Mostly she only listened as the doctor talked, breathing out “Mm-hmm” or “Oh, my!” when a response seemed called for. Or she just hummed a song inside her head if the doctor waved his hand for silence. So she wasn’t quite sure what to think when he sought her out one afternoon and said, “What would you say if I told you they had altered a scientific report? What would you say if I told you the data had been fudged?”
The doctor’s eyes were wide and searching, but what Dolly saw in them now was more a mine shaft than a window.
“What report?” she asked him. “Does it have to do with the damaged babies?”
Before the doctor could answer, the second-to-last patient of the day came into the waiting room, drenched from a pelting rain and calling out behind her, “Okay, Frankie. Come back for me in half an hour.”
The woman had suffered a miscarriage and seemed both teary and relieved. After assuring the doctor she was fine, she started sobbing. “It’s just that Frankie came back from the war without his feet. Some days it’s all I can do to take care of him. What would I do with a baby? And Frankie has trouble sleeping, so then I have trouble sleeping too. Can you give him something to help with that?”
“This is a women’s clinic,” said the doctor, but then he relented and took out his prescription pad.
“These pills are for you,” he said. “It’s against the law to share them.”
“Oh,” said the woman.
“However, I doubt anyone would find out if you did.”
“And he stopped going to physical therapy. He says there isn’t any point.”
“I can’t solve everything,” said the doctor, tearing the leaf off the pad and giving it to the woman. “He needs to see his own physician.
“I can’t solve everything,” he said again when Dolly put her hand on his arm and said, “You’re a good man.” Of course the doctor had hopes and dreams! Of course he had a beating heart!
“Tell me, then. What would a good man do if he knew what I know? Would he make that knowledge public even if it ended his career, or would he close his eyes and continue to help his patients the best he can?”
Dolly was certain the doctor was talking about the report on munitions safety he had mentioned several weeks before. She took a deep breath and asked, “Was it the report on birth defects and munitions safety that was altered?”
The doctor looked startled, as if he hadn’t meant to speak his thoughts aloud. “Oh, that,” he said. “Whatever caused the birth defects, it wasn’t the munitions. The revised report was absolutely clear on that.”
“The revised report,” said Dolly carefully. “What did the original say?”
But the window was closed now, closed and shuttered. And then the doctor was glancing at his watch and asking about the last patient — wherever had she gotten to? Did she think he had all night? While they waited for her to arrive, he talked pompously about the heroic things he had done, the influential people he knew, the exotic places he had traveled to, the new car he was going to buy. “So I really don’t have time to wait,” he said.
“Doctor,” whispered Dolly. “Do you have copies of both reports?”
“Do I have copies?” asked the doctor absently. His eyes had lost focus, and Dolly couldn’t tell if he had been drinking again or if he was merely lost in thought.
“Yes, of the two reports.”
The storm was turning the orange clay of the parking lot into an orange pond. The owner of the building had dumped a load of pea gravel in a corner of the lot, but no one had ever come to spread it, so it sat like a miniature mountain near the rusting trash receptacle. Dolly liked to imagine the improvements she would make if she were the owner of the facility: curtains at the windows instead of broken mini blinds, pots of geraniums at the entrance, a fresh coat of paint on the flaking stucco, and in the waiting room, a basket of magazines and comfortable upholstery rather than metal folding chairs like the one the second-to-last patient was sitting on while she waited for someone to pick her up.
“Do you have a ride?” asked Dolly.
“Yes,” said the woman. “We got the truck fitted out with hand controls. Frankie’s still getting used to them, so he says I’m not to worry if he’s a little late.”
“I guess she’s not coming,” Dolly said when fifteen minutes had passed and the last patient had failed to arrive.
The doctor put on his coat. “Who would have thought?” he muttered. “Who in tarnation would have thought?”
“What’s done in the dark always comes to the light,” said Dolly.
“Unless it doesn’t,” said the doctor.
“What about if we give it a teensy push?”
“No, no. I can’t afford to ruffle feathers,” said the doctor. “That would be disastrous.”
“But I can,” said Dolly. “What if I were the one…”
But the doctor was pulling a rain hat over his ears and she couldn’t tell if he was listening or not.
After he left, Dolly made her way through the rooms locking cabinets and making sure the bathroom was presentable. She had just finished, all except the lights, when a rusty pickup pulled into the parking lot and honked, the beams of its headlamps illuminating the heavy raindrops and the gravel pile. The woman who had had the miscarriage jumped up and ran out the door, slamming it behind her and holding a paper grocery sack over her head to protect her from the rain. Just when she reached the passenger-side door, the truck lurched forward, causing her to fall to her knees in a puddle.
Dolly opened the door and called out, “Are you all right?”
“It’s not Frankie’s fault!” the woman called back as she scrambled to her feet. “It’s the hand controls! They can be a little bit tricky at first!” The gears ground and caught. Then the truck shuddered backward until it was clear of the puddle, and she opened the door and climbed inside.
3.3 Will
The A students sat up front, their faces smug with knowledge. After school, they streamed out the doors to the waiting minivans, the waxed and buffed high-riders, the sleek four-doors and rusted rattletraps, taking their secrets with them while Will was left with the mystery: “Were the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw real or not? Explain.”
He had a 50 percent chance of getting the first part of the question right, but how could he explain what he did not know? And how did it make sense to ask if something in a made-up story was real, especially when that something couldn’t be real in reality. At first he thought it was a trick question, and after hesitating, he had written “No,” comforted that the letters, scratched out in soft pencil, were easily erased — something he quickly did. “Yes,” he then wrote. But “yes” was an answer he couldn’t explain, while “no” had years of experience to back it up, not to mention Sunday school instruction if he chose to get into that, a tactic that went over well with most of his teachers, but somehow not with Mr. Quick. Besides, the Y looked shaky, about to topple over on its stick, so he erased “Yes” and replaced it with the more solidly grounded “No,” which he made as bold and as black as graphite and his wavering conviction could make it.
“I’ll show you what a nice guy I am and give you ten more minutes,” Mr. Quick announced to Will and the three other students who had only slouched more deeply in their chairs and clutched their pens and pencils more tightly when the dismissal bell sounded.