What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “What?”

  “They require it before they’ll accept his identity.”

  “The U.S. government accepted the DNA test I got,” said Laura. “The result was unequivocal.”

  “The sibling test isn’t standard,” said Bea. “It won’t hurt to get another.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Laura.

  “They’re just being prudent,” said Bea. “They need to be absolutely certain before they legally declare him Philip Banford Preston. Entitled to a third of the trust.”

  “Money?” said Laura. “Really?”

  “The only people who say it like that have never wanted for it,” said Bea. “I’m in charge of it for a reason.”

  “Oh my God,” said Laura. “That again.”

  The nurse came over. “Maybe talk outside?” she said, with an edge to her voice. She slid the glass door open, stood there waiting; like bad dogs, Bea and Laura went through. The door slid closed again.

  “Mum will know if he’s Philip,” said Laura in a low voice suited to the surroundings, the hush of critical illness, all the glass-doored rooms and muted beeping.

  “Mum doesn’t know who I am half the time,” retorted Bea. “We can’t tell her about this. What if he dies? What if we tell her and she does understand, and then he dies here?”

  “What if we don’t tell her and he dies? How could we let that happen?” A thought struck Laura. “Do the lawyers really want another test, or is that something you want?” Before Bea could respond, “Why am I even asking? Of course my DNA test isn’t good enough. Only your DNA test will do.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Bea.

  The glass door slid open again.

  “Waiting room,” said the nurse firmly through the gap.

  * * *

  They’d been in the waiting room for ten unspeaking minutes, side by side in a row of chairs in the corner under the hanging television monitor, when the door opened. The scattered conversations around the room ceased and heads turned toward the doorway. Dean came through, followed by a man in a white coat. All eyes followed the doctor as he walked across the room, silent questions pulsing from every side: Whose doctor are you, who is getting an update, is it bad news or good?

  “Are you the Preston family?” the doctor asked, stopping in front of Bea and Laura. They nodded. “I’m Dr. Gomez. May we speak in private?” He told Dean, “I’ll bring them back in a few minutes.”

  Philip is going to die, thought Laura, her head light, as they followed the doctor through the door and down the hall. She thought of the mild man riding beside her on the Skytrain, his face alive; his smile as he said extra pickles into the phone; how he’d taken the inhaler from her on the plane without demur. He’d trusted her. Had her impulsiveness killed him?

  FAMILY ROOM, said the sign beside the door near the elevator bank. It was a small space, furnished with hospital-issue furniture: a settee and some chairs upholstered in apricot vinyl, an end table holding a bulbous lamp and a box of tissues. Bea and Laura filed in and sat. The doctor closed the door and sat in one of the chairs facing them. For the first time, Laura read the name tag swinging free from his collar: CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY.

  “You’re a psychologist?” said Bea. She must have noticed the ID just then too.

  “For God’s sake,” said Laura. Dr. Gomez looked confused. “We thought you were a real doctor.”

  “She means a medical doctor,” said Bea. “About to give us bad news.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dr. Gomez. He didn’t seem bothered by the real doctor. “Didn’t the team tell you I’d be coming?”

  “No,” said Beatrice. “They didn’t. We haven’t even met the team.”

  “I was consulted because they noticed some tension between you two.” He looked from Laura to Bea, then took an index card from his pocket and looked at it. “From what I understand, it is an unusual situation.”

  “I’ll say,” said Laura. Without warning, it all struck her as hilarious. Dr. Gomez’s long, concerned face, this room, the awful chairs and terrible lamp. The Kleenex box discreetly placed with its flame of tissue at the ready. What did that index card say? She snorted with laughter. “I’ll say it’s unusual.”

  Bea looked startled, then furious. “Stop it,” she told Laura, who was bent forward, overcome. “She’s jet-lagged,” she told the doctor.

  “I am,” said Laura, squeaking it out. “I’m sorry.”

  “We have no need for a psychologist,” Bea told Dr. Gomez. She hissed at Laura, “Pull yourself together.”

  Laura sat upright, cleared her throat, composed her face. As Dr. Gomez put the index card away, another wave of hilarity crashed down; Laura squeezed her eyes shut and shook with suppressed laughter.

  “From what I understand,” Dr. Gomez said to Bea, “you haven’t seen your brother since you were young.”

  “He was abducted in Thailand in 1972,” said Bea. “Not a trace of him since, not a word.”

  “Miraculous,” said Dr. Gomez. “Missing since 1972.” A pause for quick calculation. “He was nine years old then?”

  “Eight and a half,” said Bea. “It would be miraculous,” she said. “If it’s him.”

  “It’s him,” said Laura. The giggles were stopping, finally. She took a tissue from the box and wiped her streaming eyes. She blew her nose, told Dr. Gomez, “I got a DNA test.”

  “A sibling DNA test,” said Bea. “Those are not perfect.”

  “Nothing is perfect,” said Laura. “Especially something you had nothing to do with.”

  They glared at each other.

  “Forty-seven years,” said Dr. Gomez in a quiet voice. Both sisters looked at him, wary. “Has he told you where he’s been all this time?”

  “She didn’t ask him,” said Bea. “She didn’t ask him anything.”

  “I feel bad enough about that,” said Laura.

  “But apparently he wasn’t locked up,” continued Bea, ignoring her. “He could have just walked out. Gone to the police. Used a telephone. Used the internet. Something. Sometime in the last forty-seven years.”

  “I don’t understand that part either,” admitted Laura.

  Dr. Gomez nodded for a few seconds after they’d stopped talking, as if he were listening to extra information in the after-echoes of their speech.

  “This event injured your family—it likely shattered your childhood,” he said. Laura nodded; Bea did not. “You do have a right to want to understand it. But Philip—if this is Philip”—looking at Bea—“also has a right to his own story; how much to tell, and when. As for why he didn’t contact you before now, I can’t know that, of course. But if I imagine being eight years old and taken away from everything I knew—” He paused, as if to let Bea and Laura imagine along with him. “In that terrible situation, I would need to trust the adults caring for me. Even if the adults didn’t do it very well. Even if they sometimes hurt me.” Laura felt a queasy pain at the pit of her stomach. “The person who was feeding and sheltering me might even become a person I loved.”

  “He called the man he was living with his teacher,” recalled Laura. Bea looked at her sharply: Laura hadn’t mentioned that before.

  Dr. Gomez nodded. “Children adapt to the most extreme situations in order to survive.”

  “He hasn’t been a child for a long time,” said Laura.

  “We’re all still children,” said the psychologist. “That never stops.”

  “There’s no point in discussing any of this,” said Bea. “Until we have definite DNA confirmation of his identity.”

  “Another DNA test probably won’t be possible until he’s awake and can give consent,” said Dr. Gomez. “You should check that with your lawyers.”

  “I have,” Bea said. “I also called Uncle Todd,” she told Laura. “He’s out of the office, but he’ll get back to me.”

  “Out of the office, at his age?” murmured Laura. They both knew what out of the office meant. Of course Bea had called Uncle Todd; it was her ref
lex, when anything of importance happened in the family. It was annoying. Uncle Todd couldn’t replace Daddy. Laura felt a sudden terrible yearning for their father, and its aching corollary: how happy he would have been to see Philip again.

  “Since you can’t agree,” the psychologist said, “and you can’t do anything right now to settle the question, I suggest a truce. A time during which each of you can focus on preparing yourself for whatever the future holds: the verdict of a new DNA test as well as the medical outcome for this patient.” Avoiding the name, keeping things neutral. “I’m happy to meet with you again, separately or together.” He looked from one stony face to the other. “Or not. And when he’s awake, I will work with him, if he wants me to. Whoever he is.”

  * * *

  They collected Dean from the waiting room and rode down in the elevator as a silent threesome; on the sidewalk they parted, Dean giving Laura an I’m doomed grimace, drawing a finger across his neck, before turning to follow his mom. Laura wondered what punishment Bea would mete out, hoped she’d cut him some slack.

  As she walked to the Metro, Laura took out her phone and called Edward. Two rings before voicemail clicked in—so his phone was on, but he had declined her call. He had declined her call: that knowledge pounded through her, erased the script of what she had been planning to say.

  “It’s me,” she said after the voicemail beep. “But you know that.” She watched a father stop at the subway entrance and lift his small daughter to his hip to carry her down the steps. The girl’s hand curled around her father’s ear as if it were a handhold. “I guess you’re not ready to talk yet, huh.” It wasn’t like the old days, when you could ramble on into an answering machine until the person got annoyed enough to pick up. Voicemail was a windsock, a blind pouch. “Um, okay,” Laura said, watching the heads of the father and daughter bob out of view. “I guess I’ll wait for your call.”

  She clicked the phone off. She felt a giant emptiness, as though she stood on a wind-scoured plain, totally alone. It was devastating, but also warmly familiar: she’d been here before.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  NO CHANGE, said the ICU doctor the next day. Not better—but not worse. She gave Laura a pinched smile. So that’s something.

  During the journey to the hospital that morning, Laura had girded herself for confrontation. But Bea had not been in the lobby, or the elevator, or the ICU waiting room where Laura sat most of the day with a book open on her lap but not actually reading it, looking up every few minutes at the door. Once an hour she rose to spend the permitted fifteen minutes standing at Philip’s bedside, placing her hands on the rails between the drooping vines of tubing and watching him in his chemical sleep.

  When visiting hours ended, she left the hospital and walked to the Metro, rode it two stops past her own. She shopped at the gourmet grocery for things to tempt Genevieve, who was always having to be coaxed into eating, and called a ride-share car to carry her and the bags down Albemarle Street, into the warren of placid green lawns where she’d grown up.

  When she entered the kitchen of the Tudor, Noi was sitting at the table with one of her daughters.

  “I brought plenty of food if you’re hungry,” said Laura, setting the bags on the counter.

  “We eat already,” said Noi, as the daughter—Vanessa, that was her name—said, “No, thank you.” She was a serious woman; Laura remembered her as a serious toddler. She was a doctor now, in Boston.

  They watched Laura unload the bags, get cutlery and clean napkins from the drawers, go to the cupboard for plates. As she unlidded the tub of pasta salad, Noi got up from the table, came over.

  “Philip,” said Noi. Pillip. The two syllables in her accent came out of the past like a punch. “You think it’s really him?”

  Laura nodded.

  “Did he tell you what happened to him?” said Vanessa, from behind them.

  Laura shook her head, then cleared her throat. “Not yet.” She unwrapped one of the butcher-paper-wrapped sandwiches, took a knife from the block.

  “Is he requiring any intravenous medicines like dopamine, dobutamine, norepinephrine?” A doctor Laura had dated before Edward had done this too—offered medical-information processing as an expression of caring. I changed your diapers once, kid, Laura didn’t say.

  “He’s on a lot of IVs,” Laura said. “I don’t know what they are.”

  “You stop fighting with your sister,” Noi said.

  She had seemed so tall when Laura was a girl. Now she was tiny; Laura could see a scattering of white strands along the part in her hair.

  “She’s fighting with me,” said Laura. She set the blade of the knife across the sandwich and pressed it down, then turned the plate and did it again, cutting the halves into quarters.

  Noi looked skeptical. “You always fighting with everybody,” she said.

  Laura felt the heavy silent phone in her pocket: still no message from Edward. The thought of him was like pressure on a bruise.

  “It would seem so,” Laura said. For the first time in her life she heard her mother in her own voice.

  * * *

  Genevieve raised her eyebrows at the pasta salad but managed two sandwich quarters, enough to make Laura feel a pang of victory. The visit was quiet, their conversation genial and vague. Afterward, she stood on the sidewalk outside the Tudor with her fingertip hovering over the Call Car button on her phone screen. It was early evening, but the light was still strong. Spring was in full glory up and down the street, dogwoods sheeted with pinched white blossoms, front gardens brimming phlox like lavender ponds. She used to know every inch of this street and every street around it, every shrub and sidewalk crack. When they had returned to America the lack of walls had been astounding to Laura, and she had taken full advantage, roaming barefoot through neighboring backyard grass sugared with dew and venturing down the alley behind the house to the busy road at its foot, dashing across to find the surprise of a creek clattering cold and clear. Walking a landscape was so different from riding through it. She hadn’t really looked at the old neighborhood for years.

  On an impulse she closed the app and pocketed her phone, set off walking. The same route she and Bea had taken every school morning, fifteen minutes to the city bus stop where they’d wait for the first bus that would take them to the transfer point for the second, the one that would stop across the street from the school and flap open its doors so they could exit in a hot grind of exhaust.

  Here was the house where the scary dog had barked and barked as they passed, leaping against the diamond-wire barrier. No dog now, and the fence was split-rail, merely decorative. Across from it, the house with the tire swing, the tire gone but the tree still there, extending its empty branch. In the next block a flowered hedge had hummed with bumblebees in two seasons and required a wide berth, first Bea and then Laura stepping into the gutter to pass. No hedge now, and no remnant of it; that house sat revealed on its emerald lawn.

  How miserable a walk this had been in the cold, in the rain, struggling to keep up with Bea’s long strides. It had seemed such irony to Laura, to work so hard every morning to get to such a hateful place. At least, Laura had hated it. Bea intercalated herself without apparent effort into the popular mainstream of the Upper School while Laura gutterballed her way through the Lower, keeping her head down, weird but not the weirdest, smart but not the smartest. Remodeling her accent and vocabulary, making herself say Really when she meant I agree, squealing Gross about anything she didn’t like. She learned to call Mum Mom when a friend came for a sleepover, sometimes making two complaining syllables of it: Mah-ahm.

  Not that she saw very much of Genevieve, who was always packing or unpacking, calling to Noi or the au pair to get or leave things, riding away in a taxicab and returning after a month or more in another one, an exhausted, stringier version of herself. Their dad traveled too but not as much, and never for as long. He didn’t talk about where he went; Laura didn’t ask. By some process of osmosis, she unders
tood that while some of the girls at school had famous fathers—in the White House or cabinet or on the Hill—some other fathers were the opposite of famous. Their daughters were scattered throughout the student body like a broken string of beads. A null quality made them recognizable to one another and they resisted aggregation, keeping the string broken, the beads safely dispersed.

  The only good thing about the American school as far as Laura was concerned was the Art Room, which took up the whole top floor of the Lower School building. Skylights cut into the ceiling poured sunshine onto the bounty below: easels, pottery wheels, bolts of drawing paper, cups of charcoal and colored pencils, cubbies filled with cloudy bottles of tempera. Students were free to use it all when a class wasn’t in session, as long as they cleaned up after themselves. Laura spent every minute there that she could.

  She brought a painting home when she was eleven. As she passed the sitting room, her mother looked up from her Smith Corona. Feeling caught by the beam of her gaze, Laura went into the room and unrolled the stiff curl of painted paper with a depersonalized sense of playacting. Wasn’t this what television children did, they showed their mothers their artwork, for praise and proud display on the refrigerator? The only thing ever magneted to the Harvest Gold surface of the Preston refrigerator was Genevieve’s itinerary.

  Genevieve stood up from the desk and took the picture from Laura, carried it into the light from the wall of windows.

  “You have talent,” she said, after two or three long minutes. “Is this something you want to do?” Laura only stared, made speechless by the compliment. Her mother rolled the picture up again, gave it back. “The life of an artist is difficult,” she said. “Be sure you want it very badly before you go down that path.”

  “Do you really think it’s good?” Laura asked, greedy for praise. She had thought so herself, but she’d been too shy to show it to anyone, even the teacher.