Page 46
“Angle, deeper, there – you’re in. Good.”
The rush of air is audible – that flat hiss of pressure finally finding somewhere to go – and the monitor starts climbing before the tube’s even secured. Ninety-one. Ninety-four. Lopez threads the tube, sutures it down, and his hands, I notice, have stopped shaking entirely. They knew the whole procedure. They always did. Fear was just temporarily standing in the way.
I had that shake once. I remember mine: intern year, a July night, a chest that needed a tube and hands that had decided they belonged to somebody else. The attending was a doctor named Ikeda, flat calm from the eyebrows down, and she didn’t take the clamp from me either. She put her hand over mine, exactly that weight, and waited me through the pleura, and said one word on the other side of it. I’ve been handing the word down ever since. Some things you inherit on purpose.
“Post-placement film. Watch the output.” I strip my gloves.
I walk away. That’s the whole ceremony. The praise was in the good, and he’ll figure that out in about four years, when he says it to someone else.
At the nurses’ station, Mamá is on the phone, threatening the blood bank if she doesn’t get O-neg here in the next five minutes. She watched the whole thing – she watches everything. She doesn’t say anything as I pass. She looks at me over her reading glasses and gives me one nod, and goes back to the phone. From my mother, that’s a standing ovation.
By 04:30 the board is yellowing and I’m at the lounge window with coffee that tastes like the building. Seven patients came in tonight and I wasn’t scared once. Chaos, I can run. Chaos has vitals. Chaos responds to protocol.
At 10:00 tomorrow – today actually – Preston and I have an appointment at a fertility clinic in Manhattan, and my heart rate is already up.
There’s no protocol on the planet for that waiting room. Believe me. I already checked.
The clinic occupies the top two floors of a building on the Upper East Side that doesn’t have a sign, because buildings like this don’t need signs.
The waiting room has a waterfall.
Not a fountain. A waterfall – a full sheet of water coming down a slate wall into a trough of smooth river stones, softly lit, making the sound money makes when it wants you to feel calm about spending it. The magazines are architectural journals, and they’re current, which unsettles me more than anything else in the room. I’ve spent my whole life in waiting rooms where the newest magazine predates the patient.
The walls are lined with framed, handwritten thank-you notes. I read three before I realise I recognise the names – not from medicine. From the magazines you’d normally see in checkout lines at the grocery store.
“That one,” Preston murmurs at my shoulder, nodding at a note in violet ink, “is a Grammy winner thanking Dr. Rosenthal for ‘making the impossible a duet.’ The album that followed was called Duet.”
“How much does this place cost?”
“My mother is handling it, which means more than you want to know.” He squeezes my hand. “Just breathe.”
Of course we’re not alone. On paper, this is a consultation for two prospective fathers and their gestational carrier. In practice, we’ve arrived as a delegation.
Elena’s on the leather couch with a folder in her lap – her folder, tabbed, because she took one glance at Catherine’s navy notebook last week and looked envious. Mamá sits beside her, purse on her knees, reviewing the waterfall with the expression she reserves for anything that wastes water. And Catherine has taken the chair nearest the consultation-room door, wearing a suit the colour of a verdict, notebook open to the page headed SPECIALISTS. Dr. Rosenthal is number one on her shortlist. Ranked, she informed us in the car, by success rates, discretion, and the acceptability of his waiting room.
“The waiting room is acceptable,” she announces now, as a finding.
“The waterfall’s a lawsuit,” Mamá says. “Someone slips on that mist, they’ll own the floor.”
“The mist is calibrated, Rosa.”
“So is my knee, Catherine. It’s telling me rain and litigation.”
I lean toward Preston. “Why are our mothers here?”
“You say that as though there was a version of events where they weren’t here. We were never going to be consulted about the guest list for the conception of their grandchildren. To be fair, we’re barely being consulted about the conception.”
The consultation-room door opens.
The chart version: male, approximately sixty, well nourished, well dressed. The chart version is a lie of omission.
Dr. Rosenthal enters the way weather enters. The suit he’s wearing is burgundy with a sheen to it, wide-lapelled, cut in a style last considered dangerous on a dance floor in 1982 – expensive, tailored, and clearly no one in forty years has had the courage to tell him disco died. Under it there’s a silk shirt open two buttons past regulation, and a gold chain sitting in the chest hair like it pays rent. There’s a watch heavy enough to require its own consent form, and when he smiles – he was smiling before the door opened, possibly since 1979 – there is, unmistakably, gold in it. Two teeth. Maybe three.
“The Silva-York party,” he says, warm gravel, broken in by thirty years of saying mazel tov in every tax bracket. “Or the York-Silva party. We’ll let the lawyers fight about the hyphen. Come in, all of you – a family that shows up together is already ahead of the curve.”
He shakes Preston’s hand, then mine – dry grip, two pumps, reads my calluses like a palm reader – and then he arrives at our mothers, and everything I need to know about the next thirty minutes happens in eleven seconds.
He takes Mamá’s hand first.
