I took the next exit and drove toward her apartment building because she didn’t need to be in this car with me right now. I was a bomb and I was about to go off and she didn’t deserve to be in the blast radius.
When I pulled up to her building, I put the car in park and stared at the windshield.
“I don’t know why you came with me. Get out.”
“No.”
“Mehar, I’m not playing with you.”
“And I’m not playing with you.” She turned in her seat to face me fully. “You are not getting rid of me. Not tonight. I don’t care how angry you are. I don’t care how much you want to push me away. I know what it looks like when a man is drowning and I’m not going to stand on the shore and watch.”
“I don’t need you to save me.”
“Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
That landed. Because she was throwing my own words back at me. Every time she’d told me she didn’t need saving and I’d showed up anyway. Every time she’d pushed me away and I’d stayed. She was doing the same thing to me now and I hated it and needed it in equal measure.
I sat there for a long time. The engine running. Mehar in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and her jaw set and her eyes saying try me.
“I’m not going to your apartment,” I said.
“Then take me wherever you’re going.”
I put the car in drive and kept moving. No destination. Just away. I ended up at an overlook off the George Washington Parkway. It was a spot I used to come to when I was younger and needed to think. The city sprawled out below us, lit up and indifferent, millions of people living their lives without knowing or caring that mine had just been detonated.
I killed the engine. The silence settled around us and the Potomac shimmered in the distance and neither of us said anything for a long time.
38
QUEST
The city glittered below. The Potomac was black and still and the overlook was empty except for the Maybach and the two of us sitting in it, surrounded by silence that was too heavy to break and too loaded to leave alone.
Mehar hadn’t said a word since we parked. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, giving me the space she’d fought to stay in. Present but not pushing. Just there.
I closed my eyes and my mind went back. Not to the letter. Not to Vivica. Further back. Fourteen years back. To the worst year of my life.
Quindon was seven months old when I noticed something was wrong. He’d been fussy for a few days, not sleeping well, running a low fever that wouldn’t break. Peanut said it was teething. The pediatrician said it was probably a virus. But something in my gut told me it was more than that because I’d been holding this baby every day since he was born and I knew his rhythms better than I knew my own. He wasn’t teething. He wasn’t fighting a cold. Something was off in a way I couldn’t articulate but could feel in my bones.
I took him to Children’s National myself. Didn’t wait for an appointment. Walked in, told them my son had been sickfor five days and nobody could tell me why, and said I wasn’t leaving until somebody ran real tests. They drew blood. I held him while they did it. His tiny arm in the nurse’s grip, the needle going in, his face crumpling into a scream that broke something in me that has never been repaired.
Three days later the results came back. The pediatric oncologist sat us down in a room with soft lighting and a box of tissues on the table and said the word leukemia and the floor dropped out from under the world.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The most common childhood cancer but there was nothing common about it when it was your son. When it was the baby you’d named before he was born and painted a nursery for and held every morning before work because you wanted his face to be the first thing you saw every day.
I went to war for that boy. Flew in specialists from Johns Hopkins, from St. Jude, from the best pediatric oncology programs in the country. Money was no object. I would’ve sold Banks Reserve down to the last bottle if it meant saving Quindon’s life. The chemo started immediately. He was so small that the doses had to be calculated in fractions and every treatment left him weaker. I’d sit in that hospital room holding his hand with my finger because his whole fist couldn’t wrap around mine and I’d talk to him about all the things we were going to do when he got better.
Boxing. Ball. Business. His first suit. His first pair of Jordans. Everything I’d been dreaming about since the day Peanut held up that pregnancy test on the bathroom counter.
Then the doctors said bone marrow transplant. His best chance. A donor match from a parent was the ideal scenario. Peanut got tested first. No match. Then it was my turn. I sat in that chair and let them draw my blood with the absolutecertainty that I was going to save my son’s life because that’s what fathers do. They save their children or they die trying.
“Quest.”
Mehar’s voice pulled me out of it. I opened my eyes and I was at the overlook, not in the hospital. The city was still glittering below and my hands were gripping the steering wheel so tight my knuckles ached.
“You’ve been sitting there for twenty minutes without moving,” she said quietly. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t believe she lied all this time.” It came out harsh and raw and aimed at nobody in particular and everybody at once. “What the fuck is up with women and their fuckin’ lies?”
