by Nella Tyler
“She said she was sure you could hear,” I told him. “She said you used to kick around inside of her when she would start, and then you’d slowly calm down until you fell asleep.”
“Is that why you always read to me, Dad?”
I smiled again. “It is shrimp. She asked me to do that for you when she knew she wasn’t going to be with us much longer. She wanted to make sure that you had something that she’d always done with you, for as long as she knew you.”
“What books did she read me?”
I laughed in spite of the pain I could feel inside of me, remembering the woman I had loved. “She read everything,” I said. “She loved to read you Dr. Seuss books especially—she said you always kicked the hardest when she’d start on The Cat in the Hat or Hop on Pop. But if she was really tired she’d read those Peter Rabbit books you like so much now.”
“Do you think I like them because mom used to read them to me?”
“Well—I think you like them because they’re good books, mostly,” I said. “But it probably helps that you were hearing those stories before you were even out in the world.”
“Did Mom look anything like Mackenzie?” I frowned at the question.
“What makes you say that?” I glanced over at the rearview mirror; Landon was sprawled out as much as the booster seat would allow, his head resting against the back of the seat.
“I don’t really remember her,” Landon said. “You showed me her picture, but I’ve never seen her before.”
“You were really little when she died, bud. You were just a baby.”
“I know,” Landon said, nodding. “But there’s this way that Mack talks sometimes and it’s like I almost remember Mom.”
A shudder worked through my spine. “Does it make you feel bad or good?” I asked, almost afraid of what his answer would be.
“It makes me feel good,” Landon said, nodding a little bit. “I like her.” He went silent for a while and I tried to pay attention to the world around me instead of thinking about my dead wife; I had to keep my eyes on the road, I had to keep my son safe. “What was Mom’s favorite food?”
“She loved a good steak,” I said, smiling to myself. “When we finally had you, and we knew that she was going to be going into treatment, so she couldn’t nurse you herself, we went out and got her a great big, rare steak at her favorite steakhouse to celebrate.”
“Can we have steak for dinner tonight, Dad?” My throat felt like it might close up on me, like I might suffocate right there in the car. I turned the heat down a little bit in the front—I kept it on full blast in the back for Landon—and nodded.
“Yeah, we can have steak for dinner,” I told my son. He reached into the bag that I kept in the back seat, full of toys for him to play with, and he was off in a world of his own, talking back and forth between two action figures. I drove us the rest of the way home from the park thinking about my wife, missing her, feeling the pain of her absence.
Mackenzie really wasn’t anything like Joanne—not in the way they looked, anyway. Joanne had had the same dark hair my son had inherited, and dark eyes to go with it. She was tall and sturdy instead of being short and curvy and slim. I’d fallen in love with her in college; we’d both been scholarship students, studying in different areas, but we’d met at a meeting for the fencing club, and before long we’d spent more time flirting with each other than actually learning how to fight with a foil.
It had taken us a few years to get pregnant with Landon; Joanne had been determined that she wanted to have a baby—a son, and if we could have a son first, she wanted a daughter to follow. Just when we were about to give up on the idea of conceiving and start looking for a baby to adopt, Joanne had finally conceived, and we’d been so happy. I’d run out of the house at all hours of the night to pick up whatever she was craving—whether it was dressed hot dogs with a strawberry milkshake on the side or sauerkraut and chocolate. I was glad to see her so happy, glad that everything seemed to be going so well for her pregnancy.
By the time she was somewhere between four and five months along, though, things started to go bad. She was tired all the time, and her back ached more than it should for just the typical pregnancy. Her OB-GYN sent her to get tests done to make sure she didn’t have something going on with her spine, and that was when we’d discovered what it was that had made it so difficult for her to conceive; she’d had a tumor. How they could have missed it when we’d been tested for everything else under the sun before Joanne finally got pregnant I would never know, but they said it had been steadily growing, right along with the baby inside of her, throughout the pregnancy—that the hormones that had coursed through her had created the perfect conditions for it to develop faster.
Joanne had done what she could to keep herself healthy after that, because she had wanted to stay alive long enough to at least give birth to Landon. When they’d done the C-section to take him out, they’d gone ahead and removed the tumor too, but it had already metastasized to different parts of her body. A week after she gave birth to Landon, she’d started treatment with aggressive chemo, and in spite of the fact that our son was as healthy as could be, the three of us spent months in and out of the hospital, until finally she decided that she just couldn’t take anymore. She went on pain medication and the last night of her life, she’d lain with Landon in her arms, singing to him as they both fell asleep; she didn’t wake up the next morning, and there I was, a single parent, all in the span of a few months.
As I pulled into the garage for our building, I thought to myself that I’d been neglecting an important part of Landon’s life for years; I had avoided talking about his mom, and I had avoided seeing anyone more than once or twice. He wants a mom. He needs a mom. A mom would have been good for him a couple of months ago when he broke his leg. I pushed aside my guilt; it didn’t do me any good to feel bad about it now. But it might be nice to start looking for another woman to share my life with—someone who could love Landon almost as much as I did, who wouldn’t replace his mother, but who could be a mother to him.
Chapter Seven - Mackenzie
“I wish I had time to sit around and drink coffee,” Amie said, walking up to my desk.
“You have time to come over here and complain that you don’t have time,” I pointed out, sticking my tongue out at her. Amie laughed.
“Like fifteen minutes. Next patient called to say she was going to be ten minutes late—apparently Jocelyn’s piano recital went over.”
“Because as we all know, piano is a million times more important than walking properly.” Amie rolled her eyes.
“So what turn of events made it possible for you to be sitting around drinking coffee?”
I shrugged, sitting back in my chair until it squeaked. “My two-thirty canceled on me,” I explained. “So I walked around the corner and grabbed a coffee to get me through the last few hours.”
“And you didn’t even think to ask me if I wanted something,” Amie said, shaking her head in mock disapproval. “What a bitch.”
I laughed.
“Yeah, well, you were busy. I didn’t want to look like I was slacking off.”
“Which you are,” Amie interjected.
“Well yeah. But I didn’t want to look like I was. So I sneaked out. Besides, didn’t I see you with a Starbucks cup yesterday afternoon?” Amie snorted. It was an open secret in the office that whoever had a cancelation was apt to run to either the closest café—a mom and pop place that had better regular coffee than fancy things like lattes—or to the Starbucks in the opposite direction. If we were slow then whoever ducked out for a few minutes would take orders from everyone else, but if we were busy it was important not to look like we were taking a break.
“How are your patients doing?” I patted the pile of files on my desk and sighed. One of my long-time patients, who’d been coming in three times a week for six months, was finally able to walk competently on her own. I had advised her mother that we should probably go to once-a
-week sessions to increase the little girl’s balance and coordination, but the mother had seemed relieved enough that her daughter could walk unassisted that I doubted she’d follow through.
“I’ve got one who’s transitioning out of care,” I said, smiling slightly. “And Ruby-Lee is doing really well, making a lot of progress.”
“My Jeremy had a setback,” Amie said, her face settling into glum lines. “I was really rooting for him, but he had a bad weekend of seizures and now he’s lost a lot of progress.”
“I always hate when that happens.” I sighed with her; it was heartbreaking to bring a patient to the verge of being able to function, only to have something interfere. I reminded myself that if I’d stuck with elderly patients, or even general practice, I’d see a lot more of those cases—generally kids were much quicker to adapt, and faster to recover from setbacks.
“But Cassie is doing really well! I think she might actually be able to get clearance to start dance again in the New Year.”
We chatted about different patients for a while, comparing what we were doing, and picked apart an article in one of the journals that had found that alternating hot, cold, and electrical therapies had more efficacy than any of the individual therapies had alone. “As if we needed a study to tell us that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve been doing that with the bad ones ever since I got my license to practice.”
“Well, but at least we can tell some of those anti-vax parents that there is proof,” Amie pointed out. We both made faces at the mere idea of anti-vaccine parents. More than a few of our patients that had come in over the months were ones whose parents had refused vaccines; when the babies got whooping cough or flu or something like that, their fevers climbed and they got brain damage that they had to spend years and years working through. I had told more than one of my former high school friends that if they refused to vaccinate their children I would never speak to them again; only a couple were stiff-necked enough to actually go against me, but I knew that there was a good chance that I’d end up seeing their kids in my practice, victims of brain damage or nerve damage from one disease or another.
I finished off my coffee, wishing I’d bought one of the delicious-looking apple pastries to go with it while I’d been in the café. “I have one patient that’s all good news,” I told Amie.
“Oh? Which?”
“Landon Willis. He’s making tons of progress.”
Amie laughed. “Imagine that. When his dad brought him in late that first session you were sure that he’d be one of those that fell through the cracks.”
“Well I had reasons to believe that!” I wagged my finger at Amie. “How often does a parent bring their kid in late for an evaluation and then go on to be even halfway decent about follow-through in their therapy?”
“True,” Amie said, nodding. “So he’s a decent dad?”
“He’s really decent,” I told her. “Really worried about his son. Wants to do everything right.”
“And he’s hot,” Amie pointed out. “That’s always helpful.” I rolled my eyes at her, chucking my coffee cup into the trash bin. “Ooh—is he single?”
“Yes,” I admitted, and I felt my cheeks burning up with a blush.
“Look at that! Oh man you’ve got it for him, don’t you?”
“He’s a patient’s father,” I protested. “I can’t have anything for him other than a respect for the fact that he’s taking good care of his kid.”
“You can have the hots for him just fine,” Amie said. “There was a guy like…a year ago. He was so hot. He looked like Brad Pitt from like twenty years ago. I could barely keep my mind on work when his daughter came in for her sessions. I kept thinking of all the ways the equipment could come in handy for sex.”
“You’re terrible!” I shook my head. “There are kids using those machines.”
“It’s not like I’m saying I’d use it to have sex with them!” Amie looked at me wide-eyed with pretend shock. “But it’s the same equipment we’d use on an adult, most of the time. And you can’t tell me the TENS unit wouldn’t be fun to play with if you found the right open-minded guy.”
“You are depraved.” I shook my head again. “Don’t you have like, two boyfriends right now? Why are you peeking at patients’ parents?”
“Greener pastures, girl,” Amie said. “I’m always on the lookout for a better option.”
“So you’re never going to be happy with what you’ve got,” I told her. “Because you’re going to keep looking for a hotter, sexier guy. You could land Brad Pitt himself and you’d still look—and waste all that Brad Pitt hotness.”
“I’m not saying I’m not happy with what I have,” Amie told me, holding up a hand to forestall me saying anything. “I’m just saying that if a better option shows up, I’m on board.” She looked me up and down, her lips twisting into a weird half-smile. “I think your problem is that you’re not looking at all.”
“That’s not fair!” I gestured to my cluttered desk. “I’m crazy busy all the time.”
“So am I, but there are these things called phones. You can use them while you’re doing other things. They even have apps that let you find people who are interested in meeting up and maybe hooking up.”
“I don’t want to just hook up with someone,” I said, frowning. “I want to find someone I can really have a relationship with.”
“They have apps for that too. Girl, you must be getting desperate if you’re getting all worked up over a patient’s parent.”
“I’m not getting worked up over him!” My cheeks burned even hotter. “I swear to god—they’re coming in later, and if you even look at me while they’re here I’ll beat the hell out of you.”
“You are hot for him,” Amie said, looking at me a little more seriously. “Not that I blame you. He’s totally got the goods.”
“That’s not the point,” I said, sighing. “It’s unethical.”
“That makes it even hotter,” Amie told me, raising an eyebrow. “That little bit of risk of what might happen if it gets out.”
“Nothing is going to happen. He’s not even interested in me, not even a little bit.” I shrugged. “He’s a nice guy, he’s taking good care of his son. He works all the time anyway, according to Landon, so it’s not like he’s looking for a relationship in general.”
“Well I think you’d be cute together,” Amie said, her voice teasing. “I better up there. My patient’s probably finally showed up.”
I watched her leave. I don’t have a crush on Patrick. He’s just a nice, cute guy. I shook my head. The one time he’d called me he’d been interested in finding out something about his son; even if we’d had a quick personal conversation on top of it, it hadn’t been like he’d tried to flirt with me or anything. A man as responsible as Patrick was wouldn’t rush to date someone anyway; he’d want to wait until he knew that the girl he was seeing would be a good influence on Landon—which was how it should be. Besides, he’s good looking and has money. It’s not like he’s got a shortage of people who’d like to play Landon’s step-mom.
I spent the rest of my impromptu break thinking about Landon and Patrick Willis, and trying to focus on the next patient that I had coming in. He was a little boy with cerebral palsy, who had moved to the city recently and had already had years of physical therapy in the hopes of managing his health problems more effectively. I knew his parents hoped that he might eventually be able to walk completely unassisted, but from the progress he’d made so far I thought that the boy would need to have a walker or possibly even a wheelchair at his disposal for the rest of his life. There was a limit to what we could accomplish; that fact was something that a lot of parents didn’t want to believe.
Patrick, at least, had come in with realistic expectations, I thought as I pulled up the patient chart for the little boy with cerebral palsy. I thought—though I wasn’t going to say it yet, at least not to Patrick—that Landon might actually be able to take a week or two off of his therapy at the end of
the scheduled sessions. I might be able to transition him to twice-per-week sessions by early January, and get him finished up before Valentine’s Day. That would please both of them; but I didn’t want to suggest it before I was absolutely sure. It was always a terrible idea to suggest that a kid might recover faster, only to have a setback arise or to see him or her hit their plateau sooner than you thought they would. But I looked forward to seeing the widower and his son, whether or not I wanted to think of how cute Patrick was.
Chapter Eight - Patrick
I told myself that there was nothing different about the latest session with Mackenzie, that Landon was just the same as he had always been and so was Mackenzie, but ever since Landon had asked me if I thought Mackenzie looked like his mother, something had been eating at the back of my mind. I sat on one of the benches, watching the two of them as they went through one exercise after another, talking like they always did. She doesn’t look anything like Joanne. Nothing at all. I watched Mackenzie guiding Landon through another exercise, encouraging him with her soft voice full of enthusiasm. “You’re doing great, Landon,” I heard her say, patting my son on the shoulder. “Two more of these and we can take a break.”
Landon told Mackenzie about his school day as he caught his breath, and I listened in too, even though I’d gotten all the news from him as we’d driven to the center from the school only a few minutes before. “One of the third graders said that Jessie is my girlfriend,” Landon told her; that was one thing he hadn’t mentioned to me.
“Oh? Did you ask him why he thought that?”
“He said it was because I always spend recess with her, and I share my afternoon snack with her.” Landon made a face. “She’s just nice.”
