Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

Still, she had to send some very stern letters to the lawyer representing Dan, asking him to tell his client that if he made absurd demands — like wanting the house and half of the savings account and everything that I didn’t take with me when I moved into that temporary apartment at Lucy’s — we would now demand half the house etc. Did he really want to spend thousands in legal bills, especially when I was asking for so little and there was so little to actually divide?

Dan saw sense. The two lawyers met once and hammered out an agreement. Dan asked that it not be signed for a couple of months to give us both time to think about it; which was clearly his way of hoping against hope that I would change my mind. The curious thing was, once I had left the house he never phoned me — preferring to communicate by email, and only when he had something practical to discuss regarding the house or our children. According to Amanda — who gleaned this information from Dan’s lawyer — my husband still wanted me to make the first move when it came to reconciliation, even though he had to understand that, as I was the one who’d left the marriage, that was never going to happen.

‘People go truly strange in the wake of a long marriage detonating,’ Amanda said. ‘I sense that your husband simply can’t face up to what’s happening — and expects you to make it all right for him. Which, as I explained to his lawyer, was something you had repeatedly informed me was beyond the realm of possibility.’

‘I feel sorry for him.’

‘Not as sorry as he feels for himself.’

News of our impending divorce got around Damariscotta in the expected matter of nanoseconds. But the hospital still organized a goodbye drink for me; a little after-work soirйe at the Newcastle Publick House in town. To my immense surprise, Sally showed up. And then, around an hour into the proceedings, in walked Ben.

‘Surprise,’ he said quietly, planting a kiss on my cheek.

Dr Harrild made a little speech, talking about how I knew more about things radiographic than he did, and how my ‘professional rigor’ was ‘matched by an immense decency’, and how the hospital would be a lesser place without me. I found myself blushing. I have never been totally at ease with praise. But when asked to speak, after thanking Dr Harrild and all my colleagues for such interesting years and such ‘ongoing colleagiality’, I then said this (having thought it through beforehand):

‘If there’s one thing I know about my work it’s that it constantly reminds me of the enigmas we all live with. The discovery that what seems to be evident is frequently cloudy; that we are all so profoundly vulnerable, yet also so profoundly resilient; that, out of nowhere, our story can change. I’m always dealing with people in extremis, in real possible danger, and grappling so often with fear. Everyone I have ever scanned or X-rayed has a story — their story. But though my equipment peers behind the outer layer we all have, if all these years at the hospital have taught me anything it is that everyone is a mystery. Most especially to themselves.’

Three days later I awoke at five and headed south to Portland, reporting as agreed at an early hour to go through the usual employee registration process: being photographed and fingerprinted, being issued an ID and parking sticker, doing all the paperwork to transfer me to the hospital’s health scheme, being given a complete checkup by a staff doctor, then spending much of the day being taken around by a soon-to-be-retiring technologist named Ruth Redding — who, in her own quiet way, made it clear that this was the closest Maine came to a high-pressured urban hospital. Radiography operated day and night, ‘and though we might not be Mass General, the pressure is always on. But, trust me, it’s never less than interesting — and from what I saw in your file, you can handle the pressure.’

Pressurized it was, especially as we were very much an adjunct of the ER and seemed to be dealing with at least a dozen bad accidents per day. Then there was the booked-full stream of scheduled procedures — and the need to maintain time-management efficiency (in Damariscotta we might have an entire forty-five minutes twice a day when no patient was scheduled, and accident cases usually were rushed to the bigger hospital in Brunswick). The head of radiology, Dr Conrad, was hyper-rigorous and exacting. But I had worked with this sort of boss in the past — and decided to show her, early on, that I would match her professionalism and clinical cool. Though she was notoriously closed-lipped when it came to praising others (as the other technologists in the department told me), she did turn to me after a few weeks on the job and say: ‘Hiring you was a good call.’

End of praise. But it still touched me.

‘So it’s all right accepting praise from others?’ Lisa Schneider asked during a session a few days later.

‘I’ll tell you something rather interesting — the crying fits that used to characterize so much of the last year have largely stopped. Yes, I can still get deeply affected by a patient. There was a sixteen-year-old girl in last week with what was clearly a major malignancy in her uterus — and that was a tough hour. But I didn’t break down afterwards, as I had done so often last year.’

‘And why do you think that is?’

I shrugged, then said:

‘I don’t know. maybe the fact that I am no longer in an unhappy marriage. I can’t say I am in a happy place myself. but then again, as you keep telling me, this is a period of serious transition, so don’t expect “inner peace” or zen-like calm.’

Lisa Schneider looked at me quizzically.

‘Now I think you’re putting words in my mouth.’

‘Actually, those were Sally’s words — when I settled her into her dorm room at U Maine last weekend. “You’re looking a little happier, Mom. Don’t tell me you’ve gone all inner peace and zen on me.”’

‘How did all that go with Sally?’

‘It was a wrench, seeing my youngest child now starting college, for all the obvious reasons. Then again, having moved out of the house a few weeks before, there wasn’t that terrible silence of coming home afterwards to the proverbial empty nest. Dan suffered that, however. We agreed by email that I would settle Sally in on Friday and Saturday, then leave Sunday morning — and he’d come up and see her then. Around ten o’clock that night, long after Dan usually goes to bed, I got a call on my cellphone. It was my soon-to-be ex-husband. Sounding beyond sad. Saying that coming home to this empty house was beyond awful. Telling me how stupid he had been. How if he could turn back the clock. ’

‘And how did you reply to all this?’

‘I was polite. I never once mentioned how he had talked about my affair with our children, and how monstrous I thought that all was. But when he asked if he could come over now and see me — that he really wanted to try and work things out — I was very definitive. I simply said no. That’s when he started to cry.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘Sad, of course. But — and this was an interesting change — not guilty at all.’

‘That is an interesting change,’ she said.

‘It’s all interesting change, isn’t it?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Something else happened a few days ago. During coffee break at the hospital I picked up the Portland Press Herald that is always left for us in the staff room every morning. Turned a page, saw a small item in the “In State” columns — the suicide of a prisoner at the State Psychiatric Prison Hospital in Bangor. William Copeland, age twenty-six. Richard’s son.’

‘What terrible news,’ she said with studied neutrality.

‘I was very shaken by it.’