Otto did well in school. He wasn’t a straight A student, but average was good enough for him and Will and me. His grades fell in the B/C range. He did his homework and turned it in on time. He never slept through class. His teachers liked him, and only ever had one complaint: they’d like to see Otto participate more.
I didn’t overlook the warning signs because there were none to overlook.
I stare at the house now, waiting for Otto to come. After four minutes, my eyes give up on the front door. As they do, something out the car window catches my eye. Mr. Nilsson pushing Mrs. Nilsson in her wheelchair, down the street. The slope is steep; it takes great effort to hang on to the rubbery handles of the wheelchair. He walks slowly, more on the heels of his feet, as if they are car brakes and he’s riding the brakes all the way down the street.
Not yet seven twenty in the morning, and they’re both completely done up, him in twill slacks and a sweater, her in some sort of knit set where everything is a light pink. Her hair is curled, tightly woven and set with spray, and I think of him, scrupulously wrapping each lock of hair around a roller and securing the pin. Poppy is her name, I think. His might be Charles. Or George.
Right before our home, Mr. Nilsson makes a diagonal turn, going to the opposite side of the street from ours.
As he does, his eyes remain on the rear of my car where the exhaust comes out in clouds.
All at once the sound of last night’s siren returns to me, the waning bellow of it as it passed by our home and disappeared somewhere down the street.
A dull pain forms in the pit of my stomach, but I don’t know why.
The drive from the ferry dock to the medical clinic is short, only a handful of blocks. It takes less than five minutes from the time I drop Otto off until I pull up to the humble, low-slung blue building that was once a house.
From the front, it still resembles a house, though the back opens up far wider than any home ever would, attaching to a low-cost independent living center for senior citizens with easy access to our medical services. Long ago someone donated their home for the clinic. Years later, the independent living center was an addition.
The state of Maine is home to some four thousand islands. I didn’t know this before we arrived. There’s a dearth of doctors on the more rural of them, such as this one. Many of the older physicians are in the process of retiring, leaving vacancies that prove difficult to fill.
The isolation of island living isn’t for everyone, present company included. There’s something unsettling in knowing that when the last ferry leaves for the night, we’re quite literally trapped. Even in daylight, the island is rocky around its edges, overcome with tall pines that make it suffocating and small. When winter comes, as it soon will, the harsh weather will shut much of the island down, and the bay around us may freeze, trapping us here.
Will and I got our house for free. We got a tax credit for me to work at the clinic. I said no to the idea, but Will said yes, though it wasn’t the money we needed. My background is in emergency medicine. I’m not board-certified in general practice, though I have a temporary license while I go through the process of becoming fully licensed in Maine.
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