Carver was beginning to feel nauseous. He stood and paced the room, still clutching the print-out in his hand, needing some locomotion. “But he had family. I could have known his family.”
“They weren’t him. Nothing could bring him back.”
“Knowing him — knowing about him. It would have been — been better. Okay?”
“Carver, you’re going to make yourself hyperventilate.”
Carver hadn’t realized his breathing had sped up. He slowed it down. “I should have known. I wanted to know.”
“I see that now. We see that now.”
“Tell me about him,” he said, turning to her. “Tell me more about him, I want to know.”
Nora stared up at him from behind the desk. “What do you want to know?”
“What did he like to do? Who was he, besides a doctor? Did he, like, watch ALF? Just tell me stuff.”
Nora squinted at him, then chuckled. “No, honey, he didn’t watch ALF. I think he died before ALF even started airing.”
“Well, tell me something else then!”
“Okay. Can you sit back down?”
Carver obeyed, but leaned forward this time, his elbows on the desk. She studied him, then exhaled.
“As far as TV shows,” she said, “he liked Cheers, and Remington Steele. I think he had a crush on Stephanie Zimbalist. He liked going to the movies, he loved watching movies on VHS. Um…” Nora looked away, lowering her gaze as if racking her memory. “He was a runner, obviously… he ranthe New York marathon three times. He was very good at trivia. Isaac, Doug and I were a great trivia team.”
Carver nodded encouragingly, desperate for more.
“He was sort of anal about interior design,” Nora said. “He liked thingsjust so. I remember Rachel complaining she wasn’t allowed to put up her posters because they clashed with his design sensibilities.” She said this with fondness, as if she liked this about him. “He read a lot of magazines and medical journals, he was always reading, but not usually books. What else… he was very social, he liked bringing people together. He had a silly sense of humor, he liked to tease and pull little practical jokes. The night I met him, he convinced me his hair was a wig.”
She went quiet. Carver waited, transfixed, thrumming with energy.
“Um,” Nora said, her voice cracking. “He was always terrified of his cancer coming back. He got it young, in college. When it recurred — well, it didn’t really recur. He would correct me about that if he were here. He got a second cancer, secondary acute myeloid leukemia. It’s something you can get if you’ve had radiation or chemo. And by the time they found it, it was already very bad.” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat. “When he called to tell me it was back, and much worse this time, I remember he kept saying, ‘I knew it. I knew it.’ But he didn’t give up his hope of beating it until the very, very end.”
Carver wanted to reach out to her, to touch her hand or something, but he was sure she wouldn’t want this. All he could do was stare at her in silence. Her eyes had filled with tears.
“It was so devastating for him to realize he’d never be a surgeon,” she said. “It was horrible.”
“What about me?” he couldn’t help asking. “What about not being able to see me grow up?”
“Oh…” Nora dabbed her eyes with her pinkies. “We talked about that sort of obliquely. Just, you know, the lost opportunity there. That even if you found out somehow and wanted to know him, you’d never be able to. But he told me he wasn’t worried about you, that he thought you’d live a great life. You know, he thought quite highly of you, even though you were so young. He could tell you were bright, which was very important to him.”
“Yeah,” Carver said with difficulty.
“I do worry I let him down, with how things ended up going with us, and you.”
“Mom, I…” He let out a dry laugh and clasped his hands together. “Look, he was one of the architects of this fucked-up situation, so…”
Nora’s eyes filled with tears again. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For all of this blubbering.”
“Mom, come on.”
She opened a desk drawer and dug around until she unearthed a small pack of Kleenex, then got a tissue out to dab her eyes and blow her nose.
