“MY RECEPTIONIST TELLS ME YOU GOT INTO IT WITH BETTY DOYLE,” Dr. Houseman said as he closed the door to his small office and took a seat behind the desk. “I’m sorry about that. Betty was grumpy when she was younger, but she’s even worse now.”
“She left without seeing you.”
“She’ll be back,” he said. “I’m the only doctor in town. Betty Doyle isn’t going anywhere.”
Erin nodded. “I was hoping to make a good impression on the people I haven’t seen since childhood. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of that.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gossip, a bit of small-town chatter. People talk, that’s all. By late this evening, everyone will know you’re back. Then they have to decide what to make of you.”
“Any words of advice?”
“Be yourself. What else can you do?”
“Betty tells me I should be careful.”
“You should concentrate on your father’s recovery. Getting him better is our top priority.”
Erin was silent for a moment, recalling the image of her father in the hospital, his breathing supported by the ventilator, a line of plastic tubing running from an IV pump to a catheter that disappeared beneath the blue-and-white fabric of his hospital gown. He’d appeared weak and vulnerable, an older and thinner man than he’d been when she last saw him.
“Will they arrest him, once he’s well enough to leave the hospital?”
“I don’t know,” Mark said. “I hope not. Right now they don’t know what they’re dealing with.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m your father’s physician, not his attorney.”
“But I respect your opinion.”
“I don’t have one to offer,” he said, “not on any legal matters.”
“You think I should hire someone—an attorney, that is?”
He shrugged. “He hasn’t been accused of a crime yet.”
“Not formally, no.”
He looked down at his desk, then back up at her. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
“It’s not my area of expertise,” he said. “If you need the name of someone, I can ask around. There’s a guy in town who does some defense work, but”—he shrugged—“maybe it’s better to get someone from outside of Wolf Point.”
“Hard to separate the town from the person? Hard to find someone who isn’t already biased?”
“Something like that.”
There was a knock on the door. They both turned in its direction.
“Come in,” Mark called, and the door opened halfway to reveal the receptionist.
“Will you be needing me anymore this evening, Dr. Houseman?”
“No, Candice. Thank you. Have a good night. I’ll lock up when I leave.”
“Okay. Have a good night, Dr. Houseman. Good night, ma’am.”
“Good night,” Erin said, and the door closed, leaving the two of them alone once again in the office.
Erin leaned back in her chair. “By tomorrow morning the whole town will know I stayed after hours to chat with you in your office.”
Mark smiled. “Right.”
He picked up a small instrument from the surface of his desk and turned it over in his hands. It looked like a drawing compass, with two thin metal arms that tapered to sharp points at the ends. He glanced up at her. “Calipers,” he said, “for measuring intervals on an EKG. Do you use them in veterinary medicine?”
“Rarely,” she said. “I don’t have any in the office.”
Mark nodded. “It was a gift from my father.” He brought the arms together and returned it to the desktop. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” he said. “We discovered it during your father’s diagnostic work-up.”
Erin straightened herself in the chair. “He had sepsis, pneumonia . . . and the nurse said something about anemia.”
Mark nodded. “He had all of those things. We’ve been giving him IV fluids and antibiotics, so the sepsis and pneumonia seem to be under control. The anemia’s better, too, after the transfusion.” He laced his fingers together. “We’re heading in the right direction. I’m pleased with the way he’s responded.”
“That’s good,” she said. “It sounds promising.”
“Yes,” he said. “You see, we’ve . . .” He looked down at his hands, then back up at her. “There’s a mass in your father’s right lung. The first few chest X-rays didn’t show it very well. It was hidden beneath the pneumonia. Now that the infection is clearing, it’s more distinct on the follow-up films.”
“A lung mass. A tumor,” she said. The words tasted sour in her mouth.
“Yes, a tumor. I ordered a CT of the chest, just to be sure. There’s a tumor sitting in the right middle lobe of your father’s lung. There are some enlarged lymph nodes in the mediastinum, and a smaller nodule in the left lower lobe.”
Erin sat in silence, trying to wrap her mind around the things he was telling her. “Lung cancer,” she said. “You’re sure.”
Mark shook his head. “No,” he said. “There are other possibilities. We’d need a biopsy to be certain.”
“What other possibilities?”
“It could be anything. Scarring from a previous infection, for example. Tuberculosis. A pulmonary abscess. Or it could be something benign and of no concern. The point is, we don’t know. That’s why we need the biopsy.”
Erin drew in a deep ratcheting breath and let it out. As a veterinarian, she’d had similar conversations with the owners of her own patients. It was difficult to deliver bad news all at once. More tests were usually needed. In this case, her father needed a biopsy. They couldn’t make a definitive diagnosis without it. And yet she could tell from Mark’s demeanor that he was pretty certain already.
“—have a friend from medical school who’s a pulmonologist,” he was saying. “He works out of Billings, but he’s agreed to fly up here this weekend to do a bronchoscopy.”
“He’s flying all the way up to Wolf Point just to do a bronchoscopy?”
“He owns a Cessna and has his private pilot’s license. It’ll give him a chance to get out of the office and log some flight time.”
Erin was quiet. It was hard to come to terms with the things Mark was telling her. She wanted to argue that it didn’t make sense for the pulmonologist to fly all the way to Wolf Point to perform a single bronchoscopy. Why not send the patient to the doctor, instead of the other way around? But no, the argument ran deeper than that. How had she suddenly ended up in a world where her father had cancer?
“He never smoked,” she said. “Not that I know of.”
Mark nodded. “Smoking is only one risk factor. There are people who smoke for most of their lives who never get cancer, and there are people who never smoke who do. Part of it is genetic,” he said, and Erin winced. “Or other exposures,” he added quickly, “a whole host of factors we know little about.”
“Some chemical he used on the farm, perhaps? A carcinogen he wasn’t aware of?”
“Could be.” He cleared his throat. “Most of the time we never know, not for certain anyway.”
She stared at the surface of the desk. It was the second one she’d studied in the space of a single afternoon, the second time she’d been handed a revelation about her father she did not want to accept.
“He’s a good man,” she said, “the best man I’ve ever known.”
“Yes,” he said. “Wolf Point is lucky to have him.”
“It gets everyone, doesn’t it?”
“Hmm?”
“It gets everyone, everyone who’s ever lived here. My mother. My father. It’s only a matter of time until the town takes what belongs to it.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it, just a sound that filled the room and was gone, like many of the lives that had passed through this very office. “It’s had a piece of him for years. I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s decided to take the rest.”
“Erin, listen to me.”
She looked up.
“I know this comes as a shock,” he said. “It’s going to take time to process. Right now we’re at the beginning of it. There are many steps in front of us. My advice is to try not to worry about all of them at once. It’s hard to see around the corner. The road ahead is never as straight as we think it is.”
“The specialist,” she said. “You called in a favor and pulled some strings to get him up here.”
Mark shrugged. “Dr. Kowalski is a good friend. It’s easier for him to do the bronchoscopy now while your father is still sedated with an endotracheal tube in place.”
“Thank you. I appreciate the way you’re taking such great care of him.”
“Of course,” he said. “You should try to get some rest. Do you have a place to stay for the night?”
“I was initially planning on staying at my father’s house, but Lieutenant Stutzman tells me that’s not an option at the moment.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have a room to offer you,” Mark told her, “unless you’d like to share one with a three-year-old.”
Erin smiled. “As tempting as that sounds . . .”
“Other than that, it’s the Homestead Inn. The other place closed five years ago.”
She nodded. “Then the Homestead it is. Do I have time to visit my father again this evening?”
“Visiting hours are from nine A.M. to eight P.M.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s six-thirty. You have time to see him again if you’d like.”
“Thank you,” she said, and Mark walked her out and said good night.
The wind was blowing hard from the west as Erin crossed the street to the hospital. She found the room on her own this time, and her father appeared unchanged from earlier that day, only now she had a better understanding of what he was up against. David’s illness had unearthed more than just an unsettling discovery on the farm. It had uncovered something ominous lurking inside of him. There was a chance that one of these things—the tumor or the human remains they’d discovered on the property—might get him before the other. But Dr. Houseman was right. It was hard to see around the corner, hard to know for certain what lay ahead.
Erin leaned over her father’s body and kissed him on the forehead, something her mother had done to her each evening when she tucked Erin into bed. “Good night, Daddy,” she whispered, but the words caught in her throat. It was painful to see him like this, dependent and helpless, waiting for whatever came next. Still, she was glad she had come. Her father needed her, more than she’d realized. Maybe he always had.
She sat there for a while longer, her left hand cupped around the top of his forearm. Erin closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the hospital until her breathing fell in step with the steady cadence of the ventilator. There is a way through this, she thought, but she kept hearing the sound of the shovel striking the earth, the scrape of metal against the dirt. She woke to a hand on her shoulder, her father’s nurse telling her that visiting hours were over.
“Sorry,” she told Diesel as she climbed into the truck. She keyed the ignition, and the engine turned over twice before it caught. “Homestead Inn,” she said, and she put the Chevy in gear, pulled a U-turn in the middle of the empty street, and got them heading in the right direction.
The streets seemed different in the dim, artificial glow of the headlights. Yards and houses she’d recognized earlier that day were indistinct shapes now, the shadows shifting and merging, a congregation of souls gathered along the roadside to watch her pass. She turned left too early and ended up in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Erin pushed onward instead of turning around and heading back. Her phone with its GPS was in her front pocket. But, no, she told herself. Even after all those years away, I should know how to move through Wolf Point in the darkness.
You don’t know this place, an inner voice responded, not the way you used to. And beneath that was Betty Doyle telling her that the things that happened here had changed this town for good, that the people who left were different kinds of survivors than the ones who’d decided to stay.
“Right now, we’re at the beginning of it,” Mark told her. “There are many steps in front of us.”
“I know,” Erin whispered, and she drove deeper into the heart of it, searching for something familiar.