“Patricia,” he answers, curt but not unfriendly. “What a surprise.”
“How are you, Doctor?” she replies. She learned long ago that calling a man by his earned title will get her farther than calling him by his first name as if they’re equals.
“Busy. What can I do for you?”
She smiles and bats her eyelashes. Even if he’s not right there with her, she knows it changes her voice. “I had a little accident yesterday, I’m afraid, something that needs stitches, and I’m really trying to avoid the hospital. Are you still taking house calls?”
He pauses with a soft, drawn-out, “Hmm.” Not a good sign. “I am, but my girl had a call from the judge’s office. Sounds like you’re no longer on his plan. But there’s a nice little urgent care just two miles down the road—”
“Dr. Baird, I hope you’ll forgive me for interrupting you, but you know Randall’s…secretaries…can’t be trusted. I do believe they’re rather forthright when they need certain antibiotics or…procedures…but in general, they do not look so fondly upon me.”
They have a long history, Randall and the doc, and Patricia knows for a fact that certain frowned-upon procedures to get rid of unmarital surprises have lined the doctor’s pockets over the years. Her eyebrows are raised as if she’s waiting for a little boy to confess to having put a frog in her boot.
“I’m sure that’s true, Patricia.” He used to call her Mrs. Lane. “But I’m afraid Randall has me on retainer, and thus he calls the shots. I believe he’s in Iceland now with…Donna, is it? Or Alexis? I handled the vaccine for her right before they left.”
She hates his tone—smug and self-assured, greasy as a rat that knows he can’t be caught or punished. If he were here in person, she’d slap him, but he’s on the phone, impossibly far away.
“Well, then. Tell me, what is the going rate for an hour of your time?”
“More than you have currently. Good day, Patricia. And good luck.”
And then the cocky bastard has the balls to hang up on her.
On her! After all she’s contributed to his coffers over the years.
Apparently golf outings to the tropics are worth more than a Hippocratic oath.
“Well, fuck you, too,” she snarls, throwing her phone at the pillows.
The knowing little smile, the aristocratically cocked eyebrow, the careful accent, the learned vocabulary, the sly social games all flee as she realizes there is no way to get what she wants out of the snide little shit.
She opens her laptop again and googles “human bite wound.” Ten minutes and forty tawdry Halloween makeup tutorials later, she’s in her pantry, bare leg hiked up on the sink, tools laid out on top of the dryer: sewing scissors and needle and thread, hydrogen peroxide and gauze. Bright sunlight shines in from the window, and Brooklyn is happily eating carefully sliced chunks of melon and watching her show. Patricia pulls back the bloodied gauze on her calf and nearly throws up from the sight. What she’s read online indicates that once it’s cleaned out and sterilized, she’ll need to hold all the parts of the wound shut and sew it neatly, and she thinks she’s ready, but the moment she gets the needle through the first flap of skin, she almost passes out.
She can’t do this.
Even if she could, the possibility of getting an infection is high. She has no antibiotics.
“Goddammit,” she murmurs, an old word she’d abandoned in her new life, and the worst thing she’s ever felt is the thread pulling through her skin as she yanks it back out.
She wraps the wound in gauze and hobbles back into the kitchen. “Brooklyn, I’m going to go out for a brief errand. Can you sit quietly and watch your show?”
Brooklyn nods vigorously. “Oh yes! I did real good the last time you went away. It was easy!”
A shiver goes up Patricia’s spine.
It was not easy for her—the aftermath. Not of the mirror, and not of last night.
But she can’t think of another way out of this.
She has to go to urgent care. She can’t take a child with the Violence to a public space, with witnesses. If Brooklyn attacked someone, they’d take her away, and Patricia would never get her back. Just a few weeks ago, she was desperate for someone else to take over care for the child, but somehow, now, the thought of Brooklyn in a government facility, alone, confused…
Patricia knows she is cold, but she’s not that cold.
She nods to herself and gets dressed—khaki shorts she doesn’t like all that much, short enough to allow the doctors access to both her wounds with no need for one of those shabby gowns. She grabs one of Randall’s hundred-dollar bills. She has her keys and her wallet full of now-useless cards, and she reminds Brooklyn of all the things she should not do: eat, drink, go outside, touch the pool, open any doors, answer any phones, play with any knives or matches. She realizes for the first time that her home is a vast collection of dangerous items that could cause a small child irreparable harm. There aren’t even covers over the electrical outlets. The cabinets are full of bleach and Drano and rat poison.
But she can’t mention that to Brooklyn now, a mile-long list of warnings that might become ideas. When Chelsea was a child, they weren’t even considerations.
As she sits in a four-car garage in last year’s nicest Infiniti, ecru leather seat cool against her gauze-wrapped thigh, Patricia puts her forehead gently down against the steering wheel and cries. It’s destroying her mascara, but she can’t stop herself. She has never felt this helpless, not even when her mother kicked her out. Then, she left out of spite, fueled by her rage and the drive to prove herself capable. Only now does she leave out of desperation.
39.
The room is completely packed with sweaty, heaving bodies, with heartbeats, with a riotous thirst for blood. “VFR! VFR!” they chant. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people are crammed into the warehouse, holding up signs, punching the air with their fists. Steve’s fight song starts up, and he gives Chelsea an encouraging nod, squeezes her shoulder, and starts his walk down the aisle, serious and arrogant as a venture capitalist about to swipe someone’s cab. He reaches the ring and looks up at it as if expecting an elevator to appear.
Harlan Payne’s voice booms from every corner, pressing the air out of the room: “Straight from the New York Stock Exchange, please welcome power broker turned power choker, Mr. Steven Nissen, Esquire!”
Half the room erupts in cheers, half the room erupts in boos—and then the boos take over. And it’s not really a room. It’s a huge cube bound in industrial metal, pounding with noise and emotion. Chelsea can smell them, all those bodies crammed in, not enough air-conditioning, no filters, their rage and desire rising into the air.
Harlan was right—the people want this. They need this.