Chapter 17 Buttons

"Can DNA be shark?"

The technician, a young man with a shaved head and a lanyard covered in cartoon molecules, leaned over the counter toward Pippa and took the question seriously, which I liked him for.

"Not yours," he said. "Yours is people."

"But it could be a little bit shark."

"Everybody's a tiny bit fish, way back," he said. "But no. No shark."

Pippa turned to me with the face of a client whose lawyer has let her down.

It was eight on Tuesday morning, in a beige room above a dentist's office off the highway: the genetics lab the Probate and Family Court used when it wanted to know who belonged to whom. A counter, four plastic chairs, a poster about cheek cells, a box of swabs in paper sleeves. Rhys was already in one of the chairs.

Tamsin had fought the order for a week and lost on the law.

"The presumption makes it a formality," she'd told me, eating a pear over the sink at Netmaker Lane. "If we refuse, it looks like we've got something to hide. We haven't. So they get one swab each, in a room, with you there, and then they get a piece of paper that says what everybody already knows. Nothing else."

I hadn't told her about the tray. I hadn't told anyone. I'd gone home from St. Ansel on Monday night, bathed the twins, read the shark book twice, and lain awake until two with Rosa's voice in my ears and the foxglove still sealed in its bag in my bedside drawer.

In the morning I'd gotten up and done what came next. Swabs. Then work. You stitch the bleeder you can see.

"Who's first?" said the technician.

"Me," said Rhys.

He stood up. He was in a gray suit and a white shirt, no tie, and he took the swab from the technician and then gave it back. "You do it," he said. "So they can see how."

He opened his mouth. The technician rubbed the inside of his cheek with the cotton end, ten seconds, counting aloud, and Rhys sat there with his mouth open and his eyes on the ceiling tiles, looking entirely ridiculous, and I understood after a moment that he was doing it on purpose.

"Does it hurt?" Pippa demanded.

"No," said Rhys, around the swab.

"Does it taste bad?"

"It tastes like nothing."

"Nothing's not a taste."

"It is today."

The technician slid the swab into its sleeve and wrote on the label, and Pippa marched up to the counter before anyone could ask and opened her mouth very wide.

She bit the swab.

Not hard. Just enough that the technician said "Ow, okay," and laughed, and had to start again, and Pippa said with her mouth open "Thorry, it wath a reflekth," and I put my hand over my eyes.

Second swab. Done. She went back to her chair and swung her legs and looked pleased with herself.

"Felix?" said the technician.

Felix was behind my legs.

He'd gone there when we came through the door, and he'd stayed there, one hand fisted in the back of my coat. When I looked down I could see the top of his head and the blue tubing of his stethoscope and nothing else.

He wasn't crying. Felix almost never cried. He went small and silent, a hermit crab pulled back into its shell, and waited for the world to go away.

"Sweetheart," I said. "It's just a Q-tip. Like for your ears. It goes on the inside of your cheek."

Nothing.

The technician came around the counter with the swab and crouched down. Felix pressed his face into the backs of my knees.

"We can come back," the technician offered.

"We have an order," I said. "Give him a minute."

I'd done this with other children's parents. I'd done it with Felix at his echoes, at his blood tests, at the dentist. There was no trick that worked twice. You waited and talked about something else, and sometimes he came out and sometimes he didn't. Once, in Zurich, we had gone home and come back three days later.

Rhys got up from his chair.

I tensed. I thought he was going to say *Felix, be a big boy*, or *come on, it doesn't hurt*, the things his own father would have said to him, the things men like him said to boys. I opened my mouth to stop him.

Not a word. He came and crouched, not in front of Felix, but beside my legs, a little to one side, so he was level with the place where Felix's face was hidden. He didn't reach out. He put his forearms on his knees.

Then he started undoing his cuffs.

He did the left one first. It was a plain white button, not a cufflink, and he undid it and folded the cuff back once. Then the right. Then the top button of his shirt, which was already open, so he did it up and undid it again, slowly, so it could be seen. Then the next one down.

Behind my legs, something moved.

Rhys kept his eyes on his own shirt and went on. Third button. Fourth. He wasn't taking his shirt off. He just opened each one and closed it again, one after another, down the front.

From behind my knees came a whisper.

"Five."

The whisper went to Pippa. She'd slid off her chair and come over and crouched on my other side with her face next to her brother's, and Felix was whispering into her ear.

"Six," Felix whispered.

Rhys did the next button.

"Seven."

His jacket. The two on the front. "Eight. Nine." The single button on his cuff he'd already undone, which he did up again, and undid.

"Ten," Felix breathed into his sister's ear.

Then he took his face out of the backs of my knees and opened his mouth.

The technician, to his eternal credit, moved like a scrub nurse. In went the swab, ten seconds, out again, into the sleeve. Felix shut his mouth and put his face back into my coat. It was over.

Rhys stood up and did his cuffs back up. He went to his plastic chair and scrolled through his phone, a man with emails, a man who hadn't done anything. He didn't say *there you go*. He didn't look my way to check I'd noticed.

I'd noticed.

---

In the parking lot afterward, Pippa marched Felix to the strip of grass by the entrance to explain that she had been braver because she'd gone first. I stood by my car with my keys. Rhys stood by his.

"Saturday," I said. "You asked me something."

"I did." He looked over at the twins. Pippa had Felix by both shoulders and was shaking him gently to make a point. "Not here."

"Here." I kept my voice down. It goes down when I'm angry or frightened. It always has. "You asked if I didn't think you should know he's sick. He isn't sick. He has a valve with two leaflets instead of three, an echo once a year, and a sister who cheats at tag."

"I know. I read about bicuspid valves. All of Sunday." His hand was on top of his car door. "I know the numbers now. That isn't what I asked."

"No. You asked why I didn't tell you."

He waited.

"They found it on a scan in June. In Zurich. Three months after you left a freezer bag on the hall table and told me to sign by Tuesday or you'd call the police."

I watched his face. "So tell me how it should have gone. Should I have called Carrow? His number was on the cover. Should I have mailed the scan to Lantern Row with a note? *From the woman who poisoned your grandfather. Thought you should know.*"

"Margot."

"You had me tried and divorced before the gala champagne was flat. I stood in that hall and tried to tell you one thing. You didn't let me get to the end of the sentence."

He didn't answer. His knuckles had gone white on the top of the door. For once he didn't have a word ready, and he didn't reach for one.

Across the lot, Felix had stopped listening to his sister. He was standing on the curb with one hand on his stethoscope, watching us.

Rhys saw it too. He looked at his son for a long moment.

"Does it hurt him?" he said. "Ever?"

"No."

He nodded once. He turned his face toward the highway, and his jaw worked, and I waited until it stopped.

"Margot. That night..."

"Not here," I said, and went to get my children.

---

The afternoon was a full clinic, two pre-op consults and a long talk with a frightened man about his mitral valve, and I didn't think about Rhys at all until twenty past four, when one of the nurses at the clinic desk turned her phone around and slid it across to me.

"Isn't that..." she said, and stopped.

It was a gossip site. The headline was in pink capitals. VIVIENNE SUTTER BACK IN BRAMPORT. Under it a photograph, taken that lunchtime outside the Calloway Meridian tower on the harbor.

Vivienne was on the sidewalk in huge sunglasses and a camel coat I recognized. Her honey-blonde hair lifted in the wind off the water and fell exactly where it should. She was smiling over her shoulder at the camera.

Her left hand was tucked through the arm of the man beside her, who was walking out of the revolving door with his phone at his ear and his head turned away.

Rhys.

Gray suit. White shirt. The same cuffs.

Under the photo there was a quote. *"Darling, I'm just home for family,"* the actress told our photographer, who just happened to be there.

"Just happened to be there," the nurse said. "Sure."

I slid the phone back. "Thank you."

"Dr. Fairley, I didn't mean it like..."

"It's fine. I'd rather know."

I went back to my office and closed the door. From the window the tower was small at this distance, its top floor already lit. I thought about a man crouching on a beige carpet doing up and undoing his buttons one at a time for a boy who wouldn't look at him.

I thought about Vivienne's heels kicked off on the runner at Lantern Row five years ago, and her coat on the hook.

The same coat. She'd kept it too.

---

Fish sticks at six. Dora had gone home. The rain had started again, the leak over the back of the kitchen was dripping into the stockpot, and Felix was counting the drips under his breath between bites. Pippa had ketchup to her elbows.

"Is the grumpy man coming on Saturday?" she asked.

"I don't know yet."

"He should. He can carry things." She considered her fish stick. "He has ten buttons."

"Everybody has buttons."

"Not ten," said Pippa, scandalized. "You only have four. Dora has six. Felix counted."

Felix, beside her, kept his eyes on his plate and his ears very pink. Then he leaned over and whispered, and Pippa listened with her head on one side.

"Felix says he did them all up and down for him," she reported. "On purpose. Felix says that's a trick." She paused. "But a good trick."

"Eat your peas," I said. It came out lower than I meant.

Felix ate one pea. Then he went back to counting drips, his lips moving, and every so often his free hand went to the front of his sweater and touched the place where a button would be.

The little television on the kitchen counter had been Helen's. It was older than me and got four channels clearly and two more if you stood next to it. I kept it on for the weather.

At six the local news came on, and after the weather and a fire in Revere and a story about the harbor tunnel, the anchor smiled and said, "And a familiar face is back on the North Shore."

There was Vivienne. The sidewalk, the sunglasses, the hair falling where it should, the hand tucked through Rhys's arm. Then a clip I hadn't seen, Vivienne stopping for a microphone on the steps of a hotel, laughing, touching her hair. "I grew up here, darling," she told the reporter. "Bramport's always been home. I'm just here for family. For the people I love."

I reached for the remote.

Pippa got there first.

She had climbed up onto her knees on her chair, ketchup and all, and she had the remote in her fist. She didn't change the channel. She pointed it at the screen and studied the woman on it with the full gravity of four and a half years old.

Her green eyes narrowed, and they were her father's eyes doing it, the exact squint he gave a bad set of figures. Felix had stopped counting drips.

On the screen Vivienne laughed again and tilted her head and looked straight into the camera, and into Helen's kitchen, with her bright, expensive, practiced smile.

Pippa pressed the red button. Vivienne shrank to a bright dot in the middle of the black glass and went out.

"That lady," Pippa said, "is a witch."