Our eyes lock, and I think that maybe he can read it there. Everything that happened. That maybe, somehow, he has reached back. That he knows. In that moment, I want to tell. I want to tell him, if only so he can carry this thing with me.
“Aaron,” I start, and then his cell phone rings. He takes it out.
“It’s work,” he says. “Hang on.”
He stands up and leaves the booth. I see him gesturing out by the glass doors emblazoned with the diner’s name: Daddy’s. The waitress comes over. Do we want any food? I shake my head. Just the check, please.
She hands me the bill. She hadn’t expected us to stick around, I guess. I leave cash on the table and get my bag. I join Aaron at the door, where he’s hanging up.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
“It’s okay. I’m going to head out. I should go back to the office.”
“It’s Saturday,” he says.
“Corporate law,” I mutter. “And I’ve been gone a lot.”
He gives me a small smile. He looks disappointed.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say. “Really, thanks for showing up. I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he says. “Dannie — you can call me anytime. You know that, right?”
I smile. I nod.
The bells on the door jingle on my way out.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It’s the first week of November, and Bella won’t speak to me. I call her. I send David over with food. “Just give her a little time,” he tells me. I don’t express the absurdity of his statement to him. I can’t even think it, much less say it out loud.
Dr. Christine is no more surprised to see me back in her office than I am to be there. She wants to know about my family, and so I tell her about Michael. I remember him less and less these days. What he was like. I try and focus on the details. His laugh, the strange way his forearms hung from his elbows, like there was just too much limb. His brown, curly hair, like baby ringlets, and his wide brown eyes. How he used to call me “pal.” How he’d always invite me to hang out in the tent in our backyard, even if his friends were over. He didn’t seem to have any of the hang-ups older brothers usually have about their little sisters. We fought, sure, but I always knew he loved me, that he wanted me around.
Dr. Christine tells me I am learning to deal with a life I cannot control. What she doesn’t say, what she doesn’t have to, is that I’m failing at it.
I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished.
The following Wednesday, Dr. Shaw walks by. I’m sitting on a cement ledge, some fake foliage dangling below me, doing some paperwork.
“Humpty Dumpty,” he says.
I look up, so startled I nearly fall.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bella,” I say. I gesture with my free arm, the one not holding my array of folders, upward, to the room where Bella lies, chemicals being pumped into her.
“I just came from there.”
Dr. Shaw takes a step closer to me. He peers at my binder disapprovingly. “Do you need some coffee?” he asks.
I found some crappy vending machine stuff earlier, but it’s wearing off quickly.
“It kind of sucks here,” I say.
He holds a pointed finger out to me. “That’s because you do not know the tricks. Follow me.”
We wind through the ground floor of the treatment center to the back and down a hallway. At the end is a little atrium, with a Starbucks cart. I swear, it’s like seeing Jesus. My eyes go wide. Dr. Shaw notices.
“I know, right?” he says. “It’s the best-kept hospital secret. Come on.”
He leads me to the cart where a woman in her mid-twenties with two French braids smiles wide at him. “The usual?” she asks.
He turns to me. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a tea drinker. That’s why Irina here has to know my order.”
“The hospital is big on coffee?” I ask.
“More manly,” he says, gesturing for me to step forward.
I order an Americano, and when our drinks are ready, Dr. Shaw takes a seat at a little metal table. I join him.
“I don’t want to keep you,” I say. “I appreciate the coffee referral.”
“It’s good for me,” he says. He takes his lid off, letting the steam rise. “Do you know surgeons are notorious for having the worst bedside manner?”
“Really,” I say. But I know.
“Yes. We’re monstrous. So every Wednesday I try and have coffee with a commoner.”
He smiles. I laugh because I know the moment requires it.
“So how is Bella?” he asks. His pager beeps and he looks at it, setting it on the table.
“I don’t know,” I say. “You’ve seen her more recently than I have.”
He looks confused; I keep talking.
“We had a fight. I’m not allowed upstairs.”
“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”
I’m cognizant of the time, of how little he has. “I’m controlling,” I say, getting to the punch.
Dr. Shaw laughs. It’s a nice laugh, odd in this hospital setting. “I’m familiar with this dynamic,” he says. “But she’ll come around.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“She will, “ he says. “You’re here. One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t try and make this experience above the simplicity of humanity, it won’t work.”
I stare at him. I’m not sure what he means, he can tell.
“You’re still you, she’s still her. You still have emotions. You’ll still fight. You can try and be perfect, but it will backfire. Just keep being here, instead.”
His pager goes off again. This time he snaps the lid back down on his cup. “Unfortunately, duty calls.” He stands and extends his hand. “Hang in there,” he says. “I know the road isn’t easy, but stay the course. You’re doing good.”
I stay sitting near the Starbucks cart for another hour, until I know Bella has finished treatment and is safely out of the building. When I head home I call David, but there is no answer.
The following week, I’m not at the hospital but, instead, on a plane with Aldridge to Los Angeles. Aldridge is seeing another client while we’re out there, a pharmaceutical giant who sends their jet for our use. We board with Kelly James, a litigating partner I’ve never said more than twenty words to over the course of my nearly five years at Wachtell.
It’s a ten-seater, and I take the one in the rear, by the window. I lean my head against the glass. I said yes to this trip without considering what it means. It is, of course, an answer to Aldridge’s original question. Yes. Yes I’ll take on the case. Yes, I’ll commit to this.
“You’re doing the right thing,” David told me last night. “This could be huge for your career. And you love this company.”
“I do,” I say. “I just can’t help but feel like people here need me.”
“We’ll survive,” he said. “I promise we’ll all survive.”
And now here I am, flying over an endless mountain range in pursuit of the ocean.
We’re staying at Casa del Mar, in Santa Monica right on the beach. My room is on the ground level, with a terrace that extends onto the boardwalk. The hotel is shabby chic Hamptons meets European opulence. I like it.
We have a dinner meeting with Jordi and Anya tonight, but when I reach my room, it’s only 11 a.m. We picked up half a day on our way across the country.
I change into shorts and a T-shirt and a sun hat — my Russian Jew skin has never met a sun it particularly got on with — and decide to take a walk on the beach. The temperature is warm and getting hotter — in the mid-eighties by lunchtime — but there’s a cool breeze off the ocean. For the first time in weeks, I feel as if I am not simply surviving.