Once a month, I made house visits. This was an arrangement that the doctor I had taken over the practice from had with some of the patients who preferred not to make the drive to Chapin, patients that would not otherwise see a doctor. These visits took me to the more rural parts, deep in the woods where the houses were spread out, sometimes by half a mile or more. A lot of the people lived as off the grid as they could, and even coming to town for a doctor’s visit was more than they wanted to do.
My first stop took me deep into the woods, near the foot of Bear Claw Ridge. The house was really a log cabin, set deep in the pine trees. There were two cars parked in the gravel driveway when I got there, and there was a woman getting out of one of them.
I recognized the woman as soon as I go out of the car, but by then, it was too late to get in and drive away. Plus, I had to see the patient, Mr. Geary. But what was Sam’s sister doing here? For a second, I couldn’t remember her name, but then it came back to me: Shannon.
“What are you doing here?” she asked when she saw me, her eyes narrowing.
I regarded her. “I could ask the same of you.”
“I’m Mr. Geary’s home health aide.”
“You are?”
“I just started a few weeks ago.”
“I’m his doctor.”
“I didn’t know that. I don’t know if I should even be around you right now. I don’t know if that would be a good idea.”
“If you’d feel more comfortable waiting outside while I go in with Mr. Geary, you can. But that’s not necessary.”
She was giving me a wary look. “I’m not sure about that.”
“I think we can be professional, don’t you? I’d like to think that everything that has happened is in the past now and that we can all move on.”
We stood there for a moment, neither of us saying anything.
“That’s easy for you to say,” she finally said.
“It’s not, actually. You seem to forget that Marissa was my sister.”
“Yeah, and my brother loved her more than he even loved himself. And your sister was a damn good person, which is surprising considering the family that she comes from. You
and your parents just couldn’t get past the idea that she might end up with someone who wasn’t from the same fucking socioeconomic class as you. You guys couldn’t stand the idea.”
“That’s not true,” I said, all the while feeling surprised that someone like Shannon would even know the word socioeconomic. I sighed. “Look, Shannon, I just came out here to do my job, okay? I’m not trying to start anything with you, I’m not trying to reopen old wounds, I’m not—”
“There are no wounds to reopen,” she snapped. “Because they never healed in the first place! How can they heal when we have to deal with what you did to our family every single day of the year? Yeah, your sister died, and you can go visit her grave and remember her on her birthday and during the holidays, and then the rest of the time you can get on with your life. But Sam didn’t die—his whole life just got completely destroyed because of you.”
Somewhere above us, I heard a chickadee. The wind ruffled the white pines; the sun dappled the ground. Mr. Geary was probably sitting inside, wondering what the hell I was doing out here, wondering what Shannon and I were talking about. The thing was, she was right—her brother’s life did get completely upended because of me, though that hadn’t been my intention. My intention had been to give him enough of an ass-kicking that he’d get the idea through his head to leave my sister alone, that he’d decide dating her simply wasn’t worth it if he had to deal with me.
But Sam, I had underestimated. He was wiry, not very muscular, but somehow quick and very strong, and though I’d been expecting him to fight back a little, he had gone all out, bruising my ribs and splitting my lip.
“Your brother was a drug addict,” I said. “A drug addict who also got my sister addicted to drugs.”
“So you’re blaming him. This is all his fault. He ended up addicted to drugs because a fucking doctor prescribed him Oxys. He put his trust in a doctor and got completely screwed over, and then another doctor comes along and beats him within an inch of his life.”
Maybe you could just...rough him up a little. That was how my mother had put it when she came to me that night. Your father doesn’t know that I’m talking to you about this, she’d said. He wouldn’t be okay with this sort of thing at all, you know that. But what else can we do, Cole? What other choice do we have?
No other choice, really. I knew that my parents had tried to pay Sam off. Unbeknownst to my sister, they’d given him $4,000 in cash—probably more cash than anyone in his family had ever seen at one time—if he would just disappear from my sister’s life. Had they told me they were going to do such a thing, I would have told them not to, because all Sam was going to do would be to buy drugs with it. Marissa had only just started using at that point; it was still early enough that she could’ve gotten clean without being sent off to rehab. But with Sam’s newfound wealth, the two of them were able to take off, hole up in a cabin somewhere for a few months, and have all the drugs they wanted. When Marissa finally reappeared again, she was hooked, and it was because they’d been able to afford all those drugs with the money my parents had given them.
And so my mother, my prim and proper mother who objected to the use of pesticides on the front lawn because it would kill the earthworms, had come to me that one night, at her wit’s end, not knowing what else to do.
And I had agreed, because I thought a good ass-kicking would make Sam realize that dating my sister came with too much shit for him to deal with.
I was wrong, though.
My parents hired the state’s top criminal defense attorney, and the charges against me were dropped, Marissa was sent away to detox, and we thought that we’d be able to begin the healing process.