I'm Glad About You(105)

Speak of the devil. There he was, in the doorway, holding the swaddled baby and looking completely besotted, even though Gabe was as usual colicky and screaming. Kyle didn’t seem to mind; he was more in love with that boy than he had ever been with his own daughters. It was infuriating. Her lover had just evaporated, and she and Kyle had never once spoken of her broken heart, her disappointed dreams. This whole public charade, that the baby was Kyle’s, that was another thing that just happened without any discussion. Even when you’re forced to sit through nobody can even count how many hours of couple’s counseling, the important things never make it to the table. Bouncing the fussy baby on his shoulder, Kyle looked at Van, curious.

“Who was on the phone?” he asked.

“Just some wrong number,” she said. “Oh, give him to me.” She took the baby into the next room to feed him.

After some four days of casual consideration, Van decided to pass along the message. If Alison wanted to come along and cry on her old boyfriend’s shoulder because her mom was in the hospital, why should she care? The whisper of guilt which hovered in the back of her head had begun to bother her. She had no reason to feel guilty. She in fact refused to feel guilty. In regard to Alison she remained blameless. The bitterness of her heart informed her that Alison could not say the same. But her own sense of moral certainty finally insisted that she do the right thing.

“I meant to tell you, your friend Alison called.” This was tossed over her shoulder as Van fetched dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets.

“Alison called?” Kyle’s voice took on a quiver, the slightest of strains. I knew it, Van thought. The girls, at the table, were coloring wildly. They didn’t even look up.

“She’s in town, her mom is in the hospital, she was having some problem. I’m not sure . . . Maggie, come on, sweetie, we’re setting the table now.”

“What did she say?” Kyle asked steadily. “Did she want me to call her?”

Honestly, he was trying so hard to be cool.

“I think she did.”

For the next three hours everyone pretended that everything was normal. Kyle helped feed the girls, then he and Van had dinner, then the baby woke up, and while Van fed him, Kyle did the dishes, and then he took the girls upstairs and gave them a bath, and then he changed the baby and rocked him while Van put the girls to bed. And then, while she took the baby back for his nine o’clock feeding, she looked up at Kyle and smiled with a friendly, helpful encouragement.

“Aren’t you going to call Alison?” she asked. “She sounded like she really needed to talk to you, about her mom. I think she said she was ill.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Of course! Kyle. I think that you should be allowed to talk to your ex-girlfriend on the phone.” She smiled at him, as if he were being silly. How she was pulling this off, she didn’t know, but it felt good, even virtuous.

“Did she leave a number?”

“Actually, she didn’t,” Van acknowledged. “You probably should try her parents’ house.”

Kyle nodded and reached for the phone by the side of the bed. Yes, okay, you’re going to do it in front of me so you can prove that you don’t have anything to hide, Van thought. But you still know the phone number by heart.

Kyle waited patiently, listening to the burr of the phone ring across town. His wife was sitting on the bed, breastfeeding their baby; his daughters were sleeping down the hall. Alison had called him. He could call her back.

“Hello,” she said. In high school, in that household of millions, she always had seemed to be the one to pick up the phone.

“Alison, yes, hello,” he said. “Hi, it’s Kyle.”

“Kyle,” she said. “Hello, Kyle.”

They could still say hello to each other. The past and the present started to merge.

“I heard you called, that your mother was ill?” he said. “How is she doing?”

“She died,” said Alison.





twenty-seven





YOU COULDN’T BLAME KYLE. He was such a relentlessly decent guy, he had come to the funeral. There he was, at the back of the church, braving his way all the way up to the side of the coffin to say good-bye, expressing his condolences to her thousands of relatives. She managed to avoid talking to him at the visitation and the Mass—there was a lot going on, after all—but when he showed up at the graveside, she knew she wasn’t going to get out of this. And she wanted to get out of it. She didn’t want to talk to him, she really didn’t; having a talk with Kyle at this point in time wasn’t going to help anybody. But there he was.

He was still so good looking. And sad. Why would a successful doctor with three beautiful children look so sad? Well, it was a funeral, so everyone looked pretty sad. Except for Alison, who was just pissed off. They had all somehow managed to move through the shock of Rose’s sudden illness and death with courage and humility, but Alison was the one who had been there, that long horrible day, and she still hadn’t released the terrible sense that more could have been done, that people weren’t paying attention, mistakes were being made not because those doctors and nurses were incompetent, but because they didn’t understand that Rose was young, it wasn’t time for her to die.

Of course by now her death was inevitable, that was all that anyone could see. You couldn’t go back in time and say, put her on a different antibiotic, that infection should have been brought under control faster. Or, the surgery didn’t have to be done on an emergency basis, it released too much bacteria into the body from the cutting, which is why the sepsis set in, if they had waited they could have prepared her, made sure her intestines were empty. Or, maybe they could have been more cautious in how much of the intestine they took out. There was too little prep time and yes of course the doctor didn’t want to leave dead tissue in there but taking out as much as he did undermined her whole system. If they had just waited a day.