Part 2
“There was no letter,” Nathan said.
Claire closed her fingers around the watch. The cracked crystal pressed into her palm. “He watched me seal it.”
Her words came slowly, with small pauses that Nathan remembered from the last weeks before his transplant. Arthur had met her outside the cardiac intensive care unit after the transplant team received a second heart offer. Nathan was refusing it unless Claire promised to be there when he woke.
“You said you wouldn’t let them take you unless I promised to be there when you woke,” Claire said.
Nathan remembered. He had been thirty-two, exhausted by the pump strapped beneath his shirt, terrified that the operating room would be the last place he saw. He had made Claire responsible for whether he lived.
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“It was frightening.” She pressed her fingertips to her temple. “Your father said if I ended things, you’d get angry enough to choose the surgery. He asked me to leave only until they took you in.”
“And you agreed?”
The hurt in his voice made June draw closer to the bed. Nathan hated himself for it before Claire answered.
“I agreed to stay away until the surgery. I never meant to leave you.” Claire looked toward the rain striping the window. “I wrote that I was pregnant and going to my cousin’s in Wheeling. I remember your father taking the envelope. After that, there are headlights in water.”
Her car had been found downstream from a washed-out section of Route 7, its roof crushed, her purse still caught under the passenger seat. Search crews had worked the river for nine days. Arthur arranged the memorial before Nathan left transplant isolation, but Nathan never petitioned a court to declare her dead. There had been no body. By the ninth day, with the river still swollen and near freezing, even the state police investigator was talking about currents and cold water in the past tense.
Claire had been thrown clear before the car entered the river. Before the car was recovered, a county road crew found her unconscious beside the washed-out crossing, miles upstream, with no vehicle or identification nearby. Flood closures forced the ambulance to a small hospital across the state line, where she was entered as an unidentified storm casualty. The hospital sent out an unidentified-patient bulletin before the missing-person case was opened, then withdrew it when Claire could say the surname Vale. The river case, filed later in another state under Claire Mercer, did not list Vale as an alias. Months afterward, a rehabilitation social worker used Claire’s birth record to restore her maiden identity, but no one reran the inactive files against each other. June was born seven months after the accident, while Claire was still receiving outpatient neurological rehabilitation.
“The Bells took us in after rehab,” Claire said. “She worked in the therapy kitchen. He had a little kiln in his garage. They helped with my papers and with June.”
“Where are they now?”
“Mrs. Bell died two years ago. Mr. Bell moved near his son in Arizona. We came back because the community studio offered me work, and St. Catherine had a clinic that would see me.” She gave a faint, humorless smile. “Apparently I came back very close.”
Nathan turned her water cup so the straw reached the left side of her mouth. Claire watched his hand.
“You used to do that.”
“Your right thumb hurt after a firing day.”
“Did you ever remember enough to look for me?”
“Eighteen months ago, the name Mercer came back. A student at the studio searched it and found Mercer Clay.” Claire looked at the watch. “I watched a video of you and your father at this hospital. I knew his voice before I knew your first name.”
“You knew I was alive.”
“By then, yes. June was five. I was having seizures, and I was afraid your father would call me unfit and take her. I shut the laptop.” She met his eyes. “I knew what I was doing, and I’m sorry.”
His hand remained beside the water cup. “For eighteen months?”
“Yes.”
He looked at the wet ring the cup had left on the tray. “I don’t know what to do with that yet.”
“I know.”
Dr. Shah entered with the neurosurgeon before either of them could say more. The doctors recommended draining the collection pressing on Claire’s brain, probably the next morning. It was a common procedure, the neurosurgeon said, but not trivial. The immediate goal was to prevent further decline.
Claire listened intently, then asked him to repeat which symptoms might improve. When he did, she wrote three words on the back of a meal-order slip: pressure, attention, balance.
“And memory?” Nathan asked.
“Recent attention may improve,” Dr. Shah said. “Her older memory injury is not something this procedure can promise to change.”
Claire folded the slip into a square. “Good. Please don’t tell me those memories will come back if you don’t know.”
She asked Rosa to take June for hot chocolate. June refused until Claire showed her the three written words and repeated the doctor’s name correctly. Only then did she slide off the chair. At the door, she pointed at Nathan. “Don’t make her tired.”
After they left, he sat where June had been. He kept both hands flat on his knees. “What do you need?”
“Independent advice. Rosa with June. A way to cover the rent if I can’t go back to the studio next week.”
“I can take care of the rent.”
“Ask me before you pay anything.”
“May I pay it directly for three months?”
Claire considered before saying yes. “Three. Not a year. And no moving us into a Mercer house while I’m under anesthesia.”
His phone vibrated again. Arthur.
“He’s coming,” Nathan said.
Fear altered Claire’s face faster than pain had. She pulled the blanket higher over her chest. “I don’t want him in here.”
“Then he won’t come in.”
Arthur arrived twenty minutes later in the charcoal suit he wore to the donor luncheon. Jonah had met him at the elevators to retrieve the medication Nathan left in the clinic, but Arthur followed him down the corridor before Jonah could stop him. At seventy-one, Arthur was leaner than he had been during Nathan’s illness, though his energy remained managerial; he entered any hallway as if someone had asked him to solve it. He carried Nathan’s anti-rejection medication in one hand.
“You left these in the clinic,” he said. Then he saw Claire through the narrow glass panel in the door, and the medication bottle rattled once.
“My God.”
Nathan stepped between him and the room. He left the door closed. “She said no.”
Arthur looked at his son as if he had spoken in another language. His grip tightened on the bottle. “I need to see her.”
“You need to answer me. Did she give you a letter?”
Since the river search, Arthur had been able to discuss Claire’s death with grave, controlled sorrow. Now his eyes went to the floor.
“Yes.”
Nathan’s body went cold around the steady beat in his chest. He held out one hand. “Where is it?”
“In my safe.”
Behind the glass, Claire watched them. Arthur saw her watching and lowered his voice.
“You were hours from losing the donor heart. She left, you consented, and then the accident report came. You nearly died twice on the table. I told myself the letter could wait until you were strong enough.”
“All these years?”
“At first, six days. Then six weeks. After that, I no longer knew how to tell you what I had done.”
Nathan thought of the private missing-person firm he had hired from his transplant room and the boxes of reports it sent. For the first eighteen months, every lead had gone directly to him. When a rejection episode left him too ill to keep reviewing them, he authorized Arthur to receive the firm’s reports and screen out the weak ones; by the third year, Nathan had told him to stop forwarding anything he considered another false sighting. “Did you ever see something real?”
Arthur shut his eyes.
“Nineteen months after the crash, one of your private investigators found an old Greenbrier Neurorehabilitation newsletter published the previous year. There was a photograph from the pottery room. The caption named Claire Vale and her infant daughter, June.” His voice roughened. “The firm sent the report to me because I was the contact you had authorized. The photograph was poor, but I thought I could see the watch. You were having another rejection episode. I marked the lead unconfirmed and told them not to spend more time on it. I told myself bringing it to you might kill you.”
“You saw enough to bury the lead.”
“I was trying to keep my son alive.”
“After I came home,” Nathan said, “you watched me open those reports.”
Arthur said nothing.
“You knew she was pregnant.”
“Yes.”
“And when you saw that photograph, you knew there was a child.”
Arthur looked toward the closed door. “Yes.”
Arthur was still holding Nathan’s medication bottle. Nathan took it, shook out the scheduled dose, and swallowed it with water Jonah brought from the nurses’ station.
Nathan went back into Claire’s room. “Nineteen months after the accident, one of the private investigators I hired found your photograph in a rehabilitation newsletter. My father was authorized to screen the firm’s reports while I was ill. He marked that one unconfirmed, stopped the follow-up, and never told me.”
Claire’s face became very still. She reached for the folded meal slip and flattened it against her blanket, as if facts might otherwise move.
Rosa returned with June, who had whipped cream on her upper lip. Claire held out her hand.
“Come here, Junebug. I need to tell you something.”
June climbed beside her. Claire looked at Nathan once, asking without words whether he would let her do this in her own way. He nodded.
“Nathan and I were married before the accident,” she said. “You were growing inside me when I left the hospital.”
June’s gaze moved to the blue figure on the bedside table. She reached toward it, then stopped.
“Is he my father?” “Yes.” June looked at Nathan for a long time. There was no sudden joy in her face, only the effort of fitting the new fact among all the others she already carried. “Then where were you…”
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