Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said, crouching next to him and feeling for his pulse, her curly blond hair spilling over her shoulders. Together, we dragged him to a sitting position, against a stone memorial to the Civil War dead. Alan’s head lolled to the side. Having seen the family photos, I knew that at one time he’d been a good-looking teenager, green-eyed, with a dimple in his cheek. It was hard to imagine girls going for him now. During his second tour in Afghanistan, an IED took off his left foot, and since he came back, Stephanie said, he’d been struggling. That looked like an understatement.

We hoisted him up and anchored him on our shoulders. His eyes were closed, but I could feel him trying to steady himself, to help us out. It took fifteen minutes to get him across the street and into the backseat of Stephanie’s Civic. She wanted to sit back there with him, so I drove us up the hill to Forks Township. Her condo was in a subdivision that had sprung up too fast, and half the houses were empty. With all those carless driveways and skinny, seedling trees, the neighborhood had a creepy feel. As I drove, I glanced at them in the rearview mirror. Her arm was around him, his head leaning against her neck. His eyelids fluttered. He was smiling.

I met Stephanie my first week at the clinic, which was also my first week in the Lehigh Valley. I was a brand-new doctor, and newly single. Robin, my girlfriend since medical school, had said she’d come with me to Pennsylvania but then, at the last minute, took a job in San Francisco instead. She’d barely even apologized. “San Francisco, Tom,” she’d said, spreading her palms, the difference between California and eastern Pennsylvania too manifest to require explanation. So I moved alone. The job was at a large practice with a staff of young doctors, including me, who rotated through before pushing on to bigger hospitals in other cities. I myself didn’t plan on being here long. What I hoped was to set up my own practice in a nice suburb of Philly, maybe Cherry Hill, where I’d grown up; this place was just a stopover.

Stephanie was the head nurse on my first shift. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fought to contain it; it frizzed around her forehead, and she kept lifting her hand to smooth it down. She showed me around the place, introduced me to everyone, and from the offhand way she said my name I understood that she had my number and didn’t count on my staying long either. She was a good nurse, unflappable and smart. Two weeks after we met, I was walking to my car when I noticed her leaving at the same time.

“Hey,” I said.

“Doctor.”

“Call me Tom, please.”

“Okay, Tom,” she said. Her tone was not inviting. She was wearing a lumpy brown cardigan over pink scrubs and Crocs, as unattractive an outfit as I’d ever seen, but somehow I still kept straining at its outlines, wondering just what it disguised.

“Buy you a drink? I don’t really know where to go around here, but maybe you can tell me.”

She cocked her head to one side, not smiling. I was expecting her to shake her head, but instead she said, “Let’s go.”

She took me to a sports bar, and over drinks she was quiet. At one point, I caught her looking at her watch. But then she leaned over to me in the booth and suddenly we were making out. She tasted like chicken wings and rum.

She never sought me out at work, and we didn’t flirt there, but whenever I’d ask her if she wanted to grab a bite or a drink, she said yes. Stephanie was a local, born and raised in Macungie; her father had worked at Bethlehem Steel until it closed, her mother as a secretary for the school district. They didn’t have a lot of money, and she’d put herself through nursing school working as a waitress. As soon as she told me that, I felt like I could picture her no-nonsense way of taking orders, a change belt wrapped around her thin hips.

“I bet you got great tips,” I said.

She looked at me, her mouth in a straight line. She had these deadpan expressions that took me a while to figure out, and I liked her for that.

“Enough for school,” she said. “And a car. And a couple trips to Mexico.”

We’d been dating for around a month when she called and asked me to help her with her brother. She hadn’t said much about him, just that he’d been injured while serving and she wasn’t sure what he’d do now. He was younger than her by a few years, and I had the feeling she’d always looked out for him. They’d gone to high school with a guy who was now on the police force, and he’d called her when Alan passed out in the square.

On the short drive back to her place, we didn’t say much. I could hear her talking to him in the backseat, just simple things. “You don’t look good, Alan. We’re going to take you home and get you cleaned up. I’ll make you some grilled cheese. Or whatever you want.” As if she were his mother. Her arm was around his, their blond heads clustered together, and I felt like their chauffeur, some hired hand. When we got there, she guided him into the bathroom. His clothes stank, and his arms and chest were crowded with tattoos and bruises. He looked tough, but he was pliant while we stripped him.

Together we bathed him, as if he were a dirty overgrown child, and he started to come around a little. He didn’t seem upset that we were manhandling him. He was very polite. “Thanks,” he kept saying, and “I’m sorry.” When he was more or less clean, we helped him out of the bathtub and Stephanie asked me to get him some fresh clothes from a dresser in her bedroom. Apparently they were his own clothes, because they fit just fine.

“This is Tom,” Stephanie told him, once he was dressed.

“I’m sorry we met like this,” Alan said. He held out his hand and we shook. His blond hair was lank, and his green eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion. I’d have given him a B12 shot and locked him in rehab for a month, but he wasn’t my brother.

“No problem,” I said.

She fed him a grilled cheese sandwich, as promised, and put him in her spare room. Then she and I went to bed.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“It’s not the first time,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “His leg kills him.”

“What’s he on, medication-wise?”

“He’s been on everything. He always says it doesn’t help.”

She was undressed for bed, and her back was covered in tiny freckles. I set myself to tracing them with my index finger, making constellations out of them, a triangle, a star. I loosed her hair from its ponytail, and it sprang to life, a million curls clouding her shoulders. She lay down and folded herself against me, pulling my arm across her stomach. I wondered if she was crying. But she turned, and kissed me, then moved down my stomach and took me in her mouth, and I closed my eyes, not thinking about anything else at all.

After that night, I was deep into Stephanie’s life, and I liked it there. We started spending most weekends together, and I met her parents, who were sweet, tired people, too impressed that I was a doctor for me to be comfortable around them. She showed me around Bethlehem: the shuttered factory they’d turned into a casino, the quaint cobblestoned Main Street, the shambling towpath along the Delaware canal. Sometimes we went hiking in the Poconos, the mountains’ dazzling green bisected by the truck-heavy rumble of I-80. The whole place seemed hardscrabble to me, gritty and rural, and as much as I liked Stephanie, I had a hard time imagining staying there for long.

As I got to know her, I realized how closely her life and Alan’s were intertwined. She was constantly bailing him out, helping him get job interviews, putting him up for the night when another in his series of housing arrangements — he’d get a new roommate or a new girlfriend, then argue with them and move out — crumbled.