Chapter 29 What Exactly Is He

Two words. I had carried them around all weekend, through Saturday's laundry and Sunday's pancakes and a night of lying awake listening to the foghorn off the harbor mouth. *Her. True.*

At five-forty on Monday morning I was standing behind the rope at Logan arrivals with a paper cup of terrible coffee, and when Lorenz came through the sliding doors, tall and rumpled behind his wire glasses, a canvas bag over one shoulder and a paper sack held against his chest, I didn't say hello.

"Edmund spoke a sentence," I said.

He stopped in front of me. "Which sentence?"

I told him. He stood there holding the sack while a family with a luggage cart steered around us, and his eyes behind the glasses did something complicated. Then he set the sack down on his bag as if it held eggs, put both arms around me, and held on.

"Good," he said into my hair. "Margot. That is good."

When he let go he was a cardiologist again. "His rate?"

"A hundred and twelve at the top. Back to ninety in four minutes."

"And he pointed. With the left." He shook his head slowly. "Five years nobody hears a sentence from this man, and he chooses those two." He looked at me over his glasses. "He had been saving them."

The sack held two round dark loaves from the Hottingen bakery and a twist of the soft braided bread the twins called Sunday bread. "Nearly twenty hours old," he said, "and still better than anything in this country."

The twins slept through all of it, slumped together in the double stroller beside me, because I wasn't leaving them with anyone at five in the morning. They slept through being lifted into their car seats, too. They woke on the ramp out of the garage, when the car bounced over a speed bump. Pippa saw a fair head in the passenger seat and screamed so loudly I nearly drove into a pillar.

"LORENZ! You came! Mama said you were coming but I thought she was lying!"

"Your mother does not lie."

"She lies about broccoli."

Lorenz twisted around as far as his seat belt allowed and reached back between the seats. Pippa grabbed his hand in both of hers. Felix studied him with grave gray eyes, then took two of his fingers and held them, as he used to on the tram.

We drove through the tunnel like that, Lorenz folded backward in his seat with a child attached to each hand, the bread on his lap, telling Pippa that the sharks in Lake Zurich had all asked after her.

At Helen's kitchen table, with his knees nearly up to the edge of it, Lorenz cut the dark bread with my mother's old serrated knife. Then he unbuckled the canvas bag.

Inside was a flat wooden box with a sliding lid. Wire, a bag of colored lights no bigger than grains of rice, a battery holder, a bundle of striped resistors, a small pair of pliers and, in its own slot, a pencil-thin soldering iron with a cork handle.

Felix let out a small, involuntary squeak of joy. Then he leaned to Pippa and whispered.

"Felix says there are fourteen of the stripy ones," Pippa reported. "And thank you. And can he do it now."

"After school," I said.

"After the echo," Lorenz said, at the same moment, and raised both hands. "After school. Your mother outranks me."

---

Lorenz was giving grand rounds at St. Ansel at noon. Okafor had arranged it the minute he heard Lorenz was flying in, because a visiting pediatric cardiologist from Zurich was the kind of thing a teaching hospital liked to put on a flyer.

But at nine, before any of that, Lorenz did Felix's yearly echo himself, in the pediatric echo lab on the second floor, as he had done every echo of Felix's life, starting with the one where Felix had been the size of a plum.

The lab was a dim room with blue walls painted with fish. The echo machine sat beside a narrow cushioned table with a paper sheet. Felix lay on it in his undershirt, his stethoscope folded on his chest because he wouldn't let anyone take it, and Pippa sat on a stool beside his head with Admiral in her lap, keeping watch.

I stood by the wall with my arms crossed and watched the screen.

The door opened behind me, and Pippa stopped talking in the middle of a word. I knew who it was before I turned around.

"I asked to be here," Rhys said. "After the park. You said yes."

I had. In the first week of April, after he'd heard Felix's murmur through a toy stethoscope and found out about the valve in the worst possible way, he had asked to be at the next echo, and I had said yes because there was no good reason to say no. I had not expected him to remember the date.

"Come in, then," I said. "Close the door. He doesn't like the corridor light."

Lorenz looked up from the machine. He took off one glove and stood and came around the table, and the two of them took each other in across the dim little room, Lorenz in his rumpled shirt and Rhys in his dark suit, both of them taller than the door frame.

"Lorenz Brandt."

"Rhys Calloway."

They shook hands. It went on too long. I watched each of them decide not to be the first to let go, and I watched the moment where they both realized they were being ridiculous in front of a four-year-old, and let go at exactly the same instant.

"Dr. Brandt is Felix's cardiologist," I said. "He has been since before Felix was born."

"I know who he is," Rhys said. "I read the reports you sent."

Pippa had been watching all of this from her stool with her chin on Admiral's head. Now she pointed the shark at Rhys.

"You have to stand by Mama," she said. "And you can't talk. Felix is counting."

"Counting what?"

"Ceiling squares. If you talk he has to start again from the beginning, and then it takes *forever*."

Rhys looked at the ceiling. Then at me. Then he went and stood against the wall beside me, a careful foot away, and folded his hands in front of him and didn't say another word. Pippa watched him do it, nodded once, and turned back to her brother. It was the most obedient I had ever seen him. No boardroom in Bramport had ever managed it in one sentence.

Lorenz went back to the machine. He put on a fresh glove, squeezed warm gel onto the probe, and said, "Felix. Cold, then warm. As always."

Felix pressed his lips together. The probe went down on his small chest, and the screen bloomed gray and black, and there it was: his heart, beating, fast and neat, a little fist opening and shutting in the dark.

Felix didn't move. He lay with his arms at his sides and his eyes on the ceiling, and his lips moved. Then he turned his head an inch toward his sister and whispered the number to her, and she whispered it back to him to confirm it, and he went back to counting from the beginning.

Rhys stood beside me at the wall. I could feel him trying to understand the screen, the gray shapes, the colored jets when Lorenz switched on the Doppler. He ran a shipping company. He could read a sonar printout. This he could not read, and he hated it.

"There," Lorenz said. He froze the image and turned the screen a little so we could see. He spoke to Felix, but it was for us. "This is the aortic valve. It is the door between your heart and the big pipe that takes the blood to the rest of you. Most people have three flaps in that door. Felix has two."

He traced them with the tip of a gloved finger, two pale curved lines meeting in the middle of the dark. "Two leaflets where most have three. It behaves. One watches it, one does not fear it."

"Is it bigger?" I asked. "The root."

"Measuring." He clicked. He clicked again. "No. Same as last spring, within the margin. The flow is the same. The murmur will be the same murmur." He glanced at me. "I'll write it properly by Wednesday. But you can see."

I could see. Something in my chest that had been clenched since five-forty in the morning, if I was honest since Zurich, let go.

Beside me, Rhys was looking not at the screen but at Lorenz's hand. At how easily it moved the probe, angled it, found the next view without searching. At Felix, under it, not flinching.

"Does it hurt him?" he said. His voice was low, for Pippa's sake. "The probe."

"No. It is cold for one second. Then it is boring." Lorenz didn't look up. "Boring is the best thing an echo can be."

"How long have you done this?"

"His echoes? All of them." Lorenz moved the probe a fraction. "Seven, I think. Two before he was born."

Rhys said nothing to that at all.

But I saw him count. I saw it go across his face, the arithmetic of it: seven scans, two of them before Felix was born, and not one with him in the room. He looked back at the screen, at the small gray heart he could not read, and he kept looking at it long after Lorenz had moved on to the next view.

Pippa turned around on her stool.

"Forty-eight," she announced. "We counted twice. But two are broken, so really it's forty-six and a half."

"Thank you, Pippa," Lorenz said gravely. "I will put that in the report."

---

When it was done Lorenz wiped the gel off Felix's chest with a warm towel, and Felix sat up and put his stethoscope on and listened to his own heart with great concentration. Then he held the bell out to Lorenz so that he could listen too. Lorenz bent and listened, solemnly, for a full ten seconds, and said, "Yes. That is Felix."

I stepped into the corridor to call the twins' school and tell them we'd be in after lunch. When I turned around, Rhys was there.

He had followed me out and walked me, without touching me, to the alcove by the vending machines at the end of the corridor, where a humming machine full of chips and pretzels threw a cold white light across both of us. He stood between me and the corridor. Not on purpose. He was simply very large, and he had stopped in the place he had stopped.

For a moment he didn't say anything. In three years of marriage I had learned that Rhys's silences came in sizes, and this was a large one. I waited it out. I had waited out worse in operating rooms.

"You let me find out about the valve from a toy," he said.

"I've told you why."

"You told me. I heard it." He looked back up the corridor, at the window in the echo lab door.

Through it, in the blue fish-painted light, Lorenz was kneeling on the floor beside the table helping Felix into his sweatshirt, one arm and then the other. Pippa was explaining something to him with large gestures, and he was nodding at her with his whole attention, the way he nodded at a resident presenting a difficult case.

Felix got his head through the neck of the sweatshirt and reached up without looking and put his small hand into Lorenz's large one.

He didn't have to look for it. He knew where it would be.

Rhys's jaw set. He didn't take his eyes off the window.

"And what exactly," he said, "is he to my son?"