We just kept walking, quick strides, as if we were racing, but we didn’t know where. My head was full of numbers, percentages, 80, 90—the chance of my son staying alive.
“Can you wait? Can you please wait?” Anna said.
I stopped. We were standing on Cavendish Square, in the gardens under a bronze statue, and it had started to rain.
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t understand. Does he look like he’s got a...”
“No,” Anna said. “No, he doesn’t.” She shook her head, and her chin began to dimple and then quiver and then, in the afternoon drizzle, she began to cry.
“I wish it were me, I just wish it were me,” she said, and I put my arm around her and pulled her closer, and she rested her head on my shoulder and we stood like that, her tears wet on my shirt, listening to the sounds of the city, the sounds of other people’s worlds.
“We should get back,” Anna said suddenly, her face a ghostly white. The rain was beating down now, gasoline rainbows in the gutters, a dark blanket of cloud suffocating the city.
I needed to see Jack. To take him in my arms and feel his warm skin on mine. I didn’t want him to be alone. Once, when he was three or four, he said that he was sad because Peppa Pig didn’t want to be his friend. It broke my heart. I could not bear to imagine Jack’s loneliness, like the feeling, as a child, of wetting the bed in someone else’s home.
* * *
Jack ran toward us when we got home. I picked him up and swung him around. He looked so alive that evening, boisterous, oversugared by his grandmother.
Anna’s mother could see it in our faces. “So how was it, any news?” she said.
“We can talk about it later,” Anna said quickly. Janet narrowed and then widened her eyes, like a puppy wanting a treat, and I wanted to scream at her, can you just wait, can you just fucking wait.
“Well, Jack has been a very good boy,” Janet said, ruffling his hair. “We’ve been reading stories.”
I resented Janet being here, in our home, in London. A woman who had spent her life between rural Suffolk and Kenya, who always said that city life wasn’t for her. After Anna’s father had suddenly upped and left for his beloved Africa, Janet said there was nothing for her in Suffolk anymore. Her husband’s abrupt leaving, a month before Jack was born, was rarely discussed. He had a calling, Janet said, a desire for solitude, to be closer to God. A desire to be closer to the village girls, Anna said, although she could not say such a thing to her mother.
The church arranged the flat for her. A little place above a Lebanese barbershop on Praed Street, just a few doors down from the drop-in center where she served goulash to the homeless in return for a book of prayer. She tried, but she could not hide her pain, her shame at being abandoned. You could see it in the slight hunch she had developed in her shoulders, the sag of skin on her face that had nothing to do with age.
“We did a story about Daniel,” Jack said, “and they throwed him in with the lions but they didn’t eat him because they would get in troubles.”
I didn’t like Janet teaching Jack Bible stories but now wasn’t the time. “Ooo, I know that one about the lions,” I said. “That’s a good one.”
Janet smiled at me approvingly.
“Right, beautiful,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
We took longer that evening with Jack’s bedtime routine. We both read Shark in the Park, and then we tucked him in, doing snug as a bug in a rug, once, twice, three times. How could I reconcile all this, the way he lay down, clutching Little Teddy and his flashlight, tucking his knees up to his chest, with what we had just been told?
When I got downstairs, Anna and her mother were sitting in silence, rigid, their familial response to crisis.
“I am very sorry to hear the news,” Janet said, looking up at me.
“Thank you, Janet.”
She shook her head. “Poor little mite,” she said. Little mite, like a helpless Victorian child, Tiny Tim but worse.
“I will be praying. For you all, every day,” Janet said, looking down into her lap. Anna remained still. She had not moved a muscle since I entered the room.
“I don’t think Jack needs prayers right now,” I said. She was acting as if he was dying. “This is something that can be cured. That’s what they’ve said.”
Anna’s mother nodded sympathetically, but there was something robotic about her reaction, a rote response, as if she was counseling a wayward drunk at the drop-in center. She kept shaking her head. “Of course, of course, but what a terrible thing. And so young. Just a child.”
I couldn’t listen to her anymore and left the room, taking refuge in the office upstairs. There was something about her response, a smugness, almost as if she had always known this was going to happen. Poor little mite, as if Jack was forsaken, done-for already.
* * *
After Janet had gone, we sat in the living room. Anna, still pale, sat in silence, watching the finance channel. Later, we looked at a list of pediatric neurosurgeons that Dr. Kennety had already emailed us. When she went up to bed, I sat downstairs and heard her pause outside Jack’s door and then go into his room. In a little while, she came
