Chapter 15 Murmur

"Two scoops is a normal amount for a shark."

Pippa had planted her palms on the counter of the ice-cream kiosk, which came up to her chin, and she was addressing the teenager inside it like a judge who'd been wrong before. The kiosk had opened for the season that morning, and the boy's paper hat was still stiff from the box.

"You're not a shark," said the boy.

"I'm part shark. On the inside." She looked over her shoulder at me. "Mama, tell him."

"She's mostly girl," I said. "One scoop."

"Mama."

"One scoop, and it can be any color you like."

She turned back to the boy, unbeaten. "Blue," she said. "The bluest one. And he's paying." She pointed past me without looking to the tall man in the navy coat who was standing exactly ten feet from my left elbow with his wallet already out.

Rhys paid.

---

Tamsin's terms for the visit had arrived by email at eleven on Thursday night, numbered, in bold. Public place. Two hours. Margot within ten feet of the children at all times. No photographs. No discussion of the petition, the court, or "the future."

And at the bottom, not in bold: I will be on a bench nearby, eating, supervising. If he so much as says the word custody I am going to throw a lobster roll at him.

She was on the bench now, twenty yards up the path, in sunglasses and a puffer coat, with a lobster roll from the fish shack in one hand and her phone in the other. She raised the roll at me.

Rhys had agreed to every term within four minutes of receiving them. Carrow had called Tamsin the next morning to say his client "accepted the arrangement without prejudice," and Tamsin had said "Good, because he's getting nothing with prejudice either," and hung up and eaten a granola bar so aggressively I could hear it.

So here we were. The harbor park was a strip of brown grass and benches below the fish market, with a granite seawall and an iron rail along the top, and gulls on the rail facing into the wind. It was the first Saturday in April, and cold enough that everyone on the path was walking fast except us.

Pippa came back from the kiosk with a cone of something an alarming shade of turquoise and fell into step beside Rhys. She had decided, somewhere between the parking lot and the kiosk, that he was useful. He could carry things. He'd already been handed Admiral, her mittens, a piece of driftwood she was keeping, and half a cracker she was saving for a gull who deserved it.

"Actually," she told him, licking, "do you know about sharks?"

"Some."

"Sharks have to say sorry by swimming backwards."

I looked at the water. Beside me Felix walked with one hand in my coat pocket, holding my fingers, his stethoscope swinging blue against his rain jacket.

Rhys considered this. He was carrying Admiral under his arm by the tail, and the driftwood in the other hand, and he was the only man on the path in a coat that cost more than the kiosk.

"Sharks can't swim backwards," he said.

Pippa stopped walking. She looked up at him with tremendous patience.

"That's why they never say it," she said.

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, one short bark into the wind. Rhys's head came around. I studied the gulls, and I hated it, the laugh, the fact that it had happened in front of him, the fact that he'd heard it.

He studied Pippa, her blue mouth and her serious green eyes, and then he turned to the water too.

"Noted," he said.

"What's noted?"

"It means I heard you."

"Then say heard," said Pippa, and went on ahead to inspect a dead crab.

Then the gull who deserved the cracker had to be identified. That one had a mean face. That one was a boy, and boys got enough.

Rhys followed her with the driftwood and the shark and the mittens. He didn't tell her to come away from the edge, though his free hand drifted out every time she leaned toward the rail and drifted back when she didn't fall.

"That one," Pippa said at last, pointing at a small brown gull with one foot tucked up. "She's sad. She has one leg."

"She's resting it," said Rhys. "They stand on one leg to stay warm."

Pippa narrowed her eyes at him. "How do you know?"

"I own a port. There are a lot of gulls."

She decided this was a reasonable qualification and held out her hand for the cracker. He gave it to her. She broke it into exactly two pieces, threw one to the one-legged gull and ate the other herself, and the gull, unimpressed, flew away.

"Rude," said Pippa, and moved on.

Over her curls, Rhys's eyes found mine. I gave mine to the harbor. I didn't want him to see me smile twice in one morning.

---

Felix had not spoken a word to Rhys.

He hadn't at Netmaker Lane in the storm, when he'd come down the stairs and pressed the stethoscope to Rhys's coat and whispered his verdict into Pippa's ear and not Rhys's. He hadn't in the parking lot this morning, when Rhys had crouched to say hello and Felix had stepped behind my legs and stayed there.

Felix didn't speak to adults he hadn't decided about. He barely spoke to adults he had. In Zurich Agathe had bribed him with pastries for four years and still got her answers through Pippa.

He'd let go of my pocket, though. He was walking a few feet ahead of me now, along the foot of the seawall, counting the iron posts of the rail under his breath. When he got to the place where the wall stepped down into a low broad ledge, he stopped and climbed up onto it and sat, his boots dangling, facing the path.

Rhys was standing near him, holding Pippa's things while she harassed the crab.

I saw Felix look at him. A short look, then away, then back. He checked new food on his plate that way.

Then Felix took the stethoscope from around his neck.

He didn't look at Rhys. He looked at a point somewhere around Rhys's coat buttons, and he held the stethoscope out in one small hand at the full length of his arm, the earpieces toward Rhys and the bell still in his own fist.

Rhys went still. I watched him understand what was being offered. His glance came to me across the ten feet, fast, asking. I didn't give him anything. It wasn't mine to give.

He set the driftwood down on the wall. He shifted Admiral under his other arm. Then he bent and took the earpieces, gingerly, and fitted them into his ears.

Felix unzipped his jacket two inches. He pushed the bell down inside his sweater, flat against his own chest, a little to the left, exactly where he'd seen me put it on him a hundred times. He held it there, one hand over the other, and stared at the harbor.

Rhys bent down further to keep the tubing slack. His face was a foot from his son's. The wind lifted Felix's straight dark hair and dropped it in his eyes, and he didn't push it away, and he didn't look at the man listening to him.

I knew what Rhys was hearing, because I'd been hearing it since a fetal echo in a darkened room in Zurich when Felix was the size of a lemon. The heartbeat first. Fast, a child's rate, lub-dub, lub-dub. Then, under the first sound, if you knew to listen, a short soft rush. A whoosh, like a breath let out through the teeth. Every beat. There and gone and there.

Rhys's face changed. He heard it. I saw him hear it. He frowned, then went on listening, longer than anyone listens to a heartbeat for fun. The gulls shouted. Pippa told the crab it was rude. Felix sat with his hands pressed over the bell and his eyes on the water.

At last Rhys straightened. He took the earpieces out and held them for a second in his closed hand. Then he gave them back to Felix the way he'd taken them, earpieces first, and said, "Thank you."

Felix took the stethoscope and hung it back around his neck and climbed down from the ledge and walked straight past Rhys to Pippa. He leaned his head against hers. He whispered.

Pippa listened. "He says your heart is boring," she announced. "It doesn't swoosh."

Then Rhys looked at me.

---

Tamsin came off her bench as I walked toward it. She looked at my face, then at Rhys's, and said to the twins, "Who wants to see if the fish shack has a lobster in the tank with only one claw?" and Pippa said "Me," and Felix took Tamsin's free hand without being asked, and they went off along the path to the shack.

It was near enough for me to see the top of Pippa's curls bobbing in front of its window.

I sat down on the bench. Rhys sat at the other end of it. Tamsin had left half the lobster roll in its paper on the slats between us, and neither of us touched it.

"Tell me," he said.

I told him the way I'd tell any parent in clinic. It was easier that way. I'd done it a thousand times, and I knew where the sentences went.

"Felix was born with a bicuspid aortic valve. The aortic valve is the one between the heart and the main artery out of it. Most people's has three leaflets, three little flaps that open and close with every beat. His has two. It's the most common heart abnormality there is. One or two people in a hundred have one. Most of them never find out."

"The noise."

"The noise is blood moving through a valve that doesn't open quite as wide as a normal one. It's soft. His is mild. It was found before he was born, on a scan. He's had an echo every year since, an ultrasound of his heart. It's barely changed. He'll have another this spring."

I watched the shack. Pippa had her nose pressed to the tank window. "He doesn't need surgery. He may never need surgery. Some people with his valve need it at fifty or sixty. Some never do. He can run. He can play. He can do anything Pippa does, and he does, mostly to stop her from winning."

Rhys was looking straight ahead at the water. His hands were on his knees, and they had closed, slowly, until the knuckles stood out white.

"Who knows," he said.

"His cardiologist in Zurich. Me. His nanny in Zurich. Now his teacher, when he starts school." I paused. "Now you."

Down the path, Tamsin had stopped chewing. She was standing behind the twins at the shack window with the paper bag in her hand, and she'd turned her head toward the bench and was watching us, very still, the way she watched a witness who'd just made a mistake.

I knew what I'd done. I'd said it the way I'd say it to a father I'd met that morning. Calm and full of numbers, so he'd have something to hold onto other than me. It had always worked. It worked on frightened parents, on angry ones, on the ones who wanted to blame someone. I'd thought it would work on him.

The wind came off the harbor and moved the paper on the lobster roll.

Rhys didn't turn his head. He kept looking at the water, at the gray chop and the gulls riding it, and when he spoke it was so low I had to lean toward him to hear.

"You didn't think I should know he's sick?"