CHAPTER THREE

SEAN HAD NEVER ENTERED MOUNT SINAI THROUGH THE AMBULANCE entrance and was disoriented as he raced after Calvin’s gurney into pediatric emergency, otherwise known as hell. Inside, he recognized the windowless room from last year when Toby had fallen off of Calvin’s bunk bed and hit his head on the way down. He’d turned out to be fine, but the six hours in emergency had traumatized them all. Looking around now, he recognized the terror on the faces of the desperate parents trying to calm screaming babies, cool fevers, and staunch bleeding.

A team of doctors who looked like they were just out of med school circled Calvin, listening to his heart and taking his pulse. The paramedics reported what they knew: no preexisting conditions, no allergies, all in all a healthy eight-year-old boy.

A 12-year-old in a doctor’s coat turned to Sean. “Can you tell me what happened today?” Her eyes were huge and dark like in Japanese animé.

“Um …” He had no idea what had happened. “I … we found him on the stairs. He was unconscious and kind of … flailing around.”

“Does your son have any known allergies to medicine, food, anything you can think of?”

“I’m not his father.” He’d tried to make that clear in the ambulance. “But I don’t think Calvin has allergies. According to the file, I mean.”

“Have there been any changes to his routine recently? Has he taken any medication or been out of the country? Has this ever happened before?” She stared at him with her cartoon eyes waiting for something. Anything.

“I don’t think so. I have no idea,” he stammered. “I’m not his …”

Shineman rushed in. “There you are,” she panted. She reeked of breath mints. “His parents are on their way.”

“Let’s get him on a monitor and take his vitals.” An orderly in teddy bear scrubs began sticking electrodes on Calvin’s chest.

Sean heard Cal Drake before he saw him. “Where the hell is my son?” he boomed. His footsteps were heavy but fast. He raced around the corner and stopped short when he saw Calvin lying motionless, hooked up to oxygen, with an IV in his left arm. Melanie trailed a few paces behind. When she caught up, she let out a gasp. “Calvin!” she sobbed and tunneled through the sea of residents and interns to hold her son.

“Jesus Christ.” Cal exhaled slowly. He looked around for what he considered to be a real doctor, but finally focused on the girl with cartoon eyes, who was marking information on a chart. “What’s wrong with him? Will he be okay?”

“When we finish these tests we’ll know more,” she said.

He turned angrily to Shineman. “What the hell happened?”

“He collapsed on the stairs,” she said. “Sean and the new third-grade teacher found him there. They may have saved his life.”

Melanie turned her head toward Sean and mouthed thank you through a stream of tears. Cal glared at Shineman, concentrating all his fear, helplessness, and hostility into tasers that shot from his eyes. “What the fuck was my son doing in the stairwell by himself?”

Shineman spoke extra quietly to counteract the yelling. “This is a tense time,” she said. “For everyone.”

“Oh, you’re going to feel a lot of tension,” Cal spit out. “Believe me! I entrust my son’s safety to you and this is how you protect him?” His voice escalated, though it hadn’t seemed possible. “I’d like an answer to my question.” His nostrils flared. He was waiting—for an answer, for someone to blame. The doctors furiously took readings and looked about as bewildered as Sean felt.

As her husband tore Shineman a new one, Melanie clung to her son, kissing his hand and begging him to wake up. She wouldn’t remember the details of any of this. He could see that everything else had fallen away, that she was channeling everything she had into willing Calvin to be all right. Watching her sob over Calvin, he imagined Toby on the gurney. If he didn’t slip out now, he would start crying too. He backed away slowly. “I should go,” he said, even though no one heard or cared. “I hope Calvin’s okay.”

As soon as he hit the sidewalk, he broke into a run. He had no destination, just a need to get somewhere fast. It was below freezing and Sean had left his jacket in Toby’s classroom. When he saw the sign for Hanratty’s, he knew that was where he was going. He plopped himself at the bar, leaving a few empty seats between himself and a middle-aged man whose nose and cheeks blossomed in a web of burst capillaries. The man wore a ridiculous turtleneck covered with lobsters and was sweating alcohol.

The bartender dropped a paper coaster in front of Sean. “What can I get you?”

“Bloody Mary,” he said, before he’d made the decision. Drinking in the afternoon was always a bad idea. But he knew there was no way an overpriced cup of Starbucks coffee was going to do the trick. Besides, he reasoned, Bloody Marys were a daytime drink. “House vodka’s fine.”

Sean drank in silence and pretended to be riveted by a rerun of an old Lakers/Knicks game from the nineties on the flat-screen television behind the bar. He watched a young Billy Horn dribble through the Lakers’ best guys over and over to make six easy layups in a row. There was no denying he used to be a basketball god.

When the door opened again, a young, preppy guy bounded in, beaming unguardedly. “Hey man,” he said to the bartender. “Can I order some food to go?”

The bartender handed him a menu.

The guy picked it up, but didn’t have the patience to read it. “Do you have shrimp cocktail? My wife wants shrimp cocktail and I told her I’d find it for her. You have it, right?”

“We’ve got shrimp scampi,” the bartender said.

The guy considered it for a minute. “Yeah, okay,” he said in an annoyingly upbeat tone. “That’ll probably be fine. I’ll take an order of that to go.” He looked at Sean and the alcoholic next to him, and then at their drinks. “And I’ll have a beer. You know, while I wait.”

He sat at the bar and kicked his feet against his stool and fiddled with the coaster. The energy of the place was suddenly all messed up. The kid was going to want to make conversation. He could feel it.

“I just had a baby,” the kid blurted out. “I mean, my wife did.”

So his mood was pure joy. Sean decided to cut him some slack. “Congratulations.” He saluted with the Bloody Mary. “Boy or girl?”

“She’s a girl. Savannah. She’s got these little dimples.” He pulled his phone from his down jacket and stared scrolling through what seemed like hundreds of photos. He stopped on a picture of his new family. At home in an album somewhere, Sean had an almost identical photo of himself and Toby and Ellie that had been taken eight years ago at Mount Sinai. He loved that photo. In it, Ellie’s hospital gown is slipping, her hair is a mess, and she looks like she’s been through hell. She’d never looked more beautiful. In the photo they’re happy. In love. Hopeful. That first night they’d stared at Toby for hours. “This is it,” Ellie had said as they watched their child. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

The long haul hadn’t turned out to be all that long. “I’ll have another,” Sean said to the bartender.

After his second drink, he looked at his watch. He had five minutes to get back to Bradley. He slapped money on the bar and walked into blinding daylight. The new father carried a Styrofoam box of scampi. Sean didn’t have the heart to tell him that if a woman who’s just given birth asks for shrimp cocktail and you bring her shrimp covered in garlic and oil, there most certainly will be hell to pay. The kid would find out soon enough.

The vodka only kept him warm for the first block and a half, and as he ran past the Mount Sinai buildings, he thought of Calvin in the ER, Melanie sobbing over his lifeless body. Whatever buzz he’d had was gone now and he felt heavy, slow, sick.

He dragged himself into Bradley just in time to see the kids following their teachers, single file, down the sweeping staircase and across the lobby. A few girls in bellbottoms and sparkly T-shirts giggled. A tousled-looking boy tripped over his feet, but then recovered. Sean winced, remembering how he’d tripped over his own feet all through school.

He watched Toby search the room, find him, and shoot him a toothy grin. He seemed fine. All the kids did. Maybe Jess hadn’t told them about Calvin. Sean tried to read their faces, but you couldn’t tell with kids. Sometimes information like that took a while to sink in.

Jess had pulled herself together and was talking to the kids like she’d known them forever instead of just eight hours. From a distance it was easier to size her up. She’d said she played lacrosse in college, and now he saw it. She had a great body. Athletic, not sucked-out and bony like so many New York women. Her expression hovered somewhere between authoritarian and conspiratorial and was as intriguing as anything he’d seen in a long time—especially here.

He watched Toby laugh at a joke Zack was telling. Calvin should have been laughing right along with him. The other parents in the room still had no idea how lucky they were to be here picking up their kids while the Drakes prayed to see Calvin’s eyes open.

He took a minute to catch his breath, to steady himself before pushing through the wall of mothers.

“You’re Sean Benning,” a soothing male voice said. A hand descended on his back in a fatherly way. “Walt Renard.”

He shook the hand that was extended toward him. “Hi.” Walt Renard looked tanned, well-rested, like he’d just stepped off a tropical island.

“I hear you took Calvin to the ER.”

Walt was one of the parents who knew everyone, even though he didn’t fit The Bradley School’s parent profile. In all the years he’d seen Walt at dropoff and pickup, Walt had never once worn a suit and tie. Today he wore blue jeans, a button-down shirt, and expensive shoes.

“Word spreads fast,” Sean said, keeping Toby in his peripheral vision. “Does everyone know—about Calvin?”

“Not yet. Not most people.”

“I have no idea what happened, why it happened.”

“There’s nothing more terrifying than being a parent.” Walt removed his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his untucked shirt. “We do everything we can to protect them. And then something like this happens.”

Toby was looking for Sean across the room. “I ought to …”

“Yeah, you ought to get your son,” Walt said. “You did a good thing today.” He clasped Sean’s hand again. “Karma points,” he said, and gave a wave.

When Toby saw Sean, he stuck his hand in Jess’s direction for his formal dismissal handshake. As soon as they’d unclasped hands, Sean scooped Toby into a fierce hug. He hadn’t meant to, but there was no fighting it.

“Dad,” Toby said, embarrassed.

He hated letting go, but forced himself. “Don’t know what came over me,” he said. “Sorry.”

Jess handed him his jacket. “You might need this.”

He thanked her and put it on. She seemed so together. “How are you?”

“Fine,” she said, as though they hadn’t just saved a kid’s life together. Or probably saved it. “Thanks for the art project.” Apparently, he and Toby had been dismissed.

Toby said nothing as they walked to the bus stop.

“So,” he said, when he realized Toby was going to need some prodding. “How was the rest of your day?”

Toby shrugged. “Calvin went to the hospital.”

Sean nodded. Wait for it.

“Kayla said Calvin’s eclectic,” Toby said.

He tried to imagine ways in which Calvin could be eclectic but failed. “He’s what?”

“Eclectic,” Toby said. “Kayla saw a show on PBS. They get all weird and shaky when there’s a lot of bright light.”

He should really write this stuff down. “Epileptic?”

“Yeah,” Toby said.

Sean was pretty sure Calvin wasn’t epileptic. If he was, the doctors would have identified it fairly quickly. The blank looks on their faces had made the whole thing that much more terrifying.

“Drew said it could be a peanut allergy,” Toby went on. “Even though Chef Antoine doesn’t use peanuts.”

“Calvin doesn’t have allergies, Tobe.” Sean wondered if Toby would ask how he knew this, but he didn’t. It was a given that parents knew everything about everything.

“Isaac said school was going to have to pay lots of money if it was their fault.”

Perfect. Isaac was working the litigious angle. “So are you worried about Calvin?”

“Remember Patrick?”

Patrick, Patrick. “Uh …”

“Remember, he did the Empire State Building set for the second-grade play?”

Sean remembered some kid’s parents paying two hundred bucks to have a professional set designer come in and build the set.

“Patrick had a peanut allergy and had to go to the hospital, too. He came back.” Toby shrugged. “But then he left school after the summer.”

“Calvin doesn’t have any allergies.” He put his arm around Toby and they walked a while without speaking.

“I hope Calvin comes back.”

“Me too,” Sean said. “Me too.”