Point of Balance (6 page)

7

Here on death row there's a guy four cells down, name of Snow, who plays solitaire all day long. He says that winning is all about getting the right cards. If he deals himself a poor hand, he shuffles the deck and starts again. Outwardly, he has all the time in the world. He doesn't. Snow has six weeks to go, so before long we'll see him walk down the row.

This overarching wish to start again, to clear away the cards life has dealt you, is a treacherous and woeful feeling. We have all felt it sometime, although it is never keener, nor more devastating or lethal, than when it is fed by guilt and self-reproach. Then it is enough to drive somebody crazy. Little wonder that most everyone in this place ends up clinically nuts.

There is no wiping the slate clean.

The night I came back from that first meeting with White and lugged myself upstairs, up to Julia's room, I was almost catatonic. I felt numb, like you do after the dentist leaves half your face frozen.

I don't remember stepping on top of the white stool Julia used to get her clothes down from the hangers. But I must have, because at some stage I found myself grasping a heavy-duty, sealed plastic bag of the kind used to store clothes in out of season. I took an old and worn college sweatshirt out of it, held it to my face and breathed
in. It still smelled of Rachel, that smell of deodorant mixed with flower-scented soap and scrubbed skin she left behind every time she put something on.

It was then that it sank in I would never see her again. There would be no more tea in the kitchen before bedtime, no more walks under the trees or knowing winks beside the operating table. The dawning realization ushered in a feeling of closure. All those months of maudlin and guilty grief, which had turned me into a bad-­tempered recluse and workaholic, ended right there.

Because I understood.

Rachel Evans, née Rachel Robson, got the results of her magnetic resonance imaging scan forty-eight hours before she took her life. She had been having splitting headaches for days, but played them down, and I had taken little notice. Don't go judging me for that. I've been at it for a while now, and much more scathingly than you. In my defense, I will say that no one is blinder to his own family's health problems than a doctor. The response to any of your wife's or children's symptoms is to give them a Tylenol and tell them to take an afternoon nap.

Rachel was a woman with a high pain threshold who never complained and gave birth to Julia with no more chemical assistance than a couple of Diet Cokes. So when she found herself gobbling down a jar of painkillers a day, she was worried sick. Or at least that's what a colleague in Neurosurgery told me. She had consulted them on the sly and they scanned her while I, wholly unaware, had taken Julia to a school play. While I watched our little girl dance in a raccoon outfit, they told Rachel she had glioblastoma multiforme, grade 4. The most malignant and, sadly, also the most common type of brain cancer. More than half of cerebral tumors are GBM, a ruthless killer for which there is little or no known cure.

“How long have I got?” Rachel asked the neurologist as the tears welled up in her eyes.

“Without treatment, six or seven weeks. Unfortunately it has
branched and I'm afraid it will spread quickly. In a few days it'll reach the area that controls speech.”

She understood in a flash. Not only was she a great doctor, but she had also taken part in enough neurosurgery operations to know what lay in store for her. How she would lose her faculties piecemeal until she ceased to be everything she was. And how on the way she would suffer dreadfully and make her family suffer all the more.

“Maybe David . . . ,” the neurologist ventured.

“No.”

“But, Rachel . . . He's achieved results with—”

“No! You won't tell David a thing. Promise me. You'll keep it under wraps until Monday. This weekend's our anniversary and I don't want anything to spoil the party.”

The way they told it later, shamefaced, when they came clean, they had fallen for Rachel's story and kept their mouths shut. The same way an anesthesiologist she worked with swallowed another yarn a couple of days later.

“I've got this terrible migraine and am ready to drop. Can you fit me up with a drip? The neuro has prescribed me a mild analgesic every five hours, but I don't feel like waiting around that long. And you know how I hate needles.”

He looked at her suspiciously.

“Can't your husband do it at home?”

“David and I won't overlap there, his shift's about to start,” she lied.

So Rachel left the hospital with a drip in her left arm and headed for the Four Seasons, where the evening before she had booked a room with a view. She took an envelope out of her purse, with a handwritten letter in it, and carefully laid it on the bedside table. She scheduled an e-mail to be sent three hours later, to tell the police where to find her.

Then from the bedstead she hung a cocktail of propofol, fentanyl and Anectine she had secretly prepared in the hospital and main
lined it with the drip kindly inserted by her colleague. Then she sank into a sweet sleep from which she would never wake up.

In hindsight, Rachel's planning was flawless. That morning she had mailed me her farewell letter, the one I had never spoken about to anybody. Then she had phoned the school to say Julia would be taking the day off, took her out to play in the park and then to eat pizza, ice cream and other junk that was off-limits midweek.

I have often asked Julia about that day. What Rachel said to her, whether she hugged her or said anything out of the ordinary. But Julia remembers very little. It's weird how pure, unadulterated happiness leaves no trace in our hearts, but the murky waters of sadness blight everything. Our little girl simply remembers that Rachel told her she loved her and would be with her always.

“Mommy smelled like strawberries.”

When I got home from work, my wife was supposedly about to go on duty. It was usual on such days to steal a couple of kisses between one of us coming and the other going, so it took me by surprise to see her standing barefoot and waiting for me in the front yard.

“What's up?” I asked, giving her an inquiring look.

“I want to feel the grass between my toes.”

“You'll be late for work, you slacker,” I objected, not knowing she'd already called in sick.

“There's not much going on today. Let's have some tea.”

We sat in cozy silence for a bit. When she finally got going, she gave me a big hug and a lingering kiss.

“I love you so much, Dr. Evans.”

“And I love you too, Dr. Evans.”

As she stepped toward the car, I yelled, “Don't forget to pick up doughnuts on your way back.” She stopped and smiled over her shoulder, her medium-length hair wafting in the breeze. I would like to think her determination faltered then, albeit following such a humdrum request. Or maybe I'm merely kidding myself, to assuage the nagging thought that my final good-bye to her was so corny.

“I love you,” she said back. “Give Julia a big hug for me.”

I waved as she drove off, and that was the last I saw of her alive.

When a burly cop with a bushy mustache knocked on the door, I hadn't the faintest idea anything was up. His long, hard stare could have cracked mirrors, but I was oblivious at the time. I could only nod, stone-faced, while he told me how a maid had found Rachel when she went to turn down the bed.

“There must be some mistake,” I answered.

“Who is it, Daddy?” Julia said from the top of the stairs.

“Go back to bed, honey,” I shouted. “It's a man who's got the wrong house.”

“I'm afraid there's no mistake, sir. Do you have any idea why she would do such a thing?”

“There must be some mistake,” I repeated. I felt my legs buckle and the cop sounded miles away.

“In her letter she said she was ill. Were you aware of her condition, doctor?”

“She . . . she . . . couldn't abide pain.”

“Was there anything in her behavior to suggest she was thinking of suicide?”

I remember that I fell to my knees, unable to reply. Denial, shock and a sense of failure held back the answers we both sought.

Answers which only now, as I hugged her old sweatshirt in our kidnapped daughter's room, did I finally understand.

Rachel and I were unique in the world. No one else had what we had, and no one ever would. Ours was a special love, a one-off. All we had spoken about, all the wisdom we had meant to hand down together to our daughter, all the mistakes our parents had made that we would never make with Julia . . . All that had gone up in smoke. She had taken a pain-free way out, to relieve our pain as best she could.

It took untold strength, courage and unfailing love to make that decision. Very few would dare to do the best for their loved ones in that way, regardless of the cost or consequences.

What if Rachel could see me now, see how I'd lost our daughter? What would Rachel want me to do to get her back?

Team Evans
.
Yay!

The sound of the three of us, chanting our family battle cry, rang through my mind. Two decades devoted to medicine, the childhood dream of a boy who wanted to follow in his adoptive father's footsteps and be a doctor, my very conscience. It all disintegrated, as quickly as a sandcastle swept away by a strong wave.

If Rachel's sacrifice had taught me anything, it was that the welfare of those you love comes before all else. If I had to forgo my integrity, my ethics, every single thing I stood for, I was ready. I would play White's game, but I wouldn't be putty in his hands. I could play games too.

“Have it your way, you goddamned son of a bitch. I'll do it,” I muttered in an empty room, in an empty house, in the dead of night.

And a few seconds later came a text that made my hair stand on end.

YES, I KNOW.

53 hours before the operation

Somewhere in Columbia Heights

White sat back in his chair and allowed himself a slow, smug smile. The leather upholstery hissed quietly as his skin slid over it. All his clothes were carefully folded on a classy ebony stand. The silvery glow from the screens lent an unearthly sheen to his totally naked body, which sparkled here and there with drops of sweat that dotted his skin.

It was hot.

He stood up and walked to the kitchen, his barefoot steps echoing off the empty walls. The small apartment was unfurnished apart from a foam mattress in a corner and a huge flat table with eight twenty-­seven-inch screens mounted on steel supports screwed into the woodwork. In a high-turnover neighborhood full of postgrad students and yuppies starting out on the career ladder, the dapper Mr. White was quite unremarkable.

He opened the fridge and a flurry of ice-cold air gave him goose bumps. Each of the five shelves was stocked with bottles of Hawaiian Punch. A flavor for every tray: Fruit Juicy Red, Wild Purple Smash, Lemon Berry Squeeze, Polar Blast and Island Citrus Guava. He went over the names in a low voice, a quiet mantra, until he opted for the first one. He picked up a cold bottle and promptly replaced it with another of the same flavor he had fetched from the cupboard. A completely full
fridge consumes less energy than a half-f one. White always considered the environment.

He went back to his seat and to eyeballing the screens, which relayed pictures of the
Evanses' home. The cameras had been carefully concealed, although the aim wasn't that Dr. Evans shouldn't know they were there.

Quite the opposite.

He tapped a few keys on the laptop that controlled the whole shebang. Every screen showed Julia's burrow, six minutes previously. The audio feed amplified the slow, heavy breathing and the doctor's whisper murmured like a gust of wind.

“
Have it your way, you goddamned son of a bitch. I'll do it.”

The text message tone boomed out of the loudspeakers. White hit the space bar and zoomed in. Evans's face showed up on all eight monitors, at the precise moment he read the text. His tense expression, his eyes like dinner plates.

That's it, Dave. Now you can see the extent of my power. There is no escape
, White thought as he swigged the punch.

He looked longingly at the gritty mascot, the unmistakable Punchy. Political correctness had stripped him of all his character. It was way funnier back in the eighties, when the character used to ask his victims whether they'd like some punch, then let fly with a good wallop. Whenever he saw the ads, sitting on the white Persian rug in his parents' living room, White would laugh out loud.

His had been a happy childhood. That of a spoiled only child, like all New York investment bankers' children. He had seen more of the servants than his blood relatives, but that was no problem. Nobody had smacked him, abused him or given him major trauma.

White was just the way he was.

He was born that way, and there was nothing to be done. He knew that clearly when he was eight, in the park where the au pair took him every afternoon. A little girl fell awkwardly from one of the slides, landed on her left arm and broke it. The end of the fractured bone poked out through her skin and was covered in blood. She howled in pain and stood up. Most of the kids clinched their arms in sympathy.

White didn't.

That day he understood he was a unique and self-reliant being. Human beings have leaky boundaries. They feel other people's pain, see their emotions affected by those of others. They live their lives connected to the rest by a sort of emotional grapevine.

White was unburdened by that flaw.

His total lack of empathy put him a cut above the rest. He could read others' feelings and interpret them, without those feelings sullying him. That evolutionary step forward was most practical.

Learning how to make use of this knowledge had been a long hard road. White took years to find out that every human being has a boundary between the comfort zone of their hopes and fears, and the quicksand of their wishes and needs. To achieve a total surrender of the will, you had to push them out of the former without sinking them into the latter.

Up to the tipping point.

Everyone had a different personality type. For somebody such as Dr. Evans, violence was no more than a back-page story in the
Post
, something that did not impinge on the confines of his world. At bottom, human nature is the denial of death, and a committed doctor is the epitome of that denial.

To get a subject with such strong convictions to resort to violence, you had to burn his bridges, one by one. Steadily, until you forced him to embrace the contradiction between his beliefs and reality. By plotting a road map with pinpoint precision. With someone more unthinking and not as straight as Evans, he would have cut the response time.

White's cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. Just like David's, it was a very exclusive
model. It had been modified using state-of-the-art technology, and its signal was protected by a 128-bit encryption key. He didn't bother to see who was calling. Only one person in the world had his number: his employer.

“It's under way.”

The voice at the other end of the line mumbled a few words in response. White barely listened to him. His eyes were still glued to the monitors.

He pressed a key to bring the picture back to real time. It looked like the doc was asleep.

White frowned, bemused. He'd never seen him do such a thing;
cling to that sweatshirt that way. He thoughtfully stroked his earlobe and jotted something down on his iPad.

Tomorrow would be a most interesting day.