ATLEAST MYPATIENTS were happy.

“I’m doing great since that last stent.”

“My ankles hardly swell except for sauerkraut.”

Treadmills, caths, hospital rounds, office visits. Treadmills, caths, hospital rounds, office visits. You heard too little about how work was healing. You heard about work wearing people down, deathbed confessions that careers had been too consuming. You didn’t hear about the comforts of a busy day.

Mick and I had discovered e-mail. Before, the thought of this had made Mick nervous, his secrets exposed. Even though he used his Turkman account, there was still the chance that Karn or his children could get into his file. But now that fear had been made trivial by the Big Fear, the fear Mickey didn’t want to say existed. Mick wrote, I’m sitting here writeing and B.C. is right in front of me. Do I love you or what????

B.C., the athletic director Mick couldn’t stand.

I typed, I’m sitting here and Howard is right in front of me. Is he oblivious or what???

Mick: B.C. at least can read.

I loved getting e-mail from Mick. When I pressed send I saw my message stream into the air, one strand of a series of crisscrossing ligatures, a house of our own we were building line by line.

“Your stress test looks great,” I said, riffling through the papers. “And the thallium was perfect.” Both reports were clipped to the front of Jessica’s chart, and I wondered if Lindy had noticed that Jessica’s stress test had again been done in the hospital and not our office. Better think up an explanation, I thought, anticipating Lindy telling Howard.

“Do you think I need a heart monitor?” Jessica asked. “The lady at the front desk said . . .”

“Ignore her. She flunked out of med school.”

“Good, because I feel fine.” Jessica was perched at the end of the exam table, dandling her son. “Except my dad has cancer.”

I heard, I almost said, but I stopped myself. No one was supposed to know. “Cancer?” I said, and it was a relief to say that word out loud. “What kind?”

“Prostate. My mom’s going crazy. He’s getting shots, but Mom thinks he needs surgery, like, yesterday. She found this doctor at Johns Hopkins who agrees with her.” Jessica explained about Mick’s team, his plans for surgery at the end of the season. She looked at me face-on. “What do you think?”

“I . . .” There was urgency in Jessica’s eyes. “From what I’ve heard,” I said, “prostate cancer is very treatable.”

She frowned as if I’d disappointed her. “His cancer’s got some high score. I know Marcus is worried.”

Marcus! I’d forgotten I was supposed to be Marcus’s girlfriend. “Well . . .” I stammered, “Marcus did tell me. But I didn’t know if he was supposed to.”

“It’s okay,” Jessica said, reaching across the space between us to take a swipe at patting my arm. “My brothers and I wanted you to know. You being a doctor, you could help us. You know Mom.” She looked at the ceiling. “She makes him watch the Three Stooges. He hates the Three Stooges. She says, ‘This’ll be one hell of a Christmas. ’ ” Jessica’s voice cracked. “You think you could call her again?”

I couldn’t believe she was asking me this. I was her cardiologist, not her buddy. Was it my supposed connection to Marcus? Did she just not know better? Or was it the entitlement of a coach’s daughter who was used to having her family’s seats saved and their meals paid for? “I’m not a cancer specialist, I wouldn’t know . . .” I wondered about the doctor at Johns Hopkins. Did he know things I didn’t? (Of course.) Was he reasonable? I’d visited websites and reviewed textbooks and talked to the urologist in the office down the hall. Mick did have a chance, but the high Gleason score was worrisome, and his putting off full treatment was risky. I was standing at the exam room counter finishing Jessica’s note, trying to correct my handwriting’s steady downhill slant.

“My mom always wants to direct things,” Jessica said almost dreamily. “She made lists of boys I was allowed to like.” I turned, puzzled by what I was hearing. “Starting in eighth grade. She used to talk to the school secretaries to get information. It didn’t work, though.” Jessica nodded toward her toddler. “His dad wasn’t on the list. She did it for my brothers too. In my opinion, that’s how Eric ended up with Delilah.”

Lists? Lists of boys Jessica was allowed to like? How in the world could a parent control the affections of her offspring? I don’t want to know about this family, I thought. I don’t need to be dragged into this craziness. I turned my back to Jessica and faced the exam room counter as I installed the results of her stress test into her chart.

“Dr. Toledo?” Jessica said. “Would you call her?”

At least she had the decency to ask this in a timid voice. But the repeat request stunned me.

I swiveled to face her, hitting her chart with my elbow. “What about your father?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the chart career across the counter and stop at the edge of the sink. “Where’s your father in all this?” Did Mick know about Karn’s lists of acceptable suitors? Did he approve of such tactics? “Why doesn’t he tell your mother he hates the Three Stooges?”

The words were a little too loud, they emerged with too much pressure behind them. An outburst, someone might say. The silence that followed was loud. The toddler on Jessica’s lap took the pacifier from his mouth and extended it in my direction.

“She trusts you,” Jessica said, ignoring her son’s gesture. “That’s why I asked. I thought because of you and Marcus . . . I thought you might do her a favor.” She slid off the exam table and brought the child to her shoulder. “Am I done?” A hint of suspicion and anger in her face, as if she wondered now what Marcus saw in me.

“You’re done.” I filled out Jessica’s billing form, scrawled “Back 3 months” with a particular flourish, and handed the chart to Jessica with what I hoped was a stalwart grin. She was a good head taller than I was, and in that moment I felt the difference. Jessica smiled back, but her eyes slipped from my face to a spot between the window and the floor.

 

 

 

 

 

ON DECEMBER 12 , a Tuesday, Mick’s forward Tom Kennilworth was arrested for aggravated menacing at a party. He had been brandishing a gun, telling another attendee to stay away from the infamous English tutor/girlfriend. Kennilworth’s lawyer was angling for a deal with the prosecutors, but in the meantime Kennilworth was off the team. Mick and I had been over and over it on the phone. Privately, the Turkman State president had said the possibility and the timing of Kennilworth’s reinstatement would be up to Mick, but Mick should remember that the faculty was still upset about the English chair’s resignation (he had indeed moved to Iowa). It might be better, under the circumstances, to err on the severe side and keep Kennilworth off the team unless the charge was dropped to a misdemeanor. The president hinted at Kennilworth’s convenient whiteness. The Students of Color League, he said, would not be making a statement.

Mick was bursting with advice he had given his players.

“Whatever happened to a good old fistfight?”

“I tell them all the time, nothing good ever happens after ten P.M.!”

“No one cares if it’s not loaded.”

I could imagine Mick’s players rolling their eyes at these statements. Each one made Mick sound old.

When I got to our room Thursday Mick was by the window, slumped in a chair as if it had been pulled out from beneath him. He was wearing his nubbly brown sweater. His eyes rolled toward mine as he spoke. “I’m beat,” he said.

Immediately, I thought about the trouble with Kennilworth. The Warriors were 6 and 1. The partisan TV commentators were sounding almost giddy. “What are you talking about?” I said. “You can’t be your players’ babysitter. You can’t be their conscience, sit on their shoulders like Tinker Bell all night long.”

He didn’t smile. He looked to his right, away from me, and worried his upper lip with his lower teeth. “I don’t feel like much of a coach.”

“You’ve got Eluard.”

“Eluard’s a kid.”

Kid. The word itself seemed to burst with the plosive truth of it. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I have Frederick, sure,” Mick said, “but Frederick can’t do everything.”

I traced the stitching in the bedspread with my finger. “And Chiswick,” I said, “and Morgan, and your freshmen.”

Mick said, “I don’t know if I have the energy for this.”

I looked at him, thinking of Mick’s life that was secret from his team, the cancer and the antitestosterone shots and the expectation of surgery. I wished that I’d had cancer myself, because I couldn’t really know what Mick was experiencing. Sometimes I thought the same thing with my patients. What did chest pain really feel like? What sensation let people know that they were about to die? You could see, sometimes, the understanding fill their faces, but its source was as mysterious as starlight. It was possible Mick couldn’t be the coach he was the year before. “Are you tired?” I asked, and it hit me that “tired” was a word as rough and rudimentary as a caveman’s hammer.

“I don’t have the endurance.” Mick pushed himself upright in the chair and turned toward me, and the deliberate way he did this made me think of Himself before he died. “It gets frustrating.” In his last office visit, recalling the effort of walking from a stadium to his car, Himself had almost cried.

“Sit down here beside me,” I said, patting the bed, and when he did I removed his nubbly sweater and the shirt beneath it. I moved my hands over his back, circling each mole, then over his chest and down his shoulders, all the time wishing that my hands, my doctor’s hands, were capable of healing.

“How about my cholesterol?” Mick asked later as we lay in our usual position. “Can I just forget about my cholesterol?”

I unwrapped my legs from his and sat up quickly. “Oh no! You can’t stop the medicine. That’s long-term.”

 

 

 

 

 

HE’S ALWAYS TIRED,” I told Claudia when she brought over her invitations. “It’s come down to talk and sleeping.”

Claudia’s eyes widened, her right hand flew to the base of her neck and touched the hollow there, a gesture that struck me as vaguely religious. “That’s all we can do together now,” I said. “Talk and sleep.”

“Oh, Mommy,” Claudia said.

I hadn’t realized the power of simple kindness.

CHURNING. I lay in bed and my toes were hot, my right hip hurt, my eyes under my closed lids wouldn’t stop moving. I flipped on the light and sat up. 1:42. I’d be up for good in less than four hours.

A list of boys Karn’s daughter could like. Madness. Yet wouldn’t I have made a list for Claudia—at least a mental list—if I’d ever gotten the idea? That was what a parent did: worry about her offspring and her choices. If I’d had the opportunity, I might have pumped a school secretary for information. In fact, I’d never met a school secretary. I was always working, and I never had the time.

I plodded to the bathroom, thinking of Toby. Pleasant enough, I supposed, and God knows he made a point of being wholesome. Intelligent? Who knew. At least he wasn’t threatening to stay home and look after his and Claudia’s future children. At least he was nice to Claudia. At least he wasn’t Giles.

“You could do better,” my mother had said when I got married. She was right, yet it was wrong of her to tell me. A person had to learn things for herself. Look at Jessica. A guy on Karn’s list might at least pay child support.

In the bathroom mirror my face sagged like an old donkey’s. “Oh God, go away,” I said, waving at my image, and with relief I flicked the switch that made me disappear.

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE MEANTIME, Mick and I kept e-mailing.

How’s my dozey-bear? Planning to rest up Wednesday night?

You wait. Next time I’ll tie you down and nibble you up.

Sickening, yes. We were like kids again. We were playing make-believe.