The Awakening of Dr. Brown

cradled against one hip she leaned down and touched her lips to the arching stream, and Ethan felt a powerful urge of his own to swallow…

Was this what it would be like, having her always in his life? he wondered. With even the smallest, most ordinary acts seeming touched with magic, as if he was seeing them for the very first time?

Like a long-abandoned piece of machinery creaking to life, he stepped forward to hold the faucet on for her while she stroked cool water onto her cheeks, throat and chest like lotion. He gazed entranced at the glossy black coil of her hair as she smoothed back the sweat-damp tendrils clinging to her forehead, and thought about her nape, and how sweet and vulnerable it looked. Then she straightened and raised both arms, turning slightly toward him as she settled the cowboy hat into place over the mass of her hair, and his gaze dropped to her lithe and supple torso-how could it not?

“Good God,” he said before he could stop himself, “is that a navel ring?”

She laughed, the coughing sound a surly tiger might make, then said dryly, “Yeah, Doc, that’s what it is.” She waited while he brought his guilty gaze back to her face before she shrugged. “See what I mean? You’re shocked.”

“I’m not shocked…” He shouldn’t have been. As a doctor he’d personally encountered pierced body parts he’d have been embarrassed to tell her about. “Just…I hadn’t noticed it before, that’s all.”

“But you disapprove.” And how was it she could sound both amused and sad?

“No, I don’t,” he said, feeling twitchy and annoyed, suddenly, and very misunderstood. Because the truth was, what he found shocking about the navel ring was the fact that he didn’t disapprove. He felt that he should, that ordinarily he would. But for some reason the fact that it was her navel ring made it not only acceptable, but somehow just one more delightful facet of the incredible and fascinating person she was. It frustrated him that he couldn’t tell her that, and it only added to his frustration when a moment later she voiced his deepest feelings almost exactly in her own words.

“It just goes with who I am,” she said in her soft-scratchy voice as they walked on again, not touching. “It’s Phoenix. It’s me. That’s all.” He could feel her turn her head toward him, but felt too exposed just then to face the sadness and irony in her eyes.

He was glad he hadn’t when a moment later she added, “You know, Doc, funny thing is, I don’t feel that way about you. I happen to like you a lot-just the way you are.”

He’d never felt less likeable in his life. He felt, in fact, like nothing so much as a contrary child, a mass of confusion and contradictions, inadvertently hurting that which he only meant to hold.

He closed his eyes, needing to be away from her just then, needing to go to his quiet place and try to rediscover himself there-or failing that, at least to find his path again. Somewhere, he knew, there were important things he was supposed to do that he’d lost sight of, priorities he’d set for himself that he’d somehow forgotten. Somewhere along the line he’d wandered off the path on a quest of his own, this search for the ellusive and alluring being named Joanna, who for all he knew might exist only in his own mind. He sensed that he was very close to becoming hopelessly lost, and that he desperately needed some sort of compass to bring him back to where he belonged.

It was at just that moment, like an answer to an unspoken prayer, that he heard a childish voice calling, “Hey, Doc! Doc-where you been? Hey, come on, man.”

He opened his eyes and found Phoenix watching him, blue eyes bright and quizzical in the shadows beneath the brim of the cowboy hat. Beyond her, behind the lattice of a chain-link fence, he could see the basketball court’s cracked pavement reflecting heat in sluggish waves. And Michael, standing at the fence, the fingers of one small hand woven through the chain link, impatiently shaking it while holding the basketball precariously balanced on one scrawny hip. A short distance away, Tom Applegate waited under the basket, patiently mopping sweat.

“Better go,” Phoenix said with a small jerk of her head. She glanced upward and added wryly, “You might want to hurry…”

He noticed only then how dark the day had gotten. The air lay on his skin like a hot, wet blanket, and somewhere in the distance thunder rumbled. He felt as surly as the weather, his thoughts humid and unsettled, confusion and frustration tumbling rampant through his insides. He stood and looked at her, part of him craving the peace and quiet only distancing himself from her could bring, part longing to plunge headlong into the emotional tumult, to hold on to her and never let go.

“Go,” she repeated in a grating voice, forcing herself to smile. She waited until he had nodded and turned away before she sagged against the chain-link fence, shaken…shaking inside.

His eyes aren’t a shaman’s eyes now. The thought gave her a sharp and angry sense of triumph, but no satisfaction. Those emotions she’d been so smugly sure of, those passions she’d sensed churning below the surface of his quietness-all that and more she’d seen just now in those dark and turbulent eyes. But those feelings were in no way hers to control. Foolish, foolish Phoenix, she thought, to ever have imagined they might be.

Control his emotions? How, when she couldn’t even manage her own? Avidly, she watched the trio on the basketball court-which, due to the combination of the heat index, a threatening storm and the sports season, they enjoyed unchallenged-tall, imposing black man in running clothes, cute skinny black kid in clothes several sizes too big, and Dr. Ethan Brown, the president’s kid, blond, conservative and wholesome as shredded wheat in light blue jeans and a pale yellow polo shirt. It was obvious the doc wasn’t much of an athelete; in spite of his size and naturally beautiful physique, he had none of Tom Applegate’s feline grace. And yet of the three out on that court it was he who drew her gaze like filings to a magnet. His moves she followed, standing on the sidelines, clinging with both hands to the chain-link fence like a shunned child, with the ache of yearning behind her smile. She heard a little boy’s laughter, but it was the doc’s face she saw, smiling and flushed with heat and exertion as he scooped up the boy with the ball hugged tight in his arms and lifted him high, high toward the basket. She heard the childish shriek of delight as the ball clanged through the iron hoop, but it was the doc’s quiet “Way to go!” as he executed an endearingly awkward high five that made her breath catch and tears gather sizzling behind her eyes.

What do you want from me? She’d asked him that only minutes ago, hadn’t she? Now she knew she should have asked herself the same question. What do you want from this man, Joanna?

She was suddenly terribly afraid that what she wanted was something she’d have no earthly idea what to do with once she got it. Afraid that if she got it, and if she tried to make it work, she might harm this gentle and beautiful man irreparably. Afraid that with her selfish wanting she would try-and hurt him-anyway.

A large raindrop splashed onto the back of her hand. She looked up, startled, as if such a thing were completely inexplicable and miraculous, and when she did, another drop landed on her cheek. She was wiping it away when the three came, laughing, through the gate.

Tom Applegate was talking to his watch. “Carl’s gone to get the car. He’ll meet us on this side of the park,” he reported when he’d finished.

Ethan glanced at Michael, who was looking mulish and disappointed, then said to Tom, “Why don’t you tell him to meet us over at-” he just did stop himself from saying “The Gardens,” and with a quick, guilty glance at Phoenix made it “-Michael’s place. We can walk back. That way we can stop on the way and get a hot dog-how’s that sound, Michael?”

Michael shrugged and said, “That’s cool,” trying hard to be offhanded. But he couldn’t keep the grin from slipping through his pose of determined indifference.

“How ’bout you?” Ethan said, turning to Phoenix. He wanted to lower his voice to a level of privacy, make a joking remark about “regular people,” maybe say something cute about Leroy and Joanna. But those were things between them, and it felt wrong, suddenly, to share them with anyone, even someone as unobtrusive as the Secret Service, or as oblivious as a child. What he offered instead was a rather stiff and formal sounding, “Would you like to join us for lunch? We can take you home, if you want to, after we drop off Michael.”

“That’s cool,” she said with a shrug, in deliberate imitation of the child. Except that she didn’t smile, and her eyes, before she turned to walk beside him, had a curious silvery brightness, as if a hard rain was falling somewhere just behind them.

Around them raindrops fell only sporadically, making quarter-sized dark spots on the sidewalk. Thunder growled and wind blew in fitful gusts, stirring the pea-soup air like an indifferent chef-though one inclined to carelessly throw