Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [10]
She gasped. Something about his face had changed. It seemed to fade in and out of focus.
5
She woke to sweat-soaked sheets, in the dark of her bedroom.
Livy had crawled into bed beside her, in the night. Julie felt embarrassed to have had such an erotic dream with her daughter sleeping beside her.
She watched Livy’s face, as she slept, and waited for the sun to come up.
6
The next morning, Julie checked the machine for messages, but there were none. Hut had not come home at all. She called his cell phone, but got the recording. She called the clinic; got his voice mail.
I hate you Hut Hutchinson. I hate you for doing this to me. For making me suspicious. For making me call hospitals in case you had accidents and then finding out you had just worked too late and hadn’t thought it important enough to call me. Or your kids. I hate you for being this cold to me.
Julie you are nuts. He loves you. He is working on important things. He loves the kids. He probably just pulled an all-nighter working on some emergency or other and is still asleep in that little cot in the filing cabinet room at the clinic.
7
Matt had been up by six. He had his Sony camcorder out and was making a movie of birds in the backyard at the birdfeeder. When he saw Julie at the kitchen window, he turned the camcorder on her and waved. She waved back, opening the window to tell him that she had some oatmeal and toast with raspberry jam for him for breakfast. He lowered the camcorder from his face, and scowled a bit. “Oatmeal? What about Pop Tarts?”
“I’ll pick some up tomorrow at Shop Rite,” she said. “In fact, if you want anything else special, let me know.”
“Maybe some Dr. Pepper?”
There was an everydayness about the two of them talking through the open window that made her smile and forget the bad day that Matt had, and nearly forget the little scratches and scars on his arms.
She had to rouse Livy from what must’ve been a fantastic dream, because even as she hustled her into the shower, Livy kept talking about the wondrous things she saw the previous night, including flying horses.
“And in my dream, Daddy kept asking me if I could get up, and I said, of course I can daddy, I just want to keep sleeping. But you know what? I did get up. I thought I heard him say something.”
“Daddy had to work all night,” Julie said, kissing her on the forehead, smelling Livy’s hair—the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo of it, the little tiny last bit of babyness in her six year old daughter.
“You never work all night,” Livy said. “Daddy works all the time, but you don’t.”
“I know. I have a perfect job.”
“Like on ER.”
“Just like that,” Julie grinned. “Plus, I get to be Mommy.”
“Poor Daddy,” Livy said. “He never gets to be Daddy anymore.”
“Poor Daddy is right,” Julie said, and tried not to think of the slip of paper with a phone number on it that smelled of perfume that she’d found in Hut’s overcoat, a number she had never called, a woman whose name she didn’t know, a woman who might not even exist except in a jealous, insecure wife’s imagination.
8
She did her telephone punch-in when she got to Rellingford Hospital, and then proceeded down the long rose-colored hallway to the ER. She passed some medics and other nurses, said the obligatory morning hellos and listened to the lukewarm jokes, but her mind was elsewhere and she was craving coffee. The staff in the ER was small, like everything else in Rellingford. There was simply the doc—Dr. Davison—and a unit clerk, and a few nurses on the day shift. Night shift was even more bare bones. Not a lot happened out in Rellingford on a continuing basis for the ER, and some days, nothing happened beyond a twisted ankle or a kid who need a few stitches and a hug. There were always lab techs around, the respiratory therapists, but it was bare bones in the ER most days, with an on-call staff in case anything major came down.
She picked up the report