The Bullet Read online

  It took a second, and then I got it. Even luxury hotels such as the St. Regis must see their share of the world’s oldest professionals. I had now waltzed in with a different man on my arm three mornings in a row. And today, Will and I were no doubt radiating the rumpled glow of two people who’ve just enjoyed great sex and little sleep. My poor waiter probably assumed I was a high-end hooker. A hooker whose services included a weird ritual of making her clients buy her pancakes afterward.

  “Your other friends?” Will asked after the waiter walked away.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Will raised his eyebrows, then let it drop. “How’s your neck?” he said instead.

  “Fine.” It was nearly true.

  “And your wrist?”

  I flexed it up and down. “The same. Sore.”

  He reached across the table and lifted my right arm to examine it. His fingers laced through mine, rotating my wrist in one direction and then the other. Tiny needles of pain shot out.

  “Ow. I told you. It’s sore.”

  “Just checking your range of motion.” He slid his hand out of mine, rested my arm back on the table, and traced a slow circle inside my wrist. “I gather this feels better.”

  “Mmm. Don’t start that again, or we’ll wind up back upstairs.”

  “Where you could demonstrate again for me what an astonishing range of motion you enjoy in other parts of your body.”

  I swatted him with my good hand. “Shhh!”

  “Sorry,” he said, not looking sorry at all. “So. Let’s see. We could talk about . . .” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “It’s a shame, actually, that we have to race back to Washington. I keep meaning to check out Turner Field one of these days.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Braves, silly. Home field for the Braves. The baseball team here in Atlanta.”

  I stifled a yawn. “They’re pretty good, right?”

  Will lit up. “Yeah, not bad. Just won their division.”

  “Did they win the World Series this year?” I asked by way of making conversation.

  “Did they win the World Series this year?” repeated Will, sitting back and staring at me in disbelief. “Tell me you didn’t just ask that. The World Series hasn’t happened yet. It starts next week. The Cards play the Dodgers tonight in St. Louis. And then tomorrow’s the American league, Red Sox versus the Tigers in Boston. Huge game. How can you not know that?”

  “But isn’t baseball a summer sport? Shouldn’t this be the off-­season?” This time I could not hold back a yawn. Baseball. Johnny Cash. Was there no end to the topics that animated this man and bored me senseless?

  Will was now gaping at me as if I were an alien just landed from Mars. “Are you actually American? Or do they brainwash you before they let you join the French Department, make you swear only to follow, I don’t know—competitive cheese eating? Escargot racing?”

  “The French are excellent at soccer. And tennis. Formula One racing. And . . . let’s see . . . pétanque.”

  “What the hell is pétanque?”

  “It’s, you know, like boules. You have metal balls, and you try to roll them as close as possible to a wooden ball, the cochonnet.”

  Will snorted. “I stand corrected. That sounds gripping.”

  “Oh, you’re impossible.”

  “Tell you what. How about, as a special treat, sort of a remedial educational service, we watch the World Series together? The opening game is on Wednesday. I’ll explain everything, teach you the mechanics of the game.”

  “Wow. That sounds . . . tempting.” My brothers have tried ­episo­dically over the years to educate me about baseball. They share a block of season tickets for the Nationals, Washington’s wildly popular franchise. Every once in a while—when enough time has elapsed that I’ve forgotten what torture it is to sit through nine innings—they persuade me to come along. Tony buys the beer while Martin devotes himself to explaining, for the umpteenth time, the difference between a player’s batting average and his on-base percentage. I remind him that I haven’t even mastered which is left field and which is right field. The only useful piece of information I’ve picked up is that section 109 is home to an outpost of Ben’s Chili Bowl, which sells a mean Half-Smoke.

  “So we’re on for Wednesday?” Will was waiting for an answer.

  “Sure. Okay. But not at some sports bar. Your place?”

  “No, let’s say yours.”

  “Deal.” Yes, that would be better. I could cook. I’d still be stuck watching baseball, but at least we would eat well.

  “I’ll bring scorecards, show you how to track all the stats.”

  “Now you’re pushing it.”

  He grinned and pushed back from the table. “At the risk of boring you further, would you excuse me a second? I’ve got a few voice mails I need to respond to. Be right back.”

  I watched him walk away with some relief. I needed a moment alone, to collect myself. What on earth was I doing here? With Will Zartman? With my physician, for God’s sake, in an Atlanta hotel, flirting over predawn pancakes? Clearly I was not myself. The last twenty-­four hours had brought a tumult of contradictory emotions: one minute found me weeping; the next, gobbling up jalapeño poppers and giggling like a schoolgirl. I wasn’t sure what I felt anymore, other than raw. It would take time to process everything I’d learned yesterday.

  And now this thing with Will. It was true: he wasn’t my type. But that didn’t seem to be preventing my feeling attracted to him. Will, the earnest, solicitous doctor in Washington? Him, I could resist. But this less predictable man, who’d flown to Atlanta on a whim and then kept me up all night—well, he was intriguing. I studied him as he wove through the restaurant, absorbed in his phone conversation. He was wearing the same Levi’s and cashmere sweater as before. The jeans hugged him in interesting places; maybe I liked the boot-cut look after all. This would be a ludicrous time to start a relationship. My whole world had just been upended. But no one ever argued that laws of reason and logic apply to the chemistry between a man and a woman. Will caught my eye from across the room and winked, held up one finger to indicate he would be just another minute.

  I winked back. It had been a while since I’d had a crush. You would think I’d be too old for such nonsense, that at thirty-seven I would have graduated to responding less like a teenage girl and more like a sensible woman approaching middle age.

  It was a pleasure to discover this was not the case.

  PART THREE

  Washington

  Twenty-one

  * * *

  Sibley Hospital is a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility set deep in well-tended lawns. It’s the kind of place that makes you grateful to live in twenty-first-century America. No one wants to suffer dire illness or injury, but should it happen—it’s reassuring to know that the best medical care money can buy exists right up the street.

  I’d never visited Sibley before. The elevator deposited me on the fifth floor. Hushed, carpeted corridors. A closed-in smell of disinfectant and dust, as though the air had been recycled many times. It must have been years since someone had thought to throw open a window. I found my way to the Division of Neurological Surgery, where the dimly lit, blue-and-green waiting room felt vaguely aquatic and was presumably meant to be calming. At three o’clock sharp a sturdy-looking nurse in scrubs called my name. We went through the usual routine, checking my weight (steady, despite the cheeseburger frenzy), my blood pressure, my temperature.

  “All right, then.” She peeled the pressure cuff off my arm and indicated for me to climb down from the examination table. “Let’s get this CT scan done and then you can relax a bit, while Dr. Gellert reads the results.”

  I looked up, startled. “A CT scan? Do I really need that?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Apparently you do.” She was already holding open
the door to the hallway.

  “But . . . hang on. I already got an MRI.”

  “CT’s different. Uses X-rays.”

  “I already got an X-ray, too.”

  “Not like this, you didn’t. This one, you lie flat and slide in. Then they take loads and loads of pictures. Slices. The doctors stack the slices on top of each other, and we can see your whole head in three-D. It’s cool, you’ll see.”

  I felt a stab of frustration. The afternoon would slip away; I had a pile of mail waiting at home for me, not to mention piles of laundry and no food in my fridge. “How long will it take?”

  “You’re gonna like this.”

  “I doubt that,” I whined.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Thirty seconds?”

  “New machine. I told you, it’s cool.”

  • • •

  THE THIRTY-SECOND ESTIMATE, of course, referred only to the time needed to perform the CT scan. The time needed to review the results was another matter. My nurse assured me that I’d been tagged an urgent priority. Still, it was pushing 5:30 p.m. and I had read Vogue cover to cover, called my mother, and placed an online grocery order with Safeway by the time Marshall Gellert strolled in.

  He was a slight, intense man in his fifties. He perched on the edge of a stool, scrutinizing me with hawklike eyes colored an almost-­otherworldly shade of blue. But what you noticed were his hands. They never ceased moving. As he spoke, they danced up and down his thighs, darted into his pocket, produced a pen, and twirled it across his knuckles in tight, precise loops. He seemed unaware. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Those fingers might soon be slicing a scalpel into my neck.

  “Dr. Zartman was adamant that I should see you immediately.”

  “He can be pushy that way.”

  The hawk eyes bore down. “I’ll admit it’s an extraordinary case. The survival rate for being shot in the head would be one in several thousand, at best.”

  I nodded. What could one say?

  “Extraordinary that your brain stem wasn’t injured. I’ve got your whole file.” He opened a purple folder on his lap. The profile from yester­day’s Journal-Constitution peeked out from near the bottom. He’d done his homework. “The cranial computed tomography indicates no neural damage. The foreign body is just below the left side of the foramen magnum—”

  I held up my hands. “In plain English, please?”

  “Sorry. The bullet’s one point three centimeters long. Roughly half an inch. Lodged below the opening where your spinal cord passes through and connects to your brain. Here we go.” Mounted on the wall beside us was a flatscreen monitor. Dr. Gellert reached over to flick it on. After a moment, the sharpest image I’d yet seen came into focus. A stark outline of my skull, my teeth, and the bullet, glowing white as usual.

  “What’s unclear is why it may have shifted after all these years. If indeed it has.”

  “Will thinks my spine has compressed.”

  “Will?”

  “Dr. Zartman, I mean.” I let my hair fall across my face to hide my blush.

  “Well, that’s a decent theory. At any rate, your symptoms certainly suggest movement of some sort. Which makes you a more urgent candidate for intervention than if it were causing you no trouble.”

  “Your advice, then, is to go ahead and remove it? But I’ve been told it’s surrounded by nerves and blood vessels.” I frowned at the screen. “Even to my untrained eye, it looks awfully close to my spinal cord.”

  “It couldn’t get much closer,” he agreed, a tad cheerfully for my liking. “Ms. Cashion, the truth is that with an injury like this, there are considerable risks to any course of action. Including leaving it put.” He flipped the pen behind his ear, wiggled and stretched his fingers. “I always like to look at comparables. Tricky in your case. As I said, the odds are maybe—maybe—one in five thousand that you should even be alive and walking this earth. Still, there are documented cases of people surviving gunshots to the neck or skull. I pulled some recent ones that may be instructive.”

  He plucked a photograph from the folder. It showed teenage boys in yellow jerseys, kicking a ball around a scrubby field. “A soccer team? I don’t follow.”

  “Bear with me. This is one of my favorites. It’s from June. This past summer. Those boys are playing on a field in Bosnia. Same field where an unfortunate goalkeeper was playing when he started complaining that his head hurt. Article cites a Sarajevo newspaper, says the goalie completed the match, but—I’m quoting here—‘He soon complained of a stiff arm and had difficulty speaking. He was driven to a local hospital, where doctors were shocked to see that a nine-millimeter bullet was clearly lodged in his skull.’

  “The good news is, he’s fine.” Dr. Gellert held the article out to me. “They got it out. But here’s my favorite detail: Local police arrested a guest at a nearby wedding. Guy thought it would be a good idea to celebrate by firing his pistol into the air. They found another twelve shells scattered around the soccer field. Could have wiped out the entire team. God love the Balkans.”

  I smiled politely and handed back the paper.

  He started stuffing it into the folder, then froze. “Hang on, I take it back. That’s not even the best bit. Listen to the kicker: ‘For the record, Krtalica only conceded one goal while playing with a bullet in his head.’ One goal! Can you beat that?” Dr. Gellert was clearly enjoying himself.

  I tried to steer the conversation back to my predicament. “Of course, that’s a totally different scenario from mine—”

  “Of course, of course.” Gellert cleared his throat. “And check the source: Yahoo News New Zealand. Perhaps not a paragon of accurate medical reporting. That’s the problem with most of the cases I turned up. They tend to happen in rural China, or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Impossible to authenticate. But, this one.” He shuffled through the folder again. “This one is interesting.”

  On the page before him were two black-and-white images that looked remarkably like the CT scan of my own head. A bright-white bullet, unmistakable, resting atop a neat stack of vertebrae.

  “New England Journal of Medicine,” said Gellert. “As reputable as you can get. Three years ago, this guy walks into a cardiology clinic in Moscow. He’s eighty-five years old, needs treatment for heart disease. The doctors spot something odd and ask him about it. The patient reveals that at the age of three, his older brother accidentally shot him with a pistol.”

  “Three? That’s the same age as I was.”

  “Mm-hmm. And same as you, he exhibited no clinical or radiographic evidence of neural damage. He was a successful engineer, won the Soviet State Prize. All while walking around with a bullet in his neck for . . . what would that be? Eighty-two years.”

  “So did they remove it?”

  “Nope. Didn’t seem to have done him any harm.”

  I shifted on my chair. “But you think I should remove mine.”

  “Look. Let me put this simply.” His fingers raced along the edge of the desk between us, back and forth, constant motion. “There’s a big difference between you and that Russian engineer. His bullet wasn’t bothering him. Yours is. Plus, you’re young and healthy. A much better candidate for surgery.”

  He walked me through what surgery would entail. One operation, lasting four to five hours. I pressed him for details, best- and worst-case scenarios. We talked for another thirty minutes.

  As I stood to leave, I posed the question that doctors must dread: What would he do if it were him? Or his daughter, or his wife?

  Marshall Gellert did not mince words. “If it were me, I’d want it out.”

  “I thought you would say that.”

  “Sorry to be predictable. You know what they say. Show a surgeon a problem, he’ll want to operate on it. It’s what we’re trained to do. But, Ms. Cashion? As an added bonus in your case, it’s also the righ
t thing to do.”

  I studied his eyes. Studied his hands. Felt myself arrive at a decision.

  “Will it come out intact? I’ll be able to keep it?”

  He looked at me strangely. “As a souvenir?”

  I thought of Beamer Beasley. Of the little house on Eulalia Road, and the horror that had played out there. As I’d slept on the plane this morning, I had dreamed of Sadie Rawson, of her smile—so like mine—beaming out from the faded newspaper photograph.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Twenty-two

  * * *

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2013

  I spent the weekend alone.

  I had let everything slide, and now I devoted myself to restoring a semblance of order to my life. Mail was sorted, houseplants watered, bills paid. I got the car washed and collected my dry cleaning. Will and I texted each other, flirty “thinking of you” messages. I phoned him on Saturday, but he did not come by, and I found that I was fine with that. The thing about being an introvert is that people get on your nerves after a while, even people you like. Whether Will could sense this, or whether he was just busy, I didn’t know. But after the demands of interacting with so many new people in Atlanta, I was grateful to retreat and spend time on my own.

  The exception to this—and one of the reasons I’d always considered myself closer to them than to anyone else—is my parents. They didn’t exhaust me the way other people did. Sunday afternoon I drove over and let myself in the kitchen door as usual. My mother cooked; my father leaned against the counter, scratched Hunt behind the ears, and chatted about the Le Carré novel he was reading. They seemed determined to carry on as though nothing had happened. To preserve the rhythms of our prior life. I understood. Informing this display of nonchalance was a desperate, almost tangible current of love. You could read in their eyes the words they were not saying out loud: You are our daughter, this is your home, nothing has changed.