Corinne Demas - The Writing Circle - A Novel

T HE HOUSE IS SET ON A HILLSIDE, WITH A LONG DRIVEWAY that leads up to it and disappears around the back. Its after dinnertime, already dark. A garage door at the rear of the house opens, and a pickup truck backs out and turns around. Whoever is driving has not turned the headlights on, and if you were viewing the scene from above, you would barely make out the truck as it comes around the side of the house, as it heads down the driveway.

A figure cuts across the sloping front lawn and starts down the driveway, towards the road. Its probably a woman, but shes dressed in black, and almost invisible in the dark. A young man is standing by the house, watching her. Light spills out of the doorway behind him. He hears the pickup truck as it emerges around the corner of the house, and he turns towards the sound. Then he cries out somethingthe womans name perhapsbut she does not hear him. Shes halfway down the driveway, just at the point where it takes a sharp turn. He flies down the hillside, plunges towards her, towards the point of intersection.

Upstairs, in a room in the hospital, were a man and a woman and a dead baby. You would not realize, at first, that the baby was dead. The woman had bobby pins holding her brown hair back off her face. The man wore glasses with tortoiseshell plastic frames, cloudy over the bridge of his nose. Those were the only details the doctor could bear to picture now.

Years later the couple would have two more childrenboth boysbut at the time neither they nor the young doctor had any way to know that. They would adore those sons, and anyone who hadnt known about the first child they might have had, a little girl, would think them so content as parents that they wanted for nothing. But that night, as the doctor walked out through the lobby of the hospital, the future, which would in fact hold a reasonable share of blessings, was unimaginable.

It was a small country hospital, and the doctor, who was older than he looked, had come back to the area where he had grown up to join a local practice. His parents had moved to Arizona and sold the house where he had spent the early years of his life, but he still knew people in town, though not many, since he had always been a shy kid and had gone away to boarding school and then college.

The hospital had recently opened its new wing, the result of a surprisingly successful capital campaign, and the lobby had been in use for only three weeks. It was designed along the lines of a grand hotel, with high ceilings, art deco light fixtures, and upholstered armchairs placed in conversation clusters along its length. The floor was carpeted in purple and the walls were paneled in honey-colored wood, and the effect was soothing and deceiving, though no one was entirely fooled because the smell of the hospital seeped out from the rooms and corridors beyond. It was a faade that seemed fragile, because just beyond it the real business of the hospitalcarried out in rooms with white linoleum floorsseemed as if it might burst through. But that was during the day. Now, at 2:30 a.m., even that world beyond the wood veneer was quiet, too, the lights all dimmed.

A woman wheeled a carpet sweeper in front of the bank of elevators and disappeared behind a doorway. And then the lobby was absolutely still until the doctor appeared around the partition at the far end. He had changed from his scrubs into his street clothes, and he wore running shoes and a black leather jacket that didnt seem like the style of clothing a doctor would choose. From a distance, the jacket made him look like a teenager. He walked with his shoulders slung forward and his chin against his chest, and he didnt look up until he passed the glass doors of the gift shop and snack bar. He paused for a moment and looked into the room, which was illuminated only by the lights in the refrigerated unit that held juice and bottled water. It had been nearly two days since he had slept and hours since he had eaten. He ran his hand along the brass door handle, and, although he knew the door was locked, when his hand reached the end he jiggled it anyway. He leaned against the door, pressing the side of his unshaved face against the cool glass, and closed his eyes for a second.

It was clear to him that he could not go on this way. He had allowed grief to enter into a realm where grief had no place, and the result was that he could no longer function as he needed to. He was absolutely certain about thismore certain than he had been when he had decided to go to medical school, more certain than when he had completed his residency and decided to join a practice in the place where he had grown up. He was certain that he could not recover the kind of distance that he knew he needed to have, that he had trespassed into an emotional territory where even the greatest amount of resolve couldnt lead him out. He had no idea what else he would do with himself, but he knew it couldnt be this.

The revolving doors in the center of the entrance had been locked. He let himself out from the smaller door on the side. The staff parking lot was on the far side of the building, farthest from the main road. There were white pines in the lot that must have been planted when the original hospital building had been erected, and now they were forest giants, several stories high. He breathed in the smell of them. He walked to his car at the far end of the lot and brushed the pine needles from the windshield. He started up the car and drove out to the semicircle of road that went past the emergency room entrance and under the porte cochere outside the main lobby. He looked back at the brick front of the hospital. Most of the rooms were dark. He was certain their room was dark, the room where the couple and the dead baby were, and he counted off the floors and windows and located which one was theirs. He forced himself to look at it, but his head soon jerked as he twitched himself awake. He put on his headlights, which he had neglected to do before, and pulled out into the road that would take him home.

I T WAS THE DAY OF TESTICULAR CANCER. NANCY (A NAME that no one was given anymore) had laid out the offprints from various medical journals on her desk the night before, but she hadnt looked at any of them yet. The monthly newsletter she edited had a dozen articles an issue, and she usually spent a day collecting material for each article, and a day reading through it, boiling it down, and writing it up. The newsletter was published under the name of a university medical school, but Nancy was its major author. An editorial board of physicians at the hospitalwhose names were used for PRsometimes suggested subjects for her, but mostly it was she who came up with the topics covered each month. She kept her ear out for what people were worried about, health crises that hit the local news (like the deadly strain of E. coli bacteria that had contaminated baby spinach) and the usual seasonal concerns. She did articles about lower back pain when spring gardening season arrived, articles about skin cancer as summer approached, and articles about frostbite at the start of winter. She farmed out some of the work to freelance writers (she had once been one of them), but she rewrote all the articles herself. The narrative voice she had perfected was professional but jaunty. She sounded like an authority, but her tone was upbeat, even when the article was ultimately informing the reader about some hideous condition that involved suffering, disfigurement, and certain early death.

We are not in the business of scaring people is what the physician who had started the newsletter and hired her years before had said. Were in the business of informing them and helping them make wise choices about their health.