Page 24 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

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a moon and stars along the headboard.
Two weeks later, on a rainy morning just after the semester’s final exams are over, Peter sits in the office of Dr. Rayan Murr. The last time he saw Murr was at Helen’s funeral. Peter had looked around at some point, a little amazed the man had come, though of course Murr had heard about the shooting. His office had sent flowers:
“Really, Marianne, how could I have given up that?” ~
Agnes Kurowsky isn’t given to gossip, but she did read about the shooting at the grocery store, the one in which Peter Fricke’s wife, seven months pregnant and out for a few items, had been killed. There are days when his eyes flicker over her face and body, not with desire, though there is hunger there, and sorrow so deep Agnes believes that if she looked too long, she could get lost in it. Ag- nes herself has known sorrow; it lingers in her sister Beth’s house, and at times it seems to cut through Beth’s fury to reveal something purple and bruised with longing.
a dozen white roses and a card that Peter can’t remember having read.
Even though Agnes isn’t majoring in English, she signed up for the seminar because she’s deter- mined to read the great writers while pursuing her nursing degree. It’s the one thing her largely self-educated grandmother believed every person should do. And because Agnes loved her grand- mother, who looked after her and Beth while her mother had to work, the advice stayed with her, became her own.
“Ah, well.” A smile creeps over Peter’s features, remembering what Helen used to say about their endocrinologist, how certain she’d been that he was more high maintenance than the vainest wom- an. And yet there is no denying that Helen had liked him. Hell, Peter himself had always liked him. After all, he’d made it possible for Helen and Peter to have a child, and they would have— Pe- ter slams closed this door to his thoughts.
What Agnes never expected is the effect Shake- speare’s plays would have on her. So young, my lord, and true, Cordelia tells Lear when he is disappointed, then enraged by her inability to flatter, her inability to heave my heart into my mouth. Agnes doesn’t entirely understand every- thing in these plays; yet lines like this one bur- row deep beneath her skin, becoming part of her blood stream. She thinks of her own father, who left when she was seven, the way she knew, even as a very small child, this wiry, broad-shouldered man who took off on his motorcycle on Saturday mornings, would not stay. Like the loyal daugh- ter in King Lear, she’d tried to hold her father, to keep him, with her love. And she failed, just as her mother had.
“How are you?” the doctor says, once he opens a folder dating back to their first appointment nearly three and a half years ago.
I am a feather for each wind that blows.
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~
“That’s a considerable undertaking,” Murr says carefully.
“You look different somehow,” Peter says, startled when the doctor steps into the office, and Peter stands to shake his hand.
“It’s the hair,” Murr says, shaking Peter’s hand. “I had a transplant.”
“Surviving,” Peter says, then realizes this is prob- ably not the best way to proceed given the reason he’s here. “I’m tenured now at the college. I pub- lished my book on Shakespeare’s romances.”
Murr congratulates him, the vague look in his eyes suggesting he has no real idea of what Pe- ter’s book is about, and will therefore not press him further. For this Peter feels only relief.
“So,” Murr leans back in his chair, his fine hands folded in his lap. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve come to talk to you about finding a surro- gate.”