"Sympathy Between Humans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Compton Jodi)18A loose-limbed teenage boy ambled by in the hallway of the 26th floor of the north tower. His eyes met mine and flicked away; he went on to the apartment at the end of the hall. I was in front of 2605, where I’d knocked on the door, but gotten no answer. I tried again. Then Cicero opened the door, wet-haired, a towel held half-crumpled in one hand. His shirt was damp where he’d obviously pulled it on hastily, without adequately drying the skin underneath. “Is this a bad time?” I said. “No, no,” he said. “Come on in.” Inside, a smell of Ivory soap and steam had drifted into his living room. I said, “Sorry, I’m empty-handed tonight.” “You don’t have to bring me anything to come over here,” Cicero said. “But am I right in guessing that while you didn’t bring a bottle this time, you haven’t been abstaining tonight? I thought I detected a semiliquid A knock on the door interrupted him. Cicero rolled to the door and opened it partway. “I burned my arm,” a female voice said. Cicero rolled back, and his patient entered. She was a thin white woman with lank brown hair, dressed in a disjointed ensemble of spaghetti-strapped satin camisole over sweatpants, and she held a wet paper towel to her arm. “How’d this happen, Darlene?” Cicero asked. “Cooking,” she said, and looked at me. But I saw her eyes, and knew from her pinpoint pupils that drugs were probably at the root of whatever kitchen accident she’d had. Cicero turned to me. “Sarah, would you mind waiting in the other room?” I nodded agreement and withdrew into his bedroom. If I knew him, this would take longer than just cleaning the burn and putting a topical salve on it; I doubted he’d missed her contracted pupils any more than I had, and he would probably follow treatment with advice on where to seek drug-dependency counseling. The blinds of the window were up, as always, and the lights of Minneapolis lay below; I went over to look down. Cicero ’s voice and Darlene’s were faint through the bedroom door. Other than that, nothing. It was surprising how thick the walls of this building were. There were people around us, but I heard none of their activities. Other than hearing Fidelio bark once, my visits here had been like coming to someplace high atop a mountain. Normally, it was peaceful. Tonight, it was unnerving. Roz had been a great distraction, as had the noise and crowd of the bar and the war stories we’d told each other. But now the question I’d been pushing from my mind came back to me, unappeased. What would happen if the BCA found Stewart’s blood in my car? To be questioned as a primary suspect in Royce Stewart’s death had been painful. To see the distrust in the faces of some of my colleagues, and the perverse approval in the eyes of others- that had been distressing. But ultimately, I’d always had an escape clause where Shorty was concerned. I’d always known that if I were arrested or indicted, Genevieve would come back and tell the truth. I’d still be a conspirator in Shorty’s death, but not an accused murderer. Now an unhappy possibility had arisen. Was it possible that Genevieve’s confession wouldn’t be enough? If all the physical evidence pointed to me, and so did all the witness testimony from Blue Earth, would a grand jury weigh Gen’s unlikely claim of guilt against the preponderance of evidence, and send me to trial instead? Once that happened, there would be very little to keep a jury from convicting me. When I’d first been questioned by detectives from Faribault County, lying to protect Genevieve had seemed natural and right. Now I wondered if I hadn’t dug for myself a deeper hole than I’d ever realized. The bedroom door opened, and I turned from the window. “Hey,” Cicero said from the doorway, “sorry about that.” “It’s your job,” I said. “Are you hungry?” I realized that I was. “How did you know that?” “Med school,” Cicero said. “We’re taught to catch malnutrition early. What did you have for dinner?” “Four whiskey sours, three beers, and half a basket of potato wedges,” I admitted. “If there’s a more balanced meal than that, I haven’t heard of it,” Cicero said. “Let me make you some coffee and see what I’ve got in the way of food.” I frowned. He was far from rich; I wasn’t even sure he was solvent. “You shouldn’t waste your food on me,” I said. “Enjoy it and it won’t be a waste,” Cicero said. He fixed me a tomato-and-avocado sandwich with a cup of coffee; we went back into his bedroom while I ate. After I was mostly done, Cicero asked, “So, why were we drinking tonight?” “Why is it that doctors always say “It suggests empathy,” Cicero said. “You weren’t celebrating, were you?” “No,” I said. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing, really.” I lifted the mug of coffee as if it would protect me from his curiosity. “Like hell. What’s wrong?” I licked a drop of tomato-stained mayonnaise from my finger. “That was a really good sandwich,” I said. “Thank you. What’s wrong?” I sighed. “It’s complicated,” I said. “It has to do with what my husband went to prison for, and… I just thought I was doing the right thing, and now I’m not so sure. Maybe you can understand that. What am I saying, of course you can.” I gave him a knowing look. “That’s how you lost your license, isn’t it? Assisted suicide. You helped a terminally ill patient to die, right?” Cicero lifted an eyebrow. “How do you know that?” “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” I said. “Compassion. It’s your fatal flaw.” “Sexual misconduct,” he said. “What?” I asked. “I lost my license for sexual misconduct with a patient.” “You’re joking,” I said. “Sarah,” he reproved me, “why on earth would I make a joke about something like that?” Chastised, I took refuge in my coffee once again. I drank, then spoke more carefully. “But it was a misunderstanding, right?” I said. “A false accusation?” “No,” Cicero said. “It was sexual misconduct, period.” I wanted to say, “She came into the ER one night on a suicide attempt,” Cicero said. “She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with waist-length blond hair. I could see that the suicide attempt was ambivalent. She’d cut her wrists, but only shallowly. I got her admitted to the crisis unit, and during the process, she told me her story. “She was British, had come to New York at 16 to study ballet. There was a rift in her family: her mother was dead, and she didn’t talk much anymore to her father and sister. She’d wanted to start a new life in the States, but things didn’t go well. She’d started to struggle with her weight, which meant anorexia and amphetamines, and then alcohol and downers to cope with all the stress. She had a series of boyfriends, none of whom treated her well, and when her career evaporated, she’d married the worst of them, a man with a more serious drug problem than she had. She had two babies in quick succession, and quit drugs for her children’s sake, but her husband never did, nor was he faithful. One day she woke up and realized she was trapped in a strange city and a loveless marriage, with two small children and no viable skills. That was when she decided her kids would be better off without her. “She was obviously troubled, but to me it seemed that something in her was struggling to survive, suicidal ideation or not. I was hopeful about her case, but after I got her a bed in the psych ward, I didn’t hear anything about her again. “She never forgot me, though. One night, about six months later, she left me three phone messages at the ER. I called her and found out that she was in crisis again. Her husband, who’d been a needle user, had told her he was HIV positive and didn’t think he could support her or the kids anymore, then took some cash and the car and left. She hadn’t heard from him in two days. She couldn’t come in to the ER, because she had no car and no one to watch her babies, but she badly needed someone to talk to, in person, not over a crisis line. She asked if I could come over.” Cicero rubbed his temple, remembering. “I can remember to the minute how long I had before I got off work. Forty-two minutes; there was a digital clock hanging in the corner. I looked at it and told her I’d be there soon.” It wasn’t right that I was feeling angry at this woman. My anger should have been focused on Cicero. I could see how he must have appeared to her: tall, competent, caring, handsome, and sworn to first do no harm. But instead I felt a spark of anger at the unknown, needy, grasping woman who I knew was about to drag Cicero into a trap that would cost him his job, his license, and eventually his legs. “On the way over,” Cicero went on, “I’d been thinking about what I would tell her: that she had to get tested for HIV, places where she could get help taking care of her children. But she didn’t want to talk about her problems when I got there. She was composed, making tea in her kitchen in this long white nightgown. She didn’t seem crazy, and she didn’t seem suicidal. If she had, everything would have gone differently.” I felt a little chill when Cicero said the word “She told me about her childhood, ballet, and England. In the middle of this reminiscing, she said it was ironic that she’d married her husband in order to stay in America after her visa expired. Now all she wanted was to be in London again, and she was afraid that was never going to happen. She said she felt like her life was over at age 22.” The building’s air-conditioning kicked in, noisy in the silence between his words. “It seemed very, very natural,” Cicero said, “to put my arms around her and hold her.” He said no more, bringing the curtain down on the first act of a two-act story. “She could have been HIV positive,” I reminded him, as if the danger hadn’t long passed, one way or another. “I knew that,” Cicero said. “Did you ever read “Once,” I said. “Did you notice the oddly sexual imagery in Ophelia’s burial, how the queen compares a bridal bed to a grave?” “What are you saying?” “That sometimes proximity to death can be erotic. She was Ophelia to me. I wanted to lie down in her grave and bring her back to life.” “So I was right the first time,” I said. “It was compassion.” “If you can be compassionate and selfish at the same time,” Cicero said. “If she needed to feel alive, I needed that, too. In those days, sometimes I’d leave work so numb from what I’d been doing all night that I felt like a walking dead man. That was before I realized how lucky I was just to be walking.” He said this very simply, without self-pity. “I was 34 then. I told myself the same lie a lot of ER staff tell themselves: I didn’t have time for a relationship, that no woman would tolerate the crazy hours or understand the stress I was under. Other women in the ER did, and I hooked up with a few of them, but those were just friendly trysts. Relief sex, we called it sometimes. And I had some one-night stands with women I met in bars. Underneath it all, I was probably pretty goddamned lonely, although I couldn’t have seen it back then.” I was sitting on the floor; now I slid closer to him so that I could take his hand. Cicero let me, but he said, “Don’t feel sorry for me. I deserved everything that happened next. Her sister came over from Manchester and helped her file a lawsuit against the hospital. In the hearings, a lot of things came out that I hadn’t known. Since her suicide attempt, this woman had been seeing a psychiatrist, and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She had a terrible time with men, couldn’t trust them, but at the same time had been known to fixate on men she barely knew, as potential lovers and saviors. She’d been transferred to a female psychiatrist after transference had caused problems with a male therapist.” “You didn’t know any of that,” I said. Cicero ’s expression told me I should have known better. “The mentally ill cannot be expected to identify themselves as ill.” “I just meant, it seems like an awfully harsh punishment for what you did.” “ ‘Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick,’ ” Cicero said. “It’s part of the Oath.” I looked down into my empty coffee cup. “Is it guilt, then, that makes you keep seeing patients under these circumstances?” I indicated the small and underequipped exam room that lay beyond his bedroom door. Cicero considered that. “Not really,” he said. “It’s selfishness, almost. You know how some dogs- herding dogs, rescue dogs- are bred to work? Even when they’re raised as house pets, they wake up in the morning and look at a human to say, I caught the last bus home, sometime after midnight. As I got on, a young woman got off at the back exit. Just as she did, our eyes met. Ghislaine, for once without Shadrick, eyed me quite curiously for a long moment before she dropped down the back steps and through the doors. |
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