THE POLICE AND Gunther’s friend drove the parents to a local hotel that had Wi-Fi. As soon as her phone was no longer an infuriating paperweight, Liv googled “How long Type 1 diabetes survive without insulin?” She read the results with her breath held, gripped by cold fear. The answer was two weeks, but the second week you’d spend in a coma. Sebastian probably had a couple of days before he would get really sick. She left a message at the doctor’s office in Los Angeles, trying not to sound too panicked. But she was panicked, obsessed with the thought of Sebastian without his pump. Sebastian seizing, dying, ketone bodies poisoning his blood. She lay in the hotel bed, wide awake, with the memory of her son’s body curled into her side, his warm back, his sweet smooth skin. It was like having a phantom limb. A phantom child.
Penny would look after her brother, but she couldn’t do it alone. And what was happening to Penny? She remembered reading about an Amber alert, the police finding the DNA of the little girl’s tears in the abductor’s car. She squeezed her eyes closed to try to make the thought go away.
In her twenties, Liv had not been sure she wanted children. How could you know? It was a decision made at the brink of a widening abyss, based on rumors from the other side. Do you cross over? Do you leap? She hadn’t been sure.
At twenty-two, she’d moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a production company, answering phones and ordering lunch. She didn’t even have a cubicle, just a desk in a hallway. But she worked, and got promoted, and decided she would be vice president of a studio before she had children. When she met Benjamin, he was designing props for a sci-fi movie. In their first years together, they’d never even had a houseplant depending on them. She bought a cactus that shriveled and died. Benjamin had once owned a dog in New York, a Labrador mutt, but gave it to a cousin when he moved. The dog seemed happy in the suburbs, but still: It told.
“To have a child is to open an account at the heartbreak bank,” Liv had said, one night in bed.
“I hear there are some benefits, too,” he’d said.
She got a studio job, and made movies, and read a stack of screenplays on the weekends. Then, one sunny Sunday morning, she and Benjamin went to a brunch at a house where other people’s children were building a fort out of lawn furniture in the backyard. Someone told the children that Benjamin was an engineer, and he was called in as a consultant.
“I don’t do buildings,” he’d said. But he followed the children onto the lawn.
Liv watched from the shaded patio, drinking coffee from an unfamiliar mug. She had no opinion about whether the game was safe, and only mild curiosity about whether the towering fort would stand. But then a chair fell, and Benjamin scooped up a toddler in a yellow sundress to get her out of the chair’s tumbling path. He placed the child on his hip and directed the placement of the chair in a more stable spot.
It had been a golden morning, and the children were lit by sun. Benjamin had saved the little girl without having to think, and now she sat contented in his arms, surveying the progress of the fort from her queenly height. Liv was overcome with a feeling like ravenous hunger, so rooted was it, deep in her abdomen. She set down her mug in surprise. The sticky sweet rolls, the scrambled eggs, the fat red strawberries, they did nothing to curb it. Later she would connect the moment with the fact that Nora had just told her she was six weeks pregnant.
Benjamin drove them home on Sunset Boulevard, dodging the Sunday drivers. Liv watched the trees go by, a sharp-focused, saturated green against the blue sky. She said, “I think we should have a baby.”
“Now?” Benjamin said.
“As soon as possible.”
“I thought you wanted to be a vice president first.”
“I don’t care about that anymore.” She’d never been so sure about anything.
“Okay,” Benjamin had said, still looking at the road, his knuckles gripping the steering wheel. “Okay.”
She was twenty-eight and it was easy. She went off the Pill and got instantly pregnant. They married in Colorado on her parents’ back lawn. Benjamin’s parents came from New York and made awkward conversation with her aunts and uncles. Nora, her only bridesmaid, was already showing, with that radiance that turned out to be a cliché that was also true. Nora and Raymond stayed up with them after the reception, the husbands sober in solidarity. They found the little cake someone had saved to freeze for their first anniversary, but it was the middle of the night and they were starving and ate it with their hands.
She went to prenatal yoga with Nora. Marcus was born first, quiet and watchful, and then Penny arrived screaming, demanding of attention. Sebastian, three years later, was mercifully mellow and cheerful.
But when he was sixteen months old, Sebastian went limp. At first it just seemed like tiredness, a flu. Then it got bad enough that they called a doctor friend at midnight for advice. She said, “Get the baby to the hospital. Not that one, they’ll kill him. Have them test for Kawasaki.”
At the hospital, Sebastian didn’t have any pain response to the needle sticks for his blood. Meg, their doctor friend, sat with them and never left their side.
Those were bad days, the hospital days, and the last ambivalence Liv had felt about Benjamin, all her self-protective distance, burned away. By the time Sebastian was diagnosed and stabilized, the two of them were bound together by terror and love and anticipatory grief. She’d been right about the heartbreak bank. They had a joint account.
The idea that Liv might have forgone these two particular children and taken her chances with some unknown later zygotes sometimes made her catch her breath in the middle of an ordinary task. If she and Benjamin hadn’t gone to that brunch, if the chair hadn’t fallen and he hadn’t swept the toddler onto his hip, then they wouldn’t have started trying when they did, and there would be no Penny. And probably no Sebastian. Certainly no Sebastian with Penny as an older sister, which was part of who he was, and who he would be. Rationally, Liv knew that there would have been other children she would have loved just as much, but it didn’t bear thinking about. Even the hypothetical loss made her dizzy with horror.
But now—how much worse to lose them now.
She remembered talking to the news cameras in that clearing in the trees. Babbling, crying, begging. If she had seen these parents on TV, these parents who had lost their children on a cruise, she would have thought how irresponsible they were, how careless. No one deserved such a fate, of course, but she would have judged them, and found them wanting.
She knew that Nora must be suffering the tortures of the damned for wandering off looking for quetzals with the flirty guide, but all she could think was that Nora, her best friend, her almost-sister, should suffer.
Some part of her brain still believed this was all a mistake, one of those panicky moments when the kids wander away to the candy aisle, or hide as a joke, and your heart races and your armpits sweat. And you search, and call their names, and imagine the worst. And then there they are! Safe and sound, asking for Twizzlers, or giggling at having tricked you. And you want to shake them, but you have to keep your voice under control, calm and in command, telling them, “You have to stay near me. You cannot walk away.”
But this was not a mistake or a moment in the grocery store. She had seen a decaying dead body. She kept seeing the children in their swimsuits, playing in the water, and she kept trying in her mind to wade in after them, to pull them back to shore. Benjamin put his arms around her in the lumpy hotel bed. She tolerated it for a few minutes and then felt claustrophobic, suffocated.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And she rolled away, wrapped in the cheap comforter and her pain.
13.