Page 73 of Beneath the Stain

“What’s so damned funny?” Cambridge called after him.

Mackey just kept giggling, shaking his head.

Yeah, he dressed nice and everything, and the white hair was all distinguished and shit, but money or no money, the guy was as fucked-up as any pot-bellied homeboy in Tyson.

Mackey turned around and grinned, walking backward for a few steps. “Man, you are just regular people, you know that?”

And then he trotted to his room before anybody could come out and ask him why he missed dinner.

THATNIGHT,after Cambridge came by, good to his word, and served him some damned fine London broil with bordeaux sauce and vegetables, he texted Trav.

His conversation with Cambridge had, surprisingly, been about music. Cambridge had been a fan of Led Zeppelin, who had been big when he’d been in grade school, and was also a huge fan of some of the classics—Def Leppard, Tesla, Guns N’ Roses.

“Yeah,” Mackey said, picking at some bread Cambridge had stolen from the cafeteria. “Old Axl could really tear shit up. It was a shame what—”

“What he let the booze and the drugs do to his talent,” Cambridge said with meaning, and Mackey felt a particular wrench at the words.

“Yeah, well, I guess they don’t all go out in a blaze of glory, do they?” He took a bite of London broil and closed his eyes. “You know, it’s like food tastes better now that I’m not doing coke anymore. Is that right? I mean, the coke tastednasty. Fucking nastiest shit on the planet. And all I can think right now is that must have been some rush if I was gonna give up food that tasted like this.”

Cambridge nodded and made a “mmf” sound through his own food. After he swallowed he wiped his mouth. “Yeah, I remember coke—drug of choice in the eighties, when I was going through college. Taste was bad, but it could definitely keep you up all night.”

Mackey stared at him in surprise.

“What?” Cambridge asked before taking another bite. “You think just because we’re doctors here doesn’t mean we haven’t done some of the drugs?”

Mackey thought about it, thought about everything he’d learned. “Were you an addict?” he asked carefully.

Cambridge shook his head deliberately. “Good question,” he praised. “No. I finished grad school and stopped buying coke. I was done.” He grimaced. “But my first wife, who finished the same year I did—she wasn’t so lucky.”

Mackey nodded, hungry for some poetry, even if it was from his shrink. “What happened?” he asked seriously.

Cambridge sighed. “We started working for an HMO, and she put most of our salary up her nose, and when we couldn’t afford it anymore because we were paying off our student loans, she started stealing from the hospital.”

Mackey listened, enthralled—and at the same time sympathetic. “Hard,” he said, reasoning it through. “Watching someone do that to themselves.”

“You think?” Cambridge said dryly.

If Mackey wasn’t so relaxed, so hollowed out by his breakdown in the office and the damned decadent forty-five minute shower he’d just taken, he might have flushed. “How’d she stop?” he asked, not wanting to talk about himself anymore.

“She got busted by the hospital and got arrested,” Cambridge said, grimacing. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and set it on top of his little foil-insulated lunch box. “It was before hospitals were so generous about sending people to rehab—she lost her job and her license and did two years in minimum-security prison.”

Mackey was aghast. “That sucks,” he muttered. “Man, that shit is just soeverywhere, you know? You forget it’s illegal until someone wants to remember.”

Cambridge nodded. “Yeah. That’s the truth. I know Kristin was pretty damned surprised—and so was I. I mean, I don’t know why it was so much easier for me to stop.ProfessionallyI do. I know about genetic studies and personality profiles and the differences in the way people respond to stress. But… but in my stomach, I don’t. It hit me, how really damned lucky I’d been, to just be able to walk away. She couldn’t, and it never seemed like her fault. I mean, webondeddoing blow in the bathroom when we were doing our clinical rotations. It was 1987—whowasn’tgetting high? But….” He sighed, and Mackey realized his voice had gotten really impassioned.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth dry. “What happened to her?”

Cambridge smiled. “She got out, rehabilitated. Got a job in retail. But she… she was angry with me. We both knew it was irrational, but the situation was difficult. It was as though I’d gotten away with something. Doesn’t make for a long-lasting marriage,” he said, twisting his lips. “I understand she met a nice man and is working on grandkids right now, but we were never the same.”

Mackey nodded thoughtfully. “It can fuck shit up,” he said, picturing Trav.

“It can indeed,” Cambridge agreed. “It’s how I found my calling, though.” He smiled at Mackey’s surprise. “Yes—you heard me. That’s why I’m here. Penance, sort of. But mostly it felt important. A real reason to practice healing.”

“Craft is important.” Mackey nodded earnestly. “If it’s… it’s arealthing you love to do, you want to do it your best.”

Mackey was starting to hate that thing Cambridge did with his face, the thing where he wrinkled his nose and squinched up his cheeks. “Andthatdiscussion is for another day,” he said grimly. With that, he stood up and started gathering plastic plates and throwing everything in the lunch bag his wife had brought him.

Mackey had a thought. “Hey, Doc?”