I plaster a fucking smile on my face and confess that I’m between jobs. We’re uninsured. We can’t afford the two or three hundred dollars that a chest X-ray will cost us.
And then Mia starts coughing until we all think she might puke. The doctor fills a little plastic cup with water and hands it to her. And then she stands back to watch her patient gasp for air.
“Okay,” she says. She writes out the damn prescription and leaves the room.
We pass her in the hall on the way out. She’s bent over a countertop, writing notes in Chloe Romain’s file. Her smock hangs low, to the top of leather cowboy boots. There’s an ugly dress beneath. Her stethoscope is wrapped around her neck.
We’re almost to the door when she stops and says, “Are you sure I haven’t seen you before? You just look so darn familiar.” But she isn’t looking at Mia. She’s looking at me.
“No,” I say dismissively. No need to be kind. I got what I need.
We make a follow-up appointment for Chloe Romain, one she’ll never keep.
“Thank you for your help,” Mia says as I gently shove her out the door.
In the parking lot I tell her that we did good. We have the prescription. That’s all we need. We swing by a pharmacy on the way back to the cabin. Mia waits in the truck while I run inside, grateful to find a sixteen-year-old pothead working the register and the pharmacist, tucked in back, never raising his head. I give Mia a pill before we pull out of the parking lot and I watch, out of the corner of my eye, as she falls asleep on the way home. I slip out of my coat and lay it over her so she doesn’t get cold.
Gabe
Before
I spend many days visiting Kathryn Thatcher in her new abode. The first time I showed up I said I was her son. The receptionist said to me, “Oh, thank goodness—she talks about you all the time,” and led me to the woman’s room. I could tell in her eyes that she was disappointed to see me, but so relieved to have company she didn’t bother to tell them I’d lied. She’s well-medicated now and can function minimally on her own. Mrs. Thatcher shares a room with an eighty-two-year-old woman on hospice care; it’s only a matter of time before she dies. She’s so doped up on morphine she doesn’t have a damn clue where she is, and she’s certain Mrs. Thatcher is a lady named Rory McGuire. No one comes to visit the woman. No one comes to visit Mrs. Thatcher but me.
Turns out Mrs. Thatcher likes true crime novels. I go to the bookstore and pick up every bestseller I can find. I sit in on the edge of her bed and read them to her. I suck at reading aloud. I suck at reading at all; I don’t think I quite mastered that in the first grade. Turns out I like true crime novels as well.
I sneak chicken nuggets into her room. As often as we can, we share a ten-piece and a large fry.
I bring an old CD player of mine and borrow Christmas CDs from the library. She says that it doesn’t feel like Christmas in the nursing home; she can see the snow out the window, but inside everything feels the same. When I leave at night, I turn on music so she doesn’t have to listen to her roommate’s troubled breathing.
The days off I don’t spend with Kathryn Thatcher, I spend with Eve. I find some asinine reason to repeatedly show up at her door. As December sets in and winter descends upon us, a fog comes over her. She chalks it up to seasonal affective disorder, whatever the hell that is. I can see that she’s tired all the time. She’s sad. She sits and stares out the window at the falling snow.
I try and devise one small scrap of information—real or not—about the case that will give the impression I’m not at a dead end.
I teach her to make my mother’s lasagna. I’m not trying to turn her into a chef. I’m just not sure there’s any other way to make her eat.
She says her husband is coming home less and less. He works even later, sometimes until ten or eleven at night. Last night he didn’t come home. He claims to have worked all night catching up on motions, something that Eve attests he’s never ever done.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“He looked tired this morning. He passed through to change his clothes.”
I’m trying to hone my great detective skills to figure out why she doesn’t leave her husband. So far, no luck.
“So he was working,” I conclude.
Fat chance in hell he was working. But if it makes Eve feel better, so be it.
We never allude to the kiss. But every time I see her, I imagine Eve’s lips pressed to mine. When I close my eyes, I taste her, and smell everything from her hand soap to her perfume.
She calls me Gabe and I call her Eve. We stand closer than we used to.