The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [10]
Now again she waylays Peter and takes him into the room. While he repeats the examination, Julianne studies her patient more closely. What has she missed? Perhaps Paisley’s too-golden tan is not from early-autumn sunning. Perhaps it’s the beginning of jaundice. Paisley has always had remarkable skin, toned and flawless, with an almost apricot tint even in winter. Jaundice would be easy to miss. Perhaps the whites of her eyes harbor an incipient yellow tinge, disguised by the wide-awake blue of the irises. Julianne is too shaken to know. To Julianne, Paisley simply looks beautiful. Paisley looks fine. Only the hard liver says no. But even then, even as Peter consults with Paisley’s primary physician and orders further tests, even as they wait for the results that won’t come back for days . . . even then Julianne lives in the shadow of the darkness that assailed her . . . and she knows. She doesn’t for a moment think: hepatitis, parasite, something simple. She knows.
“I heard about Paisley,” Julianne’s ex-husband, Bill, says when he brings Toby home after taking him to dinner that night. This is Monday, not his usual Wednesday with their youngest son, who at seventeen is satisfied with their one night out a week and doesn’t need more. Julianne is sure Bill heard from her boss, Peter, how upset she is about what happened, and he’s come to check up on her. “From what I hear, it was pretty awful,” he says.
“It was. Try being the first one to touch the obviously diseased liver of your ex-next-door-neighbor. Try watching someone who thinks she’s opting for elective surgery end up with orders for a slew of serious tests.”
“I know.” But of course he doesn’t know, he has no idea—and she’s certainly not going to tell him.
He looms in the doorway even after Toby bolts off to his room, a man just shy of six feet but looking taller because of his long-limbed build. When Julianne first met him at the hospital where she worked after nursing school, part of his appeal was his status (up-and-coming surgeon) and part was his aristocratic bearing that reminded her of an Episcopal priest—aquiline nose and blue-gray eyes, narrow face with impossibly high cheekbones, a smooth, mellifluous voice and languid, graceful walk that has degenerated over the years into a shorter, pinched-looking stride. It saddens her to see how quickly he’s aged. At forty-eight, Bill is only four years older than Julianne, but tonight he looks like a man of sixty, jowly and gray. Odd, how once she stopped desiring him physically, her attraction to him was over so completely that she can’t imagine ever feeling differently.
“Are you okay?” he asks in his practiced doctor voice, which she would resent if he didn’t look so world weary.
“Fine. Just a headache.” She rubs the area between her brows with thumb and index finger. The dull throbbing has stayed with her all day just as it did after the incident with Eudora Nestor, when it didn’t go away until morning. As on that other occasion, aspirin hasn’t helped.
“I wish I could do something,” Bill says.
“Really. I’m fine.” Generous Bill. He makes her feel like a force-fed goose, forever stuffing gratitude down her unwilling throat. During the divorce proceedings, Bill deeded their house to her without asking her to buy him out. He agreed to liberal child support. He let her have custody of the boys but offered to watch them anytime she asked—and actually did watch them, even after he remarried and had a daughter. When Julianne went back to school to become a nurse-practitioner, she sometimes needed whole weekends to study. Bill was always available. His openhandedness was boundless. He was a paragon, wasn’t he?
Ask him in, Julianne tells herself. When you’ve known someone half your life and shared the task of raising sons, that’s what you do. But she doesn’t. For another thirty seconds, she lets the renowned but humble surgeon and model father lean wearily against the doorjamb. “What about Doug?” he finally asks. “Did you tell Doug?”
She’s too startled to say it’s none of his