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By Root 448 0

in the suture. The result is a poor tissue response. That’s all I’m seeing here, not the world coming to an end,” and finally, as he braced her hand and picked at the knot with a pair of angled scissors, “Now I don’t want any flinching from you, Miss, understand? This won’t hurt a bit.” Surprisingly it didn’t. She watched the thread sinuate through her skin, flashing in and out of sight like a black snake moving through white sand. The first time a doctor ever took her blood, she was not yet three years old, and he had pacified her by telling her that her body was filled with red water, asking, “Did you know that? Would you like to see some?” She had sat there fascinated while he pricked her arm and his syringe filled with cherry Kool-Aid. She felt a similar fascination as she followed the surgical thread passing out of her thumb. Afterward, she was left with only a pale impression of stitches on her skin, barely glowing at all. A few lambent blood-vessel blotches traced the edges, and a checkmark of scar tissue rose above the knuckle. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

She was on her way out when Dr. Alstadt chased her down, placing a hand on her wrist. “So how did everything go with Dr. Kimberley?” he asked.

“Kimberley! That’s it. I think he was angry with me about something.”

“People always think that. He just has this manner. But your thumb is feeling better? You can get back to doing the things you love?”

“Like tying my shoes and brushing my teeth.”

“Exactly.”

She found herself adopting the pose of the woman she wished to be, someone coolly self-deprecating, confident, willing to puncture her own seriousness with a shrug and a wry remark. “My plan is to take it slow, start with one tooth and work my way up.”

“Good idea,” he said.

He smiled nervously, looking down at the chart in his hands. She could tell that he was mustering up the courage to continue.

“Is there something else, Doctor?”

“Actually, yes. We’ve transferred you over to primary care. Officially, you’re no longer on the A&E registry, which means I’m not your doctor anymore. So I was wondering …” He cleared his throat. “We’re not supposed to do this, but I was wondering if you would consider letting me take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Doctor! I don’t even know your first name!”

“It’s Tom. Thomas. Dr. Thomas Alstadt.”

“Dr. Thomas Alstadt.” She indicated the file he was holding. “Is that me you’ve got there?”

He nodded.

“Does it have my phone number in it?”

He nodded again.

She tapped the chart and shifted on her heel and did not glance back until she had left the building. She happened to spy him at the exact moment he stopped watching her. He was turning his face away as an orderly in mocha-colored scrubs approached him with an outstretched hand, and so he did not see the call-me gesture she threw him. But it didn’t matter—she was sure he had gotten the message.

Her legs carried her beneath the blue sky and the pine trees with that drifty roller-skating feeling she remembered from the sunlit summer Fridays of her childhood. She kept replaying the sound of his voice—It’s Tom, Thomas, Dr. Thomas Alstadt—and laughing to herself. Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

That it was too big for her to contain.

That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.

And sure enough, late that night, she woke to find that she had not yet finished healing. Her hair was pasted to her forehead, and her hand shone with a sharp pain. She was afraid that it was starting all over again, all the hurt and debility. She could hear the high sustained note of a fever in her ears. Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place. The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime.