If my clients are afraid of dying, then my clients’ caregivers fear being alone. There is something bleak and barren about a world that is missing the person who knows you best.
As Brian relays an explanation of an experiment in his lab, I stare at him. He would win, if that were a contest. He knows the tiny details that make up a life: where I hide the gingersnaps, so no one else will eat them and leave me with an empty box. Which drawers hold my socks, my bras, my sweaters. How to pick the cilantro off my food, because it tastes like soap. Where my back always hurts the most, when he offers to rub it. How to undo the clasp of the necklace I can never manage myself.
But Wyatt, he knows who Icouldbe. An academic. An author. An archaeologist.
A colleague whose ideas he seeks out, whose vision he trusts.
A woman who comes apart so easily in his bed that I have to sink my teeth into him, sometimes, just to stay grounded.
The mother of his child.
The person he sees first in the morning, and last at night.
When I remember to pay attention to the conversation again, Meret is talking about her next tennis match. “I’m not great, but—”
“You’re not greatyet,” Wyatt corrects.
She rolls her eyes. “There are kids who’ve been playing since they were three.”
Brian lifts his beer. “Then the fact that you’ve improved so fast in so little time is evenmoreimpressive.”
Maybe this is what Meret has needed all along. An extra parent to build her up, when she is certain the world is tearing her down.
“I may not be entirely objective,” Brian says, “but she’s smart, you know? She doesn’t just have a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”
“Idon’thave a hundred-mile-per-hour serve—”
“—so she makes up for that with strategy.”
Meret turns to me. “He hasn’t missed a meet. He even changed his summer session’s final exam time so he could come to the last one.”
Brian smiles at her. “She’s really something to see.”
“I bet she is,” Wyatt says.
There is an uncomfortable silence as we process why Brian is the only one who’s seen Meret play tennis.
Brian begins to fold his napkin into quarters, then eighths. “I meant to tell you, Meret. I think my perfect track record’s about to get shot down. I can’t make the match on Thursday. I tried, but there’s a tenure review meeting.” He clears his throat. “Maybe your mom and…and Wyatt could go.”
It is one of the purest, humblest gifts I have ever received.
When I was a social worker doing my clinical rotations, I was called to a hospital room where all hell had broken loose. A girl who barely looked old enough to be in high school was still in stirrups, having just delivered a premature baby. Beside her was a shell-shocked boy with peach fuzz on his upper lip. The delivery suite was crammed with medical professionals who were performing a full code on their impossibly tiny daughter. I was paged because the teen mother was hysterical, and no one else had time to deal with her. I immediately grasped her shoulders, trying to get her to look at me, and when she wouldn’t I followed her stare to her baby.
The skin of the newborn was blue and as thin as tissue. With every compression of CPR, it tore, and a new wound started to bleed. The air was ringing with the girl’s shrieks and the terse fugue of lifesaving, but it was clear that the effort was futile. The doctor glanced at me over his shoulder, still pressing down on the tiny rib cage, his hands covered in blood. “Dosomething,” he ordered.
I let go of the girl. Instead, I touched the boy’s shoulder. “You have to be the dad,” I said firmly. “They are looking to you to make a decision.”
His face crumpled. “I thought…I thought we’d have more time.”
“Everyone thinks they’ll have more time. But a father has to give away his daughter, and you’re doing that today.”
The boy looked up, his eyes dead. “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”
Now, Wyatt smiles at Meret. “I would love to come to your match. Tell me your camp colors, so I can paint my face and wear Mardi Gras beads and be obnoxiously loud in my cheering.”
She laughs, and I think:He is so good at this; at gaining a child.
But my eyes drift to Brian, who is so gracious at losing one.
