Chance Harbor (12 page)

Seth had remained standing. Now he narrowed his eyes at her. “What the hell’s wrong with
you
, scolding me like a kid in the principal’s office? Not very professional, sweetheart. Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed or something?”

“Did you actually call me
sweetheart
?” Catherine folded her arms, trying to contain the rage building beneath her diaphragm. “You’d never do that if I were an MD instead of a nurse practitioner.”

“I thought you
were
a doctor!” Seth sank into the chair across the desk from her and rubbed his face. “Look, I apologize. We got off on the wrong foot. I came here because I live close by and I needed to know how to help my son.”

“Know his medical history, for starters!” Catherine shouted. “Is that really so difficult?”

Seth glared back at her. “You don’t know one thing about me or my situation! Look, thanks for seeing us. I appreciate what you did for Brady. Now, just give me what we need and we’ll be on our way.”

“He needs an asthma specialist.”

“You’re right,
Ms. Standish
.” Seth made a big show of reading her name tag. “I’m sure Brady needs more than just a
nurse practitioner
.”

“Yeah, like a father who’s more than half-awake,” Catherine said under her breath. She wrote a prescription and handed him a business card with the name and number of a pediatric respiratory specialist. “Go see this guy. He’ll help you put Brady on regular medications, as well as providing a prescription for emergencies like these.”

“Thank you.” Seth stood up. “I would tell your supervisor exactly how helpful and compassionate you’ve been, but I don’t have the energy to deal with that right now. I’ll hope your mood improves and you won’t terrorize any more parents.”

After he’d gone, Catherine dropped her head into her hands. Three more hours until she could go home.

A sharp rap on the door brought her head snapping upward. “Yes?”

“It’s me. Julia.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’m sorry, but we need to see you right now.”

We?
“All right. Whatever.”

The door opened and Julia entered the office. She stood with her back straight and her chest out, like an opera singer. “Your next patient is here, but I’ve given her to Dr. Wentworth,” she said. She spoke slowly, forming every syllable, as if Catherine were deaf and lip-reading.

“Why?” Catherine said. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve made two patients cry, and the doctors and I all heard you shouting at that last patient’s dad. Everyone heard you, actually,” she added, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of the crowded waiting room. “We think you need to go home.”

“I can’t do that,” Catherine said. At home, everything reminded her of Russell.

Last night, she’d crammed his clothing into trash bags and taken apart his bike so he could carry it on the subway. She was damned if she’d give him their car. She’d put the bulging trash bags, along with the bike, outside the bulkhead to the basement. It was going to rain today and she was glad, imagining the soggy cartons disintegrating in Russell’s hands. She’d even poured his beloved Chinese tea into the compost. Then she’d had a sudden fit of fury and dumped the compost into the kitchen disposal. Grinding it up was another rare moment of satisfaction.

“Well, you can’t stay in the office,” Julia was explaining patiently. “You’re not doing anybody any good here.”

Now Dr. Patel, the pediatric director, crowded into the room behind Julia, frowning behind her square black eyeglasses. “No, indeed not,” she said kindly. “You are scaring the patients, Catherine. We have had several complaints. You must take the rest of today off and possibly the week as well, while you hopefully resolve whatever matter is obviously troubling you. I believe we owe you vacation time.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and burst into tears.

Awkwardly, Dr. Patel leaned her round body across the desk and patted Catherine’s shoulder, enveloping her in a cloud of cinnamon and coffee. “I am sure things will look better to you in the morning.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Catherine said.

She gathered her things and left the office, ignoring the stares of everyone in the waiting room even when the metal water bottle dropped out of her backpack and clanged onto the tiled floor. Catherine froze as the water bottle rolled across the room, everyone’s eyes on it as if the bottle were a grenade, then picked it up and fled the building.

It was raining hard by the time she emerged from the T station closest to home. She’d forgotten her umbrella and kept her head down as she hurried along Mass Ave to the subway stop. The rain stung like tiny bees against her face and arms, her skin too chilled from the office air-conditioning. Several of the physicians and nurses seemed to require air-conditioning year-round now for their menopause-induced hot flashes. Last month one of them had bought battery-operated “crone fans” to put on all of their desks. Everyone had laughed about it. Oh, the hilarity of women past their prime! Sisters applauding their own invisibility and inevitable decline!

Sisters like her, almost. She was nearly forty. About to enter a new stage of life.

Catherine stopped to catch her breath, leaning against a building as she thought about how Russell was about to enter a new stage as well. But his would be crammed with the adventure and excitement of new beginnings, of parenthood. Everyone would perceive Russell as vibrant and lucky, with his young wife and baby. She would be a crone, while Russell would be like one of those aging male movie stars who always gets paired with dewy, twenty-year-old starlets.

There was a sharp tapping on the window next to her. Catherine flinched and raised her head, blinking against the rain. Water streamed down the collar of her blouse, and her hair was a misery of wet strands clinging to her head.

She wiped her eyes. To her horror, the person on the other side of the glass was the father she’d shouted at in her office: Seth. She blinked harder and saw that she’d been leaning against the window of a small corner store. Now she noticed people emerging from its red door with sacks of groceries. Seth was similarly burdened by bags. His son, Brady, was nowhere in sight.

Probably left him alone in the car, Catherine thought furiously. Like a dog.

Now Seth was outside and standing next to her, so quickly that it seemed like he must have walked straight through the glass. He awkwardly held a red-and-white-striped umbrella over both of them, his bags of groceries—cloth bags, she noted, so Cambridge, so PC, so fucking environmentally correct that she wanted to puke—slung over one arm.

“Are you all right?” he asked, shouting a little to make himself heard over the steady rain and whoosh of passing traffic.

“I’m fine,” she snapped back. “What about Brady? Where is he?” She made a point of looking around.

“I left him with my neighbor so I could get his prescription filled and grab a few groceries. I thought maybe ginger ale and ice cream would appeal to him.”

“Oh.” Catherine felt the anger drain out of her like the water rushing down the gutter in the street.

“He’s breathing much better now,” Seth volunteered. “And I made an appointment for tomorrow with the asthma specialist.”

Want a medal
? Catherine nearly asked, but she bit her bottom lip to trap the words inside. She was too exhausted to be combative. Besides, she ought to save her strength for later.

For Russell.

She felt her face do odd things, as if the rain had softened her skin and bones. She imagined her entire body folding in on itself like cardboard. “Good you made that appointment,” she said. “See you.”

She walked away. Her arms and legs still weren’t working properly, as if she were a puppet with tangled strings, but she forced herself to put one foot in front of the other.

“Are you really okay?” Seth called from behind her.

“I’m fine!” she shouted, but her willpower wasn’t enough to drive her body forward. She lurched to a stop, causing a woman passing to stare at her in alarm.

Catherine didn’t want to imagine what she must look like. She closed her eyes the way she remembered Willow doing when she was small and playing hide-and-seek, as if shutting her eyes and blocking out the world could render her invisible.

“Right. You are definitely
not
fine.” Seth had come up behind her. “You’d better come with me.”

“My house isn’t far,” Catherine protested.

“Wherever your house is, it’s too far. Mine is closer.” Somehow, despite the umbrella and the groceries, Seth managed to take her arm. He began steering her forward.

They’d walked only half a block when Seth turned into the front entrance of a brick building, nodding at a uniformed doorman as they entered a foyer with a marbled floor. Glass doors opened into a pale blue hallway, where it took all of Catherine’s strength to remain standing while they waited for the elevator. When it came, she leaned her forehead against one wall of it the minute the doors slid shut.

“Are you sick?” Seth was sounding more and more alarmed. “Should I call your office?”

“No. Not sick.” Her voice echoed in the hollow space and she felt her stomach lurch as the elevator began its ascent.

When the elevator doors opened again, Catherine didn’t even bother to look at what floor they were on. If Seth were a serial killer, fine. This was as good a day to die as any other. Meek and dripping, she followed him down another blue hallway to a black door with a silver knocker shaped like a lion’s head. He unlocked the door and stood back for her to enter first.

They were higher than she’d thought: an entire vista of Cambridge spread before them. The tall windows were streaked with rain. She sat down on a sofa covered in gold fabric and let her head fall back against it, then worried her wet hair might leave a mark and sat up straight again.

Seth read her thoughts. “It’s fine. You can’t hurt that thing. It’s a beast. Sit back. I’ll go get Brady from across the hall.”

She felt more rainwater snake down her neck and shoulders as she studied the apartment. It was obviously expensive—condo? rental?—and well kept. The parquet wooden floors gleamed between scattered bright Orientals and the artwork was mostly landscapes in greens and blues. Around a corner, she could see into the kitchen, painted a soft plum, copper pans hanging from a ceiling rack. No sign of a child living here.

Now she remembered what Seth had told her in the office: he had just picked up Brady. From where? From whom? An ex-wife, presumably.

Oh, who cared? There were so many miserable marriages in the world. What was one more?

She sternly commanded her muscles to lift her body off the sofa. They disobeyed her and remained limp. How was she going to get home? She needed to shut herself in her bedroom, maybe have a drink or three, figure out what to say to Russell. Decide how they would handle Willow.

What was that awful word? How they would
coparent
?

Whatever happened, she was determined to keep things on an even keel for Willow. She closed her eyes.

The door opened. Footsteps approached. “Is she awake?” Brady whispered. It was the kind of whisper some children used that made them sound like they were trumpeting through a megaphone.

“I don’t know,” Seth whispered back. “Should we make her a snack just in case?”

“Milk and cookies!” Brady said.

He sounded so gleeful that Catherine felt her mouth twitch, despite her mood. She kept her eyes closed. The boy would want to surprise her. At least somebody should be happy today.

She opened her eyes when she heard a tray being set on the coffee table in front of her. On it were chocolate chip cookies, a glass of milk for Brady, and a pot of tea with two mugs. She made the appropriate noises and found that pretending to be happy actually helped a little.

Brady served her cookies on a red plastic plate while Seth poured the tea. They talked about Brady’s breathing, which he described as “sort of weird, like I was whistling, only I can’t do that yet!”

After their snack, Brady went off to watch television in another room while she and Seth had second cups of tea.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was rude in the office. Then I had the nerve to land on your doorstep.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “It’s fine. You were upset.”

“I would have made it home. But thank you.” She had eaten half a cookie to please Brady, but Catherine felt it sticking in her throat now, the crumbs like shards in her throat. She took another sip of tea.

“Want to talk about it?”

She supposed she owed him some kind of explanation. “My husband has left me for someone else. I just found out.”

He nodded. “Been there. Done that. It’s rough.” He jerked his head in the direction of the TV noise, the frenetic music of a cartoon. “Didn’t have any access to my child until this morning. Brady’s mother broke our shared custody agreement and took him to Amsterdam when he was six months old. She’s Dutch. I was fighting to make her bring him home, but got snarled in red tape forever. Then, this morning, she suddenly showed up, said Brady was sick and she was done. The only time he’s not clinging to my leg is when he’s watching TV, poor guy.”

Catherine frowned. “Your ex said she was done with what? With Brady?”

“Apparently. For now, anyway.” Seth sighed. “I lost everything, fighting that custody battle: my savings, my house, my job. Pretty ironic.”

“Why?”

He made a face. “I’m a divorce lawyer, but I’ve only seen Brady three times since he was born. That’s why I didn’t know he had asthma. Now Vivian says it’s my turn to raise him.”

“And how do you feel about that?” Catherine twisted her hair, still damp, into a knot at the base of her neck.

He looked startled. “I’m delighted. How should I feel? He’s my son.”

“Oh.” She picked up her teacup, steadied her shaking hand against her chest. “That’s good, then.”

“You have children?”

“A daughter. She’s fifteen.”

“This news is hard on her, I expect.”

“I imagine so. It’s tough to tell right now. She acts like everything’s fine.”