CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“MEETING!” RICK BELLOWED THROUGH THE MOROSE BUZZ offices. “Now!”

The shit had hit the fan. Somehow, Buzz missed Owen Wilson shoving his tongue down the throat of a nineteen-year-old model at Liquid. And while stories like that usually constituted a blip on the slime-covered celebrity radar, this affair seemed to have stuck, rendering Buzz disastrously behind the other tabs. Ideally, this would be the moment Sean would save the day with a quick call to Gino, who in turn would stalk the star until he or she acted like a moron, looked like shit, stripped naked, or ended up in another compromising position.

But today Gino wasn’t answering. A little research revealed that a run-in with one of Katie Holmes’s bodyguards had laid him up in a fifteen hundred dollar per night room at New York Hospital.

Sean picked up the phone at his desk and put in a call to Lauren Ropa, the photographer who broke the Madonna thing for Star last year.

“Let’s go!” Rick was still yelling. Sean joined the staffers who were trudging toward the conference room heavily. He refused to take Rick’s theatrics too seriously, but he seemed to be the only one.

“How the fuck do we turn this around?” Rick’s face was red and the circles under his eyes were darker than Sean had seen them. “Hey, I’m talking to all of you. Wake up!”

“I’ve got Ropa on this thing,” Sean offered. On it may have been an overstatement, but it was what Rick needed to hear. “If Owen Wilson so much as brushes the ass of a woman on line at Starbucks, we’ll get it on film.” He knew he should care more about the botched coverage. But he’d gotten an email from Camille that morning telling him the top reviewer from the Times was coming to his opening. Things were looking up. Finally.

“My very best clients will be coming,” she had said. “I guarantee the specialty collectors will take home a couple each.” A couple each. It was less than a month away.

“What are you smiling about, Benning?” Rick glared at him.

The whole room turned to look at him. “Nothing,” he said, trying to look like he cared. “Not smiling. We’ll fix this, but you’ve got to let us get to work.”

Rick shooed them out with a disgusted wave of his hand.

When Sean got back to his desk, the message light was flashing. He prayed it was Ropa telling him she’d already gotten some money shots. He put the phone on speaker and pressed play.

“Mr. Benning, this is Patty from Bradley,” the voice said. “I’m afraid there’s been a … well, there’s been an accident at school. A serious accident. Toby is at Mount Sinai, and you should go there as soon as you get this message. The address of the hospital is—”

As soon as he heard the word hospital, he couldn’t think straight. Somehow, his body went through the motions of getting him out of there fast. Don’t worry was what the school always said when they called during the day. Toby’s fine. But they hadn’t said that. Patty had used the word serious. Sean shoved his arms into his coat as he ran toward the elevator bank and punched the button. For strep or a fever it was a call from the nurse. The school had never told him to go to the hospital. He imagined stitches. Lots of them. A concussion. Broken arm. How long would it take to climb down forty-two flights? He punched the button again.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Rick was still flushed from the meeting.

“Hospital,” he spat out. “School just called, I—”

Rick’s expression softened a little. “What’s a matter? Toby okay?”

He had no idea. “Yeah, I’m sure he’s …” Sean trailed off, not knowing what to hope for, what to imagine. The elevator made a binging sound before it opened. He was already inside and jabbing at the button when Rick told him to go. The doors closed on Rick’s solemn, single-father nod that was supposed to be supportive but instead terrified him.

It was surreal, pulling up to Mount Sinai and pushing through the heavy doors to the pediatric emergency room. The scene was just as chaotic as it had been when he’d come with Calvin, but now every crying child and bloody bandage shot him full of such dread that he thought he might pass out. His eyes darted to the gurneys lining the walls. No Toby.

The attendant pointed Sean to a small room sectioned off by a curtain. Bev Shineman stood in front of it, frowning, waving her cell phone around to find a signal.

“Sean,” she said when she saw him. Her voice was maddeningly calm. “Toby’s unconscious, but he’s stable.”

“Unconscious?” Could he go back and change his wish to a broken arm or stitches? His heart raced as he parted the curtain. Toby lay still on the white sheets, an oxygen tube running into his nose and an IV taped to his left arm. His stomach twisted and he felt light-headed. This wasn’t happening. This was not the way you were supposed to see your child.

It was cold in the room. Too cold. He reached out to touch Toby, who looked so delicate, so fragile, in his non-sleep. He ran his hand gently through Toby’s hair. “Tobe, buddy. You’re gonna be okay. I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

Toby had been alone in the scary cold room. How could they just leave him there like that? He called to Shineman who was still outside the curtain.

She peered in, then stepped over the threshold delicately. “Are you okay? This must be very hard for you.”

“What the hell happened?” He was livid, terrified, helpless. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Let’s wait and talk to the doctor,” Shineman said. “He knows much more than I do.”

“What the hell happened to Toby?” He wasn’t a screamer, but now he couldn’t stop. “Where’s the fucking doctor?”

Fast footsteps stopped outside the room and Jess pulled back the curtain. Her face was red and she was out of breath. “How is he?” she asked.

“Do you know what happened?” He was desperate for answers. Why was nobody giving him any?

She nodded and tried to catch her breath. “Mr. Trencher said they were doing a relay race and halfway around the track Toby went down.” She was talking fast and her eyes looked scared.

“Neither of us saw this firsthand,” Shineman interrupted.

Jess kept talking as if Shineman weren’t there. “When he saw Toby shaking and grabbing his chest, he performed CPR and had one of the kids call 911.”

Then it hit him. This was his fault. He’d done this. Despite the temperature in the room, he was covered in a panicky sweat.

“I have a hunch we’re very close,” Dr. Altherra had said when she got the new Conners scales. “This is how we do it.”

“Do what?” he’d asked.

“Find the right amount for Toby. We keep going up ’til it hits, slowly and carefully.” And we watch closely to make sure we haven’t gone over. I’ve done this hundreds of times,” she assured him. “Don’t worry.”

Worry was now the tamest emotion he felt. Then he thought: Ellie. He had to call Ellie. She would never forgive him. And she’d be right. His fault. This was all his fault. There was no one else who could share the blame—or the guilt.

He turned to Shineman. “It’s the medication.” He was afraid if he moved, his legs would give out, his body would crumple. “This is just like those stories I read online …” He turned to Jess. “But he seemed fine, right? You said he was fine.” His mind raced as he tried to remember something, anything he might have missed, a clue that Toby wasn’t responding as well as everyone said he was. It didn’t matter. He was Toby’s father, he should have known. Then a wave of nausea washed over him. Because on some level he must have known. And he’d done it anyway. He’d been an idiot, agreeing to raise the dosage, to give him the medication in the first place. What had been the point? To turn Toby into a super-student, some robot that could keep up with the other overachieving children at this Ivy-League factory? When had he decided that Toby’s academic performance was more important than his health? What had he been thinking?

Jess opened her mouth to speak, but Shineman cut her off. “Sean, you should try to calm down.”

“My son is unconscious,” he yelled. “I’m not going to fucking calm down.”

“For Toby’s sake. You’ll talk to the doctor when he comes in, but I don’t believe this could have been caused by the medication. It just doesn’t add up.”

“Where the hell is the doctor?” It came out louder than he’d thought it would, but it didn’t feel loud enough. He pulled back the curtain. “We need a doctor in here,” he yelled into the hallway. “Hello?”

“We should give Sean some space,” Shineman said.

“I don’t want space. I want to talk to a goddamn doctor!”

“I’ll get one,” Jess said, and looked at Sean with an unguarded openness he hadn’t seen since The Night. She was gone a second later. He wished Shineman had gone instead.

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Sean,” Shineman said. “That’s not useful now.”

His head spun with the horror stories Altherra and Dr. Jon had told him to disregard. “There was a story online about a boy on Ritalin who dropped dead while he was riding his skateboard.” Dropped dead. God it was a horrible expression. He fought the tears burning behind his eyes.

“You have no idea what caused that boy’s death.” Shineman was trying to be reasonable. He wanted to strangle her. “Who knows if he had a preexisting condition? There are a million things that could have hurt that child that had nothing to do with the Ritalin he was taking to treat his ADD. You’re a good father, Sean. You did not hurt Toby.”

He wanted to hurt her. “Can you just stop talking,” he snapped. Why was she here, anyway? “Where’s the fucking doctor?”

Jess ushered the doctor into the room. He was unshaven and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

“This is Dr. Schwartz,” she said.

It looked like it took a lot of effort for Schwartz to extend his hand and shake Sean’s. “Your son had an arrhythmia—an irregular rhythm of his heart,” he said. “Which deprived his brain of oxygen for a short time.”

“His heart stopped beating?” Sean couldn’t believe he was standing here having this conversation, that this whole thing was really happening. “For how long? What does that mean?”

Schwartz rubbed his eyes. “No one knows,” he said. “We have to wait.” He wasn’t in a coma, Schwartz said. He kept calling Toby’s condition a persistent vegetative state. Vegetative. Like vegetable. For a moment, it was as if all the molecules that made up Sean’s body, his brain, the universe, had come undone. He wasn’t sure what the purpose of anything was.

Schwartz said Toby’s organs were functioning on their own but that there was no way of knowing how extensive the damage was—especially to his brain—until Toby regained consciousness. If he regained consciousness.

Sean took deep breaths to avoid vomiting. “This is my fault,” he said, shaking. He told the doctor about the Metattent Junior. “That’s what this is from, right?”

Dr. Schwartz crossed his arms in front of his chest. He wore a thermal T-shirt under his green scrubs. He pursed his lips in thought. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. “What I do know is methylphenidate is an amphetamine. Amphetamines accelerate the heart rate, and if someone is exercising and it increases to a dangerous level yes, that can cause problems.”

“So … but …” The room was starting to sway. “It’s from the pills, right?”

“Look,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “Not that this has much to do with your son’s case, but I took Ritalin all through med school as a study drug. Everyone I know did. This kind of reaction is extremely rare.”

Sean assumed this piece of information was supposed to make him feel better. He wanted to take the guy by the shoulders and shake him as hard as he could. “So why is this happening? Why is my son unconscious?”

“I wish I could tell you more. All I can say is that in healthy children with no preexisting condition, this kind of thing is very rare. Very.” He paused. “Does he have any kind of heart condition that you know of?”

“No, of course not.” Toby’s heart was fine. At least he thought it was. He did a quick mental inventory of his dead relatives, cataloguing how they died. His father’s father died of a heart attack. Did that count? Maybe there was something buried in his genes that Sean should have known about, told someone about.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Sean asked, focusing all his mental powers on the doctor’s brain and willing him to say yes. Yes. It was such a simple word.

“You have to understand,” the doctor said, “in any given population of children, there are always a few instances of sudden death whether they’re taking medication or not.” The word death hung in the air. This guy was brutal. Had he ever heard of bedside manner?

Dr. Schwartz tried to gloss over the ominous report he’d just given. “The good news is he’s still alive and he’s breathing on his own. Let’s hope he wakes up in the next forty-eight hours.” The doctor paused. “Because if he doesn’t, the chances that he will, get slimmer and slimmer. Mr. Benning, you should be prepared. This kind of thing can go either way.”

The doctor might as well have told him to prepare himself for the end of the world. Sean collapsed into the chair next to Toby’s bed and listened to the monitor’s hypnotic beeps. He wasn’t at all prepared, much less remotely willing to entertain the idea that Toby might … He couldn’t even think the word. He couldn’t bear it.

He had to call Ellie. And Nicole. Dick and Maureen. He had to get everyone on board so that Toby would not be alone for a second. He had a surge of energy when he realized there was something he could do. It wasn’t much, but it changed everything. He took out his cell phone but he couldn’t get reception.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Go,” Jess said. “I’ll stay.”

Gratitude surged through him. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Toby. “I’m going to call Mommy.”

He left Ellie a message telling her to get into the city and come to Mount Sinai as soon as humanly possible. He told her that Toby was unconscious, but he didn’t tell her why. Why should he? At least not on her voice mail, not like this. That conversation could wait. Besides, the doctor didn’t say for sure it was the pills.

Sean also left a message for Ellie’s parents. Their machine said they were on a Queen Elizabeth cruise. Since they didn’t believe in cell phones, they wouldn’t get the message until they came home. Nicole was on her way.

When he got back to the ER, Shineman was gone, thank God. Jess watched Toby silently. She looked like she might cry.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Can I talk to you?”

A nod was all he could manage.

“I don’t know how to …” And then she was crying. “I noticed something earlier today at school. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but Toby was acting, well, kind of off. I started to email you, but …” She took a deep breath, trying to stop crying, but the tears came in another wave. “I wanted to give it ’til the end of the day, to make sure Toby wasn’t just … coming down with a cold or something.”

His lungs quivered. “Off how?”

“There were no jokes, no smiles, no goofing around.”

Another surge of anger, no, hatred as he remembered Shineman’s constant nagging about Toby’s behavior. “That’s what the school wanted,” he said bitterly.

“He just didn’t seem like himself, is the only way to say it. He didn’t eat lunch again today. And I’m not sure about this, but … I think his left hand was twitching a little during reading.”

Sean closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Toby at school, before it happened.

“I didn’t want to jump the gun.”

“So you just let him suffer?” Jumping the gun could have prevented this. An easy phone call. An email. Toby’s life had been in her hands. He could never have imagined Jess would be the target of the kind of anger building in him.

“I made the wrong choice,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Screaming at her wasn’t going to change anything, but he couldn’t help it. “Look at him.”

He stared at Toby, rehashing every moment, every wrong decision along the way, wishing he could go back and do it all again. He was mad at Jess—furious—but not as mad as he was at himself.

She touched his arm, an offer of solace. But he didn’t want solace. He wanted Toby back.

“Get out,” he said, shaking.

“I’m so sorry.” She looked stricken, miserable.

“Could you just get the fuck out?!”