Chapter 8
912 Words
[Cracks in the Ice]
The first time I saw him with a child who was sick, I understood something about him that the conference rooms and the contract and the careful architecture of the arrangement had not revealed.
Leo developed a fever on a Tuesday — not seriously high, the specific low-grade uncomfortable variety that makes a four-year-old miserable but is not in itself alarming. I was at St. Catherine's when the nanny called, in the middle of a consultation, and I stepped out to manage the phone call and the schedule rearrangement and the guilt that is the particular property of physician parents who understand clinically that a 101-degree fever requires monitoring not evacuation and cannot quite turn that clinical understanding into the emotional conviction that staying at work is acceptable.
My phone buzzed: Ethan.
'I'm in a meeting,' he had apparently told his entire afternoon schedule. 'Cancel everything.'
He was home when I arrived at five-thirty. Leo was on the couch with the specific miserable dignity of a philosophical child encountering physical adversity, and Ethan was beside him reading aloud from the volcano book in the steady, quiet voice of a man who had decided this was where he was supposed to be and was therefore here.
Leo was asleep by the time I came in. Ethan looked up, and I saw on his face — carefully composed, as it always was — the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent the day worried about something they loved.
He had not known he loved them yet. I don't think he had used the word to himself. But it was there, visible to someone who had spent four years watching people navigate the specific territory of loving small persons who are simultaneously miraculous and catastrophically fragile.
I sat down on the other couch.
'He's fine,' I said. 'Probably just the thing going around preschool.'
'I know,' he said. 'I looked it up.'
There was a kind of apology in this — an acknowledgment that he had spent his afternoon doing what he could do from a position of helplessness when what he wanted was to do something actual.
'You didn't have to cancel your whole afternoon,' I said.
He looked at me with something very direct and very simple. 'Yes I did.'
I looked back at him. The apartment was quiet. Leo was breathing with the slightly stuffy peace of a sleeping sick child. The city was dark outside.
'Can I ask you something?' I said.
'Yes.'
'The name Ava.' I paused. 'On the day I told you their names — you said her name differently.'
A long silence.
He looked at his hands, then at Leo, then out at the city. The multiple angles of the containment considering itself.
'My sister,' he said finally. 'Her name was Ava. She died when she was six. Leukemia.' A pause. 'It's — part of why the foundation exists.'
The pediatric cancer foundation. The research programs. The reason I had been offered the consulting position in the first place.
I sat very still.
'I'm sorry,' I said. The words were inadequate and we both knew it and that was all right.
He nodded once.
'Your Ava—' he started.
'Has nothing to do with your grief,' I said gently. 'She's her own person.'
'I know that,' he said. And then: 'But when you said her name — I felt — something that I didn't expect to feel. Both things at once. The loss and—' he stopped. Chose the word carefully. 'Continuation. As if — as if there's still something in the world that deserves that name.'
I looked at him for a long time.
This was the most he had said about himself in the six weeks I had known him in this iteration. More than the bar, more than the conference room, more than the careful architecture of the arrangement. This was the part underneath — the part that had built a four-billion-dollar foundation in memory of a six-year-old — and I could see it now, briefly, in the quiet of a sick child's sleeping and a city night.
'She does,' I said. 'She really does.'
He looked at me.
We sat in the quiet for a while, with Leo sleeping between us and the city doing its indifferent city things outside, and it was not uncomfortable and it was not the absence of something. It was — presence. The specific quality of two people choosing to be in the same space because the space is better for the being.
I went to bed eventually.
I lay in the dark in my room — my room, the one with the window facing east that I had chosen because of the morning light — and I thought about the volcano book and the cancelled afternoon and the word continuation.
I thought about how the 'things I am not dealing with' file was genuinely bursting at its seams.
Leo's fever broke by morning. He woke up demanding pancakes and the resolution to a volcano question he had formulated in his sleep and was entirely himself.
Ethan made the pancakes. I had not known he could cook. He did it with the focused competence he applied to everything, and Leo ate three of them and explained the geological record of Pompeii in considerable detail.
Ethan listened to every word.
I watched him listen and thought: I am in a great deal of trouble
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