The Look of Love. Jill Egizii

kill me that is…”

      He rambles on and on as she shakes violently willing her eyes to stay glued to the black road ahead of her.

      Their arrival at the emergency room is a blur of noise, rushing bodies, endless questions, and papers to sign. Doctor Cudahy has a room staked out in Emergency, prepped and ready for Erik’s privacy and comfort. Doc Cudahy insists Anna leave the room while he assesses the damage. As she turns to leave she sees Erik whispering in Doc Cudahy’s ear. Outside Anna slumps in a plastic chair facing the nurse’s station. She stares at the wall covered in preventative propaganda. “Never shake a baby,” warns one particularly graphic poster tacked up among many. The idea of shaking draws her attention to her still trembling hands which to her surprise are covered in blood and various unidentifiable fluids of life.

      Her hands shake more violently as her gaze travels up her arms. She examines her sweater and the front of her jeans to discover she is smeared in the rust ochre of Erik’s drying blood. She touches her face and feels the clumps in her hair. She tries to rise to find a bathroom, a shower, a hose anything that will get the blood off her hands, out of her hair. She must look a fright. Her wobbly legs won’t lift her and she sinks back down the few inches she managed to hover while attempting to rise.

      Anna glances around to see if she’s frightening any children. She recognizes the nurse approaching her with a stack of towels and clean scrubs. Her deep sigh of relief opens the floodgates to tears. She’s in full wracking sob mode in an instant. No amount of willpower can stifle the heaving cries that escape her. In fact she fears she may throw up…again. The nurse’s steady reassuring hand on her shoulder brings up a deep shame that urges Anna to resent the woman’s kindness, but she can’t. She wants to resent the nurse’s solicitude but is too weak. This only compounds her confusion, exacerbates her imbalance, makes her cry harder.

      Cudahy comes out of Erik’s room at that moment. His bulk looming over her at least halts her heaving sobs. He spouts a string of incomprehensible noise at her sounding like honking adults from the Charlie Brown cartoons. Anna is certain her forced smile looks more like a grimace but she keeps at it. As he talks at her in his officious fashion she continues smiling and nodding until he abruptly strides away. Two orderlies wheel Erik from the room, tagging along behind Cudahy’s waddle.

      “See everything’s going to be fine,” the nurse suggests. “They’re taking him into surgery now.” Anna returns her gaze to the reassuring posters on the wall. “Pregnant women should not smoke.” “Heart disease in women…the silent killer.”

      “Ok why don’t I show you where you can clean up…doesn’t that sound good?” the kind nurse asks gently shaking Anna’s shoulder and offering her the clean scrubs.

      TIME HAS LITTLE MEANING TO ANNA hovering in the hallway between the family waiting room and the coffee stand. She feels self-conscious in the scrubs. She’s afraid some frightened mother or sister will accost her demanding answers about Michael’s gallbladder or Steve’s prostate.

      If for nothing more than the sake of appearances she knew she’d better stay put at the hospital, although she did wish she weren’t alone. She was tempted to drive to the school, pull Betsy from class, and bring her to the hospital to wait with her. After all it is her father in there. Maybe the kids should be there? But Anna recognizes her true desire is simply to have Betsy at her side so she won’t have to endure this alone.

      Anna straightens her shoulders, reminding herself that she’s an adult. She can handle this. If being married taught her anything it’s self-sufficiency and how to think on her feet.

      From week one she had to use her wits and creativity. She thinks back to the night on their honeymoon when Erik took her to an exclusive restaurant on the other side of the island. She wore a strappy evening dress and strappy sandals. Delighted to be shown off and showing off in the finest, most expensive place on the Island. That night Anna even wore the diamond earrings her grandmother had given her as a wedding gift.

      To this day she can’t remember how it started…had she shushed him when he was raising his voice to the server? Did she decide to choose her own dessert? It could have been one of the million things Anna eventually learned to ‘manage’ over the years so as not to set him off. But this was the beginning, back before she learned to deflect his ire.

      It ended with Erik stomping out of the restaurant, hopping in the rental car, and driving away leaving her there practically naked, definitely lost, and utterly alone. She didn’t even bother to bring a handbag so as not to break the charm of her ensemble. There she was nineteen, abandoned in skimpy evening wear on the far side of a tropical island, without a dime, a credit card, or key to her hotel if she should somehow make it back. He might as well have tattooed ‘victim’ on her forehead and shoved her out into passing traffic on the way home.

      But she managed. Anna made a deal with one of the busboys. He drove her back to the hotel on his scooter and she had the concierge pay him and charge it to their room. She made it…she figured it out. Looking back it seems so much clearer, so much more sinister and cruel on Erik’s part. But back then…back then she cried and cried and blamed herself, just as he wanted her to. For most of their years together Anna had been so busy, so preoccupied using all her energy and effort to maintain her own balance, and then the kids, that she failed to realize it was not simply stormy seas rocking the boat; all along it was their captain Eric.

      A pang of guilt undermines her renewed feeling of selfsufficiency when she remembers asking Erik’s secretary to tell her mother-in-law, Mother Reinhardt about Erik’s emergency. So okay she’s mostly an adult. But Mother Reinhardt scares most people, aside from Erik’s long time gal Friday; Marge. Marge frightens most people too. Anna thinks of the pair of old biddies as peas in a pod…well not really more like two dried up prunes in a tapioca. Or more like two dark parentheses closing in on Anna and Erik’s life from either side; work and family. ‘Whew! Where’d that come from?’ Anna wonders.

      She shakes her head wondering if another cup of coffee will bring her back to earth. As she stands debating she catches a glimpse of Cudahy’s distinct waddle passing along a far hallway. She hustles after him, finding him oddly quick for a squat, stocky man. She calls out to catch his attention but he’s yapping into his cell phone and can’t, or won’t, hear. Eventually he ducks into a room. Anna closes in right behind pulling the door open before it even clicks shut.

      Initially she’s embarrassed. She thinks for an instant she’s followed Cudahy into some stranger’s room. The woman she assumes to be the solicitous wife leans over her husband covering his face in kisses, hiccupping, murmuring, “Oh I’m so relieved you’re going to be all right. Thank heavens. Oh I’m so lucky” as she mwah mwah mwahes her way around his face. But the face… it’s Erik. Not as pale and peaked as he’d been last time she’d seen him, but definitely Erik.

      “Ahahah hem hem,” Cudahy’s not so subtle warning to Erik and…whoever she was…that ‘trouble’ had just arrived froze them in mid kiss. Cudahy simply rocks back on his heels clasping his hands behind his back awaiting the requisite drama with obvious anticipation. Whoever-she-was stands, straightens her polyester suit jacket, and sends Erik a meaningful glare as she musters her remaining dignity to flee.

      Anna makes a show of stepping aside to clear the woman’s exit.

      “Don’t worry Hon, I’ll call you in a little bit,” says Erik in his courtroom voice as he pats Whoever-she-was’ hand.

      Anna stopped giving them names a long time ago, about seven years ago…the time of their first divorce.

      Crisis of mortal proportions averted and maximum humiliation achieved. All in all, not a bad day for Erik. Even while flat on his back he still managed to attain his daily quota of irking Anna and keeping her distracted from her own life. As she left the hospital she at last remembered to call and apologize for missing her interviews but the icy tones of the receptionists made it clear that bridges had burned. And these were the only two interviews her father’s aging political