by Mary Perdue
Fog hangs in the damp morning air when I pull the Mini Cooper into the physician’s parking section of the hospital garage. Grey and thick, it penetrates through the first-row spaces, wafting around the car, just like it did when I left the house a half hour ago. It’s five a.m., and I have a long day ahead – rounds here, then office appointments, then back here again, and even if nobody codes there’s no way I’ll make it home before Shea and Daphne are asleep. I’ll open a bottle of red and pass out on the couch in front of Conan with Margarita on my chest the way I did last night and every single fucking night of the year. Then I’ll put the dog out and let her back in before I stagger up to bed and fall asleep next to Shea, and if I try to touch her, she’ll just groan and turn her back to me. I hardly ever see my wife or daughter and I think they both like it that way.
Anyway, the fog was so thick on my way here I almost hit some guy on a bike crossing the Starbucks drive through lane after I got my daily dose of double espresso. Now, I sit in the parking garage sipping it because the truth is maybe I’m still just a little hung over. Before I even get out of the car, my cellphone buzzes. I don’t want to look at it. This early, it can’t be anything good.
It’s a text from Shea. She’s never up at this hour. She must have gotten out of bed right after I left, before it’s time to get Daphne ready for school, so I wouldn’t see her swallow some Xanax or Dilaudid or oxy that I know she has more of than she should, stockpiled beneath her underwear in a drawer, or hidden among her three thousand purses. She’s always in pain after the car wreck and having to close her practice. She’s got nothing to live for now, she says, except Daphne.
“You motherfucker I can’t believe you left this fucking mess for me,” her text says.
“Call me.”
I lock the car and walk to the hospital, take the elevator, open my locker and put on my coat. Nurses smile and say nice things while I try to decide how to answer my wife. I sit on the ratty couch in the break room and drain the espresso.
“Can’t talk now,” I type. “Give me a clue. What have I done?”
Maybe Shea just needs time to calm down, I think as I start rounds, hoping whatever happened isn’t really that bad. But I’m not even in front of my second patient before the phone buzzes again.
“Margarita drowned in fountain,” it says. “I can’t get her out. I don’t want Daphne to see.”
I pause in the hallway, debating whether to go on to the next patient or send another text. I promise myself I’ll just do this one patient and then answer Shea, but I end up seeing quite a few while the phone vibrates in my pocket. I picture Margarita in the fountain by our front door rolling around in the water, dead. I know I didn’t see her there when I left this morning. She’s an old blind Chihuahua with a skewed hind leg from a kid running over her with a bike back when Shea and I were both practicing and neither of us had time to take her to the vet. I got her as a present for Shea when Daphne was born twelve years ago. Daphne grew up with Margarita and loved her until she got bored with her, so now the dog mostly just lays around under our out of tune grand piano that nobody plays. Many times I’ve cleaned up dog shit in the foyer when I walk in at midnight. Margarita is always there, waiting for me, the one person in the house who does. She wags her little whip of a chihuahua tail and tries to jump on me and then falls over before I scoop her up and carry her outside to pee. But I can’t say I love Margarita either. I just put up with her the way Shea and Daphne put up with me. Still, I feel sorry for her when I settle on the couch at night and she tries to make a nest on my chest, her little ribcage fluttering like a bird’s, her tiny claws scratching my shirt, her one crooked tooth hanging down from her upper lip.
The phone buzzes again. Back in the break room, I read more texts. “You bastard I know you could come home if you really wanted to,” the last one says.
“I’m sorry, Shea,” I finally text. But that’s all. Whatever else I say will be wrong. I’m starting to get mad. Every minute I spend thinking about Margarita just puts me further behind, and there’s nothing I can do about it in the middle of rounds. I’m the only one bringing in money now and we’re both in debt up to our eyeballs from student loans we still haven’t paid off even though we’re both in our fifties, plus tuition for the Miss Priss School for Girls Shea insists Daphne go to, and all the expenses on our big old mansion Shea had to have with its leaky roof and cracking plaster and buckling floors and plumbing that’s always stopped up not to mention the green and moldy fountain Margarita must have fallen into.
I take a deep breath and try hard to remember what happened last night when I got home. I know I took Margarita out to pee. I know that. But did I fall asleep on the couch and forget to let her back in? Did she spend the whole night outside and fall in the fountain and drown? But if I didn’t let her back in, why didn’t I notice she wasn’t in the house this morning? Could she have already been dead in the fountain when I left, but I didn’t see her because of the fog and because I was in a hurry? I can say it doesn’t matter, but it does. One way or another, I forgot her.
Right then a nurse comes in all riled up because she needs new orders for a guy recovering from food poisoning whose pressure has spiked. I’m almost glad because it keeps me from thinking about the dog. But as soon as I leave the patient, I realize if I’d seen Margarita in the fountain this morning, I never would have left her like that. I would have fished her out, hidden her somewhere. Shea and Daphne might think she got lost or carried away by a hawk and then I’d be off the hook. I could have put her in a shoebox in the trunk of the Mini Cooper and buried her later. Angie Claire would have helped me out. She’ll do anything for me, which makes me feel even more guilty because I’m not in love with her and was thinking how I could break off with her when I got up this morning and maybe that’s part of why I forgot the dog.
*
After rounds, I drive to the office. My phone’s been buzzing all morning and I had to check it in case it was something medical, but when I see all the messages from Shea, I don’t read them. It’s now early afternoon and even though the fog’s disappeared I still can’t think straight. There’s a ton of patients waiting and they’ll all be pissed because I’m so late from rounds due to Shea accusing me of killing the dog. I’m not sure I’m innocent or guilty but either way nothing good is going to happen to me, the dog, Shea, Daphne or the entire world that is sitting in exam rooms waiting to fry my ass when I walk in. People always think you’re keeping them waiting because you don’t care. But the thing is, I care about them more than I care about myself.
Before I go inside, I force myself to read Shea’s text encyclopedia. She couldn’t get Margarita out of the fountain because she can’t bend over that far, so Daphne had to do it, which caused her to wreck her school clothes and miss the bus. Daphne was so upset, Shea had to let her stay home from school, which is bad because the school’s already making her see a shrink as a condition of not kicking her out. Her first offense was pretending to be a wolf by pinning a fake tail to her skirt and howling when she got called on in class. Another time she threw herself on the floor and held up the whole cafeteria line because there was no chocolate milk. Of course all this is my fault too.
I decide I’m done texting as I am already at the top of the Mount Everest of screwups. I’m going to see patients and worry about all this when I get home. But the minute I step inside my own office, Angie Claire rushes up at my elbow. When she closes the door behind her, I realize I was wrong about things not being able to get worse.
“Can you fix these charts for me, please?” she begs. Her cheeks are flushed, and her blouse is open just enough I can see the lace edge of her bra. She hands me the charts with a Cliff bar on top.
Right then my phone vibrates again and it’s Shea. I look at it intently just to get Angie Claire off me.
“I put Margarita in a blanket on top of one of your Harleys in garage,” Shea says. “Please bury.”
*
My first patient is brand new, an obese diabetic chain smoker named Cox in a Go Bucks sweatshirt, who probably had to call six months ago just to get seen. Yes he is mad from waiting so long before I walk in, and his wife Janet, skinny with a perm and a jogging suit, smiles like she knows she has to kiss my ass but doesn’t want to.
“I just need refills,” Harold Cox says, due to his primary care doc having croaked. Even though I’m behind, I don’t hurry with him. His primary was so ancient and on his way out, he just prescribed what everybody thought they wanted. I take time I don’t have to explain to Harold he’s on too many meds, that some are probably making him worse, and then I get him enrolled in a new trial. When I can do things like this for patients, that’s when I feel the best. Like there is goodness in the world and it flows through me if I can just get out of the way of it.
“You’re a saint, Dr. Ross,” Janet says. “I’m going to tell all the girls in my power walking group to come here.” This should make me happy, but it doesn’t. The last thing I need is more patients. I already have too many. It’s the reason I always do two rounds at the hospital even though most docs don’t. There is always some emergency brewing, or somebody in the ICU, and anyway it gives me a stay of execution from going home.
The rest of the day goes by like they all do, a parade of bodies wheezing, coughing and lying about their condition. People who know they’re not doing things right but still expect me to fix them, and there is a kind of ugly glory in the fact that they have no choice but to believe in me, and because they do, I almost start to believe in myself.
And then, near what I hope is the end of the day, when most of the office girls have gone home and only Angie Claire is still waiting, I walk into Exam Five and there she is. This little old lady I’ve never seen before, hunched up in a baggy sweater, all shrunken with wispy hair and sagging skin and bunions on both feet. Mrs. Sharp smiles and looks up at me with watery eyes like she is not expecting one single fucking thing. She is so used to things not working out and being in pain she has pretty much given up, but still she smiles. I feel myself start to tear up, so I sit on the exam room stool and pretend to scrutinize her chart and act professional. She has a litany of complaints, all legitimate and the result of life basically beating her up. I spend an hour hearing her stories of how life used to be when she could still go to Buckeye Lake once a year or eat as much marshmallow salad and beef tips as she wanted at MCL. Now her big splurge is going to Kroger once a week on senior discount day to get the small box of Krispy Kreme glazed. I schedule her for a six-week follow-up only because I know she needs somebody to talk to just to stay alive. But as I leave her sitting there by herself on my way out of Exam Five, I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. She is the kind that could last ten more years or else go tomorrow.
Of course Angie Claire is mad when I come out because she’s been waiting all day. She thinks I spent so much time with Mrs. Sharp just to avoid making plans for tonight, which now that I think about it might actually be true.
“I’ve waited long enough,” she says. “I’m going to dinner.” She knows I am going back to the hospital again.
“I’m sorry,” I say for what seems like the thousandth time today.
“Meet me at the hotel,” she says like there is no arguing about it.
“Okay,” I shrug. I have to go, if for no other reason than to finally get this over with. I’ve tried a bunch of times before but haven’t been able to end it. We just keep going, like everything else in my life, toward what?
*
One of my patients ends up dying from a pulmonary embolism, so it’s after ten before I get to the Hilton Garden Inn on the other side of town, far away from the hospital and my office. I hurry through the lobby and take the stairs so nobody sees me.
Angie Claire’s in the room asleep with the TV on. She has a bottle of red and two wine glasses set up on the table.
I sit down gingerly on the edge of the bed. Angie Claire wakes up in a white camisole, her dark hair like a cloud around her face. She leans over to kiss me, then gets up to pour the wine, naked from the waist down. I get hard even though I don’t really want to. Every time I try to tell her we’re through, something like this happens. The whole thing started in the first place simply because she was sweet to me. I used to look forward to having sex with her at the end of the day because it meant I could stay away from home a little longer. But now she’s mad at me all the time, just like Shea. Angie Claire hands me a glass of wine and gets down on her knees. I take a long drink and pretty soon I don’t care about a goddam thing.
*
It’s so late when I leave the hotel I have to go through the all-night McDonald’s on my way home because I’m starving. I wolf down an Unhappy Meal in the Mini Cooper before I pass the Starbucks where I almost hit that guy this morning in the fog. When I turn off Nelson to Broad, I get the same bad feeling I always do, acid rising in my throat, telling me I’m getting close to home. But then for some reason I think of Mrs. Sharp in Exam Five, old and frail and worn out but still with love in her heart for something, I don’t know. Thinking about her makes me feel maybe there’s hope for me, that maybe in spite of everything it’s still possible for good things to happen. I start smiling even though I have no reason to. After I press the garage door opener, I guess I’m a little distracted because I don’t brake soon enough and the Mini Cooper’s front fender bumps into one of the Harleys parked against the back wall, and then I hear a soft thud like a soccer ball on wet grass. I sit behind the wheel for a long time before I open the car door and pick up the dog from the concrete floor. She’s stiff and still like a slab of cold meat. Her cloudy eyes are staring at me and her tongue, all grey, is hanging out over that one crooked little tooth.
I close her eyes gently with my thumb and wrap her back up in the towel.
Mary Perdue is the author of the nonfiction work Landaluce: The Story of Seattle Slew’s First Champion (University Press of Kentucky, 2022). Landaluce was a finalist for that year’s Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award alongside Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks and Kathryn Scanlan. Perdue lives in Orlando, Florida and her short fiction has appeared in Salvation South.
Photo by Tsuyoshi Kozu on Unsplash
