Evan sat on the floor with his back to door 12B of Castle Heights. He didn’t know how long a neurosurgeon’s consultation should take, but Mia’s appointment was at ten and it was already past one o’clock. A long time in a neurosurgeon’s office didn’t make for optimism.
He was drifting off when the elevator dinged and a cacophony of voices spilled out. Here came the family, lumbering toward him, Mia’s face tight and stoic, Peter glazed, Wally red-eyed from crying, and Janet looking meek and defeated.
Evan popped to his feet as they descended on him.
Mia moved past him, fumbled her keys into the dead bolt. “I thought you were out of the country.”
She scarcely looked at him, but he could tell she wasn’t upset with him; she was barely holding it together.
“I’m back.”
The door opened, and Peter bounded into his room and slammed the door behind him.
They’d all sort of tumbled into the condo, and the adults now stood awkwardly around the wooden kitchen table, Mia leaning on a chair back as if for support, arms locked.
Wally and Janet looked stricken.
Janet said, “It’ll all be okay, Mia—”
“Janet? No. Okay? Just … no.” Mia was shaking her head.
Wally scratched his nose, looking down. “We … uh, should give you and Peter some space. Rest up, and uh, uh…” His voice was wavering.
“Is there anything we can do?” Janet pleaded. “Give us something to do.”
“You don’t need to do anything, sweetie,” Mia said.
Janet’s lips were trembling. “Just—please—tell me something to do.”
“Okay,” Mia said. “After the surgery everyone from the office is gonna be overly helpful and bring too much food by, and I don’t want Peter eating a bunch of frozen casseroles.” She emphasized the noun like it was a curse word. “Okay? I want him to eat healthy. And not all leftovers, you know? When Roger and I got married, we drove to Niagara Falls for a kind of ironic throwback honeymoon, and his mom sent us off with a Honey Baked ham. I’ve always thought that’s the definition of eternity: two people and a ham. So if you can make sure he’s eating well, that will give me one less thing to worry about. Okay?”
Janet bunched a fist over her mouth, nodded rapidly.
Wally looked on the verge of collapse. “I really think we should give you some space, sis.”
“Okay, Wally. I’d like that.” They embraced, and Wally sobbed into her shoulder a minute and said, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“Enough.”
Mia pulled back and managed a tremulous smile, and then Wally and Janet were gone and it was just Evan and Mia in the sudden silence of the condo.
Emotions were still swirling in the air, tangible enough to grab. Grief and fear, thick like a scent. Evan did what he often did, throwing up a filter, compressing the situation into boundaries that could be contended with, a set of challenges to be confronted. He needed facts and figures, and from them he would determine a battle plan.
He said, “I’m going to assume the news wasn’t good.”
“That is a fair assessment.” Mia took a breath, held it. Big exhale that puffed out her cheeks. “Could be worse, though.”
Evan said, “Diagnosis?”
“Cavernous hemangioma. A bleed. It’s not so much what it is as where it is. Dead center of the corpus callosum, millimeters from the fornices, which is the memory center.”
She seemed relieved to be talking facts. Evan knew it, too, the comfort of hard numbers, of staring a threat in the teeth unblinkingly.
“Requires a craniotomy,” she said. “Cut a hatch in the skull and drill right down through my brain.”
“Prognosis?”
“Fifteen percent or so I die on the table. Thirty I suffer permanent short-term memory loss. Like: In two years I’ll wake up every morning and still think Peter’s nine. And in ten years. And twenty. Maybe even every hour, every fifteen minutes, I’ll have to rediscover his real age and then figure out how to catch up to it. Not to mention what he’ll have to figure out. So I’d prefer the fifteen percent to the thirty actually, but I don’t get to choose.” Her eyebrows hoisted, a there-you-have-it punctuation. “So yeah. It sucks.”
“Like ham and casserole.”
A hint of a smile. “Like ham and casserole.”
“Date?”
“Monday. My mom had heart stuff, so I take a baby aspirin a day. I stopped today because: anticoagulant. They can’t wait for it to clear my bloodstream entirely—too pressing—but wanted to give it at least four days. Assuming I don’t get all gorked out by then. Are you…?”
“What?”
She bit her lower lip, rolled it between her teeth. “I don’t know if you’re … out of the country again. I think it might be good for Peter if … Shit, I don’t know.”
“I will try to be back.”
“You’ll try to be back.”
“Yes.”
“What you’re into. It’s life-or-death?”
“It is.”
“Right. Right. It always is.”
“But so is this.”
“Yes,” she said. “So is this.”
She kept her hands clenched on the chair back, the table between them, like she was walling herself off from him, the world. A tilt of her chin toward Peter’s closed door. “Would you like to see him?”
He had to be back in Guaridón, but it was clear she needed him here. What was more important? A pregnant young woman in the hands of the Leones? Or a terrified single mother and her nine-year-old boy? This was the kind of math he did not do. How was he supposed to balance these scales? He reached for the Seventh Commandment for guidance: One mission at a time.
Evan said, “No.”
She stared at him. “Okay.” She started to say something else, hesitated, caught herself.
There was a fragility in the air between them, as if they were both aware that they were embarking on the type of conversation that was outside the purview of their relationship. And that they’d have to tread lightly in case they broke something that couldn’t be put back together.
“Here we go.” Mia took a deep breath. “All the things I like you for aren’t the things you think I like you for.”
“My matinee-idol looks?”
Another near smile. “No. And not your two-percent body fat, which is nice sometimes but mostly annoying—like, eat a cheeseburger. The thing is, I know what you’re made of. I know what you’re capable of. I’ve caught a glimpse of it. But you have no idea what I’m capable of. And I am going to get through this alive. For Peter.”
“I believe you.”
“But. All my rah-rah, go-me, I’m-gonna-beat-this-thing energy? I can’t afford to indulge it when it comes to Peter. So I have to steel myself to make sure I get through while making plans for that little boy”—the first quiver in her voice—“in the event that I don’t. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly.”
“Right. You’re good at this because it involves danger and menace.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“Wally and Janet get custody of Peter if … ya know. You’ve met my brother. He has a great heart and I love him to the bone. But he’s a dipshit.”
“‘Dipshit’ might be harsh.”
“‘Dipshit’ is charitable. And I’m worried Wally might not have everything Peter needs.”
“I have money,” Evan said. “I will make sure Peter never ends up in a foster home.”
The words came out in a burst, with an intensity he scarcely recognized as something he possessed.
Mia was staring at him, surprised and—it seemed—moved. She knew nothing of his past, and he realized he’d just opened a window into the core of himself.
“I have money, Evan,” she said gently. “It’s not about money.”
“Okay.” He was trying to recover, backpedaling within himself. “What … what’s it about, then?”
“You’re a … hmm. A gentleman. And there aren’t a lot of places young boys can look and see gentlemen these days.”
“I’m not a gentleman.”
“You prove my point. And. I’d like you to be there for Peter. Emotionally.”
The sound went out. For a moment Evan only heard white noise and the thump-thump-thump of his heart. He knew that words were required, but they were out of reach. He had no idea what he was feeling or how to direct those sensations into sentences.
Mia watched him with patience. And what looked like kindness.
“You have to raise a kid to have trust that the world will treat him fairly,” she said. “Then maybe he’ll have enough trust to get through when it doesn’t. And I don’t want…” She tilted her head back, eyes pulling to the ceiling, holding the brimming tears in. “I don’t want him to ever need comfort and not find it.”
“That’s not what I do,” Evan said.
“What?”
“Comfort.”
“You do. More than you think.”
“This is too big a responsibility for you to risk being wrong.”
“I’m taking that risk,” she said. “I’m playing the odds as is, letting them, ya know, cut my head open.”
“If I promise to do something,” he said. “I do it. Every time. I don’t know that I can do this. So I can’t promise it.”
“I’m not asking for a promise. I’m laying my potentially last wish on you and leaving it up to your sense of duty. Which means you at least have to try.”
“How does someone try something like that?”
She thought about it. “A lot of people have good intentions but the wrong words. And you can fight them on the wrong words all day without seeing through to their intentions. Like you. If I just paid attention to your words, I never would’ve let you into my bedroom. And my … shit, I guess my heart. Blech.” She stuck out her tongue. “I’m shockingly not good at this.” Another breath. “But what I mean is, with kids, with Peter, he has the wrong words sometimes. What he says he needs. What he thinks he wants. You have to see beneath that. To what his intentions are. Because that boy?” Another quiver. “He’s got the purest intentions of anyone I know.”
Evan nodded.
She said, “And…”
“And?”
“When there’s a kid around, you have to try to be the best version of yourself. Me. But you, too, now.”
“Of myself?”
“Yes. Like, you suck at asking for help. I can’t be mad at you for that. But I sure want to be sometimes. And … I don’t want Peter to grow up like that. Not asking for help. Don’t put that on him. He’s a boy. He’ll get that enough. I want him to be … healthier.” She wasn’t crying, but there was a deep sadness in her words and great respect for Evan as well in her stating boldly what needed to be boldly stated. “I want him to be better than you.”
Evan said, “Me, too.”
She nodded. “Don’t hug me, please. A hug would wreck me right now.” She glanced to Peter’s closed bedroom door. “I need to go talk with him. And then just be with him. As much as I can.”
“I understand.”
Evan started out, hesitated. Looked back at her. “I’ll do everything I can to be here for your surgery.”
She summoned a sad smile that crinkled the edges of her eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Danger.”
She started toward Peter’s room.
Pausing halfway out the front door, Evan watched her walk across the living room. She set her hand on the doorknob, head lowered. Paused. Two seconds. Three. Four. Her hunched shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. Settled back lower than they’d been.
He watched her enter her son’s room, then eased out of her condo.
Halfway down the hall, the door to the trash room was ajar. The soporific voice of Hugh Walters echoed inside the walls. “—need to ensure that the chute width is up to code, as specified in section eighty-two of the NFPA’s waste- and linen-handling systems.”
At the sound of the HOA president’s voice, Evan clenched his teeth hard enough to engender an ache in his molars.
Assessing the open-door threat, he made a threshold evaluation, moving to a tactical stride. Light on his Original S.W.A.T. boots, he hugged the near wall to minimize exposure. He zipped by silently, padding to the elevator, finger extended to punch the up button, when—
“Mr. Smoak!”
Evan stared at the elevator doors. Freedom, mere inches away.
He turned to see Hugh striding toward him, clipboard in hand.
There was nothing in the world Evan wanted to see less right now than Hugh Walters with a clipboard.
Farther down the hall, a repairman stared after Hugh with exhausted dismay before withdrawing his turtle head into the trash room.
Hugh closed in on Evan like a self-guided missile. “I’m glad I caught you, Mr. Smoak. I feel that you and I got off on the wrong foot and never really found … well, I suppose the right foot.”
“I don’t actually have any issues I need to—”
“The thing is, here at Castle Heights the buck stops with me. When the trash chute is two inches too narrow. When there’s a cricket infestation in the garage. When there are service-animal provisions that must be updated.”
“About that, I don’t really require a—”
“And … well, this really isn’t very kind to say, but sometimes I get quite frustrated with our fellow tenants.”
“I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“I know I’m considered a bit of a hard-ass around these parts.” A self-satisfied chuckle. “But every time I’m tempted to judge someone for wanting environmentally friendly coffee filters in the lobby or asking to replace our perfectly suitable social-room chairs or having goddamned allergies”—Hugh paused, breathing hard, his face shiny, eyes huge behind the Coke-bottle lenses—“I stop and ask myself, I wonder what they’re feeling that I’m not? I wonder what vulnerabilities or worries they’re dealing with that I know nothing about?”
Hugh tapped the clipboard against his thigh, a show of emotional agitation. He was pushing himself here, getting out of his comfort zone. Evan couldn’t help but have a shred of admiration for that.
Hugh continued, “And … well, I want to tell you that I’ve waived the preregistration requirements for service animals. Because … well, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t know what worries you might have that I don’t know about, Mr. Smoak.”
Evan stared at him, dumbfounded. “I appreciate that.”
Hugh tipped his head in a nod. Evan saw him for the first time as an actual person rather than a self-created caricature. Hugh had always seemed one of those people who’d decided on a persona early in life and worn it so long and so rigidly that he’d forgotten he was anything else. But now Evan found himself wondering at Hugh’s inner life. What did he think about before he fell asleep at night? Did he need his clipboards and regulations the way Evan needed his missions and Comandments, because they gave him a sense of order, of purpose?
“I know I’m not as interesting as some of the folks who live here,” Hugh said. “You probably feel that way, too.”
Evan matched his confiding look.
“But … well, I’m reliable,” Hugh said. “And reliability might be considered … unsexy out there these days. But when someone is struggling with their allergies or anxiety, when they’ve lost faith that the rules will hold, that they can count on what to expect from the world, that they’ll be dealt a fair hand … I guess what I’m saying is that when they’ve lost trust, I want to be the one who can restore that for them.” He lowered his eyes and nodded a few times, as if only now agreeing with what he’d just said. “Do you understand?”
For the first time, Evan dropped any pretense of his cover. He felt like himself, his true self, answering an honest question with an honest answer. “I do.”
Hugh offered his hand.
Evan shook it.