by Bec Linder
I sat at the table, resting my elbows on the rumpled white tablecloth, while Devin mucked around with the wine. He filled my glass almost to the top, and I raised my eyebrows.
“You look like you need it,” he said.
“I guess so,” I said. “I also need a job.”
He sat across from me with his own overflowing glass. “I thought you were working for that start-up, though.”
“I am,” I said. “But it’s just a contract position. I’ll be out of work again in less than a month. I need to find something else. I’ve put in some applications.”
“So why do you look so depressed?” he asked.
I sighed and took a big sip of wine. “Because I sort of like the contract work. The guy’s a real do-gooder, saving starving babies in Africa and all that—”
“Oh Lord, spare me the white guilt,” Devin said.
“—and I like working for him. Shut up, Devin. He’s not like that.”
“Okay, sure,” Devin said. “Whatever you say. You’re still gonna keep looking for other work, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to call some places on Monday to follow up on my applications. If anyone offers me a job, I’ll take it. I’m not an idiot.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Devin said.
I rolled my eyes. “What about you? How’s Freedom Writers going?”
He sipped his wine and scowled at me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Wrong movie. I mean To Sir, With Love.”
“Why can’t I be Hilary Swank?” he asked. “Is it my skin color? Are you racially profiling me?”
“Children,” my dad called from the kitchen.
“Okay, I’m done,” I said. “Sorry. For real, though. How’s the new semester?”
Devin sighed. “Tiring. It’s like they forgot everything over Christmas break. Logarithms, subtraction, basic hygiene…”
“One day you’ll give in and get a cushy job at a private school in Forest Hills,” I said.
I heard a noise at the front door, and then my mother’s voice calling, “Where are my little babies?”
“Quick, finish the wine,” Devin said, and I chugged my glass, trying not to laugh or choke, while he called out, “We’re in the dining room, Ma.”
She came in, still wearing her scrubs and looking worn out. I set my glass on the table—only half-empty, despite my best efforts—and stood up to give her a hug. “Hi, Mom. How was your day? Do you want some wine?”
“That’s the Devil’s drink,” she said sternly, and then, “Pour me a glass.”
Devin laughed and emptied the bottle.
Dinner was pork roast, greens, and fluffy yeast rolls. I set to work stuffing my face while my mother told a story about one of her patients who had gotten fed up with the hospital food. When we all finally stopped laughing, she turned to Devin and said, “Have you met a nice girl yet?”
Devin and I exchanged a meaningful look. She asked this question every week. Devin was gay, and had been out to my parents for a solid decade now, but my mother was still in denial about it. “No, Ma,” Devin said gently. “I’m still with Mohammed. You met him at the barbeque, remember?”
“He’s a very nice young man,” my father said. He wasn’t totally on board with the gay thing either, but he’d accepted that it wasn’t going to change, and I thought his awkward attempts to show support were very sweet. Parents were adorable.
My mother sniffed. I wasn’t sure if she disapproved of Mohammed more because he was a man or because he was Muslim.
Then Devin got a wicked look on his face and said, “You should ask Sadie about her new boss. Sounds like she’s crushing hard.”
I kicked him under the table, and he yelped, but it was too late. My mom turned to me with a gleam in her eyes that said, GRANDCHILDREN!
“No,” I said. “He’s my boss. I like him, but not like that. Nothing is going to happen. Stop looking at me like that, Ma.”
“I just think it’s time for you to start dating again,” she said. “It’s been a year, sugar.”
“Cheryl, leave her alone,” my father said.
“We’ve been leaving her alone,” my mother said. “I know you agree with me, Kevin. It’s not good for a person to be sad for so long. I know you loved him, Sadie, but that boy told me he wanted you to move on with your life. And you aren’t moving at all, sugar. You’re going nowhere.”
I sat there, stunned, feeling a tight, achy heat gather behind my eyes. This was not at all what I had expected from the evening.
I was not going to start crying at the dinner table.
“Excuse me,” I said tightly, and stood up and headed for the door.
“Let her go,” I heard my father say.
I should have just gone home.
NINE
Elliott
I didn’t take the weekend off, but I went home before midnight on Friday, and on Saturday morning I slept in and didn’t make it to the office until after lunch.
I hoped Sadie would approve.
She was infuriating, and she amused the hell out of me. I still wasn’t sure that hiring her had been a good idea—she was a deadly distraction, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted—but fantasizing about taking her to bed made a nice change from worrying about my finances and my father’s inevitable meddling.
He knew I was back in New York, and probably knew what I was up to, but I hadn’t spoken to him since our brief conversation in August, when I called him from the embassy in Kampala and learned that he was cutting me off. That was what had sparked my return to the States: fury, and a foolish desire to prove him wrong. My job with MSF paid more than enough to live comfortably in-country, and my head of mission told me she would see about getting me a raise—but it wasn’t about the money, at that point. It was about showing my father that I had become a man.
Now, months later, I felt less like a man and more like a misguidedly rebellious boy. Such was life.
As if thinking about my father had somehow drawn his evil, unblinking attention, like the Eye of Sauron pulsating wickedly on the horizon, I received a call on Sunday morning from the oldest of my three younger sisters, the one who had taken over as heir apparent when my father reluctantly conceded that a woman was better than a non-Sloane.
“Cassie,” I said when I answered, having recognized the number. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“Elliott,” she said grimly. Cassie and I had never gotten along well, and in the last few years she had turned into a younger, more feminine version of our father, full of disapproval and boring statistics about international markets.
“What have I done to deserve your attention?” I asked. I was already enjoying myself. Cassie had no sense of humor to speak of, and pissing her off had long been a favorite pastime.
“Father told me to check up on you,” she said. “He gave me your number. So. I’m checking. What are you doing?”
“Well, right now, I’m doing laundry,” I said. That was a lie; I was sitting on my bed watching the Duke vs. North Carolina basketball game.
Cassie sighed. “Don’t be difficult, Elliott.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m working on my start-up. Which is exactly what I told our father I would be doing. I haven’t starved to death yet, and I’m not out on the streets. You can check up on me again in three months.”
“Fine,” she said. There was a long pause. I waited. Finally she said, “Kristin would like to hear from you.”
Kris was my middle and favorite sister. I hadn’t contacted her because I didn’t want to create any problems. I told Cassie as much, and she sighed and said, “You act like Father is the Devil incarnate. I know you’ve had your problems, but he isn’t actually the Gestapo. He isn’t having us followed. He isn’t tapping our phones. You’re allowed to meet Kristin for coffee.”
I thought he probably was having all of us followed, but I held my peace. “Maybe I’ll call her, in that case. Please keep me abreast of any devel
opments in our father’s attempts to sabotage me.”
“Good grief,” Cassie said, and hung up.
I smirked at my phone. Every time I managed to make Cassie hang up on me, I mentally added ten imaginary points to my score.
Family intrigue was such a delight.
I called Kris.
She didn’t answer. I knew she wouldn’t—she screened all of her calls, and she wouldn’t recognize my new number—but I left a message telling her I wanted to see her, and she called back ten minutes later.
“If you’re not Elliott, you aren’t funny,” she said, when I picked up.
I broke into a helpless grin at the sound of her voice. I hadn’t seen her in two years, not since the last time I was in New York, and I had missed her every day since then. “It’s really me,” I said.
“You’re a real jerk, you know,” she said. “You’ve been in New York for months and you didn’t call me.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Kris. I just thought—with our father—”
“Yeah, I get it,” she said. “Apology accepted. What are you doing right now? Can we get dinner? You know I hate talking on the phone.”
I glanced at the clock. “Of course. We can go anywhere you want. I’ll even go to that terrible beer garden in Times Square.”
“You’re watching the Duke game, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Busted,” I said. “They’re probably going to lose.”
“You’ll have to drown your sorrows in delicious food, then,” she said. “I know just the place. I’ll text you the address. 7:00, okay? Don’t be late, or else.”
“That’s a pitiful threat,” I said.
She laughed at me, and hung up.
We met at a Thai place in the East Village. Kris was waiting for me outside on the sidewalk. Despite her bravado on the phone, she raised her hand to her mouth when she spotted me, and as I drew closer I realized she was crying.
“Oh, Kris,” I said, my stomach knotting with a combination of guilt and terror. I never knew what to do with a crying woman. I took her in my arms and patted her back while she clung to my coat and wept. “Kristin. Please don’t cry.” We were making a scene. A passing hipster scowled at me, like I had done something horrible. Maybe I had. I knew Kris felt that I had abandoned her.
Public weeping didn’t match Kris’ image of herself, and she pulled herself together after just a few minutes and carefully wiped her fingers beneath her eyes. “Did my mascara smear?”
I dabbed one black fleck from her face and said, “You look beautiful.”
“What a charmer,” she said. “God. Fuck you, Elliott. Don’t ever go away for two years and then not call me the instant you get back. That sucks. That was a shitty thing to do.”
“You’re right,” I said. Looking at her tear-stained face made me feel like a pathetic worm. “I’m sorry. I wish I could go back in time and call you from the airport. I suck.”
“You have too many daddy issues,” she said. “We all need therapy. Every single one of us. Especially Cassie. Dad has totally brainwashed her.”
“Don’t pathologize,” I said. “She’s always been like that. Are you ready to go in now? Let’s eat. We’ll get a bottle of wine.”
“Two bottles,” she said.
The restaurant was one I hadn’t been to before, but the food was spicy and authentic, and the waiter kept our water glasses filled and otherwise left us alone, so all of my requirements for an acceptable dining experience were filled. Kris talked a little about her job—she was a junior editor at a major fashion magazine—and got me up to speed on the latest family gossip. Julie, my youngest sister, had never even attempted to do anything with her life and was still living at home and buying expensive crap with our father’s credit card, and Kris told me a delightful story about Julie’s new cockapoo puppy, whatever that was, pissing all over our father’s favorite oriental rug.
“I wish I could have been there to see his face,” I said.
“Me too,” Kris said, “but Cassie did a pretty good job of describing it. She’s gotten a little better lately, you know. I think maybe she’s finally realized that Dad is an asshole.”
“Wonders will never cease,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, by the way, let me tell you this before I forget. Mom’s attorney has called me a few times, trying to get in touch with you. He says it’s something about her estate. Probably some paperwork or something, I don’t know the details. But you should call him.”
“Sure,” I said, and sighed. My mother had been dead for more than a decade, but it seemed like there was always more paperwork to sign. “Is it still that old guy, what was his name—”
“Harrison,” Kris said, and grinned. “No. It’s a new one. Young. He’s pretty cute.”
“Kris,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt to look. Anyway, please call him so he stops calling me.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow morning,” I said. “First thing.”
“Good,” she said. “Now I want you to tell me all about this company you’re starting. Don’t spare any details. I want every last boring tidbit.”
“If you insist,” I said. “But we’re going to need another bottle of wine.”
TEN
Sadie
It happened like this.
Ben rolled over in bed one morning and said, “I don’t feel right.”
One week, five blood tests, and two doctors later, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
I was at work during the appointment, but he called me after, his voice cracking slightly, and said, “The doctor told me to check into the hospital.”
I spun in my chair to face my cubicle wall, not wanting any of my co-workers to see my face. I asked, “When?”
“As soon as possible,” he said. “Like, today.”
That was the moment I knew it was serious.
Ben hadn’t felt well for weeks. Mysterious bruises bloomed underneath his skin and disappeared, and he started going to bed earlier and earlier, until he was asleep half an hour after dinner. I told him to go to the doctor and he wouldn’t, insisted he was fine, until the morning he finally admitted that he wasn’t.
He wasn’t fine.
We took the subway to the hospital, at his insistence. A cab would be wasteful, he said. There was no need, he said, and I gave in. I didn’t want to upset him.
The hospital was noisy, crowded, and aseptic, all white corridors and bustling nurses, but Ben’s room was quiet, just him and an older man who was rapidly dying of brain cancer. It was a small oasis, there on the ninth floor, with a view over the East River and Queens beyond it, and a small artificial plant on the windowsill. I wondered who had left it there. I didn’t think the hospital would waste money on something so frivolous.
“It’s nice,” Ben said, perched on his bed with an IV already dripping a clear fluid into his veins. “I guess.”
“For a hospital,” I said.
His oncologist came by that first evening to introduce himself. He was a tall, extraordinarily skinny man. Dr. Mukherjee. I hated a lot of people at that hospital, but Dr. Mukherjee wasn’t one of them.
“It’s most known in children, of course,” he said, in the calm, straightforward manner I came to appreciate so much over the course of the next several months. “Leukemia, I mean. But not uncommon in adults. We’ll need to do a biopsy to be certain, but I have little doubt that’s what we’re dealing with here. We’ll start you on the standard chemotherapeutic treatment.”
“What are my chances?” Ben asked, squeezing my hand tightly.
The doctor looked down at his clipboard. “Your blood counts aren’t great,” he said. “I won’t lie to you: it concerns me. Five-year survival rates for adults with this type of cancer are between thirty and forty percent.”
“That’s less than half,” Ben said, and I looked at him and saw that his face had gone white.
“Try to remain optimistic,�
� the doctor said. “There’s no better treatment you can give yourself. I won’t give up on you, as long as you promise that you won’t give up either.”
After he left, I leaned into Ben’s side, just for a moment, letting him bear up my weight, and then I said, “Do you want me to call my mom?”
“Yeah,” Ben said, “I’m—I want to know what she thinks.”
I nodded, and kissed him on the cheek.
My mother was a pediatric oncologist at Mt. Sinai. She’d seen plenty of leukemia before, and when I told her Ben’s blood count, she sighed and said, “That’s not great. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. Let me come by and talk to his doctors.”
“They seem pretty competent,” I said, because I didn’t necessarily want her showing up and meddling, the way she was so good at doing; but on the other hand, this was probably the sort of situation that called for a little meddling.
“Don’t you sass me,” my mother said. “I’ll come by tomorrow. Tell that Ben to drink a lot of fluids and stay positive.”
I passed along the message, and Ben grinned and said, “Is your mom going to come boss me around? I can’t wait.”
“The fact that you enjoy her fussing is the sign of a sick mind,” I told him, and then bit my lip and looked down at the floor, because he was sick. I couldn’t joke about things like that anymore.
My life changed between one day and the next. I woke up that morning, the day Ben was admitted to the hospital, as a care-free twenty-something hipster, and the next day I felt thirty years older. I had more to worry about, now, than paying rent and getting a spot in my favorite spinning class.
I read everything I could find, whenever I had a quiet moment at work, looking for anything, any hint of a miracle cure, any experimental treatment that might help. I learned the names of all of Ben’s nurses, and did my best to get on their good sides. And I worried. I tried to hide it from him, but I felt it sitting in my belly, a dark lump, a cold stone, slowly dragging me down to earth.
I was afraid.
A few days after he was admitted, I showed up at the hospital after work and found a strange woman sitting beside Ben’s bed. She turned when I came in the room and gave me a look of distaste I recognized all too well: Who’s this black girl?
