Read Online Dream of the Blue Room by Michelle Richmond - Free Book Online Page B

getting out from under it. I look back at that nineteen-year-old boy in the body cast, and I envy him.”
    Dave spears a piece of pork. “I think we all envy ourselves at nineteen.”
    Dave, I know, sees Graham in terms of the particular case, the disease itself, in the impersonal light of reason. Dave is unencumbered by emotion. Each time he goes to work, he sees terrible things. His response to these things is professional, exact, rational. He looks at a young girl bleeding from a gunshot wound and thinks, “How can I help this girl survive?” If it is clear his patient will die, he thinks, “What can I do to make her comfortable for now, until it’s over?” I wonder sometimes if he looks at me and sees a useless person. While he’s saving lives, I’m telling women with platinum cards which handbag to wear with their tailored silk suits, which earrings to pair with the Hermès scarves. I wonder, sometimes, if this is why he moved out: I simply cannot compete with the ongoing drama of his job.
    “And you?” Graham says, looking at Dave.
    “Me?”
    “What’s the greatest degree of pain you’ve ever endured?”
    “That’s easy. A couple of years ago I had a cracked tooth. It became infected at the root. The dentist, Dr. De Salvo, dug around in there for more than an hour. When he went to pull the thing, it shattered. He had to yank each piece out individually. Because the infection was at the nerve, it all had to be done without any Novocain. By the time he was finished, I had passed out. When I came to, he was standing above me, apologizing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently, he’d left the nerve exposed. I went home pumped up on drugs, and sometime in the middle of the night the drugs wore off. Ouch.”
    “He was crying like a baby,” I say.
    “This guy?” Stacy says. “Crying? That’s hard to believe.”
    What I remember most from that time is the intensity of feeling I had for Dave. Seeing him in pain made me look at him, at us, in a new way. Suddenly, this man who had always been so sure of himself in every situation was vulnerable. Dave had always been the rescuer, but during those brief days, he had to depend on me. Years before, my fondness for him had evolved into love because he was there when Amanda Ruth died; he had known exactly what to say, ushering me through those first horrible days and weeks after her murder. Although I hated seeing Dave in so much pain, I secretly relished his weakness. I watched over him like a careful mother. For the first time in our marriage, I felt that he needed me, that I was the one in control of the situation.
    “Well?” Graham says, nudging me with his elbow. “What was it for you? What event established your pain threshold?”
    “I was fourteen,” I say, trying to avoid Graham’s eyes, certain that my attraction toward him must show, that my voice comes out weak when I speak to him. “This was in Alabama. I was having my riding lesson—Miss Linda was teaching me how to canter—and my horse bucked, reared up, and fell on top of me. My pelvis was broken, both my hips fractured.”
    Dave is looking at me like I’m a stranger who just walked in off the street. Graham leans toward me. I’m wearing a sleeveless dress, and I can feel the rough fabric of his shirt against my shoulder. “Go on,” he says.
    “The ride to the hospital and the emergency room is a blur. But I have a clear memory of the orderlies transferring me to a cold metal table in the X-ray room. Then I was alone with just one nurse, a skeletal woman named Ramona who smelled like she’d been smoking nonstop for the last twenty years. ‘Okay, hon,’ she said. ‘Count to three now, and I’m gonna slide this thing here under your behind.’ She tricked me. On two she jerked my hip up and slid the X-ray plate underneath. Then she pressed down on my pelvis and flipped the switch. It hurt about a hundred times more than actually falling off the horse. Ramona did twelve