said. My voice was rising, I heard it but couldn’t stop it. “None of this has actually happened, Leon. Can I worry about it when it does, yeah? If it does? Is that OK with you?”
“Not really, no. Because when it does get to be too much for you, there needs to be a plan all ready to go. You can’t just walk out and leave him to look after himself till—”
“Then make a fucking plan. I don’t care what it is. Just leave me out of it.”
I expected Leon to snap my head off, but he gave me one unfathomable look and turned back to his smoke. The shadow had inched farther across the garden and the butterflies were gone, which to me in that mood seemed gratuitously and cheaply symbolic. I finished my cigarette as fast as I could and crushed it out under my shoe.
“I asked my dad,” Leon said suddenly. “About what happens to this place.”
“And?”
“I had it wrong. It’s not just Hugo’s to live in; Gran and Granddad left it to him, straight up. Oldest son.” He ground out his cigarette on the step. “So the question is what Hugo’s will says. If he has one.”
His eyes had slid sideways to me. “Oh hell no,” I said. “I’m not asking him.”
“You were going on about how you spend all that time with him, you know him so well—”
“And you were going on about how you’ve got a life in Berlin and God forbid you should have to move back here. What do you care if—”
“Do you actually want the place sold?”
“No,” I said, swiftly and definitely, startling myself. After the last few weeks, losing the Ivy House was unthinkable. “God, no.”
“Hugo wouldn’t, either. You know he wouldn’t. But my dad says Phil and Louisa are all gung-ho about it: give Su and Tom a few bob for the kids’ education, for a better house, all that stuff. Susanna doesn’t want it, but try telling them that. And Phil’s the next oldest. Hugo could easily leave it to him, and boom, gone. If you talk to Hugo, you can explain that. Make sure he leaves it to someone who’ll hang on to it.”
“OK,” I said, after a moment. “OK. I’ll talk to him.”
Leon went back to staring at the garden, arms clasped around his knees like a kid. “Make it soon,” he said.
I buried my cigarette butt in the geranium pot and went inside, to Hugo and Melissa looking up smiling from the old photo album he had dug out to show her. But it was too late: my head was pounding savagely and there was no way I could face an evening of ravioli and rummy and chitchat, watching Leon watch Hugo’s every move. I said something about a headache, went upstairs and took a Xanax and a couple of painkillers—fuck Leon, anyway—and went to bed with the pillow over my head.
Susanna had got a lot pricklier, too. She had been a sweet kid, earnest and bookish and quirky—sometimes to the point of cluelessness; I had spent a fair bit of our teenage years explaining to her why she needed to make an actual effort with clothes and hair and whatever, unless she wanted the shit slagged out of her—with an unexpected sharp sense of humor. In spite of the various shifts she had gone through since then, a part of me was still expecting that kid, and it came as an unpleasant surprise when that wasn’t what I got at all.
“I’ve got hold of the guy,” she said, one afternoon, in the kitchen. She had just taken Hugo to his radiotherapy session; he had come back exhausted and shaky, and we had helped him into bed and were making tea and buttering scones to take up to him. “For the second opinion. He’s in Switzerland, but he’s the guy for this cancer, worldwide. I rang him up and he says he’ll take a look at Hugo’s file.”
“I thought like three doctors had already seen him,” I said. “At the hospital.”
Susanna pulled open the fridge and rummaged for the butter. “They have. So one more won’t hurt.”
“So a fourth opinion. What do you want a fourth opinion for?”
“In case the first three were shit.”
I was at the sink, filling the kettle; all I could see was her back. “How many are you planning to get? Are you going to keep chasing doctors till one of them tells you what you want to hear?”