“Can you ask her?” I ask. “Please.”
Sophie is silent for a moment, and I know that she wants to resist. She’s twelve now, no longer the scared little girl calling me in the middle of the night to tell me that she’d just seen her dad kissing a strange woman in the kitchen and worrying that I’ll be more upset that she’d been downstairs sneaking cookies past her bedtime. She understands betrayal, understands heartbreak, understands the permanence of death enough to know that the father she knew may never come back.
“Fine,” she eventually huffs.
She doesn’t mute me. I hear stomping feet and the creak of a door opening, Winona’s weary voice. They talk for a minute, and when I next hear a clear sentence, it’s from Winona.
“It’s fine,” she says. “She can go to yours.”
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Winona laughs. It’s the only appropriate answer to my completely asinine question, and the moment I ask, I wish I could snatch it back. With her kid in the room, she can’t afford to break down, which, it occurs to me, might be precisely what she needs to do. She’s not giving me permission; she’s calling in a favor.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I say. “Ask her if she wants me to bring Onix.”
“Yes please,” I hear Sophie answer in the background.
I’m on my feet and hunting for Onix’s harness as soon as I get their assent. As if he heard it too, Onix hobbles to his feet.
“Come on boy,” I say. “Let’s go get your baby.”
Twenty-Three
Sophie is quiet on the ride to my downtown apartment. She greets me with a “Thanks, Auntie” and scoots into the back seat with Onix, who immediately rests his heavy head on her lap. She strokes him mindlessly, and they both fall asleep. When we get inside, she waits until my door is closed before she asks me the question that has been weighing heavy on her spirit.
“Mom says Dad will be okay,” she says. “Is that a lie?”
Typical Sophie, to come out of the gate swinging. I busy myself helping Onix out of his harness, and when I straighten, she’s still staring me down.
“We’re being optimistic,” I say.
“It’s brain cancer,” Sophie deadpans. “Isn’t it dumb to be optimistic?”
I fight back a grimace. Both Winona and Brandon are brilliant people; it should come as no surprise that their daughter is as well. I hold out a hand for her coat, then stuff the pink puffer jacket into my closet as Sophie stands behind me, waiting for my response. When Sophie first started asking questions—endlessly, at the tender age of three—she’d been impatient for answers, demanding and irritatedwhen they didn’t come immediately. Now I’ve learned that she appreciates thoughtfulness and truth over speed.
“Hope is never dumb, nugget,” I say.
It’s the right thing to say, because her doll eyes well with tears.
“Okay,” she says, nodding vigorously, as the tears begin to pour out. “If you say so.”
I pull her into my arms as her body shakes. Her mother is probably crying like this too, alone in her bedroom, and I ache. Brandon will never mean to me what he means to them, but I know him in a different way. He’s never been my lover or my parent, but he has been my colleague and friend. I have seen how he manages exhaustion, how he comports himself when his body is pushed to the limit. Hewillsurvive this.
I just have to figure out what exactly he’s surviving.
When I tuck Sophie in to sleep—in my bed, with Onix, who relishes the opportunity to snuggle with his second favorite person—I begin to research. I’ve been considering supernatural explanations rather than scientific ones, but what if the culprit is biological? Science, after all, is magic to the uninformed; I imagine that if I went backward in time and showed the people of eras past a device that could not only communicate with anyone across the globe but also record perfect images of them in motion, they would brand me a witch and keep hold of my phone as a cursed relic. What if it’s something that sits latently in Leila’s and Julian’s bodies but can reanimate in the people they touch? What if they have the effect ofToxoplasma gondii, the bacteria that removes fear from prey animals and leads them to deliver themselves to their predators, or the rabies virus, which creates a hysterical fear of water and an insatiable need for violence in its victims before killing them? I think about Brandon’s obsessiveness over his wife, how he rushed to obey her commands—What if it’s caused by an autoimmune disease, like an encephalitis?I’ve read books on miraculous recoveries from diseases thought to be entirely psychological; if there is a component of this in Brandon’s condition, it would do us good to find it.
I stay up too late going down rabbit holes with strange dead ends, wake up early, make Sophie a big breakfast. She’s in better spirits after blueberry pancakes and a good night’s rest, and on the drive to Oak Park she’s back to her chatterbox self, switching between her favorite K-pop songs and giving me the lowdown on the latest of her dance troupe drama. I half listen, my mind coursing over what it learned last night. I can’t stop thinking aboutThe Recurring Nightmare. Most of Margaret West’s work is abstract, and this piece, the sole work chosen to remain at Harrison & Conrad, is a stylistic departure. Did Julian select it himself?
“How was she?” Winona whispers when her daughter flies back into her house.
“The bravest little soldier,” I say truthfully.
So brave that she makes me want to be brave too.
If I want answers, I’ll have to do the one thing I’ve been avoiding so far: going to the source. I need to find Julian.
I put aside my pride and try the simplest strategies first, but when I call his phone number, the line doesn’t work, and trying from my alternate numbers reveals that it’s less likely that I am blocked than it is he changed his number entirely. His emails bounce back regardless of sender. I draw the line at going to his apartment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I talked to his doorman and found he’s moved too. Julian clearly doesn’t want to be found.