He’d asked her this, a couple of months ago one afternoon in the car. They were on the way to a dentist appointment for a filling that Jacob was supposed to take him to, until he’d been offered a last-minute preview at a gallery. Whitney technically had a clear afternoon.
What would it be like if you weren’t here? she’d parroted, like she does when she doesn’t want to think of the answer. Instead, she’d thought of someone she forgot to call back before she left the office. She’d thought about calling from the waiting room while Xavier was in the dental chair. She’d thought about whether she had the budget numbers handy she knew the client would ask for; she could search her emails when she parked. What do you mean? Do you mean, where would you be if you weren’t on earth? Explain yourself a little better, Xav. And then, Shit.
She’d missed the entrance to the underground parking.
She can’t, now, remember how he’d answered, if he’d said anything at all.
She traces Xavier’s name on his arm, again.
6
Rebecca
She scans a patient’s lab results for the third time. She doesn’t like feeling distracted at work, but she’s stuck on Xavier. And the conversation earlier that morning in the hallway, when Whitney asked her why she doesn’t want children. She’d replied with something she’s never said aloud before: “There’s nothing in the world I want more than a child.”
The words had felt exposing. There’d been no hiding the desperation in her voice. But she’d wanted Whitney to know that she’d still choose to be a mother, even if she knew it would end this way, in an ICU bed. She wanted to remind her in that moment that as of 2:08 a.m. on Thursday morning, she still had her son. He was alive. He was hers. There’d been something uneasy in Whitney’s eyes before she blinked once, slowly, and looked to the double doors at the end of the hall. But then she’d reached for Rebecca’s hand again.
Normally, the fragility of life isn’t something Rebecca allows herself to contemplate at work. That awareness does not serve her constitution here. It is better to assume that every child who crosses her path will live, and that she is responsible only for the next fragment of time that will begin the rest of their long and meaningful lives.
But if that child doesn’t live, she will, from then on, be the person who changed that family’s life. Her words—I’m so sorry to have to tell you this—will be burned in their memory until the day they themselves die. She becomes a part of those broken people’s histories. That is a consequence of the job, and she has gotten used to it. She can move past it. Today, though, has been different. She checks her wrist for the time—9:18 a.m.—and wonders if it’s too soon to call the ICU again for an update. The social worker would be by to see Whitney soon, if they haven’t already. And the police will be back. The nurse can tell she’s unfocused.
“Sorry to ask again, but did you talk to the parents? The suspected cardiomyopathy?”
Rebecca nods while she scans discharge papers the nurse put in front of her face. “Very sweet kid. I paged the on-call too. They need a breast pump machine, can you find them one? What do you have for me next?”
She rubs the top of her forehead under her rainbow scrub cap and then bangs the sanitizing dispenser to clean her hands. She needs to wake up. To jolt herself out of this.
She usually thrives here in the emergency department, the pace, the unknown, the constant rotation of cases. Anything can happen on a shift, and she wonders how people with almost any other job get out of bed in the morning to face the guarantee of monotony. And yet she, too, finds comfort in her days. The comfort is in the new. New children, new families, new problems, and she can help most of them, most of the time. The not-so-sick ones go home, and the others enter the system in some capacity, upstairs to other doctors, oncology, neurology, nephrology, wherever they end up after leaving the cramped, curtained lineup of bays she does her work in. Some might never leave the hospital again, and when she suspects this, she finds herself surveying the few things from home they’ve got with them. The pilled pajama bottoms, the clutched teddy bears. Markers of the end that parents will carry, later, without them.
Rarely does she learn what becomes of these children unless she bumps into a parent in the parking garage or the line for coffee. She has become expert at looking engaged with her phone as she walks through the hospital atrium; she’s not as recognizable with her scrub cap off, her dark, straight hair falling over her shoulders. She feels guilty about this part, but it’s how she’s able to push open the swinging double doors of the emergency department ready to work.
A nurse is briefing her about the two-year-old waiting in room 3. Recurring high fever, lethargy, loss of appetite. The girl’s parents sit on either side of her gurney, watching her focused on the iPad on her lap. They straighten when she comes into the room, and Rebecca can feel their assembly of relief and tension: the doctor is here, but something is wrong. Rebecca scans the child’s chart on the computer monitor, and it happens: 05/19/2017. The patient’s birth date. She’s been waiting for this. She breathes in sharply and rolls the stool toward her.
“Lucy? I’m Rebecca. Do you mind if I have a look at you while you watch your show? Is that Daniel Tiger?” She picks up the girl’s hand and pinches the skin gently to check her hydration, presses on her tiny nail beds. She turns her hand over and slowly feels her smooth, chubby palm. She slips the stethoscope up the back of the child’s pajama top to listen to her lungs. She thinks of the bedroom Ben painted two years ago. She thinks of pretty floral crib sheets. She moves the bell around to the girl’s chest to hear her heart. She thinks of the pulsating mass of cells she and Ben heard in the very first ultrasound. The girl’s eyes are on her now instead of the screen. Rebecca reaches to the wall for the ophthalmoscope and moves close to her. She can smell peanut butter on her breath as she looks at her retina. She pulls the instrument away. The girl is studying the parts of her face, her nose, maybe the mascara on her eyelashes. Rebecca touches the back of her head. She runs the fine, dark curls through her fingers. She touches her tiny earlobe. The softness of her warm, plump cheek. Her tiny chin.
The mother clears her throat.
Rebecca turns away. “I’d like to do bloodwork, if that’s okay with you both?” She types in the order. Name. Birth date. The blinking cursor on the screen is hypnotic. She’d have just turned two, like her. She’d have been perfect.
7
Blair
Aiden had appeared at Blair’s feet. It was the year they both turned thirty-one, at a mutual friend’s party jammed in a studio apartment. She’d been about to leave. And she’d also been about to step on a piece of a broken bottle. Aiden had put his arm out to stop her as he dropped to his knees to pick up the shard, lifted it up in his wide palm like a glass slipper.
It was a bit of a charade, too dramatic for her taste. But when Aiden stood up, she saw the kind of man who wasn’t often looking at her. She could tell immediately. It was the grin, the boyish mischievousness, his six and a quarter feet. The way everyone around them was watching him.
She came to crave the rush of being found by him in a room, of having his attention land on her, the one he wanted. He was loud, his voice deep and reverberating. She’d felt desired by men before, but not like him. Aiden’s gregariousness made her feel vulnerable at first, like someone had ripped off her clothing in public. She wasn’t used to so many eyes in her direction when she was with him, to his volume, to the socializing that came so naturally to him. He was magnetic. He was inarguably handsome. He touched her a lot. He held her tightly under his arm and he stroked her shoulder with his thumb when they spoke to other people. She liked that this gesture caught people’s attention. She watched for them to notice, for their eyes to dart down to that touch.
There was a softness about him when they were alone, and that she was the only person privy to this side of him felt special. His sweet, slow doting on a Sunday morning. The noise he made when he smooched her cheek, successively, like she was delicious, like he needed his love for her to have a sound. Evening baths they’d have together, tangled and giggly, he far too big for the tub, damp hair in his eyes.
“Do I make you happy? Is this what you want?” He was always checking with her, always making sure he measured up to what she expected of him. She never thought he would cease to care.
When she had called her mother to tell her about Aiden, that he had a good job in sales, that he’d sent flowers to her office on her birthday, her mother had been silent. Blair had stared at the twenty-four peach garden roses in the cloudy plastic vase from the staff kitchen and waited for her to speak.
“Hello?”