PART 3
Dr. Amara Sekou’s office was on the fourth floor of the teaching hospital, and she was fifty-four, and she had the kind of face that had delivered forty percent to a great many people and had never once rounded it up.
“Mr. Corliss.
Your wife told me you’d be angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“She also told me you’d say that.”
I laughed, which surprised both of us.
She laid it out.
Five months of nightly infusions.
One month left.
Bloodwork every two weeks, which is what the vials were for — Gabriel drew them, Dr. Sekou read them, and the numbers had been, in her words, “moving in a direction I’d describe as encouraging and would not describe as anything else until the six-month panel.”
“When’s the six-month panel?”
“Three weeks from Thursday.”
“And if it’s not encouraging?”
Dr. Sekou did the thing Elise had said she’d do.
She told the truth.
“Then we talk about second-line options.
Which exist.
And which are harder.
Mr. Corliss, I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be fine.
I told a fourteen-year-old that once, early in my career, about his father, and I’ve never said it since.”
I looked at her.
“That’s — ”
“Your wife told me about your father.
She told me about the CVS.
She told me, in this office, in week one, ‘My husband’s father d*ed of something with a name like this and he still can’t say the word, and I’m not putting him in a chair next to my bed for six months unless I know it’s worth it.'”
“She said that.”
“She said it in about that many words.
Then she wrote a letter, and asked me to keep it.”
Dr. Sekou opened a drawer.
An envelope.
Elise’s handwriting.
FOR BEN AND LILY — IF.
“I’m going to give you a choice, Mr. Corliss.
I can hand this to you now.
Or I can hold it three more weeks, the way she asked.”
I looked at the envelope for a long time.
“Hold it,” I said.
“She wanted six months.
I can give her three weeks.”
Dr. Sekou put it back in the drawer.
“That’s the first thing you’ve said that she’d have predicted wrong.”
The pressure came on Sunday.
It came the way pressure always does in my family — by casserole.
My mother arrived at 4 p.m. with a dish she hadn’t been asked to bring, and my sister Dana, and Dana’s husband, and the expression Frances Corliss wore when she had “something to discuss.”
Elise was upstairs.
Resting.
Gabriel had said the fifth month was the hardest, and it was, and she’d been sleeping in the afternoons, and I had told my mother, on the phone, that Elise was “under the weather.”
“Under the weather,” Frances said, in my kitchen, setting down the casserole.
“Ben.
I have something to show you.
I’d like you to see it before she comes down.”
Her phone.
Photographs.
Mrs. Dunphy’s, from across the street, taken with a zoom lens I did not know Mrs. Dunphy owned.
A dark car at the curb.
1:08 a.m.
A tall man in a jacket, walking up my front path, carrying a case.
Another night.
Another.
Six photographs.
“Six times,” my mother said.
“That I know of.
Ben.
I didn’t want to be right.
But a man goes into your house every night while you’re asleep and comes out forty minutes later, and your wife has ‘a specialist’ she won’t name, and — ”
“Mom.”
“I’m your mother.
I notice things.
I noticed with your father, God rest him, and I said nothing for three years, and I promised myself I’d never — ”
“Mom, stop.”
“Ben, she’s hiding a MAN — ”
“Frances.”
Dana.
My sister.
Quiet, usually.
She was looking at the photographs on the phone.
She was looking at the case in the man’s hand.
“That’s an infusion kit.”
Silence.
“I’m a dental hygienist, Mom.
I’ve seen those cases.
That’s not — that’s a medical case.
That’s a nurse.”
My mother looked at the photograph.
“That’s — no.
That’s a — ”
“Ben?” Dana said.
I had promised Elise three weeks.
I had promised her six normal months.
I looked at my mother — seventy-one, holding a phone with six photographs she’d been building for a season, certain she was saving her son from the thing that had happened to her — and I understood that my wife had been right about all of us, and that the only person in this family who had ever looked at that case and known what it was had been the eight-year-old with the pink backpack.
“Mom.
Put the phone down.
Elise is going to come downstairs.
And when she does, you’re going to sit at that table, and you’re not going to say the word ‘man’ again.
Because I know who he is.
And on Thursday, three weeks from now, so will you.”
“Ben — ”
“Three weeks.
You owe her that.
You’ve owed her that for nine years.”
My mother put the phone down.
She did not, in the end, get three weeks.
Because at 6:40 that evening, while Frances was still at my table pretending to eat, Gabriel Ortiz’s car pulled up to the curb three hours early, and my wife came down the stairs already in her coat, and said, “Ben.
Dr. Sekou called.
The bloodwork’s back early.
She wants us tonight.”
