After the End(5)

two





Max


Something to drink, sir?”

The flight attendant has bright white teeth and shiny hair. We’ve barely left Chicago, but I’m exhausted. The client I was summoned to see is new—an Illinois start-up with academic funding—and I’m expected to not just keep their business but double it. I spent the first day presenting quick-wins to justify their choice; the evening impressing them with a reservation at Schwa. When we finally left—One more for the road?—I sat up till three getting set for the next day. And repeat.

“Sounds like we’re in good hands,” the client said as I left, but we both know it’s results that count. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the Brits say.

I yawn. Those three a.m. finishes have taken their toll. I’d give anything to sleep now. Dylan was sleeping through the night around ten months old, but you never sleep the same when you have kids, do you? You’re always listening for a noise, half ready to wake. I’d be convinced Dylan was lost somewhere, and I’d wake with a start and my legs would be out of bed before my brain kicked in and told me I’d been dreaming. Even then, I’d have to cross the hall and stand in his doorway to check that he really was in his crib.

But in hotels, when I knew Dylan was safe at home? Boy, could I sleep . . . Sure, the jet lag was tough, but nothing beats a soundproof hotel room with blackout blinds, a minibar, and a room service breakfast.

“How was the trip?” Pip would ask when I got back from Phoenix, or New York, or Toronto. “Nice hotel?”

“Not bad,” I’d say. “I was hardly there.” And I never am—our clients pay big bucks and my God do they make every cent count—but those hours that I was . . . I swear I’d never slept so well.

Those deep hotel room sleeps stopped when Dylan got sick. I started having the dreams again, only this time Dylan wasn’t just lost in the house, or in the park, he was underwater, and if I didn’t find him he would drown. I would lie awake in my pitch-black room and wish I was at the hospital, or home making sure Pip was OK. I watched CNN and felt numb to other people’s grief.

I order a vodka and Coke, then open my laptop. If I can finish my report in the air, I can “work from home” once I get back to the UK, and spend the time at the hospital with Pip and Dylan instead. If I can get this report done. I stare at the screen, my eyes gritty and my head someplace else, then I move my finger across the trackpad and open Photos.

When Dylan was born Pip started a shared album. She posted a new photo every day, and invited the family to join. It was a neat way of bringing everyone together, despite the distance between them. Scrolling through the photos fast is like flipping through one of those animated books, only instead of a stick man it’s my son, growing from baby to toddler, with hints of the man he’ll one day become.

The blond hair he was born with—as fair as Pip’s—began darkening last year, and by the time chemo started, the strands left on his pillow were as dark as mine. But he was still the spit of Pip. Big, brown eyes, with long lashes and round cheeks. Hamster cheeks, Pip calls them, puffing them out and making me laugh.

Beneath the photos are comments. So adorable! He likes his food, then? He looks so much like you in this one, Pip! I have a picture of Max on the beach just like this. Oh do please share—we’d love to see it! Grandparents who have only met once, at our wedding, united across an ocean by their only grandson.

Each photo triggers a memory. Dylan’s first flight, to visit Granny Adams in Chicago. The farm park with the postpartum gang. Birthday parties, Thanksgiving, Dylan’s baptism.

“He’ll break some hearts when he’s older.” The flight attendant takes my empty glass. “Have you chosen your meal?”

“The salmon appetizer, please. And then the beef.”

She smiles at the screen. “Cute kid.”

The photo on the screen was taken last summer. Dylan’s wearing a pirate outfit and a pink tutu he refused to take off.

“Just while you sleep,” Pip tried, but no one ever negotiated successfully with a toddler, and for three weeks Dylan slept with a circle of pink net around his dinosaur pajamas.

“He looks like some of the women on my Ibiza flight yesterday,” Pip said. We were walking through the grounds of Packwood House, Dylan’s tutu at odds with the T-shirt and shorts underneath.

“Hen party?” I said, the English term for a bachelorette party still foreign to my ear, even after ten years in the UK. My American colleagues tell me I sound British; the English ones say I’m Yank through and through. Pip says she can’t tell anymore.

“All I hear is Max,” she always says.

We turned into the topiary garden, where centuries-old yew trees covered the lawn like giant chess pieces, and Dylan ran between them with his arms outstretched, like an airplane.

“Yup, hen party. Tutus and wings, and drunk before the seat belt signs went off. Too tight to pay for prebooked seats, so they spent the whole flight running up and down the aisle, and sitting on each other’s laps.”

“Bit different from yours.” Dylan ran to hide behind a huge tree, and I ran the opposite way, shouting Boo! and making him squeal.

Pip and I had borrowed from both sides of the Atlantic for our prewedding celebrations, hosting a party in the pub down the road in something that was part wedding shower, part bachelor party, part rehearsal dinner. No presents, we’d said, but people brought them regardless, or sent them after the wedding via an endless stream of delivery drivers.