Husbands & Lovers

Prologue

June 2019

Mystic, Connecticut

I kissed Sam goodbye on a Saturday morning toward the end of June, and the call that changed my life came the following Friday afternoon.

Actually, the call came in twice. I’d stepped away from my desk to do some gardening. I remember the tomatoes were growing like crazy that summer, the roses exploding on their bushes. Everything so abundant. Sometimes, when I’m stuck on an idea, I find it helps to walk away for a bit and do something else, something with your hands, something useful, and that knot in your mind will loosen and unwind into the bread dough or the soapsuds or the stacks of folded clothes.

Or the soft, rich loam of a vegetable bed.

It still fills me with terror, to look at that patch of earth and remember how I knelt there, staking the rampant new vines, humming to myself while a new pattern took shape in my head—atrailing creeper in a pristine shade of spring green, not too dark or too light, the color of promise, delicate shoots and leaves curling from the parent vine.

At a few minutes to three, I stood up, dusted my jeans, shucked off my gloves, and went into the house for a glass of water and my sketch pad.

I remember my phone lay on the kitchen counter, because I hadn’t carried it outdoors with me. You know how it is. I meant to step out for a few minutes to pull some weeds, maybe water the tomatoes, breathe some fresh air, but one thing led to another, and it was a beautiful day, eighty degrees and not as humid as it gets later in the summer. A breeze came in from the Mystic River, tinged with brine. Tourists would be swarming the drawbridge for ice cream. Over at the aquarium, kids would be screaming with joy as the belugas hurtled past on the other side of the plexiglass. Anyway, my phone sat alone on the counter, so I picked it up to check for messages and startling news alerts, maybe a little light scrolling, and instead I saw that I’d missed two calls from Camp Winnipesaukee.

You know that feeling. Every parent knows that feeling.

Probably nothing, you think, probably just some missed paperwork or an impulsive, inappropriate exclamation. Maybe a fistfight, God forbid. Kids could get scrappy at that age.

But your body’s not so logical, is it? Your body’s evolved for catastrophe. Your body leaps straight to the worst scenario. Your stomach turns sick, your trembling hand picks up the phone. Your heart cracks against your breastbone.

You swipe the number to call back.

You say, in your voice of fake buoyance, Hi! This is Mallory Dunne. Sam’s mom? You were trying to reach me.

And you hear the tiny silence, the fraction of a sigh as the person on the other end gathers courage for the task before her.

Then the dreaded words:

Mrs. Dunne, I’m afraid I have some difficult news.

I think I must have driven the entire three hours to New Hampshire in a state of shock. Now, don’t panic, I told myself, over and over. This is not really happening. This is just a movie you’re watching, a script you’re acting out. Kind of like the metaverse! Whatever that was.

Not real, anyway.

Not your real son, the love of your life.

I remember how I rinsed out my coffee cup and put it in the dishwasher before I left. I mean, you can’t just leave a cup of coffee on the kitchen counter when you lark off to New Hampshire for God knows how long! I swiped on a little lipstick, even though my hand shook so badly I looked like one of those Instagram people who color over the edges of their lips to make them look bigger. I started to throw a few things in an overnight bag and then thought, What if he dies and I’m not there in time to say goodbye?

I dropped the overnight bag and ran out the door to the car. I made it all the way to Springfield before I realized I wasn’t wearing any shoes, so I had to pull over at a gas station and buy flip-flops. And gas. And three Kind bars and a bottle of water, because I was about to pass out.

He’s not going to die, I told myself. A perfectly healthy boy doesn’t die from eating a bad mushroom.

Unless it’s too late.

Unless said boy ate said mushroom on a dare the day before and didn’t mention this fact because he didn’t want his friends to get in trouble, so he spent the night and the morning in the infirmary with so-called stomach trouble because the nurse had no idea she was dealing with a case of mushroom poisoning.

Unless the damage was already done.

Unless they were keeping him alive only so I could say goodbye and give permission for organ donation.

Could you donate a kid’s organs if he’d ingested a poisonous mushroom?

A Range Rover zoomed past, New York plates. I looked at the speedometer and saw I was going only sixty-four, like it was no hurry, no emergency, don’t want to get a speeding ticket or anything.

I pressed the accelerator.

He’s not going to die, I said aloud.

My shining, beautiful boy.

Who loved to play soccer in the fall and baseball in the spring.

Whose favorite food was s’mores.

Who went boogie-boarding last week with his cousins at his aunt’s house on the Cape and pretended to get attacked by a shark. (Not funny, I told him, after I fished him out of the water.)

Who filled an old jam jar with fireflies the night before he left for camp and told me he figured the lights came from all your ancestors in heaven, keeping watch over you.

I pounded the steering wheel. So where were all the fucking fireflies yesterday?

Just as I reached White River Junction and turned off the interstate, it started to rain. A couple of fat drops, a couple more, and the next thing you know—monsoon. I turned on the windshield wipers. Three seconds later, I turned them on high. Wildly they pumped across the glass and still I couldn’t see a thing. Sheets cascading before me. Like trying to look through a waterfall.

What happened next is a true story.

I’m tearing down this road through the New Hampshire woods toward the hospital, right? Every second counts. But I can’t see ten feet in front of me. So I’m straining my eyes, not even blinking, and this dark shape flashes into view and whoomph! Smacks into the windshield and the jaws of the wipers.

Probably I scream, I don’t know.

Just a few inches long, this poor creature, this bird. Whisking back and forth, back and forth, feathers everywhere, and I’m crying now, screaming and crying, begging God to free the bird because I can’t pull over, I need to reach my son before he dies.

But the poor thing remains stuck in the wipers, smearing blood across my windshield that the rain washes away. I can’t even tell what kind of bird it is. I just keep on driving, and praying, and crying.

The rain was thinning out as I swerved into the parking lot of the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where they’d airlifted Sam a little after noon today.

(Later, when I saw that line item on the explanation of benefits notice from Blue Cross, I would get up to pour myself a glass of bourbon.)

But at this point, I wasn’t thinking about how much any of this would cost. Save my son, that was all I cared about. I found a miraculous space near the emergency room and slammed the brakes and got out. A man stood nearby smoking a cigarette. He stared at the bird on the windshield of my old Volvo station wagon, handed down from my sister.

“Is it dead?” I demanded.

He looked at me. I still have the image of him in my head—this young, smart, hardscrabble kid in green scrubs. I remember thinking he might have been a resident or a medical student, by the look of him—a kid who got in the hard way, no fancy private schools, no tutors or pushy parents. Job after school bagging groceries to save up money. He just wanted to be a doctor.

“That’s an owl,” he said. “A baby owl.”

“Is it dead? Just tell me, is it dead?”

“Of course it’s dead,” he said.

At the ER reception, I fumbled out some explanation about summer camp and mushrooms to the nurse on duty. He was used to hysterical parents and interrupted me to ask, in a voice that was neither kind nor unkind, for the patient’s name.

I took a deep breath. “Sam Dunne.”

“Date of birth?”

“May tenth, oh-nine.”

“Relationship to patient?”

“I’m his mother, for God’s sake!”

He tapped away on his computer keyboard, staring at the screen. “Name?”

“My name?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I stared at the part in his hair. Light brown waves. Pink scalp.

The nurse looked up. “Ma’am? Your name?”

Starts with an M, I thought. You can do this.

He waved his hand slowly in front of my face. “Ma’am? Do you need to sit down?”

“Mallory!” I sagged in relief. “Mallory Dunne.”

The nurse turned back to his computer and resumed the tapping. “I’ll need your ID and insurance card, please, Mrs. Dunne.”

“My what?”

“ID and insurance, please.”

I gripped the edge of the counter and leaned over. “My son is dying and you want to see my identification?”

“Mrs. Dunne, I need to ask you to calm down—”

“Calm down? I just drove three hours to get here! I don’t even know if he’s alive! He’s ten years old! He’s surrounded by strangers! He needs his mom!”

“Mrs. Dunne—”

“I want—to see—my son!”

The nurse closed his eyes, filled his lungs with patience, and said, in a nice slow kindergarten voice, “I understand. And I’m still going to have to ask for identification. For security reasons. If Sam’s father—”

“Sam’s father,” I said, “is not in the picture.”

“Irregardless—”

“That’s not a word, damn it!”

The nurse picked up the phone. “I’m going to call security now.”

“Call security? Are you kidding me? My son is in there! I need to see my son and you’re going to call security?”

“Mrs. Dunne, you need to calm down—”

I pointed my finger at his chest. “Don’t ever tell a woman to calm down! Especially a mother whose child is in the emergency room! And some man is trying to keep her from seeing him! And I am not a missus, by the way!”

The nurse rose from his chair, telephone in one hand. “And I’m telling you, Ms. Dunne, you need to start practicing calm right now. For your son’s sake. Because you’re going to need it.”

Half an hour later, my sister arrived at the waiting room they set aside for hysterical parents. I jumped from the chair.

“Paige? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m the emergency contact, remember? I got here as fast as I could. Oh, Mallory.” She stepped forward and pulled me into her arms. She smelled of gardenia soap and responsibility. “You’re such a screwup, honey. Only you could end up in hospital jail.”

“Have you seen him? Is he okay?”

“I talked to the doctor. He’s stable. Critical but stable—”

“Critical? What does that mean?”

Paige pulled back and held me by the shoulders. “Let’s go see the doctor together, okay?”

Dr. Stephens was a slight, intense, blond-ponytail woman of the type who runs eight miles at dawn before she goes to work. She looked up from her clipboard and delivered a searing gaze as I approached with Paige.

“Mrs. Dunne,” she said.

I opened my mouth to correct her, then slammed it shut.

“Doctor?” I said meekly. “I’m Sam’s mother.”

“Yes. I’m very sorry about what’s happened. We treat a certain number of mushroom cases each year, but it’s rarely so serious as this.”

“How serious?”

“The next forty-eight hours will be critical. Your son has ingested a basidiomycete fungus known as Amanita phalloides—”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Again, her eyes impaled me. “A death cap mushroom.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“I thought you were already informed.”

“They said mushroom. Not fucking death cap.”

You could almost hear her bristles arranging themselves. Her eyes weren’t clear blue but opaque, like a cloudy sky at dawn, and I couldn’t tell if she objected to my attitude or my language or both.

Paige gripped my elbow. “Excuse her, Doctor. It slips out when she’s emotional.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Stephens. “The death cap contains two primary types of toxins—amatoxin and phallotoxin. In the initial period, which begins several hours after ingestion, the patient will experience the common symptoms of gastrointestinal distress—vomiting, diarrhea. So in these early stages, unless we know the patient consumed a mushroom, it’s easily dismissed or misdiagnosed as a norovirus.”

“Stomach flu,” Paige said knowledgeably.

“Exactly. Especially in the case of children, and especially when they’re reluctant to tell adults what they’ve been up to.” Dr. Stephens clicked the end of her ballpoint pen. “However, during this time, the toxins have already begun to attack the patient’s organs—”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Oh, shit.”

“—principally the liver and kidneys, in the worst cases leading to organ failure and death.”

I was acting in a movie, I reminded myself. This wasn’t really happening.

“But you can treat it, right? This is modern medicine. You can give him something.”

She looked at her clipboard. “The immediate concern is dehydration. He’s been on an IV drip, replenishing fluids, electrolytes. There are a couple of different antibiotics that have shown efficacy in counteracting the toxin—”

“And you’re giving him those?”

“Yes, along with intravenous silibinin—that’s an extract of what’s commonly known as the milk thistle—which helps the liver fight the damage caused by both toxins.”

“What else?”

She shrugged. “We treat the symptoms. The rest is up to his body. How much he ingested, when exactly he ingested it.”

“Is he in pain?”

“He’s in a coma, Mrs. Dunne. That’s common, in these cases.”

“Can I see him?”

Her face softened. “Of course. Come with me.”

She started past us. I touched the elbow of her white lab coat to stop her.

“Dr. Stephens? It’s Ms. Dunne. Not Mrs.”

The doctor made a note on her clipboard. “And his father?”

This time it was Paige who spoke up. “His father’s not in the picture.”

Against the white pillow, Sam’s face was the color of a Dorito. I might have gasped.

“That’s the jaundice,” said the nurse.

I dropped into the chair next to the bed. Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t hold myself up any longer. “Shit,” I whispered.

“You can touch him. Talk to him. Let him know you’re here.”

Around him, the machines beeped and burped. Sam had always been big for his age, robust like his father. Radiant. Energy bursting from his skin. Too much, sometimes. So much that I would collapse in bed at night and cry because I was so exhausted, because there was nobody else to keep this ball of fire from hurtling into space, because Sam was all up to me.

The shrunken, yellowed body on the bed couldn’t be Sam. It wasn’t him. There was some mistake.

Then I looked at his face. A curl of damp gold hair on his forehead, the same color as his skin. I brushed it back. Behind me, Paige put her hand on my shoulder.

“Hey, buddy,” I croaked. “It’s Mom. Sorry it took me a while. Traffic.”

The monitors beeped back.

“Anyway, I made it. I’m here. We’ll get you all better in no time. And when you wake up, so help me—”

Paige snorted back a laugh.

“A mushroom, for God’s sake. A goddamn mushroom.”

“Mallory, don’t swear in front of the kid.”

“Sorry, buddy. Darn mushroom.”

The nurse finished checking all the monitors and turned to us. Back and forth, me and Paige. “So…you’re the parents?”

Paige snatched her hand from my shoulder. “Oh, Jesus, no. I’m her sister. She’s the mother.”

“Gotcha. Well, you’ve got one tough kid there, I’ll say that much.”

“You think so?” I said.

“For sure. Kinda cute under all that yellow, right? He looks like that singer.”

“Oh?” Paige said innocently. “Which singer?”

“You know. Sits on a stool and plays his guitar? That new song about the birds flying south, not looking back.” She hummed a few bars. “You know who I mean. He was on the cover of People a couple weeks ago. Dead ringer, this kid.”

I turned back to Sam and sandwiched his limp hand between mine. I was so dizzy, I thought I might throw up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard that one.”

Later, when I looked back on that first week in the hospital, I wouldn’t be able to remember much. They say it’s a blur, experiences like that, and maybe it’s a cliché but it turned out to be true, the way clichés sometimes are. I would like to say there was a single moment of revelation, a turning point after which we knew Sam would survive, and we had joy and resolution and a happy ending in which we thanked all the doctors for saving his life and drove back home in that fragile moment of late afternoon when the air is washed with gold. Like in the movies.

But life isn’t a movie, and that moment never came.

We kept time by the beep of the monitors and the rising and setting of the sun on the other side of the window, out there in that world where ordinary people got on with their lives, went on vacation, enjoyed the summer. Paige brought her kids and booked one of those extended stay hotels, and nobody complained about missing the summer on the ocean or the scarcity of fried clams in the New Hampshire hills. Her husband drove up on weekends to join us. Nice guy, Jake.

Paige delivered me coffee and sandwiches and made sure I brushed my teeth and changed clothes.

Day by day Sam went on living, breathing, existing, and the fear of his death was replaced by fear for the future ahead of us.

What was to come in this new world in which my ten-year-old son did not own a functioning pair of kidneys.

One discrete moment I do remember. I remember walking out of the hospital to drive to the hotel room Paige had booked for us, not because I wanted to leave but because she insisted. This would have been the second day, after I spent that first night sleeping—or not sleeping—on the chair in Sam’s hospital room.

You need to sleep in a bed, Paige told me. Sam needs you to sleep in a bed.

So I trudged out to the parking lot and found my car. The hour was late, and because it was the end of June and this was New Hampshire, the sky had only begun to darken. The air was heavy with shadow. Would have been spooky if anything was left in this world to scare me.

I got to the car and stared at the lump of feathers stuck at the base of the windshield wipers.

I had forgotten about the bird.

A baby owl, said the man with the cigarette, and he was right. I didn’t know much about woodland birds, but you could tell it was an owl by the shape of its head and its dead glass eyes. A small, juvenile owl. Probably just left its nest. Had flown out into the wide world and run smack into my panicked windshield and died, and the mother owl and the father owl never knew what happened to him.

In my ears, I still heard the relentless beep of the monitors. The tick of Sam’s life.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the baby owl. “I’m so sorry.”

I sat down on the curb and opened my palms.

On my right wrist, my mother’s bracelet had slipped around the wrong way, so the ends pinched the tender skin on the inside of my arm. She’d left it to me when she died, and I still felt a shock to see it wrapped around my own wrist instead of my mother’s—a golden cobra, its hood arched to strike, two tiny emerald eyes and a tiny ruby tongue reaching eternally for the tip of its tail. Her own mother had given this bracelet to her, she’d told us when we were little, and I had never seen Mom’s arm without it.

Until her funeral, a year and a half ago.

The snake’s eyes glittered at me, the same color as my mother’s.

“I need her so much,” I whispered. “Why did you take her?”

But the cobra didn’t say a word.