fic: Chimera — Chapter 8

[readingrat]

8. Fraternising With the Enemy

He spends the flight working because, contrary to what Lisa and Wilson believe, he has a few commitments that he can’t wriggle out of, one of them being his lectures at Oxford. He has a backlog, and the academic year is coming to an end. The university lets its academic staff post pre-recorded video talks for the students to download instead of teaching in person — provided that the lecturers tune in for an hour-long Q&A session afterwards. This latter stipulation makes the offer eminently unattractive, because the Q&A session alone is as long as the class that it aims to replace. But now he isn’t in England to hold his remaining lectures, which robs him of any choice in the matter.

Those lectures are tougher than he’d thought they’d be, the problem being that he can’t remember his old cases. Yes, he can read up on them (the ones that PPTH can release without causing a big HIPAA stink), but he can’t recall how he and his team arrived at a diagnosis. The patient histories and the tests they performed give him some clues, but he frequently doesn’t have any idea why he rejected one diagnosis in favour of another or what clue told him to attempt a different diagnostic strategy. Foreman and Chase have been helpful, but — reconstructions aren’t the same as memories. That’s what he’s doing: he’s reconstructing his past in the manner of an archaeologist reconstructing prehistoric sites, trying to get a clear picture from evidence that has been scattered, damaged, and corroded with time. (Chase’s memory, pickled in alcohol, leaves something to be desired and Foreman’s tends to be selective …)

Preparing an online lecture entails recording a voice-over to the slides that he means to show. Strange to say, the passengers on either side of him (and in front and behind him, for all he knows) aren’t interested in the finer details of maternal mirror syndrome, the topic he has chosen for the next lecture because a former patient, Emma Sloan, lifted all HIPAA restrictions off the case, saving him a lot of bother and paperwork. (She reiterated her offer to take some spiffy pictures of him, but he declined as politely as he could manage.) There’s a big stink, during which the flight attendant not only takes needless umbrage at being referred to as a ‘glorified waiter’, but also sides openly with his persecutors, insisting that if he, Pete, continues talking into his laptop microphone while the passengers around him are trying to sleep, the flight attendant will be forced to confiscate his laptop till the end of the flight. So, he’s forced to add captions and explanatory notes to the slides instead, which takes more time and will probably take some explaining to TPTB at Oxford University. On the other hand, even if he can’t record an accompanying commentary to the slides, he can add a soundtrack. He browses through his hard drive in search of titles featuring the word ‘mirror’ and finds both awe-inspiring (Iron Maiden’s ‘Dream of Mirrors’) and plain awful specimens (a contribution by Justin Timberlake).

By the time he reaches Philadelphia, fatigue is setting in. After the taxi drops him off outside Lisa’s place he hesitates, contemplating the house. Lisa isn’t going to be keen to see him; she’ll feel humiliated. He pulls out his phone to call Rachel, thinking that he should have instructed her not to open the door to anyone who doesn’t advertise their arrival in advance, but as he’s about to dial he sees a movement inside the house, the shadow of a person passing by a window. It can’t be Rachel, because her wheelchair is too low for her to be spotted from the outside, so it’s probably Lisa, who must be up and about again. If she’s better again, she’s going to be even unhappier to see him. Maybe the situation isn’t as bad as Rachel made it out to be and Lisa is on the road to recovery. In that case his presence is superfluous.

Nonetheless, now that he’s here he’d do well to check that everything is under control, so, suppressing his desire to run, he goes to the front door and rings the doorbell. The woman who opens the door is not Lisa, although she resembles her: she’s short, slim, and dark haired, but softer and less energetic. She smiles at him politely, uttering an enquiring hello.

After the first shock has died down, a myriad of possibilities flash through his mind. Julia — if it’s her, but he’s pretty sure that it is — hasn’t recognised him. He could say he has come to the wrong place, turn around, and depart. Or he could pretend to be someone else, like Lisa’s … what exactly? Colleague or employee? Or an insurance rep going from door to door?

“Um,” he says, reviewing and discarding one or two opening lines.

His hesitation, unfortunately, has lasted for too long. Rachel, appearing behind Julia, says, “Who —? Oh, hi, Pete!”

Julia’s expression changes from a friendly smile to a puzzled frown. From there it morphs into dull recognition. “You!”

“Yes, I …” He scratches his eyebrow with his thumbnail. “Rachel said you weren’t coming.”

Julia contemplates him, breathing heavily. Her self-control, however, is better than her sister’s. After a moment she moves away from the door, beckoning for him to come inside. He follows, grimacing at Rachel as he passes her. Rachel gives him a sympathetic smile.

Lisa appears at the door of her bedroom in pyjamas, her hair a mess. She takes one look at him, says, “Oh, God!” and retreats into her bedroom again.

“Rachel, would you give us a minute, please?” Julia asks.

Rachel pulls a face, but wheels herself into the living room. Julia leads the way into the kitchen and motions him to a chair. She sits down opposite him. He doesn’t say anything; the less he says, the less likely he is to put his foot in it good and proper. Besides, there isn’t much you can say to someone you nearly killed. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t really cut it in such cases, he finds.

Julia seems to find long silences unnerving. “Lisa said she was fine and that Rachel was just being dramatic, but she sounded — odd, and then, when you called, I realised something must be really off, so I fixed things at home and came.”

He nods.

“I haven’t seen Lisa like this since, oh, Rachel’s accident.”

He nods again, not because he has any idea what state Lisa was in after Rachel’s ‘accident’, but because his teeth are clamped down on his tongue. But he registers that this isn’t the first time that Lisa has crashed this badly.

“What happened?” Julia finally asks.

He shrugs. He could make an educated guess, but he’d rather not enlighten her sister, who isn’t his biggest fan as it is.

“She was fine until she came back from Paris,” Julia continues.

“Was she?” he asks, not because he doubts his own culpability in this, but because it doesn’t seem likely that his asshattery in and of itself could have transformed Lisa from perfect health into a cast member of The Walking Dead.

Julia takes her time to answer. He likes that; it isn’t often that people try to figure out the truth instead of spouting assumptions that they make based on their prejudices and preconceptions. “She was run down before she left,” Julia finally admits. “It was one of the reasons we encouraged her to go to Paris. We thought a few days away from here would help her to unwind and get a perspective on things.”

“What ‘things’?” It can’t just have been moving house. There’s no perspective to be had on that; it needs to be done, that’s all there is to it.

“Oh, everything,” Julia says with a vague wave of her hand. Her face says, If you don’t know, I’m not about to tell you. That’s interesting. So something has been going on over and above Wilson’s grand marriage schemes and the disruption that buying a house and moving into it causes.

Lisa comes in, dressed in yoga pants and a baggy sweatshirt, with her hair tied back. Other than that she has made no concession to being in society. She sits down between them.

Julia rises. “Are you hungry?”

Lisa shakes her head.

“You have to eat and drink something,” Julia insists.

“Cup of tea,” Lisa says, leaning her head on her hand.

“Do you … want to take a shower while I fix your tea?” Julia asks delicately. She has a point; Lisa looks as though hygiene hasn’t been a primary concern for a few days.

Lisa shakes her head. “If he doesn’t like the way I look, he can leave. Actually, he can leave, period!”

That’s fine with him; it’s not as though he was eager to come, nor did he expect to be greeted with open arms and a welcome parade. A cup of coffee obviously isn’t a possibility either: Julia pointedly ignored him when she offered Lisa sustenance. But hey, there’s more than one coffee shop at the airport, and drinking coffee in Julia’s company won’t improve its taste. So he pushes back his chair and rises.

Julia looks up at him and smiles awkwardly. “Thanks for coming,” she says. Lisa doesn’t even look up.

He doesn’t quite know what to say to that, so he just nods and leaves the room.

Rachel is watching television in the living room; in passing he says by way of a farewell, “Do your bowel programme!” (It’s a safe bet that she hasn’t done it yet.)

She pulls a face and doesn’t move, so he grabs the remote, switches the television off, and places the remote out of her reach on the bookshelf next to the television set. Then, oblivious to her wails, he limps out. Shit, phantom pain! It hasn’t bothered him in — oh, about two years, he estimates. He’d touch Lisa up for a scrip for something with a bit of punch, but today probably isn’t the day for it. He’s going to have to sit this out.

When he opens the front door, there’s a van parked at the curb in front of the house and a deliveryman with a box is coming up the path.

“Groceries!” Pete yells back into the house.

Julia appears. “I didn’t order anything,” she says.

“I did,” Pete says.

There’s a bit of a scrimmage at the door: the deliveryman is trying to make someone take the box, Pete is attempting to get past him, and Julia is scrambling for her purse instead of taking the box. Lisa comes into the entryway, but makes no effort to assist anyone.

“It’s paid for,” Pete says to Julia. The deliveryman finally dumps the box down at his feet so he can’t get out the door, and waits expectantly.

“Why’d you order food?” Lisa asks, scowling at Pete.

“Because Rachel said there’s no food and you guys haven’t been eating.” Duh!

Julia squeezes past him to slip the deliveryman a tip, a satisfactory one judging by his polite wishes that they have a pleasant day.

“We won’t,” Pete barks at him.

The deliveryman stares at him.

Pete spells it out. “We won’t have a nice day.”

Julia, to her credit, doesn’t even blink. “Thank you very much,” she says to the deliveryman. “Have a nice day, too.” She closes the door on the deliveryman before Pete can manage to push past her and get outside.

Lisa calls in the general direction of the living area, where Rachel is still whining about the TV remote. “Rachel, stop wailing! Why’d you say we didn’t have any food?”

“Coz we didn’t!” Rachel wheels herself into the entryway to stare at the box. “We didn’t have lunch yesterday.”

“I fixed you a cheese sandwich,” Lisa says, looking guilty.

“That isn’t proper food!” Rachel says sulkily. “You’re supposed to cook. And there wasn’t anything decent in the fridge. No milk either.”

“There is food in the house,” says Lisa, opening the box and peering inside. “There’s a loaf of bread in the kitchen, cheese and butter in the fridge, a few frozen meals in the freezer, and some UHT milk on a shelf in the pantry.” She takes out a carton of milk. “We have about five of those in the pantry already.”

Well, he ordered five more, just to be on the safe side, so now she has ten.

“That’s milk?” Rachel says.

“We normally get fresh milk,” Lisa says, “but yeah, that’s milk.” She drops the milk back into the box, rises, and goes back into the kitchen.

Pete, after calculating what this trip has cost him so far (plane fare, cab, groceries, and pizza), glares at Rachel, who backs her wheelchair away. “I’ll do my bowel programme now,” she says to no one in particular.

“Rachel,” Julia calls, “you did everything right.” (Maybe she’d like to pay her share of the costs he incurred?)

Rachel looks at him for confirmation. (Since when is he a moral authority in this household?)

“Yeah, you did fine,” he says, nodding. We mucked up, he adds mentally. Whether Rachel’s pessimistic take on the food situation was warranted or not is pretty much beside the point; Lisa’s state is dire enough to warrant Rachel’s panicked reaction. “But you still have to do your bowel programme.”

When Rachel is out of earshot Julia turns to him. “Since you’re here anyway ... what’s your opinion?” She tips her head towards the kitchen.

He leans against the wall. “You’re asking me about Lisa?” (He doubts she’s interested in his opinion on the kitchen décor.)

Julia flushes. Then she says, “Lisa trusts your medical opinion.”

He shrugs. “This doesn’t require an expert. She’s having a medium to severe depressive episode.”

“Shouldn’t she be … doing something about it?”

“Exercise. Medication. Therapy. Whatever rocks her boat. She has a therapist, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t know whether she’s seeing her.” Julia’s expression says, Do something!

“Oh well, therapy’s overrated,” he says flippantly. “Besides, you slammed the phone down on me not twenty-four hours ago. What changed?”

Julia heaves a long sigh. “Now it’s about Lisa, not about me. I can’t leave her here by herself while she’s in that state, can I?” she asks. He shakes his head. “I need your help to make her come with me, because I can’t stay here, and she won’t listen to me. She has never listened to me.” She trains soft grey eyes on him. “You owe me, you know.”

He realises that her softness and her overt ability to smooth over rough situations are deceptive. She’s every bit as manipulative as her sister, if not more so. She has appealed to his professional pride, his chivalry (she can’t know it’s non-existent), and his guilt, all within a bare minute. He couldn’t have done better himself if he’d tried. So he follows her into the kitchen a second time and looms over Lisa, who is listlessly poking a spoon into a yoghurt cup.

“You can’t stay here by yourself and Wilson isn’t returning till next weekend. Take a few days off and go with your sister,” he says.

“I can’t,” Lisa says, not even looking up. “I’ll lose my job if I do.”

“You’ll lose you job if you call in sick?” Julia says, with a hint (but only a very small hint) of incredulity.

“I had roughly four months of sick leave this past year, and I took personal days for the move,” Lisa says to her sister. “And you know what Ryan thinks.”

“What does Ryan think?” Pete asks, because he doesn’t know Philadelphia Central’s current dean of medicine’s state of mind.

“That I’m conspiring against him. He’d love an excuse to fire me, and if I call in sick again, my department will fall apart, giving him the excuse he needs.”

“Are you conspiring against him?”

Lisa stares at him blankly. “Of course not. Where would that get me? I’m not a complete moron, you know.”

“So either he’s paranoid or you’re paranoid,” Pete says, considering the likelihood of the second option.

“He’s paranoid — but he can afford to be. What does he care whether I’m really conspiring against him? By firing me he’ll set an example, so that no one will dare to challenge his authority for a long time. It’s a win for him, no matter what.” She lifts the spoon out of the cup and watches as a big blob of yoghurt drips off the end of the spoon back into the cup. It doesn’t look as though she intends to eat any of it any time soon.

Lisa’s interpretation makes sense. He turns to Julia. “How long can you stay?”

Julia looks worried. “I can’t. Even if I take a few personal days, there’s my mother.”

He frowns at her. “You’re married, three teens. You’re not needed there. They can look after Granny and after themselves.”

Julia flushes angrily, but her tone is neutral as she says, “No, they can’t. I mean, they can look after themselves, but my mother needs a diplomatic hand and a lot of attention. It’s tight enough as it is with both Rob and me working now.”

“She means that Mom walks off and gets lost, and then yells at everyone for changing the street layout and disguising the house,” Lisa says dully. “And she goes out of her way to rile Rob. She accuses him of stealing her money, reviling her to her friends — as though she had any! — and turning the boys against her, but they can’t stand her guts because she’s always criticising them.”

“It’s not that bad,” Julia says.

“It is, and you’re a masochist,” Lisa replies.

“The boys love her, even if they are a bit stretched at the moment, and Rob knows better than to —”

“Care facility,” Pete says succinctly. “It’ll only get worse, you know. You’re not doing anyone a favour by playing the martyr.”

“I don’t want …” Julia begins before correcting herself. “Even if I started looking for a care facility, that wouldn’t solve our present problem.”

He’s inclined to say that it isn’t his problem, but chances are that she’ll just remind him that he owes both her and the absent Rob big time. So instead he asks, “Can you take Rachel?”

“And leave Lisa alone?” Julia asks doubtfully.

“I’ll stay till Wilson comes back,” Pete says, hoping he can get hold of Wilson and make him return earlier than planned.

“I’m not deaf,” Lisa says morosely. “And I’m fine. I don’t need a babysitter.” Her tone is so much like Rachel’s that in a different context it would be funny. Pete and Julia roll their eyes in unison, a short moment of bonding before Julia remembers that she doesn’t like him.

Julia rises. “I’ll get Rachel ready,” she says to no one in particular as she leaves the kitchen. It strikes Pete that she has avoided voicing an opinion on leaving her sister in his care. She’s leaving the decision entirely to Lisa.

Lisa hasn’t moved. She’s staring down at the table, as though the grained wood holds the answer to the questions of life. He folds his hands on the tabletop and leans in to rest his chin on them, so that he’s peering up at her.

“This has happened before,” he states.

She doesn’t look up. “Yes. When Rachel was in hospital. I snapped out of it; I’ll snap out of this again too. I just have to …” Her voice trails off; her finger draws a pattern on the table.

“Last time, how long did it take before you ‘snapped out of it’?” he asks, his intonation painting the quotation marks.

“Did you stay by yourself or with your sister?”

More silence. Then, “You don’t have to stay. I can manage.”

Oh no, she can’t. He’s pretty sure about that. He’s stuck now, unless he can persuade her to depart with Julia. “Why’d you tell Julia you were fine when you talked to her last night?” he finally asks. If she hadn’t done that, Julia would have come and taken over, and he’d never have come here.

Her nails scrape across the table, setting his teeth on edge. “What was I supposed to tell her? ‘Dear Sis, you already have to shoulder the entire burden of dealing with Mom, but hey, wouldn’t you like to pull me out of the rut I’ve gotten myself stuck in? Remember that guy you warned me about, the one who nearly killed us all? Well, he not only talked me out of half my liver, sabotaging my career in the process, he’s also screwed me over big time again. So drop your job and abandon your family, like you always do when your sister screws up her life.’ Sounds like an attractive proposition, doesn’t it?”

“You’re blaming me,” he says heavily.

Now she does look at him, with dark rings under her eyes. “No,” she finally says. “No, I don’t blame you. What happened in Paris was just the straw that broke this camel’s back, and that’s as much on me as on you. I blame myself for believing that you care when you don’t. I do that all the time. I look into those soulful blue eyes and tell myself that what I see there is real, that it exists. But it’s a figment of my imagination. I’m an idiot, but that isn’t your fault. I should know better, should always have known better.” She rises abruptly, almost tipping over her chair in the process. “I have to talk to Rachel, explain to her …”

He doesn’t like the way her sentences trail off. He also doesn’t like the way he’s feeling. She says she doesn’t blame him, but no matter which way he turns her words, there’s hurt and disappointment and contempt dripping off them. Maybe he is who she perceives him to be: someone with so little empathy and such a low level of awareness that he can’t be expected to fulfil expectations of any kind, someone with an emotional disability who therefore gets the maximum handicap for the course. The alternative to her perception of him isn’t any more flattering, namely that he knew his actions would hurt Wilson and Lisa, but that he nevertheless chose to do what he did anyway, letting them pay the price for his policy of avoidance. Is he a sociopath?

Now that he comes to think of it, it’s odd that he has never asked himself this question. (Or maybe he has, before his ‘Pete Barnes’ days.) He sees himself as an eccentric with a rational take on life and a tendency to shun dumb people (meaning most of the world’s population), but Antisocial Personality Disorder? He goes through the ICD-10 list (as much of it as he can remember).

• Callousness towards the feelings of others: Uh, check, he supposes.


• Disregard for social norms, rules, etc., etc.: Double check. (Yeah, but those norms are not rational! You have to be a moron to believe that sticking to them gets you anywhere.)


• Something about maintaining relationships (he can’t remember the exact wording): There’s too little data to evaluate that one, but that could be a check too. He has no idea how he handled family relationships when his parents were still alive, but judging by his Mayfield notes, visits were few and far between — not good. His relationship with Gail ended because of circumstances, not because he failed to maintain it — not bad. From what he could glean from his Mayfield notes, however, he wrecked the one with Stacy —uh-oh! — but it lasted for five years before he managed to do so — phew!. A stately period of time, in his opinion. So, no check there.


• Immunity to feelings of guilt: No check mark there. He’s feeling guilty as hell at the moment and will probably continue to do so for the next, oh, ten minutes or so.


• Rationalising bad behaviour or blaming others for it: No. … Leastways, he doesn’t think so. His behaviour is rational, so he doesn’t need to rationalise it. … Damn, that might be a check too.

There are one or two other symptoms on the list, but if he remembers correctly, three check marks make a diagnosis. Ergo, he’s a sociopath. Or if he isn’t, he’s close enough to pass for one, because even if he doesn’t fulfil enough criteria to be an officially diagnosed sociopath, he has some of the nastier character traits. Besides, there’s no clear cut-off mark, no definitive marker like those of genetic diseases.

He eats up Lisa’s yoghurt (ugh, low fat!), and then rises gingerly, taking care not to irritate his leg, and hobbles into the living area. It’s empty, with bright sunlight streaking in through the windows, highlighting the dust motes in the air. He examines the surfaces of the shelves and the coffee table: there’s about a ten-day layer of dust on both, meaning that they haven’t been cleaned since Lisa moved in. A babysitter isn’t the only amenity Lisa has failed to organise. It’s going to be a dire week.

Julia comes out of Rachel’s bedroom pulling a trolley suitcase behind her. “Rachel’s still in the bathroom,” she says over her shoulder to Lisa. “Do you have spare catheterisation kits for her anywhere else?”

“In the utility room. It’s next to my bedroom.” Lisa, who has followed her, waves vaguely in the direction of her bedroom.

Julia looks at him expectantly as she passes him, so he follows her to the utility room.

“I know you’re going to talk about me,” Lisa says as they exit the living area, but it’s a token protest.

Once they’re in the utility room, a small shelf-lined chamber with no natural light, Julia turns to face him. Her expression, puzzled at first, suddenly clears. “Now I know why I didn’t recognise you when I first saw you: you’ve shaved.”

He rubs his chin, thrown off balance by her non sequitur. But there’s no sense in beating about the bush. Julia must be crapping her pants at the thought of him alone with her darling sister. “You didn’t drag me off to a dark corner to tell me that. Worried about leaving Lisa with me?”

“No. I mean … I wanted to ask you if you’re sure you can do this.” She flicks her wrist to indicate the direction in which they left Lisa. “If you … can’t take it, let me know.”

That is — unexpected. “Depression isn’t Ebola. I can handle this.” It entails kicking Lisa out of bed in the morning, making her take a shower every now and then, and ensuring that she exercises. He’ll check on her therapist, find out what medication she’s on, and maybe get someone competent to take a look.

“Are you sure?” Julia asks.

He looks at her down his nose. “Is there anything I need to know? Some complication? A dirty family secret? Does she turn into a werewolf at full moon?”

Julia shakes her head, almost but not quite smiling. “No, of course not.” He can sense that she’s weighing her words, wondering what to say next. “It’s just that you don’t cope well with medical stress in your personal circle.” She draws an imaginary circle in the air with her index finger to illustrate her point.

He draws himself up, feeling decidedly misunderstood. He did just fine during Wilson’s run-in with cancer, which was a lot more ‘stressful’ than anything Lisa has come up with so far. “What makes you say that?”

Julia sighs. “That time when you thought Lisa had terminal cancer: you were conspicuously absent. Don’t deny it; I was there, so I know.”

She waits for a reaction, so he says, “Well, I don’t know.”

“Oh. Sorry, I forgot.” Julia has this look that people get when they’re confronted with a disability, the ‘pretending everything’s normal while taking sly peeks at the disability’ look.

“How long was she this way the last time this happened?” he asks.

“Difficult to say,” Julia says. “It was when Rachel was first hospitalised, and everything was terribly hectic and chaotic, so we didn’t catch it at first. When we did, she was put on medication and improved rapidly. But when I asked her just now about going back on medication, she said something about her liver. It’s been over half a year; shouldn’t her liver be back to normal?”

“Yes,” he says. “Do you know anything about that?” He should definitely look into that while he’s here.

“Only that she’s been going for regular check-ups. There was something about a consult with the Mayo Clinic in Jackson.” Julia hesitates. “She keeps her medical files on her laptop,” she finally says, turning away and fingering one of the boxes on the shelf in front of her.

“You’re advising me to hack into your sister’s account and sneak a look at her medical files?” he asks, pretending to be outraged.

“No,” Julia says. “See, I don’t know how serious her condition is, but if … if something goes wrong and I could have prevented it, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“So that’s yes, you are advising me to hack her computer,” he says drily.

Julia turns around again to face him, leaning against the shelves. “You don’t have to. Get her to show the files to you. She listens to you.”

He wishes he shared her confidence in his superpowers, because he’d rather not have to fight Lisa all the way during the coming week.

Lisa appears at the door to the utility room. “I don’t want to break up anything intimate, but Rachel has completed her bowel programme,” she says. “Catheterisation kits are in the box right in front of your nose, Julia.”

“Oh, right,” Julia says, looking guilty and grabbing the box. “I’ll put Rachel in the car, shall I?”

Lisa leans against the doorjamb watching Julia as she goes to get Rachel, then she turns to Pete. “Fraternising with the enemy,” she says. “Making a pact with the devil.”

He isn’t sure whether she’s referring to Julia or to him. “You look better already,” he says.

“A week without Rachel,” Lisa says, expelling air in a huff that blows a few stray locks out of her face. “It’s like a vacation.”

“You haven’t exactly been taking care of her lately,” he points out.

“Do you have any idea how much work Rachel is even when I’m ‘not taking care of her’?” Lisa asks, sketching the quotation marks in the air. “She may not have been getting gourmet meals or doing her physio routine the past week, but I’ve still had to get her out of bed, to school and back, help her take showers, catheterise her when she’s too tired to do it herself, and so on.”

Actually, he knows. He experienced a week of it himself last fall; he had Tanja to take care of the grosser stuff and do most of the cooking, and that student (he has forgotten her name) to do some of the school drop-offs and pick-ups, but even so the mornings — two hours of getting a very grouchy Rachel through her hygiene programme and ready for school — were excruciating.

“Lisa, we’re ready to go,” Julia calls.

He watches from a safe distance while Julia and Lisa take Rachel to Julia’s car and transfer her to the passenger seat. Rachel is quiet and subdued. It’s anyone’s guess what she’s thinking, but at least she isn’t making a fuss about going with Julia. Then again, she has probably figured out that she’s getting out of school, so it’s a win for her. Once they’re out of sight Lisa returns to the house and walks back to her bedroom without sparing him a glance.

“Shower,” he calls at her back. She hesitates, her shoulders once more slumped in exhaustion, but then she continues on her way, ignoring him. He stands there, staring at her bedroom door long after she has closed it behind her. Maybe, just maybe, Julia, with her three teens, semi-demented mother, and crippled niece, is getting the better deal.

---

Previous Chapter

Chapter Index

Next Chapter