The Identicals(105)
“I know,” Sadie had said. Her resistance to him seemed to have nothing to do with any actual fear of getting pregnant. Rather it was an act of hostility, of power, of torture.
Reed relieved his urges in the shower. He went for long bike rides. He stayed overnight at the hospital; the nurses commented on his devotion to the patients.
It was back in October, after nearly ten months of living without touch, kiss, or caress, when Reed bumped into Harper Frost at Morning Glory Farm. He had noticed the woman standing in line in front of him because of the pleasing way her ass filled out her jeans. When she turned around and he saw it was Harper Frost, the daughter of his patient Billy Frost, he was pleasantly surprised. Reed liked Harper for a couple of reasons. She was down-to-earth; she was concerned about Billy’s treatment but not uptight. She and Billy had a charming, irreverent repartee; Reed enjoyed listening to the two of them parry. Harper teased her father about his smoking, his drinking, and his legion of female admirers, and Billy teased Harper right back about her nagging him as though she were his wife or mother. He called her “my old lady.” The two of them seemed very close—they talked about scalloping, fishing, Dustin Pedroia and the future of the Red Sox, Billy’s handicap at Farm Neck (Billy claimed it was a three, but Harper said it was a hundred and eleven), and a restaurant in the North End that made a crab-and-artichoke ravioli they loved. Listening to them, Reed once again felt a pang for a child of his own. Who, he wondered, would take care of him in his old age?
Sadie? Not likely.
At the farm, he bought Harper a cup of coffee, and they sat and talked, and it was the happiest hour Reed had passed in some time. Two weeks later, when Reed asked Harper to go for a drink, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision but also one he’d been considering since they parted ways at Morning Glory Farm. Reed knew it was a risk—going for drinks (which turned out to be dinner as well) with a patient’s daughter—but until they walked out of Atria that night, Reed was still able to tell himself they were only friends. Reed had a populated life—his patients, his colleagues at the hospital, his wife’s family—but he hadn’t had a friend since medical school except for Sadie. And now, it was safe to say, Sadie was no longer his friend.
Reed had started kissing Harper—why? Because the night air was finally crisp after such a hot summer? Because he was high from the wine, the food, the companionship? Because at dinner Harper had unwittingly brushed his shoulder and knocked her knee against his? The circumstances demanded it, Reed thought later, when he tried to rationalize his actions. But that was cowardly. The decision hadn’t been foisted upon him by outside “circumstances.” The decision had been consciously made. By him.
Once Reed had kissed Harper, once he had made love to her in the backseat of his car—well, the genie could not be put back into the bottle. He thought about her nonstop. At first it was only sexual. His brain was engulfed in a fug of overwhelming desire for an act that he had been so long denied. A few weeks in, however, there were intimate conversations and the inevitable sharing of histories, and Reed realized that Harper was an extremely complex human being. He heard about her upbringing, her parents, her identical twin, her elite private school, her rarefied life in a town house on Beacon Hill. But then that particular storybook ended. Her parents divorced, Harper attended Tulane, then moved to Martha’s Vineyard to live with Billy. Reed heard about her series of jobs: scooping ice cream, selling carousel tickets, landscaping for Jude Hogan—and one or two nights a week, serving drinks at Dahlia’s. Reed was both proud and ashamed to say that he had never set foot in that particular establishment; it was rumored to be a hotbed of cocaine, infidelity, and summer money. Harper had fallen prey to the scene; she had agreed, on one occasion, to deliver a package for Joey Bowen. She had not known there would be any danger, but she had ended up handcuffed and lying facedown on a client’s lawn. There was a fair amount of public shame, she told him. Reed pointed out that it might have been worse; she could have ended up in jail. Harper said she would rather have served her time. Instead the citizens of the island seemed determined to make her pay in other ways.
Reed and Harper saw each other once a week at first, then more often. But when the weather started to warm up, Harper became less available. Reed then discovered that she had started dating an Edgartown policeman, the young, charismatic, well-connected Drew Truman. Reed couldn’t believe the way this discovery pierced him. He had never in his life felt so jealous. He realized he had no right; they had made no promises. But he didn’t care. He couldn’t stand the thought of Harper with anyone else. He left the hospital midshift and showed up at her duplex and demanded that she break things off with Drew.
She had laughed in his face.
Dr. Reed Zimmer, a pillar of the hospital, if not the community, found himself caught in a conundrum commonly experienced by lesser men. He was in love with someone other than his wife but unsure if he had the gumption to leave his marriage. To leave would bring pain, shame, scrutiny. He didn’t think he could stand it; he liked being held in high regard—which was, he realized, a character flaw in itself.
Reed had allowed himself to believe that he was invincible. Unlike every other unfaithful man in the history of the world, he would not get caught. He would stay with Harper until Sadie left of her own accord, and surely that would be soon. Sadie was as miserable in the marriage as he was. In the spring, she started talking a lot about Tad Morrissey, the Irish carpenter who worked with Franklin. Tad was wonderful, Sadie said. Tad had come to the pie shop to build some new shelves, and he had shimmed the back door, which Sadie always had a hard time closing in the summer.