“You have a good evening now.” Brady headed down the corridor. His encounter with Martha had scared him off small talk for the night.
The hall was windowless, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling that made shadows seem to disappear and turned faces hard. He said hello as he passed a cleaning lady. The floor was bland asphalt tiles. The walls were a faded mauve.
He turned into another, shorter hall that led to a tunnel connecting the smaller professional center to the hospital. At the tunnel’s end, he took the stairs to the second floor. He inserted his key card into the door and went into the empty waiting room. He passed reception, the records room, examining rooms, the offices of the other doctors in the practice before coming to his own. He unlocked the door, seeing the charts piled on top of the corner file cabinet. Several white lab jackets on wire hangers hung from the coatrack next to the cabinet. The blinds were drawn. Beneath the room’s only window was a sofa he’d never rested on.
He set down his briefcase and grabbed a handful of charts. Sitting at his desk, he took a microcassette recorder and some pens and pencils out of the top drawer.
He looked at the charts before him and heaved a deep breath. Heaven was gone. Here, even behind the office’s closed door, he could only smell the bitter scent of sickness, the false lemon of antiseptic.
He’d thought he would get used to it. He never had. Each time, whether in his office or the operating room, it was still a shock—the compressed smells, the soundless slice into skin, the easy break of bone. It scared the hell out of him. But what had scared him the most was his own fear—the feeling of being vulnerable, not in control. And so, he’d had no choice but to specialize in surgery.
He opened a chart but didn’t look at it. The walls of his office were the same nonthreatening color as throughout the hospital. The lighting was surreal. The linens in the exam rooms and everywhere else were an innocuous white. The beds were metal. The gowns were thin and fashioned to expose.
He thought of the flower shop with its color, its life, and suddenly he longed for its quiet. It wasn’t the eerie quiet of the hospital but a calm, content silence. A quiet one would imagine to be in the paradise The Garden was named after.
He’d gone there on a whim. That had been the beginning, the first spontaneous act in an otherwise orderly life. It had been the soulless month of February. He’d been walking home, tired, frustrated, wondering if there was a world where there were no Februarys. He’d been thinking of a patient, a woman all alone, old, frail, arthritis ballooning her fingers, curving them at odd angles so that even holding a cup became a feat.
She’d come in with a hip fracture and her whole life in a worn black leather pocketbook. Her history showed several ministrokes. She’d be transferred to a nursing home as soon as a bed opened up. All day, through rounds, meetings, consultations, Brady had thought of that woman, sitting alone in her thin-mattressed bed, staring, her mauve walls bare as she moved more toward death than life. They’d done all they could for her medically. Still he’d wanted to do more. Some would say he did enough every day with his prescriptions and sutures and killer smile. For him, it wasn’t enough any longer.
That evening he’d walked the few blocks from the hospital to home, passing The Garden of Eden. In the front windows there’d been flowers from winter-whites and palest pastels to summer brights and heady deep tones the color of ecstasy. He’d stopped. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the lipstick-red so startling at the ends of the tulips’ yellow petals. Maybe it was the spray of baby’s breath like the first snow. Maybe it was nothing more than to stand somewhere and see only color and life. He had no reason, but he went to the door. Just to look around inside a few minutes, he had told himself as he’d turned the knob. It had been locked, but as he turned to go, the door had opened. Eden had seen him at the windows and had unlocked the door. Finally he was inside, his steps too quick, the charcoal-gray of his suit too drab. Yet the scents lured him, kept him long. And there’d been Eden with her own soft style and extraordinary eyes. She had said a few words in her quiet way, then leaned toward him as if only wanting to listen. And he, who never revealed, had told her about the elderly patient alone in the empty, faded room. By the time he’d left, he’d ordered an extravagant arrangement to be sent anonymously to the woman. He’d also felt better than he could ever remember.
The next day he’d stopped by the shop again after hours and had another lavish bouquet sent to the woman, then another and another, filling her room with flowers until even the other patients, visitors and nurses stopped as they passed and sighed with pleasure.
The woman had died at the end of the week—pneumonia complications—but Brady knew she had died surrounded by life and color and beauty and the thought that somebody cared. She hadn’t died like his mother, her smile not being seen again by those who needed to see it most.
Now Brady sent flowers almost every other day. There was always someone alone or sick or with a heavy heart. The deliveries were never signed. The flowers were always ordered after hours. Brady wouldn’t jeopardize his patients’ confidence or the hospital staff’s respect by being anything other than the strong, sensible, self-sufficient surgeon they expected. He had learned at the age of eleven never to expose your weaknesses. And he never had…until he’d gone to Eden.
Chapter Two
Cookies. Brady smelled cookies. Mixed in with the rose and the lavender, the sandalwood and the gardenia, there was cinnamon, melting sugar and a richness so dense, the air around him seemed thick.
“Eden,” he called, his voice sounding slow and full in the fat air.
“Hello, Brady.”
He looked to the right, past the deep stainless steel sink and the crowded shelves to the stairs that led to the second floor. On the landing two big fuzzy bumblebees, their antennae bobbing, greeted him. From the whimsical slippers, Eden’s thin, bare legs stretched up like lollipop sticks into baggy shorts beneath an oversize cotton shirt. Her hair was pulled back, twisted up high and tight into a knot, except for two ends that had broken free. They stuck up like the rabbit ears children sneak behind another’s head in a photo. She came down the stairs fast and, at the bottom, paused, panting. She smiled, a faint pink in her cheeks and her eyes the deep purple of dawn. He wanted to kiss her so badly, he could almost taste her like the promise of cookies that came down the stairwell. He wanted to take her right there on the softly lit stairs with the swirl of smells around them.
Great. He’d gone from leering at Eden to seeing her stretched out, waiting for him on the staircase. Guilt grabbed him, gave him a hard shake. Shame came next. This was Eden—sweet, awkward Eden who taught the ladies auxiliary how to make balsam wreaths for the Christmas bazaar and made sure Guy Teator, the oldest resident of Worthington House but still the snappiest dresser in Tyler, always had a fresh boutonniere, free of charge.
She was in no way the type of woman that normally drew his attention. He preferred a more sophisticated type of woman. A woman with more curves, with artfully curled hair and carefully chosen clothes. A worldly, ambitious woman who enjoyed a relationship based on mutual respect and physical pleasures. A woman who didn’t expect a long-term commitment.
Eden wasn’t that type of woman.
He saw her spindly legs, her knees as he’d imagined, hard and round as apples picked too early. No, Eden was the opposite of the woman he usually dated.
Eden was the type of girl who’d fall in love.
He was staring again. Eden looked at her oversize bee slippers. Could she blame him? Had she really imagined desire in those jade green eyes? This had to stop. She had to stop.
Yet she said, “I baked cookies.”
“I shouldn’t have come.” He spoke in the tone of a man who was listened to, but he was leaning on the edge of the sink where the flowers were processed. “It’s too late. I’ve kept you up.”
“They’re oatmeal chocolate butterscotch.” A buzzer sounded from the second floor. “Oops,