The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer

Author:Hilma Wolitzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307417008
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T22:00:00+00:00

15

Ev found a place to stay, a Midtown sublet, so quickly he couldn’t have had much of a chance to change his mind. I learned much later that the vacancy had been conveniently posted on the bulletin board at work the day he left, and he’d moved right in. That afternoon, after I’d directed Michael to the West Side Y, I went to the park for a while to try to sort out my feelings. But all I really did was stare at the mesmerizing movement of the river and wish things unsaid, undone.

When I came home I realized that Ev had been there in my absence. I’m not sure exactly how I knew it, but I did, as soon as I entered the apartment. I can only say that there was a disturbance in the air around me. It felt as if the place had been robbed, although I didn’t notice anything missing right away. Then I put my purse down on the kitchen counter and took in the space on the windowsill where Ev’s paperweight had been.

It was like that chilling moment in a thriller when the victim realizes she’s not alone, that her murderer is somewhere in the house. Except that the very opposite was true; my murderer had been here and was gone. In the bedroom, the door of Ev’s closet was ajar, and I could see the abandoned hangers dangling there.

I looked for a note from him in all the usual places—the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator door, my pillow—but all I found was a blue Post-it stuck to the cover of my computer, with his new address and phone number printed on it. I held the little square of paper up to the light, as if I hoped to find a hidden message, like the ones Jeremy used to write with the invisible ink in his junior spy kit, and that he’d probably cribbed from the Hardy Boys: “The treasure map is under the body.” “Watch out, Jim, the girl has a gun!”

The only invisible subtext on the Post-it was In case of emergency only. There was a slight depression at the edge of the bed, on my side, where he may have sat for a moment or two before he left again. I put my hand on it and it felt cool, but I lay down there anyway, where he’d so recently been. Now, as my father would say, I really had something to cry about. And I had plenty to tell Andrea Stern, too, if psychotherapy was, as I tended to believe, something like the oral installments of a serialized novel.

“Well,” Violet grudgingly conceded, “it’s something like that.” We were on a subway platform on Canal Street, waiting for a train to take us to Williamsburg and the live-in studio of one of her fellow co-op artists. “But with plenty of flashbacks,” she said. “And CliffsNotes,” she added.

I’d told Violet that Ev and I were having very serious problems, but not that he’d actually left.

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