Read The Good Doctor for Free Online

conceal myself from him, for her sake. But something in her also gave me to understand that he might harm me. She didn’t want to talk more about it. On the next night I drove
past to look and there was a car parked outside. A white car, what make I didn’t know. Parked outside the door, in full view.
    From that night he registered as a presence, standing behind her somewhere, face unclear. I waited a week before I went back to her. I said, ‘Is he really your husband?’
    She nodded solemnly.
    ‘But really?’ I said. ‘Isn’t he just your boyfriend? Did you actually get married? Married?’
    ‘Married,’ she said, nodding vigorously. It was impossible to tell if she had understood the question.
    She didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything. In a life as stripped-down and bare as hers, none of the usual things applied. She might anyway have married in some ceremony or
ritual that didn’t involve a ring. There was no way to know. I liked that; I liked not knowing much about her. This wasn’t a relationship in any normal sense of the word. I had never in my life had
anything like this wordless obsession, with so many meanings implied or understood. Of course there had been other women since my marriage had crashed; I’d had a short affair with Claudia Santander
at the hospital, there were a couple of brief encounters in passing, but none of those liaisons were as silent or so disturbingly powerful as this. All I had to go on was what I came to there at
night: the poor inside of the shack, the hard dirt floor, the smell of her sweat – sometimes vaguely repellent – when I opened her dress. And the hot, blind embrace in the dark.
    We weren’t tender with each other. Or only sometimes, in particular ways. I touched her and stroked her, but she never touched me like that. And we weren’t allowed to kiss – when I tried she
turned her head sharply away and said, ‘No, no.’ I asked why, but it was never explained, and the silence suited me. It suited me too that we weren’t able to talk in any real way. We came together
for the primal, intimate act, while keeping a huge distance open between us.
    Sometimes there was no sex. Sometimes it wasn’t what I was looking for. I just lay there with my face against her shoulder and one hand under her dress, on her breast. When this happened it was
usually in silence, just the sound of breathing in the dark. But then once she did speak to me, a long soft monologue in her own language. I didn’t understand a word, but her voice sketched out a
story on the inside of my eyelids, in which she and I were somewhere else.
    So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day, and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with
the other. For a long time she had no curiosity about who I was or what I did. And when she finally asked, I found myself telling a lie. I said I was an engineer for the government, here on
contract for two years. I told her I was doing some work at the hospital at the moment, which was how I came to be driving the ambulance sometimes. I said I was living in a municipal flat in town,
and that I had a wife in the city who often came up to visit me. I don’t know why I told these lies, except that I wanted to keep her away from my other, daytime life.
    I needn’t have bothered. She never showed the slightest interest in uncovering the other side of me; the town itself seemed to exist for her on a different planet somewhere. Only once did I ever
see her there. I was driving down the main street one afternoon and I spotted her on the pavement, walking alone. I pretended I hadn’t seen her and turned off at the next corner. She never
mentioned it to me, and perhaps she hadn’t seen me either, but for two days afterwards I felt full of guilt and betrayal.
    But I went back; I always went back. Every night that I wasn’t on duty, or when