Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“This reminds me of my grandfather stitching me up on the island when I cut my knee,” I tell him as he pulls the Ethicon through my skin with a curved needle.

“I guess he always carried his black bag with him?”

“Oh, he has a whole clinic down there. When my aunt Ann was ten years old, the family got trapped on the island in a storm. She had a hot appendix. Grandpapa removed it by lantern light with one of the island women assisting him. That’s one of his hero stories, but it’s pretty impressive.”

Michael nods and continues stitching. “You’d be surprised what you can do when conditions demand it. I’ve been on a few medical mission trips to South America…saw some unbelievable things. OBs sterilizing women one after another in the open air. They stretch them out on benches, cut them open, clip their tubes with special plastic clips, and close them up again.”

“Jesus.”

He laughs. “I wouldn’t recommend it to a suburban housewife, but it does the job.”

Medical mission trips. I have a feeling there’s a lot more to Michael Wells than most people know. “I like what you’ve done with this house.”

“Do you? Your mom did most of it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, when I first got to town, I was too busy to breathe, much less decorate a house. I stopped by Gwen’s interior design store one afternoon and hired her to do the whole place.”

“Now I’m not sure I like it.”

He laughs. “You don’t get along with your mother?”

“We do, as long as we don’t see too much of each other.”

He ties off the last stitch, then lays his forceps on the countertop. “You hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Steak and eggs?”

“Are you ordering out?”

“No.” He goes to the refrigerator and brings out a package of rib eyes. “Go sit on that sofa. You’ll be digging into this in twenty minutes.”

The sofa sits against the wall beyond a round table in the dining area. Too far away for conversation, or even to watch Michael cooking. Given my earlier experiences today, I don’t really want to lie on the couch and let my mind wander.

Sliding off the counter, I sit on a barstool and watch Michael. It’s strange to have a man cook for me, though Sean sometimes boils crawfish in my backyard.

“You want to talk about today?” Michael asks, meeting my gaze long enough to let me know he’s genuinely concerned.

“It isn’t just today. It’s the past month. It’s my whole life, really.”

“Can you give me the gist in twenty minutes?”

I laugh. And then I start talking. I start with my panic attack at the Nolan crime scene, the one prior to Arthur LeGendre’s house. That leads me to LeGendre, then to Carmen Piazza removing me from the task force, and then to my trip back to Natchez and to finding the bloody footprints in my bedroom. I’m talking on autopilot, though, because what I’m really doing is watching Michael cook. He’s good with his hands, and I can tell from the way he uses them that he’s a good doctor. He asks questions during my pauses, and before long I’m telling him about the depression that began in high school, the mania that followed, and my serial monogamy with married men. He’s a good listener, only I can’t tell what he makes of all this. He looks as though he’s hearing nothing out of the ordinary, but inside he may already regret rescuing this particular damsel in distress.

When the steaks and eggs are done, we move to the glass dining table, but I do as much talking as eating. I can’t seem to stop. The funny thing is, he doesn’t try to force me to eat, as most men would. He just keeps watching my eyes, as if they’re telling him as much as my words. I tell him about my father, Grandpapa, Pearlie, my mother, Dr. Goldman, Nathan Malik-even the things Grandpapa told me earlier today. The only thing I don’t tell Michael about is being pregnant. That I cannot bring myself to do.

When at last my stream of words slows to a trickle, he sighs deeply and says, “You want to watch a movie? I rented the new Adam Sandler.”

I’m not sure whether I’m offended or relieved. “Are you kidding?”

He grins. “Yes. You want to know what I really think about all that?”

“I do.”

“I think you’re under more stress right now than most people could stand. I think your life is probably in danger from whoever is behind these murders, not to mention the risk of dealing with your disease without adequate therapy or medication.”

I say nothing.

“Does it piss you off that I said that?”

“A little.”

He holds up his hands, palms outward. “I know it’s not my business. If you don’t want to take your medication, fine. But I know a little bit about being bipolar. I had a good friend in medical school who was that way.”

“I’m not bipolar. I’m cyclothymic.”

“That’s just semantics. Same symptoms, just a question of degree.”

I concede this with a nod.

“What I learned from my friend was that a lot of bipolar people tell you they want to get better, but they really don’t. They feel so good during their highs that they’re willing to endure the lows as the price of that euphoria. Even if the lows are so bad that the person is suicidal when they crash.”

“I can’t argue with that. What happened to your friend?”

“He flunked out of med school.”

“Just like me. Is that your point?”

“You didn’t flunk out. They basically kicked you out for causing someone else to try to kill himself.”

“Yep.”

Michael’s face is nonjudgmental. “I don’t think any of that stuff was your fault, Cat. I don’t know too much about the links between childhood sexual abuse and adult psychological problems, because I treat kids. That’s why I knew so little about repressed memories. But I do know about child abuse. I’ve seen a lot of it, especially as a pediatric resident working ERs.”

There’s something in his eyes that reminds me of John Kaiser’s eyes. Knowledge earned through pain. Wisdom never asked for.

“Those cases are the easy ones, though,” Michael says. “The tough cases are the ones where you know something isn’t right, but you’re not looking at genital warts or something obvious like that. Dealing with those cases is how I learned the most surprising things about sexual abuse.”

“Like?”

“Like it’s not usually the physically painful, horrible thing that people imagine. It’s not violent rape or even necessarily a terrible experience in itself. Not in the beginning. If it were, sexual abuse wouldn’t be the invisible epidemic that it is. Sex is pleasurable, even to a child. Adult abusers know that. They seduce the child a little at a time, gradually raising the stakes. The family dynamics are altered in ways it would take Freud years to figure out. Complex power games are played between abuser and victim. You get young girls serving as surrogate wives in the home, sisters competing for the sexual attention of their father, fathers training sons to use women the same way they do. Of course, the reverse happens, too. You get older daughters trying to protect younger siblings by doing anything they can to keep the abusive father focused on them.”

I close my eyes in horror. “I’ll bet this isn’t how you thought you’d be spending this evening.”

Michael spears a piece of cold steak and chews it thoughtfully. “No, but I’m okay with it. I was always curious about you. Why you picked the guys you did in high school. And these repeated relationships with married guys. That’s not hard to figure out now, is it?”

“My therapist tells me I pick unavailable guys so that I can’t become too attached to a man. That way the loss I experienced with my father can’t be repeated.”