The Other Mrs.(6)

Inside, the blue building no longer resembles a house. Walls have been put up and knocked down to create a reception desk, exam rooms, a lobby. There’s a smell to the building, something heavy and damp. It clings to me even after I leave. Will smells it, too. It doesn’t help that Emma, the receptionist, is a smoker, consuming about a pack a day of cigarettes. Though she smokes outside, she hangs her coat on the same rack as mine. The smell roves from coat to coat.

Will looks curiously at me some nights after I’ve come home. He asks, Have you been smoking? I might as well be for the smell of nicotine and tobacco that follows me home.

Of course not, I’ve told him. You know I don’t smoke, and then I tell him about Emma.

Leave your coat out. I’ll wash it, Will has told me countless times. I do and he washes it, but it makes no difference because the next day it happens all over again.

Today I step into the clinic to find Joyce, the head nurse, and Emma waiting for me.

“You’re late,” Joyce says, but if I am, I’m only a minute late. Joyce must be sixty-five years old, close to retirement, and a bit of a shrew. She’s been here far longer than either Emma or me, which makes her top dog at the clinic, in her mind at least. “Didn’t they teach you punctuality where you came from?” she asks.

I’ve found that the minds of the people are as small as the island itself.

I step past her and start my day.

  Hours later, I’m with a patient when I see Will’s face surface on my cell phone, five feet away. It’s silenced. I can’t hear the phone’s ring, though Will’s name appears above the picture of him: the attractive, chiseled face, the bright hazel eyes. He’s handsome, in a take-your-breath-away way, and I think that it’s the eyes. Or maybe the fact that at forty, he could still pass for twenty-five. Will wears his dark hair long, swept back into a low bun that’s growing in popularity these days, giving off an intellectual, hipster vibe that his students seem to like.

I ignore the image of Will on my phone and attend to my patient, a forty-three-year-old woman presenting with a fever, chest pain, a cough. Undoubtedly bronchitis. But still, I press my stethoscope to her lungs for a listen.

I practiced emergency medicine for years before coming here. There, at a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in the heart of Chicago, I went into each shift without any idea of what I might see, every patient coming in in distress. The victims of multiple-vehicle collisions, women hemorrhaging excessively following a home birth, three-hundred-pound men in the midst of a psychotic break. It was tense and dramatic. There, in a constant state of high alert, I felt alive.

Here, it is different. Here, every day I know what I will see, the same rotation of bronchitis, diarrhea and warts.

When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it, I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind engineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for another day of school.

It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl. There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin, are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the unkempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige. It’s actually quite lovely.

Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before. His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school. As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table working on math homework last night, for example, and Imogen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name on the front of it, commenting: Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.

Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The word fuck is not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.

This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the expertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she did, I was certain her eyes came to me.

Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?

Or was she just staring vacantly into space?

I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.

“It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says, “It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who lives down the street?

“What about the Nilssons?” I ask, but my mind has trouble going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the single seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him. On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.