Everything After(25)

“Rough day,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb.

“What happened?” She took a sip of the wine and then put it down on the bathroom counter so she could finish her hair. She wondered if one of his patients had taken a bad turn, or if he’d gotten into an argument with the hospital administration again about getting his patients into clinical trials. She hoped it wasn’t Malcolm.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

She looked at him, her eyebrows drawing together. Something was wrong. Something other than what they’d experienced together.

“Ez—” she started.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t try to shrink me.” He took a big gulp of wine. “I’m gonna jump in the shower. I’ll be ready in fifteen.”

Emily was taken aback. He’d never said that to her. Never implied that he saw her questions as intrusive. She didn’t say anything. Just nodded and looked back at the mirror, watching herself raise the curling iron to her hair, wishing she could walk through like Alice and spend some time in a world on the other side. It felt like the white knight was talking backward. Was the red queen off with her head?

Maybe there would be a mirror Ezra in there who would sit with her and hold her and tell her she could mourn as long as she wanted. Someone who would let his pain mingle with hers, bringing them closer. Maybe they could walk through the looking glass together.





23



Ezra and Emily met up with Ezra’s parents in the bar at the Gregory on the Park.

“Oh, honey,” Ezra’s mom whispered, when she hugged her. “How are you doing? You know, it happened to me, too, a few years after Ezra was born.”

“I’m okay,” Emily answered, in a way that made her mother-in-law hug her harder.

“I’m always here for you,” she whispered, her voice teary. “Please. Call whenever you want to talk.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, knowing that saying any more might bring her to tears, too, and she didn’t want to risk it. But she did want to talk to her mother-in-law, ask her how long it took her until she stopped crying, if it was different if you already had a healthy child, different if you were older when it happened, knowing you didn’t have much time left. Those would be questions for another time, though, if she ever had the courage to ask them.

Ezra’s dad gave her a tight hug but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Emily could tell what he wanted to say through the strength of his arms. This was a loss for them, too.

Both of Ezra’s parents were doctors. The first time the four of them went out to dinner after Emily and Ezra’s wedding, a woman came over to the table and said, “Dr. Gold!” And all four of them looked up. The woman had meant Ezra’s mom, who, before she retired, was the chief of breast imaging at Princeton Medical Center. The woman was ten years cancer-free, after Ezra’s mom diagnosed a malignancy. Dr. Gold had gotten up from the table and hugged the woman.

“It makes all the training, all the long hours worth it when something like that happens,” she said, when she sat back down.

Ezra’s father was an ophthalmologist. He’d said his favorite part of the profession was when he got to fit someone for glasses the first time, and all of a sudden the world sharpened for them and they could see everything differently.

In Ezra’s parents, Emily could see the seeds of his passion, his empathy, his need to make the world better, even if it was for just one person, one family, one child. But she could also see the high standards he held himself to, the self-sacrifice, the need to appear fine, even when he wasn’t.

Emily remembered the second or third time she’d gone with Ezra to visit his parents in New Jersey. He’d knocked over a wineglass that had shattered on their terra-cotta floor. He’d apologized over and over until his father said, “We don’t dwell on failures, Ez. We acknowledge, we vow to do better, and we move on.”

After looking at the expression on Ezra’s face, one that contained the understanding that his father saw his accident as a failure, Emily realized that it hadn’t been easy for him to grow up in that house, the sole focus of two hypersuccessful parents. She was glad they hadn’t seen this miscarriage as a failure, even though that was how it felt to Emily.



* * *



—

    The four Golds walked into the fund-raiser together and started circulating, chatting with the people they knew, getting drinks, visiting the food stations for pasta or freshly sliced pastrami or charcuterie or cheese. Emily wandered over to the silent auction area and bid on a week at a vacation home in East Hampton that she knew Ezra would like, donated by a man named Darren Maxwell, and a dinner at the chef’s table at Daniel, donated by the chef himself, which, if Ezra didn’t want to go to, Ari certainly would.

“Hey, Emily,” a woman said. Emily turned around. It was Hala, one of the doctors who worked with Ezra.

“How’s Ezra doing tonight?” she asked.

“Fine?” Emily replied, her answer more a question than she meant it to be, as she remembered their conversation before he got into the shower, his puffy eyes.

“I’m so glad,” Hala said. “I was afraid he would take it personally.”

“Yeah,” Emily answered, not wanting to ask what Hala was talking about. It couldn’t be the miscarriage. It must be something else entirely. Something work-related. Clearly something she should have known about. It was easy to fall back on her therapy training: “How are you doing?” she asked.