For if.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, on her side, where the man with the case had stood.
“And my mother.”
Elise almost laughed.
“Your mother asked me, in September, why I looked tired.
I said I was seeing a specialist.
She asked what kind.
I said it was private.
She’s been calling Mrs. Dunphy every week since.
Mrs. Dunphy’s told her about the car.
Your mother thinks I’m having an affair with a man who parks at midnight.”
“She called me.
Three weeks ago.”
“I know.
You hung up on her.
I heard you from the laundry room.”
“I was on your side.”
“I know you were, Ben.
That’s why I couldn’t tell you.
You’d have been on my side so hard you’d have broken.”
Gabriel knocked.
Once.
Soft.
“Elise.
It’s been twenty-two minutes.”
She held out her arm.
He came in, and set up the pump on the nightstand — my nightstand, I noticed, because hers was covered in the things she’d been hiding — and swabbed the inside of her elbow, and I sat there and watched a stranger put a ne*dle into my wife with the gentleness of someone who had done it a hundred and forty times.
“You can hold her hand,” Gabriel said, not looking up.
“Most of them do.”
I held her hand.
It took eleven minutes.
“It’ll only take a minute,” I said, when it was done.
Elise looked at me.
“That’s what he says every night.
So I don’t count.”
Down the hall, a door opened.
Lily stood in the bedroom doorway in her pajamas, with the pink backpack on, because she’d fallen asleep with it, and she looked at the man in scrubs, and at her mother’s arm, and at me, and she said, in the voice she uses for the moon:
“Is he the man?”
“Yes, baby.”
“Is he bad?”
I looked at Gabriel Ortiz.
“No,” I said.
“He’s the opposite.
Come here.
I think it’s time somebody explained to you what he’s carrying.”
PART 3
Dr. Amara Sekou’s office was on the fourth floor of the teaching hospital, and she was fifty-four, and she had the kind of face that had delivered forty percent to a great many people and had never once rounded it up.
“Mr. Corliss.
Your wife told me you’d be angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“She also told me you’d say that.”
I laughed, which surprised both of us.
She laid it out.
Five months of nightly infusions.
One month left.
Bloodwork every two weeks, which is what the vials were for — Gabriel drew them, Dr. Sekou read them, and the numbers had been, in her words, “moving in a direction I’d describe as encouraging and would not describe as anything else until the six-month panel.”
“When’s the six-month panel?”
“Three weeks from Thursday.”
“And if it’s not encouraging?”
Dr. Sekou did the thing Elise had said she’d do.
She told the truth.
“Then we talk about second-line options.
Which exist.
And which are harder.
Mr. Corliss, I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be fine.
I told a fourteen-year-old that once, early in my career, about his father, and I’ve never said it since.”
I looked at her.
“That’s — ”
“Your wife told me about your father.
She told me about the CVS.
She told me, in this office, in week one, ‘My husband’s father d*ed of something with a name like this and he still can’t say the word, and I’m not putting him in a chair next to my bed for six months unless I know it’s worth it.'”
“She said that.”
“She said it in about that many words.
Then she wrote a letter, and asked me to keep it.”
Dr. Sekou opened a drawer.
An envelope.
Elise’s handwriting.
FOR BEN AND LILY — IF.
“I’m going to give you a choice, Mr. Corliss.
I can hand this to you now.
Or I can hold it three more weeks, the way she asked.”
I looked at the envelope for a long time.
“Hold it,” I said.
“She wanted six months.
I can give her three weeks.”
Dr. Sekou put it back in the drawer.
“That’s the first thing you’ve said that she’d have predicted wrong.”
The pressure came on Sunday.
It came the way pressure always does in my family — by casserole.
My mother arrived at 4 p.m. with a dish she hadn’t been asked to bring, and my sister Dana, and Dana’s husband, and the expression Frances Corliss wore when she had “something to discuss.”
Elise was upstairs.
Resting.
Gabriel had said the fifth month was the hardest, and it was, and she’d been sleeping in the afternoons, and I had told my mother, on the phone, that Elise was “under the weather.”
“Under the weather,” Frances said, in my kitchen, setting down the casserole.
“Ben.
I have something to show you.
I’d like you to see it before she comes down.”
Her phone.
Photographs.
Mrs. Dunphy’s, from across the street, taken with a zoom lens I did not know Mrs. Dunphy owned.
A dark car at the curb.
1:08 a.m.
A tall man in a jacket, walking up my front path, carrying a case.
Another night.
Another.
Six photographs.
“Six times,” my mother said.
“That I know of.
Ben.
I didn’t want to be right.
But a man goes into your house every night while you’re asleep and comes out forty minutes later, and your wife has ‘a specialist’ she won’t name, and — ”
“Mom.”
