Pain sliced him in two.
Another crack, another. Would Pater kill him this time?
The door crashed open.
Get off my brother. Get off! You ever touch him again, and I’ll call the police. Right after I tell Mother and Grandmother.
Scuffling and chaos followed, but Felix kept his eyes shut tight. He couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but cry. His legs were cold and wet; his bottom was on fire.
Tom was lifting him up. His hero, his savior.
He would never love anyone the way he loved Tom.
Felix gasped for air.
“You okay, Dad?”
“Yes.” Felix stabbed his left palm with his fingernails. Again and again, until his hand was pockmarked with pain. “I have to go inside. You can come with me, or you can wait in the car.”
“For real, Dad?”
“I can’t baby you through this, Harry. I’m not your mother, I—”
“Why d’you think I called Max?” Harry said, and strode past him through the open door. Then he stopped in the foyer, his body writhing, jerking, contorting, dancing to the weird tempo Harry alone understood.
“I need help,” a woman inside shouted. “Why aren’t you helping me?” She collapsed into the arms of a security guard and screamed in Spanish.
The security guard wore a holstered gun on his hip. Instinctively, Felix moved between him and Harry. He could live in America for another seventeen years and never adapt to the sight of an armed cop. He looked up at a sign banning concealed weapons. This was not a world he could comprehend; this was not England. He didn’t want Ella in a place with armed guards.
Harry stared at the woman and began to shake.
“Go through the metal detector,” Felix said, “and sit in the far corner of the waiting room. Watch the game.” Felix pointed at a huge flat screen TV, which was showing players running around in powder-blue and white basketball uniforms. “The Tar Heels are playing.”
“Now you want me to watch television?”
“I’m doing my best, Harry.”
Behind him, the woman grew hysterical. Voices muttered and she was gone.
“I know, Dad. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be . . . I’m freaking out. Really freaking out.”
“I’ll see if I can get us somewhere private to wait.”
Harry’s head bobbed with short, jerky nods.
Felix turned to the receptionist, a bank teller look-alike behind bulletproof glass. “My wife was brought in earlier from RDU. Suspected heart attack.”
The woman scanned a clipboard. Good God, was she incompetent? How many women could have been brought in from an airplane?
“Name?”
“Felix Fitzwilliam.”
“No, sir,” she said gently. “Your wife’s name.”
“Ella.” Ella Bella, Ella Bella.
“Ella Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes. Is she—?”
“I believe they took her to the cath lab. Let me get some information for you.” She picked up the phone.
“And my son.” Felix swallowed. “My son has Tourette’s and a hospital phobia. He’s quite . . .” Sharing personal information with strangers was not within Felix’s definition of normal social interaction. “My son is quite distressed. Could we wait somewhere private?”
Somewhere with a door. A door meant Felix could contain Harry the way Ella used to during the rage attacks that, on some level, Felix had understood. After all, if you were going to lose yourself in one emotion, anger was the least complicated.
“I’ll go ask,” the woman said. She finished her call and moved away from the glass.