Perfectly Undone. Jamie Raintree
Chapter 5
Some things can never be forgiven.
This thought flashes down my spine like lightning. The rain thunders overhead with the same rhythm as my heartbeat as I sit at the dining room table I bought together with the man I love, in the house we’ve shared for the last two years.
Can they? I ask myself, consuming every last inch of him with my eyes, as if it will be my last chance.
Cooper.
On one knee.
His blue eyes tense, waiting for my answer.
Those stubborn strands of blond hair fallen over his forehead.
“Dylan?” he presses.
I shake my head—not an answer, a try at clarity. It comes.
We can’t start a marriage based on secrets.
“I can’t give you an answer,” I whisper in a voice that isn’t mine. His eyebrows furrow, unsure of whether or not he heard me correctly. I can’t stick around to watch understanding take over his features. He can’t push me into this one. I place the fork in my hand back on the table with forced precision, then attempt to pull my fingers from Cooper’s grasp. “I’m so sorry. I love you, but I can’t.”
Still he won’t let me go. The fact that he knows he isn’t going to get the answer he wants and he still doesn’t want me to leave pushes a sob from my lips.
“Cooper,” I cry, but I pull myself free, stand and cross the living room. I wrench open the front door, no shoes, and walk out into the rain without looking back.
The storm hits me with a force that shocks me, making me feel more awake than I’ve been in years. I don’t know what I’m walking toward or what I’m running away from, I just feel the wet earth against the soles of my feet, holding me up, pushing me on. My breath comes quickly, and the spring air is so new, it forms a cloud in front of my face with every exhalation. I rush forward, rain and tears mixing together on the palette of my cheeks. I reach the road, follow it with my eyes until it disappears in both directions and realize I’m in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to go and not a single person I can turn to.
My hair sticks to my face, the mud to my clothes.
With no one to hear, I ask myself what I’m doing, how I got here. Don’t I have everything I’m supposed to want?
With no one to notice, I wonder if I’m wasting the life Abby never got to live.
Six weeks earlier...
I stand at the edge of the terrace outside the Women’s Clinic and grasp the cold metal railing. I watch the orange rays of sunset spray across the downtown high-rises, Portland’s never-ending rush-hour traffic and the landscape of trees as they soak up the last offerings of winter moisture. My white coat is draped over the back of the metal chair next to me, and a cool breeze sweeps over my arms.
This is my midday ritual, when my first round of patient consultations is finished, before the bustle of the day is replaced by stacks of charts to be filled out. I escape to this terrace, this place of solitude, and hold tight to a few moments of perspective. I breathe in the busy silence, and once a day, I pretend I could go somewhere no one knows my name, where absolution is easy and truth isn’t so hard to come by.
A bird flies overhead, past the parking lot below me and the still street entrance beyond that. My gaze follows it to the path of the Willamette River, a wide divide of sleepless water that cuts Portland in half. The break in the scenery means nothing to the bird, but I often wonder why they bothered to build the foundation of a city on land that would always be split. No matter how close to the water they plant offices, or how many bridges traverse one shore to the other, the two sides will never connect. It will never be whole.
But I am up here, seven floors high, and if I close my eyes and raise my face to the sky, I can almost pretend that I, too, am flying above it. Untouchable.
“Dr. Michels.” I turn to see Enrique, a nurse intern, leaning against the open glass door to the clinic. His dry sarcasm and the way his brown eyes squint almost closed when he smiles has made him one of my favorite nurses.
“You ready for another delivery?” he asks, his Puerto Rican accent pulling down his vowels.
“Of course,” I say. I pick up my coat, feed my arms back into it and follow him inside.
Sunlight shines through the towering glass walls of the clinic and glints off the modern furniture tucked in alcoves and lining the walls around the check-in desk. Enrique and I weave through women at various stages of pregnancy, with their families, nurses and doctors, and back into the halls of the clinic—a beehive that from the terrace is a low hum; inside, a violent roar. Between my four-year residency and my year as a licensed OB/GYN, this is my fifth year at this clinic, and it still surprises me how many patients we fit into a day.
Once we hit our stride in the hallway, Enrique passes me the chart of the laboring mother.
“Eight centimeters,” he says. “She’s been laboring for six hours and progressing at a steady rate.”
I quickly flip through the pages of Mrs. Forrest’s chart, then let the pages flutter back to their place.
“Have you seen Vanessa around today?” I ask him. Vanessa Lu is the chief of the OB/GYN department and the woman who holds my fate in her email inbox. Vanessa agreed to be my mentor for my first clinical trial, one of a dozen hoops I have to jump through to get my research