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“I’m so sorry Michael. You know you and Nicky are the most important things in my life. Please, can we—”

A formation of jets roared overhead. They both glanced skyward. Claire placed her hands over her face and concentrated on her breathing, trying hard to silence her sobs. When she looked out, she saw Michael walking toward the hospital entrance, head bowed, shoulders slumped.

She returned to the ICU alone and found Michael already in conversation with Dr. Marks in the lounge. Claire listened as the doctor recommended a craniotomy and clip ligation of the aneurysm, whereby he would open a hole in Nick’s skull and secure the damaged vessel. The other option was to wait and see if he would emerge from the coma on his own before reducing the pressure on his brain, which might put Nicholas at risk for further hemorrhaging. Dr. Marks left them to make a decision.

Back in Nick’s room, Claire sat next to her son and stroked his arm as she considered the doctor’s words. She touched his lips and eyelids with her fingertips. His mouth twitched, just a reflex—the nurses had explained this to Claire the first time she’d witnessed it. But she took it as a sign, as the response she’d been waiting for. And in that instant she knew that the surgery would work. She felt it as a mother senses the sex of a baby still in her womb, felt it etched in the grout beneath her feet and the soft hum in the air around them. Nicholas would wake up after his surgery.

“If he comes out of that surgery a vegetable, or if he . . .”

“Shut up,” she hissed, seizing Michael’s hand and yanking him through the curtain to the hallway. “Don’t you ever speak like that in front of him again. Ever.” She hit his chest with her fists, thud after thud like low drumbeats, and Michael grabbed her, pulling her to him as she began to shout. She felt his arms grow tighter around her, felt her anger peak and then tick slowly down like a blood pressure monitor with one final, muted scream into his chest.

“Calm down,” he whispered, guiding her to the lounge and away from the eyes and ears in the corridor. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Claire yanked herself free and wiped her eyes, putting as much distance between them as the room would allow. “I think Nicky should have the surgery as soon as possible,” she said.

“Why?” His tears were flowing freely now.

“Because I know it’s going to work.”

Michael moved into her line of sight. “And you think you can trust your instincts? They’ve served you well up until now?”

“Damn it, Michael,” she said, the ticker soaring again, “I know I made a terrible choice, but don’t ever question the choices I make about Nicky’s health. Just remember who’s been there for every doctor’s appointment, and who’s done all the middle-of-the-night blood tests. I
know
our son.” She rested her arm on the wall. “Nicky’s going to wake up.”

“I want Bruce to get us a consult with one of his colleagues at Mayo. I could fly someone out tomorrow,” he said, stiffening his body.

“The doctors here are excellent, Michael. Bruce has total confidence in them, and it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and have someone here immediately. There’s no time for that.”

Michael cradled his face in his hands. A buzzer sounded in the distance. “I know,” he finally said, his voice stained with grief. “I know.”

 

Claire returned to Nicholas’s room and took out the blood-glucose monitor she kept in her purse. Another test between the nurses’ checks to give her some peace of mind. As she pricked the pad of his middle finger with the lancet and squeezed a droplet of blood onto the meter, she thought of Nick’s diabetes diagnosis years earlier, of how traumatic and overwhelming it had been. And how manageable, in light of the present circumstances, it really was. What she wouldn’t give for just diabetes now.

C
HAPTER
6

S
he remembered the moon peeking through the shades over Nicholas’s bed that night it all started, illuminating the silver stars on his ceiling and casting a strange glow on his then tiny nine-year-old face. His eyes were open and his brows were drawn tightly together in an angry V. Claire noticed a large, empty bottle of water on his night table as she sat down on the edge of his bed and stroked his hair.

“I can’t sleep,” he said, his voice unusually high, almost whiney.

“What’s wrong?” Claire looked at his heavy lids and the hint of black circles beginning under his eyes.

“I’ve had to go to the bathroom like ten times tonight.” Nicholas sat up, knocking Claire’s hand away.

She picked up the water bottle and wiped off the sweat ring from the night table with her fingers. “Did you drink this whole bottle before you went to bed? If I’d have drunk that much water, I’d have had to go to the bathroom like eleven times.” She poked his tickle spot and hoped for a smile, but the visible fatigue and irritability in his face worried her.

“I was having a bad dream and I woke up real thirsty, so I went downstairs and got the water.” Nicholas sat up against the headboard.

“What was your dream about?”

“I was in the backseat of Dad’s car and we were driving to soccer practice and I didn’t have my ball because Dad threw it out the window.” His jaw clenched and his watery eyes narrowed.

“You know Daddy would never really do that, don’t you?” She took Nicholas in her arms and hugged him tightly. “You’re going to be okay, buddy.” After a few minutes, Claire went to his closet and rummaged through the shelves, returning to the bed with a short-handled net, its rim decorated with dangling superheroes and dinosaurs.

“What’s that?”

“Your dream catcher. Remember?”

Nicholas sat up and took it from her hands. He turned it over and over, running his fingers across the netting, swatting it through the air in front of him. Claire asked if he’d like to hang it over his bed again, for old time’s sake. Nicholas didn’t speak for a while; he just gripped the worn handle tightly, and she wondered if he was coming down with some kind of virus. She knelt beside his bed, and after a few moments Nicholas put it down and interlaced his long fingers with hers.

“What does sublime mean?” he asked in that way that makes parents invoke words like
precocious
.

“Sublime?” Claire sat back on her heels, “Where’d you hear that?”

“On my radio, while I was trying to fall asleep.”

“Sublime means something that’s beautiful and perfect.” She searched for more appropriate words. “Something . . . heavenly.” She climbed into bed next to him and spread his blanket over the both of them.

 

The next morning Claire brought French toast sprinkled with powdered-sugar happy faces into the breakfast room where Nicholas was refilling his glass with orange juice. She placed their plates on the table and sat down across from him. He shoveled the French toast and some bacon into his mouth with unusual enthusiasm. After he plowed through a second helping and two more glasses of juice, Claire asked again if he felt all right, if he wanted to go to school—just to be sure.

Around lunchtime, Claire received a phone call from the school nurse, telling her that Nicholas had been demonstrating some symptoms that concerned her, and had asked if there was a history of diabetes in the family. Claire grabbed her car keys and was out the door in a flash, grilling the nurse about other possibilities. She called Michael on his cell in Boston. And as she heard herself explain the nurse’s theory to him, she somehow knew it was the truth, that Nicholas did have this frightening thing.

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions before you see the pediatrician, Claire,” he’d cautioned. “It could be any number of things. Right?”

She chewed at her upper lip and felt the sting of air and blood. “When can you be on the plane?”

There was a pause. “Why don’t you call me when we have a definitive answer from Dr. Stevens? Nicholas is going to be fine, he’s a tough kid.” His voice broke slightly. “Just be strong for him.”

“Strong? I’m not like your parents, Michael. I won’t inflict that ‘one must not display weakness’ bullshit on him. This is a nine-year-old boy here, not a teenager with a sports injury he can suck up.”

“Listen, this deal’s on the wire, and I’m sure I can get just about everything wrapped up by the time you’re finished at the doctor’s. And that way we’ll know for sure. Okay?” He spoke gently but convincingly. “Then I can be home within a few hours. I’ll have the plane waiting. I’m sure it’s just the flu, babe.”

There was no point in arguing over a few hours, or anything for that matter, with him. When Michael made up his mind about something, he could convince anyone of the correctness of his decision. And mostly she admired that about him. Paused in traffic, Claire caught sight of a homeless man standing on the median, shirtless under the already raging midday sun. He held a sign that read, “ALL TAPED OUT. PLEASE HELP.” Taped, she repeated to herself as she sped toward school.

When she and Nicholas arrived at the pediatrician’s office, Nicky went straight for the unoccupied Nintendo set, while Claire relayed the morning’s events to the nurse at the front desk. Nicholas continued battling Space Invaders as Claire sat across from him and drank in the image of her happy, carefree little boy—preserving this picture of childhood innocence in her memory.

“The good news is that we caught things early,” Dr. Stevens told Claire after an interminable wait for the blood test results. “He’s going to be fine just as soon as we start treatment.” He explained that it was insulin dependent, or juvenile diabetes, and that they would give Nicholas an injection to bring his blood sugar down and get him feeling better.

Claire repeated the strange diagnosis and stared at the painted fish swimming across the walls. “How do I do this, Bob? How do I tell him he’ll need shots every day for the rest of his life?”

“Why don’t we get Michael on the phone and just get through today first?”

She followed Dr. Stevens into his office and perched herself on the side of his desk by the telephone, where she dialed Michael and allowed the doctor to fill in the information she couldn’t convey.

“I’m on my way to the airport now. Have you told Nicholas yet?” he asked.

“Not yet. But he needs insulin.” The thought bore down on her again. It would be one of those visceral images seared into memory—the moment before her boy’s first shot as a diabetic, separating him from the afterward of a thousand more.

“Christ.” Michael paused. “What does this mean for . . . his future? What about school and sports? Can he still be a normal kid?”

Claire waited for the answer to Michael’s question.

“Nicholas can still be a normal kid. It just won’t be easy, particularly in the beginning when you’re all making adjustments. But this is a manageable disease.”

Over the speaker came the sound of static and muffled voices.

“Who’s there with you?” Claire asked, angry that he was so far away at such a crucial moment.

“What?”

“I thought I heard voices in the car.”

“It’s just a couple of the attorneys on the deal. They’re flying back with me.” More lowered voices. “Why don’t we talk to Nicholas together now? I want him to know I’m here for him.”

When the nurse brought Nicky in, his polo shirt was untucked and his hair stood up in sweaty tufts from his scalp. He plopped down onto the doctor’s couch and announced that he was starving. Dr. Bob told him he’d be able to eat just as soon as they talked about what his blood test results meant, and after he got some special medicine. Claire rubbed his back while Dr. Stevens explained to him, and to his parents, what it meant to have a pancreas that decided it no longer wanted to work.

Nicholas listened quietly, his feet frozen throughout the doctor’s G-rated description of the disease. But with the mention of daily shots and finger pokes, Nicholas’s body tensed and the flush drained from his face. Claire held him tightly, watching the tears tremble on his eyelids.

Nicholas wriggled free from his mother’s embrace, scooted off the edge of the couch and walked over to Dr. Bob’s desk. “Daddy,” Nicholas asked the telephone, “are you mad at me?”

Claire closed her eyes and turned her head away.

“Of course I’m not mad at you, pal. I’m just upset that this had to happen.”

Claire bent down next to him. “You’re gonna be fine, honey, just fine.”

He looked at her, studying her face and nodding.

“Nick Montgomery, you’re a champ and you’re going to be good as new in no time. You’ll be playing baseball and lacrosse all summer,” Michael said through the static. “You just stay tough.”

“When will you be home, Daddy?”

“Before dinner tonight, sport.”

Nicholas smiled through his tears and squared his shoulders.

C
HAPTER
7

T
he following afternoon, Claire waited in the corner of the hospital room as they shaved Nicholas’s head and prepped him for brain surgery. His hair fell to the floor in thick clumps, forming a downy brown blanket over the attendant’s feet. When it was done she wept at the pale scalp she hadn’t seen since he was a baby and ran her palm over the moony surface from his crown to his nose. She kissed his forehead and fingers. “I love you, Nicky,” she said, picking up a small handful of hair. “I love you.”

As Claire stood there thinking about the ever-changing landscape of experience, this was not a picture she could have ever fathomed. Seeing her boy against such a backdrop of upended lives and frantic hope, she felt a vein open and begin to bleed somewhere inside her, just as she’d felt before his first insulin shot all those years before. Because as desperately as she wished, she couldn’t trade places with him.

She rolled bits of Nick’s shorn hair between her thumb and middle finger until they resembled a feather—wispy and supple. “I’ll be waiting for you, honey,” she whispered on her way out. In the corridor Claire propped herself up against the shiny white wall and let Michael have a moment before they wheeled Nicholas to the OR.

When the time came, she and Michael helped roll the gurney as far as the double-door entrance to the operating room. They kept a two-foot distance between them on the side rail, making sure their hands didn’t brush as they made the tense walk. The bars they gripped were no longer shiny and reflective, but dull and somber-edged—what remorse would feel like, Claire imagined, if she held it in her hands. She wiped a sweaty palm onto her pant leg and said a silent prayer.

The surgery would last nearly four hours. Four hours to insert a lumbar drain, drill open Nick’s skull, dissect and retract the membranes, locate and expose the aneurysm, clip it, drain the excess blood, and close his skull with staples. Four swift hours of exacting precision in the operating room; four protracted hours of angst and uncertainty in the waiting room.

Claire and Michael didn’t find comfort in anxious chatter or mutual reassurances. After the previous night’s tense and blame-riddled vigil, they were both drained and barely spoke at all. She: chipped away the last remnants of her nail polish and feigned interest in Sudoku. He: text messaged and disappeared for longer than usual phone breaks, the food he brought back going cold and uneaten. Jackie sat with them briefly doing her best to encourage, but Claire had sent her home to be with her own family until the evening. And the room filled with the sound of two people breathing the heavy air of their guilt and resentment.

Claire thought about the last conversation she’d had with Nick, how he had twisted out of her arms to escape the library and all the awkwardness. How Andrew’s presence would forever stain the memory of that brief hug and kiss. And how she hadn’t realized in that moment that she might not have a thousand more chances at
I love you.
The silence bore down on her, pushing her deeper into a sinkhole. To speak or not to speak—such a strange question for two parents, she thought, as she listened to her own shallow breathing. The pungent warmth from the coffee urn in the corner suited the jittery mood of the room. From that day on, she knew she’d never be able to grab a latte to go without smelling June, hospital. Hyperventilation suddenly seemed likely on her list of waiting room possibilities.

“What did you and Nick talk about before you left for London?” Claire finally asked, well into the second hour. “You two seemed liked you were having a pretty intense conversation when I came by the study the night before you went.”

Michael startled up from his phone with swollen eyes and stared at her, though really he appeared to be looking into the past. His lips were moving as if he were having a dialogue with someone in his head, and after a prolonged silence, his mumblings found voice in a distracted whisper. “I should never have tried to keep . . . It was all so—” He buried his face in his hands. “Christ. Kids do stupid things.”

“Keep what?” she asked, confused, but recognizing the strangled remorse in his words. His last conversation with Nicholas had clearly not been a happy one either, their last memory together unpleasant as well.

Michael focused back in on her and winced. “Nothing.” His voice splintered and he clamped his lips.

In the cheerless bubble of their new world, Claire had at last found common ground with her husband. She pulled a quarter-sized clump of Nick’s hair from her pocket and held out her palm. Michael dipped a finger into it.

 

When Dr. Marks finally came in to speak with them, a lurid yellow sun was beginning its descent across the frame of the waiting-room window. He reported that the surgery had gone well. No intraoperative ruptures, no injury to the surrounding arteries. He’d had to remove a significant amount of blood from the hemorrhage, but with that, the pressure on Nicholas’s brain was also reduced. “Things looked good in there,” he told them.

Claire cried as she walked in small circles, her hands laced tightly under her chin. “Thank you,” she repeated over and over.

“And what about his recovery?” Michael asked.

“I’m hopeful we’ve minimized any damage. But based on the location of the aneurysm, your son will likely need physical and cognitive therapy when he emerges from the coma. To what extent, I can’t yet be certain.”

Claire stopped. “So now what?”

“Now we wait.”