Eight-thirty. Not too bad. The last time she had looked it was only six "Hello?"
"Kate? " It was Ellen. "Hi. How're you feeling?"
"I got concerned when you didn't stop by this morning, and I called your office. Her voice was quite hoarse, her speech distorted. "When you didn't answer I rang the department secretary. Kate, what's the matter?
Are you sick?"
"Hey, wait a minute, now. Let us not forget who is the patient here and who is the doctor, okay?"
"Kate, be serious. She said she didn't know what day you'd be back I…
I got frightened. They're giving me more blood, and now I have a tube down my nose. I think the inside of my Rtnmsrh h Qft bleeding."
"Shit, " Kate said softly. "What?"
"I said shit." rcu "Oh. Well, are you all right?"
Kate pulled a lie back at the last possible instant. "Actually, no," she said. "Physically I'm fine, but there's been trouble at work and here at home. I've been asked to take some time off while my department head sorts through some problems with a biopsy."
"Oh, Kate. And here I am all wrapped up in my own problems. I'm there anything I can do? "
"No, just be strong and get well, that's all."
Don't talk to me, Katey. Talk to these little platelets or whatever the re called. They're the ones who are screwing up. You said trouble Stop asking about me, dammit You're bleeding to death! "I'm afraid re's wife and his father in all their infinite wisdom have put him in a position where he's going to have to choose between them " At the moment, she began wondering where he was. Upstairs in the guest room, perhaps? Maybe still on the couch. She listened for a telltale sound, but there was only heavy silence. "You versus Win? " Ellen said. "No contest. Thank goodness. I thought it was something serious." Her cheer was undermined by the weakness in her voice. "Listen, my friend, " Kate said. "I'll see you later today. I may be shut out of the pathology department, but I'm not shut out of the library. There are two Australian journals I'm expecting in from the NIH. Together, we're going to beat this. I promise you."
"I believe you, " Ellen said. "I really do. See you later, Doc." Kate set the receiver down gently, then slipped into a blue flannel nightshirt, a gift from Jared, and walked to the living room. Roscoe, who had materialized from under the bed, padded along beside her. She glanced through the doorway and then systematically checked the rest of the house. She had, as she feared, read the silence well. Jared had left. "Well, old shoe, " she said, scratching her dog behind one ear,
"it looks like you and me. How about a run together and then some shirred eggs for breakfast. Later, maybe we'll make love."
The letter, in Jared's careful printing, was on the kitchen table. He had taken their wedding picture from the mantel, and used it as a weight to keep the single sheet in place. Kate moved the photograph enough to read his words, but left it touching the page. It sounds so easy, so obvious, that I'm not sure I even listened when the minister said the words. "For better or for worse." It all sounds so easy until one day you stop and ask yourself, For whose better? For whose worse? What do I do when her better seems like my worse? Dammit, Kate, I'm forty years old and I feel like such a child. Do you know that in all the time she was alive, I never once heard my mother say no to my father? Some role model, huh? Next came Lisa-bright, beautiful, and imbued with absolutely no ambition or direction. I thought she would make a perfect wife. She cooked the soup and pinched back the coleus, and I kept her pipe filled with good dope and decided when we could afford to do what, and that was that. I still don't know why she ran off the way she did, and if another Lisa had come along, I probably would have married her in a snap. But another Lisa didn't. You did. Almost before I knew it, I had fallen in love with and marrsed a woman who had as rich and interesting and complicated a life outside of our marriage as I did. Probably, more so. After first mother and then Lisa, it was like moving to a foreign country for me. New customs. New mores. What do you mean I was wrong to assume we'd have the same last name? What do you mean I was | wrong to assume that you would be free to attend three rallies and a campaign dinner with me? What do you mean I should have asked first? What do you mean you've been involved in trouble at your job that might affect my career? I could go on all night listing my misguided assumptions in this marriage. It's as though I don't have the programming to adapt. Well, I may not have the programming, but I do have the desire. It's taken most of the night sitting here to feel sure of that. If what you've said is all true, I want to do whatever I can to help straighten it out. If what you've told me is not true, then I also want to face that issue and my commitment to you, and we'll get whatever kind of help is necessary. If we don't make it, it won't be because I ran away. I've gone to speak to my father and then, who knows, perhaps a chat with Norton Reese. Bear with me, Kate. It may say five years on the calendar, but this marriage business is still new stuff for me. I love you. I really do. Jared Kate reread the letter, laughing and crying at once. Jared's words, she knew, meant no more than a temporary reprieve, a respite from the nightmare.
Still, he had given her the one thing she needed most next to answers, time. Time to work through the events that were steamrolling her life.
"We're going to find out, Rose, " she said grimly. "We're going to find out who, and we're going to find out why."
A sharp bark sounded from the living room, and Kate realized that she had been talking to herself. Through the doorway, she could see Roscoe prancing uncomfortably by the door to the rear deck. "Oh, poor baby," she laughed. "I'm sorry." Focused on letting the dog out, she missed the slight movement outside the kitchen window and failed to sense the eyes watching her. She pulled open the slider, and Roscoe dashed out into a most incredible morning. The temperature, according to the thermometer by the door, was exactly freezing. Pat, lazy flakes, falling from a glaring, silver-white sky vanished into a ground fog that was as dense as any Kate could remember. Roscoe dashed across the deck, and completely disappeared into the shroud halfway down the steps to the yard. Kate estimated the height of the fog at three or four feet. Much of It, she guessed, was arising off the surface of nearby Green Pond, a small lake that because of warm underground feeders, was always late to freeze and early to thaw. Winter fog was not uncommon on the North Shore, especially around Essex, but this was spectacular. It was a morning just begging to be run through. She dressed and then stretched, sorting out the route they would run, mixing low spots and high hills and straight-aways along five miles of back roads. Wearing a gold watch cap and a high-visibility red sweatsuit, she trotted out the front door and whistled for Rosco. He was almost at her side before she could see him. "A fiver this morning, dog, " she said, as they moved up the sloping driveway and out of the fog. "Think you're mutt enough to handle it?"
At the end of the drive, she turned right. Had she mapped their route to the left, she might have wondered about the BMW, parked not particularly near anyone's house, and perhaps even noticed the blue Metropolitan Hospital parking sticker on the rear window. It was near perfect air for running, cold and still. To either side of the narrow roadway, the fog covered the forest floor like cotton batting. "Race pace, today, Rose," she said. "Eight-minute miles or less. And I'm not waiting for you, so keep up." In reality, she knew Roscoe could maintain her pace all day, and still stop from time to time to sniff out a shrub or two. After a quarter of a mile, they left the pavement and turned onto a plowed dirt road meandering along an active stream named on the maps as Martha's Brook. Kate loved crossing the picturesque, low-walled field stone bridges that spanned the water, in part, she had chosen this route because of them. By the end of the first mile, her thoughts had begun to separate themselves from the run. For the next two or three miles, she knew, her ideas would flow more freely, her imagination more clearly, than in any other situation. Following a kaleidoscope of notions, a kind of sorting out process, her mind settled on the breast biopsy. Perhaps under the stress of exhaustion, Ellen's deteriorating condition, and the rest of the chaos in her life, she actually had made a mistake. For a time, the grisly thought held sway, bringing with it a most unpleasant tightness in her gut. Gradually, though, the truth reappeared, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes of her self-doubt. The cells she had read had been, she was certain, cancerous. But if they had been, then somewhere a switch had been made and later reversed. But how? who? The broken cryostat was, she decided, part of the puzzle. Sheila? Possible.