“What are you doing?” he cries.
“I… I…” I stammer.
“I’m in the shower!” he shouts at me.Well, duh.“You need to… to get out!”
“But—”
“Get out!” He really is screaming this time. I can see the veins standing out in his neck, and his right eye is twitching slightly. “Now!”
I nearly slip on a puddle of water as I fumble to put my clothes back on. I’msoembarrassed. As I pull my tank top over my head, I notice that the pattern of water droplets sounds different. The downpour of water is steady now—Abe isn’t moving in the shower. He’s just standing still, waiting for me to leave.
What the hell is going on?
I’m tempted to storm out of the room and go home, but curiosity and confusion keep me there. What were those stains on his scrubs? It would have been easier to believe it was something innocent if not for the way he reacted. I sit on hisratty futon couch, avoiding a rather large new coffee stain, and wait for Abe to finish his shower. I will never forget the tone of Abe’s voice. I’ve never heard him sound that way. He was furious but also something else, something even more perplexing:
He sounded terrified.
A minute later, the flow of water stops, and Abe emerges from the bathroom with one towel around his waist and another clutched in his hands. His usually pale face is very red and not just from the steam of the shower. He can barely make eye contact with me.
“Give me a second to get dressed,” he says. “Okay?”
While he’s in the bedroom changing, I sneak into the bathroom to see if the scrubs are still there. They aren’t. But since he wasn’t holding them when he came out of the bathroom, that means he must have wrapped them in a towel. Again, very strange.
Abe emerges from the bedroom wearing a clean pair of jeans and a baggy green T-shirt.The second I see him, I blurt out, “What’s going on, Abe?”
Abe doesn’t say anything right away. He sinks onto the couch beside me. “What do you mean?”
“What were those stains on your scrubs?”
“What?”
He’s stalling for time, pretending he has no idea what I’m talking about. So I tell him my suspicions, just to see his face. “It looked like blood.”
His face grows several shades paler. That’s not the reaction I was hoping for. I wanted him to laugh like I’d said something preposterous.Scrubs covered with several pints of blood? How could you think something so silly?
“I was helping Dr. Kovak with a procedure at the clinic,” he explains. “It… it got a little messy.”
And then I notice his hands. More specifically, I notice his fingernails. There’s a dark-brown substance caked into the nails that didn’t entirely come out in the shower.
“You weren’t wearing gloves during the procedure?” I ask.
He stammers out some sort of explanation that doesn’t make any sense. Whatever he said, it’s so clear that he’s lying to me. Exceptwhy?
“What were you doing, Abe?” I say.
His eyes drop, avoiding mine. “Just working.”
“You swear?”
His shoulders heave. “I swear.”
I have given him every chance to tell me the truth about what he was doing. And he’s still lying through his teeth.
14
I hardly seeAbe for the next few days. He’s clearly avoiding me.
I’m too agitated to study. How can I? Every time I try to concentrate on anatomy, I start imagining what Abe could possibly be hiding from me. Why were his clothes covered in blood? Why was it caked into his nails?
