The Black Witch of Mexico (20 page)

The swim had sobered him up. He wondered if he would even recognize this girl if he ever saw her again. He stole a glance in the dashboard light: just a skinny girl in black underwear. Her hair - and her beard - were lank and dripping wet and he realised he still had no idea what she looked like.

When they pulled into the driveway outside the reception he waited for her to ask him in. “I’m sharing with two girlfriends,” she said. “You might like the idea of that but I have to tell you I think that would be immoral.”

“It never crossed my mind.”

He was about to kiss her goodnight but pulled away.

“What’s wrong? Have you never kissed a woman with a beard before?”

“One of my aunts had a moustache.” He tugged at it. “How does it come off?”

“I have to soak it. It’s some kind of glue.”

“It’s very realistic. Are you sure it’s not real?”

“Would that bother you? You are so shallow.”

He found a sailing jacket on the back seat and handed it to her. “Put this on. You can’t go in looking like that.”

“You think that cute guy at reception will hit on me?” She started to get out of the car. “Well, that was an interesting night. Thanks.”

“Will I see you again?”

“I don’t know. I know where to find you, if it comes to desperate measures. You’re a shrink, right? I’ll make an appointment with your secretary.”

“I’m not really a psychiatrist.”

“I’m not really Jesus,” she said and ran inside the hotel.

And that was how they met: both drunk, swimming naked in the ocean at midnight after fumbling through some slightly painful sex in the front seat of his X5. Afterwards he didn’t think he would ever see her again, she would be just a vague memory of a funny girl with nice legs and a beard.

It wasn’t meant to be the start of something, of anything.

But all week he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Twice that week he caught Fiona and Jackie staring at him and whispering and he guessed they knew what had happened but he resisted the urge to go up to them and shout:
who the hell is she?

Then about a week later, as he was leaving work, he saw a woman sitting in the waiting area drinking coffee from the machine and reading a gossip magazine. He couldn’t help noticing her; she was the kind of woman no man could miss. She looked up at him and smiled and he knew it was his lucky day.

She held up her index finger. It had a Garfield Band-aid wrapped around it.

“I don’t like to jump the queue but can you take a look at this for me?”

“What happened to it?” hesaid, playing right along.

“I was turning water into wine and I got it stuck in the bottle.”

“That could be serious,” he said. “We should go and have a drink and discuss your medical options.”

“Just promise me no anaesthetic. I want to feel
everything
.”

Chapter 52

He never went back up to the ICU to visit Elena after that first visit. He heard she had been taken off the critical list after a few days and was sent to a general ward for recovery. She was in hospital for a month before she was discharged.

He stayed out of the way. He didn’t want to see Julie; he didn’t want to see Oliver. He was sure he didn’t want to see Elena.

You didn’t get yourself off a hard drug by shooting more into your veins.

By day he counted the hours in the emergency department, impatient with the alcoholics, the homeless men, the prostitutes, and the drug addicts who all somehow ended up on gurneys in the hallways. He only found relief in the true emergencies, when there was no time to think about anything but blood pressures, airways, sinus rhythms.

When he was working day shifts he came home at night and watched movies until three in the morning and fell asleep on the sofa; after a night shift he walked for hours around the city, dreading his empty apartment and cold bed even when he was bone tired. He stayed fuelled on coffee and energy drinks. His sleep debt was getting dangerously out of control but he no longer cared that much anymore.

Chapter 53

He woke up on the sofa. The TV was still on; he winced and fumbled around for the remote. Jesus, he was lying on it. Maybe that was why the volume was so loud.

He got up and stood on a CD case he’d left on the carpet. He tossed it on the bookshelf. He stumbled into the kitchen. There were dishes piled in the sink, food scraps on the marble bench top.

He needed coffee. There were no pods left, he’d have to stop by Starbucks on the way to work. Nothing in the refrigerator either, the thought of shopping after his shift yesterday had been too daunting. He didn’t think he could face it tonight either. He’d grab something in the hospital canteen.

There was cold pizza, still in the oven, still in the box. He ate a slice of Sicilian and washed it down with a glass of milk. He stared around the apartment. It looked like it had been vandalized. He promised himself that he’d clean up when he got home.

There were messages on the machine from yesterday, several missed calls on his mobile. He grimaced and pressed play; Lynne asking him if he was all right, Jay wanting him to come to the ball game.

The last one was from Elena. He felt like he’d been shot with adrenalin.
Please call me.
He reached for his mobile. He supposed perhaps she just wanted to thank him.

“Elena? It’s Adam.”

She said she needed to see him but she couldn’t talk on the telephone. Would he meet her tomorrow? She sounded close to tears, but he didn’t push her.

He stayed chill for once, arranged to meet her at the coffee shop in the medical centre in a couple of hours. The coffee shop should be okay, he didn’t think he could get in a fight there.

* * *

The coffee shop looked like a battlefield triage; doctors and nurses in scrubs, patients on crutches, relatives and visitors sitting around staring into cups of cold coffee with the thousand yard stare, taking a break from some horror story in the wards or the ER.

He saw her arrive in a cab and got up to open the door for her. He barely recognized her. She had lost a lot of weight and she was walking with a cane, it was aluminium with an underarm pad. The scar that ran from her temple to her cheekbone was still very pink and her hair hadn’t grown back yet, so she couldn’t hide it. She still turned heads, but now for all the wrong reasons.

He helped her sit down. She looked exhausted just from walking from the cab.

He got them both coffees. “How are you?”

“Getting better. Another couple of weeks and they say I can throw away the stick. I go to PT every day.”

“It takes time. You’re alive, that’s the main thing.”

She told him what they had told her, and much of it he already knew: she had fractured her pelvis in five places and the surgeons had inserted metal screws into her ischium, and across the symphysis pubis. There had been a month of complete bed rest and she needed a walking frame for two weeks after that. She had only recently graduated to using just the cane.

“I do a lot of swimming. They tell me it’s the best exercise. The doctors say I might have a little difference in leg length, but physically I’ll be as good...as good as a sterile beat-up hag can be.”

She broke down. He had never seen her cry before and it took him off guard. He fetched tissues from the counter and she grabbed them with something like desperation and dabbed at her make-up. “This is embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said and waited. Why had she called him? What was going on? Even now there was a part of him that wished her boyfriend had walked out on her. He didn’t give a damn about the scar or the limp.

“It’s Oliver,” she said.

He held his breath.

“He’s sick.”

He took a moment to take that on board. “How sick?” hesaid.

“They found a melanoma on his back. They removed it but it was too late. It was malignant. It had already met...what’s that word?”

“Metastasized.”

“Whatever. They found five spots just in his right lung.”

“What’s the prognosis?” he asked, though he already had a pretty good idea.

“They say three to six months. They want him to have chemotherapy but he’s not sure if he wants to put himself through it.”

Adam sat back, stunned. He was very accustomed to death but not in Starbucks and not someone he knew. He tried to think of something to say outside of the platitudes he used to armour himself with in the ER.

“I’m so sorry,” was the best he could manage.

“I need your help,” she said.

There was a fly pestering him. He tried to brush it away, but it was persistent and he couldn’t get rid of it.

“What can I do?”

“I want to know if the chemotherapy will do any good, or if it’s just a waste of time. Maybe there’s something else we could try. You’re a doctor. You know about these things.”

“I’m an emergency physician, Elena. I’m not an oncologist.”

“But you talk their language.”

“Who’s treating Oliver?”

“His name’s Evans. He’s here at St Mary’s, in the medical centre. Do you know him?”

“charlie Evans? Yeah, I know him.”

“could you talk to him?”

“He won’t be able to tell me much. There are patient confidentiality rules and-‘

“You don’t have to mention Oliver’s name.”

“I’m sure I can’t find out anymore than you already know.”

“Please.”

He took her hand. “Okay. Sure. I’ll do what I can.”

“People keep telling him to fight it, that sometimes there’s miracles, but there’s not, there’s no such thing, is there?”

“I don’t believe this. It’s so soon after your accident, it just doesn’t seem...”

“Fair?”

“I guess.”

“Whoever said life was fair?”

“How are you coping?”

“I break down and cry in pubic half a dozen times a day. Is that coping? I don’t know. No one can tell me. Adam, I’m sorry to do this to you. I know I’ve been a complete bitch to you, and I don’t see why you should want to help him or me. But anything you can do...”

“Whatever I can. You know that.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing,” she whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“I left you because you didn’t want children and now I’ve lost my baby and I can’t have any more. It’s a joke, right?”

“No one’s laughing over here.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do if anything happens to Oliver,” she said.

He tried not to look bitter. How could he be jealous of a guy who had just been given a death sentence? But she had never loved him that much, not ever.

“We had the wedding all planned. We were going down to the beach at Cape Cod, his parents have a place down there. We were planning to have the reception in the garden. It was going to be perfect. I figured I had enough time to get my figure back after the...”

She couldn’t say the word: ‘baby.”

Adam stared into his coffee. He stirred it but didn’t touch it.

“I didn’t think he’d want to go through with it after the accident, didn’t think he’d even want to touch me. Look at this,” she said touching the scar on the side of her face.

“It will fade with time,” he said. “There’s cosmetic surgery if it bothers you.”

“It’s not just my face. Have you seen my belly? It’s like I’ve got a fucking pink zipper right across it.”

“I still think you’re beautiful,” he said before he could stop himself.

“How can you?”

He didn’t have an answer for her, what he had just said surprised him as much as it had surprised her.

“My sister would kill me if she knew I was here with you.”

“Julia?”

“She always told me I was crazy being with you, that you were selfish and you’d never be able to take care of me.”

“That was nice of her. But you know, perhaps she was right.”

“Perhaps she wasn’t.”

The fly was back. He swiped at it.

“You only visited me once all the time I was in the hospital. I was in the same building.”

“You’re with another man, El.”

“So that means you stop caring about me?”

“It means I care too much. I didn’t belong there. Your sister was there all the time and so was...”

“...Oliver.”

“Oliver.”

She stared at him with her huge china blue eyes. He felt a familiar thrill. “I still miss you sometimes,” she said.

That was his cue, but he surprised himself and didn’t pick up on it. He said nothing.