Harrison remembers his strategy. “Yeah, but then I’m going to take your rook with my bishop.”
Foster gives his head a firm shake. “But you only have the one rook. I’ve got both of mine. A player with a single rook should never sacrifice it for one of his opponent’s. Lev Alburt.”
Harrison has no idea who Lev Alburt is, but assumes he must be some chess expert that Foster reads up on in his spare time. Foster takes Harrison’s rook and Harrison takes Foster’s with his bishop and then they both study the board in silence for a minute.
“I was sorry to hear about Mia.” Foster blows on his coffee. “How’s she doing?”
Harrison thinks of Mia, lying on the studio floor last night. His heart clenches.
When they first met, he thought she was out of his league—too beautiful, of course, but also too everything else. Too witty. Too passionate. Too talented. Too interesting. Too alive. She was wearing that yellow dress. And two pink plastic barrettes, like the ones kids wear, secured the right side of her long black hair away from her face. It was obvious she put effort into how she looked, but equally obvious that she didn’t care what anyone thought about it. It was so novel. Refreshing. He’d spent his whole life caring what other people thought, and throughout the night, found himself caring what she thought most of all. She could have had her choice of any man in the room. But she picked him, like one might choose a pastry from a bakery case. I’ll have that one.
She chose him. And in that moment, he swore he’d spend his entire life making sure she wouldn’t regret it. But how could he have known then how many things would be out of his control? He can’t think of anything he hates worse than seeing his wife in pain and not being able to fix it. And even though it seems with each passing year he becomes more unsure of things he once knew positively (and often thinks it’s an unnatural progression—shouldn’t you become more steadfast in your beliefs about the world around you as you age?), he knows one thing for certain: Mia’s sadness is his sadness and he’d carry it around with him like water in a bucket until the end of his days if it meant that she didn’t have to.
To Foster, he lies. “She’s OK.”
Foster dips his head. “And you?”
Harrison lies again. “I’m OK, too.”
And then his cell rings in his pocket, and because it’s his on-call day, he knows it’s the ER.
“It begins,” he mutters.
* * *
At four, when he finally has a minute to grab a sandwich from the doctors’ lounge in the hospital, his cell rings again.
“Hey, Graydon, Leong. I’ve got another one I think you need to see—woman with a hundred-two fever, acute abdomen pain; she’s tachycardic. From the free air in the X-rays, looks like a perforated viscus.”
While Leong’s talking, Harrison pulls up the patient’s records on the computer. He tells Leong he’ll be right down and takes one last monster bite of his sandwich, not knowing when he’ll get to eat again.
The patient looks around Mia’s age, early thirties (which is close to Harrison’s age—thirty-five—but Mia often teases him that the few years’ difference makes him ancient). Her blond hair’s tied back in a messy bun, and she’s lying flat on the gurney, her hands gripping the sides. Worry is etched on her face, but she’s trying to hide it with a smile. Harrison quickly realizes it’s not for his benefit—she’s not even looking at him. There’s a boy standing next to her, wide-eyed and trembling a little. He reminds Harrison so much of Noah that he goes cold, a torrent of memories flooding in.
Noah’s lifeless face, his mouth an O around his endotracheal tube, as if he was just as surprised as Harrison was by what happened. The viscous blood that coated nearly every surface, as if a can of red paint had been carelessly upended. The monotone beep, a constant reminder of his failure.
Keeping his voice steady, Harrison smiles at the kid and grabs one of the lollipops that he keeps in his coat pocket just for situations like this. “Hey, bud,” he says and offers it to him, but he turns his head away from it. Harrison can tell he’s going to be a tough cookie. He sets it on the arm of the chair next to him and then looks from the boy back to his mom. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“My stomach,” she says, through clenched teeth.
“And what’s your name?”
“Whit—” Her breath catches. “—ney.”
“Whitney, I’m Dr. Graydon. I’m just going to ask you a few questions, do a quick exam, and we’ll figure out exactly what the problem is. Sound good?”
She nods.
Harrison quickly runs through the questions about her medical history, the quality and details of the pain she’s experiencing and past symptoms. During the physical exam, when he gets to her belly, she shrieks at the contact, but then immediately cuts it off, glancing at her son. The boy glares with his Noah eyes. “Sorry, buddy,” Harrison says, holding his hands up. “I’m all done.” Her stomach is hard as a rock and hot to the touch. Leong’s diagnosis was correct, which means Harrison needs to get her into surgery immediately.
“OK, Whitney, so basically what you have is called a perforated viscus, which means there’s a hole somewhere along your digestive tract—anywhere from your esophagus all the way down to where it ends at your rectum. I’d like to do an exploratory laparotomy, which is just a fancy term for opening you up to find the hole and fix it.”
As he runs through the details of the surgery, her eyes grow bigger, which is common—most people don’t like the thought of being cut open. And then she asks the question most people ask, hoping to avoid being cut open. “What happens if I don’t do anything?”
“Well,” Harrison says. “We’ll put you on antibiotics—” He glances at the boy and chooses his next words carefully. “But the prognosis would not be good.”
“How not good?”
He clears his throat. “You would most likely not make it.”
“Whaaaaat?” the boy screams. Tears immediately spring to his eyes. “Noooo!”
“It’s OK, Gabriel,” Whitney says, putting her hand on her son’s arm. “Sweetie, it’s OK. I’m not going to die.” She turns to Harrison, wincing again from the pain. “We’ll do the surgery.”
He nods curtly and then lays out all the risks of the surgery as quickly and quietly as possible, to not set the boy off again, then pats her hand. “We’ll take good care of you, and in a few hours, you’ll feel much better than this, I prom—”
He stops and clears his throat. It’s the exact same words he said to Noah right before his surgery. And they were a lie. And he swears the boy, Gabriel, can see right through him, because he fixes him with another glare. “Don’t you kill my mom,” Gabriel says, his tiny hands in tight fists by his sides, as if he’s planning to hit Harrison if all doesn’t go well.