disorder and diminished expectations, and there were some people who believed that such conditions also required sexually inappropriate behavior. These kinds of people always ended up in Renee’s care. She’d been mooned, flashed, asked out, grabbed by patients more times than she could count. Never before had she reacted to it with anything other than a quick shake of the head or, on a few notable occasions, a call to security.
But with Jonathan Frank she hesitated. He was holding his injured hand up as she’d instructed. The discarded dishcloth was stained a deep red and edged with little yellow ducks.
On the day she met Jonathan Frank, Renee was thirty-four years old, a fellow in general surgery with top marks from the attending physician, already in talks for a transplant fellowship next year. Brett Swenson was sixteen years behind her, the man in the car twenty-one. Jonathan was attractive and intelligent and had asked for her phone number. The fact that he was her patient should have prompted Renee to answer with a simple, straightforward no.
Instead she wondered if there was any Chinese food left in the staff fridge. She wondered if Jaypa’s girlfriend, the nurse from Arkansas, had ever wanted to be a doctor. She wondered if she wasn’t the kind of person who did better on her own, someone who was meant to lead a solitary life. Someone for whom a profession, the most noble of professions, would provide a vast, singular joy. She realized that this man here was not Brett Swenson or the man in the car, but someone else entirely. Someone who perhaps, with his neat, clean hands and dark, intelligent eyes, might widen her world, not because it needed to be wider but because the opposite, a narrowing, might otherwise be inevitable. And she did not want that. Alone or not, Renee wanted to expand. She had always wanted more than herself. Medicine gave her that; maybe this man could, too. One did not necessarily preclude the other. For a brief, blazing moment, she hoped that this was true.
Without looking at Jonathan, Renee ripped a scrap of paper from the chart and wrote down her name and phone number.
“A nurse will take up you up to X-ray,” she said, and handed him the paper.
* * *
It had been a Sunday morning in April when Joe called Renee from the Alden College dean’s office. Renee was a second-year medical student and had slept four hours the night before. She’d been studying for the national board exam, a punishing full-day test.
When she picked up the phone, Joe said, “Renee, I need your help.” His voice was rough and low.
Renee did not speak. Briefly she considered hanging up on him, turning the phone off, returning to her books. Her roommate Lydia was still asleep; Renee could hear faint snores emanating from the closed bedroom door.
“What is it, Joe,” Renee said without inflection. “What’s happened?”
Joe explained the situation: the party, the alcohol, the police. Renee said very little. She whispered, “Okay, okay, I understand,” trying not to wake her roommate.
“You need to come here,” Joe said. “They wanted to talk to Noni, but I told them you.”
“Yes,” said Renee. “That was the right thing to do. Don’t let them call Noni. I’m leaving now.”
At Alden College she was greeted by Joe’s coach, the college registrar, and, she realized only as he introduced himself, the college dean. The meeting was tense but photogenic, held in a room of wood-paneled walls and chairs upholstered in supple leather. The large leaded-glass windows offered a view of the grassy quad cut through with the silvery gray of paved walkways.
The baseball coach began. As he spoke, Renee gazed just above his head, out the window. She watched a knot of tousled young people shouldering serious backpacks travel from one corner of the quad to the next. There were four of them, all deep in conversation, hands working as they spoke, debating, it seemed, some question of great significance. Each appeared so clean and shiny-haired, so focused and brilliantly backlit by the late-morning sun that Renee wondered if perhaps a photographer followed them, taking snaps for the college brochure.
The students drifted beyond her field of vision, and Renee turned her attention back to the room. Joe had been showing up for practice drunk or high or not at all, the baseball coach was saying. He wasn’t bench-pressing enough, couldn’t run the nine-minute mile required of all players. He was barely passing three classes and flat-out