Along Came Zoe

A SWOOSH OF THE AUTOMATIC DOORS announced Phillip’s arrival in the operating room. His hands and forearms dripping, he dried them with a sterile towel, unfolded a gown and slid both arms through the sleeves. Without a word, one of the circulating nurses tied the gown behind him; a scrub nurse removed a pair of gloves from their paper-wrapped package and held them out for him.

“Your handmaidens,” his ex-wife used to call them.

His first surgery of the day was an eight-year-old boy who had been sleeping in the back seat of his father’s pickup truck. The truck had stopped for a red light just as a couple of rival gang members were shooting at each other from opposite sides of the road. The stray bullet had torn through the side of the truck, ricocheted off the floorboard and penetrated the boy’s brain. In the blink of an eye, half of his right brain had been destroyed.

The human nervous system is an amazing, even elegant, structure, Phillip often pointed out to patients and their families. It allows us to feel, move, see, hear, smile and taste. It allows us to experience pleasure, as well as pain. It is essentially the organ system that defines us as human beings. And, by and large, we take it all for granted—until a bullet rips through it.

Or, as in the case of his daughter, Molly, something seems to go suddenly and inexplicably awry.

“I’m fine now, Daddy, really,” she was reassuring him as they walked along the beach below his Seacliff home that night. “I learned my lesson, I swear I’ll never be that stupid again. Why are you wearing shoes to walk on the beach?”

“Shoes?” Phillip glanced absently at his feet, sockless but in a pair of old Topsiders. “No idea.” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her close. Molly had attempted suicide just over six months ago. Her second try in a little over a year.

“You really need to loosen up,” Molly said. “Quit working so hard. Go barefoot once in a while.”

Phillip took a moment to appreciate the irony of what his daughter had just said. And, briefly, to register the glint of orange light on the windows of the houses on the cliffs above them. The tide was out, the sun low in the sky. The evening was cool and gray—a California weather phenomenon TV weather people called June Gloom. Both he and Molly wore heavy sweaters and jeans. Molly, barefoot, held her sneakers in one hand.

By the time he’d arrived at the hospital, Molly was having her stomach pumped. A fleeting sense of relief that paramedics hadn’t taken her to Seacliff, where everyone knew him—her boarding school had been too far away for Seacliff to have been an option—left him with a dull guilt that still hadn’t entirely disappeared.

His ex-wife, Molly’s mother, had been similarly relieved. Ever since her latest self-help book, My Daughter, My Best Friend, had begun climbing into the lower reaches of the New York Times extended bestseller list, Deanna lived in constant fear of bad publicity.

“I’m serious, Daddy,” Molly was saying now. “When was the last time you had any fun?”

“I don’t know, Moll.” He heard the impatience in his voice. “Let’s talk about you first.”

“I’ve figured things out, I told you. I mean I can’t believe I tried to end my life just because some stupid boy made such a mess of his own life that he’d totally lost touch with reality,” Molly said. “I swear to God, never again. From now on, I’m taking charge of my own life.”

Phillip thought about the first boy to set Molly’s life adrift. Spirit, who Phillip had tracked down one bright summer morning, at work—the sidewalk spot where the kid drew whales and sea horses in pastel-colored chalk for the coins and occasional dollar bills dropped into the coffee can next to his box of art supplies—in the slim hope that he could shed some light on why Molly had set fire to the bed in her dormitory. Phillip had guessed that Spirit, who had green hair and wore a nose ring, was probably in his late twenties.

“I don’t know, man…” Spirit’s gaze had drifted somewhere beyond Phillip’s left shoulder. “No offense or anything, I mean I know she’s your daughter and all, but Molly is one seriously weird chick.”

Molly’s story had been that Spirit, with whom she was “like totally, totally in love,” had given her an ultimatum: sell everything she owned and take off with him to Belize, or the relationship was over. It was anger over the unfairness of his demand, she’d explained, that had caused her to set fire to her bed.

But Spirit had claimed at first that he didn’t even know Molly. Only after Phillip produced a picture from his billfold, did the kid remember that, “Yeah, I’ve seen her like a couple of times, hanging out at this coffee place.” Once she’d dropped a five-dollar bill into his coffee can and tried to give him her emerald ring, which Spirit, astoundingly and to his credit, had refused to accept.

“I figured she was, like, strung out on something,” he’d told Phillip, “and I didn’t want problems with, you know, like stolen merchandise or something.”

The ring had been handed down to Molly from her great-grandmother.

Molly had been on medication ever since and, until this latest attempt, had been doing fairly well. This time they’d taken her to see a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Far enough away from Seacliff to feel comfortable that they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew. The psychiatrist, who had Art Garfunkel hair and round eyeglasses, had offered Phillip a preliminary diagnosis. Affective schizophrenic disorder, the term set out there like a bomb.

“Bull,” Phillip had responded. Okay, she was going through a weird period, she had a tendency to overdramatize—as did her mother—but this was his daughter. Bright, pretty, resourceful, a great kid. Everyone loved Molly. She had her life ahead of her. The psychiatrist had leaned back in his chair, the faintest suspicion of a smirk on his face. So. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of bad news? Phillip remembered folding his arms across his chest, then unfolding them in case this was interpreted as resistance.

“Look, I’m ready to try anything that will help Molly,” he’d told the psychiatrist. “Frankly, though, I find it difficult to accept…” Hearing himself, he stopped and started over. “My own professional judgment tells me that Molly is going through a confused period and would certainly benefit from intensive therapy, but I absolutely refuse to accept this diagnosis. In fact, I find it patently absurd.” He’d heard his voice growing louder, felt his anger building. “You’re probably thinking, denial,” he’d said. “I run into the same response myself—no parent wants to hear that their child will never walk again—but Molly’s a different matter altogether and I refuse to allow her to be stigmatized by a hastily made diagnosis.”

As a consequence of this latest incident, and over Molly’s protests, they’d transferred their daughter to a small and expensive private school that promised “…a high degree of attention to each and every one of our student’s unique and special needs and abilities.” Deanna had agreed to cut down on book promotions that required extensive periods of out-of-town travel, and he’d suspended Seacliff’s emergency neurosurgical services.

And then a sixteen-year-old girl with head injuries had died in an ambulance.

He hadn’t slept through the night since.

ZOE LOVED EVERYTHING involved in growing and selling vegetables, but farmer’s market days were the best. Three times a week, she’d load fruit, vegetables and flowers into the back of the pickup truck and drive to whatever town was having their market. Today was market day in Seacliff, which, hands down, had to be the coolest site in California with all the stalls grouped around the perimeter of a grassy park overlooking the Pacific. From where she sat under a blue Cinzano umbrella, Zoe could see the white froth of waves breaking on the rocks below. The jingle of an ice-cream bell and the throb of rock music provided an audio backdrop to the green, blue and gold of grassy verges, cloudless sky and sun-dappled strollers. Artists sat on folding chairs, their paintings leaned and stacked, bright rectangles of color. Flags fluttered from the artisan stalls where some of her friends sold jewelry, pottery, leather belts and sandals.

Zoe never thought of herself as an artist, or, as her mother would say, an artiste, but some early, misty mornings, as she arranged her produce she’d feel like a painter contemplating a palette: lemon-colored squash, like little bananas, tiny burgundy beets all cunningly arranged in a bed of bright green parsley. In adjacent baskets, plump green butter lettuce just picked from the garden; huge bunches of red-stemmed Swiss chard, feathery bronze fennel, and silver-blue heads of cabbage. Miniature eggplants that tasted like melon and sweet thumbnail-sized golden tomatoes.

On either side, were the stalls of her friends Roz and Sandy. Sandy grew and sold herbs and different kinds of lavender. Roz made honey—clover, wild-flower and lavender, courtesy of hives from Sandy’s fields—and always had some hilarious story about bee-related mishaps. Rhea, the fourth member of the group they called Market Mamas, sold bread that she baked herself—intricately braided glossy brown baguettes, soft floury loaves. Rhea hadn’t been back to the market since Jenny died, but Zoe had started selling home-baked bread and donating the money to a fund established in Jenny’s name.

“Brett wishes I’d sell bread instead of vegetables,” she said now. “But check this out.” She grabbed the roll of flesh between the dirndl waist of her paisley skirt and the bottom of her white peasant blouse. “Molasses, oatmeal, raisin. I’ve got a pumpernickel loaf on each hip.”

“Jeez, I could have sworn that was the jelly doughnuts you talked us into eating this morning,” Sandy said.

“I talked you into eating jelly doughnuts?” Zoe scoffed. “My arm still has marks from your fingernails.”

“Just trying to get my share.” Sandy gestured with her coffee cup at a blond surfer type browsing at a nearby stall. “Thirty? Thirty-five?”

“Try nineteen,” Zoe said, taking a closer look. Checking out the passersby, specifically the reasonably attractive male passersby on this side of fifty—although they kept pushing up the age limit—was a favorite pastime. They were all divorced and, if not actively looking, at least appreciative. They all had kids, too, teenagers—which was mostly what they yakked about. Sandy’s oldest son, Brian, had just gone off to medical school where, according to his mother, he spent as much time chasing babes as he did earning his degree. Dr. Biff, Sandy called him— Biff, the nickname Zoe had always known him by. God, time flies, they were always saying. Before long, her own son would be going off to medical school. The thought always gave her a thrill—she’d be even more thrilled when Brett started getting serious about it, too, but that day would come.

Roz’s daughter had, according to Roz, little ambition other than to get married and have babies. Rhea’s Jenny had shared her mother’s passion for cooking and had been planning to attend culinary school. One of Zoe’s favorite memories was of walking into Rhea’s kitchen and seeing mother and daughter, their two dark heads almost touching, poring over a recipe, or giggling together over some culinary mishap. Since Jenny’s death, so many white hairs had sprouted in Rhea’s wiry dark hair that, from a distance, she seemed to have gone completely gray.

No one had confessed to it, of course, but Zoe had detected an almost palpable sense of relief when she’d told the others that Rhea wouldn’t be coming to the market for a while. They loved her like a sister and would do anything for her, but it sometimes seemed as though Rhea had contracted a contagious disease.

Would there ever be a time, Zoe wondered, when their thoughts wouldn’t inevitably end up with Jenny? For her own part, as soon as she started thinking about Rhea, her mind immediately turned to trying to figure out some way to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. And there was only one solution: the trauma center had to reopen. Everyone knew neurosurgeons made megabucks—more in a year than she’d make in a dozen, so how hard could it be to find a replacement? It seemed all wrong just to sit back and think, God, I hope nothing happens to my family.

“How much is the lettuce?” A woman in a straw hat and a diaphanous turquoise pantsuit interrupted Zoe’s reverie. Like a crane in a fun fair machine, one fat beringed hand swooped down on the lettuce, lifted it and dangled it between thumb and forefinger under Zoe’s nose.

“Seventy-five cents,” Zoe said.

“They’re selling iceberg three for a dollar at the stall down there.”

Zoe looked at her. “These aren’t iceberg.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Taste.” Zoe offered the woman the ice-chilled bowl of samples, and watched her nibble gingerly at a single lettuce leaf. Dying, Zoe just knew, to ask if it had been washed. “Pretty good, huh?”

The woman sniffed. “Can’t tell the difference, personally.”

“Then you should get the iceberg,” Zoe said.

The woman set the lettuce down and reached for another one. Holding it aloft, she inspected it from all angles.

It’s a damn lettuce, lady. “Picked just this morning,” she told the woman.

“So it’s two for a dollar-fifty?” the woman asked.

“Yep.” Zoe smiled at a couple of teenage girls who had stopped to sniff the pots of basil at the end of the table. “You like pesto?” she asked. “I’ve got a killer recipe.”

“Cool.” One of the girls picked up a pot and fished in the bulging straw bag she was carrying. “How much?”