16. Beau
Bonnie was being released today.
I was at the door of the room when Dr. Reyes finished his last set of notes. Sabrina was standing at the foot of the bed. Bonnie was sitting up, in jeans and a sweater Mrs. Park had brought, with Walter the octopus on her lap.
Dr. Reyes turned to me and Sabrina.
"Tight monitoring plan," he said. "No school for the rest of the week. Limited stairs. No PE. Cardiac follow-up at the clinic next week. If there’s any episode, you call me first and the ER second. Yes?"
"Yes," Sabrina answered.
"I know, Mom," Bonnie said.
Dr. Reyes smiled at her. "I know you know, Bonnie. Be good."
He left.
Bonnie put her water bottle down. She slid off the bed, came across the room, wrapped both arms around my waist, and pressed her cheek to my chest.
I hadn't been ready for any of it.
I put one hand on the back of her head and held her there. "Hi, Bonnie."
"You forgot the book," she said.
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
"With notes."
I winced. "What kind of notes?"
"Notes. In the margins. Underlines. The parts you found interesting. I want to know what you think. You read it before you gave it to me, did you not?"
I hadn't. I had skimmed three pages in the bookstore on Baker. I hadn't, in fact, read it.
"I'll read it tonight."
"Mmm…"
"And bring it tomorrow with notes."
"Mmm…"
Sabrina was at the counter at the nurse's station, signing paperwork. It was thick. She was working through it the way she worked through the bar — efficient, no flourish — and I watched her sign.
She had small handwriting. Her signature was a single capital S and a tail. She used a pen that had been chained to the counter and handed the clipboard back to the nurse. The nurse said something, and Sabrina nodded.
She came back to me.
We walked toward the elevator. Bonnie was a step ahead, holding Walter, walking carefully — Dr. Reyes had said limited stairs, but he hadn't had to say walk carefully. Halfway down the corridor, Sabrina caught my sleeve.
She pulled me to the side.
We were beside a window that looked at a parking structure. The corridor was empty enough that it was just us for a while.
"Beau."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for being here, for being here all weekend. I — "
"You don't have to."
"Let me… For being here when you have your own thing to deal with. I'm not going to pretend I don't know what your weekend looked like."
I shook my head. "Sabrina."
"I'm thanking you, Beau. Take it."
I took it. I leaned down and kissed her.
Then straightened. "I'll come by after work."
"That would be nice." She smiled.
"I'll bring something for dinner."
"That’s even better."
"And the book."
"And the notes," she said. "You heard her."
"I heard her." I chuckled.
We caught up to Bonnie at the elevator.
Bonnie turned to me. She went up on her toes and gave me a hug. "Bye, Beau."
"Bye, Bonnie. Tomorrow."
"With notes."
She and Sabrina got into the elevator. The doors closed.
I drove to the foundation.
The foundation building was on Madison. The lobby had a security desk, a planter, and a piece of art on the wall that my father had bought in the late nineteen-nineties. I had walked past the piece of art a thousand times in my life and had never asked my father if he had liked it.
The eleventh floor had Cross Foundation in chrome lettering on the wall opposite the elevator.
The intake coordinator was at her desk. Margaret.
I'd been told her name was Margaret about thirty seconds after I had become her boss, and the name had stuck because her face had been stuck.
Margaret had been at the foundation longer than I had, and she had been the woman fielding calls from desperate parents for the better part of a decade.
"Mr. Cross."
"Margaret."
"I have your messages on your desk. The Kessler call is on top."
"Thank you." I went past her.
My office had a window on Madison and a door that closed quietly.
The desk had on it: Margaret's stack of messages, my father's pen — the fountain pen, the one I had taken from the drawer of his desk at Mom's house and put on my desk at the foundation because I hadn't been able to leave it in the drawer — and Simon Kessler's folder.
I had taken the folder out of the car this morning and told myself the lie that I would open it before lunch.
I put the folder in the corner of the desk, turned to my computer, and logged in. I went to the database.
Ever since Mark Olin said her name in the conference room, I hadn't looked at her file.
I kept telling myself I didn't need to. I told myself it was the right thing to do — not to misuse my access, not to turn a personal connection into a database search, not to become the kind of man who looks up the file of the woman he loves.
I'd been lying.
I looked.
VELA, BONNIE. AGE 8.
The file gave me her birthday. The file listed her birthday, and it was approaching.
DIAGNOSIS: HYPERTROPHIC CARDIOMYOPATHY (OBSTRUCTIVE), SEPTAL.
CARDIOLOGIST: DR. ALEJANDRO REYES.
WAITLIST: 14 MONTHS. ORIGINAL SURGICAL WINDOW: AUTUMN. REVISED TO LATE AUTUMN. REVISED TO SPRING.
MEDICAL REVIEW COMMITTEE NOTES, MOST RECENT: ACUTE DETERIORATION; DOCUMENTED SYNCOPE EVENT; CARDIOLOGIST REQUESTS EMERGENCY ACCELERATION OF SCHEDULING. RECOMMENDATION PENDING REVIEW. NEXT COMMITTEE MEETING: THREE WEEKS.
I read it three times.
The file was the one Sabrina had carried in her purse, on her calendar, and in the back of her mind for months — the dates recopied in red marker on her fridge, the answer to the question she had asked the foundation — we are processing the request — and Dr. Reyes's three letters lined up in chronological order in the medical review committee inbox, the most recent of them dated last week.
I didn't need to be a doctor to know she didn't have three weeks. I had read Dr. Reyes's note. The note used the words acute, syncope, and emergency.
I pulled the surgical schedule, and it was on a shared calendar. The calendar had names in some slots and PENDING — REVIEW in others. The slot that mattered was the slot in nine days.
The slot was at Memorial for a septal myectomy — the exact procedure Bonnie needed, with the exact surgeon Dr. Reyes had recommended, on a date that would get her there in time for the operation.
I shut the screen and sat with the math.
There was a slot, and the foundation had it. I was the chairman of the foundation, and the medical review committee had been sitting on Dr. Reyes's letter. The committee would, when it met, vote to accelerate Bonnie.
I knew this because the committee hadn't, in the history of the foundation, declined a Dr. Reyes acceleration request that had documented syncope, and he didn't write syncope on a request unless he meant it.
I could call Aldridge tonight.
Aldridge was in charge of scheduling surgeries.
She’d worked at the foundation for eleven years.
She always answered my calls. I could call her at home and, using the firm voice of a chairman or the commanding voice of my father — or any of the authoritative voices I'd learned to use — tell her there’d been a paperwork mistake.
I could say the surgery slot had actually been promised to a patient whose cardiologist had flagged them for fainting.
Then I could ask her to fix the mistake before morning.
Aldridge would do it.
Aldridge would do it because she had already done two of these in the last year for board members’ grandchildren, and neither occasion had presented a problem.
I pushed back from the desk, stood up, and paced.
I paced between the door and the window in endless loops.
After a few minutes, I sat down. Pulled my phone out of my pocket and scrolled to Aldridge's contact.
The contact card had her cell number, her work number, her home number, and a personal email she had given me once at a foundation event when she had been three glasses of red into the evening.
The button to make the call was a green circle.
My thumb hovered over the button.
Make the call.
I put the phone down and gave myself one more day. Simon Kessler’s folder stayed closed. So did Margaret’s stack of messages.
By six, my computer was shut down and my coat was on. I left the building, stopped at the Thai place on her block for dinner, and headed to her apartment.
Bonnie was on the couch.
She was in pajamas — flannel, snowflakes, one size too big because Bonnie liked her pajamas one size too big — with Walter on her lap and Pickles on the back of the couch behind her head and the cephalopod book on the cushion next to her.
The cephalopod book had a piece of paper sticking out of it.
The piece of paper had been there to mark the chapter on octopuses, which was the chapter Bonnie was perpetually rereading.
She didn't get up. "Beau."
"Hi, Bonnie."
"You brought Thai food."
"I did."
"You didn't bring the book."
"Oh no, not again. I forgot the book."
She glared at me.
"I'll bring it tomorrow, I promise, with notes," I said. "I haven't had time to read it tonight."
"Mmm…"
"But I'll read it tonight."
"Mmm…"
She watched me put the bag of food down on the kitchen counter. Sabrina was at the counter, in jeans and one of my sweaters — a sweater I had left at her apartment and hadn't, in any of the intervening weekends, asked for back — and she was unboxing the soup containers without looking up at me.
The kitchen was warm.
After dinner — after Sabrina had made Bonnie eat soup and Bonnie had eaten the soup with the patience of a kid who was too tired to argue — Bonnie pulled out Saturn.
Saturn was half-glued cotton balls and half-cardboard, and the cotton ball that was supposed to be Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, had come unglued and was sitting in Bonnie's lap.
"Beau, you have to glue Titan back on."
"Why me?"
"Because I'm sick, and you aren't."
"Mmm…" I sat at the table.
Bonnie set Saturn in the center of the table. I picked up the glue and Titan. I looked at Bonnie.
"Where does Titan go?"
She pointed. "There."
I glued Titan there.
Pickles, who had been on the back of the couch for the last forty minutes pretending he didn't care about any of this, jumped down. He came around the side of the couch, climbed onto a chair, sat on it, and watched the gluing.
Bonnie was watching me. She had her chin in her hand. Her eyes were on the cotton balls. Then she remembered.
"Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Neptune."
I looked up at her. “Pluto?”
Bonnie gave me a look. “Pluto isn’t a planet, Beau.”
“Since when?”
“Since 2006,” she informed me.
“Says who?”
She straightened a little. “Says the International Astronomical Union, which was founded in 1919.”
I stared at her. “Smart. I hadn’t known the name of the International Astronomical Union.”
A smug smile spread across her face. “You’re welcome.”
Sabrina was at the counter, watching us.
I looked across the kitchen.
Her eyes were on Bonnie. They found me and didn't move. They stayed.
I held the look, and she held it back.
I went back to gluing.
Bonnie went to bed early because she was going to school in three days, and Sabrina had decided a routine was returning whether Bonnie liked it or not. Well, Bonnie lost the argument, and she went to bed.
Sabrina kissed her cheek, and I waved from the doorway. Bonnie made me come over and give her a hug, so I did. She fell asleep against my shoulder before I had fully sat down on the edge of her bed.
I tucked her in and left the room.
Sabrina was in the hall. She caught my hand and walked me down the hall and into her bedroom. Then she closed the door behind us.
She kissed me.
This kiss had a softer edge. It lasted longer. Her hand stayed on the side of my face for the first thirty seconds of it.
She broke the kiss, pulled my forehead to hers, and undid my shirt button by button.
She took her time.
She slid the shirt off my shoulders, put her hand on the center of my chest, and kept it there for a beat. She kissed the place under her hand.
I had to close my eyes.
My hands found the hem of her sweater. I lifted it over her head.
She was wearing nothing under it. Her skin was warm, and her hair fell against my hands. I held the back of her head, and I kissed her again.
We made it to the bed.
She lay down, and I followed. She put her hand on the side of my face. She kept her eyes open, and I kept mine locked into hers. Her hand moved to my face.
We took our time.
Afterwards, she lay on my chest.
Her hair was loose on my shoulder. Her hand was flat over my sternum.
Her breath was slow against my collarbone.
Pickles had, at some point in the night that I hadn't noticed, jumped onto the bed and curled up by my ankle, which was, I would learn later, an honor I hadn't yet earned and was on probation for.
"Beau," she murmured.
"Mmm…"
"I don't want you to leave tonight."
I'd been waiting to be asked. I'd been telling myself, since the night in the alley when she had said no strings attached, that I wasn't going to ask to stay.
I had told myself I was going to be a man who left when he was supposed to leave and didn't test the deal.
I had told myself this every time, left every time, and now she was asking.
I put my hand on the back of her head. "Okay."
"Bonnie wakes up early."
"I'll be gone."
"Beau."
"I'll be gone, Sabrina. I promise."
She didn't push.
She kissed the place over my sternum and fell asleep on my chest.
I didn't sleep for a long time.
I was thinking. I'd been telling myself I needed one more day, and I was getting the day.
The day wasn't going to change anything.
I knew, at some point in the dark, with Bonnie sleeping in the next room and Sabrina asleep on my chest, that I needed to decide.
I'd decided sometime between the corridor outside Bonnie's hospital room when Sabrina had pulled me aside and the kitchen counter when Sabrina had been watching me glue Titan back to Saturn.
I had decided.
I was going to call Aldridge.