The Baby Doctors

“Well, I’m against taking unnecessary drugs,” Sarah said, “but asthma can be dangerous if it spins out of control.”

“Exactly. Which is why I teach her self-hypnosis.”

Sarah said nothing. Maybe it was the eyes, but there was something about him that made her vaguely uneasy. It was that whole balance thing, not swinging too far in either direction. She made a mental note to see if Matthew knew him.

FORTUNATELY, Curt Hudelson’s disapproval of her mu shu pork didn’t interfere with her enjoyment of it. Later, sitting on the living-room floor, cushions piled up around her, the take-out carton in easy reach and John Coltrane on the stereo, she started unpacking the boxes she’d brought over from her mother’s house. The first one contained half-a-dozen photograph albums documenting the first sixteen years or so of her life. The earlier photos were on black paper, stuck into tiny gilt paper corners that she used to buy in small plastic bags from the Bay Variety store on Lincoln. They predated the sticky white boards with plastic sheets that she’d discovered by the time she was twelve. Taking on the role of family archivist had been an act of desperation. After a stack of the shoe boxes Rose always dumped pictures in fell from the closet shelf, spilling all over the floor. Sarah had decided to impose order.

She speared a piece of pork with her chopstick and savored the taste.

A storm had blown in during the night and stuck around. Wind rattled the windows, and rain lashed against the glass. Northwest weather. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. Missed everything from her past. Ted, who had left his native England as a child, seemed to have spent much of his adult life looking for a sense of place. She set the chopsticks back in the carton and carried it into the kitchen.

“I want to feel that kind of connection,” Ted used to say when she would talk about growing up in Port Hamilton, about the generations of Benedicts who had practiced medicine there. “I want to know, deep inside me, that this is where I belong. I want to feel a part of the community, of the land. I want to know the people, I want them to matter to me personally. I want the kind of life you had.”

As an adult, she had a less rose-tinted view of what that had been, but until she was fifteen, she really had thought everything about her life was perfect. The big red barnlike house on the bluffs above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Her attic bedroom, with the window seat where she’d watch the Olympic Princess carry passengers and their vehicles back and forth between Port Hamilton and Victoria, British Columbia. Curling up under blankets at night, gazing at the lights across the water, imagining a Canadian girl just like her staring at the lights from Port Hamilton.

Rose would label it nostalgic yearning, but she had always felt so safe back then. Happy. Long golden summer days, perfumed by the red and pink roses that filled the backyard. Fourth of July parades and picnics on the beach. Time in endless supply, it had seemed. At Christmas, bundled up in coats and scarves, she would hold her parents’ hands as they walked into town for the Christmas-tree lighting on Main Street. Snowshoeing and skiing in the winter, bonfires on the beach in the summer and fireworks to light the dark sky.

Best of all, there was Matthew, the boy down the street. Matthew the star of her childhood memories. Racing their bikes along the jetty that protected Port Hamilton’s deep harbor from the choppy waters of the straits, screeching and whooping, the wind in their faces. Walking home from the beach together, wet hair and sandy feet.

On her thirteenth birthday, she’d scrambled over huge boulders to the rocky beach, Matt right behind her. With their backs against a rock, they’d watched the shorebirds and he’d told her the Latin name of the Black-bellied Plover.

“Pluvialis squatarola,” he’d said, and she’d burst out laughing because she thought he was making it up. She’d looked it up later, of course, and he’d been right.

If there was a time when Sarah hadn’t been in love with Matthew Cameron, she couldn’t remember it. It wasn’t puppy love or a crush or anything like that. She’d never carved their initials into tree trunks or scribbled intertwined hearts on her schoolbooks. They’d never talked about it, this bond between them, never even held hands. She could hardly even explain it to herself, the deep, certain knowledge she’d had that she loved Matthew with every fiber of her being and that they would always be together.

At least, she’d felt that way until Elizabeth moved into the house next door. Elizabeth, with her almond-shaped eyes and naturally rosy lips. Elizabeth, who knew how to talk and laugh with boys but still act like a girl. Her family was from Los Angeles and she wasn’t happy about moving to Port Hamilton, which she considered a hick town that she intended to leave as soon as she could. Elizabeth was always talking about how things were in Los Angeles: the way the girls dressed, the cool places kids hung out, the movie stars all over the place. And when Elizabeth talked, everyone listened, boys and girls.

Before Elizabeth, Sarah had never given a moment’s thought to her appearance, but Elizabeth’s long silky hair made her painfully self-conscious about her own unruly curls, about the freckles that spattered her cheeks and nose and her skinny, boyish frame. More than that, Elizabeth forced her to acknowledge there really was a difference between the way boys and girls behaved.

It was also while watching Elizabeth that Sarah first realized she lacked the ability to do what others girls seemed to do naturally. Elizabeth danced with her head at just the right angle to look up into a boy’s eyes. Elizabeth could walk into the Parrot Cage, where the kids hung out after school, and all the boys crowded round her, falling over themselves to get her attention. Matthew included.

Before Sarah realized what was happening, it was no longer just Matthew and Sarah, the way it had always been. It was Matthew, Sarah and Elizabeth. And then Matthew and Elizabeth. One night he’d started telling her about Elizabeth. “She’s sweet and pretty and…” He’d shaken his head as though words alone weren’t adequate to sum up Elizabeth.

“Wow,” Sarah had said, “sounds serious. Like you’re in love with her.”

“I think I might be.”

And Sarah had forced herself to smile.

“The thing is, I can’t talk to her the way I talk to you,” he’d gone on to tell her. “She doesn’t get my jokes.”

“Yeah, but she’s pretty.”

And then, safe in her own room, Sarah had cried herself to sleep.

By the time Matthew went off to premed in Seattle, he and Elizabeth were officially a couple. Sarah had immersed herself in her own studies and, for the first time in her life, days and weeks, then months went by when she didn’t think about Matthew. But never, ever, did she stop loving him.

The night he married Elizabeth, Sarah had wandered away from the reception out to the small patch of beach just past the hotel. Matthew had found her sitting on a piece of driftwood, staring out at the water. Allergies, she’d said when he’d asked about her red eyes. And then she’d hugged him. “I hope you and Elizabeth will be very happy.”

The following year, she’d gone off to medical school herself and met Ted, a fellow student. Ted, a gentle dreamer who wanted only to help. His death still haunted her dreams.

CHAPTER FIVE

LUCY CALLED just as Matthew was leaving the house to pick up Sarah.

“Daddy.” A pause. “Can I come with you to Frugals?”

“I didn’t think you liked it,” Matthew said. “You never want to go when I suggest it.”

“But I do this time.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Daddy.” Her tone turned wheedling. “I’m hungry now.”

He laughed. “Well, I’m sure you can find something in the house to eat.” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, Lulu, I’m running late.”

“To see Sarah?”

“Right.”

“Why can’t I go?”

He frowned. “Lucy, what’s this about?”

“Nothing. I just want to go with you.”

“Not this time.” He could almost feel the sullenness of the silence on her end and, although she’d never shown any interest in the women he occasionally introduced her to, he sensed something different. “But I do want you to meet Sarah. You’re going to like her a lot.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Lucy?”

“What?”

“Come on, honey.”

“I gotta go,” she said.

He heard the disconnect, debated whether to call back, then decided against it. No real reason she couldn’t come along, but it had been years since he’d seen Sarah and, he reasoned, Lucy would be bored listening to them play catch-up.

THE TEST OF A TRUE FRIENDSHIP, he later decided was how easily you could slip back into a natural rhythm. Sarah looked like a slightly older version of the Sarah he’d always known. Skinny bordering on scrawny, the small triangular face and shrewd gray eyes that seemed to bore right through any kind of dissembling. Hair always dated people, but Sarah wore her reddish brown hair just as she always had, in a thick, heavy braid that came halfway down her back. The row of small silver hoops in her ears were new, as were a few lines around the eyes. He could imagine her squinting into the bright sunlight. No sunglasses for Sarah. He’d teased her about the sprinkle of gray and she’d done the same to him.

After they picked up the burgers, they’d driven out to the end of Forbe’s Hook, found a spot on the rocks and watched the sun dissolve into the water.

“So what are your plans now?” he asked as the sky turned to shades of pink and red. “Are you going to stick around for a while?’

Head down, Sarah picked at the threadbare knee of her jeans. “Actually, I am.”