Under the Knife(23)

He paused before continuing. “Is it really that much of a leap, what you and I are doing right now? Think of all of the recent, remarkable developments in biotechnology and medicine. Stem cells for growing brand-new organs. Microscopic machines that seek out and destroy cancer cells. Face transplants. Your patients, and the public, seem to take these kinds of things for granted.”

“Is it … permanent? This thing?”

No answer.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Can I still hear out of my left ear?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really the only one who can hear you?”

“Yes.”

“And … you can hear other people around me?”

“Obviously.”

“How can you hear me?”

“Vibrations, mostly,” Finney said. “Carried through your skull. You might recall it’s why your voice sounds different to you than it does to everyone else.”

She conceded it made sense. If all of this was happening in her imagination, if she truly was experiencing a psychotic break, her psychosis had concocted a scenario with airtight logic and more creativity than she would ever have given herself credit for having.

Except for one incongruity: “But … you knew when Lucy had finished cleaning herself up at the sink … and then when she’d walked over to her locker. How did you know that? You couldn’t have figured that out just by listening.”

“Your glasses, Dr. Wu.”

She touched the frame. “What about them?”

“You left them lying on the bench next to her locker when you went to the sinks.”

“I don’t understand…”

He sighed. “I would have thought these things would have been more obvious to you. Perhaps I’ve overestimated you. I watched your colleague enter the room, Dr. Wu, with your glasses. The camera I’ve installed in them is quite hidden and allows me to see what you see.”

“But I thought you told me earlier you weren’t interested in seeing any of us, umm … naked.”

“I said undressed, not naked.” His tone remained even. “Your stocky surgical colleague wasn’t naked. Besides which, I certainly could have done without seeing the parts of her that I did. In any event, interest—or my lack of it—in seeing naked women is irrelevant to our purpose.”

“What purpose?”

“We’ll discuss that shortly.”

“What if I call security? Or the police?”

“And tell them what, exactly, Dr. Wu?” Finney’s voice was soft. “That, after being discovered passed out naked on your own operating-room table, you heard a voice in your head? The voice of a man whose wife previously died under your care? How do you think that will sound to security, or to the police?”

She knew exactly how it would sound.

Like I’m a paranoid, psychotic schizophrenic.

She’d probably find herself locked up on the inpatient psych ward before lunchtime.

Maybe I belong there.

She could feel herself slipping, starting to lose her mental footing again, sliding toward blind panic, and perhaps psychosis. Like Moses.

“Why?” she whispered.

“You need to speak a bit louder, Dr. Wu.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

He was quiet for several seconds.

“Did you know she was pregnant, Dr. Wu?”

Oh, God.

Her legs had become rubber. She collapsed heavily onto the bench, closed her eyes, pressed the flats of her palms against them, and rubbed.

Of course she’d known.

“Yes,” she whispered. She stopped rubbing, but kept her hands pressed over her eyes, as if hiding behind them.

“Two months,” he said. No emotion, just a flat recitation of the facts. “Two months along. Our first. We hadn’t told anybody yet. Not even Jenny’s parents. They’d been planning on coming for a visit, and she’d wanted to surprise them. But then she got sick. The appendicitis. You must have done a pregnancy test before the surgery, right? When she came into the emergency room.”

Yes, I knew. Finney seemed to have forgotten the detailed conversations Rita had had with him before his wife’s emergency appendectomy, explaining the substantial risks the anesthesia and surgery would pose to the pregnancy.

He fell silent for a long time, then said: “She was so excited. I’d never seen her so excited about anything, ever, the way she was about the b—the pregnancy.”

(Baby he almost said BABY God he’s making this HARD)

“It was all she could do to keep from telling everyone she knew, as soon as the doctor confirmed the home test,” he continued. “We would be out to dinner with her friends, and it would be obvious she wasn’t drinking alcohol, and her women friends would, ah, giggle and wink at each other. They’d ask her why she wasn’t having any wine. Women always seem to be … attuned to those kinds of things.”

Oh God, why is he talking about this?

“Jenny would laugh and change the subject. She’d also sit on her hands. Yes. I remember that very distinctly. She’d place her hands underneath her legs. I think—because she was happy. She always sat on her hands when she was excited about something. Like … like a child would.”