Chapter 19
Jess
In the end, I asked Adam to do it.
I asked him to arrange the video call with my father and the surgical oncologist who was once his college roommate. I asked him to take us somewhere where there were two coffee shops close to one another, and then I asked him to drop Tegan and me off at one while he took himself off to the other.
I asked him to find out, without me and Tegan there, whether my mother was sick when she left with Lynton Baltimore.
I asked him to come tell us once he did.
It’s been a tough few days, she’d written in her postcard.
Make sure you call your dad if you need anything, she’d written.
The funny thing—not, of course,hahafunny—was that Tegan didn’t fight me, not even a little. I blurted my suggestion to Adam shortly after that first call with my dad ended, a pit in my stomach and panic in my chest.
I said, “You should do it, Adam,” and Tegan immediately added, “I agree.”
It was a knee-jerk response, I know. It was, in principle, hugely contrary to all those initial conditions I’d set when this trip first started. But as the seconds ticked by and Adam slowly looked between Tegan and me, as though he was waiting for us both to come to our senses, I realized I didn’t want to take it back.
I realized there were reasons for this way of doing it.
Reasons that weren’t just my huge—and hugely unexpected—fear about what we might find out.
“You have more professional experience,” I said, trying to ignore the way his eyes searched mine, knowing and soft, “talking to a physician who probably has privacy obligations.”
“Yeah,” said Tegan, nodding too enthusiastically. Almost desperately.
“And it’s not as if my dad and I have an easy conversational style. He might feel more comfortable with you there instead of me.”
“Or me for sure,” added Tegan.
I could tell from the look in Adam’s eyes that he was about to tell me no, that he was about to remind me of my conditions.
“I trust you,” I said, preempting him, and in spite of everything Adam and I had been through over the last couple of days together—in spite of the fact that I’d woken up this morning with tender skin on my neck from his stubble, that I’d had the most intimate night of my entire life with him—this small declaration felt like crossing a true and permanent threshold.
Doing it in front of Tegan was practically a proposal.
And so, he’d done it.
Went to one coffee shop alone while Tegan and I waited in another. Her scrolling on her phone, me staring into a cup of tea I couldn’t bring myself to take a sip of, neither of us willing to talk about what we were waiting to find out. Nearly silent, in fact, until my phone buzzed on the table with a text from Adam, who’d never make us wait a second longer than we hadto.
Your mom wasn’t sick. Be there in a few.
The hours since have been, somehow, both long and short: plans changed, calls made, distances traveled, but all of it while I was in some strange, sped-up whirlwind. I listened, of course, when Adam told me what he’d learned during his interview: My dad’s old doctor friend was willing to say that he had, in fact, seen my mother a decade ago, but not as a patient. He was also willing to say that she had been traveling with a man named Miles Daniels. But what he was pointedly—suggestively—unwilling to say, was whether he’d seen Miles as a patient.
So I agreed when Tegan suggested we call Salem, nodded when Salem said we should skip Tulsa and instead meet in Santa Fe. I said driving to St. Louis made sense, the first direct flight we could get on from there early the next morning made sense, checking into a hotel near the airport made sense.
But somehow it all seems to have happened sofast.
“We could watch this,” I say now, my voice sounding tinny to my own ears as I pause on the programming guide of the too-big-for-this-room flatscreen. Another rerun ofFriends. I look over at Tegan, who’s sitting on her turned-down bed. I’d never let her sit on a hotel room comforter.
“If you want.”
I blink back at the screen. The sped-up feeling is still chasing me, even in this slowed-down hotel room. It’s been hours and I haven’t found a way to say anything meaningful to Tegan about what happened today; I haven’t even been able to ask how she’s doing. At home, when Tegan has a bad day, I can’t help but hover, prodding her with questions, finding excuses to check on her in her room, asking for her help with things I can easily do by myself, if only to get her up and talking.
But right now, I feel too fast to hover.
