"The Harvest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Part One New Moon

Chapter 1 August

A year and some months after the immense alien Artifact parked itself in a close orbit of the Earth, Matt Wheeler spent an afternoon wondering how to invite Annie Gates to the party he was hosting Friday night.

The question was not whether to invite her—obviously he would—but how. More precisely, what would the invitation suggest about their relationship? And what did he want it to suggest?

Pondering the question, he washed his hands and prepared to see the last two patients of the day.

In a town the size of Buchanan a doctor ends up treating the people he sees at backyard barbecues. His last patients were Beth Porter, daughter of Billy, a sometimes-patient; and Lillian Bix, wife of his friend Jim.

The two women, Beth and Lillian, were posed at opposite ends of the waiting-room sofa like mismatched bookends. Lillian paged through a Readers Digest and dabbed her nose with a hankie. Beth stared at the far wall, absorbed in the music that seeped from the headphones of her Walkman like the rhythmic rattling of a pressed tin pie plate. A few more years of this, Matt thought, and he’d be treating her for hearing loss.

The teenager was first up. “Beth,” he said.

She gazed into space.

“Beth. Beth!”

She looked up with the resentment of someone startled out of a dream. The resentment faded when she recognized Matt. She thumbed a switch on the cassette player and pried the phones out of her ears.

“Thank you,” he said. “Come on in.”

As he turned, Annie Gates stepped out of her consulting room with a file folder in hand. She glanced at Beth, shot him a look: Good luck! Matt returned a smile.

Annie Gates wore medical whites and a stethoscope around her neck. Unlike Beth and Lillian, Annie and Matt were a matched set. They were business partners. They were professionals. He was sort of in love with her. He had been sort of in love with her for most of a decade.

Matt Wheeler had been practicing primary-care medicine in this building for fifteen years. He had grown up in Buchanan, developed what he thought of as “the medical impulse” in Buchanan, and after serving his residency in a Seattle hospital and passing his general boards he had hightailed it back to Buchanan to open a private practice. His partner then had been Bob Scott, a dark-haired and high-strung Denverite who had interned with him. Together they had rented this suite, a waiting room and three consulting rooms on the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, a sandstone legacy of the Hoover era planted firmly at the intersection of Marina and Grove.

Matt and his partner had understood the perils of family practice, or thought they did. The real money was in specialties, in “doing procedures”; the hassles were in family practice. Not just patient hassles—those they had been prepared for. But insurance hassles, Medicare and Medicaid hassles, paperwork hassles… in time, a crippling, skyrocketing overhead. Dr. Scott, professing a nostalgia for city life, bailed out and left for L. A. in 1992. Last Matt heard, he was working at the kind of corporate storefront clinic sometimes called a “Doc-in-the-Box.” Bye-bye hassles. Bye-bye independence.

Matt persevered. He couldn’t imagine a life outside of Buchanan, and he couldn’t imagine any work more satisfying than the work he did, at least when he was allowed to do it. Celeste had died around the time Bob left for California, and the new demands on his time had been, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

Bob Scott’s replacement showed up in June of that year: a young female internist named Anne Gates. Matt had not expected a woman to show interest in the partnership, particularly not a young blond woman in a businesslike skirt and a pair of black-rimmed glasses that amplified her eyes into something owlish and fiercely solemn. He told her she’d have to put in long hours, make house calls, cover at the local ER, and expect nothing spectacular in the way of remuneration. “It’s not city work,” he said, thinking of Bob Scott’s defection and the cut of that Perry Ellis skirt.

Whereupon Anne Gates informed him that she had grown up in a farm town on the prairies of southern Manitoba ; she knew what small towns were like and Buchanan didn’t look so damn small to her (though it did look decent). She had survived a residency in an inner-city hospital where most of the ER patients had been gunshot wounds, knife wounds, and drug ODs. She had emerged from this ordeal still believing in the fundamental value of primary-care medicine, and as far as “remuneration” went, she would be happy to live in the absence of cockroaches, get more than five hours’ sleep in a given week, and treat at least the occasional patient who didn’t initiate the relationship by vomiting on her.

Whereupon Matt Wheeler discovered he had a new partner.

They had worked together for nearly a year before they discovered each other as human beings. He was recovering from Celeste’s death and what interested him about Anne Gates in that unhappy time was, for instance, her remarkable finesse with fiber-optic sigmoidoscopy, a procedure he loathed and dreaded, or her uneasiness with cranial injuries of any kind. They shifted patients according to each other’s weaknesses and strengths; Anne ended up with many of his geriatric patients, and he took an extra share of pediatrics. But she was also a woman and Matt was a widower and there were days when the vector of that equation did not escape him. On the first anniversary of her arrival in Buchanan, he took her to dinner at the Fishin’ Boat, a restaurant by the marina. Soft-shell crab, shallots in butter, margueritas, and a prearranged ban on doc-speak. By the end of the evening he was calling her Annie. They went to bed for the first time the week after that.

They were passionately involved for most of that year. The year after, they seemed to drift apart. No arguments, but fewer dates, fewer nights together. Then the pace picked up for another six months. Then another hiatus.

They never talked about it. Matt wasn’t certain whether these peaks and valleys were his fault or hers. Whether they were even a bad thing. He knew for a fact, however, that a pattern had been established. Nearly ten years had passed since Annie Gates stepped through that office door for the first time. Mart’s hair had grayed at the temples and run back a little from his brow, and Annie had developed frown lines at the corners of her eyes, but ten years was an eyeblink, really, and at no point in that time had they ever been entirely separate… or entirely together.

Lately they had drifted through another vacuum, and he wondered how she would take this invitation for Friday evening. As a courtesy? Or as a suggestion to spend the night?

And which did he prefer?

The question lingered.

He showed Beth Porter into his consulting room, down the hall from Anne’s.

The consulting room was Mart’s enclave, a space of his own creation. Its centerpiece was a set of authentic Victorian oak medical cabinets, purchased at a rural auction in 1985. Behind his desk was a creaking leather chair that had formed itself to the precise contour of his behind. The window looked crosstown, beyond the sweltering marina to the open sea.

Beth Porter took her place in the patient chair while Matt adjusted the blinds to keep out the afternoon sun. Annie had recently equipped her office with vertical blinds, covered in cloth, which looked exactly sideways to Matt. His consultancy announced: Tradition. Annie’s replied: Progress. Maybe that was the invisible hand that conspired to pull them apart.

She was on his mind today, though, wasn’t she?

He took his seat and looked across the desk at Beth Porter.

He had examined her file before he called her in. Matt had been Beth’s regular doctor since her eleventh birthday, when her mother had dragged her into the waiting room: a sullen child wearing a cardboard party hat over a face swollen to the proportions of a jack-o’-lantern. Between rounds of birthday cake and ice cream, Beth had somehow disturbed a hornet nest in the cherry tree in the Porters’ backyard. The histamine reaction had been so sudden and so intense that her mother hadn’t even tried to pry off the party hat. The string was embedded in the swollen flesh under her chin.

Nine years ago. Since then he’d seen her only sporadically, and not at all since she turned fifteen. Here was another trick of time: Beth wasn’t a child anymore. She was a chunky, potentially attractive twenty-year-old who had chosen to wear her sexuality as a badge of defiance. She was dressed in blue jeans and a tight T-shirt, and Matt noticed a blue mark periodically visible as her collar dipped below the left shoulder: a tattoo, he thought, God help us all.

“What brings you in today, Beth?”

“A cold,” she said.

Matt pretended to take a note. Years in the practice of medicine had taught him that people preferred to make their confessions to a man with a pen in his hand. The lab coat didn’t hurt, either. “Bad cold?”

“I guess… not especially.”

“Well, you’re hardly unique. I think everybody’s got a cold this week.” This was true. Annie had come to work snuffling. Lillian Bix, in the waiting room, had been doing her polite best to suppress a runny nose. Matt himself had swallowed an antihistamine at lunch. “There’s not much we can do for a cold. Is your chest congested?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “A little.”

“Let’s listen to it.”

Beth sat tensely upright while he applied his stethoscope to the pale contour of her back. No significant congestion, but Matt was certain it wasn’t a cold that had brought her in. The ritual of listening to her lungs simply established a doctorly relationship. A medical intimacy. He palpated her throat and found the lymph nodes slightly enlarged—hard pebbles under the flesh—which raised a small flag of concern.

He leaned against the edge of his desk. “Nothing too much out of the ordinary.”

Beth inspected the floor and seemed unsurprised.

“Maybe it isn’t a cold you’re worried about. Beth? Is that a possibility?”

“I think I have gonorrhea,” Beth Porter announced.

Matt made a note.

She surprised him by reciting her symptoms without blushing. She added, “I looked this up in a medical book. It sounded like gonorrhea, which is kind of serious. So I made an appointment. What do you think?”

“I think you made a reasonable diagnosis. Maybe you ought to be a doctor.” She actually smiled. “We’ll know more when the test comes back.”

The smile faded. “Test?”

Annie came in to chaperon and distract Beth while Matt took a cervical culture. There was the inevitable joke about whether he kept his speculum in a deep-freeze. Then Annie and Beth chatted about Beth’s job at the 7-Eleven, which was, Beth said, as boring as you might think, selling frozen pies and microwave burritos until practically midnight and catching a ride home with the manager, usually, when there was nothing on the highway but logging trucks and semitrailers.

Matt took the cervical swab and labeled it. Beth climbed down from the table; Annie excused herself.

Beth said, “How soon do we know?”

“Probably tomorrow afternoon, unless the lab’s stacked up. I can call you.”

“At home?”

Matt understood the question. Beth still lived with her father, a man Matt had treated for his recurring prostatitis. Billy Porter was not a bad man, but he was a reticent and old-fashioned man who had never struck Matt as the forgiving type. “I can phone you at work if you leave the number.”

“How about if I call here?”

“All right. Tomorrow around four? I’ll have the receptionist switch you through.”

That seemed to calm her down. She nodded and began to ask questions: What if it was gonorrhea? How long would she have to take the antibiotics? Would she have to tell—you know, her lover?

She paid careful attention to the answers. Now that she had popped the cassette out of her Walkman, Beth Porter began to impress him as a fairly alert young woman.

Alert but, to use the old psychiatric rubric, “troubled.” Enduring some difficult passage in her life. And tired of it, by the pinch of weariness that sometimes narrowed her eyes.

She was twenty years old, Matt thought, and seemed both much older and much younger.

He said, “If you need to talk—”

“Don’t ask me to talk. I mean, thank you. I’ll take the medicine or whatever. Whatever I have to do. But I don’t want to talk about it.” A little bit of steel there.

He said, “All right. But remember to phone tomorrow. You’ll probably have to come by for the prescription. And we’ll need a follow-up when the medication runs out.”

She understood. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.”

He dated the entry in her file and tucked it into his “done” basket. Then he washed his hands and called in Lillian Bix, his last patient of the day.

Lillian had skipped a period and thought she might be pregnant.

She was the thirty-nine-year-old wife of Mart’s closest friend. The conversation was genial, rendered a little awkward by Lillian’s tongue-numbing shyness. She came to the point at last; Matt gave her a sample cup and directed her to the bathroom. Lillian blushed profoundly but followed instructions. When she came back, he labeled the sample for an HCG.

Lillian sat opposite him with her small purse clutched in her lap. It often seemed to Matt that everything about Lillian was small: her purse, her figure, her presence in a room. Maybe that was why she took such pleasure in her marriage to Jim Bix, a large and boisterous man whose attention she had somehow commanded.

They had been childless for years, and Matt had never commented on it to either of them. Now—armored in medical whites—he asked Lillian whether that had been deliberate.

“More or less.” She spoke with great concentration. “Well. More Jim’s doing than mine. He always took care of… you know. Contraception.”

“And you didn’t object?”

“No.”

“But contraception has been known to fail.”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“How do you feel about the possibility of being pregnant?”

“Good.” Her smile was genuine but not vigorous. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”

“Really thought about? Diapers, midnight feedings, skinned knees, stretch marks?”

“It’s never real till it’s real. I know, Matt. But yes, I’ve imagined it often.”

“Talked to Jim about any of this?”

“Haven’t even mentioned the possibility. I don’t want to tell him until we’re certain.” She looked at Matt with a crease of concern above her small eyebrows. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

He said, “I can’t unless you want me to. Confidentiality.”

“Confidentiality even between doctors?”

“Honor among thieves,” Matt said.

She showed her brief smile again. It was there and gone. “But you have lunch with him all the time.”

Jim was a pathologist at the hospital; they had done premed together. They liked to meet for lunch at the Chinese cafe two blocks up Grove. “It could make for an uncomfortable lunch, sure. But it’s a quick test. We should have a verdict before very long.” He pretended to make a note. “You know, Lillian, sometimes, in a woman who’s a little bit older, there can be complications—”

“I know. I know all about that. But I’ve heard there are ways of finding certain things out. In advance.”

He understood her anxiety and tried to soothe it. “If you’re having a baby, we’ll keep a close eye on everything. I wouldn’t anticipate trouble.” That wasn’t all there was to it… but at the moment it was all Lillian needed to know.

“That’s good,” she said.

But her frown had crept back. She wasn’t reassured, and she was far from happy. He wondered whether he ought to probe this discontent or leave it alone.

He put down his pen. “Something’s bothering you.”

“Well… three things, really.” She rucked her handkerchief into her purse. “What we talked about. My age. That worries me. And Jim, of course. I wonder how he’ll react. I’m afraid it might seem to him like… I don’t know. Giving up his youth. He might not want the responsibility.”

“He might not,” Matt said. “But it would surprise me if he didn’t adapt. Jim likes to shock people, but he comes into work every day. He’s serious about his work and he shows up on time. That sounds like responsibility to me.”

She nodded and seemed to draw some reassurance from the thought. Matt said, “The third thing?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said three things bothered you. Your age, and Jim, and—what?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She looked at him steadily across the desk. “Some nights I open the window… and I see that thing in the sky. And it frightens me. And now what they’ve put in the cities. Those big blocks or buildings or whatever they are. I see that on television. It doesn’t make any kind of sense, Matt. What’s the name of that shape? An ‘octahedron.’ A word you shouldn’t have to use after you leave high school. An octahedron the size of an ocean liner sitting in Central Park. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing that. And no one knows what it means. They talk about it and talk about it and none of the talk amounts to more than a whistle in the dark. So of course you wonder. I mean, what happens next? Maybe getting pregnant is just a kind of wishful thinking. Or a new way to panic.” She sat with her purse nestled in her lap and looked fiercely at him. “You’re a parent, Matt. You must know what I mean.”

He did, of course. The same doubts were written in Beth Porter’s withdrawal into her Walkman, in the way his daughter Rachel came home from school and watched the network newscasts with her knees pulled up to her chin.

He calmed Lillian Bix and sent her home, did a little tidying up while Anne finished with her own last patient. Then he opened the blinds and let the sunlight flood in, a long bright beam of it across the tiled floor, the oak cabinets. He peered out at the town.

From the seventh floor of the Marshall Building, Buchanan was a long flat smudgepot in a blue angle of ocean. Still a fairly quiet lumber port, not as small as it had been when he opened the practice fifteen years ago. Many changes since then. Fifteen years ago he’d been fresh out of residency. Rachel had been a toddler, Celeste had been alive, and the community of Buchanan had been smaller by several thousand souls.

Time, cruel son of a bitch, had revised all that. Now Mart’s fortieth birthday was three months behind him, his daughter was looking at college brochures, Celeste was ten years in her grave at the Brookside Cemetery… and a spacecraft the color of cold concrete had been orbiting the earth for more than a year.

It occurred to Matt, also not for the first time, how much he hated that ugly Damoclean presence in the night sky.

How much he still loved this town. He believed he had always loved it, that he had been born loving it. It was funny how that worked. Some people have no sense of place at all; they can park at a Motel 6 and call it home. And some people, many of them his friends, had grown up hating the provincialism of Buchanan. But for Matt, Buchanan was a map of himself—as essential as his heart or his liver.

He had been a solitary, often lonely child, and he had learned the intimate secrets of the marina, the main street, and the Little Duncan River long before he acquired a best friend. He had folded this town, its potholed roads and Douglas firs, its foggy winters and the Gold Rush facades of its crumbling downtown, deep into the substance of himself.

His wife was buried here. Celeste had been committed to the earth at Brookside Cemetery, a stone’s throw from the estuary of the Little Duncan, where the chapel rang its small carillon of bells every Sunday noon. His parents were buried here.

He had always believed that one day he would be buried here… but lately that conviction had begun to falter.

He had deposited flowers on Celeste’s grave at Brookside just last week, and as he passed through the cemetery gates he was possessed of a dour conviction that some wind of destiny would sweep him elsewhere, that he would die in a very different place.

Like Lillian Bix—like everybody else—Matt had fallen prey to premonitions.

That ugly white ghost ship floating on the deep of every clear night. Of course Lillian was scared. Who the hell wasn’t scared? But you go on, Matt Wheeler thought. You do what you do, and you go on. It was the decent thing.

He heard Annie dismissing her last patient, and he was about to step into the hallway and offer his invitation when the phone rang: an after-hours call from Jim Bix that did nothing to dispel his uneasiness. “We need to talk,” Jim said.

Mart’s first thought was that this had something to do with Lillian’s visit. He said, cautiously, “What’s the problem?”

“I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Can you stop by the hospital after work?”

This wasn’t about Lillian. Jim sounded too disturbed. Not having-a-baby disturbed. There was a darker note in his voice.

Matt checked his watch. “Rachel’s home from school and she said she’d fix dinner tonight. Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?”

“I’d prefer tonight.” Pause. “I’m working shift hours, but how would it be if I stopped by on my way home?”

“How late?”

“Eleven, say. Eleven-thirty.”

“It’s important?”

“Yes.”

Not maybe or sort of, Matt thought. Flat yes. It made the small hairs on his neck stand up.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’ll be looking for you.”

“Good,” Jim said, and promptly hung up the phone.

He caught Annie as she headed out the door.

When he told her about the party Friday night, she smiled and said she’d be there. It was the familiar Annie Gates smile. She thanked him, touched his arm. He walked her to the parking lot.

By God, Matt thought, we may be on-again-off-again, but I do believe at the moment we are definitely on.

He was surprised by the pleasure he took from the thought.

She gave him a brief hug as she climbed into her Honda. The touch was therapeutic. It wasn’t good to be alone, Matt thought, when the world had taken such a curious turn.