Free A Circle of Wives by Alice Laplante Page A

think about it, a plastic surgeon needing to go into the hospital on a holiday? What, just in case someone needs an emergency face-lift? The obviousness of his lies is the truly shameful part. Thinking of him in Deborah’s house with relatives and friends eating his second turkey dinner makes me turn a hot and painful red. The third turkey dinner must have been a fantasy of a reporter or neighbor, as he would hardly have flown down to LA for dinner on the same day.
    Call me naïve, but I didn’t realize my neighbors were that interested in us. How else do they know so much? Did our gardeners, our housecleaners, gossip? The plots in our neighborhood are large, the trees and foliage mature, you can’t see other houses from ours, the garden is protected by a fence. John liked his privacy. Yet someone knew that we spent most of our hours back there, gardening or sitting under the sun umbrella drinking sweet tea, even in winter. They somehow knew the price we’d paid for the house; they knew the color of bougainvillea we’d planted. One especially alert neighbor even heard John’s car leave every morning right after five. Even on weekends. How could she not have known?
    Which is, of course, the million-dollar question.

14
Helen
    I SPECIALIZE IN THE TREATMENT of T-cell childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The smaller the patient, the less time we have. The cells multiply and move so fast that it’s a fierce race, the opponent impossibly swift. I typically treat the children and infants with a combination of chemotherapy and targeted therapy with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Inhibitor. That’s what I am. An introverted inhibitor. My job is to prevent, to discourage, to put up walls and deterrents against the cancer cells. I was pretty good at doing that in my personal life, too. John vanquished all my defenses, though. I still don’t know how he managed that.
    I’ve built a name for myself over the years. Professionally, I let my work speak for itself, and it’s gratifying in a small way that my practice calendar is full. Although distressing in a much larger sense, because it means a waiting list of sick kids, many of them hopeless cases, nevertheless hoping for a chance, any chance, I might offer. The fact that I often publish my research—my articles in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology and the Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology have won awards—and increasingly speak at conferences has intensified the attention on my professional life. But I’ve always kept my personal life—what little there is of it— personal. That is now proving impossible. For the media uproar has been frankly astounding.
    I’m not sure if it’s just a slow news month, or whether the idea of a man with three wives is simply so titillating that it pushed everything else off the front page. I take some satisfaction in the fact that no one has yet managed to take a clear photo of me and no usable video. I cover my face every time I go outside. Most publications and TV shows are running my official photograph from the hospital’s website. It’s not particularly flattering, with my brown hair in a neat, sterile bob and a fake half smile plastered on my face.
    The PR director of the hospital has been working with security to keep the reporters at bay at the front entrance. Still, some Judas on the hospital staff must have left a side door strategically open because a news crew managed to almost reach my office this morning. I was in there explaining to the distraught parents of a ten-year-old girl who had presented with excessive bruising on her legs and arms that it was probably not due to soccer practice. My assistant caught sight of the cameras and called the PR director, who then roused security and rooted the crew out of the building before they got to me. Even so, one particularly clever reporter bandaged her young daughter’s two kneecaps and almost managed to make it to my office before being stopped by an