MONDAY MORNING, RATH sat erect in a waiting-room chair of the Canaan County Medical Center, a single-story building that had once been the Canaan elementary school, before the school was absorbed into Connecticut Valley District. In 1990, the asbestos had been torn out, the building gutted, and the site remodeled to house general practitioners under one convenient roof. Rath flipped through a Sports Illustrated from April that contended the Red Sox were World Series favorites, no hint of their historic September collapse, spurred by fried chicken and beer.
Rath’s cell buzzed. Sonja Test. Rath answered. “Detective Test,” he said.
“Please. Sonja.” Her voice was low, as if someone might be eavesdropping. “I have something you’re going to want to hear. Meet me at the Wilderness Restaurant in Victory, say two o’clock.”
“Is this about your dead girl?”
“Can you make it?”
He could.
“See you then.” She ended the call.
Rath stared at his cell phone. A nurse poked her head in from the door to the back. “Mr. Rath?”
Rath got up gingerly and followed the nurse, in her mid-twenties, short, and wiry, with the requisite tattoo of her generation, an intricate blue vine snaking out from under the sleeve of her short-sleeved shirt. Rath knew of no image he’d want injected into his skin, and had no idea how tattoos were considered art by anybody; especially when every tattoo he’d ever seen looked like it was done with all the artistry of the high-school stoner drop out.
The nurse had Rath stand on the scale. Measured him. He glimpsed her underarm tuft, caught a whiff of patchouli oil as she raised the bar behind his head.
“Six feet,” she said.
“And a half.”
“No half.”
“There’s always been a half.”
“Not anymore.”
He followed the nurse into a cramped room, where he sat on the edge of an examining table covered with crackling waxed paper.
The nurse took his blood pressure. He felt his blood throb beneath the cuff. “One forty over ninety,” the nurse said.
“Is that bad?”
“You’ll live, tough guy like you. Dr. Snell will be right in.”
“Snell? Where’s Rankin?”
“In his bow stand, waiting for a big buck, so he says. He’s probably asleep on his couch, worn-out from watching game shows.”
She pointed at a Johnny. “Toss that on.”
Rath waited in his Johnny, his skin prickling in the cool room. Why were doctors’ offices always cold? Snell. He knew of him. Young. Early thirties. When Rath had been in his twenties, he’d not trusted anyone over forty and had disliked old man Rankin, who was resistant to technology, a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. Now that Rath was north of forty, he didn’t trust a doctor younger than forty-five, kids who couldn’t relate to the tolling bell of mortality accompanying daily life.
Snell strolled in, whistling, his dark eyes working crisply over the screen of the iPad he had in hand. If he didn’t know what ailed Rath, perhaps Google would.
Snell’s skull was as smooth and bare as a marble pestle, with a squeezed bulge of flesh at the back of his neck. He wore a flannel shirt, Carhartt pants, and Merrell hiking boots. On his chin squatted a soulless soul patch. He sat on a stool and looked at Rath, clicking his teeth as if calling a squirrel from a park bench. “The X-rays were negative. I’m thinking we get you an MRI.”
“MRI?” Rath’s stomach fluttered.
“We tried six weeks of PT. We gave it a chance. It’s nothing skeletal, given the X-ray. If it were muscular, the PT should have worked.”
Rath knew his liver and pancreas were packed snug to the erector spinae. What if it was something internal? Five years earlier, a friend had experienced back pain throughout the fall. On Thanksgiving, when he’d been unable to get up from the couch for dinner, his wife had taken him to the emergency room. He’d died of lung cancer on Christmas.
Rath shifted. “Rankin said I had nothing to worry about.” His voice felt weak.
“We just need to make sure.”
Sure of what?
“Look,” Snell said, clapping a hand on Rath’s knee. Rath flinched. “We’ll get the MRI, so we can scratch any other concerns off the list. You’ve been doing the stretches?”
“Religiously,” Rath said, not a lie for a man who thought comedian Bill Maher was a zealot.
“And you’ve been practicing good body mechanics, not overdoing the bending, twisting, or pulling. Pulling’s the worst.”
Rath thought about the deer he’d dragged two miles through Dufrane’s Swamp and over Corser Brook ridge. He’d dragged bigger deer much farther, over worse terrain.
“Not overdoing it,” he said.
“I’ll set you up for an MRI. Lie down, I’ll take a look.”
Snell pressed cold fingers into Rath’s flesh. “What level of pain, zero to ten?”
Rath’s pain felt like a big fat eight, an infinite loop of pain, at least with Snell jabbing away. “Not bad, a six.”
“A six is not ‘not bad’, four’s bad.”
“I’m out of Vicodin.”
“You shouldn’t be. I hope you’re not taking more than prescribed or selling them on the playground.”
“I knocked the open bottle into a sink of dishwater,” Rath lied.
“I’ll write another. This once. But don’t ever take more than prescribed. It can cloud judgment, impair motor skills.” Snell pressed the stethoscope to Rath’s chest. Cold. Always cold. He listened to Rath’s heart. “So, what’s cooking?”
Rath might have a tumor the size of an eggplant in his liver, and Snell wanted to know what’s cooking?
“I’m trying to find a missing girl,” Rath said.
Snell pressed the stethoscope to Rath’s back. “Breathe. Sounds ominous.”
Rath reached for his shirt and plucked Mandy’s photo from its pocket. “Seen her?”
Snell considered the photo, calling all squirrels with his clicking tongue. “Pretty.”
“Ever seen her?”
Snell shook his head as he clasped the end of his stethoscope. “I don’t think so.”
“You might have?” Rath sat up.
Snell squeezed the roll of fat at the base of his neck. “She sort of seems familiar. But. In that way that reminds you of someone from TV or a dream.” He handed the photo to Rath.
“Give me a call if anything comes to you,” Rath said.
“Get dressed. Don’t do anything stupid with that back. And don’t worry about the MRI. It’s probably nothing.”
Probably nothing.
One more euphemism by which to live.
Or die.