The Red Lotus Read online

  Also by Chris Bohjalian

  NOVELS

  The Flight Attendant

  The Sleepwalker

  The Guest Room

  Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

  The Light in the Ruins

  The Sandcastle Girls

  The Night Strangers

  Secrets of Eden

  Skeletons at the Feast

  The Double Bind

  Before You Know Kindness

  The Buffalo Soldier

  Trans-Sister Radio

  The Law of Similars

  Midwives

  Water Witches

  Past the Bleachers

  Hangman

  A Killing in the Real World

  ESSAY COLLECTIONS

  Idyll Banter

  STAGE PLAYS

  Midwives

  Wingspan (originally produced as Grounded)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Chris Bohjalian

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph © Mary Elizabeth Robinson / Arcangel Images

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bohjalian, Chris, 1962– author.

  Title: The red lotus : a novel / by Chris Bohjalian.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019013892 (print) | LCCN 2019014449 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544801 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544818 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.O495 (ebook) |

  LCC PS3552.O495 R43 2020 (print) |

  DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019013892

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544818

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Chris Bohjalian

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Eleven Days

  Thursday

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Friday

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Monday and Tuesday

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Thursday

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Friday

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Saturday

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Sunday

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For

  Todd Doughty and Jennifer Marshall,

  years of planes, trains, and automobiles—

  and patience that can only be called heroic

  And once more for

  Adam Turteltaub,

  a great friend,

  who has read drafts of my work on five continents

  Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.

  —WES ANDERSON AND NOAH BAUMBACH, MR. FANTASTIC FOX

  There can be no lotus flower without the mud.

  —THÍCH NHẤT HẠHN

  PROLOGUE

  The opposite of a hospice? Not a maternity ward or a NICU. It’s a trick question.

  The correct answer? An emergency room. In a hospice, you do everything you can to allow people to die. In the ER? You do all that you can to keep them alive.

  It was why she loved the ER, especially the night shift in the city. The relentlessness. The frenetic drive to keep a heart beating or to get someone breathing. Oh, sometimes you lost. You called it. You declared the suicide or the stroke victim or the accidental overdose dead. But far more often you won. Or, at least, you won long enough to get the patient into the OR or into a room upstairs, you won long enough that whatever happened to the man or woman or child or toddler or (dear God) baby was someone else’s problem. And so she became a different person in the ER. She had, in fact, become a different person there. She was a tectonic re-creation that was unrecognizable even to her own mother, an evolution wrought in months rather than millennia—sixty-six months, if she was going to be precise—that had begun in her first rotation and culminated during her first July night as an attending physician. It was in the midst of the ER madness—the light and the sound (and there were just so many sounds, the human and the mechanical, the dying and the wounded and the supportive and the scared)—that she morphed into an adrenaline junkie. She was no longer a shy soul that balked at attention, a girl as wary of kindness as shelter cats with torn ears that even after adopted would shrink into the dark of the closet. She was something bigger, inexorable and unyielding.

  There was just so much pain and so much fear and so much incredulity in the ER. So many tales Alexis heard that began, “It’s a long story” or “It happened so fast” or “You won’t believe it when I tell you”—and so much urgency that she could forget who she once was. In the ER, there was no chance that she might slip back into the anxiety or the despair or the self-loathing that as a teenager had her using an old-fashioned razor blade or X-Acto knife to cut deep into her thighs. To feel something other than depression or doubt, to be the captain of her own pain. She felt no need to tend to herself when she was tending to people who, at least that moment, were dramatically worse off than she was. Than she ever was (at least on the outside). She was just too busy.

  And so it was perhaps fitting that it was in the ER that she met him. Just as fitting was how she met him.

  Though he was probably in no danger of dying.

  It was a bullet wound, but nothing like the horrors she’d seen bullets inflict in her years in trauma bays and cubicles. The worst (and worst was a high bar when it came to guns and emergency rooms) were the three teenage g
irls who were shot after school at field hockey practice by a boy (of course) for reasons that would remain forever unfathomable because then he’d gone home and shot himself. He’d used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, and the girls had holes in their abdomens and chests and legs. One of the three was still awake, and just before she was intubated, she begged Alexis to tell her that she wasn’t going to die, her voice so strong that when Alexis murmured, No, no, shhhhh, she believed it. She really did. One of the others had a heart that stopped beating twice as they worked, and so they gave her the paddles, and the child (and she was a child, she was fifteen, for fuck’s sake) had lived long enough to die in the OR instead of the ER. Only one of that trio had lived, and when the last of the girls was gone from the room, Alexis had looked at the ER and how everything—everything—was awash in blood. The gloves and the gauze, the bone saw and retractors, the tubes and the tape and the trash cans. The sweatshirts and skirts the girls had been wearing. The white socks. Their cleats. The floor was streaked and splattered, and the team that had striven to save them had left footprints, the soles of their surgical booties sometimes traversing the red veins left on the tile by the wheels of the gurneys.

  This was different.

  Austin’s bullet wound was different.

  He appeared on a Saturday night—Sunday morning technically—and Alexis was very, very good with a needle, a toothed forceps, and a pair of suturing scissors. With the trauma scissors, when she began by cutting away his sleeve. She was also very good with a scalpel (and probably would have been well before medical school), which mattered because the bullet was lodged near the largest bone in his right arm, three inches below the greater tuberosity of the humerus. It was a low-velocity wound and had chipped off a piece of the bone, but it hadn’t shattered it. It hadn’t, thank God, ripped a hole in the brachial artery, which might have caused him to bleed out in the bar, and it hadn’t shredded his rotator cuff, which might have crippled him for life. He was in pain, but not so much that he couldn’t laugh at the fact that he had only been in a dive bar in the East Village because he’d left a party and his Uber app had said the nearest vehicle was twenty minutes away. So, on a lark, he’d gone into the bar to watch a couple of guys throwing darts. His smile was ironic and crooked, but far more boyish than rakish. He’d been drinking, and that certainly ameliorated the pain, too, his eyes a little more narrow than she would come to know them, but still open enough that she could see instantly the intangible spark and the tangible green. The muscles in his jaw would tense and untense as she worked, his breath beery, as he grimaced like the men at the gym who would lie on a bench and press three hundred pounds up off their chests. He had what she would eventually come to learn was a biker’s body: slender but a strong, solid core, and legs that were unexpectedly muscled. His hair was black-coffee dark. He and another dart player had taken a cab the twenty blocks north on First Avenue to the hospital—where, of all things, it would turn out, he worked, too. The two of them hadn’t waited for an ambulance, and they hadn’t waited for the cops. The guy who’d fired the shot? Some crazy junkie, homeless they presumed, who had run from the bar like a madman—no, he was a madman—when he realized that he’d actually discharged his crappy little handgun. Some ridiculous Remington pocket pistol.

  “What do you do here?” she asked as she treated him. “At the hospital?”

  And he told her. He told her that he worked directly for the hospital’s chief development officer. He raised money. He worked with the folks who managed the hospital’s money. They laughed about meeting here rather than, say, in the hospital cafeteria or on the promenade along the East River as she removed the bullet and stitched him up, and then as they sat in the ER cubicle behind the thick blue drapes and waited for the police to arrive so he could tell them what happened. He guessed that they were probably still at the bar interviewing the bartenders and anyone willing to stick around after someone had nearly killed some yuppie dart player at one in the morning. She asked him about the Band-Aids on the fingers on his left hand. He admitted—sheepishly—that he’d been bitten by a cat the day before. It had been in some woman’s lap in the bakery where he was getting a scone and a cup of coffee, and he startled it when he went to pet it as he was leaving.

  “Flirting with the woman?” she’d asked him, which was, in truth, flirting itself.

  “Nope. Just surprised to see a cat. The animal was sitting up in one of those cat carriers.”

  She insisted on removing the three bandages, none very big, and was startled by how deep and ugly the cuts were. She disinfected them and they talked about rabies, and he was clear and he was adamant: the cat was fine. (And clearly the cat was fine, because it had been nearly seven months ago now that he had taken a cab that night to the hospital. If that cat had had rabies, he would have been long dead.) Still, she’d cleaned the wounds herself, applied an antibiotic ointment, and added a prescription for Augmentin. Meanwhile, his new friend (acquaintance, really) had sat outside in the bright lights of the ER waiting room, stewing, and seemed far more annoyed than scared that there was a guy in a cubicle with a bullet in his biceps.

  She had tended to other patients as they waited for the police, pulling on and off the latex gloves, including a little boy with a fever whose mother was terrified (needlessly, it would turn out, when they looked at the blood work) and a deli man who’d snipped off a sizable chunk of his finger with a meat slicer—he was turning tongue into cold cuts—but hadn’t nicked bone and needed only stitches and antibiotics. Nothing very hard and nothing very stressful. No X-rays and no CT scan. For a Saturday night, there weren’t all that many to-be-seen clipboards hanging on pegs on the wall, there weren’t scads of bodies, some stoic and some whimpering, waiting on stretchers like supplicants before royalty.

  Looking back on their first moments together, it wasn’t exactly a “meet cute,” but they knew if their relationship lasted until old age, it would be one hell of a good story for their grandchildren.

  ELEVEN DAYS

  THURSDAY

  1

  The swallows skipped like flat stones across the surface of the infinity pool, their wings spread, and a lone woman in a gauzy beach coverup—what she might have called a kaftan if that word didn’t sound so matronly—watched them. The tunic didn’t merely protect her pale skin from the sun, which already was sinking into the trees to the west, it hid from the world the scars on her thighs at the edge of her bathing suit. The birds, their feathers a deeper blue and a more pristine white than their cousins in North America, looked playful and frivolous, and she was beginning to resent their happiness because her disquiet was morphing moment by moment into dread. She lowered her sunglasses to gaze beyond the pool, down the long, flat stretch of driveway she could see from here, and the lines of statuesque dipterocarp trees that bordered the pavement like sentinels and were at least seventy or eighty years old. They’d been planted by some French overlord and they’d survived the wars. She was hoping to see him on his bike, hurtling through the open wrought-iron gates, past the guardhouse (manned this afternoon by a sweet and slight teenage boy in a uniform that looked like it belonged on a bellman from a grande dame hotel from a distant era) and down the straight stretch of asphalt, but she saw nothing. No bicyclist. No cars. No delivery trucks. The idea crossed her mind that he had stopped at one of the massive beach hotels to dive into the ocean on his way back; he’d expressed his disappointment that the bike tour hadn’t booked them at a property on the water, the way they had the last time he was here. No one would presume that a tall American wasn’t a guest if he raced in, leaned his bike against a palm tree, and cooled off in his bike shorts in the waves.

  Still, she tried to will him to appear, she tried to fashion an image of his black-and-red bike helmet from the heat that hovered, even this late in the day, like mist atop hot, fresh pavement.

  She swatted a mosquito on her knee and sat up on the chaise, her bare feet on the bluesto
ne tile, and dropped her magazine. Her hands were moist with sweat and sunblock, and she wiped them on her coverup. An animal, a tiny rodent of some sort, skittered beneath the chaise and into the nearby brush. A salamander froze. She reached for her phone and sent him yet another text asking him if he was okay. She’d sent him five now, each one a little more urgent and anxious than the one that had preceded it. He was an hour and a half late. If he’d had a flat tire, he would have texted. The sag wag—their slang for the support wagon, a van technically—would have left to rescue him. There was pretty good cell coverage in this corner of Vietnam, though apparently it was spotty in some of the inland stretches and up over the pass that would comprise a part of his ride. If he’d stopped for a cup of iced coffee—or even hot coffee; he was obsessed with the way the waitstaff at so many places here would bring a French press to the table—he would have let her know. If he were lost, he would have sent her what she imagined would have been a comical Mayday. She’d heard nothing from him since they’d parted midmorning.

  The sun wouldn’t set for a few hours, but it troubled her that his bike didn’t have a light.

  For an hour now, her thoughts had grown steadily darker, a step-by-step ascent into the thin air of trepidation: He’d been hit by a car that had left him hurt by the side of the road. He’d been hit by a truck that had sent him careening over a guardrail, and his broken body was bleeding out amidst the rice paddies or in some thick copse of bamboo. He had a head injury, and he needed her right now to do a SCAT 2—a sport concussion assessment—on him. How many had she done in the ER on others in the last year? Thirty-five? Forty? Probably more. Maybe one a week, whether it was a pedestrian hit by a cab or a teen in a pickup basketball game or a college kid who had just done something stupid. How was it you could give yourself a concussion playing beer pong or quarters? She’d treated university freshmen who’d managed the seeming impossibility playing both.