here.”

  “You’re a woman.”

  “Sugar, believe me, I haven’t noticed lately.”

  “Where can I buy Styrofoam balls and wooden clothespins?”

  Jo pressed her forehead against the wall. She could hear Tess shouting in the background, Anna crying, and the distinct sound of a ball being bounced on wooden floors.

  Paul released a long, haggard sigh into the silence. “Yeah, yeah, stupid to ask. I thought, you know, you being a woman and all—”

  “Paul, I’ll tell you one thing I’ve discovered. Talent in motherhood? It doesn’t come with the boobs.”

  Jo disconnected, flipped the phone shut, and set it to vibrate as she walked back into the waiting room. She tried not to envision Paul, a father for over a decade, losing his mind after a few days alone with his own kids. How was she, never a mother, supposed to take care of a half-psychotic orphan?

  Moments later, a woman in a vintage Nurse Ratched getup poked her head around the door to the examining rooms. “Ms. Marcum? Dr. Maria Rodriguez is ready to see you now.”

  Dr. Rodriguez turned out to be about half Jo’s age, a fact she tried to hide by slicking her hair back and wearing oversized tortoiseshell glasses. As Jo entered her office, the doctor jumped out of her chair, rounded the desk, and thrust out a hand so full of false fingertips that it could be classified as a weapon.

  “Ms. Marcum. I’m Dr. Rodriguez.” She displayed bleach-whitened teeth. “You’ve got one heck of a daughter there.”


  “Well, she’s not really mine—”

  “I know, I read the file.” Her nails clacked as she waved off Jo’s explanation. “Grace is just great, open and smart as a tack. But she sure as hell has been through a lot. Tell me, how did she get those stitches?”

  Jo blinked. That was the third time she’d been asked that question since coming through the shrink’s door. “She fell down the stairs in my condo. She hit the edge of a table.”

  “You’ve got to get that padded,” she said, clacking her fingers again. “There’s this stuff called Glasswrap. It’ll fit right around the edges. How did she fall?”

  Jo’s phone vibrated but she ignored it. “It was the first time she slept at my place. I guess she didn’t see the stairs—”

  “Sleepwalking, probably.” The doctor nodded, then rounded the desk, sat down, and wrote something on her pad. “Yeah, sleepwalking. It fits the profile.”

  “Profile?”

  Dr. Rodriguez shuffled forward in her seat. She pulled off her glasses and laid them on the file. “Ms. Marcum, you have nothing to worry about. What you have there,” she said, gesturing through the large window to Grace, who was playing in a room such a bright yellow it could produce seizures, “is a totally, completely, absolutely normal child.”

  Jo should have felt relief, but instead she felt terror. She couldn’t shake from her mind the sight of Grace’s contorted face the other day as she threw the plate of three-cheese macaroni across the room.

  “Now, that’s not to say she doesn’t have issues.” Clackety-clack went the nails. “Oh, boy, does Grace have issues! I mean, think about the disruption in her life in just the past two weeks. A mother dead—a concept she’s hardly old enough to grasp, by the way—an abrupt change in location, severing her not only from her lifelong caretakers”—here the doctor slipped the glasses on long enough to read the file—“but also severing her from whatever network of neighborhood friends and pets she may have had.”

  Pets?

  “Of course she doesn’t know which way is up and which way is down. Can you blame her? But the biggest thing of all is the loss of her mother, and that’s what she’s trying to work out when she throws bowls of pasta at you.”