Chapter 11
The foundation building was on Madison. The hospital was on Sixty-Eighth and York. For days, I'd been telling myself the foundation was the lesser evil, and I'd finally believed it enough to put on a tie.
I'd never been a runner.
That had been Cade. He hadn't seen his own father in two years when the man died, and he had grieved by going further from the family, not closer. I hadn't understood then what Cade had been doing. He'd been triaging, and he'd been right about that, even when no one had given him credit for it.
Now I was at the foundation, in a tie, with nothing on the calendar that strictly required me, because I couldn't bring myself to walk into the room my father was in.
I was pulling a Cade.
I was going to have to apologize to him. Eventually. This was a backbreaking task to set for myself when I hadn't yet figured out how to apologize to my father. How to accept the reality that I was losing him.
The conference room was on the eleventh floor.
The chairs were ergonomic. There were bottles of water and a basket of granola bars on the conference table. Board members weren't always good at remembering to eat, and a granola bar at the right moment had prevented two negotiations from going sideways.
I sat at the head of the table.
Mark Olin was running the afternoon agenda.
Mark was the medical director, conscientious, ahead of his own timeline.
He had a clean haircut and wore a navy polo with CROSS FOUNDATION on the chest. He had been at the foundation longer than I had — he had come over from St. Vincent's the year my father had funded the cardiac arm.
He was reading the case-review summary off a bound packet.
"The committee's recommendations on the reschedules came back in writing.
Wong and Phelps are going forward in the fall window per the original schedule.
Aldarmaki was moved from fall to early winter — that one was at the family's request. Vela, Bonnie.
Pediatric. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with syncope.
Septal myectomy. Moved from late autumn to the spring window. "
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Mark had already moved on.
She didn't tell me.
I'd been at her stoop, at her counter, in an alley with my hand on the back of her neck, and her daughter's name had been right there. She hadn't put it on the table.
Mark was on the next case.
The meeting ran another forty minutes. I made decisions about a fundraiser, a comms calendar, and a foundation event that was now going to be moved because my mother couldn't be expected to host an event in this season, this year.
Mark wrote everything down. He didn't look at me when he wrote. Mark was good at his job.
The meeting ended, and I stayed in my chair.
The room emptied. Two of the board members thanked me on their way out. One of them asked after my father, and I gave him the answer I now give everyone — he is comfortable, my mother is with him — and he nodded and went out.
Then I was alone.
I stared at the line on the agenda where Mark had read Bonnie's case.
Pride. That was the lazy answer. Sabrina was proud and pragmatic. She didn’t want to use me. That was the noble answer. She would die on the hill of not having been a woman who worked an angle for a daughter she hadn't known she would meet me through.
Maybe she hadn't told me because she hadn't trusted me to handle it.
I put both hands on the table.
I stood up, and came out of the conference room. Mark walked me to the elevator. He said something about the next quarter that I nodded at without hearing. The elevator went down. The lobby was quiet.
My car was in the executive row.
I had my keys in my hand when the phone rang, and I looked at the screen.
Mom.
I answered. "Mom."
"Oh, Beau."
The two words landed at the back of my neck and stayed there.
She was breathing on the phone. There were words in it, but the words weren't arriving in order.
Fragments. "Not breathing. Seizure. They tried.
Cade. Theo. Your dad. My boy, my boy, my boy.
" The third my boy was the version she had used when I was small, the same one she had brought to the hospital that first night in the cardigan and the cup of tea.
I leaned both hands on the hood of the car.
The metal under my palms was cold.
My father was the hand on the back of my head when my hamster died. He was the man teaching me to tie a tie in his own bathroom mirror, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled and the smell of his aftershave in the steam.
He was the one at the rail at Sebring with his hand on Theo's shoulder, yelling something at the track that the engines ate before any of us could hear it.
The man at the door of my dorm in the middle of the night with a sandwich in a wax-paper bag because he had decided, on his own initiative, that I wasn't eating enough.
I knew he was gone.
Mom was still on the phone. “Beau, baby, can you come? Beau, please come.”
I said yes, that I was on my way, and that I would be there.
I ended the call, stood with my forehead on the roof of the car, and drove.
I didn't remember unlocking the car or turning the key. The garage came up around me, then fell behind me, and the avenue slid under the car while I drove the route to the hospital with my hands on the wheel. But the rest of me elsewhere.
I tried to remember the last time I'd seen him.
The last visit. Mom had been in the chair. Theo had been on the couch by the window with his phone. Suzanne hadn't been there. Cade had been there for the first hour and had left for a meeting, and I'd stayed for what — half an hour after that? An hour?
I tried to call up the last thing I'd said to him.
I'll see you tomorrow, Dad. That came up first. I'd said it most days.
Get some sleep, old man. This came up next. I'd said that often.
Love you, Dad. That came up third. I'd said it more in the last month than in any year of my life, and the words were too easy now. They came up too fast, and I couldn't tell which of the three had actually left my mouth and which my head had handed me because I'd asked for one.
The car had a steering wheel, a windshield, a brake, and a gas pedal, and I had all four going at once.
The hospital hadn't been a graveyard before. It was a graveyard now.
I went down the corridor.
I'd been walking fine. At the door of his room, fine ended. My knees gave in, but I caught the doorframe with one hand, and I made it through.
He was in the bed.
Mom was in the chair beside the bed with his hand in both of hers. She was crying without sound, shoulders shaking, back bent over his hand as she kissed the back of it in a slow, regular rhythm.
Cade was at the foot of the bed, Suzanne pressed against him, her face tucked into his neck. One arm held her shoulders close while the other gripped the bed rail, his eyes closed.
Theo was on a chair near the door with his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, back bent. The hands in his hair were moving slow, very slow.
I made it to Mom's chair and looked at my father.
He was long under the blanket. His chest didn't rise. His mouth was open in a shape it had never made, and his fingertips, where they showed past Mom's grip, were the wrong color.
I hadn't, until that minute, understood that a body was a place a person lived.
I broke.
My knees went down beside Mom's chair, and the rest of me came with them — chest collapsing, hands on the floor, breath gone.
I tried to take a breath. None of it would come in.
A hand landed on my shoulder.
Cade had crossed from the foot of the bed and was on his own knees on the floor in front of me. His hands were on my shoulders. His face was a foot from mine.
"Beau, look at me."
I looked at him.
His eyes were red. He had been crying for hours. He was holding my shoulders steady, and the steady was costing him.
"Breathe in."
I tried and got a quarter of a breath.
"Out. Slow."
My breath went out.
"Again. In."
Another quarter. Then a half. Then a longer one. He counted me through three breaths. He counted me through five. My breaths got longer. The shaking under my ribs went down a notch.
Cade took his hands off my shoulders.
He didn't stand. He stayed on the floor with me. His eyes didn't leave my face.
"Cade, I can't… I can't be here. Cade — I have to go."
He didn't flinch. "Beau. Please."
I shook my head. I had wanted to be the kind of man who stayed in the room. But I stood and headed toward the door.
Mom's voice came down from the chair.
"Beau, where are you going?"
I stopped and tried to make a word, but none of them came. My mouth was open, but there was nothing in it. Then I made my way out.
Suzanne put her hand on the rail of the bed.
"Let him go, Vivvie. He'll come back."
I heard her saying while I left.
I got to the car and drove, while my heart was crashing inside me.
The streets were empty. The city was winding down — yellow lights at the long avenues, no traffic, the windshield wet. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
I couldn't go to my apartment, Mom's house, Cade's, or Theo's hotel.
I drove down Madison, across town, up the West Side, and back down it. I didn't know where I was going, how long I drove for until I was three blocks away. Then I knew.
I was going to her bar.
I didn't know what I expected to find. I knew when she got off. I'd asked her twice in the past two weeks when her shifts ended, and she'd told me both times. The bar would be closed for the night. She would come out the back door because that was the door she used.
I parked across the street and sat in the car.
I hadn't thought about what I was going to say to her.
Slowly I got out and crossed the street. I leaned against the brick wall opposite the door of Half Past, and the brick felt cold through the back of my coat.
I waited.
After some time, the door opened.
She stepped out — jacket, shoulders up, keys in her hand, the clip still in her hair. The bare bulb lit the side of her face for a second, and then she was past it in the alley and saw me.
She stopped.
I pushed off the wall and walked across the alley to her. I stopped a foot in front of her.
I raised both hands and cupped her face. My thumbs went to the high points of her cheekbones. Her face was cold from the bar door. The skin under my thumbs was warm.
She was looking at me, surprised.
I kissed her.
My mouth pressed on hers and held there for a count I didn't measure, and she didn't pull back, and I didn't pull back. After a few seconds, I stopped kissing her and put my forehead on hers and stayed there.
I closed my eyes.
"Fine."
She made a small sound — half breath, half question.
"Fine what?"
"I'll do it. I agree to your terms."
I didn't let go of her face.
"No strings attached."
She didn't answer. Her eyes widened.
For a beat, I couldn't read her, and then her hands came up fast and closed around my wrists where my hands were on her face.
She kissed me back.
Her mouth opened under mine. Her fingers pressed into my wrists. I dropped one of my hands from her face to the back of her neck and pulled her closer. She let me. Her tongue was on my bottom lip, my hand was in her hair, the brick wall was four feet away, and my breath went deeper.
I broke for air. "Your place or mine?"
She let out a single short breath — half a laugh. "Neither."
I lifted my forehead off hers.
She shook her head. "Bonnie. I have to go home to her. I can't — " She breathed in. " — tonight."
I nodded.
"Tomorrow?" Her voice came up at the end, softer than the voice she had been using on me.
"Yeah."
I kissed her lips, slower. I kissed her forehead. I kissed her neck. I pulled her against me and put my chin on the top of her head and held her there.
I lowered my mouth to her hair.
"I'll be seeing you."