Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“Is this about the text? I thought that was just spam,” she said.

This shook him back to the concrete. “Text?”

Behind Melanie, a face appeared at the screen door. It was a boy, little more than a toddler. “Mommy?” Stout with bangs. Not Lyle’s kid, Lyle thought, and winced. Melanie caught it. “Be right there, sweetie. Can you wash up for dinner?”

“K.”

She turned around and looked for a cue from Lyle. Did he want to talk about the Elephant at the Screen Door?

“Text,” he urged.

“You texted me: Kill your phone before it kills you.”

“What?”

Melanie set down the robot and screwdriver and pulled her phone from her pocket. She scrolled the large-screened device and held up the phone to him.

Kill your phone before it kills you.

“You didn’t send this?”

“When did it come?”

“Ten days or so ago. Middle of the night.”

Lyle gritted his teeth in focus. He hadn’t remembered sending it. Was that when he was in Steamboat? What did it mean?

“There’s another one, shortly after. It’s even weirder.” She handed him the phone.

He read the text: Must find brilliant woman from last UCSF class.

He shook his head. Nonsense. But it tickled in his brain just the way random clues tickled him.

“Why are you here, Lyle?”

He met her eyes and then couldn’t look at her anymore. Her tenderness overcame him. She had a hero’s compassion with a survivor’s backbone. How long had he been blind to this strength? He mustered the courage to say what he wanted to say. He looked down.

“Who is this woman? From your class. Were you having an aff—”

“Me. No way. You have no right—” He stopped. This wasn’t why he’d come, not to fight.

The last class, he remembered, had happened prior to that fateful Africa trip. It lodged painfully in his craw. He’d put Melanie at risk by allowing her to come with him, then humiliated her on the airplane by diagnosing her pregnancy, and, as much as any of that, he well might’ve blown his analysis about what was ailing the small village. He’d said it was man-made. On what basis? Whimsical, cynical half-baked sophistry.

But she’d cheated on him, not the other way around.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Lyle? Are you sick?”

“When did I lose it?” he blurted.

“What?”

He fought himself, his pride, his urge not to ask or delve into his own bullshit. He never tried to make it about him. It was about the patient, disease, pathology. Maybe he was those things now. He made himself ask.

“When did I give up?”

“Wow,” she said, then almost immediately: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. What’s happened, Lyle?”

He shook his head. I don’t know.

She looked over her shoulder, wanting to make sure they were alone.

She started to say something and then thought better of it. “Do you want to find some other time to talk?”

He looked to her in that moment like a patient who just wanted to be given a shot. Get it over with.

“I’ve thought about it a ton,” she said, “when it all went to shit.”

She told him about a weekend they’d had in a yurt near Santa Cruz. It had been a few weeks after Lyle had been asked to speak at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. While he was there, the talk got called off because of a shooting at a nearby school. Lyle remembered that part well enough. After the shooting, he had been witness to an argument among several researchers at the CDC, one of whom had a student at the school. The kid was okay but the mom was enraged. Enraged, she’d railed against the gun culture. Another researcher took offense and railed back. They’d nearly come to blows. On the way out of the parking lot, the second researcher, giving the middle finger to the first researcher, plowed into the security hut and, while unhurt, totaled his car.

“That’s when your withdrawal really intensified,” Melanie said. “I’m not sure if what happened in Atlanta had anything to do with it. That’s what I thought. But then I started to wonder whether that was convenient and it might not be us—”

“But—”

“Listen, Lyle, I appreciate that you devoted your life to helping people and then found that people weren’t always reciprocating, weren’t always helping themselves—that they were hurting themselves.” She saw that he wanted to interrupt again. She held up her hands. “You must’ve known that all along. It’s always been a razor’s-edge fight. So I suspect it was something in you, or us. Relationships live on the razor’s edge, too. The great passion had subsided for us, the easy part. It was work, all of it; you got overwhelmed.”

“No, I—” He stopped. He didn’t have an immediate answer. Just more questions: How do I get it back? How do I work through this soup?

Something very bad is going to happen, Melanie. I need to figure out how to stop it. He hated those words and didn’t know how to ask for help.

He couldn’t get any words out.

“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Melanie said.

“No—”

“Just listen. You’ve got this powerful brain, the most powerful brain. That power, any power, has a flip side. It might be that you’ve gotten off track. I think that’s what happened in Africa. You said there was a conspiracy, some terrible man-made thing. But there was no conspiracy or anything like that. Just a disease that you didn’t want to—”

“Something’s going to happen.”

Now she smiled with such love and caring that it couldn’t possibly be seen as patronizing even though she was filled with pity. “Lyle…”

A car pulled into the driveway, crackling gravel beneath the tires as it came to a stop. Melanie stared at the car and then turned as the screen door opened behind her.

“Daddy!” the boy said.

“Sweetie, he’ll be right inside. Can you go wait for us?”

The boy somehow understood she really meant this particular request. “K,” he said again, and he disappeared.

From the boxy silver car stood a tall man in a T-shirt. He walked around the front of the car with a basketball under his long arm, wearing shorts.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Elbow,” the man said. “I gotta take up chess.” He smiled at Melanie and then offered Lyle a guileless nod. Dark stubble peppered his chin. “Eh, who am I kidding? I stink at chess.”

“George,” he said. “Are you a neighbor?”

“Lyle. I’m…”

“Oh, of course.” Recognition took over his face. He nodded again, a second greeting, this one with a certain respect for the situation. “Nice to meet you, Lyle.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me interrupt, and I want to go inside and see Evan.” This was guileless, too. It gave Lyle what would be his tiniest solace when he thought about this later. At least Melanie wasn’t with a jerk. Now all he could think was, Holy shit, she’s got a boyfriend or husband or live-in whatever, maybe the father of her child, or not? The screen door closed behind the man.

“Peño.” She looked at him and he was impassive, that same ingrown look that had gotten them here in the first place.

“It’s a beautiful family.”

Tears dripped down Melanie’s cheeks.

He knew what it meant. He wasn’t the victim here.

Anumb subway ride home. It wasn’t that Lyle hadn’t been expecting this when he went to see Melanie. He had been expecting anything, nothing. He had let himself walk into a situation unexposed. If he could have seen himself at a distance, with perspective, he might’ve realized how valuable that was, how necessary and, more than that, how much it was like the old version of Lyle. He walked into situations unexposed, dangerous ones, emotionally fraught ones, deadly ones, and he led with his curiosity and an essential faith things would work out. Now, on the subway, his openness left him blown apart.