He often pondered an existence in which he’d never met Donna, never married her. It had been a slippery slope lately, one he tried to avoid, but it was a thought he had been entertaining. Say, if he had married another woman. Become a father to another woman’s children. He didn’t want to think of Penelope as not having come into existence, yet here he was, wondering what his life might have been like without her or her mother.
Edward accelerated. Suddenly he couldn’t get away from Shadow Garden fast enough. He had no clue if he was doing the right thing—he had just dropped off his wife like a pesky relative who had overstayed her welcome—and just like that, guilt saw an opening and swooped in, and a fair share of guilt at that. He couldn’t help but think he should have known, seen the signs.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
* * *
• • •
It all started out with so much hope. He had met Donna in the ER at Houston Methodist, where he worked as an intern. When he rubbed the stethoscope on his thigh to warm it up, her childlike voice spoke of flu symptoms: cough, aches, nausea, fatigue, and a fever. He observed her being short of breath and she complained of short and stabby chest pain. An X-ray showed atypical pneumonia and he treated her with antibiotics. Donna caught his eye not because she was beautiful but because, though she was flushed and coughing and unable to keep food down, she was looking to him to make her well. He had made people well before, as much as an intern can whose every diagnosis and test is signed off by a resident, yet he caught himself checking in on her more often than he had to.
It wasn’t a grandiose and sweeping love affair, Edward wasn’t looking for that, figured what came on quickly and powerfully waned just as fast, while slow and steady would win the race. The relationship began with a natural ease, revolved from acquaintances to friends, from friends to lovers, though it took them a year to become a couple. They married informally at a justice of the peace. No family attended.
He had wondered about that often, why they didn’t have a big wedding with family and cousins and people flying in from all over the country. To his recollection, Donna said she needed time to plan the wedding but then came the residency, and Penelope’s birth, the move to Florida, the modest house they bought, and then she seemed to have lost interest. How could she have been such a frugal and pragmatic person then, compared to the woman who ended up throwing parties with tents and caterers and valet parking? Once he generated a fortune, she was all about showing it off, had the mentality of someone winning the lottery just to end up destitute within two years’ time. It was a gradual change, he liked to think, and therefore it was hard to pinpoint the moment she changed, and he often saw himself as a lobster in cold water and Donna turned on the burner and he happily drifted off into a stupor.
Edward had learned a lot about himself when he became a father. The way the world tilted the moment he held Penelope, the vulnerability six pounds of flesh created inside of him, a helpless bundle wrapped in a generic hospital blanket, a milky white synthetic material with thin stripes in blue and pink. Her mere existence opened him up to so much more than anything he had experienced thus far. But his love for his daughter was complicated by the detachment he had cultivated and refined over the years. It was not something that had come easy to him, it was a rather unnatural skill, he was not not compassionate, but he had to learn to suppress this innate sympathy. It had taken him years to get to that point but he eventually came to see death as the result of a disease and not of the care he gave.
Edward balanced on that fence for a while—the detachment on one side, this crushing love for his daughter on the other. It was impossible to teeter back and forth between those extremes. The physician in him was trained to disconnect and though it was useful and necessary, he might have taken it too far. He ended up with a limited capacity for caring altogether and a sense of distance snuck between him and the rest of the world and ultimately Penelope got caught up in that. One day he awoke and no longer embodied his role as a father.
Though he blamed Donna for monopolizing Penelope, it wasn’t up to her to foster their father-daughter relationship, but he knew it was the sting of I’m-not-a-perfect-father that made him fault her. He knew that about himself but he didn’t want to admit it to Donna, didn’t want to complain, saw it as some kind of ungratefulness—because look at what they had achieved, look at this life, this house, the cabin by the lake, the cars, the money, their standing in the community.
He’d achieved his status by choosing detachment from those around him, coupled with an innate need for proficiency, and add to that his curiosity, his way of wanting to get things done faster and more efficiently. That was what had led to his patents and one day he realized he had made a name not only in the community but worldwide, was asked to speak at international medical conferences, and was given awards. He was a success, he had arrived.
He was man enough to admit the sacrifices he’d made to himself but Donna was a different story altogether. The past couple of years or so distrust had crept in and burrowed itself a den. Donna told little lies Edward ignored for the most part, and when he did ask her about inconsistencies—money she’d spent or another renovation she didn’t tell him about, issues concerning Penelope—she blamed it on absentmindedness and maybe she was a bit of an airhead after all, something his mother had alluded to. But when did all this mistrust start? This deeply entrenched wariness he felt toward Donna, it couldn’t have been that far back—or could it? This needle was hard to thread.
Here he was again, obsessing about Donna when he should have . . . Then the thought comes, a good-for-the-goose-good-for-the-gander moment; maybe he too had been taught to look the other way, like his parents did when it came to George, his brother, who gambled and had more money problems than anyone cared to admit. One of his sisters, Debbie, had problems too, but no one ever acknowledged that either. She was an alcoholic, had been sober for decades now, but back then they all looked the other way. Had he and Donna brought their own little carry-on baggage to this marriage, were they both to blame? All along he thought this life had come with some sort of a guarantee, and it wasn’t until he left Shadow Garden and Donna behind that he understood his limitations.
Edward took a deep breath and straightened his tie by slowly running his hand from knot to tip. How eager he had been all these years to stay trim and fit and how loose the fitted shirt was now. Nothing was right, not his clothes, not his life. Not this car, the house. It had all become ill fitting. Disengage, he told himself. It’s done. Disengage and separate.
Except, he couldn’t free himself of Donna. She tore at him. The way she had clowned around even on the ride to Shadow Garden, how she cracked jokes about everything. Old shrew this and weeping hag that. It was all a joke to her. One big goddamn joke.
He floored the gas pedal, turned onto the highway, and true to its German origins, the car remained stable even as he accelerated way beyond the speed limit. The signs flew by, cars honked at him or hastily switched lanes to allow him to pass. When he reached the underground toll lane, the concrete barriers propelling him forward like chutes, he felt a sense of calmness. Just a twitch of his arm and the car would turn and collide with the concrete wall and that would be the end of it. Nothing lives that hits concrete at this high a speed. He wasn’t planning on doing just that, but it felt good to know the tunnel wasn’t going anywhere.