Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

What the hell, all he would ask about was my health history, which was extremely uneventful. And he was right: I might need to see him again someday. “All right,” I said.

The first questions were easy.

“Last name?”

“Pribek.” I spelled it for him.

“Age?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Known allergies?”

“None,” I said.

“Are your parents living?”

I shook my head again.

“What were the causes of death?” he asked me.

“My father had a heart attack a few years ago. My mother-” I swallowed. “My mother died of ovarian cancer.”

“Were you a child?”

“At one time, sure, we all were,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

“I mean, when your mother died, were you a child?” He wouldn’t let me evade it.

“I was nine.” My throat felt stiff, and I wasn’t sure why. I’d told this to other people before.

“Siblings?” Cicero asked quietly.

“One brother, he’s dead,” I said, and quickly added, “An accident, not related to any health concerns.” Buddy had died in a helicopter crash in the Army, and I didn’t want to answer any more questions about him.

“What about your husband, how long has he been in prison?”

“Five months,” I said. Quickly I lowered my head. “Sorry, I think I’ve got something in my eye,” I said, rubbing wetness away.

“Are you in contact with him at all?”

“No,” I said.

My head was in my hands now. We were both still trying to pretend: Cicero was pretending to take a medical history, and I was pretending I wasn’t crying.

“But you’ve got plenty of friends in the Cities you can talk to?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Oh,” Cicero said.

“You do an interesting medical history,” I said, my voice wet.

It’s hard for people in wheelchairs to enfold people, so Cicero reached across the space between us to rub between my bowed shoulder blades and stroke my hair. “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay.”

I’dlike to say that he initiated the sex, afterward. But I did.

I rarely cry, and it seems like bad form to do it in front of a virtual stranger. But with Cicero it was different. He’d already seen me sick, phobic, irrational, drunk, and in pain. There weren’t a lot of barriers left to fall. Then, when the brief spasm of sadness had passed, I’d wanted to do this with him.

“I’m sorry,” I said aloud, lying wedged against Cicero in his single bed, my cheek against his bare shoulder.

“What for?” he asked.

“Being a basket case every time you’ve seen me, I guess,” I said. “I’m surprised you even like me.”

“How do you know I like you?” Cicero asked me lightly.

“I don’t think you’d sleep with someone you didn’t like,” I told him seriously. “Am I wrong about that?”

“No,” Cicero said. “You’re not wrong.”

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” I asked him. “Is it because you’re agoraphobic?”

Cicero raised himself up on his elbows, looking at me quizzically. “Where’d you get the idea I was agoraphobic?”

“Ghislaine,” I said. Everything I’d seen since meeting him had supported what she’d said.

“Ghislaine,” he said. “Of course.”

“You really don’t like her,” I said, sitting up. “What’s the story there? By the way, she’s not a friend of mine. I barely know her.”

“I barely know her either,” Cicero said. “She doesn’t know much about me either; I’m not agoraphobic. But to answer your question, Ghislaine is the person who brought me the prescription pad.”

I was only briefly surprised. Cicero had referred to the person who’d brought him the pad as “she.” I didn’t even want to know where she got it.

Cicero went on. “She came to visit me. Brought her cute little kid with her, told me how hard it was, raising a son on her own. His father’s not around anymore, she says, and there’s no support from her parents in Dearborn.”

“That part I know,” I said.

“Ghislaine said she hated going to the public clinic and being treated like a second-class citizen, so here she was. I said, ‘Glad to help, what can I do for you?’ She tells me she thinks there’s a lump in her breast, can I check for her? And she takes off her shirt. I do what she asks. And I’m very careful about it, I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t feel a thing and tell her so. I tell her she’s young and breast cancer isn’t too great a risk at her age, but to please keep examining monthly and stay vigilant.”

“You felt comfortable with that? You didn’t send her elsewhere for a test?”

“I really am a doctor,” he reminded me. “I’m as competent here as I would be in an office. Any doctor would have told her the same thing. Particularly in the age of HMOs, not one doctor in a hundred would have ordered a mammogram based on what she reported and I felt.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay. Besides, you haven’t heard the whole thing yet. She cheered up and agreed she was probably overreacting. Then she put her shirt back on and said that she had something for me.”

“Here it comes,” I said.

“Right. The prescription pad. She was sweet as saccharine. She told me she wanted me to have it, because she knew I could do a lot of good with it, for my patients. Then she asked me to write her a scrip for Valium.”

“Are you kidding?” But I knew he wasn’t.

“It all made sense then. She never thought there was a lump in her breast. She decided she’d soften me up by showing me her goods, and I’d be willing to do anything for her. I don’t know if she wanted the Valium for herself, or more likely, if she had a boyfriend who could turn around and sell it. I didn’t want to know.”

“You told her no, obviously,” I said. The reason for Ghislaine’s small scowl in the diner, when the subject of “Cisco” had first come up, was now quite clear.

“I told her no, I wasn’t going to get into the scrip-writing business, not even to help my patients, much less to start perpetrating prescription fraud. So she asked for the pad back. Again, I said no. I wasn’t going to use it, but I saw no reason she should have it.” Cicero paused, remembering. “Then she asked me what would happen if she told the cops about me. I said, ‘The same thing that would happen if I told the cops you stole a prescription pad, so let’s both pretend this never happened.’ She got up and said, ‘Fine, keep it.’ I was still worried about her threat to turn me in, so I told her she could take her forty dollars back. She did.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“When she picked up the money, she asked if I’d always been a paraplegic. I said no. She said, ‘I guess that’s why you can afford to let forty dollars walk out the door. Since you don’t have working equipment, you’re not paying for sex anymore.’ ”

I winced. When people can quote verbatim like that, it’s usually because the words in question had ricocheted around inside the psyche like the fragments of a hollow-point bullet.

“Hey, don’t look like that,” Cicero said. “She was ignorant.”

The truth was that I’d been nearly as naive as Ghislaine, shocked when Cicero had taken my hand and guided it down to where I could feel him stiffening under my touch. Later, he’d explained to me about reflex erections.

“Ignorant is excusable,” I said. “Spiteful is something else.”

“She probably doesn’t feel very good about herself,” Cicero said. “Unkind people often don’t.”

“You’re so charitable,” I said.

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked.

I looked out the window at the city below. “We don’t live in a world that rewards that anymore,” I said. “If it ever did.”