Everything After(2)

She wasn’t sure how much longer her mind could take the crushing loss of hope each time her period started again, each time a month passed and the only thing growing inside her was disappointment. Seven months felt like forever. She’d been imagining this child for so long. For two years and seven months, to be exact, since she’d been ready to try right away. Which made each month that she wasn’t pregnant even more excruciating. But perhaps this month would be different.

Emily sat down in her office and quickly reviewed her notes for her first patient, her fingers running along the pages as if they were playing scales on a piano. So many years later, she still couldn’t shake the habit. She closed her notebook and let her hand stray to her abdomen again. If there was a baby in there, its brain was only starting to develop, not actually a real brain yet. Forty to forty-three days—that was when brain activity first sparked.

Kai walked into her office and sat down on the couch, holding one of the granola bars they always put out in the reception area. Free food, both to lure college students in and to help take care of them when they weren’t caring for themselves. He looked over at the aquarium.

Emily had discovered years ago that watching fish swim seemed to relax people, or maybe it was the quiet burbling of the filter. Either way, her patients seemed to like it. And it gave them something to talk about when they were working up to what was really troubling them. It gave her something to look at, too, when she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to hold it together, wasn’t sure if she could be the anchor they needed her to be.

She quickly glanced at the framed quote on her desk. John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

Then she cleared everything else from her mind as she focused on her patient. She wasn’t going to let him down.





ii



When I met your father, the first thing I noticed about him was his smile.

It appeared, slow and easy, across his face when he saw me walking toward him.

We were in a folk music club in the basement of an old church, the spring of my sophomore year. He offered me his chair and a beer. I offered to share the cup of popcorn I’d snagged on my way in.

We listened to a woman with a smoky voice sing about a crystal castle she’d build in the sky.

He called me his crystal queen.





3



After Kai left, Emily heard a knock on her office door while she was writing up notes. Three staccato raps. She knew those raps; they meant “I. Love. You.” Ezra had been knocking on her door like that for the last four and a half years; it began soon after they started dating, soon after she got her job at NYU, a few months before her twenty-ninth birthday. Originally, he’d said it meant “Em-il-y,” but that changed three months in. It became “I. Love. You.” A love that had only grown from there.

He knocked again.

Emily opened the door, and her worries about her patients, about whether she was pregnant, disappeared when she saw his face.

“Hey, love,” he said, as he stepped into her office and took her into his arms. She lifted her face up for a kiss, and he brought his lips to hers.

“You feel so good,” she told him, once they stopped kissing, when she leaned her head against his shoulder.

He smelled faintly of soap and cologne. She brought her finger up to his name, embroidered on the left side of his button-down, right above his heart, the letters that spelled Dr. Ezra Gold. A gift from his doctor parents when he completed residency, and a favorite of his.

“What happened?” she asked.

He taught one class a week in bioethics during NYU’s spring semester, and otherwise practiced medicine at NYU’s children’s hospital, a mile and a half away, specializing in pediatric blood cancers. He and Emily had started working at NYU the same year, even though Ezra was four years older. His job needed more training than hers did. But he never quite got trained in how to handle when he was feeling overwhelmed by what he was facing, what his patients were facing. He had to figure out how to deal with that on his own. Sometimes he needed to leave the hospital, to jump in a cab for the nine-minute ride to Emily’s office. Sometimes he needed a kiss to get through the rest of the day. Sometimes he needed to tell her what happened. Other times she had to be a detective, trying to figure out why he was so silent at home, what had hurt him so deeply.

“It hasn’t been the best morning,” he said, holding her tighter. “But better now that I’m here with you.”

“Good,” she told him, wondering if today was a day she’d have to dig, if he would let her in or push her away.



* * *



—

When they spoke for the very first time, in the elevator in the Global Public Health building, Emily had been surprised that Ezra noticed her. She’d seen him around—in the hallways, walking from the subway—and he always seemed absorbed in thought, as if the only world that existed was the one in his head. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses, which added to the sense that he was somehow separated from the world, looking at it through a window. And he kept to himself. Only a handful of people on the faculty knew anything about him other than his name.

Once they got together, Emily realized that Ezra’s studious appearance, his quiet reserve, masked the heart of a doctor who felt deeply for his patients and their families, and who was always thinking about what he could do to make their lives easier, how he could practice medicine more ethically, not just to make their health outcomes better but their quality of life, too. He tried, tirelessly, to find trials his patients could be part of to improve their outcomes.