Deficiency (2 page)

"That's okay, I…"

"Would you like to dance?" he asked.

"Dance?"

"It does seem to be one of the main activities here," he kidded.

She had to laugh at herself. Sure, why not? she thought. She would be on the dance floor with this handsome man when Eileen finally arrived. Wouldn't her eyes pop?

"All right," she said.

He took off his jacket, folded and left it on the stool, and then reached for her hand. She gave it to him and stood. He was at least three inches taller than she was and broad shouldered with a narrow waist. His turtle-neck, milk-white silk shirt emphasized his dark complexion and made his eyes seem positively luminous. She noted how snugly his jeans fit and how tight was his rear end, tight and very enticing.

Even though her aerobics gave her the stamina to dance all night, her nervousness shortened her breath and she was self-conscious about the way she looked in the lights. She was positive she appeared awkward and gangly beside these other young women who had moves that rivaled Broadway dancers. That was the main reason why she hated dancing. People weren't dancing with each other; they were competing for attention. Every move was a desperate cry, "Look at me! Me!"

But something odd happened once they began. He focused intently on her and she felt herself drawn to him, held in his orbit like a planet held to the sun. He was a wonderful dancer, graceful and smooth, his body undulating in perfect rhythm to the music. Almost immediately, she began to move in synchronization with him, mirroring his movements. It was as if he had control over her body, as if there were some invisible cords binding them so she would move as he wanted her to move.

She lost track of time and even became oblivious to everyone else around them. Never had dancing been more exciting or had she felt so complete and fulfilled by it. They barely spoke while they danced, but he never took her eyes from her and she couldn't look away from him. After a while she felt as if she had slipped into a warm cocoon, a cocoon he had spun around her with his gaze, his movements, the wet sensuality of his lips.

They returned to the bar a number of times to refresh themselves with new drinks. They danced on and on, and even though they talked at the bar, she couldn't recall anything he said. His words were like music; she was mesmerized by the melodic rhythms, not the meaning. What he said almost didn't matter. Whenever he touched her, she felt an excitement building, and she didn't back away.

Vaguely she thought, something special is happening here and I feel so good about it. Perhaps for the first time, I like the sense of abandon, the freedom, the excitement.

So she let it go on and on and she even forgot that Eileen never arrived. She didn't bother to even look for her anymore. The club had become so crowded anyway.

Hours later, (she really wasn't sure about time), they left together. He had leaned forward and whispered an invitation into her ear, only it didn't seem like an invitation from him, it seemed like an invitation from herself. The thought, the proposal came from her own dark thoughts, that promiscuous second self with whom she was always debating. She drew upon her own well of fantasies and indeed she felt as if she were moving in a dream.

Maybe she hadn't paid enough attention to how many drinks she had, too. Whatever, some time later, like someone who had been literally hypnotized, she was surprised to find herself in a cheap motel room naked in bed with this handsome and beguiling stranger. And just as unexpectedly she felt the blood drain from her face. Although his lips were on hers and she welcomed his naked body against hers with more passion than she thought possible, she was confused by the mixed physiological messages being processed in her brain. She wanted him, more than she ever wanted any man, but instead of feeling complete and pure ecstasy, she was now feeling more like someone about to lose consciousness.

She raised her hands from the small of his back and ran her fingers through her hair, pressing her palms against her temples as if she wanted to keep her thoughts contained or her head from exploding. He was kissing her neck and moving his lips down over the base of her throat to the valley between her supple breasts. She felt the tip of his tongue move over one nipple and then the other, but when she heard herself moan, she thought she sounded more like someone moaning in pain than in sexual delight.

She opened her eyes and he raised his head so she could look into his. They no longer looked light blue. Instead they looked blacker, deeper, larger. It was as if they were absorbing the rest of his face until he would be nothing but eyes.

Suddenly she felt a terrific aching in all her joints. It was difficult even to bend her arm without experiencing some pain. The back of her neck felt tight, as tight as it would if someone had placed a metal clamp over it and had begun closing the clamp. She opened her mouth to express her discomfort, but he pressed his lips over hers and his tongue jetted into her mouth and over her own tongue, attaching itself to it like fly paper.

She began to gag. She willed her arms to push him away, but they remained limp at her sides.

Vaguely she knew he had entered her and they were making love, but the
initial pleasure was gone from his thrusts. There was a terrible ringing in her
ears that grew louder and louder. She was struggling now to extricate herself
from his embrace. The chill that had come into her face grew even colder. She
felt her eyes going back in her head and she fought desperately to remain conscious, but it was impossible. Everywhere his body touched hers, it felt sticky.

The last thing she thought was, it feels as if he is oozing over me.

Then she went dark.

STAT!

Dr. Terri Barnard dropped Irene Heckman's medical chart and rushed from her hospital room. The seventy-two-year-old woman had just begun to describe her chronic back pain in a slow, monotone voice as if the aches had taken over completely and turned her into another one of the walking dead, aged zombies parading through the corridors of Medicare, haunting the consciences of doctors. Terri knew it was arthritis and there was little she could do in the way of a cure, especially an instant cure, but she was prepared to be patient and sympathetic despite Mrs. Heckman's laying all the blame for her aches at the foot of her doctors and an uncaring medical community. Terri had an especially good bedside manner when it came to elderly patients. It made sense for a doctor to have that quality, she thought. Most of his or her patients would be elderly, wouldn't they?

STAT!

It was originating from the emergency room, and the Community General Hospital serving the once-famous resort area in the Catskills had no doctor on duty during the fall months. The participating physicians were rotating the responsibility. Tonight, it was hers, and for the first time!

Tough luck, she thought. Only hours after beginning her rounds she was thrown right into a crisis. At age twenty-eight, she had just finished two months as an assistant to Dr. Hyman Templeman, a sixty-eight-year-old family physician who had become something of a fixture in the upstate New York community of Centerville, a village of just fewer than two thousand year-round inhabitants. During the summer resort months, it and its surrounding hamlets and villages used to jump to ten times their population. It still multiplied five or six times, and Hyman's patients did come from all the surrounding hamlets in the Fallsburg township and not only Centerville.

Terri Barnard considered the elderly hands-on physician a perfect mentor: a doctor who diagnosed almost as much from instinct as from knowledge, maintaining an almost gleeful distrust of the new technology, but willing to learn and seize upon any aid to diagnosis and treatment that proved itself. Hyman Templeman liked to refer to himself as a medical iconoclast.

Despite her youth and her high-tech medical education, Terri had an affinity for the human touch. She believed in her grandmother's adage: people get well faster when they feel the doctor really cares whether they do or not. Her grandmother always wanted her to be a doctor, but "a real doctor, like your great-uncle Abe, who thought a doctor was a man with a gift, not a man with an expensive education." It followed then that if someone was given a gift, it was ungrateful, no, sinful, for her not to use it whenever and wherever possible.

Terri seemed to be following the dream life design. She had been a brilliant student, and she had returned to practice medicine in her hometown, where it was presumed she would marry her high school sweetheart, Curt Levitt, who had himself come back to the community to become a successful attorney in his father's firm, now taking it over with two partners since his father's retirement.

"Mr. and Mrs. Yuppie America," her girlfriends called them, "the dream couple." They teased, but she recognized their underlying envy, too.

Was her life too perfect? Could such a thing be so? She thought about it often. Her grandmother had brought all of her Old World superstitions with her, not the least of which was a belief in the Evil Eye. Whenever things were going too well for you, some covetous witch could cast a wicked spell. According to her grandmother, it was best to be humble, even secretive about good fortune.

At this moment in the emergency room, however, she thought about nothing but the problem at hand. She was doing what she was quickly becoming noted for… concentrating so intently she looked like she had shut away all distracting noise and sight.

A young woman had been brought in by ambulance and was on the gurney in one of the examination rooms. The woman had lost some of her teeth, but it didn't appear to be the result of a blow to the mouth. There was no trauma, no blow to any part of her face. It appeared her teeth had simply fallen out. In fact, the young woman's face seemed to age right before Terri's eyes. The emergency room nurse looked up from the young woman, her eyes pleading for Terri to do something miraculous quickly. She pointed to a large hemorrhage on the woman's arm, just above the blood pressure cup.

"I did that," the nurse said. "With the blood pressure cup. I'm afraid to squeeze the bulb. Pressure, no matter where I place it on her body, and no matter how gently I do it, immediately produces hemorrhages."

Terri moved quickly to her side and examined the woman's neck and chest. Her eyes were open, but they were glassy, the pupils barely dilating. She stared up at the ceiling light. Petechia appeared up and down her arms and legs and over her stomach and chest. It looked as if some madman had come along with a dark-blue Magic Marker and poked her body for hours and hours.

"There's barely blood pressure," the nurse warned.

"My God…" Terri brought her stethoscope to the young woman's chest, but before she could suggest a therapy, she heard the young woman's heartbeat thump into silence. She looked at the nurse and then started CPR.

Nothing helped. Death had too tight a grip.

Terri felt her own face whiten in disbelief.

"How long… was she like this?" she asked the nurse.

"I don't know, Doctor. The ambulance and the police just brought her in. She was found in a motel outside of Monticello. What is it? What killed her?" the nurse said, grimacing. She pulled herself away from the dead young girl as if she had already concluded whatever killed her was highly contagious.

Terri shook her head. The symptoms were clicking off against a computerlike memory bank, and what resulted made no sense.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Not without the blood work. There are too many possibilities. You better call the coroner," she said softly.

This was almost a nonstop trip directly to the hospital morgue for this woman, Terri thought. She felt like a toll booth operator, a modern-day Charon ferrying her patient across the River Styx, full of disease and illness.

Actually, this was the first patient to die in her care, as short as that care was, and although she was cognizant of the way she should react, she couldn't help what was going on inside her. Of course she was used to corpses from her medical training, and when she had interned, she had seen patients die, but this was different because it was so bizarre and had happened so quickly. And on her watch!

"Was there any identification?" she asked softly.

The nurse gazed at her clipboard.

"Paige Thorndyke, age twenty-eight. Lived in Mountaindale."

"Thorndyke?" Terri asked looking up. "Paige Thorndyke?" She looked at the dead woman. Her face was unrecognizable at this point, otherwise, she would have known her. "I knew her," she muttered. "I know the Thorndykes. Her father, Bradley Thorndyke, is a commercial airline pilot for American. They live in the Greenfield Park Estates."

The nurse nodded sadly and they both turned back to the deceased young woman. Terri recalled that Paige was in junior high when she herself was a senior. There was an older brother, too, Phil, who was a year behind her and Curt. He had been on the basketball team with Curt.

A little voice in the back of her mind threatened: "You're not going to be able to do this — you're not going to be able to practice medicine in a hometown community where you will get emotionally involved in every case."

She stared down at Paige Thorndyke for a few more moments and then covered her with the white sheet, her fingers trembling as she did so. Whatever it was that caused this, she thought, it was a horrible way to die. The emergency room was already buzzing around her. She sighed and dropped her shoulders. She had to recuperate and, after speaking to the policemen who waited in the ER lobby, go back upstairs and continue with Mrs. Heckman.

The rest of the night went just as badly. They had two motor vehicle accidents, one resulting in a fatality, dead on arrival. She couldn't believe she was looking into the vacant eyes of another corpse, two within four hours. She set one broken arm and patched up another motor vehicle victim. Then she had to pump the stomach of a four-year-old girl who had swallowed paint remover. By the time 6:00 A.M. rolled about, she was ready to check herself into the emergency ward.