The Ranch

“When am I going to see her?” Tanya asked wistfully, thinking about her old friend and the little Korean girl she had adopted. Jade. She loved the name. And it was so like Zoe.

“I'll send you a picture,” Zoe said apologetically, as she signaled to a nurse waiting for her in the doorway. She pointed to her watch and held up five fingers to her. She wanted five more minutes to talk to Tanya. But there were over forty patients waiting for her in the waiting room, some of them too ill to be there. It was a familiar story to Zoe. But she could take at least five minutes out for old times’ sake.

“How about doing better than a snapshot? How about coming to Wyoming?” Tanya had just decided to ask her on the spur of the moment. What if Zoe came, and Jade, and Mary Stuart… but she knew that was silly. Mary Stuart was going to Europe with her daughter. “It's just a thought. I've rented a cabin at a fancy dude ranch for two weeks in July and I have no one to go with.” She sounded tired and forlorn, and Zoe knew her well enough to sense that things weren't going well, and if it were true, she was sorry to hear it.

“What about your husband?”

“That proves what I always suspected about you. You don't buy groceries, and you don't read tabloids.” Zoe had been much too thin all her life, and was the envy of every woman who knew her, but she laughed at Tanya's comment.

“You're right on both counts. I never have time to eat, and I wouldn't read that junk if you paid me.”

“That's comforting. Anyway, to answer your question, he's gone. He moved out this week, as a matter of fact. And now his ex-wife won't let me see his kids, because I'm being sued by a bodyguard who claims that I tried to seduce him. Actually, it's all so sick it's not worth trying to explain to a rational human being. Don't bother to figure it out. I can't, and I live here.” But what Zoe heard more than the words was the distress in her friend's voice. She sounded genuinely distraught over the state of her life at the moment.

“It doesn't sound like much fun. Wyoming sounds like a great idea. I wish I could go with you.” The nurse was standing in the doorway flailing again, but Zoe didn't want to cut Tanya off. It sounded like she needed someone to talk to. So Zoe signaled for another five minutes, and the nurse disappeared again with a look of desperation.

“Don't you think you could come, Zoe? Maybe just for a weekend?”

“I wish I could. I don't have anyone working with me right now. I'd have to leave a call group covering me, and my patients really hate it. Most of them are so sick they want to know I'm going to be here.”

“Don't you ever take time off?” Tanya said in amazement, not that she took much time off either. But what she did was a lot less rigorous than caring for dying patients.

“Not very often,” Zoe confessed. “In fact,” she said apologetically, “I'd better get back to work now, or they're going to break my office door down and lynch me. I'll call you sometime. Don't let the assholes get you down, Tan. They're all lesser beings, and it's just not worth it.”

“I try to remember that most of the time, but they get you anyway. Somehow they always win, in this town anyway, or at least in this business,”

“You don't deserve that,” Zoe said in her gentle voice, and Tanya smiled broadly for the first time that morning.

“Thanks. Oh, I saw Mary Stuart the other day, by the way.”

“How is she?” Zoe sounded tense when she asked, but it was still the same old thing, and Tanya never paid any attention to it. She had continued to give each of them news of the other over the years, and she still had fantasies about getting them back together, like the old days.

“She's all right, more or less. Her son died last year, I don't think any of them have recovered. I think right now everything is still a little shaky.”

“Tell her I'm sorry,” Zoe said softly, and she was. “What did he die of? An accident?”

“I think so,” Tanya said vaguely, she didn't want to tell her it was a suicide. She knew how private and pained Mary Stuart felt about it. “He was at Princeton. He was twenty.”

“That's a shame.” She dealt with death so constantly, but she had never grown blasé about it. It was a defeat she still hated, and knew she would never accept with grace. Every time she lost a patient, she felt cheated.

“I know, you have to go… but think about Wyoming, if you can. It would be fun, wouldn't it?” It was a crazy dream, but it appealed to Tanya, and Zoe smiled at the thought. For her, it wasn't even a dream. She hadn't had a vacation in eleven years now. “Call me sometime.” She sounded wistful and lonely, and Zoe wished that she could reach out to her and hold her. It was odd to think that someone with so much could be so vulnerable and unhappy. For those who didn't know her life, they would never have believed the beatings Tanya and people like her had taken, and the price Tanya's fame had cost her.