I Regret Loving You for Five Years novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Old Dates

Thea refuses to sign for the crates, buys replacements with her own savings, meets Boone, and lands at Pole to find Marshall and Amber's dueling statements about her on the news feed.

I held the sticker up to the light.

Underneath it, the real date was printed right on the cardboard.

Fourteen months gone.

I opened the next box. Same crooked sticker. Same old date.

I opened a third, and a fourth, and stopped counting.

"Doc? We need your signature."

The Wexler loading supervisor had a clipboard and a lanyard and the patience of a man with a schedule.

Behind him, a line of winter crew waited with their duffels.

Forty people, give or take, all in the same red parkas.

"I'm not signing for these," I said.

He blinked at me.

"It's your medical kit. You sign, it goes on the plane."

I held up the epinephrine box with the sticker hanging off it.

"This expired fourteen months ago."

"Those are new labels."

"I can see that. I'm asking what's under them."

A woman in the line leaned to look.

The supervisor stepped in front of her.

"Ma'am, the kits are certified. Ludlow Medical certifies them. Wexler packs them. You don't open them."

"I'm the doctor who has to use them."

I took out my phone, the one with no SIM, and started photographing lot numbers.

Box, sticker, the date under the sticker.

Box, sticker, the date under the sticker.

"Stop that," he said.

I didn't.

"You keep holding up my line, I'll bump you off this flight. The station can have the summer doc for another week while we sort you out."

"The summer doc leaves on the last plane," I said. "Bump me, and forty-one people winter with nobody."

The line had gone very quiet.

Somebody near the back said, "Is she right?"

"She's right," said a man's voice behind me. "Doc goes, we all go."

I didn't turn around.

I photographed the last crate.

Then the loudspeaker crackled.

Weather at the Pole. The flight was on hold until morning.

The whole warehouse groaned at once.

I put my phone in my pocket and walked out to the taxi stand.

***

The pharmacy was on a corner in the middle of Christchurch, with geraniums in the window.

The pharmacist was a tall woman with reading glasses on a cord.

I gave her my list.

She read it twice.

"This is a hospital order, love."

"It's a station order. I'm the only doctor for eight months, and my kit's no good."

She called the Program's medical office while I stood at the counter.

It took forty minutes and three faxes I didn't watch.

Then she started pulling boxes.

Epinephrine. Antibiotics. Steroids. Antihistamines. Burn dressings. Insulin. A cooler bag for the things that needed one.

She didn't have the clot-busters. Nobody kept those on a shelf.

"That's nine thousand four hundred," she said, in New Zealand dollars I would have had to convert, and didn't.

It was most of what I'd saved toward a house Marshall was always going to buy us next year.

I handed her my card.

It went through.

I'd half hoped it wouldn't.

***

At six the next morning I was dragging three pharmacy boxes and a cooler across the warehouse floor.

A big man in Carhartt bibs took two of them out of my arms without asking.

He had a sandy beard and a wool watch cap and a face that had been out in a lot of wind.

"You're the doc who told Wexler to get bent," he said.

"I said it more politely."

"Not from where I was standing." He hefted the boxes. "Boone. I fix the dozers."

"Thea."

"I know. Everybody knows." He looked at the receipt sticking out of the bag. "You paid for this yourself?"

"Somebody had to."

"Huh." He walked a few steps. "Rich man's wife?"

"Ex."

He glanced down at me.

"Huh," he said again, in a different voice.

He carried the boxes all the way up the ramp of the plane and strapped them in next to his own gear.

Then he sat across from me in the webbed seats and went to sleep with his arms folded.

The plane was loud and cold and smelled like jet fuel.

Somewhere over the ice I fell asleep too.

When I woke up, his spare parka was over my knees.

He was reading a manual for a snow groomer and didn't look up.

"You snore," he said.

"I don't."

"Like a D8."

"I don't know what that is."

"A dozer. A big one." He turned a page. "It's a compliment."

***

We landed on the skiway in a white so bright it hurt.

The cold went straight through my parka and into my teeth.

A woman in a red parka with grey braids was waiting at the bottom of the ramp.

She shook my hand hard.

"Harriet Fairbank. Station manager. Welcome to Pole, Doctor."

Then she held out a folded sheet of paper.

"This came through the news feed an hour ago. I'd rather you read it from me than from the galley."

I unfolded it with my glove still on.

It was a statement on Ludlow Group letterhead.

Dr. Thea Bevan was my wife for five years. Anything said about her is said about me. Marshall Ludlow.

Under it, someone had printed the reply from Wexler Enterprises.

We're sorry for Dr. Bevan's difficulties. She is a troubled woman who has fled to Antarctica, and we wish her the help she needs.

Amber Wexler.

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