“Can I go with him?” Tatum asks. “To the X-rays?”
“One parent can tag along,” the nurse replies. “Though I promise he’s in good hands.”
“I know. My mom was a nurse.” She loses herself to a memory that she doesn’t share, which should make me bristle, but does not: I haven’t earned her confidence recently. I don’t deserve her secrets now. Shame rises through me at how unavailable I’ve been for her, but then drains just as quickly. Though she’s been there, literally been there, for my harder moments, she hasn’t been entirely present either. So maybe we deserve the half effort we get from one another in this pocket of time. Maybe this is the best we have.
“ER nurse?”
“Obstetrics,” Tatum says. “I know the hospital runs on you guys. But ... I’m his mom.” I watch her, unable to read her in the way that I used to, unable to see exactly what she is thinking, where her actress persona ends and Tatum, my wife, begins.
“Mom always helps,” the nurse says, smiling. “But no phones in that ward.”
Tatum hands me her cell phone.
“I was supposed to do a call with everyone. If Luann texts, tell her I don’t know when I’ll be free.”
“OK,” I say. Luann is her publicist; her team is everyone. Tatum doesn’t have to remind me that she plays the part of supermom well. That even if she is traveling for weeks on end—a press junket from London to Paris to Rome to Berlin—or even if she embodies people she is not, loses herself to accents and tics and character traits that unintentionally ebb into her own personality, she will show up and be accountable for Joey, be his backbone when he needs her. I will too. He’s the one thing that we both do easily, equally, though to be fair to both of us, for the past six months, since Leo and the Oscars, I’ve spent a decent portion of my days wondering how much it will hurt if I drown myself.
The nurse and Tatum ease Joey into a wheelchair, and Tatum, not the nurse, steers him out of the room toward Radiology.
“Hang in there, kiddo,” I say, before the door closes behind them. “You’re going to be good as new.”
I drop my head into my hands, sink my elbows atop my knees. Tears come almost immediately, which is no surprise. I’m stripped bare now, a walking open wound. How long does it take to mourn the person you swore you’d protect? Forever. It feels like I will mourn Leo forever. It’s different from the grief with my dad, and it’s different from the grief with Tatum’s mom. She concedes this, even as she tries to be helpful:Let’s find a therapist, why won’t you talk to me about it?I should have donesomethingto stop it, seensomethingto help my baby brother. I should have known. But I didn’t, and now he’s gone, and my son has a silly accident like slipping off the monkey bars and breaks his arm, and I am reduced to sobbing in a halogen-lit hospital room because I carry around my grief like a boulder, unable to ever find a resting place. Unable to forgive myself for not being a better, more present, more forgiving big brother.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, startling me. Spencer. Wondering when I’d like to start working again. I delete the e-mail, wipe my cheeks, try to compose myself. I close my eyes, drop my head back against the wall, and wait.
I’m nearly asleep when a knock rattles the door.
The doctor, with her red hair high in a ponytail and studious black glasses, is examining Joey’s chart with a furrowed brow; then her eyes move up to mine.
“Oh my God,” she says. “I thought the name ...”
“Oh my God,” I say. I knew the red hair looked too familiar, that her dancer’s posture was like a shadow of an old friend. Something electric runs through me for the first time in so long. I don’t pay close enough attention to examine it, what this feeling is, what it means, if I should lean in and touch the live wire, if I should instead run.
She laughs and shakes her head in disbelief.
“Ben, Jesus. I haven’t seen you since—”
“The Plaza Athénée,” we say in unison.
Then: “Amanda.” It’s recklessness, that feeling. Now it comes alive. “God, it’s been forever.”
“Joey’s still getting his X-rays,” I say, after we’ve stumbled over our hellos.
“Sorry about that: he was supposed to be back by now,” she says, tilting her glasses to rest atop her head, so she looks no older than when we loved each other a million years ago. But we split, and now here I am, married with a kid. In a gasp of a moment, a prolonged heartbeat. “Today is a mess here. I’m covering for two other pediatricians who couldn’t make it in. The timing’s off all over the place.”
“Timing never was our forte,” I say, more boldly than I meant to, but then maybe exactly the amount of boldness that I intended. I haven’t felt something like this in too long. A spark, a fire, so while I might tell myself that I don’t mean to flirt with my old girlfriend who left me for a residency in San Francisco, I know that plenty of things we tell ourselves are untrue. Like that I’m not responsible for Leo’s death. Like I haven’t intentionally cratered my career because nothing felt important after Leo. Like Tatum might be growing weary of me. Like I have stopped trying to read her—in small ways, like if her smile for the nurse today was genuine, and in larger ways too—and I haven’t done anything to change it. I tell myself all sorts of lies every day, so this one—that I don’t mean to overstep with Amanda—is just another on my list, another way I betray myself. Another way that I test Tatum too: Would she notice that I spent the afternoon flirting with my old girlfriend? Would she sense it on me, like a dog smells fetid garbage, like she once would have?
Amanda grins. “I always wondered if I’d run into you here. Notherehere. At Cedars. But LA.” She shrugs. “I guess it’s a big city. And you’re married now. To Tatum Connelly. My God. I never had a chance.”
“Hey,” I say. “You’re the one who broke my heart.”
“If I recall, you broke up with me.”
“Oh, you know. Beating you to the punch and all of that. It’s not like I didn’t sit and cry myself to sleep that whole first summer. Also: lots of alcohol was involved.”
“But then you got over me.” She smiles.
“Only because my endless weeping was seriously crimping my rebound sex.”
