The bouquet of roses he had bought last night sat in a vase on the dining room table. They had never made it to the Blue Heron. Rachel said she wasn’t up for it.
“You want pancakes?” she asked, her voice void of inflection. Her face was ashen and the flesh under her eyes was puffy. Her hair was disheveled and stuck back by a couple of hasty bobby pins. She looked as if she hadn’t slept all night.
“I’ll just have some orange juice,” he said and poured a glass. “I’ve got a breakfast meeting with Charlie O’Neill on the road.”
She nodded woodenly. He hated it when she got in these moods. Upstairs Dylan could be heard singing while getting dressed. He liked show tunes, and at the moment he was wailing “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.”
Martin studied Rachel while he drank his juice. She looked miserable, standing there hunched over like an old woman, her feet stuffed into a pair of old slippers, her face looking as if it had been shaped out of bread dough. “So, there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“I said I’m fine,” she snapped.
“Then how come we haven’t made love for over three weeks?”
Her body slumped in annoyance, but she didn’t answer.
“How come you’ve been avoiding me like I’m the goddamn Ebola virus?”
Without looking up from the pan she said, “I haven’t been avoiding you. And stop swearing, he’ll hear you.”
“You have been avoiding me. For weeks I’ve suggested we go out to dinner together, or a movie or something nice and romantic, but you’re too tired. You don’t feel up to it. You’ve got a headache. You go to bed early. Except for bumping into me, I don’t think you’ve physically touched me in weeks. Something’s wrong, and I want to know what the hell it is.”
Rachel continued staring into the pan, then slowly she turned her head toward him. She seemed just about to respond but then laid the spatula down and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Dylan that breakfast was ready.
When she returned, Martin said, “I don’t know what the problem is, but you’ve been moping around here like you’ve got some goddamn—”
Suddenly she let out a scream, shaking her hand. She had burned the tip of her finger pressing chocolate chips into the batter.
Martin ran to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She was not just whimpering in discomfort. She was outright screaming, as if in outrage that the pan had done this to her. Then, she burst into tears.
Martin walked her to the sink and turned on the cold water and held her hand under it. With one arm around her shoulder, the other hand holding hers under the water, he could feel her shaking as she stood there, deep wracking sobs rising from a place that had nothing to do with burnt fingers.
“Mommy! What happened?” Dylan ran into the kitchen and instantly froze in place at the tableau of Martin holding Rachel’s finger under the streaming water and Rachel crying, tears pouring freely from her eyes and her nose running.
“Mommy just burned her finger,” Martin said. “She’s going to be fine.”
“Mommeee.” Dylan ran over to her and hugged her about the middle and buried his face into her bathrobe, then he began to cry.
“It’s burning!” Rachel shouted through her tears. “Turn it off.”
On the stove smoke billowed up from the frying pan.
“It’s burning,” Dylan screamed. “Fire!”
I’m going to lose my fucking mind, Martin thought, as he shot to the stove, turned off the gas, and pulled the pan off the burner.
Suddenly the smoke alarm went off, filling the house with a hideous electronic wail.
While Dylan yelled, his hands to his ears, and Rachel stood by the sink crying, Martin pulled out a kitchen chair. Yup! Any second now I’m gonna hear a snap like a celery stalk, and then I can join the chorus, screaming and blubbering. Yoweeeee!
He punched off the alarm.
The pancakes looked like smoking hockey pucks. Martin felt the crazy urge to laugh, but pushed it down. Instead he tore a couple of sheets off the paper-towel rack and handed them to Rachel. While she dried her face, Dylan insisted that she hold her finger up so he could kiss the boo-boo.
Just another normal little breakfast scene in the happy Whitman household.
“I think you’re going to make it,” Martin said, looking at her finger, “thanks to ole Dr. Dylan here.” He winked at his son. The tip of Rachel’s index finger was a white crust of burnt skin. Martin tousled his son’s hair. “You made her feel better already, right?”
Rachel nodded and caught her breath. She smiled thinly and gave her son a hug.
Seeing Rachel pull herself together again, Dylan rapidly repaired. “Am I going to be a doctor when I grow up?”
“I don’t see why not,” Martin said. “You’ve got the touch. Now maybe you should go upstairs and put the other shoe and sock on, okay, Doc?”
Dylan looked to Rachel. “Take two ass burns and call me in the morning,” he said, and headed upstairs. It was something Martin said all the time.
Rachel nodded, then headed for the stove to clean the frying pan. Her body had slumped into itself again.
Martin came over to her and gave her a hug. She let him, but it was like hugging a dead person. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure?”
She nodded.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing to tell,” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you. And you don’t believe you.” He kissed her on the forehead. “You never were a good liar.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. “You’re going to be late for your meeting. Say hello to Charlie.”
He nodded. “I love you, woman, but I wish you’d let me in.”
She hugged him weakly, and he left.
He was right: She never was a good liar.
Rachel watched Martin pull out of the driveway. She cleaned the pan and made another batch of pancakes. When she was done, she called Dylan down. And while he ate, she got dressed.
A little before nine o’clock she dropped Dylan off at DellKids and headed toward Rockville, which was nearly forty miles south of Hawthorne. They had thought of finding a local pediatrician, but Dr. Rose had attended Dylan since his infancy. And Rachel liked the man. More importantly, Dylan liked him. He was a warm and gracious man who never rushed through an examination.
To get to the highway, Rachel headed down Magnolia Drive, trying to ease her mind against the fugue playing inside her head.
Had the MRI results been normal, the doctor would have called himself and just said things looked fine. If there was a problem, he would surely have called himself—unless he didn’t get the chance because of the emergency. Maybe he wanted to talk to her about some special learning programs for Dylan.
Yes, think Special Program, she told herself. Special Program. Nice and normal. No problems. No tumors. No …
It was her idea to have the scan in the first place, and Dr. Rose had agreed—a good precautionary measure since the procedure was easy and noninvasive.
Normal procedure. Normal precaution.
That was what she had told herself. Her cover story to herself.
As Rachel drove along, she felt the onslaught of an anxiety attack. She tried to concentrate on the scenery, tried to distract herself by taking in the arborway of maples and oaks and the seaside mansions that clutched the rocky coastline—mansions with their driveway entrances of granite pillars, some surmounted with large alabaster pineapples that forbade you to enter. The road opened up to a sea view and a scattering of shingled homes with deep and closely cropped lawns, sculpted hedges, and trellised gardens festooned with rose blossoms. In the distance, powerboats cut quicksilver plumes across the harbor under a brilliant blue sky.