The Queen of Hearts(80)

Tenderness engulfed me. Emma was finally reaching out! Whatever had happened with Graham, at least she’d get it off her chest, and I would be there for her.

“Okay,” I told her. “I’ll be there tonight, late, once it calms down. And I got the name of a doctor who can help you too. Everything’s gonna be okay, Emma. I’m with you, no matter what.”

Emma sounded sad. “Don’t say that,” she said, “until you’ve heard what I have to say.”





Chapter Thirty-four


    AN ETERNAL GASP


   Zadie, Present Day


A shining disk of moon hung suspended above Nick, Emma, and me, emerging in the little window of night sky visible between the spiky tops of the skyscrapers. The three of us stood voiceless in the courtyard of the Ritz as I looked at the object Nick had handed me.

It was a photograph.

After thrusting it into my hand, Nick took a small step backward, breathing like an angry elephant. I ignored him and stared at the picture in my hand, my disbelief so profound it seemed possible the image would rearrange itself into something else. But the people in the photograph remained immutable, even though I stared until they blurred into fuzzy blobs.

The picture was old; it curled at the corners. Years of someone’s fingerprints rubbing across it had dulled the glossy sheen of the photographic paper, but the image was still visible. Taken from the vantage point of someone standing in a doorway, it showed a cheap, utilitarian twin bed, with a twist of dingy sheets. The subjects of the photo—standing in front of the bed—had clearly been photographed against their will; both of them faced the camera, the slight blurring of their torsos indicating motion as if they’d just heaved themselves upright. The woman looked disheveled: her hair blowsy and askew, her face red, her hands clutched defensively just above her unbuttoned shirt. Mascara was beginning to pool underneath her eyes, giving her a trampy, intoxicated look. Additional moisture leaked out of her nose; her mouth was frozen in an eternal gasp.

Emma.

Nick fared better; his face blended surprise with a little hostility, but I knew him well enough to recognize a calculating appraisal too. I’d be willing to bet if another picture had been snapped a moment later, his expression would have morphed to a grinning, sheepish okay-dude-you-caught-me look.

Emma’s skin shone with the kind of dewy radiance you never see in people over thirty, no matter how good they look. Her hair tumbled down her back in a luxuriant gold waterfall, errant wisps dive-bombing across her horror-struck face. I cast my mind back, rewinding through memories like an unspooling reel of film, until I reached our third year of medical school: she’d cut her hair just after Graham died, and she’d never grown it long again.

I became aware of my breathing, which was harsh, bullish, scary. I was trembling, an unforeseen rage somehow intensifying even as it became dwarfed by a miserable all-encompassing feeling with no name. This was a betrayal I had never seen coming.

A tear fell from my eye and landed on Emma’s beautiful, traitorous twenty-four-year-old face, smearing it into an unrecognizable blot. I swiped my thumb across the teardrop, melting Nick’s face as well, and handed the photo back to him. “Here you go,” I said.

“Zadie, wait,” he said.

“No, no, no,” I yelled, stumbling away from them. I kicked off my high heels and bent to retrieve them. “You two deserve each other. Why would you show me this? Why did you even bring it here? Did you plan this?”

To his credit, he looked chastened. “I didn’t plan to show it to you,” he said. “I always carry it.”

This stopped me. I straightened up. “Why?”

He shifted his eyes slightly in Emma’s direction. She stood in exactly the same position she’d been in when Nick first handed me the picture, an unblinking statue.

“To remind myself,” he said, so quietly I had to strain to hear him, “of the photographer.”

“Who was the photographer?” I asked, but even before he spoke, I knew the answer.

Graham.





Chapter Thirty-five


STOP HITTING ON MY MED STUDENT





Late Autumn, 1999: Louisville, Kentucky


   Zadie


I returned from my call with Emma preoccupied but still eager to see more patients. Up next: a soft-spoken biology teacher in his early forties who said he’d coughed up some blood. “You get his chest X-ray back?” Dr. Tamara asked, rocking back and forth on her heels a little.

“It’s up on the board,” I said, gesturing toward the radiology reading area.

“And?”

“It’s normal?”

“Hmmm. Okay. Order a scan. What’s up next?”

“A kid with a bean in his nose. I’ve got the nasal speculum, forceps, lidocaine ointment, and a teeny bendable retractor. Oh, and some cautery sticks, in case of bleeding. I took a peek, but it’s hard to see and this kid is hysterical. I’m concerned we may have to sedate him.”

“Well, aren’t you the little Boy Scout? Giddyap.”

We entered. The child, who was blond and about three, caught sight of me and pointed a pudgy accusatory finger. “No more her!”

The mother eyed us. She was young, with fluorescent bleached hair and a tattoo of what appeared to be a crack pipe on her forearm. “Quit that hollerin’,” she mumbled to Nose Bean.