The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 486
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
FICTION 42: Colors of the Past 17
Colors of the Past
a novel
W.D. Haverstock
Part Two
Chapter Four
“… See what you’ve done?” George screamed. “You’ll pay for this incompetence.”
“Once again, Mr. Grange, I can assure you that it was not the . . . .”
“How can you let those people in here?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They have no business in a place like this. How can you bring them in here? Aren’t you supposed to be in charge of them?”
‘Yes, I am but . . . .”
“How could you allow that woman near our child?”
The nurse stepped closer to George, her back arched and her hands on her hips. A piece of glass crunched beneath her foot. “Mrs. Johnson is an excellent nurse. Your child is well provided for here, Mr. Grange.” She glared with her green eyes into George’s.
He turned away. “I have nothing more to say to you,” he growled. “I want to see Dr. Newman immediately.”
“He is being paged.”
George walked back to the window. Some lights beyond the lawn had become visible. The road was empty. He followed it with his eyes for as far as he could see into the twilight and wondered what had become of the bicyclists.
“Mr. and Mrs. Grange, this is a reputable hospital,” the nurse said. “The staff is well trained and the doctors are some of the finest in the country. I understand that you are upset and confused. I’m sure Dr. Newman will recommend someone who will be able to help you.”
George continued to stare into the tiny, distant lights and the deepening darkness. A young man came in and silently began to sweep the floor.
A few minutes later Dr. Newman entered. He dismissed the nurse and walked to the side of the bed.
“George,” he said when Susan appeared to be asleep. George had not turned from the window. “Would you come over here and sit down.”
George looked around at the doctor with a fear in his eyes that he tried to conceal with the tone of his voice. “Would you tell me what the hell is going on here, Doctor?”
Dr. Newman took a deep breath. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
George turned to face him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Only that I assumed that this was not going to be the surprise to you that it was to me this afternoon. I can assure you I did not know what to think when I delivered that baby. Neither of you had said anything to me.”
“Are you trying to tell me that even you believe that, that . . . .” He stumbled over the word. “That child is ours? That Susan could have given birth to that?” He jaw moved only slightly when he spoke.
“I’m telling you, George,” the doctor replied calmly, “that I know for a fact that Susan gave birth to that child because I delivered it. I delivered it myself, George, and I could see that there wasn’t a person in that delivery room who was not as shocked as I was.”
He paused and returned the anger in George’s voice with sober reason.
“Now, don’t you think it’s time we started being honest with each other? Don’t you think you should have discussed this with me before now, no matter how painful or embarrassing it might have been?”
The doctor glanced down at Susan. She had not moved. He could not see her breathing.
“I can understand your desire to keep this matter private,” Dr. Newman continued, “but now it’s just going to be that much more difficult. There were half a dozen people in that room with me. If I had known, we might have made other arrangements.”
“You don’t understand, Doctor,” George interrupted. “There was nothing to discuss. There is no situation. There has been a mistake.” He spoke these last words in a menacing whisper as though trying to change the facts of existence by refusing to accept them.
Dr. Newman walked around the bed and spoke softly at George’s shoulder. “George, Susan is still feeling the effect of the anesthesia. She needs to rest. I’ll have the nurse give her something to make sure she does. In the meantime, we can talk further in my office.”
George looked past the doctor at his wife. “Susan,” he said. She did not respond and he realized that what little there was to say had already been said. He had said it to Mrs. Johnson and to a girl he had seen once and had never seen again. He’d said it to another girl so often that nothing should have surprised him.
The vision of the woman and the girl on the street that afternoon suddenly filled his mind and he was overcome with guilt. He dropped his head into his hands and knew what he had done. In an instant he knew that the child was his own and that he had been cursed by his own acts. Instead of the angelic likeness of Susan, he would have the hideous image of those others before his eyes, the child he had met in the early morning hours of his wedding day, the Mediterranean girl whose graceful movements he had pretended to ignore, the dark-haired girl back east whose ephemeral, carnal pleasures had seemed to balance his devotion to Susan. The sins he had willfully sown would be miraculously reaped in the innocent form of this tiny brown baby.
“Dear God,” he said into his blindness.
“George,” Dr. Newman said more sternly, “come up to my office and let Susan get some rest.”
The doctor put his hand on George’s arm and pulled him away from the bed. Susan still had not moved. She might not have breathed.
At the nurses’ station, he prescribed a sedative as George stood by with his eyes fixed on the shiny floor. Across the desk and behind a window were the tiny beings just arrived into this world, one of them the result of everything he had done in his life. He could not bear to look upon it.
Upstairs they went into a room with a wide, oval table. George sat down in the chair that the doctor offered.
Dr. Newman took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his lab coat and offered one to George. George took it. The doctor lit the cigarettes and walked to the opposite side of the table.
“George,” he said, “I don’t mean to pry into your personal affairs, but can you tell me anything at all about what’s going on here?”
George shook his head, the anger entirely overtaken by the fear.
The doctor began to pace along the curve of the table. “You and Susan have been married about two years now, isn’t that right?”
“A year and a half.”
“Yes, I remember the wedding. It was in the fall, wasn’t it?”
George made no reply. A year and a half had passed exactly as he’d planned it. Susan had accepted the idea of living in the city for a while and then had begun spending more and more time in Wilmette. Only when it had happened did he admit to himself that that was what he’d hoped for all along. By then he could think that it was best for Susan to live the way she had always lived, in a house like the one she had grown up in. He had told himself that even as he thought of the possibilities that now were his. A year and a half had seemed like only a beginning.
“Then I have to ask you, George,” the doctor said. “Have you and Susan been getting along? I mean, how are things between the two of you?”
George took a deep breath through the cigarette and then watched as the smoke swirled into the room. It had been a year and a half since the honeymoon and yet it was the morning of his wedding that he remembered. The girl had asked for a cigarette. She had asked him for a pack of cigarettes as they had walked up the stairs of the hotel that night. He had told her to buy them for herself with the money he would give her and she had laughed. She would have laughed at whatever he said.
He’d watched her walk away, smoking a cigarette he had given her and turning the lighter over and over in her small hand. It was two o’clock in the morning and he watched her walk away in the clothes that had caught him and he had felt a chill in the air. He pulled his jacket collar around his neck and looked up and down the empty avenue for a taxi. There were none and would be none .…