Chapter 8
The weeks before Christmas were insanely busy for Alex. Every woman he had treated
for the last year, even before he moved his practice to Bel Air, wanted some kind of
treatment or tune-up before the holidays. Word of mouth, particularly in the Hollywood
community, had grown his practice rapidly in the past six months since he had opened
his offices in Bel Air and expanded his practice into Bellissima. His new and old
patients loved it, and Mickie was a familiar face there now. Her photograph was blown
up on his office wall. She circulated among the patients as they left and arrived and
chatted with them, and knew many of them.
They thought her an enchanting young woman and enjoyed talking to her. She wore
mostly Chanel now, and had bought lots of white pants and white sweaters, and white
Chanel jackets to blend into the décor. Sometimes she just wore a white bodysuit, to
show off her incredible figure. Alex had instructed her to tell patients she had had either
body contouring or cool sculpting if they asked for specifics. And that she’d had both
Thermage and regular mesotherapy on her face. She knew just what to say now. Alex
was particularly fond of mesotherapy because it was a combination of pharmaceuticals
by injection, which allowed him to mix his own blend of secret ingredients and
experiment on patients. Most of the time the results were remarkable. There was risk
involved because it was not FDA approved, which he glossed over when describing it
to patients, and since they trusted him implicitly most of them let him try it. Only the
most skeptical or skittish hesitated or decided against it. He was so convincing when he
told them about a treatment tailored specifically to them, and seeing Mickie’s gorgeous
face usually reassured them. It was his favorite treatment, because he could combine so
many different elements in the injections. He could add vitamins, use homeopathics,
hormones, or enzymes to get different results tailored to each patient. He had a natural
talent for his specialty, like an artist. He made women more beautiful.
And just about everyone wanted Botox and bigger lips for Christmas. Some days it
felt like an assembly line as he saw as many as fifteen to twenty patients a day, nearly
double his usual caseload. He stayed late every night in order to fit them all in before
the holidays.
He was doing a delicate collagen thread lift when Wendy came to tell him that he had
a registered letter he needed to sign for. There was no way he could leave the procedure
to do it. They had hired two more women in the office just to deal with increased billing
since June. He had never expected the volume of patients to increase as fast as it had.
He had been right to leave Florida and come to L.A. It had taken two years to open his
new offices, and the gamble had paid off.
“Can’t you sign for me?” he said to Wendy.
“It’s registered, no, I can’t,” she said firmly.
The mail carrier said he would wait. He had to wait forty minutes until Alex finished
the procedure, apologized to the patient, and left Wendy with her while he went to sign
for the letter. He tossed it on his desk unopened, and came back to chat with the patient
until she left, as he always did. Bedside manner was everything in alternate esthetic
medicine, as he called it. He refused to call it surgery, since he never used a scalpel.
He had four patients back-to-back after the collagen thread lift, and it was almost
eight o’clock that night before he remembered the registered letter on his desk.
Wendy hadn’t opened it, since it was registered to his name and handwritten and she
thought it might be personal, so she had left it where he tossed it. He read it in a short
stack of other letters. Some were just Christmas wishes, a few were bills for Mickie’s
clothes. He opened the registered letter last and sat staring at it for a long time. It was
from a patient whom he vaguely remembered. He had seen her in July for Botox
injections and silicone injections, and never again. Liquid silicone was not approved by
the FDA, but he had used it successfully several times. And there was counterfeit Botox
on the market, but he was careful about his suppliers.
The woman said that she had spent four months in the hospital due to his treatments
and nearly died. He had injected her with liquid silicone without warning her it was not
approved. She had had to have surgery to remove it. She was now facially disfigured.
The silicone had entered her lungs and nearly killed her. She had had an embolism as a
result, and she was filing suit against him civilly, but more important, she had turned her
medical files over to an attorney to bring criminal charges against him for attempted
murder. The civil suit was frightening enough, but could be settled. Mistakes happened
sometimes if a patient had an allergic reaction, and he engaged in delicate procedures.
But criminal charges would end his career if he was found guilty. His mesotherapy
injections often contained non-FDA approved substances, although some were quite
harmless. The liquid silicone was potentially a major problem in a criminal case.
The woman had sent him a handwritten letter so that he would know from her
personally, and not just through the courts or the police or lawyers, that he had ruined
her life. She had attempted suicide twice since being released from the hospital in
November, but had now decided to live at least long enough to see him put behind bars.
She had included a photograph of her face and what he saw there made him want to cry,
not for what he had done to her, but what it would do to him if the case went to criminal
trial. She looked like the Elephant Man. He put it back in the envelope with the letter
and put it in a locked drawer in his desk. He hoped that the police would believe she
was a crackpot and would drop the case. It was all he could hope for. He didn’t dare
tell anyone about the letter. He didn’t even dare call a lawyer. He was too terrified to
think. He just wanted to ignore it and will it away.
He poured himself a stiff drink from the bar in his office, a straight double Scotch,
neat. Everyone had gone home by then, and he turned off the lights and went up to the
apartment.
Mickie noticed immediately how pale he was, and she could smell the Scotch on his
breath when she kissed him.
“Are you okay? You’re very pale.”
“I’m just tired, long day. Everyone wants something before Christmas.” He tried
smiling at her but it felt like a rictus, and he felt nauseous and dizzy. He was half
terrified the police would show up any minute. His mesotherapy injections were
sometimes very creative. He believed in them, but an accident could happen to any
doctor, even with a simple procedure if a patient had an adverse reaction.
He went through the motions of sex with Mickie that night but she could barely arouse
him. He threw up afterward, and she put him to bed, sure he had the flu.
He was better in the morning, and had sex with her to prove he was, but he felt like a
robot all day. He could barely get through the patients he had to see, and was much more
cautious than usual with his mesotherapy patients, making their treatments up of mostly
vitamins and hormones, and he didn’t use liquid silicone all day. He was haunted by the
registered letter locked in his desk, not for the patient’s sake, but for his own.
It took him four days to stop expecting to see the police at the door. He felt like he
could breathe again, and told himself nothing would come of it. And on the fifth day, he
got another registered letter. At first he thought it was from the same woman, but it
wasn’t. It was from another woman who had almost died from a counterfeit Botox
injection he had given her, and liquid silicone too. He suddenly realized he must have
bought a bad lot months ago, and it was a miracle no one had died. But the second
woman was even more severely disfigured than the first one, and she was threatening to
hand over her files to the police, and sue him civilly for ten million dollars. She was a
flight attendant and could no longer work. She had been in the hospital for months,
fighting for her life, and some of the silicone damage had to be surgically removed. The
second letter almost did him in. He didn’t know what to do. He knew he had to call a
lawyer, but no one had brought charges yet, the police hadn’t shown up, and there were
things in his past he didn’t wish to share even with a lawyer, let alone with the press or
all the patients in his practice. All he could hope was that the police wouldn’t bother to
press charges. He was terrified that more women like them would surface. They had
waited a long time to hire lawyers and contact him, because they’d been too sick to do
so, had been hospitalized, and had wanted to see the extent of the damage after a few
months and if it would improve. It hadn’t. There were before and after photographs of
the second woman, and it was tragic. He sobbed when he looked at them, and locked the
second letter up with the first one. He felt like there was a time bomb ticking in the
drawer and didn’t know what to do with it.
He saw the last of his patients that day and gave his staff their Christmas bonuses. He
and Mickie were leaving the next day for St. Barts. He could hardly keep himself
together enough to pack, and he threw his clothes into a suitcase that night. Mickie was
busy in the guest room she had taken over as a closet, and packing her own clothes in
five suitcases, so she didn’t see Alex, or notice the shaking hands, the perspiring face,
the gray color of his skin, or the terror in his eyes as he packed. He had no idea what he
was going to do if the two women went to the police to bring criminal charges against
him. He was vulnerable in so many ways.
He called Wendy, his assistant, the next morning before they left, and told her to go to
the office and lock up all the brochures, he said he was going to do new ones when he
got back. He trusted her and she promised to do it. Alex was well aware that if the
police got hold of them, the fraudulent before and after photos of Mickie would be
damaging and would not help his case. He did not say that to Wendy. He had
replenished his Botox supply since he’d seen those women, and he was certain that his
newest supply was not counterfeit. He had used the current supplier before. He
promised himself not to use liquid silicone again when he got back. He had gotten lucky
too many times, since it wasn’t FDA approved. Using it was risky.
They left for the airport with a luggage van driven by one of their security guards.
Alex had two valises and Mickie five. She was in high spirits in a beautiful huge straw
hat too big to pack, white jeans, a white linen Chanel jacket, and sky blue platform
espadrilles. She looked exquisite as they boarded their newly leased jet paid for with
the money from the Koreans for the spa in Dallas. And Alex had paid two million
dollars to charter the two-hundred-and-eighty-foot yacht, with a crew of twenty-five, to
cruise around the Caribbean for two weeks. He intended to use the Korean investors’
money to repay the three million dollars he had taken. He could afford to once he went
over his accounts for the year, and they didn’t need the money for Dallas yet. He and
Mickie hadn’t invited any guests for New Year’s and now he didn’t want to. He needed
time to think about what he would do if the two women pressed charges. It was all
terrifying. He had never had a problem like it before. Everyone loved their treatments
and his patients adored him. There were just a few that weren’t happy with their results,
but that was to be expected, dealing with people’s bodies and faces and their sometimes
unrealistic expectations. He tried to weed those out but sometimes they slipped below
the radar. The two women who had written letters certainly had. But if their
photographs were honest and not Photoshopped, they had good reason to be upset, and
even to want him behind bars. Their faces were ruined and could never be fully
restored.
“You’re very quiet,” Mickie commented, as they sat across from each other at the
dining table on their new plane. It was beautiful inside and out, and extremely
comfortable. It was fitted for twelve passengers and a crew of five: captain, co-pilot,
engineer, two flight attendants.
“It’s been an exhausting week,” he said to Mickie, trying to smile. She walked around
the table to bend down next to him and whisper in his ear.
“Don’t you think we should christen the plane?” she asked him. There was a
luxurious bedroom for them, with a dressing room and bath. Alex looked up at her with
a weak smile. “I’ll have you shipshape in no time,” she whispered to him. “Better than
acupuncture,” which he firmly believed in for himself when he was stressed or tired.
More than that, he was panicked, with a terror that had his guts in a vise-like grip and
hadn’t let go in six days, since the first letter. He wanted to rewind the film and cut that
part out. But he couldn’t.
A short time later, Alex thanked the stewardess and followed Mickie to the bedroom,
looking very circumspect. It was a nine-and-a-half-hour flight to St. Martin, where the
boat was meeting them, and perfectly reasonable that they would take a rest during the
flight. Rest was not what Mickie had in mind. She used her most artful tricks that always
worked on him, and finally dragged him back from the grim place in his head where
he’d been trapped all week. He forgot about everything but Mickie and her magic, as
they flew east across the country, heading toward the Caribbean. She tormented him
exquisitely for nearly three hours, which emptied his mind completely, and after that he
slept for two hours. She lay beside him for a while and then went to read magazines.
Alex emerged from the cabin, looking refreshed five hours later, in time for a lunch of
caviar, smoked salmon, and crab salad. The food was superb, and they served his
favorite white wine, a Chassagne-Montrachet, while Mickie drank champagne, her drug
of choice. She had never gotten into drugs, but she loved alcohol, and had an enormous
tolerance for vast quantities of good champagne. They had stocked up on Cristal for her.
She had easily become accustomed to the finer things in life in the last six months,
thanks to Alex. He wondered how long that would last, if he went to prison. And then he
suddenly remembered that a wife could not testify against her husband. He was going to
propose to her on the boat, and marry her as soon as they got back to L.A., if she agreed.
She was very young, and had said to him right from the beginning that she had no
interest in marriage yet. She felt too young to get married, but he had to coerce or bribe
her into it somehow. It was crucial that she not be able to tell the truth of what she knew.
The before and after photographs alone would make them guilty of fraud. It was all
racing through his mind as they headed south into the Caribbean, with the turquoise
waters beneath them, and he was already tense again by the time he finished lunch. They
went back to their bedroom after lunch to attempt to calm him down again. Mickie could
tell that something was bothering him, and she had no idea what. But two weeks on a
superyacht would fix anything, and she could take care of the rest.
They landed in St. Martin, and the boat came from St. Barts to pick them up. Alex
thanked the crew and said that everything had been flawless, and a luggage van drove to
the port to load their luggage on the yacht, appropriately called the Marry Me, which
made him laugh when he saw it. He’d been more interested in the size of the yacht and
the bill than the name when he chartered it. It seemed fortuitous now.
Mickie was stunned when she saw the boat. It looked enormous from the dock. The
crew were all lined up on deck in their white uniforms. It looked like part of the royal
navy, and she couldn’t believe all the features and special comforts that were available,
from their own hair salon and spa, fully staffed, to their own movie theater. The master
cabin was huge, the most luxurious she could ever have dreamed of, the guest cabins
were beautiful, and the sun deck was vast, with a helipad and a swimming pool. Mickie
and Alex came back upstairs to drink champagne on deck and watch as the yacht
motored out of the port at St. Martin. They were a gorgeous sight. Mickie had no idea
what it had cost and would have been speechless if she knew, but Alex realized this
was exactly the vacation he needed, with her, away from all the problems and dangers
that were threatening him. Nothing could touch him here for the next two weeks, while
they floated away and were waited on hand and foot. It was going to be the best
Christmas of Mickie’s life. She hadn’t even known that boats like this existed, and she
couldn’t wait to try everything out.
As they motored steadily toward St. Barts, they had sex in the master cabin for the
first time, and Alex felt like himself again. And this was only the beginning of the trip.
He didn’t care how much of the Koreans’ money he had spent to charter it, it was worth
every penny of the two million dollars, and he would figure out a way to cover it later,
if he didn’t go to prison first. But he didn’t even care about that now. Only two weeks
on the motor yacht seemed real.
Billie and Jason’s plane landed at JFK with a light snow falling. It looked like a
Christmas card, and reminded Billie of Boston. Jason felt invigorated just knowing he
was home. He kissed Billie as they landed, and they headed for baggage claim with the
other passengers, and then went outside to find a cab. The snow wasn’t sticking yet, but
it looked pretty as Billie had a frost of it on her hair and eyelashes, and Jason couldn’t
wait to get to his parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. It was the same apartment he had
grown up in, and the treasures of his boyhood were still in his room. His mother was
putting him and Billie in one guest room and his sister and her boyfriend in the other.
Their childhood rooms remained as shrines to the past, with all their mementos and
souvenirs, trophies and photographs. His sister Emily’s blue ribbons from her horse
shows, his baseball and basketball trophies. The apartment had a view of Central Park
and by the time they got there, the trees were turning white.
“Do you skate?” Jason asked Billie in the cab, and she nodded enthusiastically.
“I love it.”
“We’ll go tomorrow if we have time,” he promised. They chatted animatedly in the
cab, both of them excited about what was going to be a wonderful Christmas, better than
Billie had ever known, among people who loved each other, were intelligent, and had
meaningful jobs. It was the world she belonged in now.
It took them an hour to get to the city. The snow hadn’t slowed the traffic down yet.
Shoppers and theatergoers and people going to Christmas parties had added to the usual
traffic, but the whole city seemed festive to Billie and Jason, coming from L.A. where it
didn’t look like Christmas at all.
When they got to the building on Fifth Avenue where Jason’s parents lived, the
doorman recognized Jason and was happy to see him. A porter helped them get the two
bags upstairs. Jason didn’t have his key with him and he rang the bell. His parents were
waiting for them and his mother opened the door. She was a trim-looking woman in her
mid-sixties with attractively dyed brown hair, and was wearing the black suit she had
worn to the office. She had rushed home to be there to greet Jason and meet Billie.
Jason’s father was at home too. He looked very much like Jason and was equally tall,
with a thick head of white hair. Jason carried their bags to the bedroom, and Marta, the
housekeeper who had worked for them for thirty years, came out of the kitchen to hug
him. There were delicious smells emanating from the kitchen, and the table in the dining
room was set for four. Jason’s sister was arriving the next day from Vermont, so he and
Billie would be alone with his parents for the evening.
They looked like people in a movie to Billie. There were warm greetings and hugs,
the same housekeeper who had taken care of Emily and Jason when they were children.
There was stability and warmth, kindness and comfort evident in every fiber of the
tapestry of their lives. They were the kind of family Billie had dreamed of and had
never belonged to. She had gone to college with people like Jason at MIT, but she had
never been one of them. She had been an outsider wherever she went. She had been
considered a freak in Iowa, in a poor farming town where her classmates still married
straight out of high school, didn’t go to college, and started having babies immediately.
Her hunger for learning and books and wanting an education had set her apart from them
all her life, even from her own father who had been a stranger to her and treated her like
an intruder from another planet. To people like Jason and his parents, she was an
outsider too, having grown up poor in a farming town, with a father who ran a dairy
farm, and she had none of the sophisticated, educated background they did, traveling
around the world and working as doctors and lawyers and publishers. Whichever way
she turned, she was out of step. She felt as though she didn’t belong anywhere, and was
standing out in the cold, looking in through a window. She never belonged with the
people she was with.
Billie was quiet as she tried to adjust to her surroundings, and Jason looked at her
when they were alone in the pretty guest bedroom with a blue satin bedspread, antique
furniture, and flowered chintz curtains in the same blue as the bedspread. He could
suddenly sense how out of her element she felt. She had the right credentials to be with
them now, but she came from a place that was foreign to his family, and her whole
upbringing was shocking by comparison. She couldn’t put words to what she was
feeling, but Jason could see it in her eyes. She felt like an orphan again. And she was
much younger than Jason, which set her apart too. He put his arms around her and held
her for a moment.
“Just breathe,” he said to her quietly. “I know everything is new, and you don’t know
anyone here, but they want you to be here, they’re happy to meet you. You’re safe and
welcome here, and I love you. Nothing bad is going to happen. They’re not going to
send you away. The mean girls are all gone, even your sister, who made you feel like
you didn’t belong. You belong here because I want you here, and I’m so proud that you
came home with me. Take off your coat, and relax.” She was still standing in her coat,
and he understood how she felt without her having to explain it to him. She hadn’t felt
that kind of kinship and bond with anyone since she was a kid lying out in a field
looking up at the sky with Tom, or by the river with him in the summer. They were the
only two people in the world they lived in who spoke the same language. And now she
felt the same way with Jason. They were best friends as well as lovers.
She took off her coat, washed her face and hands, brushed her hair, and put on decent
shoes instead of running shoes, and they went back to the living room to talk to his
parents. She was surprised how easy it was, and how welcoming they were. Jason’s
father, Robert, was funny and told her stories about Jason getting into mischief as a kid,
about the science experiment that had nearly blown up their house in Connecticut, and
the time when he and Emily built a tree house and it turned upside down. They were
silly stories but they put Billie at ease, and the love among all of them was tangible. It
was a living, breathing thing that bound them to each other. She told them how much she
had loved Boston and had wanted to stay there, but couldn’t find a job, so she wound up
in L.A. with her sister, and had met Jason. Robert said his brother had gone to MIT and
had become an engineer, and he said it was a great school and he used to visit him there
when he was in high school. Robert had gone to Princeton instead because their father
had. They were part of the boys’ club that had attended MIT and the Ivy League colleges
in the old days, and now the student body was more diversified and included people
like Billie.
“That’s why I went to UCLA,” Jason intervened. “I didn’t want to go to the schools
my family did. I wanted to do something different. I only applied to schools on the West
Coast.”
The conversation at the dinner table was lively. Robert talked about some of the
authors his firm published, and told funny stories about them. Jason’s mother, Valerie,
talked about a challenging case she was handling, which put ethics in question at the
highest corporate level. It was an intelligent exchange among educated people, whose
education and interests were similar to hers, and Billie discovered that she did fit in
after all. They weren’t snobs, they were good people, and by the time she and Jason
went to bed in the guest room she felt at home among them, and couldn’t wait to meet his
sister and her partner. They had talked about Emily’s newest book, which was enjoying
a modest success, but her parents and Jason thought it was very good and had real merit.
His mother gave Billie a copy to read if she wanted to, and she was intrigued, and eager
to read it.
When they woke up in the morning, the city was blanketed in snow, and Billie and
Jason went for a walk in Central Park after his parents went off to their offices. They
went skating as Jason had promised and had fun. And afterward, they had lunch at a
famous deli, and took the subway to SoHo and walked around, and then went back
uptown. An hour later, Emily and Thad arrived. She was almost as tall as her brother,
and had been the captain of the women’s basketball team of her high school. Billie felt
tiny among them, but comfortable in their midst by then. They had hot chocolate with
marshmallows and delicious homemade cookies in the kitchen, just the way they’d had
them as kids and still loved them. Billie enjoyed talking to Thad, who had done his
residency at Mass General and loved Boston too. He had gone to the University of
Vermont, and then got into Harvard Med School.
After dinner, the four young people went to a favorite bar of Jason’s on Third
Avenue. They walked through the snow to get there. The atmosphere was festive and
fun, and they got back at one in the morning, fast friends by then. Billie was the youngest
in the group and they teased her about it.
At the end of the week, they went to the Bells’ house in Connecticut, which was rustic
and cozy, with a big fireplace in the living room. It was an old colonial farm with small
outbuildings around the property. It was the perfect place to spend Christmas.
Billie had brought small gifts for each of them. Jason’s mother had given her a white
cashmere sweater, which fit her perfectly, and Emily gave her a signed copy of her
book, and his father had brought her several books he had published that he thought she
would enjoy, including a biography of Marie Curie, which Robert said he had found
fascinating.
They went to church together on Christmas Eve. It reminded Billie of her mother. She
sat between Jason and Thad at the service, and they sang all the familiar Christmas
carols that she loved. When they got back to the house, the two young couples had a
snowball fight, and pelted each other with snow, while the parents went inside to light a
fire to get warm. Valerie served them hot rum drinks when they came in, covered with
snow like little kids, their faces wet and red, their cheeks burning, and laughing as they
took their snow-coated coats off, and got warm by the fire. It was a storybook Christmas
for Billie. Thad talked about how his parents had gotten divorced when he was young,
and were still at war with each other thirty years later, which had made every Christmas
difficult. So not everyone had a rosy history like the Bells did. They were well aware
of it, and grateful for the family they had, and generous about including others like Thad
and Billie.
They spent Christmas Day relaxing and walking in the snow. They cooked a turkey
together, and the men were better cooks than the women and teased them mercilessly
about it. But everyone made some part of the meal and the results of the joint effort were
delicious. They had dinner in the dining room, and it was a warm, congenial meal.
Jason’s mother, Valerie, watched her son with Billie, and noticed how kind he was with
her, and how protective, as though he wanted to shield her from anything that could hurt
her. Emily and Thad had a strong, equal partnership. Valerie and Robert watched their
children with their partners and were happy to see that they were both with good people
who suited them. As far as they knew, Billie was the first girl that Jason had been
serious about, or that they had met anyway. She was the first one he had brought home to
the family for Christmas, and she was a good addition, helpful, intelligent, fun, and very
mature for a girl her age. She had been through painful things in her youth and had had to
grow up quickly. Billie called her father on Christmas morning, he sounded hungover
and got off the phone quickly after she wished him a Merry Christmas, and she sent
Mickie a text on the boat and she sent back an emoji of Santa Claus.
Emily and Thad left a few days after Christmas. They had to rescue their large dogs
from their neighbors. Jason and Billie left on the thirtieth, to spend New Year’s Eve in
L.A. He had to be back at work the day after New Year’s. He wasn’t looking forward to
it. He and Billie had had such a nice time with his family that they hated to leave and go
back to the West Coast. Valerie and Robert hugged Billie and their son when they left,
and told her they hoped she would be back soon.
“It’s beautiful here in the summer,” Valerie said, smiling warmly at her. “Take good
care of each other,” she said, and both his parents stood in front of the house as they
drove away, and as Jason and Billie turned in the car to look at his parents, they saw
them kiss and go back inside with Robert’s arm around Valerie. It had been a perfect
Christmas, and it had been wonderful to see the family that Jason came from, and how
close they were. Billie snuggled up next to him in the Uber, and they held hands all the
way to the airport to fly back to the world where they lived and worked. It had been a
Christmas Billie knew she would never forget, and she would cherish the memory
forever.
