Hope Street: Hope StreetThe Marriage Bed Page 19

  Sure enough, the TV screen displayed one of the photos Jessie had taken of Ellie at the airport, standing near the security checkpoint, wearing khaki slacks, a sweater and a fleece jacket and holding up her passport. In the picture she looked happy, but also a little scared. Or else maybe Curt was reading into her expression the fear he’d felt that day, that she would never come back. That fear had remained with him the entire time Ellie was gone, and with good reason. She’d returned to the United States the last day of July that past summer, but she never really did come back.

  “Ellie traveled to Kumasi, Ghana, to work at a pediatrics clinic in an outlying village.” Katie’s voice emerged from the television’s speakers while a map of Africa appeared on the screen, followed by a map of Ghana, followed by a street map of Kumasi. The civics-lesson illustrations ended with the appearance of photos that Ellie had sent home via e-mail while she’d been in Kumasi. Curt had seen all these photos—she’d sent them to him as well as the girls, attached to brief, cheerful notes describing her work and living situation. One photo showed the clinic where she’d worked, a bland, boxy white building constructed of stucco or cinderblock—hard to tell from the picture. Another showed the residence adjacent to the clinic, where she’d lived with the other volunteers. Another showed her in an open-sided, roofless Jeep, her hair held off her face by a colorful scarf and her eyes shielded from the bright sun by dark glasses. Another showed her sitting on the concrete front steps of the clinic, dressed in cargo shorts, a tank top and sandals, with a chubby brown toddler perched on her lap and several other children seated around her on the steps. She’d cut her hair at some point, and in that photo it was short and breezy.

  Jessie’s voice took over the narration. “After a few weeks in Ghana, Ellie learned to coexist peacefully with snakes—” a photo of a green snake slithering up the side of a palm tree appeared “—and exotic insects.” Another photo showed a brightly hued butterfly resting on a palm frond. “She developed a taste for mango—” the next photo depicted her with several other volunteers in the residence kitchen “—and since Kumasi is located in a major cacoa-producing region, she also enjoyed a lot of chocolate.” The next photo showed Ellie and a starchy older woman with thick gray hair proudly displaying a chocolate sheet cake. A single candle protruded from its center, and “Happy Birthday, Adrian” was written across it in white icing.

  “Most important, of course, Ellie had the chance to help children who weren’t like the privileged middle-class children she treated back home. She assisted in surgeries, gave physical examinations, vaccinated children and worked with their families on general health issues.” A series of photographs showed Ellie in various poses with her patients. In one, a toddler hugged her leg. In another, she held a thumb-sucking youngster high in her arms. In another, she leaned over a bed, where a toothy little boy lay waving at the camera. In yet another, she sat on the floor in a play area filled with toys and children, several of whom were climbing on her while she laughed.

  “Ellie also developed close friendships with her fellow volunteers,” the narration continued, accompanied by a series of photos of adults: the starchy older woman with whom she’d presented the cake in the earlier photo; in this photo, the woman stood beside a desk in a cramped office. A trio of college-age girls, vamping for the camera. A tall, thin African man in scrubs. A sixty-something white woman with wiry gray hair and a bulldog face. A white man with sun-bronzed skin and long hair framing his face in rippling waves, standing beside the Jeep, a stethoscope dangling around his neck and his face set in a serious pose. The same man, standing with Ellie in front of the residence, his arm resting on her shoulders. In that photo he was smiling. So was Ellie.

  Curt leaned forward, his pulse drumming inside his head. “Pause the movie,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Hit the pause button.”

  Ellie did. Curt stared at the photo. Tell me, damn it, he wanted to shout. Just tell me if you fell in love with the guy. All he said was, “That was the doctor, right?”

  “Adrian Wesker,” Ellie said.

  Curt took a deep breath, and another. Why did he need to know? What did it matter? Ellie was leaving him. Whether or not she loved some other man—whether or not she was still in love with him—was irrelevant. Once she and Curt were divorced, she would be free to fall in love a million times, with a million other men. He couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  But…he had to know. Call it a compulsion. Call it the same masochistic urge that made a person touch a sore again and again, just to determine if it still hurt. He’d already lost Ellie before she’d gone to Kumasi. He’d probably lost her the day Peter died. If she fell for some other man—someone who hadn’t been by her side, trying to prop her up during the long, dark days of her overwhelming grief, trying to reach her, trying to nudge, push or drag her back to sanity—he had to know.

  “Tell me about him,” he said. “Tell me about Dr. Wesker.”

  Five months ago

  “ADRIAN NEEDS YOU,” ROSE announced, barging into an examining room, where Ellie was scrubbing an infected sore on a little girl’s hand. The girl was sniveling and flinching, even though Ellie was rubbing the wound as gently as she could.

  “Why don’t we soak this for a bit, and then I’ll come back and dress it,” Ellie said, half to Rose and half to herself. “That won’t hurt you, sweetie. We’re just going to stick your hand in a bowl of warm water—” she prepared the bowl as she spoke “—and you can suck on this lollipop while you soak, and when I come back I’ll put some ointment on it and bandage it up.” She placed the girl’s hand in the bowl and glanced at Rose. “She’ll need a dose of amoxicillin, too. How’s our supply?”

  “Adequate. Adrian’s in the surgery. Go.” She waved Ellie out the door.

  Ellie raced down the hall to the clinic’s small operating room. Any surgery that required general anesthesia was performed in one of the hospitals in the city, but Adrian could perform minor procedures that required only local anesthesia.

  Ellie stopped outside the room to scrub at the sink, then shouldered through the swinging door. She was greeted by the frantic screams of a boy of about nine, who sat on the table, wearing only a pair of briefs. Adrian stood beside him, his face gleaming with perspiration. “Calm the boy down!” he shouted to Ellie above the boy’s howls.

  Ellie immediately moved to the table and hugged the boy. “What’s going on here?” she asked in a soothing voice. “What’s your name?”

  “Abrafo,” the boy whimpered, hiding his tearstained face against her shoulder.

  “Abrafo.” She stroked his wiry black hair, then peered past him at Adrian. “What are we doing for Abrafo today?”

  “Removing a mole from his back,” Adrian told her, his terse tone reflecting his exasperation. “If he deigns to let us.”

  Ellie turned back to Abrafo, easing his head away from her chest so she could gaze into his terrified eyes. “That’s nothing, Abrafo. You won’t feel anything. Just a little pinch when Dr. Wesker gives you a shot.”

  “He’s cutting an animal!” Abrafo wailed.

  “No, honey. Just a little piece of skin. He’ll give you a shot to numb the area—that means you won’t feel anything else—and then he’ll use a little tool called a scalpel to remove this skin, and then he’ll sew a stitch or two and put a bandage on it. That’s all.”

  “It’s an animal,” Abrafo said. His skinny shoulders trembled against her hands.

  “No, it’s a…oh!” She let out a laugh. “It’s not that kind of mole, the little furry animal that burrows in the ground. A mole on your skin is a dot of discolored skin. Sometimes it forms a little bump. Look—here’s a mole.” She extended her arm and displayed the small brown mark that had adorned the side of her wrist for as long as she could remember. “When it’s in a place where it won’t get inflamed, doctors leave it alone. But if it’s raised, or it can get irritated, doctors sometimes remove the mole so it won’t cause you any trouble.”


  “This mole—not an animal?”

  “No, Abrafo. It’s just a little dot, like this.” She let him touch her wrist.

  He issued a final, shuddering sob, then relaxed in her arms. She grinned at Adrian above Abrafo’s head. “Let’s lie down, now, so Dr. Wesker can get rid of that little dot of skin. Okay?”

  Clinging to her hand, Abrafo lay on his stomach. A few hiccups emerged from him as Adrian swabbed antiseptic on the mole—larger than Ellie’s, slightly raised and located near where the waistband of his trousers would likely rub it raw. The actual surgery took no more than five minutes, and while Adrian sutured Abrafo Ellie placed the excised mole into a sterile envelope to be sent to the hospital for a biopsy. It looked benign to her, but the biopsy was a routine procedure whenever a mole was removed.

  Once the surgery was completed, Abrafo shook the sterile towels surrounding the surgery site from his back and jumped happily down from the table, announcing that he was going to get dressed. Ellie could barely contain him as he bounded toward the door. As he swung through it, Ellie caught him, scooped him into her arms and carried him down the hall to a waiting area where his mother sat, holding his clothes. “Everything’s fine,” she assured the mother as she lowered Abrafo to his feet. Her arms had developed some extra muscle over the past few months from carrying children around.

  After accepting thanks from Abrafo’s mother, Ellie pivoted and jogged back down the hall to the surgery, where she found Adrian peeling off his gloves. “If I didn’t stink of iodine, I’d give you a hug right now,” he told her as he tossed the gloves into a trash receptacle. “I intend to give you one later. Maybe your magic will rub off on me.”

  “I have no intention of letting you rub anything off me,” she teased. They’d been working together too long, in too close quarters, not to be able to tease each other.

  “I want your magic, Ellie. I don’t know how you do it. But I shall sing your praises—and perhaps rub some part of you—later. Right now, I have to go and give Abrafo’s mother her postop instructions.”

  SHE DIDN’T SEE ADRIAN AGAIN until dinner. Gerda had left Kumasi in May, replaced by a cheerful young Canadian couple, both physician’s assistants. The trio of college girls would be departing soon and a fresh batch of college volunteers arriving. Ellie would miss the girls more than she missed Gerda. They reminded her of Katie and Jessie, and they were always laughing, yammering, bubbling with enthusiasm. They’d shown Ellie the best places to shop for local handcrafted jewelry and apparel. Ellie supposed she would have to pass all that vital information along to the next crew when they arrived.

  Adrian swept into the dining room at the compound five minutes later than everyone else, as usual. “There she is,” he bellowed, gesturing grandly toward Ellie before he joined her and the others at the table. “All ye, sing her praises. She soothes the savage breast.”

  “A good brassiere can do that,” she joked.

  “I had an hysterical little boy in the surgery today. Absolutely frantic because I was going to remove a mole from his back. It took Ellie to wrest from him the fact that he thought I was planning to cut an animal from his back.”

  This news was met with gentle laughter.

  “I would have called it a nevus, but I thought he might find the sound of that far more alarming. So medical, that term.”

  “Was it cancerous?” Rose asked.

  Ellie shook her head and Adrian said, “I think not. It looked innocuous, but it was raised and had the potential to become problematic. We’ll get the pathology report next week, but I believe the child will be fine.”

  A conversation ensued about how much rarer skin cancer was in Africa than in other parts of the world, despite the intensity of the sun in equatorial regions. “Melanin protects the skin,” Atu boasted, displaying his dark forearms. “Mother Nature’s sunblock.”

  As the others discussed skin pigmentation, Adrian leaned toward Ellie. “I need to talk to you,” he murmured. “Are you free tonight?”

  Why wouldn’t she be free? Most evenings after dinner, she and the rest of the staff saw more patients and completed paperwork for which there hadn’t been time during the day, and then they retired to bed early. Their days were so full no one had the energy to carouse all night. “Sure, I’m free,” she said.

  After dinner, she, Adrian and the others returned to the clinic. Fortunately, it was a calm evening: a child with a splintered toenail that had to be removed, another child who’d jammed her finger and required an X-ray, a new mother worried about whether she was producing enough milk for her chronically hungry infant. No emergencies, no crises.

  By nine, all the patients had been seen and the sky had faded to a canopy of black dappled with stars and tacked in one corner by a lemon-colored crescent moon. Adrian found Ellie in the clinic’s modest pharmacy, where she was filling out an order form for drugs. “Come, Ellie,” he beckoned. “I’ve finished making the evening rounds, and our overnight guests are all comfortable and cozy. I’ve got two very cold beers waiting for us at my house, if you’re interested.”

  “That sounds great.” Ellie smiled at him, then signed the order form and dropped it on Rose’s abandoned desk before she left the building with him. The night air was hot and sticky, and fireflies danced above the dry tufts of grass lining the road.

  Adrian’s house was a two-room cottage a short walk from the clinic. He rarely invited his colleagues there, since he spent so much of his time at the clinic working, eating and socializing with the staff. Ellie had visited his cottage only a few times—once to drop off a file of documents on a day when he’d been planning to meet with some of the clinic’s British benefactors at one of the fancy hotels in the city, another time when he’d hosted a birthday party for a former patient of his who’d been diagnosed with leukemia four years ago but had defied the odds and remained in remission. For the most part, though, Adrian’s cottage was his private refuge, and folks from the clinic stayed away. That he’d invited Ellie to have a beer with him there was an unusual privilege.

  The cottage included a screened porch with a long-bladed fan in the ceiling, circulating the steamy air. He’d decorated it austerely, with a few wicker pieces and a ceramic urn on the floor in one corner, a comically glowering face painted across its curved surface.

  He motioned for her to sit on one of the wicker rocking chairs, then vanished inside and emerged a minute later with two chilled bottles of beer. He lit the citronella candle that sat on the rattan table between their chairs. Dispensing with glasses, Adrian clicked his beer bottle’s neck against hers in a toast, then drank. Ellie drank, too. The icy bubbles bit her tongue and cooled her entire body.

  “Ellie,” he said, smiling. “I have a proposition for you.”

  “It better not have anything to do with rubbing,” she warned.

  “It has to do with your magic,” he told her, then leaned back and nudged his chair, starting it rocking. The motion drew her eyes to his feet. He’d left his shoes inside. She rarely went barefoot, concerned about picking up a parasite or some other skin problem, but she supposed Adrian’s bare feet were reasonably protected in his own house. “I’d like you to stay,” he said.

  “Stay?” An undefined emotion sizzled down her spine. Apprehension? Excitement? She wasn’t sure. She tried not to glance at his naked feet again. “Stay where?”

  “Here at the clinic. You signed up for six months. I’d like you to stay longer. What’s the word you Yankees use? Re-up, I believe that’s it. I’d like you to re-up.”

  “Oh.” Another ripple of mixed-up emotions passed through her. She was relieved, flattered and, for no good reason, a touch disappointed.

  “You’re scheduled to leave us at the end of July. That’s a little over a month from now. Surely you’re not ready to say fare well yet.”

  She considered his statement. She was happy in Kumasi, much happier than she’d been at home. Partly that was because the work was so rewarding, partly because she was too busy
to mope. Partly because she’d needed to get away from Curt and from a house haunted by excruciating memories. She liked living where people knew about her only what she wished for them to know, where they didn’t gaze at her with pity or treat her as if she were frail and helpless. She liked feeling that she was doing something worthwhile, making a difference in a few children’s lives, healing them.

  But she was merely a visitor here, a legal alien on a visa. Every morning when she woke up in her narrow bed in her barren little room, and when she ate fried bananas for breakfast and drank local coffee so strong, one cup could power her through the entire day, she knew this was not her home. She knew it when she heard the local radio station playing unfamiliar music. She knew it in her conversations with the locals, with their accented English and their Twi slang and their superstitions.

  “I can’t,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s nice to be asked, Adrian, but I can’t.”

  “Why the bloody hell not?”

  She laughed. Adrian had a tendency to assume that any opinion contradicting his own was utterly wrong. His obstinacy helped to keep the clinic functioning and funds flowing in, but it also occasionally made him seem mule-headed and unsympathetic.

  “I’ve got a job waiting for me back in Massachusetts,” she reminded him. “I’ve got a home there. I miss my daughters.”

  “And your daughters’ father? You don’t miss him, then?”

  She hadn’t discussed her marital troubles with anyone at the clinic. They knew she had a husband, even though she’d stopped wearing her wedding band and eternity ring shortly after her arrival. She’d told herself that was for practical reasons: given her work, she was simply more comfortable without them.

  Sometimes, though, she wondered whether feeling more comfortable without her rings had anything at all to do with her work.

  Adrian had no right to ask her about her husband—except that everyone at the clinic formed such a tight community, and they were all always nosing around in one another’s business. When their wireless Internet connection jammed and no one could e-mail home, as happened once a week on average, they would all bitch and moan about the people they absolutely needed to reach. The college girls all had boyfriends. Gerda had a daughter and two grandchildren. Although he was a local, Atu had friends all over the continent, and he claimed he met most of the women he socialized with through dating sites on the Web.