The Queen of Hearts(53)
“I—” I tried. I stopped and shook my head. All at once I was furious with myself for wallowing in speechless grief. I steeled myself and I said it.
“It shouldn’t have happened.”
Zadie didn’t say anything.
I waited a beat, and then I started talking. I told her the story, and I didn’t spare any of it. I couldn’t know for sure at this point, but it was easy enough to surmise: I must have hit the tail of the child’s pancreas, causing an enzymatic leak that ate her from the inside out, its corrosive fluid burning a hole in her stomach, sending bacteria through her bloodstream. Or maybe it was something else, given the short time frame. The pressure in her abdomen could have grown after the surgery, straining against the incision I’d insisted on closing, until her organs began to fail. Then a series of miscues and mistakes ensued during the chaos of call, when everything blew up at once. I didn’t get to her in time.
I could have saved her. I should have saved her. The realization that I hadn’t saved her kept hitting me with a gale-force punch: first, disbelief—this could not be happening—and then a cataclysmic rush of horror.
Zadie listened with intense absorption, not flinching at the worst parts, which surprised me again. In general, Zadie could be described as a sappy, tenderhearted mess, especially when it came to anyone she cared about. But I recognized now a facet of her I didn’t often see: her game face. This was her professional side kicking in, the part that allowed her to function when she had to tell parents their son needed a heart transplant, or had to explain to them their newborn daughter would not be likely to live past the age of one.
“You will endure this, and you’ll be better for it,” she said.
Shame upon shame. I said, “No, I won’t.” Adding: “The Packards.”
She shook her head. “I’ll help with Boyd and Betsy,” she said. “Give them time. Boyd can be vindictive, but Betsy will listen. And she’s a kind person—she’ll understand that only lawyers would benefit from a lawsuit. The Packards don’t need money from you, and piling hatred on top of heartbreak would only consume the strength they’ll need to heal.”
A flicker of something stirred in my memory. “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”
“Yes!” she said. “Who said that?”
“I think it was Nelson Mandela.”
“That’s perfect.”
I shrugged listlessly. “Somehow, I don’t think Boyd Packard is a scholar of South African antiapartheid revolutionaries. And if I were him, I wouldn’t forgive me either.”
“Okay, then how about this one: how often shall my sister cause me harm, and I forgive her? As many as seven times?”
“Is that Mandela too?”
“That one,” she said, “was Jesus Christ. I’m paraphrasing, but you get the drift. And his answer, in case you’re wondering, was not seven times, but seventy times seven.” She placed her hands on my shoulders. “You’re allowed forgiveness for one mistake.”
If there was anything in the world I longed for more than forgiveness, I couldn’t have named it, but wishing for it was useless. The enormity of my error racked me; I couldn’t respond any longer to Zadie’s loyal efforts to bolster my spirits.
She picked up my hand and gripped it between hers. In an affectless, almost dreamy tone, she said, “Look at me.”
I looked.
Her eyes, round and clear and lovely, bored into mine. “You are not alone,” she said. “You carried me when it happened to me, and I’ll carry you too.”
I blinked hard, certain that if I let myself cry, I’d never stop.
PART
TWO
Autumn
Chapter Twenty-two
THE EXPLOSIVE METHOD OF INTERMITTENT CONTROL
Zadie, Present Day
It had been a hard few months. Not a day went by that I didn’t ache for Betsy and ache for Emma, who had both withdrawn into shellacked cocoons of misery, albeit for very different reasons. It made me feel guilty to admit, but I was longing to think of something happy.
The Arts Ball, the biggest social event of the year, was coming up this October, and Drew and I were invited for the first time. We’d made it onto the list because of Drew; the cochair of the ball this year was Hattie McGuire. Hattie was married to Reginald, Drew’s managing partner, and she was presumably well equipped to deal with the complexities of organizing an intimate dinner-dance for five hundred couples, since she had endured a twenty-year barrage of ol’ Reg. Everything else probably seemed like a walk in the park.
Drew was heading out this morning for another overseas work trip, so if I wanted to discuss a shopping spree for a new dress, now was the time. I could hear him in the shower, warbling along to something on the bathroom TV. The home’s AV system was one of the very few things on which Drew had been willing to splurge. We’d bought the house from a builder who’d been in the process of renovating it a few years back, and he customized it for us. I’d presented a wish list consisting of a few nice items: upgraded tiles (vetoed by Drew after a silent, incredulous trip to a posh tile distributor), a fantastic vintage chandelier for the foyer (also vetoed), and myriad smaller-ticket items, a few of which were grudgingly agreed upon. But when we met with the AV guys, he suddenly started throwing money around like the Sun King. As a result, we now had six televisions scattered throughout the house, including a smallish plasma screen in the playroom (very bad parenting) and this one here in the master bathroom, which was embedded into the huge vanity mirror, invisible unless it was turned on, and which Drew claimed to need so he could watch the ticker on CNBC while shaving. All of these TVs had basically become obsolete at the moment of their purchase, since now you could view downloaded and live-streaming content at any moment on your tablet, or implanted brain chip, or whatever.