The Possible World by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Author:Liese O'Halloran Schwarz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

* * *

Lucy

THE LAST TIME I LOOKED for an apartment, I didn’t really. Joe scoped out all the possibilities and did the first-looks, and I went along for the second pass, viewing the two or three options left after he’d filtered by location, price, amenities. I’d teased him for sounding like a realtor as he drove us from place to place, describing each offering as we pulled up. The wedding-cake Victorian with the top-floor apartment featuring huge drafty windows and a spiral staircase to a cupola (no); the modern two-bedroom with a gym in the basement (tempting, but the place was very dark); the second-floor apartment in the funky historical-registry building close to the hospital, with a balcony (yes, despite the iffy neighborhood).

The coffee shop is quiet, one of those bare-bones establishments that provides good pastries and Wi-Fi and power strips in every outlet; when the doors open, the students flock in and settle with their laptops and books. The quiet conversation of two young women at a nearby table floats to me, the vocabulary catching my involuntary attention: dysplasia, angiomyolipoma. They’re students, medical or possibly nursing, studying the genitourinary system, judging from the terms that trip out in their happy voices. They must be preclinical, from the mispronunciations: he-ma-tur-I-a, cysto-SCO-py, cryptor-CHI-dism.

The medical academic year runs from July to July, the undergraduate year from August to the end of May. Craigslist in March is a bath of remainders: crumbling South Providence walk-ups and first-floor apartments off the tatty northern end of Hope Street, all alike with their drafty double-hung windows and tiny rooms floored with hardwoods varnished to a sickly yellow gloss, the built-in china hutches wearing so many layers of paint over the hinges that the doors don’t open all the way. I can’t see myself in any of them. Or is it just that I can’t see myself anywhere alone? Until recently, I’d expected my next address would be a home, not another temporary stopover. I can’t keep living in a call room, though.

“Dr. Cole?” I look up to see a vaguely familiar face. Six feet, close-cropped hair. “It’s you, right?”

This happens with embarrassing regularity. Providence is a small enough city that I am forever being hailed in the grocery store or while pumping gas, strangers striding toward me with great familiarity: Hey, Doc. Is it some kind of agnosia that I am not able to recognize them when they are fully clothed and free of the hospital stretcher?

“Hi,” I say, striving for an all-purpose tone, wanting it to be appropriate to the circumstances of our previous encounter. Did I pronounce your father dead, lance your suppurating groin abscess, splint your fracture, coddle you through a night of drunken excess?

His smile broadens. Failure: he can tell I don’t know who he is.

“I’ll give you three guesses.” He nods with raised eyebrows at the chair across from me, then sits down at my return nod.

“Well, I’ll need three hints.” Glad we aren’t going to play the usual game

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