Like a man right out of a novel. And he had seen these very same details only moments before in his panic.
"Come on, Michael, let me take you back," said the Englishman.
"First you have to tell me something," Michael said. He was beginning to shake all over. "Look, tell me, do you see that man?"
But now he saw only the various shades of darkness. And out of memory, there came his mother's voice, young and crisp and painfully immediate. "Michael, now you know there is no man there."
Eight
AFTER MICHAEL LEFT, Rowan sat on the western deck for hours, letting the sun warm her, and thinking in a rather incoherent and sleepy way about all that had taken place. She was slightly shocked and bruised by what had happened, rather deliciously bruised.
Nothing could efface the shame and guilt she felt for having burdened Michael with her doubts and her grief. But this was of no real concern to her now.
One did not become a good neurosurgeon by dwelling for very long on one's mistakes. The appropriate thing, and the instinctive thing for Rowan, was to assess the error for what it was, consider how to avoid it in the future, and then to go on from there.
And so she took stock of her aloneness, her sadness, the revelation of her own need, which had caused her to fall into Michael's arms, and she took stock also of the fact that Michael had enjoyed comforting her, that it had drawn the two of them together, deeply coloring their new relationship in a wholly unforeseen way.
Then she moved on to thinking about him.
Rowan had never loved a man of Michael's age; she had never imagined the degree of selflessness and simplicity which was evident in Michael's most spontaneous words or gestures. She had been unprepared for and quite enthralled by Michael's mellowness of soul. As for his lovemaking, well, it was damn near perfect. He liked it rough and tumble the way she did; rather like a rape from both sides, it seemed to her. She wished they could do it again right now.
And for Rowan, who had so long kept her spiritual hungers and her physical hungers completely separated, satisfying the first through medicine and the second through near anonymous bed partners, the sudden convergence of the two in one good-hearted, intelligent, irresistibly huggable and charmingly cheerful and handsome figure with a captivating combination of mysterious psychological and psychic problems was just about more than she could handle. She shook her head, laughing softly to herself, then sipping her coffee. "Dickens and Vivaldi," she whispered aloud. "Oh, Michael, please come back to me. Come back soon." This was a gift from the sea, this man.
But what the hell was going to happen to him, even if he did come back right away? This idee fixe about the visions and the house and the purpose was destroying him. And furthermore, she had the distinct feeling that he wasn't going to come back.
There wasn't any doubt in her mind, as she sat half dreaming in the clear afternoon sun, that Michael was drunk by now and that he would get drunker before he ever reached his mysterious house. It would have been a lot better for him if she had gone with him, to look after him and to try to steady him through the shocks of this trip.
In fact, it occurred to her now that she had abandoned Michael twice--once when she had given him up too soon and too easily to the Coast Guard; and this morning, when she had let him go on to New Orleans alone.
Of course no one would have expected her to go with him to New Orleans. But then nobody knew what she felt for Michael, or what Michael had felt for her.
As for the nature of Michael's visions, and she thought about these at length, she had no conclusive opinion except that they could not be attributed to a physiological cause. And again, their particularity--their eccentricity--startled her and frightened her somewhat. And there persisted in her a sense of Michael's dangerous innocence, his naivete, which seemed to her to be connected to his attitudes about evil. He understood good better than he did evil.
Yet why, when they'd been driving over from San Francisco, did he ask her that curious question: had she been trying to throw him some sort of warning?
He had seen Graham's death when he touched her hand because she had been thinking of Graham's death. And the thought of it tortured her. But how could Michael construe this to be a deliberate warning? Had he sensed something of which she was wholly unaware?
The longer she sat in the sun, the more she realized that she could not think clearly and that she could not endure this longing for Michael, which was reaching the point of anguish.
She went upstairs to her room. She was just stepping into the shower when she thought of something. She had forgotten completely to use a contraceptive with Michael. It wasn't the first time in her life she had been so stupid, but it was the first time in many years.
But it was done now, wasn't it? She turned on the tap and stood back against the tile, letting the water flood over her. Imagine having a child by him. But that was crazy. Rowan didn't want babies. She had never wanted babies. She thought again of that fetus in the laboratory, with all the wires and the tubes connected to it. No, her destiny was to save lives, not to make them. So what did that mean? For two weeks or so she'd be anxious; then when she knew she wasn't pregnant, she'd be all right.
She was so sleepy when she came out of the shower that she was scarcely aware of what she was doing. She found Michael's discarded shirt by the bed, the one he'd taken off the night before. It was a blue work shirt, starched and pressed as well as a dress shirt, which she had liked. She folded it neatly, and then lay down with it in her arms as if it were a child's favorite blanket or stuffed toy.
And there she slept for six hours.
When she awoke, she knew she could not stay alone in the house. It seemed Michael had left his warm imprint on everything. She could hear the timbre of his voice, his laughter, see his enormous blue eyes peering at her earnestly through the horn-rimmed glasses, feel his gloved fingers touching her nipples, her cheek.
; It was too early still to expect to hear from him, and now the house seemed all the more empty in the aftermath of his warmth.
At once she called the hospital. Of course they needed her. It was Saturday night in San Francisco, wasn't it? The Emergency Rooms at San Francisco General had already overflowed. Accident victims were pouring into the Trauma Center at University from a multicar crash on Highway 101, and there had been several shootings in the Mission.
As soon as she arrived, there was a patient waiting for her in surgery, already intubated and anesthetized, the victim of an attempted ax murder, who had lost a great deal of blood. The intern ran through the history as Rowan scrubbed. Dr. Simmons had already opened. She saw as soon as she entered the ice-box-cold Operating Room that Dr. Simmons was relieved that she had come.
She surveyed the scene carefully as she stretched out her arms to receive the sterile green gown and the plastic gloves. Two of the best nurses on duty; one intern getting sick, the other powerfully excited by the proceedings; the anesthetists not her favorites but adequate; Dr. Simmons having done a good and tidy job of things so far.
And there was the patient, the anonymous patient, mounted in a slump of a sitting position, head bowed, the skull opened, the face and limbs hidden completely beneath layers and layers of green cotton drapery, except for two naked, helpless feet.
She moved towards the head of the table, behind the slumped body, nodding to the few rapid words the anesthetist spoke to her, and with her right foot she pressed down on the pedal that adjusted the giant double surgical scope, bringing into focus the opened brain, its tissues held back by the shining metal retractors.
"What a god-awful mess," she whispered.
Soft, delicate laughter all around.
"She knew you were coming in, Dr. Mayfair," said the older of the two nurses, "so she just told her husband to go on and give her another whack with that ax."
Rowan smiled behind her mask, her eyes crinkling. "What do you think, Dr. Simmons?" she asked. "Can we clean up all this blood in here without sucking out too much of this lady's brain?"