The Perfect Marriage(13)

PART TWO





5

The intake nurse was pretty. Her name was Sasha. She was seated behind a glass partition like a bank teller.

Sasha always seemed happy to see Owen, as her smile that morning confirmed. “Cool tee,” she said.

Owen had worn the shirt for her, so he was pleased that she’d commented on it. During last week’s visit, she had told him about liking Batwoman, the TV show on the CW. He tried it but found it unwatchable. Still, he’d decided to wear his Batman and Joker split-face graphic T-shirt today.

“I see that this is a redo,” Sasha said. “So sorry about that. I know it’s no fun to come here two weeks in a row because we didn’t get a good read from last week’s sample. Why don’t you meet me at the door, and I’ll take you in. With any luck, you’ll be in and out real fast.”

“I’ll be right out here, Owen,” his mother said.

She had a way of making it seem like she was sending her baby off to war, rather than to a routine blood test.

The brief walk from the waiting room to the exam room was the only time Owen would spend with Sasha. Sometimes she was still at the front desk when he scheduled his next appointment, but last week she hadn’t been, and some old guy with a disgusting beard had done the honors.

“So, I watched that show you mentioned,” he said as soon as they were alone.

Sasha looked momentarily confused.

“Batwoman or whatever,” he said.

“Right. Batwoman. What did you think?”

“It was okay.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I just mean . . . I don’t know. It took a little more suspension of disbelief than I thought made sense.”

“It’s a show about a woman who pretends to be Batman, Owen. It’s not a documentary.”

“It’s not?” he said, trying to hold back a smile. “In that case, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”

She laughed and then stopped in front of exam room three. Owen preferred exam room eight. The rooms were identical, but going farther down the hallway meant he got to spend another thirty seconds with Sasha.

She opened the door. “You know the drill,” she said. “Strip down to your shorts. The doctor will be in—”

“Whenever he damn well feels like it,” Owen finished for her.

“That’s about right,” she said, laughing again.

“Hey, how old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-two.”

“Perfect,” he said.

“That’s enough for today, Owen. Now get in there and get naked.”



Jessica considered the fact that she was annoyed to be a good sign. When she and Owen first started going to these blood work appointments, they filled her with dread. After enough visits in a row ended with good news, they felt more like a terrible inconvenience. Why were the doctors making them hike out to Queens once every other month to check his blood for whatever they were checking it for when it was obvious to her that Owen was now perfectly healthy?

The waiting room contained the usual hodgepodge of child cancer patients in various stages of illness. Jessica still vividly remembered their first visit. Back then, Owen had looked so healthy, and they’d sat beside a boy a few years younger than him, bald as a cue ball. Dear God, she had prayed, don’t let that ever be Owen. And yet, within a matter of weeks, it was; then it was Jessica watching the other mothers with their hirsute children silently utter the same prayer. Weeks later, she saw that those other mothers’ prayers had not been answered either.

But then, the pendulum swung. Owen went into remission. Whereas he had once epitomized every parent’s worst nightmare, his presence in the waiting room today was a beacon of hope. With hair flowing past his shoulders, he had become the poster boy for answered prayers.

“Ms. Fiske,” someone said.

Jessica was used to being called Ms. Fiske, especially by Owen’s doctors and teachers. She looked up to see Dr. Goldman in the waiting room.

She hadn’t set eyes on the doctor in some time. He looked older than she recalled from the chemo days. A little grayer, perhaps. Maybe a few more wrinkles too, even though she didn’t think he was yet sixty-five. She took some comfort in the fact that enough time had passed since she’d last had an audience with him that he’d actually changed.

“Would you mind coming back for a moment?” he asked. “There’s something I would like to discuss with you.”

All Jessica’s alarms went off at once. She couldn’t imagine Dr. Goldman had anything to discuss with her that she wanted to hear.



The trip to East Hampton from Lower Manhattan took most people close to four hours, more if they hit traffic along the Long Island Expressway. But Reid prided himself in making it in three, although that required he keep his Porsche above ninety miles an hour and weave in and out of traffic.

Today, however, he abided by the speed limit. Not exactly, as he still went ten miles an hour faster, but the last thing he wanted was for his passenger to think he was reckless. He needed James to think he was the very epitome of responsibility.

Reid’s father had been part of the East Hampton art crowd, although he’d shown up at the tail end of the scene, in the late 1960s. By then, the most famous of its members—Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, not to mention the undisputed king of the New York school, Jackson Pollock, and his wife, Lee Krasner—were already name brands. But while Reid’s father might have missed the heyday of the art scene, he was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of the East End real estate market. He paid something like $35,000 for his “cottage,” which Reid had inherited a decade ago.