And which did he prefer?
The question lingered.
* * *
He showed Beth Porter into his consulting room, down the hall from Anne’s.
The consulting room was Mart’s enclave, a space of his own creation. Its centerpiece was a set of authentic Victorian oak medical cabinets, purchased at a rural auction in 1985. Behind his desk was a creaking leather chair that had formed itself to the precise contour of his behind. The window looked crosstown, beyond the sweltering marina to the open sea.
Beth Porter took her place in the patient chair while Matt adjusted the blinds to keep out the afternoon sun. Annie had recently equipped her office with vertical blinds, covered in cloth, which looked exactly sideways to Matt. His consultancy announced: Tradition. Annie’s replied: Progress. Maybe that was the invisible hand that conspired to pull them apart.
She was on his mind today, though, wasn’t she?
He took his seat and looked across the desk at Beth Porter.
He had examined her file before he called her in. Matt had been Beth’s regular doctor since her eleventh birthday, when her mother had dragged her into the waiting room: a sullen child wearing a cardboard party hat over a face swollen to the proportions of a jack-o’-lantern. Between rounds of birthday cake and ice cream, Beth had somehow disturbed a hornet nest in the cherry tree in the Porters’ backyard. The histamine reaction had been so sudden and so intense that her mother hadn’t even tried to pry off the party hat. The string was embedded in the swollen flesh under her chin.
Nine years ago. Since then he’d seen her only sporadically, and not at all since she turned fifteen. Here was another trick of time: Beth wasn’t a child anymore. She was a chunky, potentially attractive twenty-year-old who had chosen to wear her sexuality as a badge of defiance. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tight T-shirt, and Matt noticed a blue mark periodically visible as her collar dipped below the left shoulder: a tattoo, he thought, God help us all.
“What brings you in today, Beth?”
“A cold,” she said.
Matt pretended to take a note. Years in the practice of medicine had taught him that people preferred to make their confessions to a man with a pen in his hand. The lab coat didn’t hurt, either. “Bad cold?”
“I guess… not especially.”
“Well, you’re hardly unique. I think everybody’s got a cold this week.” This was true. Annie had come to work snuffling. Lillian Bix, in the waiting room, had been doing her polite best to suppress a runny nose. Matt himself had swallowed an antihistamine at lunch. “There’s not much we can do for a cold. Is your chest congested?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “A little.”
“Let’s listen to it.”
Beth sat tensely upright while he applied his stethoscope to the pale contour of her back. No significant congestion, but Matt was certain it wasn’t a cold that had brought her in. The ritual of listening to her lungs simply established a doctorly relationship. A medical intimacy. He palpated her throat and found the lymph nodes slightly enlarged—hard pebbles under the flesh—which raised a small flag of concern.
He leaned against the edge of his desk. “Nothing too much out of the ordinary.”
Beth inspected the floor and seemed unsurprised.
“Maybe it isn’t a cold you’re worried about. Beth? Is that a possibility?”
“I think I have gonorrhea,” Beth Porter announced.
Matt made a note.
* * *
She surprised him by reciting her symptoms without blushing. She added, “I looked this up in a medical book. It sounded like gonorrhea, which is kind of serious. So I made an appointment. What do you think?”
“I think you made a reasonable diagnosis. Maybe you ought to be a doctor.” She actually smiled. “We’ll know more when the test comes back.”
The smile faded. “Test?”
Annie came in to chaperon and distract Beth while Matt took a cervical culture. There was the inevitable joke about whether he kept his speculum in a deep-freeze. Then Annie and Beth chatted about Beth’s job at the 7-Eleven, which was, Beth said, as boring as you might think, selling frozen pies and microwave burritos until practically midnight and catching a ride home with the manager, usually, when there was nothing on the highway but logging trucks and semitrailers.
Matt took the cervical swab and labeled it. Beth climbed down from the table; Annie excused herself.
Beth said, “How soon do we know?”
“Probably tomorrow afternoon, unless the lab’s stacked up. I can call you.”
“At home?”
Matt understood the question. Beth still lived with her father, a man Matt had treated for his recurring prostatitis. Billy Porter was not a bad man, but he was a reticent and old-fashioned man who had never struck Matt as the forgiving type. “I can phone you at work if you leave the number.”
“How about if I call here?”
“All right. Tomorrow around four? I’ll have the receptionist switch you through.”
That seemed to calm her down. She nodded and began to ask questions: What if it was gonorrhea? How long would she have to take the antibiotics? Would she have to tell—you know, her lover?
She paid careful attention to the answers. Now that she had popped the cassette out of her Walkman, Beth Porter began to impress him as a fairly alert young woman.
Alert but, to use the old psychiatric rubric, “troubled.” Enduring some difficult passage in her life. And tired of it, by the pinch of weariness that sometimes narrowed her eyes.
She was twenty years old, Matt thought, and seemed both much older and much younger.
He said, “If you need to talk—”
“Don’t ask me to talk. I mean, thank you. I’ll take the medicine or whatever. Whatever I have to do. But I don’t want to talk about it.” A little bit of steel there.
He said, “All right. But remember to phone tomorrow. You’ll probably have to come by for the prescription. And we’ll need a follow-up when the medication runs out.”
She understood. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.”
He dated the entry in her file and tucked it into his “done” basket. Then he washed his hands and called in Lillian Bix, his last patient of the day.
* * *
Lillian had skipped a period and thought she might be pregnant.
She was the thirty-nine-year-old wife of Mart’s closest friend. The conversation was genial, rendered a little awkward by Lillian’s tongue-numbing shyness. She came to the point at last; Matt gave her a sample cup and directed her to the bathroom. Lillian blushed profoundly but followed instructions. When she came back, he labeled the sample for an HCG.
Lillian sat opposite him with her small purse clutched in her lap. It often seemed to Matt that everything about Lillian was small: her purse, her figure, her presence in a room. Maybe that was why she took such pleasure in her marriage to Jim Bix, a large and boisterous man whose attention she had somehow commanded.
They had been childless for years, and Matt had never commented on it to either of them. Now—armored in medical whites—he asked Lillian whether that had been deliberate.
“More or less.” She spoke with great concentration. “Well. More Jim’s doing than mine. He always took care of… you know. Contraception.”
“And you didn’t object?”
“No.”
“But contraception has been known to fail.”
“Yes,” Lillian said.
“How do you feel about the possibility of being pregnant?”
“Good.” Her smile was genuine but not vigorous. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”
“Really thought about? Diapers, midnight feedings, skinned knees, stretch marks?”
“It’s never real till it’s real. I know, Matt. But yes, I’ve imagined it often.”
“Talked to Jim about any of this?”
“Haven’t even mentioned the possibility. I don’t want to tell him until we’re certain.”
She looked at Matt with a crease of concern above her small eyebrows. “You won’t tell him, will you?”
He said, “I can’t unless you want me to. Confidentiality.”
“Confidentiality even between doctors?”
“Honor among thieves,” Matt said.
She showed her brief smile again. It was there and gone. “But you have lunch with him all the time.”
Jim was a pathologist at the hospital; they had done premed together. They liked to meet for lunch at the Chinese cafe two blocks up Grove. “It could make for an uncomfortable lunch, sure. But it’s a quick test. We should have a verdict before very long.” He pretended to make a note. “You know, Lillian, sometimes, in a woman who’s a little bit older, there can be complications—”
“I know. I know all about that. But I’ve heard there are ways of finding certain things out. In advance.”
He understood her anxiety and tried to soothe it. “If you’re having a baby, we’ll keep a close eye on everything. I wouldn’t anticipate trouble.” That wasn’t all there was to it… but at the moment it was all Lillian needed to know.
“That’s good,” she said.
But her frown had crept back. She wasn’t reassured, and she was far from happy. He wondered whether he ought to probe this discontent or leave it alone.
He put down his pen. “Something’s bothering you.”
“Well… three things, really.” She rucked her handkerchief into her purse. “What we talked about. My age. That worries me. And Jim, of course. I wonder how he’ll react. I’m afraid it might seem to him like… I don’t know. Giving up his youth. He might not want the responsibility.”
“He might not,” Matt said. “But it would surprise me if he didn’t adapt. Jim likes to shock people, but he comes into work every day. He’s serious about his work and he shows up on time. That sounds like responsibility to me.”
She nodded and seemed to draw some reassurance from the thought. Matt said, “The third thing?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said three things bothered you. Your age, and Jim, and—what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She looked at him steadily across the desk. “Some nights I open the window… and I see that thing in the sky. And it frightens me. And now what they’ve put in the cities. Those big blocks or buildings or whatever they are. I see that on television. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, Matt. What’s the name of that shape? An ‘octahedron.’ A word you shouldn’t have to use after you leave high school. An octahedron the size of an ocean liner sitting in Central Park. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing that. And no one knows what it means. They talk about it and talk about it and none of the talk amounts to more than a whistle in the dark. So of course you wonder. I mean, what happens next? Maybe getting pregnant is just a kind of wishful thinking. Or a new way to panic.” She sat with her purse nestled in her lap and looked fiercely at him. “You’re a parent, Matt. You must know what I mean.”
* * *
He did, of course. The same doubts were written in Beth Porter’s withdrawal into her Walkman, in the way his daughter Rachel came home from school and watched the network newscasts with her knees pulled up to her chin.
He calmed Lillian Bix and sent her home, did a little tidying up while Anne finished with her own last patient. Then he opened the blinds and let the sunlight flood in, a long bright beam of it across the tiled floor, the oak cabinets. He peered out at the town.
From the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, Buchanan was a long flat smudgepot in a blue angle of ocean. Still a fairly quiet lumber port, not as small as it had been when he opened the practice fifteen years ago. Many changes since then. Fifteen years ago he’d been fresh out of residency. Rachel had been a toddler, Celeste had been alive, and the community of Buchanan had been smaller by several thousand souls.
Time, cruel son of a bitch, had revised all that. Now Mart’s fortieth birthday was three months behind him, his daughter was looking at college brochures, Celeste was ten years in her grave at the Brookside Cemetery… and a spacecraft the color of cold concrete had been orbiting the earth for more than a year.
It occurred to Matt, also not for the first time, how much he hated that ugly Damoclean presence in the night sky.
How much he still loved this town. He believed he had always loved it, that he had been born loving it. It was funny how that worked. Some people have no sense of place at all; they can park at a Motel 6 and call it home. And some people, many of them his friends, had grown up hating the provincialism of Buchanan. But for Matt, Buchanan was a map of himself—as essential as his heart or his liver.
He had been a solitary, often lonely child, and he had learned the intimate secrets of the marina, the main street, and the Little Duncan River long before he acquired a best friend. He had folded this town, its potholed roads and Douglas firs, its foggy winters and the Gold Rush facades of its crumbling downtown, deep into the substance of himself.
His wife was buried here. Celeste had been committed to the earth at Brookside Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the estuary of the Little Duncan, where the chapel rang its small carillon of bells every Sunday noon. His parents were buried here.
He had always believed that one day he would be buried here… but lately that conviction had begun to falter.
He had deposited flowers on Celeste’s grave at Brookside just last week, and as he passed through the cemetery gates he was possessed of a dour conviction that some wind of destiny would sweep him elsewhere, that he would die in a very different place.
Like Lillian Bix—like everybody else—Matt had fallen prey to premonitions.
That ugly white ghost ship floating on the deep of every clear night. Of course Lillian was scared. Who the hell wasn’t scared? But you go on, Matt Wheeler thought. You do what you do, and you go on. It was the decent thing.
* * *
He heard Annie dismissing her last patient, and he was about to step into the hallway and offer his invitation when the phone rang: an after-hours call from Jim Bix that did nothing to dispel his uneasiness. “We need to talk,” Jim said.
Mart’s first thought was that this had something to do with Lillian’s visit. He said, cautiously, “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you stop by the hospital after work?”
This wasn’t about Lillian. Jim sounded too disturbed. Not having-a-baby disturbed. There was a darker note in his voice.
Matt checked his watch. “Rachel’s home from school and she said she’d fix dinner tonight. Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?”
“I’d prefer tonight.” Pause. “I’m working shift hours, but how would it be if I stopped by on my way home?”
“How late?”
“Eleven, say. Eleven-thirty.”
“It’s important?”
“Yes.”
Not maybe or sort of, Matt thought. Flat yes. It made the small hairs on his neck stand up.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’ll be looking for you.”
“Good,” Jim said, and promptly hung up the phone.
* * *
He caught Annie as she headed out the door.
When he told her about the party Friday night, she smiled and said she’d be there. It was the familiar Annie Gates smile. She thanked him, touched his arm. He walked her to the parking lot.
By God, Matt thought, we may be on-again-off-again, but I do believe at the moment we are definitely on.
He was surprised by the pleasure he took from the thought.
She gave him a brief hug as she climbed into her Honda. The touch was therapeutic. It wasn’t good to be alone, Matt thought, when the world had taken such a curious turn.
Chapter 2
Brookside
In December 1843, when the explorer John Fremont was mapping what would become the state of Oregon, he descended in a single day from a howling snowstorm in the high Cascades to a lake surrounded by soft green grass—fro
m winter into summer. Winter Rim, he called his starting point, and Summer Lake, where his party pitched camp for the night.
A century and a half later, the state was still defined by its geography. The Willamette Valley, heartland and breadbasket, ran between the Cascades and the Coast Range for 180 miles south of Portland. East of the Cascades was a parched, cold desert. West of the Coast Range was coastal Oregon, 280 x 25 miles of farmland, forest land, and isolated fishing villages.
Buchanan was the largest of the coastal towns, a forest port situated on a broad, shallow bay. It had grown with the Dunsmuir Pulp and Paper Mill (est. 1895) to a population approaching 40,000 at the end of the twentieth century. Its shipping docks handled a respectable Pacific Rim trade, and its fishing fleet was the largest south of Astoria.
Buchanan had begun to cross the demarcation point between town and city, with all the possibilities and problems that implied: diversity, employment, anonymity, crime. But the municipality still held its Fishing and Logging Festival every July, and the local radio station still broadcast tide tables and Salmon Bulletins between sessions of softcore C W.
Like every town on the Oregon coast, Buchanan was accustomed to rain. Each winter, the ocean seemed to infiltrate the air. There was not just rain, there was a complex palette of mist, drizzle, fog, woodsmoke, and low clouds. Winter was the slow season, the melancholy season.
But even Buchanan occasionally saw a blue sky, and this summer had been drier than most. Ever since Independence Day, the town had basked under a dome of clear Pacific air. Reservoirs were low and a fire watch had been declared in the deep coastal forests. Crickets ratcheted in the brown fingers of dry lawns.
Afternoons evolved into long summer evenings.
Matt Wheeler’s thoughts had turned to Brookside Cemetery that afternoon, lingered a moment and turned away. Tonight he sat down to a meal of pan-fried steak and pondered a more immediate problem: that troublesome phone call from Jim Bix. Brookside had fled his attention.