Aftershock Read online

  She still wasn’t much of a parent, she knew, but Chloe seemed fine. She played hockey, got herself to games and practices, kept her marks consistently decent, did very well in math and computer science. It was only later, after Chloe met Jill, that Jules started to get calls about skipped classes, and even then it was put to her as a discipline problem, not an academic one. In general Chloe just didn’t seem to need much parenting, although Jules could now sometimes admit to herself that it was very convenient for her to view it that way.

  Finally, maybe three years ago, after almost a decade of chronic pain, one particularly alert nurse practitioner looked at the size of Jules’s file and actually clucked. She referred Jules to a pain clinic at the university hospital, where she said they would have a team of doctors and research physicians who would approach Jules’s case from different angles and share information. With their combined resources, they might figure out what was going on.

  So, you couldn’t say she hadn’t tried. Over the years, she had seen them all—doctors, physiotherapists, massage therapists, acupuncturists, chiropractors. At the pain clinic she added to the roster an occupational therapist, a naturopath, a kinesiologist, even a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist—she’d spent years on Paxil, still took Celexa every goddamned morning—and now, a neurologist.

  She’d been waiting in an examination room, leaning against the grey padded treatment table, watching white coats walk back and forth outside the open door. She heard him before she ever saw him, whistling down the corridor, some kind of jazz tune, full of vibrato and perfectly pitched, a musician’s whistle. In he walked with her thick file in his hand, and right away she could tell he was different from everyone else who worked there. Most of them wore jeans and T-shirts under their lab coats, it was a casual, team-oriented kind of place, and here was this six-foot-plus, stick-figured fortyish man in a pricey but ill-fitting suit. Jules worked with men in expensive suits, and they almost always had hidden agendas and vile attitudes towards women behind their smooth demeanours. She was leery.

  But he was lanky and nervous and avoided eye contact for a couple of minutes at least, as he flipped through her file. Finally, he said, still looking down,

  I’m Dr. Scott. Rodney Scott. Rod. I bet you’re totally fed up with guys like me.

  As he shook her hand, finally looking at her, Jules thought he meant she must be sick of men in suits, which she was, chronically. She gave him half a smile.

  Too many doctors, am I right? And he smiled back through thick lenses. His black hair looked shocked, stuck out in all directions. From his swivel chair at the desk, he gestured to the armchair beside him. Jules shook her head.

  No sitting. My L5 has flared up.

  Lower lumbar. That’s no fun.

  He stood back up, leaned against the desk to face Jules at her level.

  We all sit too much anyway. So, Ms. Wright, tell me your story.

  She’d just watched him read her file. But he had her tell him anyway, in her own words.

  Feel like I bought a lemon, Jules said forty minutes in. Everything breaking down all the time. Wish I could just upgrade my body.

  Rod glanced up from the note he was writing, said, I’ve seen worse, and then immediately went bright red.

  At that moment, she felt she was in good hands for the first time since she’d lifted that box of files. Maybe even since she’d had Lizzie. Or gotten pregnant.

  Then he said he wanted to run some tests.

  A STRANGE DUET made her lift her gaze from her coffee cup. Rod’s high-pitched guffawing playing against a husky laugh. He had gone up to settle their bill and was leaning way over the counter beside the cash register. He was tall enough that his head and shoulders were level with those of the middle-aged woman he spoke to, a brassy, short-haired blonde, her apron cut low, the loosening skin on her neck and chest well tanned, her arms a collage of tattoos. Jules had thought her stern-faced and sour, assumed she was jaded from decades of restaurant work. But now the woman was giggling at Rod, one hand fluttering a white receipt at her cleavage, one hip cocked, and Jules knew, just knew, he had mentioned his Porsche. Since they’d started dating two years ago, his social confidence had for some reason ballooned, and she’d noticed this a few times lately: Rod trying to flirt. He was terrible at it, in Jules’s opinion, and she’d more than once heard him throw the car in to try to up his game. It didn’t always work, but this woman clearly knew how to read her clientele, and which ones would tip for attention and flattery.

  The woman’s eyes darted in her direction, sizing her up. Jules gave her a half smile and three-fingered wave, wondering how much of the sarcasm in her brain was showing on her face. Quite a lot, she guessed, when the woman finally extended the bill towards Rod as she might offer him a Christmas firecracker to pull. Jules hoped he at least tipped her well.

  After mere moments in her car, the hot, sour smell of restlessness wafted off Rod’s body from the passenger seat. Nine a.m. on a Saturday morning and the expressway was moving at twenty miles an hour.

  Shall we have dinner later?

  As they merged from the on-ramp, he craned his neck around from the passenger seat to check for oncoming cars.

  I have to check on a patient this afternoon, but after that . . .

  He opened her glove compartment and started rifling through it. It was one of his more annoying mannerisms, to fidget with anything within range of his long arms. He wasn’t very good at sitting still.

  Jules made a noise that implied consent. She was concentrating on the densely packed highway, trying to get away from a little white hatchback that was dogging in and out of her lane. The young man driving it passed her, then pulled in ahead of her, then changed lanes to pass someone else, but his new lane slowed and he fell behind Jules again. Casually, like it was half a thought, she mentioned to Rod that she might, possibly, need a refill, if he didn’t mind. She changed lanes, away from the hatchback, but it followed her over.

  Rod had found the package of random snack food from her last flight from New York, stashed in there for emergencies. He turned it over, looking for the ingredients. He matched her tone of nonchalance with one of absent-minded distraction.

  Hasn’t been that long. You sure?

  Pretty sure, yeah.

  Hmm.

  He lifted up the little cellophane flap on the wrapper. The ingredients were hidden underneath it in tiny printing. He squinted at them.

  Well, I don’t have a scrip pad with me. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to talk to you—

  No rush. Tonight’s fine.

  Right, he said. He held the package up to the window, angling it in the light so he could read it better. Oh, wait, I can’t. Forgot, I told Corina I would help her study.

  How paternal of you.

  His assistant, a nurse in her late twenties, was preparing for the MCAT as a part of her application to medical school. Jules pictured her as pretty, knew she was smart, and couldn’t help imagining her as idolizing Rod. As unlikely as that might be.

  The white hatchback behind her swerved out of their shared lane, he was going to try to pass her again. She tried to slow to let him pass, but he kept pace with her, right in her blind spot.

  Paternal? Oh, I don’t know. Smart kid. Jules, have you seen what’s in these? Lila would have a field day.

  Lila was a patient, a young—Jules assumed she was young—nutritionist with debilitating nerve problems in her legs. Rod said he had been asking her questions about her hospital food, trying to establish a rapport, and she had told him to start reading the back of every package he purchased. Jules suspected there was some teasing and flirting embedded in the exchange. Rod had kept that out of his version, but how he talked about his female patients sometimes felt a little close to home.

  Rod succumbed to the need to pull out his glasses. This was another new thing. He’d replaced his thick glasses with contact lenses, but his prescription was such that he still needed readers.

  MSG, for starters. Mo
nocalcium phosphate, disodium guanylate . . .

  He continued down the list of Latin compounds.

  JULES HAD BEEN going to the pain clinic for months before he’d asked her out.

  He’d had them test everything. They scanned every bone in her body, trying to find something set in its socket wrong, or insufficient bone density, an obscure heart condition or different leg lengths. They ran blood tests for autoimmune conditions like lupus and fibromyalgia, tested her thyroid, ran tests of her nervous system and pain receptors. They looked for anything that would explain why she had spent interminable years going from one injury to the next, no matter how many core-strengthening exercises she did or how many hours of physio she crammed into a week.

  They found nothing.

  She got better, got worse, got better again, as each injury went through its cycle of flare-ups and partial resolution.

  Finally, when she went in with her back worse than it had been to date, Rod suggested a discography. He would inject contrast dye into the discs in her back, check for irregularities and ruptures, get a detailed picture of each one.

  She lay on her stomach on the treatment table, her head in the hole, in a gown that opened up the back. Her arms hung over the sides, the left one stuck with a needle and taped to the tube of an IV: a mild sedative, a pain reliever. The right one absently draped on a metal crossbar under the table. Rod swabbed her back, said the cold she was feeling was a local anaesthetic.

  Then the needles started. Vertebra by vertebra, Rod worked his way up the discs in her spine. She felt the needle puncture her skin, felt the pressure in her back as each disc swelled slightly with the added fluid.

  She was to tell him if it hurt.

  The third needle slid in.

  JeezusFUCK. Her eyes popped open, her teeth clenched. She felt the deep, radiating pain that had held her in its malicious grasp for so many years, the sizzling live wires that twisted around her spine, wringing her out. Sparks fired down her left leg, the sciatic nerve shrieking, torqued. She clutched the cold metal of the table legs, her fingernails pressed white.

  Well, that gives us something to work with.

  Rod calmly moved on to the next disc, which was just as bad.

  In all, he found three discs that caused her significant pain under pressure. By the time he was done, Jules had bitten a hole in her lip and had decided she pretty much hated this Dr. Scott, with his warm, soft hands and his reedy voice. Right there, things could have been over before they even got started.

  Okay, Jules. He laid a blanket over her back and gave her the good news:

  The bulging on those three discs is very, very slight. Quite mild herniation.

  The downplaying was uncomfortably familiar. She turned carefully onto her side, tucked her right arm under her head.

  That’s good news how exactly?

  Well, they’re not ruptured, they’re unlikely to rupture, and really, with physio, they should be resolvable.

  At this point, drained from the procedure and already struggling to maintain composure, Jules started weeping. This was the same thing she’d been told dozens of times over the years. It did her no good. Rod touched her: laid a hand on her shoulder. Leaned his head down towards hers and spoke gently.

  The bad news is that it doesn’t really explain the scale of your pain. And since physio doesn’t seem to be working for you, at least not in the way we would typically expect, it doesn’t leave us with a whole lot of treatment options.

  You can’t help me. What a shock.

  He pulled his head back but kept his hand on her shoulder.

  Well, frankly, I was hoping there was some micro-tearing on a disc, something that could be treated surgically. Or that there wouldn’t be increased pain on any disc in particular but on all of them, or none of them, suggesting something neurological, which would indicate for a different approach altogether.

  But that’s not what happened.

  No.

  So where does that leave me?

  Where indeed, he said.

  HE SENT HER for more massage, told her to stay vigilant with the physio—because it can’t hurt—and prescribed her two weeks’ worth of OxyContin.

  The Oxy didn’t make her pain stop, but its resolve softened. The parasitical claw loosened its grasp somewhat, dulled its talons, and sometimes it would even let go of her spine, drift along beside her like a scratchy shadow.

  She knew the reputation Oxy had. She’d seen a documentary. It was basically heroin made in a lab, they said. Highly addictive, they said.

  She was careful, took it only when she really needed it, and never more than the recommended dose.

  She saw Rod every week for the next few months, and they could both see that she was improving, which in turn was lifting her spirits. When he finally gathered the nerve to ask her out, she was feeling positive enough to say yes.

  WATCHING HIM NOW out of the corner of her eye, as he scrutinized the package of snack food, she wondered if she’d been too grateful, if she had confused her confidence in his medical thoroughness for an attraction she was no longer sure she felt.

  Silicon dioxide as a “manufacturing aid”? What does that even mean?

  And then:

  Watch out!

  There was a loud metallic scraping as the left front bumper of Jules’s SUV ground into the right rear corner of the white hatchback. A blaring of horns, the SUV lurching violently as Jules slammed on the brakes, Rod yelling, Stop! Jules, STOP!

  They spun sideways across the road.

  It was quiet, for a beat, and then people were standing at her driver’s side window asking her if she was okay.

  Stunned, Jules mentally collated the events of the last thirty seconds.

  She had grown tired of Rod’s voice, annoyed that he didn’t want to renew her scrip—and irrationally hostile about the young nutritionist who she was sure had wrapped her hot little mouth around Rod’s gnads, or at least made clear her willingness to do so—and frankly, she was pissed off that she might have to get through the weekend, including writing a report, without more pills. In a rash and defensive gesture Jules had reached across the over-wide SUV, popped the glove compartment open and grabbed the package of snack crap out of Rod’s hand with the intention of throwing it back in.

  Unfortunately, as she leaned across the car, her steering wheel drifted to the right. Sensing this, Jules jerked it back to the left. Also unfortunately, that was the same moment that the white hatchback chose to slide into her lane right in front of her, with scant room for error, and when Jules corrected her course so quickly, the hatchback was right there, in the space she was trying to fill.

  You’re lucky, someone said moments later, as they got out of the car.

  That could have been a lot worse, someone said.

  And this was all true, but Jules didn’t feel very lucky.

  Didn’t you see him? Why weren’t you watching the road? Rod’s face was drawn and grey. His hair looked more surprised than ever.

  An older man in a jean jacket and earrings was reprimanding the hatchback driver. You could have killed someone, son. The hatchback was somehow facing backwards beside a twist of guardrail.

  Hey man, she hit me.

  Damn it, Jules, I’m going to be late. Rod’s hands shook as he pulled back a sleeve to look at his watch. Jules heard a distant siren and saw, back down the highway, a flashing light.

  Cops are coming, she said. She looked back at her car. Guess I’ll need a tow.

  The front corner of her Benz was mashed in, part of the bumper dangling onto the ground. She sighed. She loved that car.

  That’s going to cost you. Rod nudged at the loose bumper with his foot. A small piece of metal fell off, clattered onto the road. What were you thinking? Opening the glovebox on the highway. His eyes widened over the rims of his glasses. I hope the cops don’t give you too hard a time. He hugged her with one arm, kissed her head. Jules pulled away from him, walked over to the shoulder by the mangled hatchbac
k and sat on the ground. Rod followed her.

  I’m really sorry, Jules. But I have to go. You’ll be alright?

  Jules shrugged and nodded, thinking: What a fucking day.

  I hate to leave you like this.

  He walked over to the single lane of traffic now creeping past the accident scene and waved a hand in the air. The cops were making slow progress up the narrow shoulder.

  Rod, wait. She got up and walked over to him. I’m a bit . . .

  She gestured loosely at the cars, hers and the hatchback, that blocked half the westbound highway.

  Maybe I could see you after you help Corina? Or before? It doesn’t have to be dinner.

  Rod turned and looked at her, blinking. What, then?

  What?

  If not dinner, what? What do you want to see me for?

  Jules took a step back.

  Look at my car.

  Yeah. You’ll have to take it in.

  She stepped back in towards him and lowered her voice.

  I’m pretty upset, Rod. And my neck hurts. I think I need some . . . something.