“Doctor Andersen”

By Pepper Ckua

Pepper_Ckua@yahoo.com

 

It was an unseasonably cool May evening in New York City. Dr. Andersen pulled her sweater close around her shoulders as she paid her cab fare and turned to enter the Baltimore Apartments. She was greeted by a man dressed in a cap and dark doorman’s outfit. He held the door for her and handed her a small stack of mail. 

 

 “Good evening, Doctor. Appears to be light on the bills today.”

 

“Good evening to you. Have you been reading our mail again, Nelson?” she teased.

 

“No Ma’am,” he winked. “Just that after all these years, I’ve gotten pretty good at translating the heft of the U.S. mail in my hand, can tell the feel of bills and the good stuff.” He pushed the upper button on the elevator. “Say, Doc. I noticed your husband was home with the kids today.”

 

“Yes, Joey has a bad cold and we decided to give Elena the day off. Steven just started his sabbatical at the university, and he suggested it. He thought a break from the last of his grading would be good. The month of May, it’s a busy one for him.” She smiled. “You sure don’t miss much, Nelson.”

 

“One of the reasons I’m good at my job, Doc” Nelson tipped his hat and smiled. “Looks like your elevator’s here, Ma’am.”

 

“Thank you,” Doctor Andersen replied tiredly as she stepped into the elevator car and pushed the sixth floor button.

 

She leaned up against the back of the elevator, closed her eyes and thought about her sore feet.

 

She remembered when she was young, her father coming home from work at the hospital and complaining of sore feet too.

 

“How sore could feet really be?” her twelve-year-old brain would think. Now she knew the answer.

 

The elevator dinged its arrival. She stepped into the quiet, dim hallway and made her way to her apartment. She could hear the dialogue of a Rookie re-run through the unit next door. Heaven help us from gritty television cop shows, she thought.

 

Doctor Andersen unlocked the door to the apartment and put her black bag down on the entryway table. She heard the weary crying of a small child.

 

“That you, honey?” said a voice from the kitchen. A man of medium build and a close-cropped beard walked into the hallway, feverish toddler slouched in his arms. The child reached out, and she took him into her own arms.

 

Her husband stepped behind her, lifted her hair up and kissed the back of her neck. “How was Bellevue Hospital today, Doctor Andersen?”

 

 “It was the usual crazy zoo, only worse. We lost three today, all three a damn shame. How was your day, Doctor Andersen? This little guy any better?” she asked, following him into the kitchen.

 

“He’s been clingy and crabby all day, though I can’t blame him. I have a feeling a good night’s sleep will be just what he needs. That and his mom.” Steven turned the gas down on the small pot on the range.

 

“Dory is still sleeping. She went down at four o’clock, hope she isn’t catching what her brother’s got,” he said. “Why don’t you and Joey go sit down in the living room? I’ll see to dinner.”

 

She nodded and went to sit with her small son on the couch. His soft crying had ceased, and he was content to just rest against her body, one tiny hand rubbing the collar of her blouse. She kicked off her shoes and leaned back with a sigh. It felt good just to sit.

 

Listening to the clink of dishes, the sound of a pot boiling over and her husband’s exasperated curse made her smile in the dark. She reached over, keeping her hand on the back of Joey’s head and turned on the television. She hoped to catch the beginning of the evening news.

 

Walter Cronkite was wrapping up a story about the new Prime Minister of England and went on to report on another altercation in the Middle East. Closing her eyes, she tuned out the television’s sound when Cronkite broke for the commercials.

 

She stroked her child’s soft head and felt her attention stray, back to Bellevue’s emergency room, its hassles and its highlights. Today was one of too few highlights. 

 

After the commercial break, Cronkite returned. She was only partly listening while stroking Joey’s damp hair when she heard something that made her brain come back into sharp focus.

 

“This morning in Bay City, California, a police detective was gunned down in the Metropolitan Station garage. Two assailants opened fire, injuring one of two officers. The injured officer was identified as Detective Sergeant David Michael Starsky of the Ninth Precinct. Officer Starsky suffered three bullets from an automatic weapon. He is listed in critical condition. Police have no further information regarding the assailants.”

 

She felt her stomach tense up. “Steven, come in here a minute, would you? Please?”

 

Steven came into the room and turned on the table lamp, “What are you sitting here in the dark for, Alice?”

 

“It’s the evening news, Steven. Remember that boy with whom we went to grammar school?” She asked him, feeling unnerved.

 

“Which one? Did you just see one of them on the news? If you did, it was most likely Chester.” Steven picked up some stray toys on the floor and dropped them into the basket sitting next to the couch. “Wasn’t he was the one that wrote in all our yearbooks he wanted to ‘be remembered’? Or was that Vince?” Steven laughed. “So what did our childhood thug finally do? Rob a bank or something?”

 

When he didn’t get an answer from his wife, he stopped his straightening of the living room and looked her full in the face.

 

Seeing her expression, he turned off the television, halting an Alka Seltzer commercial in mid-jingle.

 

“What, honey? What’s wrong?”

 

“It’s Davy Starsky.” Alice said. “Remember him? Always cutting up the class with his Bogey impersonations. His brother Nicky was a few years younger than Wendy.”

 

Alice paused. “Davy’s a police officer in California. It was on the news. And he was shot this morning. He’s in critical condition.”

 

“Poor guy.”

 

Both were silent for a while. Joey stirred in her arms. “Wan’ juice, Mama.”

 

“In a minute, sweetie.”

 

Alice asked Steven. “Did you ever wonder ‘what if’?”

 

“What if what?”

 

“What if I had married him and not you?” asked Alice. She gave an unladylike snort. “Not like Davy’d have gone for me. I was hideous. All you guys had the hots for that Sharman Crane anyway.”

 

“Sharman was pretty cute.” Steven grinned. “But to me, you were always the better idea. Sharman couldn’t tell the difference between a noun and a verb, was always smoothing down the front of her sweater in front of the boys, making sure she got every, single wrinkle out. I swear you could hear the collective groan from sixteen red-faced guys every time she did it. It made the hormones thick and heavy.”

 

“So that’s what that smell was, the scent of raging pheromones. I thought it was gym shoes.” Alice wrinkled her nose and laughed. “Give me break, Steven Andersen. You were thinking about verbs and nouns and not Sharman’s ample bosom and Liz Taylor looks?”

 

“Let’s just say, between bosom and brains, it was nearly a toss-up.” Steven winked. “But even my immature, developing mind knew quality when I saw it.”

 

“Either that, or you decided to take your chances and throw your towel in with the Adams dynasty and our reputation for churning out the doctors.”

 

“Well, it wasn’t for your vast riches, my sweet; my family turned out to be the prince to your pauper, so maybe the doctor thing was the draw.” He smiled. “In the end, neither of us proved the Adams Family Adage wrong.”

 

 “I’ll get Joey some juice.” Steven got up from his perch on the sofa arm. “I think I hear Dory waking too. She could be a real bear after this late nap.”

 

Dr. Alice Andersen sat in her living room, thinking of the boy who had sat on the other side of the room from her in grammar school. She knew he had moved to the West Coast after the death of his father shortly after the eighth grade.

 

Alice thought of Davy Starsky’s speed as a runner during recess and of how he beat out Simon Ryder for the lead in the third grade play. She recalled his mom bringing vanilla cupcakes to the class for his tenth birthday. The cakes had bright frosting dots on them which made her mouth and tongue turn blue.

 

Alice also remembered Davy’s little brother Nicky, a sneaky little bully who teased her about her face and weight. She hoped Davy hadn’t done that, even when she wasn’t there to hear it. He probably did though, if for no other reason than to fit in with the other kids. She knew most kids had a hard time going against popular opinion, Davy would be no different. Alice may have been low on the social totem pole, but she was no fool.

 

Alice thought of Davy’s next door neighbor and friend, Laura Anderson, the girl she had sat next to all those years through grammar school. Laura and Alice’s similar last names made them inseparable, thanks to their teachers’ unimaginative seating charts. People had seemed to think of Laura and Alice as an odd set of twins. Beauty and the Beast is what Nicky Starsky called them. Even Alice pretended to laugh at this label, not wanting “poor sport” to be on her list of faults.

 

When Laura, along with her mom and dad, died in a car accident the summer before junior high, Davy became much more subdued. No more movie star impersonations, no more big smiles. He got a job after school at a magazine stand and often seemed very tired.

 

It was, ironically, Laura Anderson’s death that brought a morbid “what if,” a twist.

 

It turned out to be Laura Anderson’s demise that put Alice Adams one seat closer to Steven Andersen in the classroom.

 

Alice shifted on the couch, trying to keep her foot from falling asleep.

 

She thought back to the seventh grade and remembered sometimes feeling Steven’s gaze on the back of her neck. At first she thought he was just trying to copy her work. Alice, in moments of self-preservation, wondered if she should let him.

 

So much for her ability to read people’s intentions, Alice chided herself; it had taken her almost a full two years to get enough nerve to turn around and say hello to Steven Andersen.

 

Even now, she and Steven joked about what she said that first time. He claimed it was to ask for his phone number, which made her laugh.

 

“Silly. It was certainly something more along the line of borrowing a pencil,” she argued, the familiar teasing making her chest feel warm.

 

Around the same time Alice Adams was first asking Steven Andersen for a pencil, Davy Starsky’s father was shot, killed in the line of duty.

 

A few weeks later, Davy was sent to live in California. Alice thought how different things might have been if it were Nicky, not Davy, who had been sent away. What if Davy had stayed?

 

Instead Davy was gone, and Nicky remained.  Nicky fell in with the tough kids, older kids whose fathers worked the docks. He skipped a lot of school, but was even more of a pest the days he was around, more to prove and no one to rein him in.

 

Alice threw herself into her studies in high school, at first determined to become a lawyer, if for nothing else, to thwart her family expectations. But law didn’t hold her interest, and she switched over to pre-med in college.

 

It was hard to believe Davy would go ahead and become a policeman after his dad’s death in the same profession, but Alice Andersen looked at the journey her own life took and understood.

 

Alice remembered Davy’s dark head in class, bent over his math book and the way he chewed all his pencil tops.

 

She remembered the scent of Sharman’s illicit White Shoulders and her incessant chatter.

 

Alice remembered Chester’s irritating habit of taking the retainer out of his mouth and tapping it on his desk. Sometimes Alice thought it sounded like a time bomb.  Sometimes she wished it was.

 

Alice remembered her own dread of gym class and Laura’s funny little laugh. 

 

All these things were little points on a map, little pins which led her to here, her place on the plat.

 

For another, the map led to gunshot wounds in a police garage.

 

For Sharman, as Alice knew from the newspapers and tabloids, a stint in the Betty Ford Clinic, proving that a beautiful exterior wasn’t necessarily the only charm for smooth-sailing.

 

And for another, Alice figured wryly of Chester, most likely the upstate prison and prison blues.

 

Really, thought Alice, David Starsky was just a name on the news, in a city almost three thousand miles away, his shooting only one of a hundred tragedies that happened that day.

 

Alice was witness to three of those tragedies on her previous shift at the hospital. One, a casualty of arrogance and the speed limit, another the end result of mundane carelessness and a can of Drano. The last was an unsecured window screen and the sixteenth floor of an apartment.

 

There was nothing special about David Starsky, except the place marker he had held in her past. That, of course, and the damn shame of any human life being put on the line and wasted. 

 

Joey was asleep against her chest, warm and damp. He smelled of apple juice and Pop Tarts. She wet a finger and gently rubbed a sticky spot on his forehead.

 

Alice heard the soft talking in the kitchen. Her husband and daughter were putting silverware out on the table, talking about the day. Dory was excitedly telling her dad something about Romper Room, Miss Sally and the Magic Mirror.

 

So many possibilities and outcomes, some put into motion a long time ago, Alice thought.  She gave a little prayer for David Starsky, the policeman and for the boy he used to be. Alice hoped he had someone to watch over him.

 

She go up carefully, shifting Joey to her other shoulder.

 

 “What if, indeed,” she thought.