He had composed this little speech while in the Sloan Kettering waiting room. It had come out even better than it sounded in his head. So much so that Wayne’s only regret was that Jessica hadn’t been present to witness it.
“Why are you telling me this, Dad? Did the doctor say something?”
Wayne had intended this pep talk to cause his son to trust him more. But like so many things he did these days, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.
“No. Nothing like that,” he said, backpedaling. “What I’m trying to say is that you should know that you can always tell your mom and me the truth. Because there’s nothing you’re going to say to us that’ll change the way we feel about you. So, long story short, talk to me, Owen. I won’t judge. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll come up with something helpful. Or, even if I don’t, you’ll surprise yourself and feel better just for sharing.”
If Owen was moved by his father’s sentiments, he hid it well. “Thanks for saying all of that, Dad. I just . . . I really don’t have much to say about it. Honest. I’m bummed about missing school. Senior year and all, especially because I had a real shot at being first violin. But in the big scheme of things, that stuff isn’t important. What matters is that I get accepted into the treatment, and they find a donor, and all the rest. I figure that’s all going to happen because, you know, there’s no real benefit to thinking about the worst-case scenario all the time. So, I might as well have a positive attitude, right? And if all goes well, then, like the doctor said, it’ll suck for a while, and then I’ll be okay.”
Wayne stared hard at his son, trying to comprehend the jumble of contradictions that could reside in a seventeen-year-old mind. Owen rarely displayed any emotion, giving off the vibe that he didn’t care much about anything. But all it took was listening to him play the violin for two minutes to realize that wasn’t true. With a bow in his hand, Owen gave voice to feelings more deeply held than Wayne imagined possible. Last year, when Owen was rehearsing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for hours on end, all he could think about was that no one could play it like Owen did without fully experiencing the range of emotion those pieces called for—joy, sadness, anger, love.
Yet, away from the concert stage, Owen ran on a completely even keel. Today was a perfect example: his calm, considered reaction to what would be the scariest time in most people’s lives.
In this way, Wayne understood his son perfectly. For Owen had undoubtedly learned from him how to hide his anger from the world.
Jessica’s mother had been a high school teacher. She always said she taught history, but the curriculum called it social studies and included things like geography and basic economics. She claimed that as a girl, she had wanted to be a lawyer or a college professor but had to put aside such ambitions because those opportunities were not available to girls of her generation. Jessica knew that wasn’t entirely true. Two of the women on the Supreme Court were younger than Linda Terry, as had been many of Jessica’s college professors.
But in her mother’s telling of her life, her options were limited by her gender, the times in which she lived, and her own mother’s low expectations. “My mother—your grandmother—made it very clear to me that finding a husband was my only real job,” she’d told Jessica more times than she could count. “Anything else I wanted to do ended when I got married, which meant pursuing something that required a long-term payoff made no sense. Thank God women today have more choices.”
Many of Jessica’s classmates ended up in high-powered fields, but those women weren’t reared by Linda Terry. While Jessica’s mother claimed to be an equal-rights disciple, the subtext of everything she had ever told Jessica was no different from the pearls of wisdom her own mother had imparted a generation earlier—that you were nothing unless you had a man. Over and over again, Linda Terry made clear to her daughter that women were divided into two categories: those who were able to attract men—life’s winners—and those who, in her mother’s words, “never had a date in their lives.”
Jessica had been determined not to be a loser in her mother’s eyes. So she made sure that she had plenty of boyfriends. Even if it required she barely eat a meal for ten years after she got her period. Even if it meant not pursuing a JD or MD or PhD because by the time she got out of school, she’d be too old to attract a man.
Wayne was the first of those men who asked her to marry him. She said yes because she feared that there would never be another one who would ask.
Linda Terry died two years before Jessica’s marriage did. Wayne always said the two were connected. That so long as her mother was alive, Jessica would have stayed married, but the moment she didn’t have to face Linda’s disapproval, she could have the rebellious adolescence she’d denied herself back when it was age appropriate.
Jessica knew that explanation was too pat. Her mother had died six months after Owen’s diagnosis, and Jessica saw the potential loss of her son as a far greater proximate cause of her need to rethink her life choices than the subsequent death of her mother.
But this much was true: Jessica had wanted a brand-new life. Not just wanted. Had to have.
The first step in that renaissance was to be with a man she loved and not the one she had accepted out of fear that no one else would have her. And then, while that thought
