Shortness of Breath

Chapter Nine

Casey - October seventeenth

When Emerson was seven, her class had a lesson on gravity. She learned about Newton and the apple, abstractly about force, weight and mass, and she tried to wrap her child's mind around the trying concept that there's something we can't see that pulls everything to the ground, wherever the ground may be. Someone on the North Pole would be standing upside down to someone standing on the South Pole, but gravity can only be described either as pulling one way, or pulling every way.

We still lived in Charlotte at the time. It was the year before Wilson was elected to Congress, and it was the year I'd taken a leave from the hospital to be at home with a newborn Cooper. I loved and hated the time off, but if nothing else it allowed me to see more of the North Carolina sunsets with my kids that I never realized would be limited or finite in amount. The old house had a balcony on the second floor, and sometimes Emerson and I would sit out there and read, or chat, or just be silently and comfortably alive. On one of those days, Cooper was inside sleeping, we were both standing outside looking over the ledge, and she was showing me a quarter that had ended up in her possession during the day - Oklahoma. And as she went to show me its tail face - the coin features the state bird, a Scissortail Flycatcher - she dropped it over the edge and it landed somewhere in our lawn.

We both laughed, and she pointed out, "Gravity shouldn't work like that. Once you let something go, that's it. There's no pulling it back up."

And so of course we had to go back inside, down the stairs, out the front door, and search through the grass for what felt like a lifetime for the fallen Flycatcher. It was a small coin in a relatively large plot of land, and wasn't easy to come by. When I did find it at long last, coming to the realization that I was a woman in her thirties crawling on all fours with dirt on her knees, I considered what Emerson had said, and I had to disagree just a bit. You can get something back that you've let go, but you have to be willing to fight for it.

Words, I thought, are so much like that Scissortail Flycatcher. Once you let them go, you have to be prepared to crawl in the grass if you ever want to take them back. And even when you do get them back, don't expect the dirt to come off your knees all at once.

I wished I could've pulled back what I'd said to Hallie after surgery that night.

"This is different, Hallie," I'd nearly shouted in hysteria. "This is a really important part of my life."

The look on her face told me I'd grossly misspoken, no matter how swiftly she disengaged and refused to let on. There were a million things I could've said in an attempt to make it better, but none of them came out fast enough. When she left, I didn't follow. To be honest, I didn't know how to clean up a fight with a woman I was kind-of-sort-of-seeing; in fact, I didn't know how to clean up a fight with anyone, not from this end. With Wilson, I was always the one waiting indefinitely to say "it's okay," not brainstorming effective ways to say "I'm sorry."

And so I did the easiest thing at the time and I walked away too. Maybe it wouldn't add up to anything. Maybe it'd just blow over. It was just a stupid comment anyway, and one that I'd made when I was shocked and upset. She was forgiving, and she was understanding. It'd been a long morning. She'd forget all about it as soon as we'd had some distance.

I had to walk in the opposite direction, and even though I was disgusted with myself for it, my legs just seemed to carry me to the obstetrics ward. I'd knocked twice on Elisabeth's door before my mind even knew what it was doing. Luckily, there were no doctors in there when I walked in, or I would've had some explaining to do to my colleagues.

I hadn't seen her since the accident. Part of me, I realized only then, had expected to walk in and see all ten feet of perfection laying in her hospital bed like Kate Winslet ready to be sketched in Titanic. Even I, who was more surgeon than human, hadn't envisioned the bruising on her face, the leftover lacerations and the three thousand machines checking in to make sure she was still alive. She looked like an honest to God wreck. It was crazy, but all of a sudden I felt bad. Apparently, not that bad, because I didn't just apologize and leave, but bad enough that I completely lost any and all audacity and adrenaline that I'd walked in there with. I'd pictured myself spouting off a hundred different profanities, threatening her firm and her entire career if she didn't drop the test, bullying her into making the scandal disappear like she'd tried to do to me earlier that week. Now, probably eighty percent because I was Casey Kenny and I didn't have the nerve to do any one of those things to begin with and twenty percent because she looked like crap, I'd lost all the nerve to say anything.