Hap sometimes accompanied his grandfather to the clinic, and this time he’d dragged Stella along. Today there were several physicians from Hamilton Hospital, giving freely of their time along with a nurse practitioner, two RNs, a resident who staffed the small ER room, and a secretary named Ruth Holworthy, who all but ran the place.
“Hey, Doc,” Ruth called out as they entered the clinic. “I see you brought a couple of freeloaders along with you.”
“That’s right, Ruth,” the doctor said cheerfully. “My entourage. You two can sit out front and help Ruth,” Dr. Stewart told Stella and Hap. “Do whatever she tells you to do.”
“Good. No dealing with sick people.” Hap was pleased. Out in the waiting room an elderly man was coughing and there was a little girl who yowled as though she’d been stuck by a pin. “I can’t believe you came along. This place is not exactly a laugh riot.”
They were alphabetizing the Medicare forms Ruth had given them, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the rear of the office, beside the filing cabinets. The fluorescent light flickered and the yowling in the waiting room kept up, rising like a mini-siren.
“I’m not afraid of sick people,” Stella said. “That’s the difference between you and me.”
“I didn’t say I was afraid. It’s just that they’re so impossible to fix.” Everyone expected Hap to be a doctor, but he didn’t have the heart to deal with the frailties of human beings. “Being a physician is like working on a machine that keeps breaking down, time after time. It’s like a toaster than burns everything no matter what you do. Or a car that won’t start even if you jump the battery every single day. It’s a pointless battle if it’s one you can’t ever win.”
Clearly, Hap was thinking of his mother, who had died when he wasn’t much more than five. Hap had told Stella what he remembered most was picking violets with his mother, the scented kind that grew on the stretch of property between the Sparrows’ acreage and his grandfather’s house, beneath tall pine trees. A single image, that’s all he had left of her. Purple stars, Hap had told Stella one day when they were exploring Rebecca Sparrow’s laundry shed. They could see a bank of violets from a window which had never contained glass. That’s what they looked like.
“Some people are fixable,” Stella said stubbornly. “Plus, they’re more interesting than toasters.”
All the same, this discussion brought to mind the image of her grandmother covered with snow, unmoving in the garden. Stella shivered just thinking about it. People died, Hap was right, and so often there was nothing you could do about it. No cure could be given, no antidote was available. You simply had to give up hope when it came to some people. But not Hap. Stella wasn’t about to let anything happen to him. If she couldn’t be in love with him, she could at least protect him. She thought of the way he had confided in her while they sat close together in Rebecca’s shed, the look on his face when he spoke about violets. She thought about the way he’d been waiting for her on the first day of school, the way he’d grinned at her when she’d appeared round the corner, walking right toward him. Hap had told her he wished he had his camera with him at that moment; her expression, he swore, was that of a bird that had been trapped and could think only of how she might best escape.
That’s what Hap was interested in, photography. He had set up a darkroom in his grandfather’s basement, and wherever he went, he carried his camera along in his backpack. He had it with him now, an old Leica, that he used to take a shot of Ruth Holworthy.
“Cut that out,” Ruth called. “I’m working.”
“You’ll be happy when you see the print,” Hap called back.
“You should tell your grandfather you don’t want to be a doctor,” Stella advised. “Then he’ll stop dragging you here.”
Hap looked at her helplessly. “I can’t hurt his feelings.”
“Just tell him! He won’t break when he gets the news.”
There was a ruckus out in the waiting room, never a good sign.
“Shit,” Hap muttered. “I smell tragedy.”
“You kids stay right here,” Ruth Holworthy said in the no-nonsense tone of someone used to being obeyed. But Stella had no such intentions and she did no such thing. Instead, she trailed along behind Ruth, ignoring Hap as he grabbed for her arm and reminded her, “That means you.”
Out in the parking lot, there was an ambulance and several police cars. There had been an accident over on 95, a bad one, and the Hopewell Clinic had been the closest emergency stop. The paramedics came rushing through the waiting room, so that Stella was forced to jump back, out of their way. All the same, she had seen what was before them, the tragedy of the day: a young man on a stretcher, covered with blood, limbs mangled, who would die, not because of any of his obvious wounds, but because of a lacerated liver. And she had seen something more: as they were racing by her, Stella had looked into the young man’s eyes. For an instant, his eyes had focused and met hers.