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“Well, what we have here, I think this is a home, and it looks like I’m going to have a baby in it. That’s why this can’t be happening. I need to know you’re with me. Totally. All these things I learned about you today, they’re … God, they’re pretty fucking unsettling, is what they are. But even though you’ve kept so much from me, I believe, in my heart, that I know you. That I know the kind of man you are. I’m willing … I was going to say forgive. I don’t know that I’m there yet and I don’t know when I will be. But I want to move past this, so long as you’re totally honest with me going forward.”
“I will be,” I said.
“I feel like I’m walking along the edge of a cliff,” she said. “Any second now, I’m going to fall.”
I dragged my chair around the table until it was butted up next to hers, put my arm around her, and held her close.
“I’m telling you, we’re going to be okay.”
“You’re a good man,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I see how you are with Tyler. How patient you are. You’re not pushing things with him. He needs time.”
“I know.”
“He’s never going to see you like you’re his father. But a big brother, maybe. A mentor.”
“I’m giving it my best shot,” I said.
“Tyler’s not perfect.”
“Maybe that’s something he and I have in common.”
“Please tell me this is just a blip. That this, whatever this is, that it’s going to pass.”
“It will,” I assured her, putting my arm around her. I felt her softening in my arms, accepting my comfort.
I added, “Look, if it really was Brie, she’d call me, wouldn’t she? She’d get to a phone and she’d call me and say, hey, guess who’s back in town.”
That was when the phone in my pocket started to ring.
Nineteen
Albert and Isabel entered their mother’s hospital room quietly. They had brought someone with them. And it wasn’t Isabel’s husband, Norman.
Elizabeth had been taking a break from watching the news, her endless flipping through CNN and MSNBC and Fox, thinking that the world she was leaving was in a much bigger mess than the one she came into. She thought back to when she worked in newspapers, tried to remember if the country was ever in as bad a shape as it was now. Sure, she edited and slapped headlines on countless stories involving unimaginable heartache. But at least back then it seemed as though they were spaced out some. You didn’t have a mass shooting every day. There weren’t kids in cages. A pandemic hadn’t brought the nation’s hospitals to breaking point. You didn’t have political parties making excuses for domestic terrorists.
Maybe Isabel had been right the last time she was here, making her turn off the damn TV.
But now she was back, with her brother and this other man. Her eyebrows went up a notch at the sight of the stranger.
“Hey, Mom,” Isabel said. “This is someone we’d like you to meet. This is Max. Max, this is our mother, Elizabeth.”
Max stepped forward and, tentatively, extended a hand. Elizabeth placed her bony fingers into his palm and he gave them the gentlest of squeezes.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Um, no,” Max said.
It had been nearly two hours since Albert, Isabel, and Norman had stood in the parking lot, wondering whether to go back to their mother’s room and tell her that they had seen a woman they thought could be Brie.
Albert, initially, thought it was a good idea to head straight up there and break the news. But Isabel was worried about giving their mother any false hope that their sister might still be alive.
Norman agreed. “You can’t go raising her spirits on something as flimsy as this. We saw that woman from several floors away. It could have been anybody.”
“Maybe a false hope is better than none,” Albert said.
But then he made the point that their mother might not even believe them. She was, after all, a hardened skeptic. She’d think they’d made it all up, that it was some cheap ploy to make her feel better, to boost her spirits in the time that she had left.
“But what if it was somebody other than us?” Albert had said. “Not a relative.”
