Sara Withers blinked under the overhead lights of
the terminal. Her boys met her and Greg, her husband, by the wheezing doors of
the airport entrance. Or exit, depending on how you looked at it. Her hands
shook violently as they always did.
“I’m just going to go to this
appointment. Greg, are you all set?” she said.
“Mom, did you get our bagels?” Tom,
their oldest son, said before her husband answered.
“How long will you be gone?” Greg
looked anxiously at the children from his wheelchair like he didn’t know what
he’d do with them.
“What appointment?” Harry said
from behind his Kindle.
“I’ve told you three times.”
“Who has a doctor’s appointment
right before a flight?”
“Did you go to Dunkin’?”
“What doctor has an office near
the airport?”
“I should be right back.”
She handed the boys the bag of
bagels. “Next time, you’re old enough to get them yourself.”
Tom took two plains before he
passed the bag along.
“We didn’t want poppyseed,” said
the twins.
“I’ll
take it.” Oh, Jonathan, in the middle. She’d forgotten to get him one.
Before she could stop herself,
she marched to the automatic doors and into the wall of exhaust of the
departures curb.
“Wait where is Mom—?” The doors
swallowed the rest of Tom’s words and silenced Jonathan as he mouthed that Mom
was going to see a doctor about her hands.
The tremors in her hands began
after Tom was born 15 years ago and worsened with each subsequent birth. The
padded base of her thumbs quivered as though receiving aftershocks from a
source higher up in her body. In the
last few years, she’d given up driving almost entirely, relying on carpools and
bike rides, limiting her time behind the wheel to local and essential errands.
Greg did a lot of driving but couldn’t right now with his broken leg. And he
refused to pay for an Uber to the airport on a convoluted principle of
frugality, which she found insensitive. During the 25-minute drive, she had not
broken up the kids’ fights; she hadn’t responded to Greg’s musings about the
election. He reached for the wheel from the passenger’s seat four times.
If it weren’t for her beloved
cousin, Meg, getting married, she would never have risked it. Any of it. Driving
to the airport. Meeting with a doctor she’d found when she asked an artificial
intelligence chatbot for “radical solutions to involuntary tremors.” Driving so
far once they landed at their destination.
But she had to. Meg, after innumerable failed relationships, was getting
married in the far northern reaches of Maine. Meg, who’d chased fireflies with
her after summer family dinners, who’d barhopped with her until dawn in their
twenties. Who’d stayed overnight with all of Sara’s children as newborns while
worrying her own biological time slipped away from her.
For years, Sara had googled her
symptoms continuously, frantically, trying to get new results to either confirm
she was dying, or she wasn’t. She didn’t want to die, not at all, but the
extent of her worry and complaint over the tremors had bored, then irritated
her family and old friends so extensively, she’d almost hoped for a dramatic
diagnosis to justify the oxygen she’d wasted.
She tried medicine, MRIs and CT
scans. Therapy, hypnosis, massage. None of it worked or provided answers.
She considered asking her local
friends for recommendations. She’d seen the version of her tremors in the tensing
in their jaws, in the manicured feet of her coworkers, in the mothers’ bikini
bellies rippling on summer weekends. But her friends in town weren’t the kind
one trusted with vulnerability. It would be spread over texts and coffee and
wine and contorted in a way Sara couldn’t handle.
So, she’d asked AI for help. The
sexy robotic voice returned Dr. Cyril’s name along with dozens of glowing
reviews. Among all the stars, the paragraphs of praise about how the good
doctor changed lives, was no mention of his actual methodology. Only how his
treatment worked when nothing else had. He had a degree in neuropsychology from
a school in the Caribbean she’d never heard of. She couldn’t find a picture of
the man, but he did have an address in a building within the concrete campus of
the airport, and an appointment available just before their flight.
GPS delivered on its promise of
the office’s proximity, and she found the brick building after a short walk
along the airport road shoulder. The lobby was worn but mostly clean, a few
clumps of dirt ground into the corners by the staircase. An engraved sign with
a short list of offices hung next to the single, waiting elevator. About
halfway down Dr. Cyril’s name was freshly etched. She could still hear the
airplanes.
She tried to run a brush through
her hair while she waited for the elevator. She’d cropped it, a cut Greg hadn’t
noticed for weeks, and still it tangled. She couldn’t grip the brush in her
shaking hands and only managed to rip a few blonde strands.
The narrow elevator reminded her
of the ones of her dreams in which she’d go up and down, missing the floor
she’d selected. She suddenly felt very alone, despite the nearness of the
airport and her family. Her left thumb trembled painfully, and she sucked it
the way the children did as babies. The twins sucked them for way too long, her
mom friend, Kelly, told her once at a birthday party while the kids rode a pony
and ate gourmet burgers from a food truck. Sara made the twins quit their
thumbs after that and sometimes she thought if she’d let them continue
thumb-sucking, they wouldn’t be so restless now. Which all reminded her she
needed to book the magician for their party next month at the arcade.
The number six glowed in the bank
of buttons, urging her to press it, and the other buttons receded. She pressed,
she stepped on the elevator, and the doors closed.
She considered what the doctor
would ask her about her medical history. The only thing she could truly note
was the shaking had worsened as she entered perimenopause, the long final
descent into the “change” or “the pause,” whatever euphemism you’d like to
apply to the looming cessation of her ability to reproduce.
After an agonizingly slow climb
in which she grew convinced that she’d be trapped and miss not only her
appointment but her flight, the elevator doors opened onto a waiting man in a
faded navy-blue cap and coat. He had tightish curls beneath the hat and a wide
smile with the early hints of tobacco staining.
“Sara,” he said. Not as a
question, but a greeting. His voice was melodic and lightly accented, which,
along with the outfit, reminded her of a train conductor in old Disney films.
He led her gently by the elbow, but with some hurry to a door immediately
across from the elevator. She didn’t have much chance to look down the hall and
though it was empty, it didn’t give her the sense it was deserted. A phone rang
out of sight. She was pleased how easily this was going, how kind he seemed.
“Let’s use this office. It’s for
my special patients.”
When he opened the door, she saw
right away it was a large, single stall bathroom with a grab bar and in the
center a chair that looked plucked from a country dining room. This was wrong.
Very, very wrong.
He began to ask her questions as
the door shut. “Did you find the office OK? Getting warm out there?” He locked
the door, still smiling, and stood in front of it.
She said, “I think this is a bad
idea.”
He said, “Why?” And his whole
face not only fell but transformed like a mirage. His eyes went from a
pleasing, lake blue to milky and hard, with contracted pupils. He was much
younger than she initially thought, and not exactly handsome but there was
something erotically attractive about him. He stared at her with distaste and a
small frisson of lust behind those eyes.
He was going to hurt her.
He didn’t even necessarily look
excited, but as if it was routine for him, inevitable.
Except, he didn’t block the door
as she got closer; he stepped aside. She, despite her fear, wanted his strong
arm to reach out and stop her. She was testing him. He was testing her. Why had
she ever decided to do this? And why couldn’t she completely bring herself to
rush by him, tackle him, grab for the door? A pull, a force, evinced by a man
she’d never met before today. She was as terrified as she’d ever been in her
life. And she froze, entranced.
She looked down. The grout was
dirty, and her eyes swam, and she was afraid she’d lose her balance and crack
her head. She focused on his conductor’s uniform and then looked up to his face
that had changed. If she looked one way, like those old hologram cards she had
as a kid, his face returned to the conductor. That was the false image, the
imposed one, she understood now. The one you saw first. If she turned more the
image underneath, the one printed on the card was the man who terrified her,
and yet, to whom she couldn’t stop advancing. She thought she might know him
after all. He raised his eyebrows. In menace, in something else, she couldn’t
tell.
He gripped her wrist.
What if she never saw her
children again? Her fear was nothing compared to the desire not to let them
feel any themselves.
“Let me out of here,” she said.
He laughed.
How airless the room was. No
windows. The heavy door seemingly sealed shut. Maybe it was. She’d missed her
chance for escape.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“What?” she said. What? She
didn’t know what she expected him to say. Any question would’ve surprised her:
routine, clinical or absurd.
“You heard me,” Dr. Cyril said.
“I, I am 48,” she said. Was he asking to mark
the end of her time on Earth, like stopping a clock at the time of a person’s
death? She did not want to die.
He said quietly. “I’ve never had
a patient like you.”
“You say that to all the girls,” she said.
Jesus, Sara. Why was she joking with this man? Because she was scared and what
else was she going to do. And, because she knew him, somehow.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “You’re
very beautiful.”
He didn’t say “still’ very
beautiful, which is what most people said about women in their forties. It
prompted her to say, “Until menopause.” And then, “The end of my useful
life.”
“The end, the beginning,” he
said, reading her mind, or not.
The surrealness and fear caught
up to her in a sudden aural swoosh. She wanted to go home. She wanted to rewind
and not come here. Yet, she wanted him, too. Him who called her beautiful and
stared at her, like inside her.
“Do you know why your hands
shake?” he said.
The last thing she remembered was
him catching her and lowering her to the ground. He smelled earthy and not
exactly familiar, but real. She still wasn’t sure he was real, if this place
were real. But his smell, the hardness of the floor, convinced her she wasn’t
dreaming.
He didn’t let her slam her head against the
ground. He whispered her name as it went
dark.
When she woke, Dr. Cyril sat in
another chair she hadn’t noticed in the corner, watching her. He wasn’t smoking
but had the posture of someone who was. The mask of the goofy conductor had
entirely slipped in the shadows. “Don’t get up,” he said. He smirked. She
imagined how his mouth would feel on her skin.
Her body got hot and then
shivered. Wanting and repelled. The room smelled of her own sweat and his musk
from a riverbed. “Please, let me go.” Her voice was hoarse.
He shrugged. “You’re the one who
wanted to come here,” he said.
It was the chatbot, actually,
who’d led her here. Artificial results, telling her what she was supposed to
do.
He held her gaze, challenging
her.
“You’re blocking the door,” she
said.
“Am I? Or do you just want me to
be blocking the door?” he said. “Two things can be true at the same time,” he
said.
“What are you going to do to me?”
she said.
He lifted a hand to her, and she
ducked. She wasn’t sure if he were going to hit her or not. It was instinct to
duck. He tucked a strand of her broken hair behind her ear.
Here was the chameleon again.
Turned and he was a familiar stranger with a dangerous pull to the depths of
her desire and turn another way and he was the humdrum doctor, as routine as
her children’s YouTube shows.
“What do you want?” Dr. Cyril
said.
Sara wasn’t even sure Dr. Cyril
wasn’t generated by AI himself. It didn’t matter; despite the supreme,
terrifying, oddness of this whole thing, she trusted he was leading her where
she wanted to go.
“For my hands to stop shaking,”
she said. “For my life to go on. For my children to grow up. For them not to
grow up.”
“I see,” he said. “Do you want
more children?”
“No, I have plenty. I just want.”
He waited. She didn’t know what
else to say.
She wanted the chance to restart
and redo everything now that she knew better. To not be invisible in midlife. To
stop the arms race of parenting. For her children to grow up happy and healthy.
For them to stay young forever. To escape the trap of all of it. She wasn’t
sure how much of this she said aloud.
“If you didn’t know it was there,
would you still worry about it?” he said, after a long pause.
“Didn’t know what was there?” She
was so tired. She wanted to go home.
“Didn’t know anything,” he said.
“Who you are. Who you were. Worry makes it real.”
“You have to worry about some
things,” she said, irritated now. “I have to be someone.”
“Do you?”
She sighed. She thought, playing
whatever this game of his was. “I guess I couldn’t worry if I didn’t know
something existed, yes,” she said. “Or
if I just let it exist.”
He smiled. A sudden deep sense of relaxation
washed over her, like she’d taken a rainbath.
One of his top teeth was snagged
across the other one and was graying, dying. For a doctor, she’d think he’d get
that fixed. Why she continued to believe, or wanted to believe, he was an
actual doctor was beyond comprehension. Every piece of evidence should’ve
convinced her otherwise by now.
He spread his palms on his knees,
and said, “Well, who are you then?”
“I am Sara.”
“Look down,” he said. “At your
hands.”
She did. And her tremors were
gone.
He rose from the chair. He put
his arms around her waist, and she thought he was going to kiss her on the
mouth, his breath surprisingly fresh, but he didn’t. And again, the fever dream
sensation only he and she were real. “You did it,” he said.
She didn’t remember leaving his
office, or getting back to the airport, or to her gate. It was as if she awoke
midway through the flight with a start. She only retained the feeling of how it
had been hard to part from him, and the increasingly hazy memory of how he’d almost
kissed her once more, a deep farewell and about which she felt no guilt.
Although, she did not tell her husband.
When they landed, she drove
without incident to the Canadian border. A lake house in the family of Meg’s
new husband for generations. The wedding was quiet, a sweet country silence.
They swam a dozen times over the weekend. The lake sloughed her skin clear and
bare. Her hands were still.
“So, he just scared you,
basically?” Meg said.
“No, it was more than that. It
was like a hologram. I can’t explain it. Everything and nothing is real.”
“Maybe it was just the intensity
of the session,” Meg said. “What are you going to tell the other women when you
get home?” she asked. Her cousin knew her so well.
“Just a little. They’re going to
want to go,” Sara said.
About the author
aire Bezdek Gochal has work published in the North Dakota Quarterly and The Astorian. She was a semi-finalist for the Story Foundation Prize and an Honorable mention for the Adele and Robert Schiff Award. She lives on the coast of Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters.
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