And he could not, finally, dismiss the spirit if not the letter of her indictment. It wasn’t the fact that he had gotten into an argument with his old girlfriend. It was what they had argued about. The swift if fleet eruption of accusation between himself and Alison had carried too much information, finally. Van could forgive the social faux pas—they had in fact gotten so heated that they were all but yelling at each other—but what Van couldn’t forgive was the fact that Kyle had never told her, even once, of the missionary dreams of his youth. That he had once wanted to go to Ecuador, or Nicaragua, the mountains of Peru, to work in a health clinic. That Alison knew an essential truth about Kyle’s soul that he had never even mentioned to Van. That she had blurted it in front of their peers. These facts informed every corner of their lives now.
They ticked away, unspoken, in the silence of the phone. He managed to keep his voice impersonal and cheerful. “Is it a problem?”
“Would it matter to you if it was?” He could hear the baby gurgling in her arms, and behind, Maggie chattering away with the cooler tones of Van’s mother, who was in town. The happy contentedness of the life he was providing for all of them breathed through the airwaves. If he had come home for dinner, everyone would tense up and hide and burst into tears over nothing, and she was complaining because he figured out how to give them all a night off?
“Of course it matters, Van, come on,” he said, allowing his voice to sound suitably conciliatory. “I just thought you’d like to have the time with your mom.”
“So what’s the plan, Dennis is going to cook for you?”
“No, we’re going to meet downtown, maybe at La Cucina or something.”
“Maybe? You don’t know?”
“Yes, we’re meeting at La Cucina, he was going to call ahead and get us a reservation.” This of course now sounded like a lie, because that’s what it was. He opted for more conciliation, rather than ratcheting things up. “I can come home,” he said. “You sound upset. Did something happen?”
“It’s fine. It’s fine,” Van announced, clipped.
The gurgling happiness of background noises had been silenced by all this. “I’ll come home if you want me to,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No. You should go out. One of us at least should have a life.”
“Well,” he said. “I won’t be late.” She hung up without saying good-bye.
How had it come to this? He no longer even tried to sort it out and simply pulled up his calendar to get a sense of his late-afternoon workload. You couldn’t cure everything online; the insurance company still allowed Pediatrics West to offer evening hours twice a week. Sometimes kids get sick at night, and a number of parents were juggling two careers and daytime appointments were impossible to schedule when Mommy’s real estate practice was taking off while Daddy had to go to a conference in Dubai. He glanced at his appointment sheet; ten patients back to back, no breaks. Some of them you’d be able to get in and out in less than a minute, but no parent was going to stand for that after sitting out there in that waiting room for more than an hour.
The kids, honestly, were great. Sniffling, feverish, lethargic at one end of the spectrum and bursting with life at the other, they all seemed preternaturally present, their innocence and energy presenting its own kind of wisdom. You wouldn’t suspect that these adorable creatures were going to evolve into the greedy and largely dim-witted race which had spawned them, although there was a creeping arrogance which showed itself when they got a little older.
His next appointment, luckily, was a four-year-old, Caleb. Wide brown eyes and a yogi-like slouch. Red curls. He looked up at Kyle with mournful expectation.
“Am I going to have to have a shot?” he whispered.
“I don’t know, what’s wrong with you?” Kyle asked him, matter-of-fact. He touched the kid’s forehead lightly. Definitely hot.
“We think it’s the chicken pox,” the mother announced. A slender woman in a skirted suit, she pocketed her iPhone quickly and gave Kyle her full attention. This one wouldn’t be snarling about a short appointment, she clearly wanted in and out. “Or at least that’s the hope.” Oh, boy, he thought.
“Then can I assume Caleb has not had his immunizations?”
“Okay, I know some of you don’t approve, but this is an ethical issue for my husband and I,” the mother announced. “We don’t want that stuff in him.”
Kids dying all over the world, and she thought vaccinations were unethical. Caleb looked up at him with those eyes. “I don’t want a shot,” he informed Kyle. His little cheeks were flushed, and now that he had gotten a second look, Kyle could see that the poor kid’s collapsed posture was probably due to muscle pain. Kyle had to resist the urge to pick him up and cradle him. The little boys, especially, seemed so vulnerable.