“I’m sorry you lost your son,” Leo said.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “But I’m even sorrier to see someone like you with four beautiful children acting like an ass.”
“I am an ass,” Leo said. “I am just a really big ass. No wonder my wife left me.”
“Stop thinking about yourself, Leo. Parents aren’t allowed to think about themselves.”
“Do you have some kind of instruction manual that I don’t have?” he asked.
“My instruction manual has been twenty-eight years of pain for my son. And it makes me grateful for what I do have, my husband, my daughter Cecily.” Therese misted up. She waved her hand. “Go find your kids,” she said.
Leo left the room and Therese watched him go. Then she eyed her checklist. At that moment it seemed so silly she wanted to pitch it out the window. Therese let a couple of tears drip down her cheeks, then she heard a knock on the door. It was Elizabeth.
“Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked.
Therese wiped her face and looked in the mirror. The white streak in her orange hair stood out like a scream in a nursery, something wrong, something amiss. Her baby boy dead. How shocked she’d been to look at herself in the mirror after thirteen grueling hours of labor and find that she’d turned into an old woman, with white hair. White hair that couldn’t be dyed, that wouldn’t hold color. So she wouldn’t couldn’t forget.
On Sunday, Leo approached Therese during breakfast. He lowered his voice. “Things are better,” he said. “I took your suggestion and recanted the statement about the perfect son.”
“Good for you,” Therese said.
Leo checked his watch. “Cole hasn’t cried in twenty hours. A new record. But I still feel like I’m balancing a tray of expensive china on my head.”
“That’s known in the parents’ manual as the balancing-expensive-china feeling,” Therese said. “All parents feel that way sometimes.”
“I’m taking Bart and Fred out alone tonight,” Leo said. “A men’s night out, you know, big, juicy steaks, red wine, cigars, the whole bit.”
“Just love them, Leo,” Therese said.
“I’m leaving Chantal with the kids and ordering them take out shrimp and fried clams. But would you check on them? In case Cole starts to cry. I know he likes you.”
“I’d be happy to check on them if it makes you feel better.”
Leo spun his coffee cup in his hands. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said and I really am sorry about your son.”
“I didn’t tell you that story to get your sympathy, Leo,” Therese said.
“I know.” Leo turned red and looked down at the carpet. “I just wanted you to know it made me think.”
“Good.” It made him think, but he would never know what it felt like to hold a dead baby. Lucky, lucky man. “I’ll keep an eye on your kids,” she said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
Later, Therese would recall certain images: the Hearn men dressed in navy blazers and white shirts and bright summer ties standing on the front porch of the lobby while Chantal snapped their picture, their arms wound around each other, looking not so much like father and sons as like fraternity brothers, team members, friends. Then, another picture with Leo holding Cole, and Bart and Fred holding the baby girl. Therese watched all this from the bay window of her house, and she felt pride at that moment. Pride! She had helped! Therese noted the arrival of the young delivery man from Meals on Keels who showed up with Styrofoam cartons of food. She thought, “I’ll check on them after they eat.” Therese searched her empty kitchen cabinets for something that might qualify as dinner. She was a great housekeeper but a terrible cook and she thought guiltily of all the times Cecily had complained growing up, “There’s nothing to eat in this house!” Therese fixed two cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches and a handful of pretzels. She poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and a cranberry juice for Bill. She took the glasses first and then the plates to the bedroom where Bill was lying in the near dark with a washcloth over his eyes, snoring. It was seven o’clock.
Then the phone rang and Therese left the plates of food on the bed next to Bill’s sleeping body as she went to answer the phone. She remembered hoping it was Cecily.
But it was Tiny, her normally serene voice high-pitched, like the very top of a guitar string. “We have a situation down here. I’ve called an ambulance.”
Therese flew down the stairs, out of her house, and across the parking lot, her long skirt billowing behind her. There had been no sense asking what or who. Her mother instinct shrieked like a siren. It was the Hearn children.
Chantal stood in the lobby holding Cole. His arms and legs were pink and swollen, his face a red, angry balloon.
Chantal was shaking. “He’s not choking, I checked. I know how to do the Heimlich but he’s not choking. I don’t know what’s happening.”
Therese took Cole from her; he was heavier than she expected. “Go get the baby.”
Therese put her ear to Cole’s mouth. Cole’s breathing was hoarse and wheezy. His eyes were swollen shut. “Can you hear me?” Therese asked him. “Are you awake?” Then Therese heard sirens. “Call a cab for the girl,” Therese said to Tiny. “And call Leo Hearn at the Club Car. I’ll go with the boy to the hospital.”
Therese hurried out the front of the lobby to meet the ambulance. Cole’s body went limp in her arms. The paramedic jumped out and took Cole from her.
“He fainted,” Therese said. Cole’s skin was turning scarlet; he looked like a boiled lobster. “Is he going to die?”
The ambulance driver flung the doors of the ambulance open, put Cole on a stretcher and loaded him in. “You coming with us?” he asked Therese. “You the boy’s grandmother?”
“No,” she said. Heart breaking at the word “grandmother” though she was certainly old enough. Mother. Mother. “But I am going with you.” Therese hiked her skirt and climbed into the back of the ambulance. The siren sounded and they sped off down North Beach Road.
The paramedic lifted Cole’s eyelids. “The kid’s in shock,” he said. He put a blanket over Cole, then took his blood pressure. He produced a needle from his bag and stuck it into Cole’s arm.
“What are you doing?” Therese asked. “I said I’m not the boy’s mother, or grandmother. Don’t you have to ask permission or something?”
“We have a little anaphylactic reaction here,” the paramedic said. “A severe allergic swelling accompanied by hives, low blood pressure, fainting. And the kid’s having problems breathing because his throat is swelling shut. Has he been eating nuts maybe? Or shellfish?”
“Clams, I think,” Therese said. She wondered if saying “a little anaphylactic reaction” was like saying “a little cancer” or “a little heart attack.” Low blood pressure, shock, fainting-all that sounded so serious. “He’s allergic, then?”
“Look at him,” the paramedic said. “This is more than indigestion.”
“Is he going to die?” Therese asked again. She might fend off the worst kind of news if she faced it head on. Was the child going to die? Less than six months before, she rode in another ambulance, when it was Bill on the stretcher, his face pale and shiny with sweat. The paramedics then talked about flying Bill to Denver in a helicopter that Therese suspected they saved for dying people. She had been too afraid then even to speak the words. But now she saw it was easier to start with the worst possibility; she might outsmart death by pretending she wasn’t afraid.