21 - THE TOUR #2
I'd only known Pamela Harrington a short time.
From the prenatal diagnosis to her death, eighteen months of appointments and difficult conversations and watching a woman face two impossible things at once.
Her daughter's heart condition. Her own mortality.
She had held my hand once, after a particularly brutal echo result.
"She was." His eyes stayed on Jessica, who was narrating her own voyage now, making engine sounds.
"She pushed me to build places like this.
Said hospitals shouldn't feel like punishment.
Said kids deserved magic, even when things were hard.
" A pause. "Especially when things were hard.
So I try to give Jess that. Whatever else I can't give her. "
He could be maddening. Arrogant, stubborn, completely certain he was right about things he was sometimes wrong about.
But standing here watching his face as he watched his daughter pretend to fly in a spaceship built partly in his late wife's memory, there was none of that.
There was just love. Raw and fierce and slightly helpless.
His phone rang.
He glanced at the screen, then at me. "I have to take this. Two minutes. You've got her?"
He was already stepping away.
Just when he seemed human, he was infuriating. As always.
Jessica made two more passes through her imaginary galaxy before she slowed.
She slid out of the tube on her own and I lifted her down. She was lighter than I remembered, or maybe I always forgot between visits how small she still was inside all that big personality. She looked around the quiet room, then at me.
She raised her arms. "Uppie."
I picked her up.
She settled against me immediately, the way tired children do.
Completely, trustingly, her head finding the curve of my neck like it belonged there.
I stood holding her, one hand on her small back, feeling her ribcage rise and fall, the repaired heart working quietly beneath my palm.
The heart I had been part of maintaining.
The heart that had been broken before she was even born and was whole now, or as whole as we could make it.
"Can you tell me a story, Dr. Lacey?"
"What kind of story?"
She considered this with great seriousness, eyes half-closed. "The fox and the bunny."
So I told her about the fox and the bunny. Then the mouse and the lion, because she asked for it before the first one was finished. Her weight grew heavier as she drifted toward the edge of sleep but kept pulling herself back, like children do when they don't want the story to stop.
I didn't want it to stop either.
I stood in the quiet of the imaging suite, holding a child who was not mine, telling her stories in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, and I let myself enjoy it without managing it from the safe distance I usually kept.
There was no safe distance with Jessica.
This small warm person who trusted me with her complete and boneless self.
Then Jessica lifted her head, suddenly wide awake. She looked like she had a big thought.
She put both small hands on my cheeks, framing my face the way she had with the drawing. Deliberately, making absolutely sure she had my full attention before she said the important thing.
Her eyes were very serious.
"Dr. Lacey. Are you a mommy?"
The question landed somewhere I kept padded but could never quite armor enough.
"No, sweetheart." My voice came out slightly unsteady. "I'm not a mommy. But I get to take care of lots of kids like you, so I think I'm pretty lucky."
She considered this with the focused patience of a child who senses something is being left out of the answer.
"But you're so good at stories," she said finally.
"Thank you," I said, not having the courage to say more.
"And you're really nice." She patted my cheek, once, deliberate. "And you fixed my heart." Another pat. "So you should definitely be a mommy."
"That's one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me," I told her. I felt my heart being squeezed almost painfully.
She wasn't finished. She cupped my face more firmly in her small hands, thumbs on my cheekbones, and looked at me with the gravity of someone issuing a decree.
"If you're not a mommy yet," she said, "you could be MY mommy."
The words went through me as light goes through glass.
I couldn't answer right away. I didn't trust myself to speak. She was warm and heavy against me, her head tucked back into my neck, the repaired heart I kept safe beating quiet and steady under my palm.
I thought of the clinic waiting room and its terrible magazines.
The grain of the kitchen table under my hands.
Brad's voice, flat and ungentle. It's you, Lacey.
You're infertile. I thought of the whole future I had built and furnished in my head across years of wanting it, the small hands, the bedtime stories read until the words ran together, the crayon drawings going up on a refrigerator door, and the way every piece of it had dissolved in a single sentence on an ordinary afternoon, vanished to where things go when they were never going to exist.
I fixed children's hearts because my love had to go somewhere, and I had made it go here, into this wing, into the charm on my stethoscope and the drawings above my desk and the small warm people who raised their arms and trusted me to hold them.
I held very still. If I moved, if I spoke too soon, the pressure against the back of my eyes was going to come loose, and I had never once let it come loose in front of a patient, and I was not going to start with this one.
So I breathed. I waited until I was sure of my own voice. But it still hitched.
"Oh, Jess." It came out barely above a murmur. "If I ever had a little girl of my own, I would want her to be exactly like you."
She pulled back, unsatisfied, and patted my cheek, businesslike.
"No, really, Dr. Lacey. Ask Daddy. You're really pretty. And Daddy likes pretty."
A sound escaped me. Half a laugh, half a thing with no name, and letting even that much out was a relief.
"Ask Daddy what, Tiger?"
Derek's voice. From the doorway.
I didn't know how long he'd been standing there. Long enough.
He crossed the room and scooped Jessica from me in one easy motion, settling her against his chest, where she went at once, arms around his neck, already drooping again.
He was smiling, the easy warm one he kept for her.
But his eyes, when they found mine over the top of her head, weren't doing the easy thing at all.
Whatever else was underneath that went by too fast, and then he was only Derek again, holding his kid.
"Dr. Lacey isn't a mommy yet," Jessica informed him, her voice blurring at the edges with exhaustion. "Can she be my mommy? She tells really good stories. And she's really pretty. And she fixed my heart."
Derek's throat worked. When the answer came it was rougher than his usual voice, and slower, like he had to find each word and turn it over before he let it out.
"It's not that simple, Tiger." He rubbed her back, slow circles, the automatic gesture of a man who'd been doing it for four years. "But she's a wonderful doctor, and you get to see her every month, and not every kid gets that. That's a pretty special thing all on its own."
"Okay," Jessica said.
Then she yawned, full-body, complete, and shivered once.
Derek's hand was at her forehead before she'd finished, checking, his whole attention contracting to her. "You okay, baby?"
"Tired, Daddy." She pressed her face into his shoulder. "And cold."
He pulled her closer, tucking her in, one hand spreading warm across her small back. "I've got you." He glanced at me over her head, and his voice dropped. "Bonds. Can we cut it short?"
"Of course. She was wonderful the whole way through."
Jessica reached out one hand toward me, fingers opening, and I took it and held it for a moment. Her grip was already loose with sleep.
"Thank you for the tour, Dr. Lacey," she murmured. "It's the best place."
"You can visit anytime," I said. "The spaceship will be waiting."
She smiled without opening her eyes.
We walked back through the wing in the quiet that falls around a sleeping child.
Both of us moving carefully, the bright murals passing, the sounds of the hospital muffled and distant.
Derek had her fully against his chest, her head on his shoulder.
His hand never stopped its slow circles on her back.
In the lobby he shifted her to one arm and extended his free hand to me.
I shook it. His grip was warm and firm, and he held it a beat past where a handshake ends, then seemed to notice, and let go. He'd done it before, at the gala. I'd never quite known what to do with it.
"Thanks for today, Bonds." His voice was low, careful of the sleeping child between us in the only way that mattered. "It was enlightening."
"She makes everything better," I said. "Bring her back whenever."
He studied me for a moment. Then he nodded, adjusted Jessica's weight, and turned toward the doors.
I watched them go.
His stride slowed to protect her sleep. The deliberate pace of a man carrying something irreplaceable.
The automatic doors slid open and the afternoon swallowed them.
The tall man and the small girl, her ponytail loose against his shoulder, his hand still moving in those slow circles on her back even as they walked away, even outside in the light, even when she couldn't feel it anymore.
The doors closed.
I stood alone in the lobby with my hand in my coat pocket, fingers finding the folded crayon drawing.
My throat was very tight.
I stood there until I was sure my face would hold, and then I walked back to my office and pinned the drawing in the middle, above my desk, in the most important spot.
And I sat for a long time looking at it.
Fixing hearts and flying.