That made Leon turn to look at me, leaning back like I was some bizarre creature that had suddenly appeared in his field of vision. “Seriously? Like how long?”
I shrugged. “I’ll see as I go.” For the last few days I had been wondering, idly but persistently, how long Melissa would be on for staying at the Ivy House. I did have doubts about how much longer I could get away with convincing my family that the only thing wrong with me was an extra glass of wine or a fondness for painkillers, and the thought of any of them realizing just how fucked up I was made me flinch like someone jamming a finger into an open wound; in some ways I felt like I should get out soon, while I was still ahead. On the other hand, going back to my apartment and the panic button and the nightly horrors was unthinkable. “I’m in no hurry.”
“What about work? Are you not going back?”
“I am back. I’m doing stuff from here.” I hadn’t been in touch with Richard in months; I had no idea whether I still even had a job. “They know the story. They’re fine with me working from home for a while.”
“Huh,” Leon said, eyebrows still up. “Lucky you. Then what happens when it gets to be more than you can handle? No”—lifting a hand, when I started to say something—“I’m actually not being bitchy. You’ve been a trouper, I appreciate it more than I can tell you, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart for saying you wouldn’t be able for it. OK? But are you on for, I don’t know, lifting Hugo out of the bath? What about wiping his arse? Giving him his pain meds every four hours, day and night?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said. My voice was rising, I heard it but couldn’t stop it. “None of this has actually happened, Leon. Can I worry about it when it does, yeah? If it does? Is that OK with you?”
“Not really, no. Because when it does get to be too much for you, there needs to be a plan all ready to go. You can’t just walk out and leave him to look after himself till—”
“Then make a fucking plan. I don’t care what it is. Just leave me out of it.”
I expected Leon to snap my head off, but he gave me one unfathomable look and turned back to his smoke. The shadow had inched farther across the garden and the butterflies were gone, which to me in that mood seemed gratuitously and cheaply symbolic. I finished my cigarette as fast as I could and crushed it out under my shoe.
“I asked my dad,” Leon said suddenly. “About what happens to this place.”
“And?”
“I had it wrong. It’s not just Hugo’s to live in; Gran and Granddad left it to him, straight up. Oldest son.” He ground out his cigarette on the step. “So the question is what Hugo’s will says. If he has one.”
His eyes had slid sideways to me. “Oh hell no,” I said. “I’m not asking him.”
“You were going on about how you spend all that time with him, you know him so well—”
“And you were going on about how you’ve got a life in Berlin and God forbid you should have to move back here. What do you care if—”
“Do you actually want the place sold?”
“No,” I said, swiftly and definitely, startling myself. After the last few weeks, losing the Ivy House was unthinkable. “God, no.”
“Hugo wouldn’t, either. You know he wouldn’t. But my dad says Phil and Louisa are all gung-ho about it: give Su and Tom a few bob for the kids’ education, for a better house, all that stuff. Susanna doesn’t want it, but try telling them that. And Phil’s the next oldest. Hugo could easily leave it to him, and boom, gone. If you talk to Hugo, you can explain that. Make sure he leaves it to someone who’ll hang on to it.”
“OK,” I said, after a moment. “OK. I’ll talk to him.”
Leon went back to staring at the garden, arms clasped around his knees like a kid. “Make it soon,” he said.
I buried my cigarette butt in the geranium pot and went inside, to Hugo and Melissa looking up smiling from the old photo album he had dug out to show her. But it was too late: my head was pounding savagely and there was no way I could face an evening of ravioli and rummy and chitchat, watching Leon watch Hugo’s every move. I said something about a headache, went upstairs and took a Xanax and a couple of painkillers—fuck Leon, anyway—and went to bed with the pillow over my head.
Susanna had got a lot pricklier, too. She had been a sweet kid, earnest and bookish and quirky—sometimes to the point of cluelessness; I had spent a fair bit of our teenage years explaining to her why she needed to make an actual effort with clothes and hair and whatever, unless she wanted the shit slagged out of her—with an unexpected sharp sense of humor. In spite of the various shifts she had gone through since then, a part of me was still expecting that kid, and it came as an unpleasant surprise when that wasn’t what I got at all.
“I’ve got hold of the guy,” she said, one afternoon, in the kitchen. She had just taken Hugo to his radiotherapy session; he had come back exhausted and shaky, and we had helped him into bed and were making tea and buttering scones to take up to him. “For the second opinion. He’s in Switzerland, but he’s the guy for this cancer, worldwide. I rang him up and he says he’ll take a look at Hugo’s file.”
“I thought like three doctors had already seen him,” I said. “At the hospital.”
Susanna pulled open the fridge and rummaged for the butter. “They have. So one more won’t hurt.”
“So a fourth opinion. What do you want a fourth opinion for?”
“In case the first three were shit.”
I was at the sink, filling the kettle; all I could see was her back. “How many are you planning to get? Are you going to keep chasing doctors till one of them tells you what you want to hear?”
“Just this one.” A cool skim of a glance at me, as she turned back to the counter. “How come you don’t like the idea?”
What I didn’t like was the implication that Hugo’s doctors might have missed a trick. It raised the horrible possibility that mine might have done the same thing, left something undone that could have magicked me straight back to normal if only they had bothered— “I just don’t want Hugo getting his hopes up for nothing.”
“Better than having him give up when he doesn’t need to.”
“What do you think is going to happen? This Swiss guy is going to come back and say hey, surprise, he doesn’t have cancer after all?”
“No. But he might come back and say hey, we could try surgery and chemo after all.”
“If there was any chance of that, I think at least one of the first three guys would have mentioned it.”
“They’re all buddies. They’re not going to contradict each other. If the first one says there’s nothing they can do—”
“I was in the same hospital,” I said, “and my doctors were great. They did absolutely everything anyone could have done. Everything.”
“Good. I’m glad. I’m sure they did.”
I had just taken out the tea bags before the teapot and I couldn’t work out what to do with them while I looked for it, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that cool flat tone. I knew I should probably be encouraging her, or at least I should prefer all this no-stone-unturned stuff to Leon’s doom and gloom, but what I actually wanted was for everyone to fuck off and leave us alone. “So why are you looking for a fourth opinion?”