Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

For the first time, Job wondered about his father. All those years ago, how had his father been able to cope? What had it meant to bury his dreams along with his first son?

Throughout the service, the pastor pressed a handkerchief to his temple. After the viewing, the casket was closed and dumped into the ground. Once covered, the plot swelled with dry earth. No one ululated for the boy. On Ifi’s behalf, Job’s mother quaked and sighed next to his rigid father, two sisters, and younger brother, mourning the boy whose growth they had only witnessed through photographs. They knew nothing of his Spider-Man, Wolverine, or his Big Wheel. They knew nothing of the clunky sound of Igbo in the small boy’s mouth.

After the funeral, the mourners ate tureens of jollof rice and moi moi. One parishioner after another shared condolences. Women embraced Job thickly. Men clasped his hands in theirs. By now, everyone had witnessed Ifi’s absence. In her place Job’s mother stood, her face wet with tears. She grasped Job’s hands in hers and held them through the day.

But Job could only imagine Ifi, with unmoving eyes, curled in front of the television. He willed the tears to spill from her eyes. But the harder he tried, the angrier he became at her resistance.

And then the anger turned into humiliation. What kind of father allows such a thing to happen to his son? he thought. What kind of doctor is it who cannot save lives?

One by one parishioners stood before Job, each nodding furiously. “Doctor, God is good, oh. We cannot understand his ways. The boy is in His kingdom.” Always, they asked after his wife’s health. Always, they began each statement with “Doctor.”

Eventually, a tall old man stood before Job. His wife was a small woman. She supported the sagging man with her shoulder.

“Doctor, this cough will not allow my husband to sleep, oh.”

A hard lump knotted in Job’s throat. Thinking of his Victor, thinking of the sliver of life in his palm, he tried to swallow it away. “I am sorry.”

“Doctor, please treat my husband.”

“Leave me, oh,” Job said. I can’t do this again. Not now, he thought. He had never been meant to be the doctor. That was for Samuel. Job had been playing an expensive game for far too long. If Samuel had stood over his son that night, Victor would still be alive. Even as it pained him, he decided that he must own up to it. When he was finally alone, he would throw the stethoscope away. He would finish this game. Once and for all.

“I am not lying,” the woman insisted.

“I do not have my tools,” Job explained to the husband.

When the woman still wouldn’t listen, his voice broke. “I am not a doctor.”

As if she had not heard, she continued, her voice growing shrill. “I beg of you. My husband will pay.” She lifted her purse and sifted through, finding ragged naira notes bound by rubber bands. She began to lower herself to her old, cracking knees to bow in supplication.

“Put your money away, Aunty,” a voice boomed from behind Job. The voice belonged to his father. His father dipped and leaned into his cane until he was standing to the right of Job. “My son is humble. He will treat you.” With that, he produced Job’s briefcase and unclasped it. All that filled the briefcase was Job’s accomplice, the stethoscope.

With wavering palms, Job touched the man’s heaving chest. He pushed in and out and asked him to breathe in deeply. The man struggled through coughs. Job plugged his ears with the eartips. All he could hear was the suction of empty air. As his father watched him fumble with the stethoscope until he found the man’s heartbeat, Job felt his own thorough disgrace. Thuds pounded in his brain. He fought for the words that would interpret the tall man’s maladies. He struggled for the words that would make the man go home with hope. Wasn’t this why his father stood alongside him, urging him to continue his charade?

“Your lungs,” Job started.

He felt his father’s breath over his shoulder as he looked on.

“You see?” the wife asked. “You see. As God is my witness, I am no liar.”

The cough, Job had noticed, was wet and thick like a rag. “Your lungs are filled with fluid instead of air,” he said, though his heart was not in it. “Your lungs are two balloons filled with water.” He thrust out his chest and sucked in air to demonstrate. “You must take,” Job paused for a word that would produce the proper sentiment, a clinical word that rang with finality, professionalism.

“Acid-o-mana-phin.”

“Yes, doctor, yes,” the man said through a cough.

FOR THE PAST THREE DAYS, THE PHONE HAD RUNG. IFI DIDN’T ANSWER. IT must be Job. Now we are even, she said to herself. Was there such a thing? Now that the world knows he is nothing in America, like me, a mother without a child, what will he become? she thought. What was left of nothing? What had brought her here to begin with? His lies.

Seduction was an art Ifi knew little about. Yet, she must have understood its ways. She must have mastered it before she even met Job. Yes, in the photograph that Aunty had mailed to his family without her knowledge, she had seduced him. Perhaps it was an innocent glance that presented her. Perhaps without knowing it, Ifi had exercised the subtleties of grace and coyness during that awkward meeting with Job in Uncle and Aunty’s living room. She had, in a way, collected him as he had collected her.

Now there was nothing, only an assortment of objects, and she would let it all go. Letters, bills, phone calls. Forget them all, she thought. This house and all its holes and all its creaking noises. She had never wanted the ugly house to begin with. Job had simply presented it to her as her own, as he had done with every single aspect of her life, beginning with his first lie. Now it would go to the dogs. It would crumble to the ground before all of them. And Ifi would watch it.

Trilling birds outside. A brutal sun. A thud from the newspaper boy delivering the paper. Ifi stretched out on the living room couch, staring at the gaping hole in the wall, taking in the exhausting heat through her nostrils until her head swam and she drifted to sleep.

As she slept, she saw the house from the outside — a chipped door, gray windows. Nothing more than a large mouth full of rotting teeth. This mouth was hungry and consuming. It chewed what was inside and swallowed. We’re all just meat, she mused. Job, Ifi, and Victor. They were nothing more than meat. This house, it spat the bones outside and left them for the wind to scatter.

A small brown face glared through the window. Ifi bolted up. The eyes, the nose, the mouth. Her fingers came to her face. They covered her lips. Her heart pumped loudly in her chest. She rushed to the window and pressed her face against the glass. She struggled to lift the window. It was stuck. Another problem with this stupid house. A hard yank and it opened. Ifi pried off the screen. She reached out and grasped the face with her hands.

“Victor.”

“Let me go!”

“Let him go!”

She pulled the face in to her. A brief struggle. Ifi lunging this way, the face that way.

“Free him!”

He was free.

Gladys toppled backwards and landed hard on her rear, her legs splayed open like used scissors. Her tote bag was on its side. Loose change was dumped everywhere. A cascade of braided ringlets flopped to one side on her head. Short tufts of her hair peeked from under the wig. She readjusted it. One sandal remained on her foot. The other, who knew where?