"The Light at the End of the Tunnel"

Chapter Three

"The Saga of the Red Necktie"

Today I had swallowed my pride. I had left him to stew in his own juices, and I was becoming curious about how he was doing. Maybe "curious" wasn't the right word. It was more like an obsession to know whether Gregory House was all right. I missed him. I missed his big mouth, his restless energy, his ongoing predilection to butt into my business and fry my brain with his incessant gabbery and hospital gossip and unceasing sexual innuendo.

I made up my mind to go back up there after work. I decided suddenly that I might need a good reason for a visit so soon after our latest altercation. Something tangible to offset any suspicion he would have that I was indeed "checking" on him. I put my brain to the task of finding the right excuse …

I spent the entire day with my mind only half on the business before me. I was facing a full schedule and I should have been listening to my patients. God knows they deserved my full attention. But I found that I was constantly distracted, my thoughts wandering time after time to the ailing, angry man on the fifth floor.

Did the detox RNs insist that he clean himself up? Or were they letting him sit and stink like the addicts and the drunks that came in off the streets? Had he been offered a shower? Had anyone bothered to stand by while he stood hunched and vulnerable under the hot water? Were they watching in case he lost his precarious balance? That long tiled slab of shower floor was dangerous as hell to a man with a bum leg and deprived of his Vicodin to tame the pain. But what was I thinking? I'd been instrumental in the very act of having it taken away.

Did they insist that he shave? Brush his teeth? Did they give him deodorant? A comb? Cuddy and I had taken him a large plastic bag filled with clothing from his apartment. Did they allow him to have it after they finished rooting through it?

My attention drifted back to the woman sitting in my office before me with a baseball cap pulled low on a head that was naked from chemotherapy. She was asking me a question, and I only half heard her.

"Dr. Wilson? Are you all right?"

My errant thoughts jumped back to the present when she spoke my name. "What? What?" There were tears in my eyes, threatening to spill. Not for her. She saw them and misinterpreted them. I wiped the moisture hastily on a Kleenex from my pocket.

"Dr. Wilson, what's wrong?" She was worried about me.

I hung my head, ashamed at my unforgivable lack of attention. "I'm so sorry. It's been a … terrible day."

She was terminal … dying … and she was comforting me. I felt like an undeserving ass. I was an undeserving ass!

Willow Ann Johnson had been beautiful once. Now her dark skin was grey, her body skeletal and grotesque. She had little time left on this Earth, and she reached out a hand to lay it gently on my forearm. "You see so much of death, don't you, Dr. Wilson?"

I nodded, quite unable to speak. The tears still in my eyes were from shame, not pain. Thank God she had no way of knowing. At the conclusion of her appointment, I hugged her to me gently. Neither of us had any idea if we'd ever meet again.

Still half in a daze, and further distracted by the dying woman, I left the hospital after work and drove to my personal favorite of all Princeton's fashionable men's stores. My delinquent thoughts had decided on the excuse I needed in order to pay a legitimate visit to House in rehab. There was nothing I could do for Willow Ann. There might be something I could do for House.

I parked in "Nathan's" lot and went inside. One of the salesmen on duty I recognized, and one I didn't. I nodded to Nathan, the owner, and wandered over near the center of the store where a display of men's accessories was arrayed. Neither man bothered me as I walked aimlessly up and down the aisles, looking for … what? I didn't know. I would know it when I saw it.

House's formal court hearing was two days hence.

He had a few nice business suits if he chose to wear one of them. He had a few decent shirts. He had neckties, which he hated. A total of two or three, maybe. I'd seen him in the blue one and the brown one. He'd surely chosen the brown one to hide possible … probable … gravy stains. The blue one? Who knew?

He would not be caught dead in shoes other than sneakers. Thanks to the ruined quadriceps in his thigh, he had little control of the nerve groups that led to the plantar quadrate muscle in his right foot. It was easier for him to lift his heel than his toes. The slap of a single, hard leather shoe sole echoing in uneven cadence in the halls of any municipal building, would draw attention to his disability like paper clips to a magnet.

Just what he needed!

Wanted.

Railed against.

I stopped in front of a dozen racks of neckties. Plain. Fancy. Silk. Thirty-dollar price tags. There was one decked out with the Tasmanian Devil. One with Marvin the Martian. NASCAR drivers, NFL and college teams. MLB. There was even one with Grave Digger on it. Price: $49.95. Yeah, right!

Any other time I might have been seduced by House's weird sense of humor. But he was facing the possibility of a hefty prison sentence, so it was not the time for levity.

I chose a bright red one with small black and white circles in a geometric pattern. Sedate. Dignified. Formal. Everything House was not. I pictured my friend holding the thing at arms' length, peering at it critically and then glaring at me with a suspicious gleam in his eyes.

I held the red necktie at arms' length myself … looking at it critically. The image of House's snarky facial expression made me smile to myself. That brought a frown from the clerk I didn't know, who was hovering close by. I met the man's eyes, wrinkled my nose and then chuckled out loud just to bug him.

House was rubbing off on me!

I paid the $29.95 and even got a gift bag for the tie. I could just hear House snickering: "Geeks bearing gifts …" or something equally insulting.

I picked up the pale yellow bag, nodded to Nathan who stood smiling from a row of coat racks in the back corner of the store, and walked out the door.

My ticket to the rehab floor.

Admit one!

Unlike House, however, I could leave when I chose …

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