The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  The bass of a rap song, rendered tinny by the iPhone’s speakers, filled the room. “Betsy, for Chrissake,” said Boyd, but she turned her great gray eyes on him, and the power of her pain shut him up. I returned my attention to the screen, where a little girl was dancing. She had her mother’s wispy black hair and perfect face, miniaturized and placed on an adorable toddler body. She wore a leotard and a look of fierce, utterly unself-conscious concentration as she wiggled her little booty in time to the music. “Eleanor,” said a woman’s musical voice, and the little girl startled and then burst into a peal of giggles as enchanting as a fairy chorus. The camera zoomed in on her face, capturing a look of such infectious joy it could have made the most hardened criminal melt. Despite the circumstances, I felt my face relax.

  “See,” said Betsy. She closed her eyes, swaying a little. She opened her mouth to speak again, but all that came out was a low, anguished rasp.

  I took her hands in mine, and her eyes opened. For once I felt no hesitation at all about touching someone else. “I’ll do everything,” I said. “I understand. I do. She’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I promise you, I will do everything as if she were mine. I promise.”

  “Thank you,” Betsy Packard whispered. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  GAS, ASS, OR GRASS

  Zadie, Present Day

  Monday, ostensibly my day off work, always seemed to be occupied with catching up on work at my practice. I’d just spent the last four hours on electronic charting—none of which was reimbursable time—trying to avoid excommunication from the hospital. I sighed as I finished the last one.

  Nina, my nanny, would be taking Rowan to acting class at our city’s vibrant downtown library this afternoon, so I had to collect Delaney from her before I hit the grocery store and fetched the boys. Panting as I raced to the parking lot, I calculated I’d make it in time if I hit every light perfectly and didn’t get stuck behind any plodding Southern drivers.

  The traffic gods were smiling; I made it to the store and then to Nina’s and school with time to spare. There was a strict no-cell-phones policy for the carpool lanes of the Oak Academy, and this included texting, but I really could not see the harm in sneaking out a little message to Emma while idling in place. I threw this tiny guilt on top of the guilt that came from idling in a large SUV spewing Freon and hydrocarbons into the air next to a playground where my asthma-prone boys were currently rolling around in a heap of other boys. They looked like a wriggling mass of puppies. Six-year-old arms and legs were flying everywhere.

  Yo! I typed. Are you at the hospital? How’s Buzzy?

  No reply. Evidently Emma prioritized saving someone’s life over communication with her best friend. I harrumphed to myself.

  Thinking of Emma led to thinking of Nick, despite my resolve to banish the memories of the calamitous black whirlwind that had accompanied Nick’s presence in my life. Until Emma’s announcement, he hadn’t crossed my mind in a while, although I’d be lying if I said I’d never Googled him. Of course I had. But it had been a long time, back in the days when Facebook was competing with Myspace for fledgling social media dominance. I knew next to nothing about Nick now. I glanced ahead of me; still no movement in the line of cars. I clicked the Facebook icon on my phone.

  I was relatively certain that Nick wouldn’t be on it, and I was right; typing in his name produced no results. Well, he wasn’t the sort of guy who would tolerate a daily blast of other people’s dinner photos or endless memes featuring sarcastic kittens. But you have to start somewhere. Almost absentmindedly, I closed Facebook and opened Twitter.

  I was surprised. Nick had a Twitter account.

  I opened his page. Even on the small screen of my phone, the photo was recognizably of him. He was skiing, or possibly snowboarding—some outdoor winter sport, in any case. Goggles were pushed up against his forehead, partly obscuring his hair, and behind him, the powdery white of some snowcapped mountain was just visible. He must have been laughing at whoever had taken the photo; his head was thrown back, exposing the bright, even row of his teeth, and his eyes were crinkled up, an unfamiliar but attractive row of laugh wrinkles at their outer corners. I stared at his face.

  Finally I wrenched my eyes from his photo to read his tweets. He wasn’t exactly prolific. In the last two years, he’d posted ten tweets, all of them related to a game between the Denver Broncos and Baltimore Ravens. Even the self-description underneath his picture gave nothing away, since all it said was Billionaire Philanthropist.

  Right.

  I closed Twitter and opened the browser on my phone. Even though the only other occupant of the car was illiterate and strapped into a restraining car seat, I hunched over furtively as I typed Nick’s name into the Google search bar. Immediately, I was rewarded with a flood of entries, most of them stupid health-care-rating sites offering every troll on the planet free rein to bash his doctor. All my colleagues loathed these sites, since privacy laws prevent physicians from responding, no matter how slanderous and untrue the comments. I scrolled past a page or two of these things, finally arriving at Nick’s legitimate Internet entries. The first couple were research-related: papers he’d authored, conferences at which he’d presented. Then I came to the website for his last practice.

  From Emma’s comments at the pool the other day, as well as his Bronco-obsessed tweets, I was reasonably sure he’d been living in Denver. His medical practice there, a big surgery group, had not yet removed him from their website. I clicked on his name, near the bottom of the alphabetized list.

  Quickly—any second now the carpool line would begin moving—I scanned the academic stuff. Medical school, Johns Hopkins; general surgery residency; fellowship in hepatobiliary surgery; Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society; Fellow, American College of Surgeons, on and on. There was no mention of a wife or a family. Where was the good stuff?

  Finally, there it was: a paragraph at the bottom of Nick’s CV.

  In addition to his surgical practice, Dr. Xenokostas is an ardent skier, golfer, and macramé artist. (Wait. What? Macramé artist? Although—that last one did sound like Nick, not because he actually was a macramé artist, but because it was the kind of bullshit he’d slip into his CV to check for signs of consciousness in the HR department.) Ignoring a contrary little zing in my chest, I read on.

  He also enjoys hiking with Zadie, his beloved black Lab.

  Whaaat?

  With a jolt, I realized that the massive SUV in front of me had already pulled ahead and was picking up cute ponytailed kindergartners. The mother in the massive SUV behind me politely refrained from honking, but she was drumming her long fingernails on the steering wheel. I thrust the car into drive and lurched forward.

  Now I could see Eli and Finn. They were standing with their friends along the wall of the building adjacent to the curb, all twitching violently as if they’d been Tasered. One of the teachers had probably told them to stop running around, which forced them to emit pent-up energy by flailing in place. How these teachers managed to instill order in a group of six-year-old boys was a mystery on par with the creation of the universe. I hit the unlock button on the driver’s-side-door control panel, and a teacher beckoned Eli, Finn, and the two other boys in their afternoon carpool forward. They charged like bulls.

  “Hey, der’s my brothers,” Delaney hollered. “Hello! Hello, big kids!”

  The boys were tangled in a logjam at the SUV’s door. “Hustle up, buttercups!” I called.

  “Hurry up, pigs!” added Delaney, who had not quite mastered the art of the idiom.

  Finn’s teacher, Mrs. Rhodes, trotted over to assist. The carpool line was a finely tuned machine, which managed to deposit scores of meandering kindergartners into their vehicles in less than eight minutes, in order to allow room for the next grade’s mothers to begin rolling in. We were holding up progress.

  “There you go,” s
aid Mrs. Rhodes, patting Finn on the shoulder as he climbed in. She gave me an odd look, the kind you’d reserve for an enthusiastic nose picker. “Hmm. Have a nice afternoon,” she said dryly.

  Well, really. It had been only about thirty seconds since the car door had opened. That wasn’t that ba—

  “Hey, Mom!” Eli said brightly. “Turn it more up!”

  My arm reached out automatically to adjust the volume and then recoiled as I realized what was blaring on the car’s speakers:

  “—gotta roll, gotta bounce,

  but first she say let’s burn an ounce—”

  Now Eli was singing along enthusiastically.

  Herbal Life’s “Bitch Ain’t Sharing.” That explained the acerbic look from Mrs. Rhodes. My car and my iPhone had some mysterious relationship where the Bluetooth was always activating random inappropriate stoner music without my consent. I hastily punched the button to forward to the next song.

  “—Yeah, 4 big blunts 4 my J-town playaz—”

  Mother of God. This was even worse. Where was all my normal music? Actually . . . this was a hilarious bluegrass version of Down with the Man’s “Sippin’ Sizzurp”—aside from the profane, misogynistic lyrics, of course—but still. I turned off the stereo.

  “Hey!” said Eli. “I liked that song.”

  “Hey, Lainie!” said Finn, patting her benevolently as he climbed in. Although the boys considered their older sister, Rowan, to be a mortal enemy, they were fond of Delaney and frequently allowed her to tag after them. As a result, she had acquired some less-than-desirable characteristics, including a disturbing preoccupation with the NFL and an extensive bathroom vocabulary. She greeted her brothers by making some arm-fart noises. This was received with enthusiasm. The other two boys, Will Grainger and Will Packard, appeared impressed. Who knew that very small girls could be so cool?

  Trying not to think about the fact that Nick had apparently named his dog after me—his dog!—I turned into the Eastover section of the city. If anything, it was even posher than Myers Park, with enormous green lawns rolling uphill toward the stately homes. Charlotte was somewhat unusual in that some of its nicest neighborhoods bordered downtown, which was handy for the hordes of converging bankers every morning, but it also meant that these enclaves were in close proximity to some of the city’s less affluent areas.

  As if to reinforce this line of thought, a pimped-out Honda turned onto the street ahead of us. Someone had gone to the expense of modifying its tailpipe, which was now enormous and bright silver and quite noisy; it made a tremendously loud rern-rern sound every time the driver hit the gas pedal. As if this weren’t classy enough, there was also a bumper sticker reading GAS, ASS, OR GRASS: NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE. Well, those were some poor options, really, if you were in desperate need of a lift. Suppose you didn’t have any money or weed on you?

  I wrenched my mind back to more pertinent issues. I tended to miss the driveway to Will Packard’s house and then would have to pull into the wrong mansion’s driveway to turn around. Ah, there it was. Will’s father or grandfather or someone had done something financially important, like founding a bank or a major hedge fund. This meant that Will’s family was one of the wealthiest in Charlotte. Wealthy, as in private planes, vacation houses in Sea Island and Vail, and their own charitable foundation. Will himself gave absolutely no clue to his family’s prominence. He was a shaggy-haired, freckled kid, wearing the same currently fashionable getup as all the other little boys, namely, a hoodie emblazoned with the name of a sports manufacturer and tall, garish neon socks. There was some discernible irony in all these private-school kids desperately trying to look like sports figures, but I couldn’t quite articulate it. Maybe I could flag down GAS, ASS OR GRASS and ask him what the fascination was with those stupid hoodies.

  The Packards’ driveway wound between an iron-and-brick gate mighty enough to front a castle and then meandered up a hill in large, graceful arcs. I eased the car to a stop at the bottom of the driveway, narrowly avoiding a child’s bicycle lying half on the pavement and half on the grass. I stopped the car. The back wheel was bent nearly in two, doubling back on itself like a folded tortilla, a training wheel dangling by a thread. Apparently being rich did not insulate you from the maddening inability of children to put away their expensive possessions.

  Finn, in a rare moment of lucid observation, was more charitable than me. “Gosh, I hope nobody was riding that bike when the dad ran over it,” he said. Finn had lost plenty of his own toys by leaving them inexplicably positioned underneath the back wheels of Drew’s car, so he spoke from experience.

  My phone buzzed as I tried to navigate around the abandoned bicycle. Text! I stopped again and peered down. It was from Will P’s mom, Betsy: Can you drop Will off at Ryder’s house?

  Blast. I was short on time, because I still had to drop the other Will off (he lived in a normal rich-person house down the street from us), get the kids to tennis lessons at Emma’s club, get Rowan from Nina, get home, unload grocery bags, supervise homework, make dinner, clean up, get everyone bathed, brushed, and pajamaed, read to Delaney and the boys, and get everyone into bed. Driving an extra fifteen minutes to Ryder’s house threw a wrench into the entire system. Still, I could not bring myself to attempt to explain all this to Betsy Packard via text.

  Sure, I typed. Before I could hit send, she called me.

  “Zadie,” she said, “is Will in the car?”

  “I got him!” I said brightly. There had been an embarrassing flail last year when I’d left him behind at the Oak Academy, but I thought we’d moved past that.

  Betsy made a rusty, half-sobbing noise. “Is your phone on speaker?”

  I blinked and switched off the Bluetooth. “Not anymore,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  I had to strain to hear her. “No,” she said. “No, no. No— I.” She stopped and tried again. “Eleanor,” she said.

  “Betsy,” I said, staring at the small shredded bicycle on the grass beside the monstrous bulk of my SUV. “What happened to Eleanor?”

  Chapter Twelve

  WHAMMIFIED

  Zadie, Present Day

  “I ran into her,” said Betsy. Her voice was alien, awful: a corroded gate croaking out human language.

  “Oh, Betsy,” I said, a hot flood of tears immediately escaping my eyes and nose in an undignified gush. I put my head on the steering wheel to hide my face from the children. Eleanor was three, and a bubbly, pink-cheeked sprite who’d been at our house just last week. She and Delaney had commandeered the space under the dining room table, industriously filling it with rocks, dirt, and the uprooted remains of all my basil plants. “Please tell me she’s going to be okay.”

  “I didn’t know she was outside.” After every few words, she sucked in her breath with a sickening audible creak. “The surgeon—Dr. Colley; do you know Dr. Colley?—says they don’t think she has a head injury, but she’s in the OR for, uh, abdominal injuries.” She caught her breath again. “They don’t know how bad it is yet.”

  “Listen, Betsy,” I said. “I know Emma Colley—you couldn’t have a better surgeon. I’ll take Will to Ryder’s house right now.” I glanced in the rearview mirror at the blissfully oblivious occupants of the backseat, roiling like an octopus convention as they crowed and guffawed and invaded one another’s personal space.

  “Sometimes, at night, I actually used to think about them getting hurt in a car wreck,” Betsy said, and then she gave in to the urge to cry—helpless, frightened sobbing that rang in my ears. My chest heaved in commiseration. There but for the grace of God . . . Betsy had just run smack up against one of those fallacious universal parenting beliefs: the idea that if you envision some terrible thing happening to your child, then it would not, in fact, actually happen. We make these implicit bargains with fate all the time, lulling ourselves into a false comfort, thinking we can ward off the worst just by acknowledging that it e
xists. A close corollary to this belief is the notion that if something ghastly happens to the child of someone you know, then your child is somehow mysteriously protected from that same thing.

  But my job exposed me far too often to the truth; unspeakable fears do lunge out of our imaginations into reality, and it doesn’t matter who has gone down before you. Childhood cancers happen. Abuse from trusted adults happens.

  And trauma happens.

  —

  Five o’clock p.m. Absolute worst hour of the day. Still reeling from the news of Eleanor Packard’s accident, I checked my phone for the thousandth time, hoping for an update. Nothing.

  The children, post-school, post-tennis, were tired and cranky and had just expended the last of their brainpower on homework. I could not bring myself to tell them about Eleanor. Delaney, who’d been carted around in the car seat all afternoon, had finally fallen asleep just before we pulled into the driveway and had undergone a terrible transformation from her normal perky self to wordless screeching demon. One side of her face shone bright red from where she’d been lying on it, and she howled to be held. I had made the horrific mistake of waking her before bringing in all the grocery stuff, so I was forced to carry her to and from the car multiple times as I brought in all the bags.

  Now, attempting to cook dinner, I staggered around the kitchen with the wailing Delaney clamped to my leg, while everyone pleaded for junk food. With the tip of my outstretched left pinkie finger, I managed to hit the home screen button on my phone in case Emma had tried to reach me. I’d been dying to tell her about Nick’s dog’s name, but now all I wanted to do was hear about Eleanor’s prognosis.

  No missed texts.

  “Rowan!” I snapped. “Get over here and assist me with your sister.”

  “I can’t, Mom,” said Rowan coolly. “I have to text Isabelle.” Rowan seemed to be developing into the sort of girl whose presence caused other girls to go into paroxysms of insecurity. She was confident and cheeky, with a finely wrought face dominated by huge sea glass eyes and a great swathe of inky hair.