What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “I wash,” she said, holding it in a bundle against her hip. “I do, okay, not so clean.”

  “And not so hard?” asked Philip, hope cracking through the words. “It cuts me under here.” He lifted a pale arm and pulled up his shirt, to show her the red chafing just below his armpit. “Softer,” he said. “Please.”

  “Soft,” promised Noi. She looked into his pleading face. “Soft.” She put a hand out and scrabbled her fingers over his lower ribs, tickling him in the vulnerable place he was exposing.

  “Stop,” he cried, clamping his arm to his side and twisting away from her, laughing.

  Later, when the policeman asked questions about Philip—was he unhappy, would he have run away?—the parents were united in their vehement negative. Philip had such an even disposition, they said, he never threw temper tantrums, not like the girls. He’s always been our sunny child, Madame’s voice trembling as she said it, and Master put his arm around her.

  Noi didn’t speak then—no one expected her to, no one thought to ask her anything—and she sometimes wondered afterward if she should have. She’d seen the look on the boy’s face that morning, the desperation. She’d also seen his laughter while she tickled him; it had made her realize how long it had been since she’d seen it. Philip used to laugh all the time. He had been happy by nature, as Madame had told the policeman. That was true, but it had not been the whole truth about him.

  PART 3

  2019

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  AFTER HE’D been put on the ventilator, the sisters were allowed in. Bea went forward to the stretcher while the nurse waylaid Laura near the door with updates: he’d be going upstairs to intensive care soon, he’d be sedated all night, they should probably go home and get some sleep and come back tomorrow.

  “Why did this happen?” Laura asked.

  “The low oxygen pressure in the airplane, maybe?” The nurse sounded like she was guessing. “A long flight could have stressed his heart, tipped him over into failure.”

  Bea didn’t look up when Laura joined her at the bedside. She was staring at Philip. His face looked swollen, and was distorted by the tube taped into his mouth; Laura couldn’t see the dimple under his eye. Was it even the same man? She had an urge to twitch away the sheet and check for the deformed ankle.

  Bea’s phone buzzed and she looked at it, then put it away.

  “Clem’s getting the car,” she said. Meaning: Let’s go. “You can stay with us tonight, no point battling traffic.”

  As they walked toward Clem’s hybrid crossover, crouched at the curb in front of the hospital like a gigantic shiny beetle, Laura’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out: a text from Sullivan.

  How’s our zen MF? How are you?

  “Is that Edward?” asked Bea, opening the car door, getting in. “What does he think of all this?”

  Edward. The name tolled in Laura’s chest. They hadn’t spoken since that conversation in Bangkok.

  She walked over to the car but didn’t get in. Bea’s window slid down.

  “What now?” said Bea. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “There’s nobody even here,” said Laura, spreading her arms. But she dropped her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone there by myself.” Her head felt hollow. “Big surprise: I’ve fucked everything up.”

  Without waiting for a response, she turned and walked away.

  * * *

  “Are you okay?” said Sullivan. “Where are you?”

  “NoVA,” said Laura. She had walked for a while on the side of the street that faced traffic, so that Clem and Bea couldn’t easily follow in their car. They hadn’t followed. Now she was sitting on a bus stop bench, talking on the phone.

  “Do you want me to come get you?” Into the brief hesitation before the offer she read an entire scenario: Kelsey, the young gallery receptionist, naked between million-thread-count sheets, pouting Come back to bed.

  “I’ll get a car,” Laura said. She pulled the phone away from her face to look at the time: nine thirty p.m. So not Kelsey abed, tousled and sleepy, but elegantly dressed Kelsey in a hip restaurant, mouthing Who is it across the table. She put the phone back to her ear. “Where are you?”

  “At the gallery, doing paperwork. My fancy life. How’s your brother?”

  “Sick.” She rubbed her eyes with thumb and index finger. “They told us fifty different reasons he might not make it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s nothing to do tonight, though, right? You need to get some sleep.”

  “I’m going home.” She took the phone down again and navigated to the ride-sharing app, tapped in the request, put the phone back to her ear. “Mohan is six minutes away.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got a six-minute story for you. Titled, ‘The Man Who Made Art with Bodily Fluids Not His Own and Got Himself and His Gallery Sued.’ ”

  Laura sat on the bus stop bench with the phone to her ear, listening, shivering in her T-shirt and thinking longingly of the cardigan in her bag, the one Clem had put into the crossover and taken home with Beatrice. Sullivan’s anecdote lasted longer than six minutes; it wasn’t done when the car came. She got into the car still listening and fell asleep with his voice in her ear. Sometime later she awoke outside her own house, hand lying on her lap still clutching her phone, her cheek smashed against the window glass.

  “Sorry,” she told the driver, sitting upright, ripping a tissue from the box in the console and wiping the faceprint, turning it into a giant cloudy smear. “Ugh, that’s worse.”

  “Lotion tissues,” said the driver brightly. “No worries. I’ll hit it with Windex.”

  Her phone screen blinked on as she went up her front steps, the display showing the call still active, the elapsed time counting up. She raised the phone to her face. “Sullivan?” she said.

  “Are you home now?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Signing off,” he said.

  * * *

  The banging on the door wove itself into her dream: it was a drum, it was a dozen drums, it was snakes dancing a conga line around a circle of drums.

  “Go away,” she moaned into the bedclothes, burying her head.

  Her phone buzzed on the bed surface beside her ear and she swiped her hand around the sheet to find it, peeked with one eye at the blinding brightness of the screen. Then sat straight up in bed and answered the call.

  “It’s two a.m.,” she said. “Is that you at my door?”

  “Yes,” came the response. “Let me in?”

  She went down the stairs at a run.

  Her nephew Dean stood on the front step, looking bedraggled. It was raining in earnest now and he was drenched, drops fattening on the tips of his hair and falling onto his shoulders.

  “For God’s sake,” she said. “Get in here.” She closed the door behind him. “Kitchen,” she said, and he followed her pointing finger. “Stay,” she said.

  She got towels and Adam’s old terry-cloth robe; while Laura stood with robe held open, Dean stripped to his shorts and put the robe on, then bowed his dripping head and let her scrub it with a towel. She put his clothing into the dryer, laid a fresh towel on the seat of one on the bar stools before letting him sit, used another towel to wipe up the water from the hardwood.

  “This place is nice,” he said, looking around. “It’s so—empty.”

  “I don’t like clutter,” she said, dumping the wet towel into the sink. “Dean. What are you doing here? Does your mom know you’re here?” His face told her the answer. She retrieved her phone, and under his baleful eye told Bea’s voicemail, “I have Dean here, he’s fine and safe, I’ll get him back to you in the morning.”

  “I can’t believe you,” Dean said, his voice thick with disappointment, as she clicked the phone off and put it down.

  “Dean,” said Laura. “I had to call her. Our brother disappeared.” She watched the accusation fade from his expression: he hadn’t tho
ught of that. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” he said, trying for silly. When she didn’t smile, “I was with someone.”

  “On a date?” she said, surprise scaling her voice up unintentionally.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  Laura felt a sudden sympathy for Bea. How frightening it must be for a parent, when the child whose whole baby skin you knew, whose every moment you supervised for years, develops his own separate, secret life.

  “I’m making tea,” she said. She ran cold water into the electric kettle, switched it on, got two mugs down from the cupboard. “So—a date,” she said. Was that why he was here, had it gone badly, had he been dumped? “How did it go?”

  “Good.” Uninflected, unrevealing. Still annoyed that she’d phoned his mother.

  She found a package of cookies in the pantry, expensive English biscuits a friend had given her, put some onto a plate and set that before Dean. He looked at them, then up at her, then took one, as if conceding a détente.

  “We’ve been seeing each other for a while,” he said around a mouthful of cookie. “He’s older. Don’t tell my parents.”

  He. Older.

  “How much older?” said Laura, carefully, a cape of fear-prickles moving over her shoulders. She didn’t look at him as she dropped tea bags into the mugs.

  “Eighteen.”

  Eighteen, only two years between them. Laura had forgotten how once upon a time, older might mean such a sliver of difference. A rushing noise rose from the kettle as the boil gathered, the first reluctant bubbles welling up. It was hard to know what to say next, to prevent the clamshell that was wavering open in the warm current of their conversation from snapping closed again.

  “Your mom loves you, you know,” she said. “You can tell her anything.”

  “Probably,” said Dean. “But.” He wrinkled his face up. “Did you tell your mother everything when you were my age?”

  “Fair enough,” said Laura, thinking Who knows—I might have, if she’d been there to listen. The kettle was boiling now, the bubbles jostling furiously against the glass. “Are you—out?” she asked, lifting the kettle and pouring into the mugs, amber swirling from the tea bags. “I mean, do your friends at school know you’re gay?”

  “I’m not gay,” Dean said, curling his hands around the mug she put in front of him. Laura looked her confusion: But you just said you’re involved with a man. “I am who I am. I don’t want to label it.” He took another cookie.

  “Okay,” said Laura. Baffled. There had been no spectrum to sexuality when she was young: boys were boys, and paired with girls. Nothing else was even imaginable. She and her generation had crossed the chasm of sexual awakening as if blindfolded on a wavering rope bridge, starting out clueless as dolls and reaching the other side either harrowed or unscathed, depending on sheer luck. Still, the crossing then might have been easier than it would be today, carrying the burden of so much information and nuance. Her gay and trans friends would probably chastise her for that thought, remind her that without nuance, we don’t have a bridge at all.

  “Glad the date went well,” she said. “And why are you here?”

  “It was his idea,” Dean said. He studied the surface of his tea, where a broken moon trembled, a reflection of the overhead light. “I told him about Philip, about you going to get him.” He raised his eyes to hers. Laura bit back her objection—You talked about our family with a stranger?—and nodded. “I want to see Philip,” he said. “You need an adult to visit the ICU, and Mom said no.”

  “So your boyfriend suggested you come here and wheedle me into taking you.”

  Dean nodded. “He said you sounded cool.”

  “Uh-huh.” Not taken in by the flattery. “How did you meet him, anyway?”

  “Loop.” He slid a hand into his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Want to see his profile?”

  What is Loop? she didn’t ask, as he turned the screen to show her a colorful collection of photos and an emoji-sprinkled bio, the font so small it was almost unreadable. That’s one way to filter out older users, she thought. Dean turned the phone back toward himself.

  “Isn’t he cute?” he said with fuzzy fondness.

  It was wonderful, and painful, to think of him striking out into that vast gulf of unknowing, the giant world ready to break his heart over and over. She felt happy for him, and frightened, in equal parts.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” said Dean, more soberly. The unspoken, hopeful yet shivered in the air at the end of his sentence. “I’m not even sure how much he likes me.” He clicked the phone off and put it down, picked up his mug and took a sip.

  “Are you having sex?” asked Laura. Dean smiled into his tea and said nothing. “Are you being safe?”

  “Yes, Grandma,” said Dean.

  “Good Lord, my grandmother would have died before she’d ask me anything like that,” she said. He said nothing, the clamshell now firmly shut.

  Her phone skittered across the counter: Sullivan, all-caps.

  GO TO SLEEP.

  “That’s a booty call,” said Dean with a grin.

  “Hardly,” she said as she typed in I *WAS* ASLEEP THANK YOU. She pressed Send. “What do you know about booty calls?”

  “I’m not a child,” he said. “We’ve been able to get around parental controls since we were ten.” Unconsciously speaking in the first person plural. What must that be like, going through life as an automatic we? “Mom’s basically a cavewoman technologically, and Dad—he trusts us.” He had the grace to look guilty, saying that. With an interested glance at her phone, “So, do you and Edward have an open relationship?”

  “Oh my God,” said Laura. “That was my gallery owner.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Not that you’re entitled to one,” she said, “but no. Edward and I do not have an open relationship. And I’m older than Sullivan.”

  “So?” Dean said. “It’s a patriarchal construct that the man has to be older than the woman, derived from ancient gender roles that defined man as provider and woman as bearer of children. Insanely irrelevant in 2019.” He smiled at her expression. “Aunt Laura, everyone understands that now.” Everyone. Youth, society’s prow, cutting a path into the future. “Why didn’t Edward go with you to Thailand?”

  “I didn’t tell him I was going.”

  “What?” He looked incredulous.

  She laughed: apparently even a teenager understood basic relationship etiquette better than she did.

  “Why not?” he said, starting to laugh too, his whole face transformed by it, the resemblance to his mother slipping to reveal a resemblance to his father.

  “He didn’t want me to go,” she said. “And I didn’t want to argue about it.”

  “I would have gone with you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. And she did know: she had this young ally, like a knight, ready to do battle on her behalf. How does anyone deserve that, she wondered. “Listen, I have to crash,” she said. “My body says it’s three thousand o’clock. We can talk more in the morning.”

  In the doorway of the guest room he lingered, fingering the molding around the door.

  “Why do you and Mom always seem like you’re in a fight?” he said.

  “Sibling stuff,” said Laura. “It goes way back.” Why a heart-to-heart now, when she felt like a dead person walking?

  “Dustin and I fight sometimes,” he said. “But it’s just, like, a blowup. Then we’re okay.”

  “You and Dustin naturally get each other,” said Laura.

  “We’re not exactly the same,” he said, and there was an undercurrent there that she read as twin frustration, at so often having been treated as interchangeable, one of a pair of clones. His voice strangled and emphatic, he added, “Please take me to the hospital with you in the morning. Please. I want to meet my uncle. Even if he doesn’t wake up. Even if he dies.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  His
hug surprised her.

  “I think you did the right thing going to get him,” he said. Earnest, impassioned. Perhaps thinking of his own brother, what he would do if Dustin were lost and then found. “I think you’re a hero.”

  Well, that made exactly one person in the whole world, thought Laura, hugging him back. Still, it was amazingly comforting to hear.

  * * *

  The next morning, Philip was still sedated and immobile, bags of nameless liquid ticking into him and the ventilator puffing breaths down the tube that went into his mouth. The ICU nurse updated Laura and Dean on his status, alternating good news and bad news as she did—oxygen’s good, kidneys are still struggling a little bit, fever is down, white count’s still high, his anemia is stable—the pattern of it hypnotic.

  “When will he wake up?” asked Laura. The nurse nodded, as though she’d expected that question.

  “We have to keep him sedated until the tube is ready to come out,” she said. “And that can’t happen until the lungs are doing better.” The lungs, as though they, like the tube, were independent entities from the man.

  “Can I talk to him?” asked Dean.

  “Yes, we encourage that,” said the nurse, smiling. She went to the head of the bed, beckoned to Dean. “You can stand here. It’s okay to touch his hand if you want. Just be careful of the IVs.” She moved away to the other side of the room, began clicking an entry into a computer there.

  Bea was suddenly beside Laura in the doorway. She had both Laura’s bag and Philip’s blue duffel over her shoulder, and she slid them down her arm and held them out; Laura put the straps over her own shoulder.

  “Thank you for leaving the voicemail,” Bea said in a low voice. Laura nodded. Bea looked at Dean, who was bent over at the bedside, his back to them. “What’s he doing?”

  “Talking to Philip.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “No.”

  They watched together for a minute. They couldn’t hear Dean’s words; his voice was a quiet rumble beneath the rushing and beeping sounds of the machines around the bed. “Our lawyers are requesting another DNA test,” said Beatrice.