He pulled up to the house and glanced blearily at the tiny digital clock on the dashboard, both alarmed and yet unsurprised at the glowing letters: six a.m. Actually, six-oh-seven a.m., if he wanted to be precise, but the winter sun was barely glowing from the other end of the street, proving it far too early an hour to be precise. He summoned whatever stores of energy he had left and forced himself out of the car, leaving his briefcase and discarded tie in the front passenger seat.
The house felt eerily still and uncomfortably quiet, and he slipped off his shoes on the front mat before padding through it in socks. It was a new-enough construction that the shiny, freshly-waxed wooden floors did not creak and the pictures on the wall did not rattle, nothing revealing his arrival. No sound, no motion. Nothing beyond the emptiness.
He briefly stopped at the kitchen, unsurprised to see his place still set and the remainders of a casserole dinner covered with saran wrap and sitting in wait in the center of the table. The expensive crystal candlesticks stood proudly, unaware that all they were displaying were crusty stubs of once-proud candles. He snorted with the bitter irony of it and headed for the stairs.
Upstairs felt as abandoned and desolate as the first floor did, lacking light and sound, and he moved deftly through the abyss on sock-covered feet. He thought idly to himself that he could have made a very good spy, stealthily sneaking through secret terrorist base camps or Scandinavian laboratories, stealing secrets and weapons like New Jersey’s very own James Bond. The thought, however foolish, brought a slight smile to his tired face. If only his patients knew.
He slid into the bedroom, the familiar curve of a body under the sheets breaking the emptiness, and he paused for a moment, almost surprised. He’d known, of course, that she’d be there, curled into their comforter, balled up in their bed, but for some reason, seeing her now surprised him. He paused, just inside the doorway, and swallowed thickly. He stared for a moment, listened to her steady, quiet breathing in the darkness, and then followed the line of the wall to the closet and rummaged through it.
He’d just gotten out of the shower when there was a light rap at the door. “James, is that you?”
Her voice was muffled, tentative. He pulled the towel from his hair and draped it momentarily around his shoulders, inhaling lungs full of steam. Despite the warmth of the bathroom, he shivered violently. “Yeah, honey,” he finally answered, forcing a smile to his lips and into his voice. “Did I wake you?”
“No.” There was a moment of silence, and he wondered idly if they’d been suspended in time, that moment where anything and nothing was possible all at once, the intersection of a dozen universes, before everything split all over again.
He could just barely hear a sigh on the other side of the door. “You all right?”
“Of course, honey,” he managed to reply, his voice surprisingly even. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He’d ask the obvious question, were the roles reversed. He could hear himself asking it, in the back of his mind, firm and unrelenting, demanding. An intuitive question, it would be, and it’d be right.
She sighed again. “I was just worried,” she said, and then he heard footsteps plodding on the shiny wood floors, moving away from the bathroom door and toward destinations unknown.
==
When he returned from the condiment bar, sugar and cream added to his coffee, Greg House was slouched in the cafeteria chair opposite his, devouring half his doughnut.
“You know, Jimmy, this is not a balanced breakfast,” he noted, adding a vague gesture with his doughnut free hand. James glanced down at the doughnut, frosted cereal, and coffee, listening to Greg cluck his tongue against his teeth. “You should know better. Aren’t you supposed to be all fiber-conscious, Mr. Oncologist? Where are your bran flakes?”
James attempted to send him a stern look, brows lowered and eyes dark. Greg smirked and popped the rest of his stolen doughnut into his mouth, sending a few sprinkles tip-tapping onto the tabletop. "Where's your own breakfast?" he replied coolly, and snatched up his half the doughnut before his companion was tempted to steal it from right under his nose.
Greg feigned hurt and touched a hand to his chest. "Such hostility! Somebody added ‘cranky’ to his coffee this morning." James rolled his eyes and started in on his breakfast, but he could feel Greg's even, blue-eyed gaze constantly on him, zeroed in and intense. "Dinner and a movie tonight, too?"
"I should be home," he sighed, using his spoon to push the frosted corn flakes around in the bowl. Milk sloshed at the edges, white liquid against off-white dishware glaze. "She cooked last night, and I feel guilty."
"She always cooks, and you always feel guilty." Greg shrugged and rose slowly from his chair. "There's a new bar and grill, and I hear their burgers are killer. Plus, we’ve still got five movies before we’ve made it all the way through my Ultimate Bond Collection. Six-thirty?"
The words strung together, a one-sided conversation leading nowhere in particular. He glanced up and shrugged. "Seven."
"Done." Greg leaned forward ever-so-slightly, bringing his eyes even with James', blue against brown in an odd counterpoint. "Don't be too late, or I'll have to start without you."
James watched him cross the cafeteria and then watched the doors swing shut behind him, and once he returned to his cereal, it was soggy.
==
He puttered through his day on a strange sort of auto-pilot, sleep-deprived and wrapped so far up in his own muddling thoughts that he felt stranded, exploring a strange new world with heavy eyelids and a confused sense of direction and being. By three, all his patients had been checked in on and medicated, and his phone rang as he collapsed into his office chair.
"Up for tennis tonight?" He sighed at the familiarity of the voice, the happy timbre ringing through his ears. "I'm bored, and there’s nothing to do up here. Skip out on work early and come."
"I can't, Ed," he replied, flipping open the first of the many charts he had to update before the day was out. Colon cancer, probably won't make through the month. He wrote in new medication names with a clinical detachment, much easier in the throes of exhaustion. "You know I'm busy."
"So busy with work and little Miss Perfect that you can't see your kid brother." Edmund chuckled on the other end of the phone as James scratched his signature after the update. "C'mon. Chuckie can't, and I'm sick of doing everything by myself. Mom and Dad said you should spend more time with me."
"Charles would kill you for calling him 'Chuckie,'" James pointed out. New chart, a twelve-year-old with leukemia, not unsurprising, and yet also still heartbreaking. He pulled it open and started to write. "And Mom and Dad said that when I was twelve."
"Whatever. James, c'mon. Chuckie brings that wife of his, Trista - "
"Teresa."
" - down all the time, and it's a long drive for him. You're a hop, skip, and a jump away. One game of tennis."
He signed the chart, picked up another. "Charles would also kill you for not knowing Teresa’s name. They've been married for three or four years, now."
Edmund snorted. "At least I stopped calling her 'the bride of Chuckie.'" He paused and sighed a long-suffering sigh. James switched charts again. "You’d better come up next week, dude, or I’m not buying you a Christmas present."
"We're Jewish, Ed," he retorted, cradling the phone against his shoulder as he signed another chart, “and besides, I don’t play tennis.”
"All the more reason." James could hear him smirking. "Call you later, bro."
The click was followed by a dial tone, and James shook his head as he hung up the phone.
==
"Did you tell the little woman you were coming over?"
Greg asked the question on his way back down the hall, leaving the door hanging open behind him and James the option of either coming into the condo or fleeing the scene of the crime. The six-pack was heavy in his fist and he watched Greg move across the carpeting, a casual, strolling pace. He rolled his eyes at the familiar back and stepped across the threshold.
"I called her," he replied casually.
He pulled the door shut and slipped off his shoes, a force of habit. They looked small next to Greg's sneakers, sitting on the mat. Greg was a tall man with big feet, and James idly remembered something his brother had joked once: "You know what they say about big feet." He didn't say anything, but followed Greg down the hall and into the living room. A piping hot pizza sat out on the coffee table, the case to a Bond movie beside it.
He watched Greg sink into his favorite armchair and take two slices of the greasy cheese-and-pepperoni concoction. "You called her, sure, but what'd you tell her?" He leaned back in his seat and took a large bite out of the first slice. "Working late? Big meeting? Patient dying?"
"Dinner with a friend," he replied evenly, and sat down on the couch. Greg reached for the six pack and, when his arm wasn't long enough, sent James a pathetic look. He handed him a beer. "I didn’t lie to her."
"How many times do I have to tell you? Everybody lies," Greg scolded. He twisted off the bottle cap. "You've been married for a year. Soon, the honeymoon will end and you'll be lying about more than her giant ass."
James snorted and scowled at him. "My wife does not have a giant ass."
"Ah, so you won't lie to her, but you will lie to me. Our honeymoon is over, isn't it?" He grinned before pulling a long swallow from his beer. "Soon, you'll be cheating on me with some pretty little thing and I'll be wondering how the romance died."
James shook his head. "That suggests the romance was ever alive to begin with," he replied, and bit off the tip of his pizza. Greg laughed, briefly but freely, and then grabbed the remote and started the movie.
==
He arrived home after one a.m., shirt rumpled and pants wrinkled, and sighed as he toed off his shoes and stepped into the same foyer he did every night. The house stood, dark and still before him, and for a moment he was tempted to turn around, avoid the desolation before him and flee to the nearest scene of life.
He stepped forward and towards the kitchen, instead.
The kitchen was dark but not abandoned, and his wife - clad in her pajamas and a bathrobe - glanced up at him. He immediately forced his eyes to the floor, wondering what she saw there, what she saw and expected of the disheveled appearance, the missing tie, and the general disarray replacing long-standing tidiness.
"A friend?" she asked quietly, her voice wavering. He raised his head but couldn't see her eyes, not in the darkness. He imagined what secrets they held, and suddenly, his stomach was a stone and he couldn't swallow around it. "Dinner?"
"A friend," he nodded, and before he could stop himself, he'd pulled out a chair and sunk into it. The crystal candleholders were empty, abandoned and ignored. "I'm not going to lie to you."
"Cheating husbands always lie," she replied coolly, crossing her arms over her chest. "Why pretend you won’t?"
The venom in her voice cut straight to his heart, and he sighed before glancing back at the floor, studying where the shining wood met the large area rug beneath the table. “Because I’m not going to,” he finally told her. “Because you at least deserve the truth.”
==
His phone rang the next afternoon at work, and he rubbed his eyes before picking it up. “Doctor James Wilson, Oncology.”
“Whoa, you sound like crap!” Edmund exclaimed from the other end of the line, his voice boisterous and admonishing. “On some new, crazy crash diet of not sleeping? How’s that working out for you?”
He groaned inwardly and rested his forehead in the palm of his free hand, massaging the skin in hopes of eliminating the dull ache beneath. “What do you want, Ed?” he asked slowly, his exhausted eyes falling shut. “I’m – ”
“‘Busy with work,’ yeah.” His brother’s voice was a perfect mockery of his own, and the comment was followed by a hearty chuckle. “Listen, James, here’s the deal. Chuckie and Tessa – ”
“Teresa,” he grunted in correction.
“ – are coming down tomorrow night. We’re going out to dinner. I thought you and Miss Perfect would want to come up and join us. It’d be fun.” He paused, a brief moment of unadulterated silence passing between them, and for a moment, James was sure his brother had either lost connection or wandered off in search of something more exciting. When his voice did return, it was even more whiny and demanding. “C’mon, bro. You live an hour away and never come by. Or play tennis.”
He gritted his teeth and glanced at the clock. It was more than an hour until he was on the clock at the clinic, and – with all his charts up-to-date and all his patients visited, no real freedom from his brother’s relentless badgering. “I don’t play tennis, Ed,” he finally said. “I play golf.”
“Golf, tennis, water polo, whatever. It’s all the same.” Another lengthy pause began and then ended when Ed sighed, the over-exaggerated exasperation hissing through the earpiece. “James, really. You and Miss Perfect need to come down. What in the world could you two have to do on a Saturday night?”
He glanced at the clock and frowned, the possible answers filing through his mind hastily. “I have to go,” he finally decided, pushing the words out from between his lips. “I have clinic duty soon, and some files to deal. Besides, I think we have something planned on Saturday.”
The other voice was surprised, and made no show of hiding it. “Something planned?” he gaped. “When has James Wilson ever had plans for a day that didn’t involve working, eating, sleeping, or f – ”
He cut his brother off. “Later, Ed,” he said, and before he knew what exactly had come over him, he’d hung up the phone and buried his face in his hands.
==
Greg popped his head into James’ office twenty minutes before the end of the day, grinning.
“Four more movies in the Ultimate Collection,” he announced. “I think this is the one with the babe in the bikini.”
He refused to glance up from the chart he’d been scrawling notes across. “They all have babes in bikinis.”
“Well, duh. Why watch Bond if not for the guns, cars, breasts?” Greg took a breath as though he was about to continue, but then paused. The silence settled over them, and James listened to him exhale as he noted a double-dose of a drug he’d prescribed that after noon. “Your wife okay with you skipping another night of her scrumptious tuna casserole?”
He glanced up, briefly, and met Greg’s eyes with his own.
“Not sure,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m sure she’ll get over it, though.”
==
"How's Anne?"
Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, he glanced up from an article on a new version of chemotherapy being developed in Sweden only to see Lisa Cuddy standing in his doorway, her shoulder against the doorjamb. She raised her eyebrows once he met her gaze, and he frowned. "What?" he asked, more than a bit confused.
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Your wife, Anne,” she repeated, as though he’d forgotten the simple fact in the last thirty seconds. "She didn't show up to our book club last night. She’s never missed before. Is everything all right?"
James pursed his lips and glanced out the window, at the winter sun and clouds. It looked cold – frigid, really – and he pulled his eyes away just in time to catch them on the photograph he’d taped to the corner of his monitor, pretty, smiling Anne in her white dress, and his own smile above his crisply-creased bowtie.
But that moment felt a million miles away.
Lisa stared down at him, her gaze even, and he shrugged noncommittally. "I don't know why she didn't come," he said truthfully, flipping a page in his article without bothering to look at it.
”Is she sick?” she pried, moving one hand onto the curve of her hip. “It’s not like her to miss our club.”
James nodded slightly, looking down at the photo again. In less than a second, he saw a thousand things – Greg eating his doughnut, Anne asleep in the darkness of their bedroom, his brother in tennis whites, James Bond, empty candlesticks – and then settled his gaze upon the picture on the monitor, a picture of bright smiles and pretty white dresses.
"Everything’s just fine," he lied.
