She needed to move. Or, to fall in love. Either would do, she thought. Trade one extreme for the other. Change was easiest when things were so new, so possible. She imagined her future a wide white beach, possibilities scattered like seashells.

Until Hudson, Vicky had lived everywhere and dated no one. She was independent, she told girlfriends, and what’s so wrong with that? She wasn’t her mother, who could fill empty spaces like pouring milk in a glass. She had waited tables here and there—California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, and Illinois, in no particular order—and men would slip her names and numbers or teasingly bounce a ringlet of hair. “Hair like a wild horse,” one man had slurred. His words came out: “Share like a vile hearse,” but she got the drift. She was vaguely flattered. It was when she awoke alone the following mornings that she found their names had slipped from her mind like wriggling fish.

Hudson had lasted because Vicky liked his profession. She liked doctors in general, and she found Hudson’s looks and his disposition appealingly precise. They met in Colorado, where Vicky was living with an old friend and her friend’s husband while she sorted some things out. Her life, for instance. Hudson, with his nimble surgeon’s fingers and brain pulsing with medical facts, was good at sorting things out.

“Hey, Vick,” he’d say, eyes running the pages of some fat textbook, its pages mapped with starbursts of splattered coffee and squiggles of ink. “Did you know that the human spine has twenty-six total vertebrae? And twelve in the Thoracic alone?”

When he first told her he had been hired at a hospital in Seattle, Vicky imagined the possibilities this held for her. Their relationship had felt stale as of late and a new place, she thought, would be just the thing. Of course she would go with him. Of course, Doctor, she teased.

The possibilities.

She imagined needing an operation (some horrible accident—Water skiing? A rollercoaster gone berserk?) and Hudson, in toothpaste-green scrubs and a white face mask. Slicing her carefully open, removing an organ here and injecting fluids there. Then stitching her up, good as new. Better than new. Seashell smooth.

 

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