The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage Read Free Book Online Page B

cafeteria. He wants to look at her, he says. He wants to see her face.
     
     
    For a moment she considers getting into the car and driving away forever. Sifting through locations like a game of solitaire, she can’t imagine which to pick, where she’d go. It doesn’t matter, she realizes, because Reverend Tim could find her anywhere. He’s got people all over the country who are willing to help him. Just name a state, he’d told her once, and I can find somebody who’s ready to demonstrate his commitment to Jesus.
     
     
    The cafeteria is empty at this hour. There is a table with three nurses drinking coffee, another where a couple of orderlies are sitting. She buys a cup of tea and sits by the picture window. Reverend Tim appears at her side as if out of thin air, and she tries to hide the fact that he has startled her. He joins her at the table with his glass of tomato juice. The juice spills a little on account of his limp. They sit for a moment.
     
     
    “You all right?” he asks. He reaches across the table and takes her hand. “You’re cold.”
     
     
    “I’m scared.”
     
     
    “You don’t have to be scared, beauty.”
     
     
    She has always liked him calling her that, just the sound of it, plush and exotic as a kumquat. Beauty. Like horses dancing. Like the sudden miraculous flash of a deer. But now it makes her stomach flip. The first time she met him she felt it: a jolt, like a cattle prod. The whisper in his eyes that said trust me. A kind of power; otherworldly. Like a saint. She’d seen an open door in Reverend Tim and walked right through it.
     
     
    “When I start questioning my life,” he tells her, “all I have to do is picture all those innocent babies. That’s all I do. And I feel justified.” He drinks the juice in one gulp and sets the glass soundlessly on the table. “I suggest you stay home for a while. Be a good wife.”
     
     
     
Lydia drives home on empty back roads, speeding. The snow has stopped and the roads are clear. She warms to the thrill of speed, the rushing wind, the shadows of heavy trees whispering across the glass. It is almost unbearably beautiful to see the heavy longing of the wet brown hills. Longing to be green and swollen and fragrant with wildflowers. Longing to be trampled by children. Oh, to be a child. To run breathlessly up a great hill with the sweat spilling down your back and the smell of raw black earth and dirty sunlight. To be a child at the top of the hill where the sky spreads itself out behind you like a great blue banner.
     
     
    Someone pounding on the window. A black leather fist. A cop. I’m caught, she thinks, dreamily, not without relief. Like a wriggling fish. Caught.
     
     
    “You all right, ma’am?”
     
     
    Lydia rolls down her window, sits back. She feels as if she’s suffocating. I can’t breathe, she thinks, but she smiles and tells the cop she’s fine.
     
     
    “Looks to me you drove off the road for some reason.”
     
     
    “I must have fallen asleep.”
     
     
    He glances around inside the car. Her black wig sits beside her on the seat, curled up like a sleeping cat. “I’m gonna have to ask you to get out.”
     
     
    She wonders if her shoes are still on, she can’t remember, and has suddenly lost all feeling in her legs. Wondering if she will fall, she gets out and steps on the hard ground, her toes spreading out inside her black boots. She is wearing galoshes she has owned since high school, there is a hole in the bottom of one of them and she can feel the wet ground seeping into her sock. I am dressed for the weather, she reminds herself, even though the snow is gone and the sun hisses down. The cop holds up a finger, making her follow it with her eyes. It gives her a headache, but she has no trouble impressing him with her abilities. She can walk the straight line, too.
     
     
    “What happened, ma’am? Any idea?”
     
     
    “The sun got in my eyes. There’s a glare.”
     
     
    “Let me take a