Leonard’s entrance to the Hospital room was met with a scowl from Stella. He looked down at his feet shamefully, and walked over to the bed, laying down a bouquet of flowers on the side table.
“Hey brother,” said Tom, giving him a nod and then gesturing towards the flowers. “Nice,” he whispered with a smile.
“I’m sure she appreciates it,” added Stella, sarcastically.
“Hey. We talked about this, okay, it’s not Leonard’s fault,” Tom told her, more seriously than his usual disposition. “She’s a grown woman. If she jumped off a bridge would you blame the guy who designed the bridge?”
“Oh shut the fuck up, that is not the same,” she snapped, elbowing him in the stomach.
“You’re right,” said Leonard. “I should have stopped her. I thought she knew what she was doing, but even then it was too risky. I feel terrible.”
“Yeah, well, you should,” replied Stella, sternly, though the frankness in her voice made it clear that she respected his admittance of guilt. They all looked down at Juliette’s face as she lay unconscious in the bed, the only sign of life the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Otherwise she may have been mistaken as dead, as she was shockingly pale. It was the evening after Juliette’s attempt at Positione II, and Leonard had followed the ambulance in a taxi, not on the instruction of anyone, but because he hadn’t been sure what else to do.
When the nurses had asked him what happened, he had told them that she had been trying a new form of stretch, and described the position as closely as he could, but did not mention the book itself. Especially now, it seemed like that should be kept secret.
After a little time, the couple left, with Stella still unhappy but more forgiving of Leonard, and he suspected that the next few dinners at their house would be a little tense. He was now left alone with Juliette in the room, and sat beside her for what must have been hours. He stared at her white face, and her still hands, and the blue sheets that made her look like an iceberg floating aimlessly in arctic waters. The faint voices from nearby rooms, and hurried footsteps along the corridor were the only sounds for a long time, until a woman’s voice from the doorway suddenly greeted him.
“Hello.”
He spun around, embarrassing himself by jumping in his chair, and stood up. The doctor in the doorway was a older woman, around the age of his mother, perhaps a few years older. She had a kind smile but piercing eyes that looked straight through him, and she stared for a few seconds, as if aware of the power of her gaze. She extended her hand, and he shook it.
“Doctor Madison Thorne,” she said. He introduced himself with his full name — Leonard Duncan, as she walked around the bed to take a close look at Juliette. She brushed the young woman’s hair aside tenderly, and felt her pulse, then scribbled something down on a clipboard. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind speaking to me for a moment in my office,” she asked him, quietly. “I don’t want to disturb her too much, you see.”
Leonard agreed, and soon Doctor Thorne was leading him down the long hallway outside, past busy nurses’ stations and dozens of patients’ rooms, some empty, some full of families and doctors. They eventually reached the quiet end of the hallway, where there were no patients’ rooms but only thick wooden doors, some with the names of doctors on placards, some bearing only the word ‘private’. Then they came to the door which read ‘Doctor Madison Thorne’, which Thorne unlocked with a long mortice key, and lead him inside.
The room was more like a private library than a doctor’s office, the walls invisible behind tall, looming wooden bookshelves, each stocked full with huge volumes. There was another, smaller door to the side of the large oak desk which Thorne sat down behind, but no windows in the room. It felt claustrophobic, made significantly smaller due to the large bookcases surrounding them. He sat down in one of two chairs opposite her, whilst she watched with a silent smile.
“Drink?” she offered, drawing his attention to the small but impressive collection of bottles at the edge of the desk. They were expensive and international whiskeys, rums and gins in tall glass bottles, and he would later look back on their presence in a doctor’s office as unusual, though in the context of that room they seemed perfectly natural. He politely declined, but she poured him a glass of whiskey anyway, and he found himself accepting and drinking it without argument. She continued to watch him as she sipped her own, until he decided that he should break the silence with a question.
“Are you able to tell me Juliette’s diagnosis?”
“Oh,” she sighed, “it’s nothing too serious. A dislocated bone or two, a few pulled muscles — I’m afraid I can’t go into too much detail, you understand, but there’s nothing to worry about. She’ll be up and about before you know it.” Leonard found this difficult to believe, when he recalled the screams of horror still fresh in his ears from last night, but Thorne seemed to brush the question of Juliette’s health away as if it were entirely unimportant. “You were with her when she had her…” Thorne paused, staring into her drink, and all of a sudden a rather inappropriate smile spread across her lips. “…accident.”
“That’s right,” he answered nervously, “she was trying a new stretch and…”
“Where did she learn about this ‘new stretch’?” asked Thorne, cutting him off.
“I… I’m not sure. I think a friend of hers had mentioned it…” Again, came that smile. Thorne smirked to herself behind her glass. He stopped talking, and her eyes came up to meet his. He felt trapped, suddenly, by her eyes.
“Who are you, Mr Duncan?” she asked blankly, any sign of a smile gone from her face.
“I’m a friend of Juliette’s.”
“Is that right?” Thorne began to pour herself another drink. “Some of the other gymnasts were here early this morning, you see. One of them asked who you were, and it seems that none of them knew.”
“Oh… well, we know each other through my sister in law…” he started to explain, and then trailed off. He was now feeling quite uncomfortable in this room, surrounded by Doctor Thorne’s bookshelves and being interrogated by the doctor herself.
“Why were you at the stadium with her?” she asked, but rather than waiting for him to answer, she stood up from the desk, and began to search her bookshelves as she continued to speak. “When I heard about what happened to poor Juliette, it sounded rather familiar to me. I recognised the state that they described finding her in — not directly at first, in fact it was by chance that I overheard a conversation between a friend of hers and a colleague of mine.” She pulled a large hardback book from a high shelf, and slammed it down on the desk. “I recognised the… what you call the stretch, but not from any medical textbooks.” Flicking through the book, she arrived at a page and opened it up fully, before turning it swiftly towards Leonard and pushing it towards him. “From this.”
Shit, thought Leonard, looking down at an annotated copy of The Dracean Positions.
