Kem Nunn - Chance

“Well,” she said, and she offered him a hand. “I am glad we ran into each other just now.”

He took her hand. “So am I. And I wish you the best.”

She seemed to take this as his way of saying good-bye, and perhaps it was. It certainly should have been. Still, in letting go of her hand he experienced a pang of remorse.

“Well…” she said once more. And he really did feel that they were both reluctant to break it off. “Enjoy your book. And good luck with your furniture, whatever you decide.”

He smiled and nodded and like that she was gone, or so it seemed. So conflicted had he been at just that moment in trying to decide if he should not have added something more, that in thinking back on it later, he could not quite recall if they’d even said good-bye. He concluded they had not. He had nodded. She had smiled. He had been left to stand there as she moved off down the sidewalk, pausing at the window of some store half a block away before moving on and out of sight, for good as far as he knew, so that what he was left with in the end was that very particular ache he had not felt in many years, the exultation of wanting in combination with a certain knowing, that the object of such desire is forever unavailable, that and the wonderful curvature of her spine as she posed like a dancer before a shop window, the afternoon light on her ash-blond hair.

Any such feelings of romantic ambiguity as may have washed over him in the immediate aftermath of this meeting were, in the days that followed, replaced by a profound relief that he had not succumbed to the absurd temptation to involve himself further in her affairs and he had returned to the contemplation of what to do about his furniture. He felt no great sense of urgency in this regard. It was his nature to view a thing from as many angles as possible, to imagine any and all worst-case scenarios. His wife and daughter had often accused him of being overly cautious in such matters, ganging up on him without mercy as Chance spent days on end lost in the evaluation of some apparently trivial decision or purchase, but then Chance was a believer in caution. He supposed such traits were drummed into him by his father, provost at a small Bible-based college on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, who, like the Master for whom the school had been named, was a lover of parables. His father had favored those in which some youthful indiscretion leads inexorably to a life of pain and deprivation. And while Chance declined entrance to his father’s school, he could not say the old man’s words had failed to dog his tracks. Nor had his own work as a doctor served to make him any less wary. He’d spent far too many days with people for whom everything had changed in the time it took to draw a breath… because they’d turned left instead of right, failed to see the light or hear the horn, or those like Jaclyn Blackstone, guilty of little else save the kind of poor judgment that would place the heart above the head, now at Mercy General Hospital in downtown Oakland with an orbital blowout fracture on the right side of her face awaiting surgery to relieve pressure on an entrapped inferior rectus muscle, and that was the second thing that happened.

He’d heard the news from Janice Silver. She’d called because Jaclyn had come to her by way of Chance and she thought he would want to know. She was also angry and wanted someone to vent to and lastly, as Jaclyn was without insurance and in a county hospital, she was wondering if Chance might be willing to look in on her, to evaluate the extent of her injuries himself.

Chance said that he would. He was seated in his office, the very book he had purchased in Jaclyn’s presence open on the desk before him, the buildings outside his window losing definition to a creeping afternoon fog. “This is the work of the ex?” he asked.

“I can’t believe it’s not.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“She’s not saying.”

Chance watched the fog. He heard Janice sigh, the anger in her voice. “She had been doing so well,” she told him. “You know this bastard had been coming to see her once a week. She’d begun to say no. It was working. Jackie was staying out of the picture. It had to be him.”

“What does she say?”

“She says she surprised an intruder on the patio of her condominium.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Janice echoed, “anything is possible. Let’s not rule out alien abductions.”

He went the following day. He did not visit her straightaway but spoke instead to her attending physician. She’d received a concussion but there was no evidence of bleeding into or structural damage of her brain. The surgery required to relieve the entrapped muscle was straightforward enough and he felt satisfied that she was in good hands. As to the nature of the incident, she had yet to claim additional knowledge. There was only the bit about having surprised someone at the rear of her condo and that was all.

He considered leaving it there as the course prudent behavior then caved to the impulse to stop by her room. He found the door open and a man seated in a chair at the side of her bed. The man wore a gray suit. He was broad shouldered with thick dark hair. He had his back to the door and was leaning forward a bit, holding to one of Jaclyn’s hands, speaking to her in a low voice. Chance heard little more than a name… Jackie … before retreating to a nurses’ station to make conversation with one of the nurses, while waiting to see if the man would leave anytime soon, and where, having identified himself as a doctor, he inquired further regarding the patient in room 141.

“She’s been in quite a lot of pain,” the nurse told him. “Complaining of double vision. She’s scheduled for the surgery this afternoon.”

“Has she had many visitors?”

“Just the husband,” the nurse told him, and excused herself to check on a patient.

Chance was still at the station when the man came out of the room. He was, as Chance had noted, a lean, broad-shouldered man of medium height, a handsome enough man, Chance thought, and fit, certainly capable of doing some damage with his fists.

Chance had expected him to walk on by and was surprised when he stopped before him. “You one of her doctors?” the man asked. The man’s eyes were black and direct. Chance of course recalled that he was a homicide detective for the city of Oakland and he had that about him, whatever that was, some air of authority, some hint of the bully. Chance had no difficulty in believing he was a cop. He had no difficulty in believing he was a bad cop. “I’m a neuropsychiatrist,” Chance told him. “I was asked by her therapist to look in on her.”

“You were in her room just now, why didn’t you look in?”

“I saw she had a visitor. There was no rush.”

“No rush? Not like the doctors I know.”

Chance thought that perhaps the man would smile but he didn’t. Chance just looked at him. The man looked back, a moment longer, before moving off toward the elevators at the end of the hall. Chance waited till the man was gone before returning to Jaclyn’s room.

She looked about as he had expected given the nature and severity of her injuries. One side of her face was badly swollen and bruised. She turned her head a bit on the pillow at his approach and he could see that she had been crying.

“Jaclyn…” he began. “I’m so sorry…”

“Please,” she said. “You should go.” She spoke through clenched teeth, turning to the wall, where a small dirty window looked out upon the city of Oakland.

Chance put his hand on the forearm that was on the outside of her blanket. “You’re going to be fine,” he said, feeling both moved and impotent, reduced to cliché. “You will feel better when they free up that muscle and you can stop seeing two of everything.”