The Cartoonist Read Free

nameless instinct, he stopped and took the few steps back to his daughter’s room. Silently, he pushed the door open and peeked inside.
    Ghostbusters wallpaper assaulted his eyes, shade after grinning shade, each snow-white inside its slashed red circle. Kath’s brass bed gleamed richly in the morning light. The glass top of the vanity was littered in tiny plastic Smurfs and, in almost tragic counterpoint, the trappings of Kath’s approaching adulthood—mascara, eyeliner, costume jewelry—only toys now, but soon, too soon, very serious concerns indeed. Kath, ten, lay bundled on her side beneath her summer comforter, one tanned arm wrapped lovingly around Jinnie, her Cabbage Patch doll. From the doorway Scott could see the loose curls of her fine, sun-gilded hair.
    He tiptoed into the room and leaned over his daughter’s bed. Kath’s mouth was open, a small dark oval edged in vermilion, and her turned-up nose was bent against her pillow. Her precious round face beamed with high summer color, and the love Scott felt for her at that moment was almost painful in its intensity. He placed a gentle, almost shy kiss on the swell of her cheek, then backed quietly away.
    Pulling the door shut behind him, he was startled again by a nearly uncontainable rush of emotion. He had been unable to pass Kath’s room without checking...to make sure she was really there, he admitted to himself. It was weird—he was still caught up in the subtle dislocation of the dream.
    Downstairs, Scott fixed himself a light toast-and-coffee breakfast, then thumped back upstairs to shower and shave, accomplishing all of this with considerably more noise than was necessary. He felt a small pang of disappointment when the ruckus of these ablutions failed to waken his wife or his daughter. For a delicious, delinquent moment he considered calling in sick, taking a French leave, crawling back into bed and waking Krista with Mister Happy. After all, it was his birthday.
    But the voice of his conscience interjected with its usual stubborn intolerance. Today was a heavy clinic day until two, then he had a group of medical students to babysit. On this latter account he knew he deserved no sympathy. Every year he promised himself he would drop his university affiliation, and every year he smilingly accepted reappointment.
    So he decided to buck up, meet his responsibilities. After all, there was tonight’s ‘surprise’ party to look forward to, and he took strength from that. Krista always arranged some sort of birthday bash for him, and he saw no reason for his thirty-seventh ( middle age , an inner voice heckled) to be any different. It was a comfortable certainty, and Scott found himself grinning at the thought of it. This was not to suggest that Krista Bowman was predictable. In some ways she was—loving, caring, mothering, sexy—but for the most part there was just no second-guessing Mrs. Draper’s youngest gal, Krista Marie.
    At the door before setting out on the twenty-minute drive to the Health Sciences Centre in Ottawa, Scott had the barely containable urge to shout and waken the entire household, maybe the whole damned lake. But he didn’t. He went out to the garage, climbed into the car and nudged a tape into the deck, trying as he motored up the unpaved hill to think about tonight’s party and the fun they would all have together.
    But that dream-born feeling, dark and strangely prescient, refused to leave him. It remained like a low-grade fever throughout most of that day.

2
    BY FOUR-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON Scott had pretty much forgotten his early-morning dream and the funk it had kindled inside of him. In fact, as he stood in the hallway on Two Link and addressed his students, a growing part of his mind was already home, lounging on the deck, sipping a beer almost too cold to hold. It was hot, tacky, and the smell of the chronic ward was none-too-sweet. The students, six of them, each done up in a bleached-and-pressed intern’s jacket,