all of his other patients had been recovering well. He had completed four surgeries today, five yesterday. If he kept up this pace, he would probably catch the attention of the Medicare people who looked for false billings.
For the two weeks since Jane had left, he had been fully scheduling his mornings with surgeries, then spending the afternoons seeing patients in his office. He ate his meals in the hospital cafeteria and went through his rounds in the evening. Then he left to drive to Amherst and put his car in the old converted carriage house next to Jane's car, and then walk up the driveway to enter his dark, empty house. Each night he did exercises for an hour, showered, and watched the news on television before he collapsed into bed.
Staying busy was the best thing he could think of to do. There was no question that the tall, dark-haired woman on the television news who had freed a convicted killer from the Los Angeles courthouse was Jane. It hurt Carey to know that she would do something crazy and audacious now. It meant that she not only was willing to risk her life but had been willing to risk his, too-or at least his chance for happiness.
What she did was illegal-buying or making false identities; obtaining and carrying unlicensed guns; operating imaginary companies to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering. But what kept him in a constant state of anxiety was the danger. The service she offered was to put herself between killers and their victims. He could understand some of this as part of her family history and traditions-the glorification of the warrior, the horror of incarceration and confinement, the contempt for fear, the peculiar Native American notion of changing names to fit new circumstances, the well-founded distrust of government. He understood all of these things and their origins. But comprehending the logic of a situation was not the same as accepting it. He hated this.
The idea that his beautiful wife had for years before their marriage harbored and transported fugitives had always made him sweat with retroactive fear for her. The fact that she was doing it again made him frantic. She helped fugitives out of a kind of idiosyncratic public-spiritedness. To her, saving people from danger was just something a person did, if she happened to have the skills.
The difference between public duty and personal responsibility was utterly lost on her. The idea that only duly sworn peace officers were supposed to save people from criminals struck her as absurd. She had said, 'Fine. I'll do it only when they can't, or won't.' The only difference she could see between herself and the authorities was mere legality, and she had no regard whatever for legality. When she heard someone talking about 'obeying the law,' it was as though he had announced he lived his life according to the rules of mah-jongg or gin rummy.
He loved her. He was never going to end the marriage, and everything else was empty chatter. He had not even asked her to quit. She had simply promised. It was just before their wedding, maybe two weeks. She had been on the road, and come home safely. She said to him, 'Well, that's over. I'm through being a guide. If I'm going to marry you, I can't do that anymore.'
She had stopped. She had turned her attention to the sorts of things that surgeons' wives did. She helped raise money for the hospital. First she took her turn serving on committees where her job was to fold letters and type envelopes, and slowly moved up to chairing committees and putting on benefits. She became active on the Tonawanda reservation and taught an after-school class in the Seneca language for middle-school students. Jane had become the ideal middle-class married woman of two generations ago. He had tried to talk to her about her decision, but she didn't seem to be sensitive about it. She said, 'I took a lot of people out of the world and made new people turn up in other places. I'm glad I did. Now the last person I have to make disappear is me. There is no Jane Whitefield. I'm Mrs. Carey McKinnon.'
After three years, she had announced it was probably safe to have a baby. Nobody had found his way to the house in Deganawida, nobody had arrived from some faraway place asking for Jane Whitefield, and no word had come that one of her old runners had been found. She had chosen the room next to theirs in the big old stone house that would be the baby's room. They had painted it a pale yellow with bright woodwork and crown moldings, and bought furnishings, and even a few stuffed animals. She had gone to the attic in the Deganawida house and brought back an antique cradleboard. She had taken it from a box and unwrapped its paper wrappings and shown it to him before she'd hung it up. It was made of a frame of half loops of bent hickory like ribs, and had a few wooden hoops at the top like a canopy to protect the baby from sun and rain. The frame was covered by a skin of beadwork. The background was black, with a pattern of green stems and leaves topped by forest wildflowers in white, red, and yellow. Carey could see it was very old, too old to be anywhere but a museum, but he said nothing except that it was beautiful. She hung it on a wall with a picture hanger, a substitute for the way a -seventeenth-century ancestor had hung it in a longhouse while she was inside, and on a low tree limb while she worked in the fields or orchards.
They had tried to have a baby for two years, but so far, it hadn't happened. After a year he'd had a colleague do workups on both of them, but they learned nothing. Their infertility was unexplained: everything was working perfectly but had not resulted in conception.
A few months later, a pregnant twenty-year-old girl had shown up looking for Jane Whitefield. One of Jane's old runners had been the girl's teacher in a San Diego high school. The girl's much older former boyfriend, a small- time criminal, was trying to find her so he could take the baby. Jane had put the girl into her car and driven off. But months later, when Jane had come back from wherever she'd taken her, she had seemed different. After she'd been home two days, she took down the antique cradleboard, carefully rewrapped it, put it back in the attic, and then closed the baby's room.
Since then, Jane had gone out with runners twice. One was an advertising man named Stephen Noton who had somehow gotten his hands on a document about drug smuggling, and was being hunted for it. The third runner Jane had taken on since she'd quit was James Shelby.
Tonight Carey was tired. The loneliness, the obsessive brooding on where Jane must be at this moment, got much worse at night, and he couldn't fight it by staying busy. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. It was Friday, so it wasn't as bad as it could be. He could sleep until noon tomorrow if he wanted, and then go in for hospital rounds at two or three in the afternoon.
He went to the kitchen without turning on the bright light, opened the cupboard, and took down the bottle of Macallan twelve-year-old single malt Scotch. He set a heavy crystal glass on the counter and poured, then held his glass under the faucet and gave it a small squirt of water.
'Doc Holliday, I presume'
He turned toward the kitchen door and there she was, standing in the dim light just inside the doorway. For an instant the word 'hallucination' came to him, but her image didn't fade or waver. He said, 'Calamity Jane,' then lifted his glass to salute her.
'I meant he ruined his health drinking and smoking.'
'You're leaving out the effects of tubercular bacilli, I think.'
'Then how about a drink'
'Name your poison.'
'I'll have what you're having,' she said.
She set her purse on the counter beside her and watched him fill a second glass and add water. She took a step toward him and reached for the glass, and then saw his eyes widen.
'My God, Jane. What happened Was it a car accident Have you been seen' He looked down at her leg, and up to her face, hair, eyes. She could see that his assessment of her appearance was not good.
She took the glass and sipped from it. 'A lot happened, not much of it good. And yes, a doctor saw me right away to clean the wound and sew me up. Since then I've taken care of myself.'
'You said `wound.' What sort of wound'
'Oh, it's a lot to say at once. If you missed me, come give me a kiss.'
He stepped to her, set their drinks on the counter, and gently put his arms around her. He did kiss her, but she could tell he was impatient. And he was so gentle it made her impatient, too.
'I won't break,' she said. 'I'm just a little tender in spots. A lot tender, actually. Fortunately for you, none of them are your favorite spots.'
'All of your spots are my favorites.'
'After I finish my drink I may be in the mood to let you prove it.'
'There's nothing I'd like better.'
'Well, I should hope not.'
'But you've got to stop trying to change the subject. You're injured, and you look terrible. What happened'
'I'll tell all.'
