On Rotation(85)

“I get how Camila must’ve felt, you know,” I managed. “About not believing that you ever actually loved her. I think you want to love me. But I don’t think you know how.”

The last vestiges of Ricky’s control snapped. I could see the transition happen in his eyes, like an elastic band pulled too tight, or a fuse running out.

“Are you throwing that in my face right now, Angie? Really?” he said. “I thought you were better than that.”

I winced, huddling myself closer.

“I guess we don’t really know each other as well as we thought,” I said, feeling the maw in my chest burst open as I said the words. Then I sighed. “This clearly isn’t going to work.”

“Wow,” Ricky said. Before this, I had thought of his anger as cold, but this time it raged red hot, flaring like a match over kerosene. I looked down at my lap, watching my tears fall in angry splotches. Then he crossed the room, snatching his jeans from the other side of my bed and tugging them over his hips. I kept my gaze determinedly forward as he dressed, focusing on my breathing as he reached past me to retrieve his phone and stuff it into his pocket. He pulled his shirt over his head and when he was done, he settled in front of me, staring determinedly at the space between us.

“Well, this didn’t last very long,” he said bitterly. “I guess I’ll see myself out.”

I heard the warning in his tone. This is your last chance, he was saying. Take it or leave it. And I wanted to take it, more than anything. I knew that I could still do the easier thing and pick him. And then what? Spend the next year and some change living in fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop? Having any of my concerns met with annoyance instead of understanding? No. Enough. Ricky had made his choice the moment he’d decided to leave me high and dry to sit at Camila’s side, and now I was making mine.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll lock the door behind you.”

I don’t know how long Ricky stood there, waiting for me to speak. As the time passed, I felt the bluster of his anger fade, watched his shoulders begin to droop. By the end, he looked like a shell of himself, haunted and lost. Then he swallowed, and his expression hardened.

“Fine,” he said. “Okay. Fine.”

Then he stepped out of my bedroom, and then out through my front door. I expected it to slam, but instead it clicked shut. It seemed like an inglorious way for our saga to end, with a sigh instead of a bang.





Twenty-Four




“Trust who? The doctors?” Mr. Jenkins, my newest patient, said. He let out a booming laugh that seemed to shake the entire room. “Why on Earth would I do that?”

I smiled, scooting myself closer to the edge of the folding chair I had propped up next to his hospital bed. My cell phone was balanced precariously on the end of my clipboard, recording. When I’d first approached Mr. Jenkins with a request to interview him for my project, he’d looked skeptical. “You folks never stop asking questions, do you?” he’d said wearily. But when I broached the topic of the interview, he had taken pause, then waved me over and signed a form consenting to be enrolled and recorded with a flourish. And like with most of the patients I had interviewed thus far, Mr. Jenkins seemed to burst forward with thoughts. After all, no one had thought to ask him his opinions about doctors’ communication practices, especially not in regard to whether they were discriminatory.

“You’re here, in the hospital,” I said conversationally. “You’re accepting care from the physicians. But you don’t trust them?”

“I don’t have a choice,” Mr. Jenkins said. He leaned back in his hospital bed, tilting his head up toward the monitor. “I can’t fix me, can I? Now, don’t get me wrong. Everybody here has been real nice. Veronica,” he said, referring to his nurse, “has been really attentive. But I don’t trust anybody in this place but God.” He gave me a critical stare. “You’re from the motherland, aren’t you?”

I nodded, and, satisfied with his assessment, Mr. Jenkins smiled to himself.

“It’s the skin,” he declared. “You’ve got that smooth, dark, African skin. Beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Thank you.”

“What I mean is that I’m sure you and your family are new to this country. You might not know all about what they did to us here.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose. “My mother died in the basement of this hospital, back in sixty-three. She came here for help, and they threw her into the back somewhere and forgot about her. Her bowels ruptured. She was thirty-two.” He held my gaze for a long moment, his old pain renewed. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back on his bed. “So no, to answer your question. I don’t trust the doctors. I just lay here and pray that the good Lord will guide them to treat me right.”

I walked out of Mr. Jenkins’s room half an hour later, our conversation saved and uploaded to the cloud. It was late, almost eight o’clock at night, and as I trudged back to the workroom I went through my mental checklist. I needed to stop by Dr. Reed’s office to put Mr. Jenkins’s paper consent form in our folder. I had to forward his recorded interview to the transcription company and check my email to see whether they had sent me any completed transcripts of my prior interviews.