12. Nolan
NOLAN
The waiting room of Dr. Amara Ellis's office has six chairs, two of which are taken when we walk in.
The magazines on the table are not six months old.
They are current, which is its own kind of statement, and there is a small framed print of a Romare Bearden collage on the wall behind the receptionist that I would like to ask about later but have, at this moment, the wrong standing to ask about.
Arielle checks in. She signs something. The receptionist — a woman of about my mother's age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain — looks at me once, gently, and at Arielle once, more gently, and does not ask whether I am here as the partner or the chauffeur, which I appreciate.
Arielle sits in the chair across from mine instead of next to me. She does not take her coat off. She picks up a magazine she does not read.
“You don’t have to come back with me,” she says, still reading. “Let’s be clear, Nolan. The waiting room was the agreement. The exam room is a different category, and I’m not placing you behind a door I haven’t decided to unlock.”
"Understood. I'll be here. Take whatever time you need. I brought a book."
She looks up at the book I brought. I am not, on most workdays, a man who carries a book. She opens her mouth to say something, decides against it, and looks back down at the magazine.
The medical assistant comes out three minutes later and calls her name. Arielle stands. She is at the doorway before she turns back.
"Nolan."
"Arielle."
"Come on, then. Don't make a thing of it. Don't say anything in there. Just come on."
I follow her.
Dr. Ellis is a softly built woman in a white coat over a navy sweater, with locs pinned back from her face and the calm, careful posture of a person who has been the first adult in the room for a very large number of difficult conversations.
She offers me her hand. She does not call me by name.
She calls me Arielle's guest, which is the exact right phrase, and Arielle exhales a quarter of an inch at the word.
"Sixteen weeks today," Dr. Ellis says, settling on her stool. "How are we feeling, Arielle. Honestly."
"Tired. Hungry between three and five in the afternoon in a way I do not enjoy. The nausea's been better since last Thursday. I'm still not sleeping all the way through."
"All normal. Drink the water. Don't fight the three p.m. hunger, you'll lose. Lie down. I'm going to do a quick listen today. We can do another scan in two weeks if you'd like."
"That's fine."
Dr. Ellis warms the gel against the back of her hand before she puts it on Arielle’s stomach. It’s a small kindness shaped by years of doing this. She settles the doppler wand into place. For a beat, there’s only the staticky shush of something not yet found.
Then the heartbeat comes through.
It is faster than I expect. Almost twice the rate of my own, a small, urgent gallop in a room that has gone quieter than rooms in this building have any business going.
The doppler picks up the slosh of fluid around it, and underneath the gallop is the steadier, slower thump of Arielle's pulse, and the two of them are running side by side like a horse and its outrider.
I do not sit down. I am already sitting.
I do not put my hand over my mouth, because I am, externally, a man who runs a company.
I sit in the chair next to the exam table with my palms flat on my own thighs and I listen to the sound of a heart that did not exist in July, and somewhere underneath my ribs something that has been load-bearing for thirty-seven years quietly buckles.
"There it is," Dr. Ellis says, kindly. "One hundred and fifty-two. Strong. Right on the line."
Arielle is looking at the ceiling. She is not looking at me. She is keeping her face very still in the way she keeps her face very still in conference rooms when Don Garvey says something she is not going to dignify, but her hand, on the paper drape at her hip, has curled into a small fist.
I do not reach for her hand. I am not invited to her hand.
I do, before I can stop myself, lean forward an inch.
Dr. Ellis lets the doppler run for another half minute. Then she lifts it, wipes the wand, and tells Arielle she can sit up whenever she's ready. She prints two grainy images from the screen — not new ones, the last scans — and tucks them into a small paper sleeve.
"For your fridge," she says, and slides the sleeve across the exam table.
Arielle picks them up. She holds them between two fingers. Then, without looking at me, she lays them down on the small rolling cart by my elbow and turns to put her shirt back together.
I look at the images. They are blurry and white-on-gray and roughly the shape of a comma, and I have stared at maps and elevations and structural surveys my entire adult life and I have not, before this minute, ever looked at a piece of paper and felt my whole body rearrange itself around what was printed on it.
When I look up, she is looking at me.
She has caught me, plainly, with my face doing whatever my face is doing, and her own face has — not softened, that is not the right word. Loosened. The corner of her mouth has gone uncertain, as if she has just put down something heavy without realizing she had been carrying it.
"You can keep one," she says, after a second. "If you want. Of the two."
"I'd like that. Thank you."
"Don't thank me. It's a printout."
"I'd still like one."
She takes one, hands it to me, and walks out of the exam room ahead of me before I have figured out what to do with my face.
I leave her at her building at three. I don’t follow her upstairs.
I drive back to the office through the snow with the ultrasound printout in the inner pocket of my coat, warm against my ribs, and a list of conditions arranging themselves in the far edge of my thoughts — preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, placenta previa, intrauterine growth restriction.
By four-thirty I’m at my desk with three color-coded tabs open and a yellow legal pad where I’ve begun drawing columns.
Claire walks in at five without knocking. She has known me long enough.
She stands in the doorway in a black turtleneck, takes in the legal pad, the three tabs, the small unframed ultrasound photo that I have, embarrassingly, propped against my pen cup, and the calendar on the second monitor where I have begun blocking Tuesday and Thursday afternoons through the end of March in a color we use internally for nothing.
"Nash."
"Don't."
"Nash, I am going to. Sit there and let me. You owe me ten minutes."
She closes the door. She sits.
"You blocked thirty-one Tuesdays."
"Thirty-two. There's an extra appointment in February."
“You blocked thirty-two Tuesdays, and by my count you’ve started sending the lead architect on that project three meals a day through a courier service we don’t even retain.
I have nine acquisitions staff who would like a fraction of the operational attention you just gave a doppler ultrasound. Do not tell me this is integration.”
"I'm not telling you anything."
“That is correct. You’re not telling me anything, and I’ve been your sister my whole life, so I’m telling you something.
I watched our father do this exact thing to our mother, Nash.
Not the meals. The schedule. The blocking out of every Tuesday.
The buying up of the buildings around her.
He called it protection. He called it integration.
He called it whatever business word fit the room.
It was a leash, and you and I have spent our entire adult lives in therapy because of it, and I’m not sitting at this desk watching you fasten one onto a woman who is twelve weeks too tired to take it off. ”
"Sixteen."
"What."
"Sixteen weeks. Today."
Claire closes her eyes. "Nash."
“I hear you. I am hearing you. I’m not arguing with you tonight — I don’t have the room for it. I’ll think about what you said. I’m putting the legal pad away. I’m closing two of the tabs. Will you trust me with the third one.”
"No. But I will leave the office, because I have a dinner."
She stands. At the door, she stops with her hand on the frame.
"I bought a building today, by the way," I tell her, before she can go. "On Wacker. The narrow one next to Halloran-Reyes. Closed at two. The brokers will release the news Monday."
"Nash."
"I needed Chicago office space. It happens to share a wall with her firm. That's a coincidence I am willing to live with."
"It is not a coincidence."
"I know it isn't."
She closes the door behind her with a small, careful click, the kind that says she’s decided to let me take whatever time I need to hang myself.
Arielle calls at six-forty. I do not let it ring twice.
“I owe you dinner,” she says, before I’ve even said hello. “For the appointment. And the snow. I’m not calling it a thank-you — I refuse to thank you for being in my own city — but I owe you a meal, and I’m calling to pay it before I lose my nerve.”
"Tell me where."
"There's a place on Hubbard. Italian. Quiet. I can be there in forty minutes. I am not dressing up, Nolan. Don't make a face when I walk in."
"I won't make a face."
She is already there when I arrive. She is in a soft cream sweater I have not seen, her hair down, her coat over the back of the chair.
There is a basket of bread on the table and a small glass of sparkling water in front of her with a slice of orange, and she is reading the menu like she has done it before, which she has, which I like.
I sit. I do not say anything sharp. She does not say anything sharp.
We order. We talk about Bianca, who has, apparently, decided I am tolerable on a probationary basis.
We talk about Pullman Row. I tell her my mother's name.
I tell her I take my coffee black because anything else is a waste of perfectly good coffee.
She laughs at that, a small real laugh, and it lands somewhere in the same place under my ribs that the heartbeat landed at two-fifteen this afternoon.
By the time the plates are cleared, the candle on the table is shorter, and she has not looked at her watch once, and neither have I.