They were standing in the kitchen, Claire and Mark and Evan. Meredith had gone to bed. According to Evan, she’d stood up from the couch after making the comment about the dog and gone upstairs without another word. By the time Evan had reported what she’d said—it took him a few minutes, he explained, because he wasn’t sure if it was “reportable behavior”—and Claire had gone upstairs to check on her, she was asleep.
“I think it’s obviously reportable,” Claire said. “Since we’ve never had a dog.”
“I don’t even know if it was about us,” Evan said. He was sitting backward on the kitchen chair. Claire realized that, darkened lens aside, he looked more like his old self than he had in months. Something had changed in him in the past week. Maybe all he’d needed was distraction. Maybe this was her son, again, still. Maybe his own tragedy had come to an end, replaced by his sister’s.
“It was like the thought had just occurred to her,” he continued. “Like it was something she’d just figured out, like a math problem or something.”
“A math problem with a dog?” Claire asked.
“Maybe it was one of those logic problems,” Mark said. “Like a boy and his father are horribly injured in a car crash, and when they get to the emergency room the doctor comes in and takes one look at the boy and says, ‘I can’t treat this boy—he’s my son!’ And, you know, you have to figure out how this could possibly be.”
“Because the doctor’s his mother?” Claire asked.
“Okay,” Mark said. “That’s obviously an outdated example. My point is that maybe it’s one of those.”
“Right,” Evan said. “So in this case the doctor comes into the emergency room and says, ‘I can’t treat this boy—there’s no dog!’?”
“Not every single thing is joke worthy,” Mark said.
“You’re telling me?” Evan said. “Almost nothing is joke worthy, okay? Lesson learned. But you’re not even listening to me. I said it was like a math problem.”
“Fine,” Mark said. “Just, let’s . . . just let’s figure this out.”
Claire could see Mark trying to hold himself together. It was a whole new thing this week, this fatherhood. He had crossed some line; his old standbys were failing him. Even after Evan’s injury, he’d held it together, but now something in him had cracked. Maybe it was the invisibility of the damage. Mark liked to see damage. He liked it obvious. This was true even with mouths; he preferred patients coming in with chipped teeth, oozing abscesses.
Evan stood up. “Do you want my help or not? Mom asked me to help. I’m trying to help.”
Mark turned to Claire. “You asked him to help?”
“I’d ask everyone in the world to help if I could,” Claire said. “Don’t make it sound like—”
“So I’m basically the same as everyone in the world?” Evan asked.
“You know that’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m trying to—” Handle your father is what she wanted to say. There was no way she could win the battle on both fronts simultaneously, and no way she could ally herself with either faction without ruining her chances with the other. (Faction? What was wrong with her? This was her husband. This was her son. She didn’t even know what they were arguing about.) “Everybody just calm down,” she said.
“You’re the one freaking out,” Evan said. He stood up from the table and went to the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, then pulled a short, wide glass from the cabinet. “Maybe she was just dreaming, you know? Maybe she was trying to break into a junkyard and she was happy because there was no dog.”
Slowly, very slowly, he filled his glass with milk and then returned the carton to the fridge. She watched him do this curious thing but, somehow, in the moment, could not figure out why it was so curious.
“Evan . . . ” she started.
“Was she upset?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know!” he exploded. “I wasn’t even looking at her. We were just watching TV. Where were you guys anyway? Maybe if you’d been there you might have done a better job than I did.”
“Nobody said you did a bad job,” Mark said. “But you’re right. It’s not your job. You are not her parent.”
He looked at Claire when he said this, not too subtly. Claire felt Mark was getting a little liberal with his expressions of displeasure in front of Evan. He really was coming unglued. It seemed to her as if the adrenaline of the last five days was wearing off and the reality setting in, the what-ifs, the images Mark had somehow managed to slyly dodge over the weekend were suddenly filling his mind. He’d been a wreck at work that day, useless, and finally Claire had sent him home, but first sent him to pick up Meredith from school. They had planned to do that together, but Mark had fallen so far behind schedule and someone had to pick up the slack, didn’t someone?
“So there was no dog,” Mark said. “Where does that leave us?”
“With the psychiatrist,” Claire said. She steeled herself. More doctors. More appointments. More paperwork. “Have you ever suffered from . . . ? Has anyone in your family ever suffered from . . . ? Has anyone in your family ever suffered, period?” Unbelievably, there’d been this question on Evan’s neurologist’s form: “Has anyone in your family ever died for no apparent reason?” And she’d sat there in the waiting room with Evan slumped in the chair beside her, thinking, Good Christ, who hasn’t died for no apparent reason? Yes, more waiting rooms. More distant, inoffensive music. More weathered magazines. More sliding windows, more cheerful receptionists, more informational videos on TVs you couldn’t turn off. These things didn’t bother her when she was the doctor. They didn’t even particularly bother her when she was the patient. But when she was the mother . . .
“Dr. Moon,” Mark said.
“Tell me that’s not really his name,” Evan said.
“He’s an expert,” Mark said. “A trauma expert.”
“Trauma is his thing,” Claire said wryly.
“No fair,” Evan said. “Trauma is our thing.”
?
Claire loved her office. She loved every room, every chair, every tray, every instrument. Some mornings she arrived before anyone else and would walk through, turning on the lights and loving the office and the things in it like she loved a person. All of these things were hers, and they were beautiful.
She loved her office less when it was populated by patients. That was just the fact, and one she had reconciled herself to long ago. Patients disrupted the order, although most were on their best behavior, polite with simmering anxiety. There was polite and there was crying. There was not much in between.
Mark chatted nonstop with his patients. He could talk about absolutely anything with enthusiasm, keep up both ends of a conversation with someone whose full mouth prevented much more than a few grunts and nods. Claire had made herself a weather expert. She had thirty conversations a day about weather.
“Lunch?” he asked, surprising her in the small office where they wrote up their notes. He had a hand on either side of the doorway and leaned in over her, hovering inches from her head, like a horsefly.
“I’m behind,” she said. “We’re behind.”
He looked at his watch. “I don’t think so. It’s just—”
“In general,” she said. “I need to go over some—”
“Did you call Dr. Moon?”
“Yes,” she said. “He can see her Friday.”
He sat down on a wheely stool in front of her. “You okay?” he said.