What had changed him was Viola Turner.
The day after their midnight surgery, Viola had opened up the clinic as usual. By the time Tom got there, the surgery room was spic-and-span again, the bloody towels gone, the instruments autoclaved and ready for a new patient. The room where Tom had treated the Eagles was just as clean. Dr. Lucas didn’t notice anything out of order, nor did the clinic’s female staff. But Tom and Viola could no longer carry off the act they’d been perfecting for the previous four years. Their frantic embrace in the corner of the garage had shattered some boundary between them, and every instant of eye contact now communicated hidden significance. Tom was certain everyone in the clinic could sense the new intimacy between them, like a magnetic field made visible. He’d sensed the same thing whenever Gavin Edwards had been involved with one of the office girls. Edwards had never gone out of his way to hide his affairs, but even if he had, it would have been pointless. Once certain levels of intimacy have been reached, they simply cannot be concealed within a small group.
During stolen moments that day, in quick snatches of conversation, Tom learned that Viola had gotten her brother and Luther Davis to the relative safety of Freewoods, a backwoods sanctuary for bootleggers, criminals, and people of all races who needed protection from the law. So long as Jimmy and Luther stayed there, they would be safe from Frank Knox and the Ku Klux Klan. The problem was, Jimmy was too committed to his civil rights work to stay hidden in the forests south of town while his brothers in the movement fought to change America. Viola’s anxiety about Jimmy made her quieter than usual, and the other girls commented on it. But beneath Viola’s worry Tom sensed something else, like a powerful motor spinning ceaselessly inside her, throwing off an energy that seemed directed at him. If he was alone in an examining room, he sensed her approach even before he heard her footfalls. When they worked together—when she passed him an instrument, say—any accidental touch sent a startling current up the nerves of his arm. He hardly slept that night, and Peggy noticed. But hardest to take were the gazes of the office girls, which followed him like the eyes of watchful informers.
This heightened state of tension was shattered by the most commonplace of office events. Dr. Lucas had owned his X-ray unit for fifteen years, and the new developing machine he’d bought for it was temperamental. The X-ray tech could sometimes repair it, but when she couldn’t, Tom had proved the most adept at getting the unit back into operation. (Tom had a photographic darkroom at home, and he was much more mechanically inclined than Dr. Lucas.) Two days after the midnight surgery, the X-ray developer broke down yet again. Since the X-ray tech was on vacation, Tom had no choice but to take on the task of repairing the machine. And since Viola was Tom’s nurse, it was she who would be helping him get the unit back online.
The developing room was hardly bigger than a closet; it had, in fact, been a closet in the original house. The old metal developing tanks stood against the wall opposite the door, still serving as backups when the automatic developer couldn’t be coaxed into action. The new machine sat on a stand against the right wall, and a metal cabinet for storing film stood against the left. The middle of this U contained barely enough room for one person to work; with two it was like being shoehorned into a crowded elevator. Separation was impossible.
Tom first thought the problem was a jammed sheet of film, but he’d checked the path under the red glow of the safelight and found it unobstructed. Then he fed an already developed X-ray through the machine; it went through fine. The next step was to shut off the lights—even the safelight—and run an undeveloped X-ray through the machine.
Standing with his stomach pressed against Viola’s back, he reached over his shoulder and shut off the overhead safelight. Utter darkness enveloped them. He heard her sliding open the bars of the rectangular cartridge that protected the X-ray film from light, then the rattle and pop of flexing film as she extracted it. Tom shifted back against the door so that she could turn and feed the film sheet into the machine. In the confines of the closet, her scent was even stronger than on the night she’d hugged him, strong enough to declare itself over the acrid bite of the developing chemicals. Tom felt his breath go shallow when her shoulder dug into his chest. She was trying to feed the film into the machine’s narrow slot.
“Sorry,” she said, as her shoulder prodded him again. “Got it.”