The Day After Tomorrow

18

THE TREES along the boulevard St.-Jacques were beginning to turn yellow, getting ready to drop their leaves for winter. A few had already fallen and the rain made walking slippery. As they crossed the street, Osborn took Vera’s arm to steady her. She smiled at the gesture, but as soon as they crossed, asked him to let go.

Osborn looked around. “You worried about the woman pushing the baby carriage or the old man walking the dog?”

“Both. Either. Neither,” she said flatly, purposefully being aloof, but not quite sure why.” Maybe she was afraid of being seen. Or maybe she didn’t want to be with him at all, or maybe she wanted to be with him completely but wanted him to make that decision for her.

Suddenly he stopped. “You’re not making it easy.”

Vera felt her heart skip a beat. When she turned to look at him, their eyes met and held there, the way they had that first night in Geneva, the way they had in London when he put her on the train to Dover. The way they had in his hotel room on avenue Kléber when he’d opened the door and stood there with nothing but a towel around his waist. “What am I not making easy?”

Then he surprised her.

“I need your help and I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how to ask for it.”

She didn’t know what he meant and said so.

Beneath the umbrella he was carrying for both of them, the light was soft arid delicate. He could just make out the top of her white medical tunic raising up under the blue anorak she wore. It made her look more like a member of a mountain rescue team than an urban doctor in training. Small gold earrings clung to the base of each ear like tiny raindrops, accenting the narrowness of her face and turning her eyes into enormous emerald pools.

“It’s dumb really. And I don’t even know if it’s illegal. Everybody just makes it seem like it is.”

“What is?” What was he talking about? He was throwing her off. What did this have to do with them?

“I have a prescription I wrote for a drug that now they tell me is only available at hospital pharmacies and that I need local authorization for. I don’t know any doctors here’ and . . .”

“What drug?” Concern was written all over her face. “Are you ill?”

“No.” Osborn smiled.

“What then?”

“I . . . I told you it was dumb,” he started uncertainly, as if he were embarrassed. “I’m presenting a paper when I get back. As soon as I get back. For a reason named Vera, I took an extra week off when I should have been back at work . . . .”

“Say what you mean, will you?” Vera grinned and relaxed. Everything they had done together had been rich and romantic and deeply personal, even to helping each other through the private embarrassments of bodily functions when they’d both had the twenty-four-hour flu in London. Aside from their first exploratory conversations in Geneva, little, if anything, had been said about their professional lives and now he was asking an everyday question involving just that.

“I’m presenting a paper to a group of anesthesiologists the day after I get back to L.A. Originally I was to speak on the third day, but they changed it and now I’m first. The paper has to do with presurgical anesthetic preparation involving succinylcholine dosage and effectiveness under emergency field conditions. Most of my experimentation has been done in the lab. I will have no time when I get back, but I still have two days here. And it seems that if I’m going to get any succinylcholine in Paris, I’m going to need an okay from a French doctor before anyone will I give it to me. And as I said, I don’t know any other doctors.”

“You’re going to self-medicate?” Vera was astonished. She’d heard of other doctors doing that from time to time and had almost tried it herself as a medical student, but she’d chickened out at the last minute and copied a published Study instead.

I’ve been doing various experiments since I was in med school.” A broad grin crossed Osborn’s face. “That’s why I’m a little strange.” Abruptly he stuck out his tongue, bulged his eyes and twisted up an ear under his thumb.

Vera laughed. This was a side of him she hadn’t seen, a silliness she hadn’t known existed.

As quickly, he let go of his ear and the goofiness faded. “Vera, I need the succinylcholine and I don’t know how to get it. Can you help me?”

He was very serious. This was something that had to do with his life and who he was. Suddenly Vera realized I how very little she knew about him and, at the same time, how much more she wanted to know. What he believed, and believed in. What he liked, and disliked. What he loved, feared, envied. What secrets he had he’d never shared with her or anyone else. What it was that had cost two marriages.

Had it been Paul, or were the women at fault? Or was he just bad at choosing them? Or—was there something else, something inside him that festered a relationship all the way to ruin? From the beginning she’d sensed he was troubled, but by what she didn’t know. It wasn’t something she could point to and understand. It was deeper and for the most part he kept it hidden. But it was there just the same. And now, more than at any time since she’d known him, as he stood there under her umbrella in the rain asking her to help him, she saw him absorbed by it. All at once she felt herself overwhelmed by a wanting to know and comfort and understand. Much more a feeling than a conscious thought, it was also dangerous, and she knew it, because it was pulling her somewhere where she had not been asked, and to a place, she was certain, no one had ever been invited.

“Vera?” Suddenly she realized they were still on the street corner and that he was talking to her. “I asked if you could help.”

Looking at him, she smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Let me try.”