Janice Macdonald - Along Came Zoe

If she had a dollar for every time she’d stopped herself from blurting that question, she’d be a wealthy woman. And as much as she’d like to credit her restraint with something high-minded, like fairness at all costs, the main reason she never asked her son if he wanted to end up like his dad was a suspicion that Brett might say that turning out like his dad would be pretty cool. A garage full of toys—surfboards, water skis, a cluster of dirt bikes; summer weekends vrooming across the water in a sleek white powerboat, winter weekends snowboarding in the local mountains. A hot-looking babe for a wife. How bad could that be?

A more pertinent question might be Do you want to end up like me?

Last month she’d attended her twentieth high-school reunion. Reluctantly. Her friend had practically had to drag her there. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Right. Wearing heels was never fun and neither was anything else about the evening. Like the emerald-green silk dress she’d bought from Second Time Around that clung like a fretting child to her legs, or the large, laminated and hideously embarrassing picture of herself at eighteen, or Evelyn Something-or-other, Ph.D., former class valedictorian, who had droned on about how reunions were a chance to catch up on one another’s lives.

“A reunion is an opportunity to examine our own life narrative,” Earnest Evelyn had told the assembled crowd in the San Diego Hilton ballroom. “A chance to consider the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we became that person. Always remember though,” she’d cautioned, “reunions can also threaten the integrity of those stories by subjecting them to the scrutiny of others, to friends and acquaintances whose memories of the past and of us may be altogether different from our own.”

That bit at least had gotten Zoe’s attention. In fact she’d fallen asleep thinking about it. Less about how she got to be the person she was—she could pretty much work that out—than why her version of who she was, which she was quite satisfied with, thank you very much—seemed so out of whack with the way everyone else saw her. Who exactly was fooling whom?

AFTER HE’D TRIED TWICE to reach the boy’s mother and got Zany Zoe’s recorded message, Phillip decided he’d talk to Molly before he tried the number again. He reached her from his office, between surgeries.

“Hello?” a young, female voice responded.

“Hi.” Was this Molly? Embarrassing, but he couldn’t be sure. “Moll?”

“Dad?” It was Molly. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you think that?”

“Uh, duh, Dad. Why do you usually call me?”

Phillip exhaled through this mouth, slumped in his chair. In his peripheral vision, he saw Eileen motioning to him. He covered the receiver. “Eileen?”

“Hospital administration on line two.”

“I’ll call right back.” He spoke into the receiver. “What’s up?”

“You called me, Dad.”

“I know I called you, Molly, I—”

“Well, you’re making it sound like I called you.”

“I’m not making it sound like anything.” He forced himself to relax. Exactly when they’d gone from being friends to adversaries, he couldn’t say, but lately every conversation with Molly seemed to go this way. “I just called—”

“What time is it?” Molly demanded. “I was still asleep.”

“It’s after noon, Molly.”

“So?”

“You were sleeping when I came to take you out to lunch last week.”

“So what?” Her voice had escalated a notch. “I was tired.”

“You don’t have school?” he asked, looking up as Eileen tapped on his door. “Hold on a minute, Moll. Yes?”

“That reporter from the Tribune. He has a follow-up question.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back.”

“He asked me to interrupt you. He said he’s on a deadline.”

“Hold on again, Moll.” He clicked the hold button and pressed the other line. “I have a question for you,” he said to the reporter. “What if you’d caught me in the middle of surgery?”

The reporter laughed. “I’m tenacious.”

“Okay,” Phillip said. “So what’s the question?”

“Confirmation really. You said on a typical day, you usually do four surgeries.

“Scheduled surgeries. There could be one or two emergency surgeries.”

“But not after-hours?”

“We’ve suspended twenty-four-hour coverage.” Phillip repeated the statement he’d given to every press query received since he and his partner had made the decision. Repetition didn’t make it any easier. Tonight, if there was a head-on crash in or around Seacliff, he didn’t say, or the gun and knife contingent went on a rampage, head or spinal injuries needing neurosurgery services would be airlifted to a center to the north, a potentially deadly delay. Worse, they’d be taken to the nearest E.R. where the chances of being misdiagnosed or undertreated by a sleep-deprived second-year resident…he stopped the thought.

“Any chance you’ll be starting up again?”

“Not until we find a third partner,” Phillip said. The green hold light had gone out; Molly had hung up. He finished with the reporter and redialed her number. It rang four times before she answered.

“Sorry, Moll.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Molly…”

“Well, it’s not like I’m used to having your undivided attention. Like I’m suddenly thinking, ‘Whoa what’s with Dad? Omigod, his mind doesn’t seem to be on what I’m saying. I wonder what’s wrong—’”

“Knock it off, Molly. Let’s talk about you running up your mother’s American Express card.”

She sighed noisily. “I needed stuff, Dad. That’s why Mom said I could use the card in the first place.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars buys a lot of stuff. What stuff did you need?”

“Fine, forget it. I won’t use the damn card again. I don’t want to go through some stupid inquisition.”

“This isn’t an inquisition, Molly. I’m just asking you to account for the fifteen hundred dollars you charged this month.”

“I’m buying drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“You know, cocaine, heroin. Whatever I can get my hands on.”

“Very funny.” It was a joke, right? He might reject the psychiatrist’s diagnosis, but Molly frequently baffled him: her mercurial moods, the sudden and inexplicable obsessions—was it last month that she’d gone on, endlessly it seemed, about wheat grass? And before that, fasting as the cure to any medical problem. That one had driven him nuts. But, as Deanna had pointed out, whacky ideas were part of being seventeen. Drugs, though, hadn’t really occurred to him as a serious possibility. Molly wasn’t losing weight, she had no needle marks, and her eyes didn’t show any signs of drug use.

Denial? The psychiatrist smirked. Phillip pushed away the image.

“Anyway, fifteen hundred dollars,” Molly was saying now. “Big deal. Mom spends that on her facials.”

“We’re talking about you.”

“I needed clothes, Dad.”

“For yourself?”

“Of course for myself. What d’you think?”

“Your mother said something about a boy.”

“What boy?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Silence on the line.

“Moll?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now, Dad.”

“Is there a time you would feel like talking about it?”

More silence. “We could get something to eat at Swaami’s.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, like in an hour.”

“I’ll be in surgery in an hour, Molly.”

“Whatever,” she said.

The line went dead. In the outer office, he heard a phone ringing, then Eileen’s voice. “Next Thursday? Mmm…let me take a quick look at his schedule, but Thursdays are really booked tight.” He heard the tap of computer keys and then Eileen laughed. “True, Dr. Barry’s one busy man.”