The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin
For Judy Martin, who taught me to love books
PART
ONE
Summer
Chapter One
MEETINGS ARE THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS
Zadie, Present Day, North Carolina
Almost a hundred years before I was born, a man named Samuel Langhorne Clemens—better known to most of us as Mark Twain—said this about the human heart: You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns. This is entirely true, as far as I’m concerned, and I should know: I’ve devoted my professional life to the study of hearts, to their intricate, indefatigable machinery, and to their endless propensity to go awry.
We thump for all sorts of reasons. Some are beautiful and life-affirming. Some are misguided, recognizable to everyone but you as catastrophically stupid. We thump for the unsuitable stoner in our college biochem class, with his easy, wicked grin. We thump when somebody we don’t like gets their comeuppance. We thump at cruelty and danger.
I’ve never spent much time revisiting the past, having thought I’d reached a settled spot in life where most of my wildly inappropriate thumping was behind me. Even if I wanted to look backward, I’d slogged through the last two decades unglued by sleep deprivation—first by my medical training and then by an onslaught of babies—so my recall of some of those years has been washed as smooth as sand.
But there are some things I don’t want to remember. Emma and I have an unspoken agreement regarding our third year of medical school: we don’t bring it up. Maybe even more than me, Emma has good reason to avoid those topics, and if there’s one characteristic you’d assign to my closest friend within a nanosecond of meeting her, it’s self-discipline.
So I was completely dismantled when Emma texted me she wanted to talk about it.
—
I cast a sneaky glance at the phone screen in my lap, reading the text three times to be sure. It didn’t change. The screen dimmed and I fumbled to keep it lit, somehow managing to dislodge the phone from my lap so it hit the wooden floor with a clunk. As I retrieved it and shoved it into my bag, ten pairs of judgmental eyeballs swiveled my way. Who would have the effrontery to read texts during an important meeting? At the head of the table, the speaker, Caroline Cooper (alma mater: Georgia, plus Vanderbilt Law School), gave me a frosty look.
“Zadie? You with us?” Clearly rhetorical. My friend Betsy Packard (Duke University) threw me a surreptitious wink as Caroline forged ahead without a pause for me to answer. “Okay . . . we need to evaluate the metrics so we’re optimally positioned for next year. Let’s leverage our assets.” Caroline flipped her blond pageboy. She was wiry and lean, with the grizzled look of too much tennis. “Yes, Jennifer, did you have a question?”
Jennifer Grosset (B-school, UVA) cleared her throat. “I understand we need to incentivize, but it seems to me the mission-critical thing here is to bring the teachers online. I’m wondering if there’s a good strategic alliance there.”
Holy smoke. This was what happened when a bunch of highly educated bankers and lawyers took time off to raise their kids. You couldn’t get five seconds into a preschool meeting without the need for a bizspeak translator. Same thing in my cardiology practice: the hospital execs and the docs who ran the office were all so deeply steeped in corporate culture that hours could go by without anyone clearly stating anything. Everything was “actionable” and “recontextualized” and “pursuant” to everything else.
In my opinion, meetings are the enemy of progress.
Everyone around the table was nodding about the alliance issue with the teachers. This was politically tricky, though, and a babble of heated voices sprang up. Caroline pitched her voice above the din: “Simmer down, y’all. Let’s do a little crowdsourcing.”
More nodding.
I shivered. Everyone looked cold, since they were all dressed skimpily and the AC was jacked up to arctic level in deference to the scorching temperature outdoors. Fashion-wise, the women fell into one of two camps. The first group looked like they’d just come from exercising, although they all had neat hair and no one smelled bad. It was considered socially acceptable to wear spandex workout gear around town to morning school meetings and whatnot, as long as you were under a size six, maximum, and had a nice ass.
The second group was beautifully pulled together. They sported gold-plated sandals, chiffon halters, Hermès bracelets, skintight jeggings, and metallic aviators pushed onto perfectly coiffed blond manes.
As the discussion veered toward teacher gifts, I felt my phone vibrating in my bag.
Unable to resist, I slid it out. Emma again. Can you stop by before work tmw? Need to talk about Nick.
My heart started to hammer, an anxious, involuntary little tachycardia. We all have a Nick in our pasts: a seemingly ordinary person who, through some mysterious subatomic combination of chemistry and personality, was capable of reaching inside you and exposing some luminescent core you didn’t know you possessed. This kind of person could make you greater than you’d have been alone.
But he could also make you terrible.
If someone had told me when I was twenty-four that I’d be witness to many violent deaths that year, I would not have been surprised. I expected it, even desired it, with an anticipation that mirrored my general outlook on life: happy, heedless, and thirsty to learn. But if my omniscient adviser had gone on to tell me that I’d be the cause of one of the deaths, I’d have been dumbfounded. That kind of trauma was inconceivable to me.