Square in the Face Read online

  Gingerly, she examined her injured ankle. Before she had gone to bed, Claire had used her bathrobe sash to wrap an ice pack around her ankle, but some time in the night it must have come loose. Her ankle was now streaked with purple, and swollen to twice its normal size. Sucking in her breath, Claire probed the worst of the swelling. There wasn’t even the slightest dimple to show where her ankle was. Maybe she had broken it. She tentatively tried wiggling her toes, then rotating her foot. Everything seemed to be working, albeit reluctantly. Somewhere, though, she remembered reading that the ability to wiggle something didn’t necessarily mean you hadn’t broken it.

  Claire scooted over to the bottom bedpost and pulled herself upright, standing on just her right foot. Slowly, she tried to transfer some of her weight to her left foot, but it hurt too much. It was clear that she wasn’t going to be walking out of her room any time soon. She sat down on the floor again.

  “Charlie?” Claire waited a minute, then called out again, louder this time. “Charlie?” Then she remembered. Twice a week, Charlie took private lessons at Valley Ice. Claire occasionally accompanied her for the simple pleasure of watching her roommate practice. Dressed in a black unitard worn under a sheer black skirt, Charlie would stroke calmly down the ice, her hands clasped behind her back. One foot spoke and the other answered, the sound like a knife on a whetstone. If Charlie stopped for breakfast at Marcos Cafe afterward, as she liked to do, it might be several hours before she came home. Claire looked down at her ankle again. Was it her imagination, or was it even puffier than it had been a few minutes before?

  It was clear she needed a doctor. Doctor. That gave her an idea. Maybe she could kill two birds with one stone. After all, who would be more likely to know about the Bradford Clinic than another doctor? Claire reached for her backpack, which was hooked over the bed post. She’d started carrying a backpack when she rode the bus. It held more and kept her hands free. People teased her about it, but they always came to her for what they needed - moist towelettes, a sewing kit, Band-Aids, aspirin. Her hand closed around her little red address book. With a slow series of hitches, she scooted backward until she could reach the phone on the bedside table.

  It was answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?” The voice was draggy with sleep. Claire looked at her watch and realized it wasn’t even eight yet.

  “Dr. Gregory?”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t sounding any more cheerful.

  “This is Claire Montrose. I’m sorry to be calling you at home, but I remembered that you gave me your number and said I could call any time...” She was talking too fast.

  “Claire Montrose? You should have said so in the beginning.” His voice had warmed up. “What’s up? You know I always enjoy a call from a famous sleuth.”

  “Oh, my fifteen minutes of fame are long over.” Claire’s discovery of the long-lost painting had been just the kind of thing the tabloid TV shows loved - especially when her efforts to find its rightful owner had inadvertently resulted in further thievery as well as kidnapping and murder. “Anyway, the reason I’m calling you is kind of embarrassing....”

  “It can’t be as bad as some of those license plate requests you used to ask me about. All those slang words for body parts. Or is that what you are calling about? Have you gone back to work at Specialty Plates?”

  Michael Gregory, MD, was Claire’s doctor. To take her mind off her Pap smear a few years back, Claire had cast about for a source of conversation. On the counter she caught sight of the New York Times crossword puzzle - completed in ink. Dr. Gregory revealed that his avocation was all kinds of word puzzles: crosswords, puns, Scrabble. He also told Claire that he collected heteronyms, which were, he explained, words that were spelled the same, pronounced differently and had a different meaning. Sow as in pig and sow as in plant. Claire thought for a minute, then asked if wound was on the list - and made a friend for life.

  In return, Claire had asked if she could add Dr. Gregory’s name to her Rolodex. Vanity license plate requests often contained what turned out to be slang or Latin for various bodily parts, functions or secretions. More than a few words and phrases had been added to the department’s Vulgar List after Claire had found out from Dr. Gregory exactly what they meant.

  “No, I’ll never go back to Specialty Plates,” Claire said now. “This is more in your capacity as my physician.”

  “Is that all I am to you?” Dr. Gregory was a consummate flirt, but since he seemed to treat any female between sixteen and ninety-six the same way, Claire didn’t take it personally. He gave a mock-tragic sigh. “Ask away.”

  “I sprained my ankle running yesterday afternoon, and it seems that it’s gotten a lot worse overnight. In fact,” Claire looked at her ankle dubiously, “it seems to be getting more swollen by the minute. I can’t put any weight on that foot and my toes feel sort of tingly. I’m beginning to wonder if I might have broken something. Charlie’s not going to be back for a couple of hours. Do you think I should call an ambulance - or can it wait until she gets back? I don’t know how much more give my skin has in it.”

  “Don’t call an ambulance. You don’t want to have to pay seven hundred dollars out of your own pocket. I’ll come by and take a look at it. If it looks broken, I’ll take you in for an X-ray.”

  After some protesting, Claire agreed. Even though he wasn’t much over forty, Dr. Gregory was the last of the old-time physicians, the ones who made house calls and treated three generations of one family. He probably even accepted sacks of potatoes and live chickens in payment. He was like a modern Dr. Welby - only instead of a graying man with a fatherly smile, he had warm green eyes and tightly curled honey blonde hair. He kept a small office in the Multnomah Village neighborhood, with only a part-time nurse. “Sure, I could work myself into the ground and make four hundred thousand dollars a year, but for what?” he had told Claire once. “This way I get to make a decent living, be my own boss, and still have time to go hiking.”

  Only after she had hung up the phone did Claire realize she was still wearing what she had worn to bed - nothing.

  Pulling herself upright, Claire began to hop slowly toward her closet. Hopping was an even more ridiculous mode of transportation than she had imagined. She was able to advance only a few inches with each hop, and every time she landed it sent a thrill of pain through her dangling injured ankle. Normally, she enjoyed the long narrow expanse of her bedroom - it ran the full width of the house - but now it seemed endless. And when had her room gotten to be such a mess? She had to maneuver around a pair of Birkenstocks, a mystery novel she had started a few days ago, and a pile of clothes she had been meaning to take down to the basement laundry room.

  By the time she made it to her closet, Claire was exhausted. Learning against the door frame, she pulled a black cotton-knit dress from the hanger. It was the dress version of a T-shirt, with long sleeves and a hem that ended just above her ankles. Her dresser - and underwear drawer - was about a hundred hops away. Then Claire imagined Dr. Gregory kneeling before her, assessing her ankle, and then noticing he had a clear shot of her crotch. Maybe she could skip the bra, but panties were a must. She had just finished struggling into a pair of cotton panties when the doorbell rang.

  Claire hopped over to the window and pulled aside the curtain. There was Dr. Gregory’s little red Mazda Miata parked in the driveway, behind Claire’s infinitely less eye-catching ten-year-old tan Mazda 323 econo-box. And there was Dr. Gregory himself, holding a black doctor’s bag. He waved up at her.

  “Come on in!” Claire shouted after she had opened the window.

  He motioned toward the door. “The door’s locked.”

  Claire made a face. How long would it take her to hop down the stairs? “This may take a minute.”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Don’t you have a key hidden under the welcome mat or anything?”

  She shook her head. And then remembered the backpack that was still looped over the bedpost. “Wait - I forgot. I do have a key up
here.”

  He fumbled the ring when she tossed it down, then recovered. “I’ll be up in just a second.”

  When she heard Dr. Gregory’s footsteps on the stairs, Claire called out, “I’m in here.” He opened the door, and she saw that his hair was still a little damp in back from his shower. Claire ran into Dr. Gregory outside his office all the time - lifting weights next to her at the MJCC, getting a latte from Village Coffee, petting the resident black cat at Annie Bloom’s Books - but still, it felt oddly intimate to have him in her bedroom. He was dressed in an expensive outdoorsy way that would never actually work in the real outdoors. His Hilfiger jeans were too snug, and his moss-green long-sleeved polo shirt was made of pima cotton too light to keep out even a faint breeze.

  “Let’s have a look, then.” He knelt at her feet, and Claire was glad she had remembered to put on panties. His cool fingers stroked her ankle and calf as he talked to her, reinforcing the oddly personal nature of his profession. On Claire’s last birthday, Charlie had given her a gift certificate for a massage. It had been the same sort of thing, professional hands paid to touch in places and ways that you would normally slap a stranger for.

  “I thought of the best heteronym yet,” she said, as he flexed her foot.

  His eyes were on her ankle, evaluating its range of motion. “Does this hurt?” He pushed until her toes pointed back at her. His nails were perfect, capped in white new moons and buffed to a discreet shine. It probably didn’t pay to be a doctor with dirty fingernails.

  “No more than anything else.”

  “How about this?”

  Claire shook her head. From this angle she could see that Dr. Gregory must have grown up poor. His top teeth were white, even and shining - and certainly capped, Claire realized, as she glimpsed the jumble of gray and yellow lower teeth, normally hidden by their spiffed-up brethren and his lower lip.

  “What was the word you thought of?”

  “Slough as in slough of despond, and slough, as in this loofah will slough off dead skin cells.” She pronounced the first word slau and the second one sluff.

  The skin around his green eyes crinkled as he smiled. “That’s great. And I don’t have it on my list.” Dr. Gregory sat back on his heels and cradled her foot in his hands. “Well, what we have here is pretty simple. You’ve sprained your ankle. You’ve torn and twisted a lot of ligaments right here,” he trailed a finger across the puffiest part, “but nothing is broken. You won’t need a cast, but you will need to take it easy for a while.” He picked up his black bag, unzipped it and pulled out an Ace bandage. “Now watch how I wrap this.”

  “What about running? I’ve been running five miles nearly every day.”

  “This is going to put a crimp in it, I’m afraid.”

  Running was the only reason Claire was still able to eat Doritos and not have the thighs to show for it. “For how long?”

  “Take it easy for a week, and then after that you can gradually start running again.” He saw the frown cross her face. “The better you take care of your ankle now, the sooner you’ll be lacing up your Nikes. You can speed the healing by keeping your foot elevated for the rest of the day. In fact, let’s get that foot elevated right now.” He stood up and helped Claire to her feet - or foot. Before she knew what he was doing, he had bent down, hooked one arm under her knees and hoisted her in his arms.

  “Hey!” Claire protested. “You don’t need to do this.” Underneath the cotton of his polo shirt she could feel the hard muscles in his chest. Was that the reason he had picked her up, to sneak in a little physical contact?

  A little huff of exertion brushed past her ear as Dr. Gregory settled her down on the bed. Claire pulled her dress back over her knees as he sat down at the foot of the bed. “I want you to take it easy, not be hopping all over your bedroom. I’m going to put an ice pack on you, and I want you to promise you won’t stir for the rest of the day. If I know Charlie, she will want to wait on you hand and foot. And if I know you, you won’t want to let her. You’re hereby under doctor’s orders to let her. Here,” he said as he bent down to retrieve the mystery novel from the floor and then handed it to her, “this should help you stay entertained until she gets back. Why don’t you spend the next couple of hours seeing if you can figure out the solution before the main character does?”

  The mystery novel gave Claire just the in she was looking for. “Speaking of solving mysteries, have you ever heard of the Bradford Clinic?”

  Dr. Gregory didn’t answer her right away. Instead, he took an instant ice pack from his pack, broke it open and then draped it over ankle. When he looked over at her, his green eyes were thoughtful. “Why do you want to know? Are you pregnant, Claire?”

  Claire was surprised to feel herself flush. “No, no, I’m not asking for me. So you have heard of it?”

  “In my line of work, everyone knows the good doctor Bradford. Do you know someone who wants to adopt? I’ll warn you, he’s not cheap. But he can come through for parents who may not otherwise qualify.”

  “ Look, I ‘m not pregnant and I don’t know anyone who wants to adopt. It’s kind of an unusual problem. About ten years ago, my friend had a baby at that clinic. You know how it works, right? You give up all rights to contact the child.” He nodded. “But see, now she has another child, Zach, and he’s got leukemia. He may need a bone marrow transplant, but there’s no match in the national registry.”

  Dr. Gregory’s reply was carefully phrased. “Does she know that even if she does find the child, the chances of a half-sibling matching aren’t much better than an unrelated donor?”

  “That’s the thing. The baby she gave up and Zach - the child she has now - both have the same father. Lori and Havi broke up around the time she got pregnant and then got back together a few years later. They have another child, too, a little older than Zach, but he doesn’t match. They’ve thought about trying to conceive another child as a possible match, but the doctor says there’s no time.”

  “Who’s the pediatric oncologist?”

  “Dr. Preston.”

  “I’ve heard he’s a good man. I’m sure he’s doing everything he can. But as for Dr. Bradford, that’s a tricky one.” Dr. Gregory seemed to be thinking something over. His voice dropped. “This is all off the record, right?”

  “Record, what record? This is just me, Claire Montrose, talking in my” - she was about to say bedroom, but switched it to -”house.”

  “I’ve heard that he’s been up before the board several times, but ultimately nothing ever came of it.”

  “The board?”

  “Of medical examiners. There’s been a few complaints about his clinic over the years. Not as many as you might think, even though he runs a fairly unorthodox set-up. But there’s so much money involved that all the parties have some incentive to look the other way.”

  “If there’s a lot of money involved, isn’t that getting pretty close to buying a baby? And isn’t that illegal?”

  “Tell that to the person who pays fifteen thousand dollars for an adoption.”

  “Fifteen thousand?” Claire echoed.

  “That’s how much one of my patients just paid for a one-year-old girl in an open adoption. The child’s mother was a stripper with a taste for meth, so my patient is paying a lot of money for a baby that may or may not have been born drug-addicted, and quite probably spent her first formative months in a less than ideal environment. And my patient got that baby through a strictly legitimate agency. Now just imagine how much someone would be willing to pay for a brand spanking new - excuse the pun - white baby, certified drug-free, whose birth parents are guaranteed to be college students with above average IQs. And on top of that, the baby comes with absolutely no strings attached, no birth mother who’s going to want to stay in the picture. How much would that be worth to someone?” He answered his own question. “I think Dr. Bradford’s prices start at one-hundred thousand dollars.”

  Claire realized there was something wrong with his scena
rio. “But my friend’s husband wasn’t in college. Havi’s smart, but he never went past high school. When the baby was born, he was in the Army.”

  “And maybe the good doctor told the adoptive parents that. And maybe he didn’t. There have been rumors around for years that Dr. Bradford might play a little fast and loose with the truth, especially when it’s to his benefit. One thing nobody doubts, though, is that he cuts all ties between the biological parents and the adoptive parents. Nobody knows except Dr. Bradford, and he’s not telling.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “I think in this state that women have three months after the birth to change their minds about giving up a baby, but I don’t know how well he explains that to them. And with the kind of money he has to hand out, a lot of these girls probably don’t care. Whatever goes on at Dr. Bradford’s clinic might be what libertarians like to call victimless crimes. The parents get the baby they always wanted. The girl gets a free education and the knowledge that her child is getting a better life than she could ever give it. And Dr. Bradford gets some money. So everyone’s happy.”

  “How come you know so much?”

  Dr. Gregory looked away from Claire. He pinched the end of his nose. “I may have referred a girl or two to him. Say a good Catholic girl comes in, wondering how come she hasn’t had her period in three months. A little girl from Burns, Oregon, never been in the big city before, now she’s a wide-eyed freshman at Portland State who forgot to say her Hail Marys and keep her legs crossed.”

  “And a girl like that probably wouldn’t believe in abortion,” Claire continued for him, although it went against her personal beliefs to call anyone over the age of sixteen a girl.

  “Exactly. Dr. Bradford offers her a way out besides choosing between an abortion or quitting school to raise her kid.” Dr. Gregory leaned over to pick up his bag, then stood up. “Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”