It is one of his endearing exchanges with Ruby: What time is it, Daddy? To which Nick grimaces, points to his mouth, and replies: Tooth hurty. Time to see a dentist. A real crowd-pleaser.
“Uh-huh,” Nick says distractedly, clearly in no mood for conversation. But as I open my eyes and watch him turn and stare intently at the ceiling, my curiosity gets the better of me. So I ask, as casually as I can given the nature of the inquiry, whether it was a birth defect—which comprises a significant portion of Nick’s work.
He sighs and says no.
I hesitate and tentatively guess again. “A car accident?”
“No, Tess,” he says, so patiently that it gives away his impatience. “It was a burn. An accident.”
He adds this last bit as a disclaimer. In other words, it was not child abuse—sadly, far from a given; Nick once told me that about ten percent of all pediatric burns are the result of child abuse.
I bite my lower lip, my mind racing with the usual possibilities—a boiling pot from the stove, a scalding bathtub, a house fire, a chemical burn—and I’m unable to resist the inevitable follow-up. The question of how. It is the question Nick resists the most, his typical reply going something along the lines of: What difference does it make? It was an accident. Accidents are just that. They happen.
Tonight he clears his throat and resignedly gives me the facts. A six-year-old boy was roasting marshmallows. He somehow fell into the fire and burned his hand and cheek. The left side of his face.
Nick’s speech is rapid and detached, as if he’s simply relaying the weather forecast. But I know that this is only an act—a well-practiced cover-up. I know that he will likely be awake much ofthe night, unable to fall asleep from the adrenaline of the night’s events. And even tomorrow morning—or more likely, afternoon—he will roll downstairs with a remote expression, pretending to be engaged with his own family, while he dwells on a little boy’s hand and cheek.
Medicine makes a jealous mistress, I think, an expression I first heard during Nick’s first year of residency, from a bitter doctor’s wife who, I later learned, left her husband for her personal trainer. I vowed then that I would guard against ever feeling this way. That I would always see the nobility in my husband’s work—even if that meant a certain measure of loneliness.
“How bad is it?” I ask Nick.
“It could be worse,” he says. “But it’s not great.”
I close my eyes, searching for the silver lining, knowing that this is my unspoken role in our relationship. Nick might be the eternal optimist at the hospital, brimming with confidence, even bravado. But here at home, in our bed, he relies on me to bring the hope—even when he’s silent and self-contained.
“Are his eyes okay?” I finally muster, remembering that Nick once confided in me the enormous complexity of repairing what everyone believes to be the window to the soul.
“Yeah,” he says, as he rolls onto his side, toward me. “His eyes are perfect. Big and blue . . . like Ruby’s.”
His voice trails off as I think that this is a dead giveaway—when Nick compares a patient to Ruby or Frank, I know he has begun to obsess.
“And he has a pretty decent doctor, too,” I finally say.
I can hear the smallest of smiles in Nick’s voice as he rests his hand on my hip and
replies, “Yeah. He does have that going for him, doesn’t he?”
***