“The vases, do we think?” said Soren. “And don’t tell me it’s a good omen.”
They rode down in silence, but it felt to Tommy like a peaceable silence. She understood that Soren had been wanting an opportunity to say what he said to her in the restaurant. When they returned to their suite, Soren went into his bedroom, though not before thanking Tommy. She might have left to track down Morty, but she stayed. She called Brooklyn and spoke to her father, who seemed disturbingly unable to comprehend why she was calling from Colorado. She browsed through the New Yorker and ate a fancy chocolate bar from the room’s array of overpriced temptations.
Soren was still asleep four hours later, when Morty returned to the room.
“I’m starving,” Morty said. “Without you there, I forgot to have lunch. Shall we go out now and bring something back? Leave him a note?”
“No,” said Tommy. “Just do room service.”
Morty bowed. “Your wish is my command.”
The return trip to New York was a terror. The small plane to Denver tilted and plunged on the fickle currents of mountain air. The flight crew remained seated, and the only sound inside the cabin was that of passengers vomiting into their air-sickness bags. Tommy sat several rows in front of Morty and Soren. She willed her stomach to behave.
If Morty was invited to Aspen again, she would decline to come along. If she survived this flight.
In Denver, Soren’s face looked as pale as raw codfish. They arranged to ride the airport golf cart to their connecting gate. “I don’t think I can do this flight,” muttered Soren as Tommy and Morty guided him to a seat in the waiting lounge.
“You have to,” said Morty. “We are not staying over in Denver. It’s too much of a production. Let’s get you home. All of us.”
Morty made Soren take a sleeping pill after they boarded. Tommy slept, too, worn out by her sustained fear on the earlier flight.
Somehow, as if the extreme turbulence en route to Denver had shaken free his will to live, Soren’s health never recovered.
By the end of the summer, the more dependable drugs had begun to lose ground. Tommy and Morty had been home from the tour for a month when Soren went into the hospital overnight for the first time, with an alarmingly fierce nosebleed.
Tommy did not ask questions. Morty offered no explanations.
When Soren came home, it was clear he had turned a corner: the wrong one. He was scared. Tommy began to wake up two or three times a week to Soren’s keening hysteria from the upstairs bedroom. Sometimes he wept; other times he cursed Morty, senselessly and often incoherently.
Soren had always refused to talk about his parents, characterizing them as “wicked, wicked people.” All Morty knew was that he had grown up somewhere in Illinois, “a place that is so not Chicago.” One evening when the three of them were sharing dinner in the kitchen, mostly in glum, ruminant silence, Morty startled Tommy by saying to Soren, “I wonder if you might think of being in touch with your family.” (Was he afraid to bring this up when they were alone?)
“That would be you,” Soren said. “You are my only family, darling.”
After a pause, Morty said, “Your parents will always be your parents.”
“Right on up to the pearly gates, where they expect to be welcomed with hula dancers and goblets of sacred punch, oh yes. Though you could pull out their fingernails one by one and they’d never acknowledge my existence.”
Morty glanced at Tommy.
“They’d want to know you’re not well,” she tried.
Soren looked at her with an oddly bright expression. “Tommy, dear, my parents are beyond evangelical. They are evangelissimo. If they haven’t disowned me already, this”—he leaned back to gesture with both hands at his wasted body—“well, this would do the trick. In spades. In every suit, jokers included. And don’t get me started on my sisters. They probably have five kids apiece by now, with those cultishly virile husbands of theirs. They married twins, if you can believe it.”
Sisters? Had Morty known Soren had sisters?
“Please stop talking about those people,” Soren said. “Please. They have nothing to offer me, and I certainly have nothing to offer them beyond shame and righteous hemorrhoids. Which might give me some satisfaction if I had the energy. But I don’t.” He reached toward Morty and prodded him with a spoon. “Now tell me about those cancerous punks, honey, what trouble they’ve cooked up today. I know you’re on fire out there in your sanctum.”
After Morty had helped Soren to bed that night, he came back downstairs. “Do I hire a detective and find them anyway?” he asked Tommy.
“That is not a decision I want to weigh in on,” she said. The talk of family, of parents, had only stoked the guilt she felt at not keeping closer tabs on her father. She had called him while Soren was upstairs, but she got his voice mail. Concerned—it wasn’t yet eight—she had then called Dani. “Come on, Tommy,” he said, without concealing his irritation, “Dad doesn’t answer the phone these days once he’s watching his TV shows. You know that.” But she didn’t.
Even fake, cynical cheer soon took too much effort for Soren. His fear of death seemed to rise from within until it was right beneath his translucent skin, as evident as the blood flowing tenaciously through his veins.
On one of the coldest mornings that winter, following a long, wakeful night of listening to Soren scream, “I will not die! I refuse to die! I FUCKING REFUSE!”—his ragings untempered by Morty’s oblique murmurings—Tommy answered the ringing phone and, after asking if Morty could return the call, was told that the news this caller had to relay was very important. Was he there?
Reluctantly, she went through the living room and called up, waking Morty. She handed him the phone midway up the staircase and went back to the kitchen to make coffee. A few minutes later, Morty came into the room, barefoot, in his striped flannel robe, sat at the table, and started to cry. “It’s too much,” he sobbed. “It’s too much, too much, too much.” Diagnosis had won the Newbery Medal.
She gave him coffee and put a hand on his shoulder. She wanted to tell him not to let Soren’s illness poison his success. “Go sleep on the couch in the nursery. I’ll take his breakfast upstairs,” she said.
—