Well, she was done thinking about it. She had been done thinking about it, officially, for almost twenty years. She was not going to apologize or make excuses for having a steady job in which she helped people, contributing to society in a way that was desperately needed. Wasn’t that supposed to be what you did in life? Fill a need, and make a wage doing it? Yes, she was done thinking about it. No one was going to make her feel bad about it. She was free to make her own choices, and she had.
Except that, in truth, she had been somewhat talked into it.
Mark’s father had been a dentist. He preached dentistry like a religion. He was called to dentistry; it was his professional duty and personal joy. Neither settling nor greedy nor lazy, he loved his work and believed in it absolutely. “The teeth are the unsung heroes of the human body,” he was fond of saying, to whatever unsuspecting partygoer he managed to corner to talk about it. She and Mark used to laugh at this. For years they said it to each other at least once a week as a private joke, usually to lighten the mood when one of them was feeling down about something. She’d said it to him when it rained throughout their honeymoon, he to her when she broke her ankle on their icy front steps. It was the secret phrase that instantly improved every situation. The teeth are the unsung heroes of the human body.
When they met as college juniors, both bio majors, she still did not know what she was going to do, what path to follow. She had always pictured herself in an operating room—yes, probably at work on the prestige organs –with classical music playing in the background, a nurse laying a glittering scalpel in her gloved hand. It sounded strangely peaceful, and she imagined herself feeling totally in control of the situation, the conductor, the scalpel her baton, always certain of what note, what incision, was to come next.
Senior year, spring break. They’d been together for eighteen months. They were on a community service trip, helping rebuild houses in a little town in Oklahoma that had been all but wiped out by a tornado. At the end of the day they sat on the floor in an empty second-story bedroom, passing one beer between them, and Mark—maybe inspired by the promise of the house going up around him?—had said, “Listen, we could open our own practice. We could run the show. We just pick a place we like and move there and be our own bosses and set our own hours.”
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t like the idea—she did. If she had had more than the vaguest notion of another direction, it might have been different. But she was open to suggestion, and he suggested, and now here they were twenty-five years later, being their own bosses and setting their own hours, a busy office in Sick City, both of them well respected in their community of dentists, and with enough money to do almost anything they wanted. And yes, she was the conductor of sorts, only her theater was noisier than the operating theater she had imagined, and you couldn’t hear classical music over the hum of the drill.
Here was the thing: they relieved pain. She liked relieving pain, especially for people who were older, patients in their sixties and seventies who were spending an awful lot of time going from office to office in Sick City. She liked giving people something they could rely on, something that could be fixed, even as the rest of their bodies failed. Dentistry had its disadvantages, to be sure—that devastating look of betrayal chief among them—but there was something that made dentistry more fulfilling than other medical pursuits: you could almost always fix a tooth, and when you couldn’t, you could take it out and put in something that was just as good, or better. She liked to be able to say, “Mrs. Elscott, you don’t need to worry about this anymore. This will not fail you. Yes, your heart might stop or your brain might stroke (she did not say this part), but those teeth in your mouth—provided you continue your stellar record of yearly visits to the dentist!—are not going to turn on you.”
They are, in fact, the unsung heroes of the human body.
After his retirement from private practice, Mark’s father (and his mother, as his assistant) moved to Honduras to work at a free clinic, providing dental care to people who would never live a single minute of their lives like the fourteen hundred and forty minutes Claire lived every day. Mark’s parents resided in a small apartment above the clinic and were often awakened by pebbles tossed against their bedroom window by their first patients of the day, children who came to have cavities filled before walking miles to school. They occasionally talked of returning to the States, but Mark did not believe this would ever happen. “They’ll die there,” he told Claire. “Right in the middle of a root canal.”
Sometimes she thought Mark’s favorite part of being a dentist was rolling around on stools. Sundays when the kids were little, Mark would race them down the office corridors, stool versus stool, a contest that normally ended with him on the floor and his stool upside down, its wheels spinning. He also occasionally liked looking at the dental hygienists. He was not an ogler, but she could slide something into the space between an “eyes passing over” moment and the amount of time that his eyes actually lingered.
“You’re such a cliché,” she often told him.
“I know,” he’d say. “But I’m your cliché.”
The thing was that, like her, he did not like messy. They dealt with it in different ways, but shared the aversion, which got deeper with time. Because of this, she did not fear those occasional lingering glances. Yet another of the Great Things About Mark: he looked, but he did not touch.
?
It was one of the hygienists—Debbie—who came to fetch her on Wednesday afternoon. Claire was in exam room 4, with her last patient of the day, filling a tooth.
“Dr. Oliver? There’s a phone call for you?”
She lifted her eyes. Not for nothing would they bother her in the middle of a procedure. Evan. He’d skipped school. He’d gotten into a fight. He’d disappeared. He’d crashed the car.
“Coming,” she said.
They had called last year, Friday, the twenty-ninth of March. The call had come from the coach. The ambulance was en route to the hospital, he’d said. Evan was talking as they loaded him into the ambulance, the coach had said. He was talking. He was moving. He was conscious. (This was all code for he’s not almost dead. You’re not going to get to the hospital and find out he’s dead.)