could try.
“Do you remember all of your patients’ favorite foods?” I asked.
“Only my favorite patients,” he said. He sat in the armchair across from me while I ate it, slowly, savoring each mouthful. I sighed when I was finished. It had been so long since I’d eaten this well; so long since anything had tasted good.
He cleared his throat. I figured that was my cue to go. He probably had plans for the night. He possibly even had a date. I racked my brain and tried to remember. What day was it? Was it the weekend?
I yawned, and Dr. K. smiled at me. “You look so tired,” he said. “Why don’t you rest for a while?”
His voice was so warm, so soothing. “You like tea, not coffee, right?” I nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
He went to the kitchen and I stretched out my legs on the couch, and by the time he came back I was half asleep. My eyelids felt so heavy. I yawned, and tried to sit up, as he handed me a mug.
“Where were you going today?” he asked.
I turned my head away, reaching for the blanket that was draped over the back of the couch. “I just went for a walk. I guess I got kind of lost or something. I’m fine, though. You shouldn’t worry. I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” he said, sounding almost angry. “You’re very obviously not fine. You’re half-starved, you’re stomping around the city, you quit your job…”
“Leave of absence,” I corrected. “I’m on a compassionate leave of absence.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed to ask for help.”
“I don’t need help,” I told him, reflexively. Because that was my reflex, ingrained as a teenager, honed over the years. I’m okay. I can handle it. I’m fine. “I’ve got everything under control. I’m fine. We’re fine. Me and the baby. We’re fine.”
He shook his head. “How are you fine? You’re not happy”
“Why should I be happy?” I shot back. “What’s to be happy about?”
“You have a beautiful baby” “Yeah, no thanks to anyone else.”
He stared at me. I stared back, furious. Then I put down my tea and got to my feet.
“I should go.”
“Cannie…”
I looked for my socks and my duct-taped shoes. “Could you take me home?”
He looked distressed. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You haven’t upset me. I’m not upset. But I want to go home.”
He sighed, and looked down at his feet. “I thought…” he mumbled.
“Thought what?”
“Nothing.”
“Thought what?” I repeated, more insistently.
“It was a bad idea.”
“Thought what,” I said again, in a tone that wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“I thought that if you came here, you’d relax.” He shook his head, seeming stunned by his own hopes, his own presumptions. “I thought maybe you’d want to talk about things”
“There’s really nothing to talk about,” I said. But I said it more gently. He had given me dinner, clean clothes, an orange Popsicle, a ride. “I’m okay. Really. I am.”
We stood for a minute, and something passed between us, some small easing of the tension. I could feel the blisters on both feet, and how my cheeks felt tight and painful with sunburn. I could feel the cool thin cotton of his T-shirt on my back, and how nice it was, and my belly full of good food, and how nice that was. And I could feel my breasts, which ached dully.
“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have a breast pump in here?” I asked. My first attempt at a joke since I’d woken up in the hospital.
He shook his head. “Would ice help?” he asked. I nodded, and sat back down on the couch, where he brought me ice wrapped in a towel. I turned my back to him and tucked the ice under my shirt.
“How’s Nifkin?” he asked again.
I shut my eyes. “With my mom,” I muttered. “I sent him to stay with her for a while.”
“Well, don’t let him stay away too long. He’ll forget his tricks.” He took a sip of his tea. “I was going to teach him how to speak, if we’d had a little more time together.”
I nodded. My eyelids were feeling heavy again.
“Maybe some other time,” he said. He kept his eyes politely averted as I shifted the ice around. “I’d like to see Nifkin again,” he said. He paused and cleared his throat. “I’d like to see you, too, Cannie.”
I looked at him. “Why?” A rude question, I knew, but I felt like I was past the point of good manners… of any manners, really. “Why me?” “Because I care about you.” “Why?” I asked again.
“Because you’re…” He let the last word hang there. When I looked at him he was waving his hands in the air, like he was trying to sculpt phrases out of the air. “You’re special.”
I shook my head.
“You are.”
Special, I thought. I didn’t feel special. I felt ridiculous, really. I felt like a spectacle of a woman, a sob story, a freak. How must I look, really? I imagined myself on the street that night, my shoe falling apart, sweaty and filthy, my breasts leaking. They should take a picture, put my poster up in every junior high school, staple it in bookstores next to the Harlequin novels and the self-help books about find-ing your soulmate, your life partner, your one true love. I could be a warning; I could turn girls away from my fate.
I must have dozed off then, because when I came awake with a start, with my cheek against the blanket and the towel full of ice melting in my lap, he was sitting right across from me.
He’d taken his glasses off, and his eyes were gentle.
“Here,” he said. He had something in his arms, cradled like a baby. Pillows. Blankets. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”
I walked there in a daze, aching from exhaustion. The sheets were cool and crisp, the pillows like an embrace. I let him draw back the covers, help me onto the bed, tuck them up over me, smooth the blanket over my shoulders. His face seemed so much softer without his glasses, in the dark.
He sat on the edge of the bed. “Will you tell me why you’re so angry?” he asked.
I was so tired, and my tongue felt heavy and slow in my mouth. It was like being drugged, or hypnotized; like dreaming underwater. Or maybe I would have told anyone, if I’d let anyone get close enough to ask. “I’m mad at Bruce. I’m mad that his girlfriend pushed me, and I’m mad that he doesn’t love me. I’m mad at my father, I guess.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I saw him… in California” I paused to yawn, to fight the words out.
