walked back to her, took her elbow, guided her back to the bed. She sagged down on it.
He, too, dropped down, to his haunches. Heartbeats shook her frame as he took one numb foot after the other, slid off slippers that felt as if they were made of hot iron. He rose, touched her shoulder, didn’t need to apply force. She collapsed like water in a fountain with its pressure lost. He scooped up her legs, swung them over the bed, swept the cotton cover over her, stood back and murmured, “Rest.”
Without another look, he turned and crossed the room as if he’d been hit with a fast-forward button.
The moment the door clicked shut, shudders overtook her.
Rest? He really thought she could? After what he’d just done? Before she had to attend her dead husband’s funeral?
She ached. For him, because of him, because she breathed, with guilt, with lack of guilt.
She could only hope that the funeral, the closure ritual, might open up the locked, pitch-black cells in her mind.
Maybe then she’d get answers. And absolution.
Five
She didn’t rest.
Four hours of tossing in bed later, at the entry of a genial brunette bearing a black skirt suit and its accessories, Cybele staggered up feeling worse than when she’d woken from her coma.
She winced a smile of thanks at the woman and insisted she didn’t need help dressing. Her fiberglass arm cast was quite light and she could move her shoulder and elbow joints well enough to get into the front-fastening jacket and blouse.
After the woman left, she stood staring at the clothes Rodrigo had provided for her. To attend the funeral of the husband she didn’t remember. Didn’t want to remember.
She didn’t need help dressing. She needed help de-stressing.
No chance of that. Only thing to do was dress the part, walk in and out of this. Or rather, get wheeled in and out.
In minutes she was staring at her reflection in the full-wall mirror in the state-of-the-art, white and gray bathroom.
Black wool suit, white silk blouse, two-inch black leather shoes. All designer items. All made as if for her.
A knock on the door ripped her out of morbid musings over the origin of such accuracy in judging her size.
She wanted to dart to the door, snatch it open and yell, Let’s get it over with.
She walked slowly instead, opened the door like an automaton. Rodrigo was there. With a wheelchair. She sat down without a word.
In silence, he wheeled her through his space-age center to a gigantic elevator that could accommodate ten gurneys and their attending personnel. This was obviously a place equipped and staffed to deal with mass casualty situations. She stared ahead as they reached the vast entrance, feeling every eye on her, the woman their collective boss was tending to personally.
Once outside the controlled climate of the center, she shivered as the late February coolness settled on her face and legs. He stopped before a gleaming black Mercedes 600, slipped the warmth of the cashmere coat she realized had been draped over his arm all along around her shoulders as he handed her into the back of the car.
In moments he’d slid in beside her on the cream leather couch, signaled the chauffeur and the sleek beast of a vehicle shot forward soundlessly, the racing-by vistas of the Spanish countryside the only proof that it was streaking through the nearly empty streets.
None of the beauty zooming by made it past the surface of her awareness. All deeper levels converged on him. On the turmoil in the rigidity of his profile, the coiled tension of his body.
And she couldn’t bear it anymore. “I’m …so sorry.”
He turned to her. “What are you talking about?”
The harshness that flickered in his eyes, around his lips made her hesitate. It didn’t stop her. “I’m talking about Mel.” His eyes seemed to lash out an emerald flare. She almost backed down, singed and silenced. She forged on. “About your loss.” His jaw muscles convulsed then his face turned to rock, as if he’d sucked in all emotion, buried it where it would never resurface for anyone to see. “I don’t remember him or our relationship, but you don’t have that mercy. You’ve lost your best friend. He died on your table, as you struggled to save him….”
“As I failed to save him, you mean.”
His hiss hit her like the swipe of a sword across the neck.
She nearly suffocated on his anguish. Only the need to drain it made her choke out, “You didn’t fail. There was nothing you could have done.” His eyes flared again, zapping her with the force of his frustration. “Don’t bother contradicting me or looking for ways to shoulder a nonexistent blame. Everyone knew he was beyond help.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? What if I don’t want to feel better?”
“Unfounded guilt never did anyone any good. Certainly not the ones we feel guilty over.”
“How logical you can be, when logic serves no purpose.”
“I thought you advocated logic as what serves every purpose.”
“Not in this instance. And what I feel certainly isn’t hurting me any. I’m as fit as an ox.”
“So you’re dismissing emotional and psychological pain as irrelevant? I know that as surgeons we’re mainly concerned with physical disorders, things we can fix with our scalpels, but—”
“But nothing. I’m whole and hearty. Mel is dead.” “Through no fault of yours!” She couldn’t bear to see him bludgeoning himself with pain and guilt that way. “That’s the only point I’m making, the only one to be made here. I know it doesn’t make his loss any less traumatic or profound. And I am deeply sorry for—everyone. You, Mel, his parents, our baby.”
“But not yourself?”
“No.”
The brittle syllable hung between them, loaded with too much for mere words to express, and the better for it, she thought.
Twenty minutes of silence later her heart hiccupped in her chest. They were entering a private airport.
With every yard deeper into the lush, grassy expanses, tentacles of panic slid around her throat, slithered into her mind until the car came to a halt a few dozen feet from the stairs of a gleaming silver Boeing 737.
She blindly reached out to steady herself with the one thing that was unshakeable in her world. Rodrigo.
His arm came around her at the same moment she sought his support, memories billowing inside her head like the sooty smoke of an oil-spill fire. “This is where we boarded the plane.”
He stared down at her for a suspended moment before closing his eyes. “Dios, lo siento, Cybele—I’m so sorry. I didn’t factor in what it would do to you, being here, where your ordeal began.”
