No need. Getting an MRI was heavenly. What’s not to like about stealing forty minutes from a weekday morning in order to rest motionless in a warm, enclosed space? The machine hummed with a loud, rhythmic, tapping noise. I nearly drifted off to sleep.
Afterward, the technician showed me back to the changing room. She cleared her throat and stared at me. “So, we’ll get those images sent over to Will Zartman. He’s your regular doctor, right?”
I nodded. She was still staring, naked curiosity on her face. “Was there anything else?”
“No, no.” She giggled shyly. “I just—I mean, how did you get it?” Her hand reached up to brush the back of her neck.
“Get what?”
“The . . . you know, here.” Again, the hand reaching up.
“Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“The bullet,” she said. “How did you get that bullet in your neck?”
? ? ?
EXTRAORDINARY, ISN’T IT? How your life can change, just like that, with a few words from a stranger? Later, you look back and think—that was it. That was the moment when life cleaved into two chapters, “Before I Knew” and “After.”
But I wasn’t there yet. I was still firmly living in “Before.”
I was walking up K Street, back toward campus, a nice stroll on a crisp autumn day. It would take half an hour to get back to the library. No hurry. I didn’t have class until after lunch. The encounter with the MRI technician had left me more amused than concerned. Because, obviously, I did not have a bullet in my neck. That would require my having been shot. Which had, obviously, never happened. It’s not the kind of thing you would forget. The technician must have been inexperienced. She must have mistaken a shadow on the image, or something like that. Still, it would make for a great story one night at a dinner party.
I pulled out my phone to share the news with my doctor. I liked Will Zartman. He belonged to a rare breed of physicians: he took my calls, listened carefully, and most of the time phoned in a prescription without ever making me come see him. It probably helped that I was never sick and thus rarely troubled him. Before this pain in my wrist started, I hadn’t talked to him in months.
Now he did his usual careful listening, then he asked me to wait. When he returned to the line a few minutes later, he sounded thoughtful. “I’m looking at your MRI now. They already e-mailed it over. There is . . . she’s right, there is something there.”
“Like a shadow, you mean?”
“No, like a . . . like something metal.”
“There can’t be. “
“It’s lodged up against your spine. Bit tricky to make out. Did you ever have surgery on your neck or shoulders?”
“What? No.”
“Things get dropped, you know. Surgical instruments, clamps, that sort of thing. The surgeon never even notices and stitches it right up. Happens occasionally. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. We’ll be able to get a better idea from the X-ray.”
“I need an X-ray now?” I sighed.
“Think we’d better. I’ll set it up.”
I thanked him and said good-bye. My wrist ached; I rubbed little circles against my inside pulse point as I walked. It was a nuisance to carve out time for another medical visit. Appointments that were supposed to last an hour could somehow expand to eat up half your day. Still, I wasn’t teaching a terribly heavy course load this semester. I could find the time. And despite myself, I couldn’t help but feel curious.
? ? ?
THAT NIGHT I went to my parents’ house for dinner.
That happens more often than it probably should, for a grown woman of thirty-seven years. My parents and I are close. We speak every day, sometimes more than once. Most mornings I call my mother as I potter around my kitchen, brewing a first cup of tea. We swap views on the day’s headlines and whatever book we fell asleep reading the night before.
You see, I live alone. I am a spinster. The word is not fashionable, but it is accurate. I’m not married, never have been. I never found anyone I liked enough. This state of affairs is fine by me; I keep my own counsel. I am not shy, on the contrary. But I am an introvert. Few people understand the difference.
Instead of a husband, I have cultivated a close circle of girlfriends. I take lovers when I feel like it. Another old-fashioned expression, I suppose, but again—accurate. And I see my parents. They live nearby in Cleveland Park, a neighborhood of wide sidewalks and genteel old houses that’s home to journalists and lawyers and other members of Washington’s chattering classes. My parents’ house is yellow clapboard, with a shady porch and views out over the stone towers of the National Cathedral. It’s the house my brothers and I grew up in, one block from the school where all three of us learned to read and write. My brothers are in their forties now, my parents well into their seventies. But they show no signs of wanting to downsize. I think they like watching my brothers’ children rampage around the house, cracking lacrosse sticks and baseball bats against the same scarred doorframes that bore my brothers’ abuse. An upstairs bathroom counter has a burn mark, from my own teenage years, when I incinerated a curling iron by cranking it to high heat before absentmindedly sailing out the door to a sleepover party. My parents’ house, in short, still feels like home.
There’s that, and there’s the fact that I enjoy their company, but a not insignificant reason that I eat dinner there several nights a week is my mother’s cooking. She cooks with flagrant disregard for cholesterol warnings or calorie counts, serving large helpings of casseroles from recipe books that went out of print in the 1970s. Tonight she pulled from the oven a chicken potpie. I knew from long experience that it contained both an entire bag of frozen carrot-and-pea medley and lashings of Crisco, and that it would taste divine.
I waited until we were seated and the wine was poured before launching into my story. “So, you won’t believe what happened at the doctor’s office this morning. The strangest thing.”