Naomi Richardson, M.D. (hiswidowedbride) wrote in mnhttnprjct, @ 2010-06-16 07:51:00 |
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"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world--not even our troubles." Who had said that? From beneath a mask of ginseng and green tea, Naomi Richardson's eyes scrunched up into the center of her face, forcing a clump of the stuff into little mounds at the ends of her brows. Charlie Chaplin, she thought she remembered from the end of one of the speeches at her undergraduate commencement at the University of Denver. Going out on a comedic note, but no less true. Strange, the things the memory latches onto, and the things it lets go of before dinner. "Did you read about the new genetic therapy injections they're coming out with?" Dr. Richardson said, eyes closed, voice low, so as not to disrupt the tranquil drone of the Exhale day spa on the Upper East Side of District 0. She was sure that if she spoke above a hushed monotone the entire facility, from the massage tables to the yoga classes, would be startled off its feet by the mere sound of her voice. It was peaceful here, to say the least, and Naomi was glad of the afternoon away from the general bustle of the New York City streets below, away from work, from Langone and her patients. She was glad of the reprieve from all the saving and failing to save, especially today. Strange, the things the memory latches onto, yet some things are hardly surprising. Certainly, the fact that the widow Richardson would remember her own wedding anniversary, even more than two years after the death of her husband, would come as no great surprise to anyone at all. Yes, Naomi was glad of the quiet reprieve and the generous company of a dear friend. And for the rejuvenating ginseng, too. "Genetic enhancements," she went on. "Cosmetic surgery without the surgery." It wasn't exactly her field, but Naomi certainly knew a thing or two about genetics. The idea of injecting herself with replacement DNA did not appeal, but then neither did cosmetic surgery classic. Naomi Richardson was a woman of many cosmetic cares, but whenever possible, she preferred the route au naturel. And, anyway, to the oncologist, the genetic therapy was nothing if not an opportunity to question the way in which the injections would react with the pre-existing cellular make-up of the patient's body, and the repercussions on the natural progression of cell growth. Nothing is permanent, but some things were built to be sustainable unless acted upon by invasive forces, like chemical injections. Or nuclear fallout. Nothing was ever truly built to withstand the unnatural barrage of the wicked world, be it troubles, genetic constructs, or marriage. Lindsay was laying on a massage table, her head turned to one side, a similar mask on her own face as a masseuse worked their way up and down her back. From where she was she couldn't see Naomi but she could hear her, the massage leaving her practically boneless, better than a cigarette and nearly as good as sex, most of the time anyway. "I did," she said, her own voice not pitched quite so low, and likely fairly familiar to any of the spa customers who had young children. "I can't decide if it's some sort of anti-christ or my salvation." She squirmed slightly as the masseuse hit a sore spot and absently flicked her hand at him. "Easy there, I am not a melon you are testing." After a moment she continued. "I don't know if I'd have anything done, but I have to say, having bigger breasts wouldn't be the end of the world." She tensed and untensed her neck, thinking this was the perfect activity for them today. After this they were going to go and have dinner and probably get drunk, and that was a good thing in her mind, something to keep Naomi's mind off what day it was. If there was anything she could do for Naomi, she would, goodness knows she (and Liz and Aubrey) had been there for her more than a time or two when she really needed them. Snickering at the melon remark, Naomi’s body tensed, then settled back into the massage table, her breath falling into the rhythm of the masseuse’s hands. “I doubt it’s the anti-Christ,” she smiled. “I don’t know if I like the idea of screwing with my genetic make-up.” The air that tickled the skin of her back felt cooler than any day spa should have felt, even to Naomi’s personal thermostat, which was always set to a constant low, but she curled her toes and the draft passed. “But, my Lord, you always look great!” she added. “Why would even you say that?” It was true, Naomi considered her friends some of the best New York City had to offer, in everything from looks to intelligence to influence. After all, what was a woman to be judged by, if not by the people she associated with? Or so Naomi had grown to believe. And wiith Lindsay, she found not only a dear confidante, but a reassurance of her own attractiveness, strength, and worth; she found something akin to the family her one remaining sibling so often failed to represent. "No, I think, as your attending physician, I have to forbid genetic mutations, Lindsay." Lindsay wanted to laugh but was afraid of cracking the mask so she settled for smiling instead. "They are a bit small and they could use a bit of a lift," she said. "But it's nice of you to say all the same." She pursed her lips slightly in thought. "Maybe they'll have something eventually that can take care of my problem. You know. It would be nice not to have to worry about it, don't you think?" The masseuse reached her lower back, and she made a low satisfied noise in her throat. "Mmm. I think I might take this one home." The masseuse murmured something in response and deepened the massage, making her sigh. "You're beautiful the way you are too, sweetie," she told Naomi. "Really. I imagine there are some people though that would do it. I mean look at all the women that have plastic surgery done as it is. People will probably be lining up." “Probably,” Naomi sighed, and thought about all the women she had treated in the past. Beautiful women, homely women, mothers, daughters, most of them older, some of them girls barely past their first period, some of them dying, all of them sick. She knew many women who had lost breasts, and she had come to appreciate those she still had. “You know,” she started, “they might, eventually. There are a lot more varied symptoms, though, and it’s such a personalized…disorder.” She was not a neurologist, either, and Dr. Richardson’s knowledge of abnormal brain activity and seizures was limited to her knowledge of Lindsay’s own case and the most basic of neurology coursework at the University of Colorado Medical School. “But they did manage to build a better mouse trap, so anything’s possible!” She laughed softly, let the masseuse have another roll over her muscles, then added, hopeful, “But it’s not always lifelong. Some forms have been known to come and go, like allergies.” "I suppose. Mine never have though." Lindsay's voice was slightly quieter at that, and she turned her head at that. The bottom of her foot itched and she moved the other to scratch it slightly as she felt the masseuse moving down along her legs. "It's only been worse since I've been older too. Although it's been a bit since I've had a problem." Meaning the last bad one she had, the time they'd taken her to the hospital. The conversation seemed too serious and she thought it best to change the subject. “Yeah,” Naomi’s brows returned to the scrunched position at the center of her forehead. “Nothing is permanent in this wicked world,” she said, relaxing her brows and offering Lindsay a warm laugh in her words. “Not even our troubles.” The masseuse was hard at work on the knots that never seemed to go away in the doctor’s neck. Allergies was a terrible metaphor, she knew that kind of frustration, and she knew that it was nothing like what Lindsay had to deal with. Naomi knew she had lived a rather charmed life, and that up until the Bomb, she had wanted for nothing and had managed to get even more than that. Even after, if one overlooked the oh-so-small incident of widowhood, there was very little to complain of in the long life of Naomi Okena Knight-Richardson. The streets of New York may have been foreign at first, but the city had become as much a home as anywhere outside of Colorado. “Have you ever read anything by Emma Goldman?” she found herself suddenly verbalizing at the thought of those first days wandering the strange streets of the former island of Manhattan. Lindsay opened one eye finally, wondering what had brought that on. "The name's familiar, but no, I don't think so. Why?" She looked at her friend, laying so seemingly relaxed and wondered what was going on in her head exactly. "To be honest I don't remember the last time I sat down and read a decent book. I'm looking forward to our summer hiatus." She was also considering, finally, asking Blaine to move out of the house, but she wasn't going to bring that up on today of all days, not when Naomi had so much on her mind. Her relationship with her ex was so stilted and painful it was almost a joke, the way they moved in the same home, the same rooms sometimes, and barely spoke. Her own affairs now and no doubt his, the way they didn't even acknowledge them. She'd loved him so much. Part of her still loved him. And she wished for nothing more than for someone to return that sort of feeling to her someday, for someone to not fail her. Even through the jokes and innuendos and the steadily increasing list of men she'd slept with recently. Until the past year for years it had only been Blaine, and now he was a stranger. Naomi turned her head (against the wishes of the masseuse, who made her annoyance clear with a sharp clearing of her throat), pressing her opposite cheek into the table, and opened one eye to meet Lindsay’s. “I’ve been working my way slowly through her autobiography,” she started. What was there to say? It was a strange enough choice in reading material for Naomi, without getting into the explanation of the even more strange circumstances under which the book had come into her possession. “Lord knows I haven’t had much time to read either,” she closed her eye again. “I…it was a birthday gift. I guess.” The beginning: Goldman comes to New York with scarcely a penny to her name, knowing hardly a soul, and makes it her mission to seek out the anarchist community. To do what? Make a difference? Take a stand, or something, for a country she was only an immigrant in? And what about Mother Russia? Why did she leave? Naomi had barely grazed the first few pages, really, and was hardly in a position to discuss the volume (a veritable tome), but there was something about it that piqued her interest. Probably just the way it had come upon her, really. If someone thought she needed to read it, Naomi was certainly going to be curious as to why. Why, and who? "From who?" She tried to remember who had brought Naomi presents at the party they'd had and couldn't come up with any that had looked like books. "You'll have to let me borrow if it's any good," she finally said, wondering why Naomi was bringing it up unless it was just a random topic of conversation. "I need to find more time for stuff like that. Something anyway different." She wondered if she filled her life with people and activity because she felt sort of empty inside most of the time. "Maybe when the community center's done." She reached up with an annoyed hand again as the massuse hit a spot that was more painful than anything else and felt the strong hands ease. "So is it any good? The book?" “Well, I don’t know,” Naomi closed her eyes again. She shouldn’t have brought it up. She really hadn’t read very much of it, and anyway, it wasn’t really the sort of thing for a spa chat. “I haven’t gotten very far. It’s not exactly light summer reading, that’s for sure.” It was about a Jewish immigrant, which did touch a particular chord in Naomi’s proud heart, but otherwise, it was more than a little difficult to get into. “And I don’t…I don’t know,” she scrunched brows again, in embarrassment this time, wondering whether Lindsay could see. “I don’t know…who it was from.” Oh, this was a can of worms she probably should have left shut today. At any rate, it was a puzzle to play with, and that was far preferable to—to other things. Was it time for dinner and cocktails yet? “It came in the mail. Just the book. And a card with some initials on it. Shit.” The latter was barely a whisper. Something about Naomi's tone made Lindsay come to attention, and she sad half up, pulling her towel around her, despite the massuse's surprised complaing. "Naomi?" She wasn't sure what else was going on here, but Naomi sounded strange and unlike herself. She was the emotional scatter brained one in this relationship usually, but that didn't mean she wasn't intuitive when it came to her friends. She waved the masseuse away, being nearly done anyway, and sat up on the table, her legs hanging off the side as she regarded the other woman. "Is something going on?" “Well, no.” Naomi pulled herself up, offered the masseuse a half-smile and a “thank you” that politely indicated she had had enough, and bit her lip, as she looked at Lindsay and tightened the towel around herself. “Nothing’s going on,” she finally said. Cryptic packages from mysterious senders called, simply, LSK? That was nothing, right? And the very absence of that thing made it into a thing. Or something. Naomi’s head was feeling fuzzy from all the droning tranquility and the relaxation and the loosening of the muscles around her neck. But, of course, there was not skirting around this. Naomi wanted to forget it had happened, but it wasn't the sort of thing that the memory let go of so easily--and rightly so, she warranted. Naomi was a woman who liked things to be kept neat, orderly, and simple. There was nothing very simple about the United States of 2029, but even so, Naomi needed only to retreat into the solace of her miniature garden, or the pans simmering over her stove, or the depths of the medical journals on her table, or the simple reminder that she was still an American citizen. No matter what. “On my birthday,” she blinked hard, “I got a package in the mail. The book, and a note card with some letters on it--LSK." She sighed. Strange that she would remember the letters so well, but there were some things the memory latched onto. For one reason or another. "I don’t…know who it was from. The return address was just to the post office. I...it was weird." Lindsay regarded her friend for a long moment, gathering her own towel more closely around herself, her sharp features intent. "That's... well that is strange. Is there anyone it could be from? Do the initials mean anything?" Surely if it was just an anonymous gift it wouldn't be quite so troublesome as more an amusing mystery. Naomi looked genuinely a little bothered by it, she thought, and naturally that bothered her. Clearing her throat, Naomi looked down at her palms, now opened upward in her lap. “I don’t exactly get a lot of fan mail,” she said softly. “And everyone I would guess was either at the party or is Camille or Dr. Hale. And they were both very neat and clear in signing their cards. I suppose it could have been someone who forgot to bring their gift to the party, and just figured I would remember. But I don’t recall anyone promising to send a belated present.” Did the initials mean anything? Well, she had asked Camille for insight; LSK meant a lot of things. To Naomi, personally, they were a familiar set of letters, as familiar as NOK or CMK. “Honestly, the letters don’t really mean anything,” she tried to smile, laugh even. “I mean, at first glance I automatically want to think L. S. Knight, but any set of three letters with a K on the end tends to trip me up. My initials, right? I've been conditioned.” Poor Lindsay would probably much rather have been spending the afternoon actually enjoying the spa. "Your brother." Lindsay waited for silence as conformation and after looking to make sure they were alone she reached for the glass of wine sitting nearby. "It could be him. Right? Possibly? Maybe this is his way of reaching out to you?" She supposed it could be something more sinister, but it wasn't like Naomi was as much in the public eye as herself or Liz. Yes. Naomi had assumed just the same. She didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t want to believe it because it didn’t make sense. Why would Leo “reach out” to her in such a way as that? Why would Leo even remember her birthday, and even if he was still in New York, how would he know where she lived? She hadn’t spoken to him in at least ten years. Why now? In all honesty, she had long considered her brother almost dead, in a way. When she thought of him at all, which hadn’t been terribly often since her marriage and his move east. “It does make sense, doesn’t it?” she finally said, and leaned back on the palm of one hand. “It could be, yeah. I guess. But I haven’t gotten a birthday present from him since…well, since we were kids, probably. I don’t know, he used to make things.” She ran a hand over her curls, let it hang there for a moment. “If Leo wanted to get in touch, why didn’t he just call me, or write a letter?” "I don't know," Lindsay said after a moment. For some reason her thoughts went to Blaine. "Maybe because sometimes you go so long without saying something that it becomes impossible? Maybe this just seemed the easier way." They were still sitting in their towels, with mud masks on their faces, and Lindsay slid off the massage table and padded over to Naomi in her bare feet to give her friend. "Maybe it's a sign you should look for him again? Stranger things have happened." She considered the other woman for a moment and then leaned in to give her a hug. "Come on, let's get this crap off our faces and we'll go out and drink and have chocolate and talk about this like proper human beings." Look for Leo? Naomi didn’t even know where to start. “Yeah, maybe,” she looked at her bare feet, swinging there on the ends of her long, bronze legs, hanging lifeless. If it really had been Leo, he hadn’t left much of a trail to go on, but he had left something. “I guess it couldn’t hurt.” It might be nice to see him again. Then again, it might be terribly uncomfortable. He hadn’t left on the pleasantest of terms, and Naomi doubted she would even know him if she passed him on the street. She might have seen him every day for the last two years and had no idea. “I’m sorry,” she smiled up at Lindsay and nudged her friend with her shoulder. “Yeah, this really isn’t a fitting venue for this kind of conversation.” Hopping down from the table, she tucked the top of the towel more securely under her arm and shook her head. “Anyway, it’s summer! I hear the Emmys are coming up! Why aren’t we celebrating properly?” "Because we obviously don't have our priorities straight," Lindsay said, heading for the rear of the spa so they could get this goop washed off them. "But tonight, I think that's going to change." |