12. Kai
Kai
One Sunday a month belongs to nobody. Not the clinic, not patients, not the hospital, not the collection of committees I have somehow allowed myself to be volunteered onto over the years.
Except Mara, because she has argued repeatedly that being my office manager gives her jurisdiction over weekends when she believes I’m becoming particularly antisocial. She’s wrong. Mostly.
I still wake at four forty-five because apparently the ability to sleep late disappeared somewhere during medical residency and never bothered returning.
By five ten, I’m at the gym with my headphones in, working through the same routine I’ve followed for years while most of Minneapolis is still asleep.
Sunday mornings are quieter here. A few regulars occupy the cardio machines, one man whose name I don’t know despite seeing him three times a week is already attempting to murder himself beneath a barbell.
Someone has left a towel across the bench I need as though declaring territorial ownership through damp fabric is acceptable human behavior.
I move it and the overwhelming need to sanitize my hands wins shortly after, before I return to it.
Forty minutes of weights followed by twenty on the treadmill usually leaves my head quiet enough to start the day without dragging the previous week behind me.
Usually, but not this morning. This morning, Julia remains stubbornly present despite every attempt to exhaust her out of my thoughts.
Not Julia sitting across from me in the office, although that version is there too.
I keep thinking about Thursday night, when I stood in the trees long after any legitimate excuse for being there had expired and watched her abruptly mute the television and get off the couch.
At first, I thought she wanted something from the kitchen, but then she walked toward the window, straight toward me.
She never saw me, there was too much distance between the house and the tree line.
The darkness did the rest, but for several seconds she stood close enough to the glass that I could see her trying to look beyond her own reflection.
She knew something was there. Not me, just something.
That should have sent me home immediately.
Instead, I watched her check the locks, switch on the porch light and leave several lights burning downstairs before disappearing toward the bedroom.
Apparently being almost caught has done very little to restore my judgment.
I increase the treadmill speed. It doesn’t help.
By six fifteen, I’m back at my place, showered and dressed in jeans and a black sweater, drinking coffee while checking the weather in South Dakota and pretending I don’t know exactly what is sitting inside the top drawer of the desk across the room.
The letter has been there since Friday night — black envelope, cream paper, red wax seal — excessive in every possible way.
I haven’t delivered it yet, though. That distinction has become important enough that I’m almost embarrassed by how much comfort I’ve taken from it.
Writing something and placing it on Julia’s doorstep are two different decisions.
I have somehow managed to convince myself that until I make the second one, I can continue pretending some functional part of my brain remains in control of this situation.
I finish the coffee, rinse the mug and leave the envelope exactly where it is.
There are more important places to be today.
The first flight to Rapid City is short enough that I barely finish the article I started before the flight attendant announces our descent.
The change in landscape becomes visible long before we touch down, the tightly arranged geometry around Minneapolis giving way to open country and huge stretches of land that make buildings look temporary by comparison.
I rent a black ZX10R at the airport and point it south.
I spend most of my free times on a motorcycle, so why not here as well.
This part of the trip always feels longer than the flight.
The Black Hills fall behind me as the road stretches toward Pine Ridge, and the landscape gradually opens into the country I remember before my brain starts rummaging through anything else.
Mixed-grass prairie shifts beneath the wind in long muted waves, broken by low ridges, ravines and stretches of earth where the land seems to have been split open and left exposed.
Farther east, the Badlands rise out of it in pale, broken formations, beautiful in the harsh way some things become beautiful precisely because nobody ever managed to make them gentle.
Pine Ridge covers more land than most people who have never been here understand.
They hear reservation and imagine a town, maybe several streets and a boundary sign.
It isn’t. It’s communities scattered across millions of acres, homes separated by long stretches of road, prairie and sky, with Pine Ridge village itself only one piece of something much larger.
I was born here. For the first fifteen years of my life, I assumed I would die here too.
Not because I hated it. That distinction matters.
There are things about this place I have carried into every room I’ve occupied since leaving.
The way the wind sounds when there is nothing tall enough to stop it.
The smell of dust just before rain. The instinct to recognize family connections nobody else would understand without a diagram.
The particular silence of winter when snow covers prairie all the way to the horizon.
I learned early that home can hurt you and still be home.
My father disappeared from our lives when I was fifteen.
Not dramatically, at least not in the way people expect stories about abusive men to end.
There was no final beating worse than the others, no police car arriving at exactly the right moment, no grand declaration from my mother that she was finally done.
He simply left. There had been women before.
The drinking, the gambling, months when money disappeared faster than my mother could make it and nights when I learned to recognize the sound of his truck before it reached the house.
I could tell from the way he drove whether we needed to stay out of his way.
Then one day he went somewhere else and didn’t come back.
My mother spent the first few weeks convinced he would. I spent them hoping he wouldn’t.
When the money finally ran out, she answered an advertisement for a live-in housekeeper outside Rapid City.
The man who placed it was named Henry Whitmore.
He was sixty-eight, widowed, wealthy enough that the word estate actually applied to the place he lived.
He was lonely in a way I didn’t understand until I was much older.
He needed someone to live on the property, take care of the house, organize meals, deal with deliveries and manage the thousand small things required to keep a large place from slowly falling apart around one person.
My mother needed work. She also needed somewhere my father wouldn’t think to look for her if he ever decided to return.Henry hired her and acquired me in the process.
At fifteen, I didn’t know what to do with a man who asked questions without demanding the correct answer.
The first few months, I treated him the same way I treated every adult man I didn’t know.
I watched his hands, listened to his voice, observed how much he drank with dinner and whether his footsteps changed when he was angry.
Henry noticed. Of course he did. He never asked me about the bruises my father had left over the years.
He never tried to force some sentimental conversation about what I’d survived.
He simply gave me things I had never associated with men before — consistency and expectation without fear, rules that remained the same whether he was tired, irritated or in a good mood.
He expected me home when I said I would be home.
Expected my grades to reflect what he knew I was capable of.
Expected me to finish what I started and to look people in the eye when I spoke to them.
When I screwed up, there were consequences, but they never involved fists, humiliation or a grown man making a child responsible for his temper.
I learned more about discipline watching Henry Whitmore remove his watch every evening and put it in the same place on his dresser than I ever learned from my father beating the word into our bones.
Discipline, Henry taught me without ever putting it into those words, was something you imposed on yourself.
Violence was what weak men imposed on everyone else.
He also realized embarrassingly quickly that I was smart.
I had spent years hiding that whenever being too good at something attracted the wrong kind of attention.
Henry had no patience for it. He bought books I didn’t ask for, then asked what I thought after I read them.
He argued with me at dinner as though my opinions were worth challenging rather than dismissing them.
When the public school I attended couldn’t offer the classes he thought I needed, he found one that could and paid the tuition despite my mother nearly having an aneurysm over the cost.
By seventeen, he had stopped asking whether I planned to go to college and started asking where.
Medical school came later. The money came from him, but the work was mine.
That was another distinction Henry never allowed me to forget.
He could buy access, he could open doors, but he also made sure to teach me that money wasn’t the reason I stopped walking toward something.
He couldn’t earn a single degree for me.