“Josh called. Again,” her mother said from the kitchen. Amber thought tonight she might call him back. She didn’t like not having a boyfriend. As she walked toward the kitchen, she wondered suddenly if Marshall Crosby had been there to see Justin at all.
7
Rinsing the dishes, Maggie cut her finger on a chip in one of the dinner plates, and she bled into the soapy water. It looked like nothing, little more than a paper cut, but she couldn’t stop the bleeding. She put her finger in her mouth, tasting the salty sweetness of her blood, a little soap. The offending dish was a piece from the casual dining set they’d received at their wedding, a discontinued line of Royal Doulton stoneware. She wondered how it had chipped.
“You okay?” asked Jones, coming up behind her.
“Yeah,” she said, showing him her finger. He lifted it to his mouth and gave it a little kiss. Then he finished loading the dishes in the dishwasher as she pressed a dry napkin against the cut until the bleeding stopped. She wiped the countertop with a tattered old dishrag that needed replacing, passing it quickly over the appliances, too, just like she would have had to do in her mother’s home. Keep on top of the surfaces and your house will always look clean, her mother would say. Upstairs, Ricky’s music had stopped. He’d never come down for dinner, and Jones had told her to leave him alone, let him sulk it out-whatever it was.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and Charlene dumped him,” Jones said, starting the dishwasher.
“Jones.”
“Well?”
He poured them each a glass of red wine, the merlot they’d opened last night, and she followed him out to the deck, even though she thought it was too cold to sit outside. She didn’t like to miss their ritual if she could help it. Maybe it was the wine, or the semidark in which they sat, but in recent years, this place after dinner was where he was most open, most relaxed. Later, the television would go on and he’d blank out. Maybe she’d sit beside him and watch whatever he had on-usually something on the Discovery or History Channel; he wasn’t into sports, didn’t like other television shows, or even movies for that matter. Or maybe she’d go to bed and read or maybe, if she had a lot of paperwork, back to her office.
She’d told him about Marshall over dinner, the scene in her office, how he’d appeared across the street. She’d mentioned Travis as well, his new business endeavor.
“As if anyone in this town would hire Travis Crosby,” said Jones. “You’d have to be the biggest moron alive to bring that guy into your business.”
Her husband had always disliked Travis, though she remembered that in high school they’d played on the lacrosse team together, been occasional friends. They’d both joined the police department in the same year, Travis staying on the street, Jones moving over to the small detective division and eventually rising to head detective, a post he’d held for ten years.
Travis had been pulled over on the interstate, driving the wrong way at more than eighty miles an hour, blood alcohol over 0.2, his service revolver exposed on the seat beside him. Had he been in The Hollows, the incident would have been swept aside. But he was unlucky enough to run into a state trooper. It was his third offense in a decade, and this meant mandatory jail time, as well as the loss of his job.
“I don’t know if that guy is more dangerous on or off the job. But I guess we’ll see soon enough,” said Jones.
“I’m worried about Marshall.”
“You do what you can for him, Mags. But keep your distance. You’re his doctor, not his friend. It’s a professional relationship.”
He was right, but she still bristled at the comment. She quashed the urge to snap at him. You think I don’t know how to keep a professional distance? But after the fight last night, she was weary of angry words. It had started with Ricky about the tattoo, then morphed into something larger between the two of them. It was the old argument about how he was too hard and she was too easy, how she always took Ricky’s side and he was always the bad guy. Thinking about it, she couldn’t even remember who said what, the memory was just an angry blur, like a landscape seen through the window of a car driving too fast. They’d been up late arguing and finally come to grudging peace before bed. She didn’t want another night like that.
He put a hand on her arm. “Don’t be mad,” he said. “I know you care about your patients. I just need you to protect yourself, too.”
Her annoyance dissolved instantly. “I know,” she said. “You’re right.”
She knew where the professional line was in terms of behavior, of course. But she didn’t seem to have a stopgap internally, didn’t always know when or how to stop caring on a personal level. It left her feeling drained sometimes, though she was better at protecting herself than she had been when she was younger.
“What about you?” she asked. She shifted in her seat, thinking the cushions were getting stiff and needed replacing. “Are you doing okay?”
There were leaves floating in the pool. They’d need to have someone out to clean and winterize, cover it for the season. Every autumn, she thought about her private promise to swim laps every day in the summer, enjoy the pool more on the weekends. And at the end of every season, she looked back with regret, thinking she could count on the fingers of one hand the times she’d done either.
“I’m just tired,” he said. “Just really tired.”
In the dim light, she watched him. He had his head back on the chair, looking up at the stars. She could already tell by the set of his jaw, the way his arms were folded across his body, that he wouldn’t say more. She drained her glass and thought about another, then noticed that the cut on her finger had started to bleed again.
She got up to bandage it, and when she returned, Jones had already gone inside. She found him lying on the couch, the remote in his hand.
“Want to watch anything?” he asked. But she knew he’d just flip through the channels until he found something that interested him.
“No,” she said. “Maybe I’ll just catch up on some paperwork.”
But he was already tuned out, just gave her a little nod. She stood in the doorway a minute, watched him settle in. She went upstairs and listened at Ricky’s door, heard him singing along to something on his headphones. She worried that he hadn’t eaten but figured he’d know there was pizza downstairs when he got hungry. Then she drifted back to her office, unlocking that door, moving through quietly, and closing it behind her.
Their house was always dark, not like at Leila and Mark’s, where every light was always shining and there was a television going in one room, a radio playing in another. Everyone was always talking, yelling from room to room, his cousins were in and out, chatting on the phone, speaking in loud voices, laughing, arguing, goofing around.
Boys, please, Leila’s eternal plea. The noise. But she never really sounded angry, not in the way he was used to. Even when she was scolding, she always seemed on the verge of laughing.
The refrigerator was always full to bursting; there was always something simmering on the stove. There was no room for dark or quiet or cold in that house.
“It’s a three-ring circus over there,” his father complained. “How did you stand it?”
“The circus is fun, Dad. People laugh and have a good time.” He’d tried that good-natured joking around that was acceptable at his aunt’s house. But it didn’t work with his dad.
“The circus is for idiots.” His father’s words had the sting of a hard slap. Then, as if the slag weren’t already implied, “You must have felt right at home.”
Marshall had felt right at home. He really had. But when the judge had asked him where he wanted to live, he’d said, “I want to be with my dad.” And he had wanted that.