Chapter Fifteen
Sterling
SIENNA EATS HER CEREAL with the spoon upside down. She’s been doing it for three days. Casey hasn’t corrected her once, which means either Casey doesn’t care about spoon mechanics or the spoon is a test I haven’t figured out yet, like most things about Sienna.
Casey gives Sienna her morning medications at the kitchen island. The medications come in a specific order. Casey explains each one to Sienna as she administers it, not in baby talk or in medical terms either, but somewhere in between that sounds like the truth told carefully.
“This one keeps your body from attacking the cells that make your blood,” Casey says, tipping a capsule out of the bottle, “And this one keeps the germs away while the first one is working.”
Sienna swallows the capsule with juice. She makes a face. She adjusts Bart’s position on the counter so he can watch. It pains me to see she’s such a pro at swallowing pills when she should have only had to have the occasional dose of baby pain reliever in her short life.
“Does Bart need medicine?” I ask. It’s the first thing I’ve said to her this morning, and I say it too carefully. I can hear the rehearsal in my voice. I closed the Prescott acquisition in thirty-two minutes but can’t figure out how to talk to a four-year-old.
Sienna looks at me. She has my eyes, which is a fact I’m still adjusting to every time I look into them. Her look is direct and appraising. She’s deciding whether to answer me.
“Bart doesn’t get sick. He’s a stuffed elephant.
” She says it with absolute authority, as though the immunity of stuffed elephants is established science, and I should already know this.
“You have to be alive to get germs, and Bart isn’t alive.
” She whispers the last word like she’s hiding the truth from Bart.
Casey turns away. I catch the corner of something on her face that might be a smile or might be sympathy, and I can’t tell which is worse.
They’ve been here for four days. I’ve learned that Sienna wakes up slowly, she likes her toast torn into pieces but not cut, Bart goes everywhere, and Casey’s morning routine is a military operation conducted with warmth.
I’ve learned that Casey doesn’t sit down until Sienna has eaten, taken her meds, and been assessed.
Casey checks her daughter’s color, her energy and the bruises on her arms in a visual exam so practiced it looks like ordinary mothering, but there’s nothing ordinary about it.
It’s a nurse reading a patient she loves.
I’ve learned almost nothing about how to be useful.
On the second morning, I make coffee the way Casey used to drink it, black, strong, and in whatever mug was closest. I set it on the kitchen island near her elbow while she’s administering Sienna’s medications.
She picks it up without looking at it, takes a sip, and puts it down.
She doesn’t thank me or acknowledge it, but three hours later, the mug is empty.
On the third morning, I make coffee again.
She uses the same mug in the same spot. Casey picks it up, takes a sip, and looks at me for the first time that day.
She doesn’t say thank you. She nods. It’s the most communication we’ve had that doesn’t involve Sienna’s medical schedule, and I take it as though I’ve been given praise I don’t deserve. I’m pathetic.
The phone in my office rings at ten with a call from Halloran. “The due-diligence package on the Kinard fund came in. The tax structure is a mess. You need to look at it before the call Thursday.”
“Send it.”
“I sent it an hour ago. You haven’t opened it. You haven’t opened anything in three days.” Halloran pauses. “What’s going on, Sterling?”
“Family situation, but I’ll look at Kinard tonight.”
He sounds faintly suspicious, like I’m being held hostage and forced to act. “You don’t have family situations. You have situations that you handle and then you have a scotch. What’s different?”
I tell him only that I have a daughter who’s sick and needs a transplant. He doesn’t ask for more, because Halloran respects boundaries, which is one of the reasons I trust him with four billion dollars. The call lasts two minutes.
During those two minutes I’m a person who runs a fund, understands tax structures, and has a chair that faces a window with a view of nothing personal.
It’s a relief. It’s also a performance, because the person who runs the fund is the same person who can’t talk to a four-year-old without sounding rehearsed.
My mother comes back on the third afternoon.
She doesn’t call first. She’s never called first, because calling first implies that access requires permission, and Gretchen Hollingsford has never considered her access to this house conditional.
She lives her when she chooses, though she prefers summers in Tuscany, fall in New York City, and spring in Paris.
She finds Sienna on the living room rug with a bowl of cereal beside her, working through a picture book about a bear who learns to count.
Sienna is correcting the bear’s math. The bear thinks four plus two is seven.
Sienna is indignant about this. She has explained to the bear, at length, that the answer is six, and the bear’s continued failure to grasp basic addition has become a personal affront.
I’m biting back a chuckle.
“Perhaps she should eat in the kitchen,” Gretchen says. She’s speaking to me, not to Casey, because speaking to me means speaking through the person she considers the authority in this house. “Children do better with structure. A dining area, a routine. It helps them feel secure.”
“She eats where she’s comfortable,” Casey says. She doesn’t look up from the book. She turns a page. The bear has moved on to subtraction, which Sienna also has opinions about.
“I only meant that a child should learn proper habits early. It’s important for—”
“She’s four. She had a transfusion this week.
She eats where she’s comfortable.” Casey says it with the same finality she used when she said don’t tell me about transplant teams on the phone, level, final, and with the authority of a woman who has been managing this child’s survival alone for four years and doesn’t need input from a woman who learned her granddaughter existed ten days ago.
Gretchen’s mouth closes. Casey has ended the discussion without raising her voice.
I sit in my own living room and watch my mother be told no by the woman I threw out of this house, and it sends a jolt of...
alarm through me. I don’t understand the reaction, but a thought flares and disappears.
It’s only the beginning of a question I can’t fully form, about who held the power in that room almost five years ago, and who decided what happened.
The memory arrives without permission of Casey in the passenger seat after that dinner, five months into our marriage, naming the things my mother had said. The word accessible. The suggestion that Casey might prefer the kitchen. The compliment about her dress that managed to contain three insults.
I told Casey my mother needed time to adjust. I told her to be patient. I used the word generous, which meant she should absorb this so I don’t have to choose.
Casey looked at me. She didn’t argue. She turned toward the window but took my hand, and that was worse than arguing, because arguing would have meant she thought I could change my mind.
Did she read me so accurately, or was she overreacting to my mother’s understandable shock at finding me married to someone not in our social circles?
I TRY TO HAVE A CONVERSATION with Sienna on day five.
It goes badly. I buy her books, the right ones, age-appropriate, the kind Casey reads to her that the room decorator filled the shelves with in her bedroom.
Sienna accepts them politely and stacks them on the nightstand without opening them.
I buy her a set of colored pencils. She gives them to Bart.
I offer to read to her before bed. “Mommy reads,” she says.
“I could read too,” I say.
“Mommy reads.” She says it with the finality of a child who has already rendered a verdict and sees no reason to relitigate.
It stings my pride, but I ask Casey whether I’m doing something wrong.
She’s folding Sienna’s laundry in the hallway outside Sienna’s room, moving through the pile with the efficiency of a woman who has folded small clothes thousands of times.
We have staff for that, but she does hers and Sienna’s laundry.
“You’re trying too hard.” She doesn’t stop folding. “You keep bringing her things. She doesn’t want things from you. She wants to know if you’re safe.”
The word safe makes my chest ache. “Have there been men in her life she didn’t consider safe?” I’m too hostile with the question, but I have no idea what influences she’s brought into Sienna’s life.
Casey’s lips compress, and she glares at me. “No, there haven’t. You’re the man she knows as her father but has no relationship with him, so that’s scary. How is she supposed to feel secure when she doesn’t know if you’ll disappear tomorrow?”
“I’m not the one who disappears.”
She tightens her hands on a pair of socks but responds with aloofness that’s probably feigned. “I did what you told me to do.” She resumes folding like I’m not there.
Realizing this is going nowhere, I de-escalate and refocus. “How does she decide if I’m safe?”
“She watches. She’s been watching you for five days. She’ll let you know when she’s done.”
“What if she decides I’m not safe?”
Casey folds a pair of pajama pants into a perfect rectangle. “Then you try differently, or you give up.”
On the afternoon of day five, Gretchen notices my forearm. I’ve been rolling my sleeves because Casey keeps the rooms warm for Sienna, and the scar from the rollover is visible below my elbow.
“What happened there?” she asks, nodding at the scar.
“Car accident. Years ago.” I’m sure I told her about it at the time, but she was in Tuscany, and it was long ago.