by Linda Seed
That night—Gary’s first in his new home—TJ tried to get him to sleep in his dog bed. When that didn’t work, he moved the bed from the living room into Owen’s bedroom, thinking that might help.
TJ said goodnight to his son and to the dog, then closed Owen’s door and went to his room to go to bed.
He was just drifting off to sleep when his door opened. He looked up to see Owen, his hair tousled from bed, standing in the doorway in the moonlight coming through the hall window.
“He won’t go to sleep, Dad. He keeps scratching at the door.”
TJ rubbed his face and sat up. “Okay. You go back to bed. I’ll handle him.”
Thinking that maybe the dog had to pee, TJ led him to the front door, opened it, and waited. “Go ahead, then. Do your business.”
The dog just looked at him patiently.
“Really? Then what’s your issue?”
Gary didn’t answer.
TJ sighed and headed back to his room. When Gary didn’t follow, TJ looked at him and waved him along. “Come on, then. You can bunk with me.”
The dog bed was in Owen’s room, and TJ didn’t want to disturb him, so he grabbed a blanket from the linen closet and put it on the floor. Then TJ got back under the covers. “Well, good night,” he told Gary. “Try not to pee on the rug.”
Instead of lying down on the blanket, Gary came to stand by the side of TJ’s bed. He put his chin on the mattress next to TJ and stared at him, his dark eyes mournful.
“Go lie down,” TJ said.
Gary didn’t move from his spot. He blinked at TJ and made a soft whining sound.
“Aw, jeez.” TJ couldn’t sleep with somebody staring at him. He tried rolling over and facing the other direction, hoping the dog would get bored and lie the hell down.
When that didn’t work, he sat up and glared at his new housemate. “You are not sleeping on the bed. For one thing, you smell like dog.”
Either Gary didn’t understand, or he simply disagreed. He put a paw on the bed and made the soft whine again—a kind of hhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmhhhh.
It was clear how this was going to go. TJ could either waste his time fighting it, or just give in and get some damned sleep.
“All right. Come on up.” He patted the bed beside him.
The problem was, Gary was at least in his mid-eighties in dog years. He put both of his front paws on the mattress and scrabbled a bit with one of his rear legs, but he couldn’t get up onto the bed.
TJ sighed, got out of bed, picked the dog up with some difficulty—he was a big sucker—and hefted him onto the mattress.
Gary turned in a couple of circles, lay down with his head on TJ’s pillow, and promptly went to sleep with a contented sigh.
TJ went to the linen closet, got another pillow, and settled in on what little space the dog had left him. He’d been thinking for a while now that he was tired of sleeping alone, but this wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
8
Since the breakup with Peter, Bianca had been both sad and relieved. The relief told her she’d done the right thing, but that didn’t make it any easier to think she might have broken his heart.
“I saw Peter at the Whole Foods in SLO this morning,” Benny said one evening as she came in from work, dropping her bag and her jacket onto the sofa. “He looked like he’d just seen those twins from The Shining. He turned around and hauled ass to the frozen foods section.”
“That’s awkward.” Bianca had just gotten in and was still in her work clothes, her hair in a sedate bun.
“Not for me,” Benny said. “I could have made friendly conversation, asked him about his recycling efforts and whatnot. But I guess he wasn’t up for being friendly.”
“Damn it.” Bianca kicked off her shoes, grateful to free her feet after a long day in pumps. “I wish he weren’t acting this way.”
Benny sank down onto the sofa. “Oh, I don’t know. I get it. He thought he was going to live with you, maybe get married, kids—the whole bit. He didn’t realize how much of a stiff he is, and he thought it was going to work. The guy needs time to adjust.”
If even Benny was sympathizing with Peter, then Bianca probably really had done some damage.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him. This sucks.”
“Yeah.” Benny reflected on that for a moment. “There’s no way around it, though, right? You get into a relationship, it’s either going to go the distance, or you’re going to break up and somebody’s going to get their ass chapped. When was the last time you dated a guy then mutually agreed to go your separate ways, with everybody on good terms?”
“Never,” Bianca said.
Benny nodded. “Right. Never. The ass-chapping was unavoidable.”
“I suppose.” Bianca put her feet up on the coffee table and wiggled her sore toes.
“On the plus side, you’re available to go out with Troy now.” Benny grinned and raised her eyebrows suggestively.
Bianca scowled. “That’s ridiculous. Who said I wanted to go out with Troy? TJ, I mean. He hasn’t asked. And I haven’t asked. And neither of us is going to. I’m treating his son, that’s all.” She was flustered by the mere suggestion.
“The lady doth protest too much,” Benny said.
Bianca might have said that her relationship with TJ was simply professional, but that wasn’t entirely true, was it? If it were, then she wouldn’t be this nervous leading up to Owen Davenport’s follow-up appointment.
Okay, maybe she still found TJ attractive. Just a little. He wasn’t bad-looking, if you liked broad shoulders and blue eyes, and that manly thing he had going on.
She supposed some women might find that kind of thing appealing.
On the other hand, she probably was only reacting to the memories of her high school crush and the intense, painful feelings it had created. She’d adored him, and he had barely known she existed. The longing, and the anguish over knowing it would never be fulfilled, had been the defining feature of her junior and senior years.
It was hard to think of Troy—TJ, now—without remembering the giddy anticipation she’d felt in the days leading up to their date. Her friends had set them up, and Bianca had imagined that this would be the time when he’d finally notice her. This would be the time when all of her fond imaginings would be realized.
Instead, on the evening of the date, he’d talked to her a little—he’d been nice enough, if distracted—but he’d been so involved with the friends who’d gone with them that he’d barely engaged with her.
At the time, she’d told herself it was understandable. In a group situation, how could she have expected to have his undivided attention? When he asked her out for a second date, she thought, it would be just the two of them, and then they would connect. Then they would get to know each other, and he would realize they belonged together.
Only, there hadn’t been a second date. Instead, TJ had started going out with Penny DeLuca.
Within a couple of weeks, he and Penny had been inseparable, Penny wearing TJ’s letter jacket, the two of them walking together with their hands tucked into each other’s back pockets.
Bianca had attempted to accept this new development with stoicism. When her sisters had mentioned it, she’d acted as though it were no big deal. But, of course, she hadn’t fooled anyone. Especially not her mother.
If anything positive had come from the disaster of her failed date with Troy, it had been Carmela’s response. Bianca’s mother had taken her out to lunch, then they’d gone down to Pismo Beach for shopping and manicures, leaving Bianca’s sisters at home.
Carmela hadn’t lectured her about the realities of love, but instead had let Bianca talk, or not talk, as she wished. Bianca had started the outing silent and sullen, but little by little she’d opened up until, by midafternoon, she’d cried on her mother’s shoulder about Troy, about Penny, about feelings that seemed too big to be contained, and about her own fears that she would never find love.
By the time they got home that eveni
ng, Bianca felt a little better.
She hadn’t felt good—it seemed to her that good was an unattainable dream—but she’d felt better, and that was something.
Bianca had put away the binders she and her mother had assembled of plans for Bianca’s someday wedding. For Carmela, the plans had been an exercise—a fun way to dream about the future—but to Bianca, they’d been specifically for her and Troy. She hadn’t looked at them again until Sofia had expressed a need to have her mother’s fingerprint on her own wedding to Patrick.
All of that was in Bianca’s head as she went through her morning office routine, knowing that she’d be seeing TJ later that day when he brought Owen in for his appointment.
Patricia, Bianca’s nurse, noticed right off that something was amiss.
“Dr. Russo? Do you want me to put in the prescription for Mark Donaldson?” Patricia was looking expectantly at Bianca, who was staring off into space, lost in her thoughts.
“Dr. Russo?” Patricia tried again when Bianca didn’t respond.
Bianca tried to focus. “What?”
“Mark Donaldson. The prescription? Do you want me to put it into the computer?”
“Oh. Yes. Thanks, Patricia.” Bianca took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to center herself.
“Are you okay, Dr. Russo?”
“She’s fine,” Sofia said from the reception desk, where she’d been eavesdropping. “She’s just smitten.”
“Really?” Patricia’s pale blond eyebrows shot up. “With whom?”
“Sofia.” Bianca fired a glare of warning at her sister. The last thing she wanted was to appear unprofessional in front of her staff.
“Oh … just some guy she met at Jitters yesterday,” Sofia lied. “Their eyes met over a soy latte.”
“Stop,” Bianca said to her sister. Then, to Patricia: “She’s joking. There was no guy. There was no soy latte.”
“There could be a soy latte,” Sofia said, “if you could just get up the nerve to order one.”
Owen Davenport’s appointment was at two p.m. After what seemed like an eternity of uneasy anticipation, Patricia let Bianca know the patient was in Room One, his chart waiting in a rack beside the door.
Bianca picked up the chart, straightened her white coat, and put a hand to her hair to smooth it. Then, having given herself a silent pep talk about professionalism and focus, she opened the door and went into the room.
Owen was sitting on the exam table, his gangly legs dangling. TJ was in one of the molded plastic chairs Bianca kept for her patients’ parents and siblings. He stood up when she came in.
“Hi, Owen,” she said. “TJ.” She held the chart to her chest like a shield.
During the initial greetings—the hellos, the polite inquiries into everyone’s well-being—Bianca was preoccupied with the fact of Troy Davenport standing in front of her and what that might mean after all these years.
But then, when she noticed how Owen looked, she stopped being a woman reminiscing about teenage heartbreak and went back to being a focused, competent physician.
“How are you feeling?” she asked the boy.
Owen responded that he was feeling “fine,” which didn’t mean anything—a teenage boy, in Bianca’s experience, would say he was feeling fine even if he had several broken bones and the flu.
“Still feeling tired?”
“I guess.”
Bianca had him lie back on the exam table and pressed his abdomen through his T-shirt.
“That feel tender?”
She pressed, and Owen winced. “Yeah.”
“How’s his appetite been?” She looked over her shoulder at TJ.
“Okay,” TJ responded. “But it’s off a little.”
“I eat,” Owen protested.
“Yeah,” TJ said, “but not as much as you used to. He used to go through so many groceries I thought I’d have to get a second job,” he told Bianca.
“And now?” she asked.
“Now … not so much.” TJ was starting to look worried. “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure yet.” Bianca lifted Owen’s pant leg and lowered his sock to look at his ankle, which appeared to be a little swollen. She also noticed some bruising on his leg. “Where’d you get these bruises?” she asked.
“Huh? I didn’t even know those were there,” Owen said.
“Wait a minute. Bruises?” TJ was becoming alarmed. “I don’t know anything about bruises. Owen?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I must have walked into something.”
“Well … he is a little clumsy,” TJ said. “So was I when I was his age.”
“Sure. It’s probably nothing.” But Bianca didn’t really believe it was nothing. She told Owen he could sit up on the exam table, and she looked at his chart. Flipping through the forms, she saw a notation about Owen’s family health history.
His maternal grandmother was suffering from liver failure.
“Okay.” She kept her voice upbeat. “Owen, I’m going to send you to have another lab test—this one for liver function. Then we’ll go from there.”
“Liver function?” A note of panic rose in TJ’s voice. “Is there something wrong with his liver?”
Bianca turned to Owen. “Owen? Why don’t you go on out into the waiting room while I talk to your dad for a bit?”
When he was gone, Bianca sat down on a rolling stool, Owen’s chart held tightly in her hands. “Owen has some signs of liver failure. He’s a little jaundiced, which was the first thing I noticed. And his abdomen is tender. That, along with the tiredness, the lack of appetite, the swelling in his ankles …”
“And the family history,” TJ concluded for her.
“Yes. The family history.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“Maybe nothing,” she said. “If the blood test I’m ordering comes back normal, then we’ll have to look at other things to see what’s going on.”
“And if it doesn’t come back normal?” TJ asked.
Bianca let out a long breath. “Then I’ll refer you to a specialist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the blood test.”
9
Bianca went home that night feeling heartsick. She’d said it might be something else, but it wasn’t. Owen had liver damage, and whatever had caused it wasn’t something you wanted when you were twelve years old and just trying to navigate middle school and your parents’ divorce.
She came in the door tired and beaten. This was part of the job, she told herself. Sometimes kids had serious health issues, and you had to be the bearer of bad news. It wasn’t all about pink, bouncing babies and well-child exams.
Bianca sat on the sofa, her purse still on her shoulder, and thought about what might be wrong with Owen Davenport.
The most common genetic cause of liver disease in children was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. It wasn’t rare—about one in 2,500. It also wasn’t good. If Owen had it, he’d be looking at chronic liver disease, potential lung disease, and a decreased life expectancy.
“Uh-oh. Bad day?” Martina came in with a mug of tea in her hand and froze when she saw the look on Bianca’s face.
“One of my patients might have a serious condition.”
“Aww. That’s hard.” Martina sat on the sofa next to Bianca and rubbed her sister’s shoulder.
“It is.” She wanted to tell Martina who it was—that this wasn’t just any patient, but TJ Davenport’s son—but doctor-patient confidentiality prevented it. She’d lectured Sofia on that, too, before they’d left the office. Bianca had thoroughly schooled Sofia on patient privacy when she’d come to work at the practice, but she’d reinforced it that afternoon, just in case.
This was one of the things that sucked about Bianca’s work. She told her sisters everything that was bothering her, but when the thing that was bothering her was a patient’s suffering—particularly a patient they all knew—she had to keep quiet no matter how hard it was.<
br />
“Is there anything I can do?” Martina asked.
“Thanks, but no.”
“Okay. If you change your mind …”
“As a matter of fact, there is something. Call JJ’s and order a large pepperoni and sausage, would you? And a small veggie special for you. You can put it on my debit card.”
Nothing she could do tonight would help Owen Davenport. But a little comfort food might help Bianca bury her feelings about it.
TJ put on a brave show for Owen. He acted like the information they’d gotten at Bianca’s office was no big deal. A little liver failure? So what? They’d find out what had to be done to treat it, and they’d do that. It was just another of life’s problems, one that they would tackle the way they did any other issue that came up.
Privately, though, he was trying not to lose his shit. He’d tried to convince himself that Owen’s symptoms were normal adolescent stuff, but they weren’t.
And the thing about the liver issue being genetic? Penny’s mother was in bad shape. Was that what Owen had to look forward to? He was just a kid. He should be worrying about girls and sports and his grades, and whatever nasty thing some asshole at school had said on social media.
He shouldn’t be worrying about his own survival.
TJ was quiet as they went about their evening routine: homework, making dinner, walking and feeding Gary, tidying up the house.
Gary seemed to know something was wrong. He usually stuck himself to TJ’s side like he was glued there, but tonight, he followed Owen around with sad eyes, whining softly until the boy patted his head and stroked his fur.
TJ held it together the best he could, acting like everything was fine until after Owen had gone to bed. Then, on Bianca Russo’s orders, he called his ex to talk about her mother’s health.
Penny sounded irritated that he’d called her after ten p.m., but maybe that was him imagining things; maybe she was just exhausted from all she’d been going through.
“I was just about to go to bed,” she told TJ, her voice flat. “Is Owen okay?”