Under the Knife(5)

Funny, Rita thought, as Lisa pulled the band free from the buckle and freed her from the pads. It looks just like the restraining straps we use to secure patients to our operating-room tables.

Another coincidence. Like the blue scrubs.

A moment later, as Lisa loosened a second black strap binding her thighs, Rita realized, with an uneasy swirl of emotions, that it was one of the restraining straps for an operating-room table.

The same table on which she was now lying.

“What?” Rita straightened her head and tipped her chin to her chest to stare at her feet.

That was when she noticed she wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Dr. Rita Wu, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California, was strapped to an operating-room table.

Naked as the day she was born.

Without the faintest idea of how she’d gotten there.





SPENCER


Spencer Cameron stepped outside, closed his front door, and breathed in the early-morning air of late November in coastal San Diego. It was still dark, but faint red-and-orange embers licked the sky behind the mountains to the east.

The predawn temperatures were cool, and Spencer wore black, full-length running tights with fluorescent-yellow reflectors stitched down the sides and a lightweight, black athletic shirt equipped with similar reflectors along its long sleeves. The skintight fabric strained against his massive chest, shoulders, and thighs as he stretched out his limbs and torso. He slipped headphones in his ears, tuned his iPod to NPR, and adjusted his knit running beanie over his curly, dark brown hair so as to shield the exposed portions of his ears and scalp from the mild chill. He took off at an easy jog down the street.

A stout, middle-aged woman walking a small brown dog of indeterminate breed appeared, heading in the opposite direction. She jumped back and froze as Spencer lumbered toward her. The dog, in contrast, seemed to decide that the best defense was a good offense: No larger than a good-sized rabbit, it lunged at him, drawing its leash taunt and yipping in the high, piercing frequency of small dogs.

Spencer stifled a scowl—he didn’t love dogs, especially microscopic ones that disturbed the peace of his early-morning runs—but waved gamely.

See? I’m friendly!

He didn’t recognize the woman or her dog. But that wasn’t unexpected. Although he’d lived here for years, there were plenty of folks in the neighborhood he hadn’t yet gotten around to meeting. His grueling work schedule—early mornings, late nights, and long days sandwiched between them—didn’t make it easy.

“Good morning!” he called, flashing a cheery smile.

The woman, bundled in a bulky grey sweatshirt embroidered with a University of Southern California logo, acknowledged him with a slight nod but remained rooted in place and looked at him askance as he passed, holding her dog at bay. Furious, the dog scrambled along the perimeter of its leash, growling truculently and straining in vain to launch itself at Spencer.

In a parting gesture of amity, he cut the woman and her dog an extrawide berth, smiling and waving one last time, before refocusing on his run. He didn’t blame the woman—or her pet rat, for that matter—one bit. Even in broad daylight, his immense frame routinely attracted curious stares, and he pictured how he must have appeared from their perspective: a man big enough to be an NFL lineman, clad in black and wearing a knit skullcap, charging at them out of the early-morning shadows of an otherwise deserted street.

Aside from the dog lady, the neighborhood was still, and he was alone. As his muscles limbered up, he pushed the pace, accelerating to a brisk trot. He needed to. He was still in pretty decent shape, but it had never been easy for him to keep the paunch at bay, even back in the old days, and it was only getting harder now that he was closing in on forty.

He swerved to the left to avoid a row of trash cans at the curb, changing his heading by pushing off with his right leg. His right knee protested with a twinge of discomfort that fell just short of outright pain. That knee had been acting up recently.

Should probably get it looked at.

A sagging midline and creaky joints.

Old-man problems.

In his headphones, a newscaster was recapping the morning’s headlines: bland iterations of the ones from the day before, with little or no bearing on his life. The newscaster’s voice faded into so much white noise. His mind wandered.

Forty years old.

Had it really snuck up on him this quickly? That was the problem with being a doctor: By the time you soldiered through your education and training, and finally found a real job, it was practically time to retire. All told, his own training had taken him, what … twelve years? But he loved neurosurgery, from the time he was a kid he’d wanted to be a brain surgeon, so his sacrifices had always struck him as irrelevant. He didn’t even think of them as sacrifices. They were choices, his choices, and he didn’t regret them. He didn’t believe in second guesses. Monday morning quarterbacking was worthless.

And yet.

Second guesses and doubts were what lately had been slipping into his head. They nibbled at his psyche, exhorted him to reconsider some of his irrational life choices. The ones he’d made in his love life.

The ones about Rita.

But what wasn’t irrational about love?

It had been nearly a year now, one year since she’d clawed his heart out of his chest for no apparent reason other than that she could. People said time healed all wounds. What a crock. Time healed nothing. But was a year time enough, if not for healing, to at least accept the way things were? To acknowledge that Rita really was done with him and for him to move on with his life?