A Small Indiscretion Read Online Free

of
GQ
magazine’s 2008 “Rock Stars of Science.” We’d teased Mitch no end after he received the award and was pictured on the cover of the magazine in rock-star sunglasses and scrubs, even though he hadn’t spent time in an operating room in years. Not until you landed in one, at least, and he stepped in to manage your care.
    The trauma-center doctor had decided you were stable enough to emerge from the medically induced coma, and the plan was to take you off propofol the following morning, when the success of your dialysis and the need for a kidney transplant could be better assessed. So when Mitch and your father went off for their meeting, I was happy enough to visit your bedside alone. I sat and watched your face for a long time. I took your bloated hand in mine, and I took comfort in the promise that the following day, or at least within a few days after that, you would wake and be returned to us.
    Later, I found Jonathan standing at the window in the waiting room. He was staring into the courtyard below, where a single sycamore tree had been planted. Its leaves had already fallen and its branches were bleached and bare, like bones long buried, dug up and scrubbed clean and displayed in the late-summer light.
    I stood next to him at the window. I let my fingers brush his forearm, but he moved a step away from me. He didn’t look at me when he spoke. He told me your body was sensitized to his blood. You hadantibodies to some of his antigens. If he were the donor, your immune system would turn on his kidney and destroy it.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you wanted it to be you.”
    “It’s all right,” he said.
    But it wasn’t.
    D RIVING BACK TO the city from the hospital, at twilight, there was a thickening of color in the sky behind the hills, and I felt hopeful, in spite of everything. We’d known it was possible your father would not be a match. We’d known there was only a 50 percent chance of a match for each of us, and though I knew he was disappointed he would not be the one to make the sacrifice, I felt sure that my own tissue test would show a positive, and that my kidney and I would be up to the task, if required, and that your body would embrace your new organ with its usual grace and competence. You would come out of the coma the following day and we would all set out on the road to recovery.
    “Are you all right?” I said to your father.
    “I’m fine.”
    But he did not hold my hand across the center console. He did not take the scenic route we sometimes took, pulling off at the coast to watch the sun drop behind the horizon before we drove home.
    That night, he slept on a camping mat, as he had in August, when I returned from London.
    “Why are you sleeping on that again?” I asked him.
    “My back hurts,” he said.
    I handed him a pillow off the bed. “Take this, at least.”
    “I don’t need that,” he said. He bent down and began to blow up the attached inflatable compartment.
    “Maybe you should let me do that,” I said. “I’ve had more experience blowing things up.”
    I had wanted it to seem like an apology, for London, but it came across sounding bitter. He didn’t even acknowledge I’d spoken. He did not kiss me good night, and I did not lower myself to the ground and ask him to. I lay on top of the sheet, the covers shoved aside, sweating. This was how I would live if your father never forgave me. This would be the trade I’d made. A moment’s friction for a life in which I would never again be free of my own body. I would never again press against his coolness beneath the sheets. I would be encumbered by my own reckless heat, the way I had been the winter I met him.
    The way, perhaps, you had been last summer, Robbie, when you first met Emme.

Four

    I T WAS EIGHT MONTHS AGO , last Fourth of July. Emme had been living and working in the store for just over a month. I’d extended her a last-minute invitation to join us for the day, and I’d promised her