Point of Balance Read online

  I was thankful she didn’t mention the other eventuality. That would be equally clear-cut.

  “Come off it. It’ll be to the credit of the whole neurosurgery unit.”

  She chuckled again, a bit too loudly. She was officially drunk.

  “I have two ex-husbands who used to lie better than you, Evans. Now, you go home and rest up. Tomorrow you have an appointment with the Patient.”

  “No worries, boss. I can handle it.”

  “How old are you, Evans? Thirty-six?”

  “Thirty-eight.”

  “Boy, at this rate, you won’t see forty.”

  I hung up and turned the ignition key. The Lexus’s familiar roar boomed under the hood, and I smiled for the first time that day. The first time in many days, actually. Before the week was out, things would finally begin to look positive for us, which they hadn’t done since Rachel died. I would have a better job and get a life. Quality time with Julia.

  Untouchable. I liked that.

  Inside an hour, I would find out how wrong I could be.

  2

  When I opened the front door, I was met by an eerie silence.

  It was almost midnight, but even so it wasn’t the kind of silence you expect from a residential neighborhood. We lived on Dale Drive, in Silver Spring. A toehold inside the Beltway, but inside it all the same. It was a thirties house, clad in gray stone. You might have seen some exterior shots of it in the National Enquirer or one of those repulsive muckraking blogs. One of them had even gotten hold of some indoor snaps off the Realtors’ website, the ones Rachel and I had bought it from. Julia was due any minute when we closed the deal, and Rachel was still painting a huge smiling bear on the nursery wall when her water broke. We raced to the hospital, our elation mingled with fear.

  Despite the steep price tag, on both of our incomes we could well afford it. This was shortly before the real estate bubble burst. Then after she left us, keeping hold of it became harder and harder. Rachel had a life insurance policy whose beneficiary was Julia, but needless to say the insurers wouldn’t pay out a red cent. We simply received an exquisitely formal letter, which went to town on the “willfulness” of Rachel’s decision, and copied out clause 13.7 of the contract in its entirety. I still recall the disgust I felt as I crumpled it up and threw it away. An attorney who had read about the case in the local newspaper showed up one day and said we could sue, but I sent him packing. The idea disgusted me, although we could have done with the money.

  It wasn’t simply the mortgage; there was also Julia. The working hours of a neurosurgeon who has to put in overtime to pay the bills are not exactly regular. I had to find home help. First there came a Brazilian woman, who vanished into thin air one fine day, a month ago. The next few days I had a nightmare roster and poor Julia had to spend several evenings in the nurses’ station, coloring in the black-and-white diagrams in old anatomy books she had found in my consulting room. She did a good job on the kidneys, turning them into cute, hunchbacked Mr. Potato Heads.

  Despite all the people out of work, my postings on Craigslist and DC Nanny drew not a single e-mail reply. Then two weeks ago Svetlana’s résumé landed in my inbox, and I thought our lucky number had come up. Not only was she great at looking after Julia, but she cooked up a storm, too. She spread big dollops of goose fat over everything, as they do in her native Belgrade, so I had put on a couple of pounds. Whenever I came home, however late, there would always be an excellent meal ready for me. Except that night.

  That night there was just silence.

  I dumped my medical case on one of the kitchen chairs and took an apple from the fruit bowl to keep the wolf away from the door. While I nibbled at it, I saw a Dora the Explorer coloring book on the table, with a half-finished picture of Boots in it. It struck me as curious that Julia had gone to bed and not finished it. She always made a point of finishing her drawings, partly to put off her bedtime, but it was also out of character for her to leave a job half-done. Maybe she was still upset because I hadn’t been home for dinner.

  I closed the book and a red crayon rolled off the cover and fell to the floor. I stooped to pick it up and felt a sudden pain in my fingertips. I pulled my hand away and saw I had cut myself—a couple of droplets of blood trickled down my index finger.

  I cursed under my breath, got up, went to the sink and held my finger under the tap for a couple of minutes. It is hard to get across to anyone who hasn’t devoted half their life to medicine what a neurosurgeon feels for his hands, but the word that comes closest is worship.

  I obsess over them, and a terrible panic seizes me whenever I have the slightest domestic mishap, until I assess the damage. You know that minor heart attack you have when your boss or wife says, “We need to talk”? Well, it’s kind of like that.

  That’s why I keep Hibiclens, gauze and Band-Aids in a kitchen cabinet, in the bathrooms, in the garage, and in the glove compartment in the car. I prefer to be on the safe side.

  When I had slapped on enough antiseptic to sterilize a Dumpster, I kneeled under the table again. This time I pulled back the chair and looked before I fumbled. Stuck between the table leg and the wall was a sliver of pottery. Warily I plucked it out and saw it was part of a Dora mug. The young explorer was headless and the evil fox Swiper loitered behind a bush with a creepy grin.

  Julia’s mother had bought that mug for her. It was her favorite.

  I hope she didn’t see it break, or she’ll have cried herself to bits, poor baby, I thought.

  I threw the shard away and went straight upstairs. I wanted to kiss her there and then, even wake her up if I had to. We had chanced upon that little mug in a Bed, Bath & Beyond, and I didn’t think about it very often. But the sudden sight of it in pieces, less than two weeks away from the first anniversary of Rachel’s death, brought it all back. It had been a Saturday, and Rachel and I both had our day off from the hospital. The three of us went to the mall for a sofa, and the deal was our daughter would pick it. She bounced on each and every one before she decided none was soft enough, nor had enough elephants on the upholstery. We came away with nothing more than that mug and a thick brown mustache Julia got from drinking hot chocolate. She refused to wipe it off and gave us mustachioed frowns in the rearview mirror all the way home.

  A terrible sense of loss overcame me.

  Just then I needed a hug as badly as Julia must have when the mug had smashed. I opened the door to her bedroom, which was oddly dark. Julia always slept with a nightlight on. I scrabbled for the switch and a warm, pink light banished the darkness.

  The bed was empty.

  That was most unusual. Maybe Julia hadn’t been able to sleep and had asked to bunk with Svetlana, but if so the least the nanny could have done was leave a note.

  And why the hell was the bed made up? Hadn’t Svetlana so much as tried to put her to bed?

  Upset at this singular breach of discipline on Svetlana’s part, I went back downstairs. She had her quarters there, on the other side of the kitchen, a spacious bedroom with a small living area that overlooked the backyard.

  I knocked softly on the door, but there was no reply. I gently opened the door, and found the room empty.

  It wasn’t so much that nobody was there, but that any sign that anyone had lived there at all had disappeared completely. The sheets and pillowcases were all gone, as were the rugs and bath towels. There were no toiletries, and no clothes in the closets. A strong smell of bleach lingered on each and every surface.

  The butterflies I had felt in my stomach since I had gotten home now cut loose.

  “Julia!” I bawled. “Julia, baby!”

  I ran through the house, switched on all the lights and called out for my daughter. I ground my teeth so hard my gums began to ache after a couple of minutes and the blood was pounding in my temples, as if a fork were beating egg whites in my skull.

  Stop, I thought
, although the voice inside my head belonged to Dr. Colbert, the man who first showed me how to handle a scalpel under pressure. Keep a cool head. Solve your problems one at a time. Decide on a course of action.

  First get hold of Svetlana.

  Call her cell phone.

  I had her number saved on my favorites list. I dialed, but it just went to voice mail.

  Where could they be at this time of night?

  I made a mental list of all the places they might have gone to as I paced frantically up and down the living room. Svetlana ran errands in Rachel’s old Prius, but it was still in the garage and the engine was cold. That certainly narrowed things down. Maybe she had gone to a neighbor’s house, but if so why hadn’t she left a note or called? And most important, why were none of the nanny’s belongings in her room?

  There was nothing for it but to call for help: the police, the FBI, the National Guard, or the goddamned Avengers. I wanted my daughter back, and I wanted her now.

  I dialed 911.

  It was busy.

  Busy? How the hell can 911 be busy?

  I paused for a second and tried to collect my thoughts. I didn’t even know what to say to them. What was it they told you to do in those leaflets they hand out at shopping malls and Parent-Teacher Association meetings? To think of the clothes she had on. What could Julia be wearing?

  Nothing seemed to be missing from Julia’s room, not even her shoes. It all appeared neat and tidy. The pajamas Julia had worn yesterday, the yellow ones with SpongeBob SquarePants’s face on them, were not under her pillow or in the laundry basket. She normally wore them for two or three days, then put them in to wash. She always changed into her pajamas before dinner.

  And then what? Had Svetlana packed up her things, scrubbed the place with bleach and walked out the door with a little girl in her jammies? Her own possessions would have filled a couple of boxes. She couldn’t have taken all of it.

  Somebody must have picked them up while I was stuck in the operating theater, removing a bullet from Jamaal Carter’s spine.

  It’s my fault. Damn it, I should have been here for them, for my family.

  I dialed 911 again.

  It was still busy.

  I held the phone away from my ear and examined it, bewildered. That was impossible, but I didn’t stop to consider it, because a thought instantly occurred to me.

  If someone snatched them away, then why are there no signs of a struggle, apart from a broken mug?

  That thought dried up my throat. Svetlana must have had it all worked out. Maybe she had kidnapped Julia for money. For heaven’s sake, I had trusted that woman! I had taken her into my home!

  Think. What do you know about her?

  She was from Belgrade. She was twenty-four. She was an English philology major and wanted to get a doctorate in the United States. She had a letter of recommendation from her professors at the University of Novi Sad. She had moved here to enroll in her new course and needed money to get by in such a costly place as DC.

  She was short, thin and frail. She was switched on, but there was a sad air about her. She had hit it off with Julia from the get-go, and they had always gotten along like a house on fire. After all, Svetlana had also lost her mother when she was about the same age as Julia had been when Rachel left us. It had happened during the war in Bosnia, but she didn’t tell Julia that. She revealed it to me in our first interview.

  She had given me the number for her doctoral adviser in Georgetown. A man with an affable voice, who had assured me Svetlana was a trustworthy student.

  It had all seemed trustworthy, and I desperately needed her, so I gave her the job. She didn’t even have a cell phone. She had to get one so we could keep in touch. She never phoned home, nor did she have any friends in Washington. She spent her days off shut up in her room, always with her nose in a book. I had never seen her breathe a word to anybody apart from . . .

  Apart from a week ago.

  A crazy notion began to take root in my head. I grabbed the car keys.

  I had to check this out before I tried calling the cops again.

  3

  Rachel’s father and I never did get along.

  When she and I were dating, he never went out of his way to be friendly. He would smile and say hello, shake my hand and take it back quicker than a congressman pocketing your last dollar. But the sideways glances he darted at me, when he thought I couldn’t see him, would have melted my chrome-vanadium forceps.

  “You’re imagining it, honey,” Rachel whispered to me when she crept out of her room and into mine. “He’s simply a grump who wants the best for his daughters.”

  “I’m going to be a fucking neurosurgeon, Rachel. What more does he want?”

  “His whole life he’s watched out for his little girls. You wait until you’re a father and have a young stud strutting around your house with a weapon of this caliber,” she said as she reached under the covers.

  Truth is, the Robson family were close-knit. Rachel was the oldest sister, the sensible one. She had an orderly, straightforward mind, was studying to be an anesthesiologist and always scolded her kid sister, Kate, for all the crazy shit she dreamed up. Aura, the happy-go-lucky and talkative mother, would make corn bread while she gossiped about the neighbors. And then there was Jim, the father figure, a Virginian through and through, one who was still seasick from the voyage on the Mayflower. He would sip his beer on the porch, irritated by the tall, dark young resident who claimed to be his daughter’s boyfriend.

  “What news from the North?” he would always say.

  “Well, you know, Jim, they do say there’s fifty stars on the flag now.”

  He never laughed at my feeble attempts at a joke, and matters didn’t improve much after the wedding. But we both made an effort and normally gatherings at the Robsons’ were homey, although they made me feel uneasy. It wasn’t all Jim’s fault, mind you. I felt I didn’t quite fit in. To be honest, I’ve never been too big on all this family business.

  I’m an orphan and I never knew my birth parents. Up to the age of nine I had lived in one foster home after another, where the other kids weren’t siblings but rivals you fought with for food and anything else you could get your hands on. Then a couple from Potts­­town, Pennsylvania, adopted me. He was a country doctor, and she his nurse and assistant. They died in a car crash when I was in my second year at medical school, before I met Rachel, so I became an orphan twice over. The crash made me flunk the whole year. Sorrow had always loomed large in my life, but for years it seemed to be well inside the closet. It leaped right out again the day my parents died, and mauled away with its sharp black claws. Only Rachel had kept it at bay after that.

  Now that she’s gone, Julia and her family are all I’ve got.

  So for fifteen years I’ve made the hour and a half’s drive to Fredericksburg every third Sunday, as well as for birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July. Although the way the Lexus was barreling along that night, I would make it in half the time.

  I don’t remember what speed I was doing, but I was so full of adrenaline that I nearly got myself killed at the Falmouth exit. I had turned off there hundreds of times but was driving so fast that night I missed it. I jammed on the brakes, left half the tires on the blacktop, and reversed the car right in the middle of I-95. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. Luckily it was past one a.m. and I was on a four-lane freeway, otherwise such recklessness could have cost me dearly. A colossal truck hove into view. Its headlights dazzled in my mirror while its horn blared louder and louder. We were about to crash but the driver slowed down in time to switch lanes. His front bumper almost clipped my rear one and my little sports car might have been a leaf, the way the draft from twenty tons of truck shook it.

  I pulled up on the shoulder between I-95 and exit 133, and struggled to collect myself. That was no way to behave an
d it would not help Julia at all. It had been a close call.

  And all because of a stupid hunch.

  A couple of weeks before, my in-laws had dropped in to see Julia. Jim owned a small chain of well-known hardware stores, Robson Hardware Repair. You may have heard the slogan: “Do it yourself and you’ll get the best workman.” Both hardware and the slogan suited good ol’ Jim to a T, because he’s as hard as nails. There were five or six stores in the chain, but none to the north of Arlington. Jim never strayed across the Potomac unless he had an appointment in the District, which he did that day.

  Aura had made her usual entrance, about as subtle as a brass bell falling down the stairs. Twice.

  “Juliaaaaa! Where is my little honey pie?”

  Julia sprinted and slid the last stretch along the polished floor in her socks. She threw her arms around her grandmother’s neck and smothered her with kisses.

  “Grandma! Come up to my room, I want to show you something!” she said as she took the old lady’s hand and pulled her along.

  I said hi to Jim and offered him something to drink, knowing full well he’d decline. He never touched a drop when he was driving. He sat on the sofa and sneered at the fixtures. Rachel had gone in for modern furniture, with clean lines, which did not go down well with her hidebound father.

  “Julia’s shot up. We haven’t seen her in more than a month.”

  “I’ve had a lot on my plate,” I said by way of an excuse, a little put out.

  I admit that since Rachel died the visits had petered out, but it also riled me that we were always the ones who had to make the trip. It was no farther from Fredericksburg to Silver Spring than from Silver Spring to Fredericksburg. But I didn’t say so, to be polite. And because I was still in awe of the old buzzard, damn it.

  “That’s my point, Dave. You work too hard.”

  That was out of line from someone who’d spent a lifetime traipsing from one of his stores to another and knew by heart what he had in stock, down to the last screw.