The following short story originally appeared in Artful Dodge Magazine (Issue 52/53). Fae Dremock will be reading at the January Watershed Reading on January 20, 2024.
Luka lived beside the coffee shop she owned, just down from 1022 Main, the homeless shelter that stretched alongside the bike trail. Most mornings after Pete left, she sat in her wheelchair at the kitchen table that overlooked the trail, drinking coffee and watching for Pete on his early morning run. He and his friends, all over 50, had made a pact that summer to get back in shape, and every weekday morning that summer and fall, they ran down the bike path, past her house, dressed in bright patches of shorts and T-shirts. But with winter and snow, the group had fallen to three, now in fleece tights and running jackets that reflected the street lights scattered down the trail that led to their gym, lighting them up like holiday figurines, lines of light flowing down their arms and legs, their heads invisible above their shoulders until red and yellow caps seemingly exploded into view under street lights. Watching them had become a morning joy, like grinding to espresso a single-source Honduran coffee, slicing a strip of wild salmon jerky into slivers of red flesh, rolling through the morning fog of the lemon thyme she heated in the hallway on a tray resting on the radiator.
The week before, she had finally described this series of rituals to Pete, teasing him about seeing these iridescent demigods popping in and out of life along the trail. It was just a winter morning joke, but it had led to a long silence and then his stiff, no, after all he was not a god, and that yes, she was dependent. Yes, she was depressed. And yes, he reminded her, she was in a wheelchair. He told her he wanted to live on a farm. And finally, “I’ve decided to move out.”
Luka had been drinking coffee, but suddenly it was all over his shirt, dripping down his face. Her cup was in pieces on the floor, and he was standing above her, holding onto her wheelchair and shaking it. “It was lukewarm,” she said, not meaning anything at all, then started to laugh, and he stepped back as if he would hit her, still holding on to the side of the chair. “I didn’t mean to laugh. I didn’t mean to laugh. . .” she said, repeating, almost beginning to chant, until he left go of the chair. The wet shirt had turned translucent across his belly, for a moment she thought she could make out the indentation of his navel.
“I’m done here,” he said. “We’re done here.”
He was looking down at her legs, his bald head tilted toward her, his ears winging away from his skull. But then suddenly he sat down, pulled his chair next to her, and took her hand between his. It felt wrong, but Pete was a psychiatrist and, perhaps as a result, she had once told him, he was rather inept when it came to dealing with his own feelings.
And she was no better. She wanted to tell him, “Don’t go,” or just “But I love you,” or some other direct and foolish thing, but all she could do was watch a drop of coffee that was slowly slipping downward through his eyebrow and was reach his left eye – while also keeping her hand stretched out between his. Then, after a few minutes of silence with him awkwardly grasping her hand, she suddenly fell asleep. It was her recent odd quirky reaction to stress, and when she woke she called out, but no one replied. Pete was nowhere “in sound.” That was how she took the world now: “in sound.”
When Luka had opened her eyes into that silence Immediately after the car wreck, she had felt her body breathe, exhale, then shake again against that immediate hard hit of asphalt that somehow streamed into her brain as sound. It wasn’t that she heard this sound so much as she was sound. What she felt in those few moments before she realized she was alive made her think she had come face to face with reincarnation.
But that understanding felt as brief and inconsequential as the insights she’d on pre-op drugs. Maybe it was the near-death experience, maybe it was just an electrical stimulation of the hippocampus, maybe it was the human need to create patterns and story, but it had brought her calm as she looked down to see her own blood pouring from her legs, as she understood at last that she was upside down, packed inside a crumpled rental car and being cut out by machines that jarred and buzzed and bit into metal terribly close to her head as she heard some calming deep male voice talking to her, asking her to count. So she had counted bones, right up through her own skeleton, naming them calmly, feeling peacefully still part embedded, while also streaming, lightweight and strong as sound. The last bit of the cutting of metal had forced her into a state of twilight sleep, and she could hear them urging her to stay awake and quietly while also quietly urging themselves to work quicker, they were losing her.
And Pete, poor Pete had shown up somewhere in the lights and white paint of the bleached walls of some room where everyone stood in red- and black-spattered clothes as she lay under them all, legless, she thought, and naked. In that moment she had believed she was giving birth to someone’s child, her own maybe, then she passed out again and when she woke, she could see her feet at the far end of the bed, Pete asleep, one arm draped across them, his head resting on her feet as well.
But she couldn’t feel his weight on her legs. She had tried to talk but couldn’t, tried to move her toes, but couldn’t, tried to scream, but couldn’t. When she woke again, she was listening to the doctor talk to Pete. Something about “a series of surgeries,” “we hope,” “eventually walk.” They weren’t looking at her, didn’t know she was listening to them discuss her.
“What are the odds?” she asked, clearly, loudly, and they startled.
The doctor, Martins, whom she knew from her work in autopsy and whom she did not trust, but who had been on call, moved closer to her bed, to talk to her, doctor to doctor, as doctors always did. But Pete had stepped in. “Not now,” he said. “She’s still not awake. Not now.”
Martins had hesitated, not knowing how to handle the psychiatrist boyfriend of a colleague who was medically awake. “Pete,” Luka said with the deepest, slowest voice she could muster. “Back off.”
“You have a concussion,” Pete said, reaching down to rest his hand on her tied-up arm.
“No shit,” she said. “But I’m also difficult. And a doctor.” She rattled the railings on her bed. “And also tied up. Untie me, Martins.”
Martins approached her bed. “You’re not yet stable. You stay tied up. You even tried to hit a nurse.” He rested his hand on hers. “Luka,” he said. “You’re paralyzed, at least temporarily. Compression and damage that might heal -- with surgical release. But it will take time. Will you consent to follow my advice? Pete signed the consent forms, but you’re obviously awake.” And he went on to tell her what he planned to do.
She drifted in and out as they talked, reading his name tag five times as he repeated terms and procedures while Pete stood there, silent and listening. At one point she simply broke down, couldn’t put words together. When Pete started yelling at Martins she told them both, told them both, “Just fuck off.” But in the end, what Martins said made sense to her, and she gave her oral consent just before she passed out once again, still tied up. When she woke, Pete was there, waiting to talk to her. He untied her arm, massaged it. “You need to cry,” he said, but she wouldn’t. She was a doctor, doctor, doctor, and the word echoed in her head. Even in post-op, every machine was wheezing, pumping, screaming at her, “Doctor. Doctor.” She could see her blood pressure spiking on the monitor. Finally a nurse who knew her leaned over her and said, “It’s the intercom. You’re not coding.” And the whole while Pete had stayed with her in the ICU -- sleeping, the nurse told her later, on the floor.
But that had been almost six months ago. And now here she was waiting for Pete, alone at the breakfast table, when she needed to get her account books over to the kitchen next door and start ordering supplies. She could already see the shadows of movement in the coffee shop, customers walking in from the parking lot next to the street, bundled in scarves, while others walked out drinking from brightly colored metal coffee mugs.
Luka had taken a long leave of absence from the hospital, knowing she would probably have to take an early retirement. Isolated and bored, she’d bought into, then taken over, the failing coffee shop next to her house. She’d replaced a few windows, added a few couches, created a new wall. At first the notoriety of a known pathologist running a café brought a few hospital people in, but then her manager talked her into switching to specialty, single-source coffees, and customers crowded into her cafe morning to evening.
Luka packed her papers up and went down the stair-elevator she’d installed, rolled her chair into the parking lot that circled the buildings, then went in through the side door of the café and through the chairs and corners of tables. A reporter she knew was in the back interviewing someone. Ralph saw her, saw everything, nodded to her as he kept taking notes on his laptop, leaning somehow into the person talking to him. A woman she didn’t remember waved her over, introduced her to a fully veiled woman she was tutoring in English. Luka talked briefly to the veiled woman, asking her simple questions the woman could understand, then rolled on. Three young men hunched over four laptops looked up startled when she rolled too close. They nodded, mostly to each other, and then went back to work.
Running this coffee shop near downtown had finally brought her out of the depression after the wreck and four pointless surgeries. Pete and she had just moved in together when the wreck happened. Relearning how to make love with someone, when they were used to wildness, had felt like crawling through rusted wire. Every touch seemed to slice skin, the invisible virtual kind, the kind Pete knew about professionally. Perhaps Pete was right to move out.
This morning Luka had woken up moving her toes. Or so she had thought until she could not reproduce the movement. Maybe she had moved them, but it had felt so momentary, a small wispy movement, maybe it was just a walking dream. Her first thought, though, was to tell Pete. She had reached for her phone and texted him with all due excitement, but a moment later realized he would think she was entreating him not to move out. Maybe she was. Pete, she was sure, would tell her, but he did not text back. He was with a client, she told herself in that sleepy, irrational, pre-dawn state. But she kept thinking about it.
The wreck and the subsequent isolation had reduced her from cutting open cadavers to slicing herself apart over Pete not texting her back. She was thinking too much about herself, but then what’s what everyone had been doing --- thinking about her, or so Pete kept telling her as she was put on leave from her job, taken off the nonprofit boards, released from commitments to the city Public Health Department. Surely I can stay on something, she had thought, but Pete had taken over. She’d had surgeries, physical therapy, more surgeries. “You can’t do these things,” he kept saying, all rational and suited up.
“But I need a reason to get better,” she said, while he prescribed her antidepressants, which she refused to take.
“You’re going against doctor’s orders,” he said.
“You playing doctor now?” she said, joking, hoping to get a flash out of him.
But Pete had long ago stopped playing doctor. And here she was, adolescent, rolling through the café she owned, obsessing about a text message she’d sent to a man who had already left her, at least emotionally, months ago really, about toes that actually -- when it came right down to it -- hadn’t even moved.
Luka picked a table in the window, stopping to say hello when she rolled past the state senator who was having coffee with two men who did not look like they belonged in her cafe. Her shift manager, Drew, brought her an americano. Luka spread out her papers, almost hoping to see an organ donation form instead of a bill from the laundry service. The bills could wait yet one more week. They had already waited a month. And there were still more papers to deal with at home. Instead she decided to enjoy her coffee, read her twitter feed, watch the bundled pedestrians. The development plans at 1022 were provoking backlash. The men talking to the senator at the next table were now drawing on yellow legal pads, shoving them around so the senator could see them, but their voices were lost in the internet jazz blasting through the speakers above her head. On one pad was a list of numbers, phone numbers, maybe. The other pad seemed to be a rapidly changing series of sketches. She motioned to Drew to turn the volume down, but it was too late, the two men were packing up, shaking hands with the senator. Luka watched them, trying to decide if they were happy, when someone walked up to her table. She looked up just as Martins sat down, coffee in hand.
“Haven’t seen you in the morgue,” he said. “Losing your grip?”
“I’m running a coffee house.”
“Looks like you’re just sitting around reading your phone. That guy behind the register is the one running the shop. You fucking him?”
“Is this a social call?”
“The board’s thinking of replacing you.”
“So? I’ve been gone for months. They should.”
“They want me to replace you.”
She closed her laptop, slumped back in her wheelchair. She wanted to roll right over him, get away from him, but he had blocked her in.
“Your plants are still alive. I’m in your office,” he said. “I water them.” He adjusted his sleeves, his tie. “I’m in your office. They want me there permanently.”
“I don’t want any more surgeries.”
“I already operated on you, Luka. Many times. I am not advocating more surgery. You’re paraplegic. Sorry.” Even when she looked away, he kept at it. “Now, why are you here?” he asked.
She saw Pete walk in, head toward the back tables. “I wanted to wake up and smell the coffee.”
“I thought you preferred the smell of formalin.”
“Do you never give up, Martins?” Luka asked. “Why are you here?”
“I asked you first.”
“Martins! Why are you here?”
The question came from Pete, now seemingly towering above them.
“I wanted to make sure my patient was adjusting to her new life.” Martins turned back to her. “Are you, Luka? Adjusting?”
Pete set his hands on the table. “She’s not in your office, Martins.”
“She’s not in yours either.” Martins stood up, mug in hand. “The question was rhetorical, Luka. I’ll make a good replacement.” He leaned forward across Pete’s arms and touched Luka’s shoulder. “Pete,” he said, looking down at Luka still, “I heard you bought that property out by the river. Good purchase.” Then he looked back up at Pete, waiting for his reaction, which was silence and even, Luka thought, tangible emotional paralysis, as Pete himself might have said. Then a woman by the register called out to Martins, and he turned abruptly and walked over to talk to her.
“So,” Pete said, sitting down next to Luka. “Your toes moved this morning?”
“You bought your farm? Already?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Just my imagination,” she said. “Early morning fantasies. Your farm?”
“Is that why you called Martins? To check you out?”
“Pete, are you moving out or not?”
“I don’t like him.”
“You don’t have to. He’s a surgeon. We’re not supposed to like psychiatrists either.”
Pete laughed and eased back in his chair. “But you do.”
“Yes, unfortunately.” He was assessing her. “Pete, I didn’t call him.”
“I wanted to surprise you about the farm. I had convinced myself that it would help you. But then, well, I guess I realized I wasn’t doing it for you. And then all this . . . ”
“ ‘This’ is my becoming a paraplegic. ‘This’ is my café. Yes, living in the country would be hard and isolating.” She started packing up her papers. “I like my house. Our house.”
Nothing was getting done this morning. Drew could handle the supply orders. She’d text him later. She waited as Pete watched someone walk by on the sidewalk, several someones. Then it hit her. “Pete, who are you seeing? Do I know her?”
“No,” he said. “She’s not important.”
“You’re moving out.”
When he said nothing, she grabbed her belongings and rolled back away from the table. “I need to get work done,” she said. “I’m a paraplegic, Pete. I get it.”
“I still love you,” he said.
“Doesn’t make much difference, does it?”
She reached out to make an awkward hug that became an elbow clasp the length of their forearms. There was a finality to it that she didn’t want to think about.
When she let go, Pete muttered, “I won’t be home tonight.”
She wanted to say that he hadn’t been home for a while, but instead just asked, “When’s the truck coming?” And in the five minutes before she rolled out the door of the café, they finalized the details of his moving.
A cluster of folks handing out information sheets on the development at 1022 were in her way as she tried to roll out the door. She wanted to run them down, but they joked with her, helped her, handed her a rough pamphlet. All the while she talked to them, she kept wondering whether Pete would be stumbling out soon. The building, they told her, would tower over everything in the block. “It’s pretty,” she said finally. “And LEED-certified.”
“And massive -- with three Starbucks cafes. And fake orange red bricks. You own this café, don’t you?”
She was still talking to them when she saw Pete’s car leave the parking lot. An hour later, when Martins wandered out, she was helping them pass out info sheets and talking to passers-by.
“Stalking me?” he said to Luka. “Good, but you’ll need to get to physical therapy for those leg braces I fit you for. Just do it.” He hesitated, then added, pointing at her info sheet, “I think I’m buying one of these condos. They’ll have a great view. Lots of coffee.” Protestors were circling him; one was handing him a brochure, which he handed back to Luka. “Luka,” he said, “winter or no winter, sun’s bad for you. You should get off the streets. Can I roll you home? Wait, no, actually I have a cadaver to cut, fairly interesting death. Jesus, that’s my bus.” And he took off running and just got to the bus stop in time to leap aboard, down jacket and all.
Martins was deliberately being an ass. Cutting up a body was something else she would not be doing again. But he was right about the leg braces. Yes, it was a lie, they wouldn’t really make her walk, but she was realizing that every inch of mobility was useful. And, she thought, I hate always being belly height.
But why had Martins shown up? Pete was right. It was just an anomaly, not a pattern. Pete was the pattern. She couldn’t imagine Friday nights without him, especially now. Someone bumped into her, apologized, then she heard moaning behind her and realized there was a man sleeping under blankets in the bushes along the side of the building. She tuned in immediately to his breathing, which seemed normal, and his color, what she could see of it as she rolled back to look more closely, was pale but more or less normal. There was nothing else she could do here. If she got leg braces, if she just started showing up to demonstrations like this, she could raise funds to open a street clinic -- a clinic instead of a coffee shop. No. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t. She didn’t know what she would do. She texted Drew to put him in charge of ordering, offering him a raise. He came outside, talked to her for a bit, then said yes. “Also,” she said, “can you serve these folks some coffee? Bill it to advertising.”
He nodded, went back in, and she made her way across the parking lot back to her house, back to her second floor windows, aware now of the view that the new development would block and the trees that would have to come down. She did the laundry—mostly Pete’s laundry, she realized. She called to make an appointment for physical therapy. She made lunch. She broke down, then rolled herself out of the kitchen away from the knives. This is temporary, she told herself. Temporary. Like braces. Like walking. She thought back to that fluttery movement of toes this morning and admitted to herself that it was a dream. She really had wanted Pete to respond to her. She wanted him to stay with her. And that was also a walking dream.
The physical therapy clinic was in her hospital. The first few times she had taken a taxi, then her therapist insisted she use the bus to get home. The first time, one of the aides walked her out and watched as she rolled onto the bus and the chair was strapped in. The aide told the driver where Luka was going and off she went. The ride was easier and more fun than Luka had imagined. She got off half a block from her café and rolled down the block over the half-shoveled snow. It was hard going, but she framed it as a military campaign, hill by conquered hill. It wasn’t peaceful spaced-out walking, but the pedestrians were hunched over as well, watching for slick spots and black ice gratings. She realized, oddly, that she was actually lucky she had to worry only about the snow-covered terrain, not falling on ice. Pete would have been pleased, but Pete, in the meantime, during these weeks of physical therapy, had really vanished. His clothes seemed to be disappearing, but he hadn’t moved out as planned, and sometimes she still found his laundry in the dryer.
The last two weeks of physical therapy she came and went in her leg braces and chair. One of the last days, the aide took her down to the hospital cafeteria in braces, but with chair and crutches in reserve, and then kept her company as Luka maneuvered the food line on crutches with the knee braces locked.
After her appointment, she stayed and rolled around the hospital, then took the elevator to the basement, to her old floor. It was late in the afternoon, and she rolled around what felt like empty hallways, past countless locked doors, down to her old office, with its door wide open.
Of course, she thought, Martins had heard the wheels. He was sitting behind her desk, in her chair, hunched over, his bald head facing the door. When she was about to call out to him finally, he looked up, not even pretending to be surprised.
“Just wanted to give you some privacy,” he said. “Must be weird, seeing your plants, your lamp, your photos on the wall. And me here, in your chair. The board hasn’t met yet,” he said. “Do you want to come in?”
“I’m a paraplegic, Anders.”
“They meet next Tuesday. Odds are you have until this Friday to decide. Denial is not decision.”
“Martins, is this your idea of flirting?”
He looked at her, then started laughing. “No,” he said. “Should I be?”
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. But why were you at my café?”
“Pete’s question?”
“Yes. No. Mine, damn it.”
“In fact, I don’t know. I’m not Pete. Don’t get me wrong. I want this job -- I need the money. But I’m not good at this. You were. I guess I wanted to find out how to do this. Or maybe, well, maybe it was an attack of honesty. You belong here. I don’t. But as of Tuesday, it will be mine. So what are you going to do? Or should I just carry you off to a table somewhere and figure out how to unlock those leg braces?” He stood up, walked over to her wheelchair. “Pete couldn’t handle it, could he?”
“Martins, give it a rest. I don’t want you.”
“I don’t want you either, but thought I’d find out what was on offer.” He picked up a photo from the shelf --- Pete and her at a festival. “Ok, so you know what you don’t want. Does that include Pete? Does it include this office? I mean you’re here, aren’t you?" He walked closer, held the photo out to her. “My god, you’ve gotten passive, Luka. You want this? Pete’s kind of cute in it.”
“You’re acting like a bully.”
“You’ve been listening to Pete too much. And now you’ve got the common sense of a squirrel.”
“You know what it’s like to first have to lock your knee braces before you can stand up to hit someone? Passive, no, I’m not passive. Hand me a scalpel, will you?”
“Luka, Luka. Much better! Here,” and he tossed keys into her lap. “You’ll need these to lock up here after you pack up your stuff. There are boxes behind you. Just label them. I’ll get them to you Tuesday, after they give me your position.” He quickly packed up his briefcase. “You can leave the keys with security when you leave. I’ll let them know you’re down here. And, yes, there are lots of scalpels around if you want to do yourself in.” He rolled her out of his way before she could react, then walked out the open doorway.
She threw his keys after him, then swore at her own stupidity and rolled down the hall to retrieve them. Martins was an ass, had always been an ass. She rolled farther into the autopsy room where she was hit by the smell of formalin and the odd stale lingering smell of organs, antiseptic, bleach. It smelled like home. She lifted her legs, locked her knee braces, then struggled up and onto her crutches. The room seemed smaller, but this she knew was the fault of crutching. She was just larger. She paced, such as she could, back and forth between the tables. She’d never be here again. She wandered over to the desk, stood in front of the shelves, rereading titles she thought she had memorized. She crutched back to one of the autopsy tables, positioned herself above it, then reached over a phantom cadaver, cutting into him. Yes, she thought, even like this, I can do this, but then she turned abruptly, caught the crutch tip on the table somehow and crashed down, straight legged, into metal. As she fell, she was looking for scalpels, trays, chemicals, whatever could deform her, paralyze her more, kill her, then she hit the ground with an incredible noise and heard the running footsteps. It was the autopsy tech, Janice, shouting at her, just plain shouting, “Are you all right? Did you try to kill yourself? Oh, god! Can you stand?” all of which sounded absurd to Luka.
“Can you help me up?” she asked, once Janice calmed down. “Martins tell you to stay?”
The girl nodded. “He told me to keep out of your way, but to make sure you got out of here alive.”
“I’m alive,” Luka said. “It was an accident. I’m not very good at crutches yet. Can you help get me to his office?”
“His office? Upstairs? Oh, right, you mean your old office. Yes, of course, yes.”
Janice made coffee for her, told her the gossip while they drank a cup, then left her alone to pack. “There are many more boxes if you need them,” she said when she left. “I’m just down the hall in that printer cubicle if you need anything.”
Luka smiled, nodded, was glad to be alone. She didn’t hurt much where she had hit, which she assumed was probably a good thing. She rolled over to the window with her coffee, locked the wheels, her braces, and got herself up, reached to grab her mug. Anders was right. She couldn’t passively let go of her life. This had to be an active decision. She looked out over the small now snowed-in garden they had created, with its sunroof on the floor of the ground level. If she was to let go, she had to actively let go.
She finished her coffee staring at a snow-covered rose bush, then began to pack up her photos, her books, her papers -- agglomerations from 20 years of working here. She kept at it for another hour and a half, then locked the room and rolled down the hall to tell Janice she was leaving.
But Janice had already left. There was a note stuck to her computer screen. “Martins called, I told him what happened, and he said you were ok now. So if you find this, you should know he told me to get out.” Janice hadn’t signed it. Luka drew a smiley face on it and stuck it back on the screen, then left, leaving Martins’ keys with security.
Getting home on the bus was easy, even at the tail end of the evening rush hour. But the sidewalks at her stop were crowded with protestors in support of the homeless day shelter, which would be torn down if the development went through. Luka didn’t know where all the homeless were coming from, but there were more and more of them. She rolled her way through the crowd of down jackets and megaphones and back inside her coffee shop. Drew was shutting down, cleaning up. She asked how he was, talked about shifting her management to him for the rest of the year, that this wasn’t for her. And as she said that, she realized with a start it was the truth. Then she said, almost to herself, that she’d been thinking of selling the business. Before he could react, she added, “To you,” then told him she’d give him time to raise the down payment, etc. if he wanted the café. She and Drew talked a while longer and agree to talk again in a few days. Then she rolled across the parking lot to her house. There was a woman curled up asleep in her entryway, who woke up screaming when Luka bumped into the steps.
“Damn, bitch! You frightened me. You need lights on that thing! What the hell kind of thing are you? Damn. Don’t sneak up on someone!”
Luka reached for her phone, wishing its case concealed a knife. “It’s my place,” she said, hoping Drew, anyone, could hear the racket over the crowd noise. Meanwhile Luka waited, watching the woman catch her breath, calm down, then she said in the quiet that followed, “I’m a doctor. A doctor. It’s all right. But I need you to walk away from the porch.”
As the woman sized her up, Luka told herself there are worse ways to go, but the woman turned suddenly and started packing up her plastic bags, folding up the cardboard she had been sleeping on. “I didn’t mean to yell at you,” the woman said, back still turned. “It just gets crazy out here.”
Luka recognized the sympathy game the woman was playing, and not playing well, but she also knew that living on the streets wasn’t easy. There were so many women on the streets now. It shouldn’t make a difference to her, but it did. “You can come back after ten,” Luka said finally. “You can sleep here, on the porch, tonight. But alone. Or I call the police.”
The woman said nothing at first. Then she hid her stuff behind the frozen plant in the huge plaster flowerpot on Luka’s porch, hesitated, then after looking back at her belongings, thanked Luka, and walked off into the crowd of people now blocking traffic.
Upstairs, the triple-glazed windows of the house cut the crowd noise to nearly nothing. Luka watched the protestors for a while, thinking again about the impossibility of a homeless clinic in this neighborhood, then wrote a few emails to friends asking about foundation grants. When she finally went out to the kitchen to cook dinner, she saw the note from Pete. “Moved out today,” it said. “I’m sorry.” He had signed it, “Pete.”
Luka felt the heat all the way down to her toes. Phantom heat. The brain has a tendency to believe in the body’s reality past all hope. Once in med school, she had asked if the phantom body of a rat might not cause pain in the rat’s brain, even though removed from its skull and living as an experiment in a jar, just as an amputated leg could produce pain or paralyzed legs could register hot crippling movement.
Pete was gone. Luka turned the note upside down, opened the refrigerator, drank water. It was nearly ten and she had promised herself she’d make dinner for the woman sleeping on her porch. She heated up a large can of chili, sliced fresh greens, grated cheese, and set it all on a tray along with a box of crackers, two root beers, two bowls, some paper towels and spoons. She managed to get it all downstairs and sat bundled in her wheelchair in the cold night air. She was there only a moment before the woman showed up. The woman looked nervous, but Luka pointed to the tray, and without a word she sat down on the steps near Luka’s chair.
“They told me you own the café --- Luka. My name’s Mary,” the woman said, watching Luka dish out a bowl of chili. When Luka offered it to her, the woman shook her head, then took the other bowl and dished it out herself. Then she waited until Luka started eating.
“Mary’s the most common name in the United States,” Luka said finally.
“I’m Irish,” the woman said. “What’s your excuse?”
“My father wanted a son named Luke,” Luka said.
Mary laughed. “Was he your guy? The guy with the rental truck?”
Luka looked at bowl and nodded. “Yup.”
“He’s an ass,” Mary said.
They sat together, quietly watching the police, who were photographing the protestors from across the street. By the time Mary got up to dish out the last of the chili, the sidewalk near them had emptied out.
“It’s supposed to snow tonight,” Luka said.
“Heard that.” Mary sat down close to Luka’s chair, kicked at a lump of snow. “What’s it like to cut into a corpse?” she asked. “Drew told me what kind of doctor you were.”
Luka stiffened, started loading the tray and shifting the remaining dishes into the wheelchair side bags. “It smells,” Luka said. “More than you can imagine.”
For a moment, she wondered if the woman was someone who could kill her to find out. Pete would know that, Luka thought, then reconsidered, thinking no, not at all, no one really knows who is capable of killing. Luka had seen someone killed once in an operating room, just a slip of the blade when someone jostled the surgeon’s arm. It took time, and lots of effort to try to stop the killing, but it happened, on the table in front of all those witnesses. The victim probably would have died anyway, but he was nonetheless killed by an attending who couldn’t keep his arm steady after being jostled by an intern. It was one of the things you learned fast in a hospital -- to live with the accidental kills.
Luka turned back toward Mary. “You cut through skin,” she continued, ”and nothing bleeds. You slice off an organ, and for one instant you think of nothing but meat, rotting meat, then you pull at the, the claws of a small tumor, and feel a lifeless brain shiver in your hand . . . It’s like working at a zoo, and no matter how many times you see a lion, it’s still the first lion you’ve ever seen.”
“Like the morning piles of new dog shit in snow? Yeah, I get that.” Mary pointed to a pile under the bush alongside the porch. “Good thing it’s cold.”
Luka laughed. “Listen,” she said, “you can sleep on my doorstep once a week, Tuesdays. And there’s a toilet down in the park and a shower and laundry at the shelter around the corner. The rest of the time, no one here, not you, not a friend, no one. Best I can offer --- that and dinner at ten on Tuesdays. Temporary deal.”
“I’ll take it,” Mary said. “I’m clean.”
Luka looked at her. “Don’t lie,” she said. “I’m a doctor.”
For the second time that night, Luka heard the truth of what she was saying. She had spent months trying to be a cafe owner, to care about shade-grown coffee more than tumor in the bone. But she cared about bones, the weight of an alcoholic liver, the tissue spaces in a plaque-ridden brain. She liked the smell of a cadaver.
Luka rearranged her dishes, made pleasant sounds at Mary, then rolled back inside, being careful to lock the door behind her. There are many ways to be homeless, she thought. In the morning she would call the hospital board, arrange a meeting. She would tell them what she needed in order to work, explain how she could manage. Upstairs, she set the bowls in the dishwasher, rinsed out the pot of chili. If the board hesitated, she told herself, she’d call her lawyer, invoke the safety clause that could reinstate her.
In the morning, Luka woke early. She emailed Martins to forewarn him of her decision to come back to work. She left a voice mail for the board president, then made coffee, eggs, toast. She settled in to eat at the kitchen table, waiting for Pete to run by, which he did, just there a few yards away, among the many other fluorescent lines of light running along the bike path, through the trees, and into the falling snow.
