and took a sip of her drink. Then she hit him with another of those questions that were apparently peeling him back like the lid of a sardine tin. “Did you name him after the song ‘Hey Jude’?”
“Yeah,” he rasped. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He was starting to get a headache. It had been threatening all day. He’d gotten a lot of sun and hadn’t drunk enough water. But a headache wasn’t the waves. A headache was endurable.
“It’s too bad life can’t be like that, huh?” she said. “Taking a sad song and making it better? It’s a nice thought.”
It turned out that not asking the nosy, entitled, salacious questions worked like truth serum. Before he could even process what he was doing, more words tumbled out of him. “It was November. I was planning to take him to get his flu shot. Dr. Baker had closed his practice that past summer. We were planning a trip to London to get Jude a fishing pole. He was old enough that he could sit up and sort of pay attention, and I wanted to take him out fishing before winter really hit. He was way too young to actually fish, of course, but I was going to get him one of those kid fishing poles and sort of hold it for him. So I thought I’d get the shot done when we went to London. We’d do the shot, and the shopping would be the reward. We were gonna go on the weekend, so my ex could come, too, make a day of it, and—” Fuck. His voice was cracking. “I shouldn’t have waited. I should have gotten it done in October.”
“You mentioned still being on the parental leave year.” Her voice was calm. “So this would have been his first flu shot, right?” He nodded. “Children between six months and five years who have never had a flu vaccine require a second dose, four weeks later, for the body to mount a proper immune response.”
He knew that. And he knew what she was actually saying: it wasn’t his fault. How many times had he heard that, in the early days? It wasn’t your fault. Everywhere he turned, someone was saying that. They’d said it preemptively, too, like they assumed he was twisted up with guilt. That was what he hated, the presumption. The gall of these people who thought they knew his mind. Who thought they knew God’s mind with their “Everything happens for a reason”s and their “It was his time”s.
It wasn’t your fault. Kerrie had said it, too. Said it so often that he’d started to wonder if she was talking to him or to herself.
“Right. But he got sick on November tenth and died on the thirteenth. If I’d gotten him the first dose right when the shot was available, there might have been time for a second dose.” He had done the macabre math in his head so many times.
“We never got our vaccines in at the hospital I worked at until late October,” she said quietly.
So, what? It probably wasn’t his fault? That didn’t help. It wasn’t even about fault. The fact was, he had been the adult. The parent. He had failed at the most basic of tasks: keeping his kid alive.
The waves were starting. The bad kind. How had he been foolish enough to think they wouldn’t get him in the end? They always did. He stood, took the elastic out of his hair, and dragged his fingers along his scalp. His headache was intensifying. “I should go. Thanks for the drink.” He congratulated himself on his calm delivery. Speech hadn’t deserted him yet, but he could tell by the thickening in his throat that it would soon. Usually he chose not to speak. This, this inability to speak that was part of what happened to him when the waves came, was different. It was a symptom of a kind of helplessness, though helplessness seemed way too benign a word. Paralysis was a better one, maybe.
“No problem,” she said, apparently oblivious to the storm that was winding up inside him. “Thanks for the deck. If you don’t mind seeing yourself out, I’m just going to stay out here on my amazing new deck and try to hear the waves.”
A sliver of something, something like satisfaction, worked its way into his chest, even as the white-noise cacophony of the waves started to overtake him. To think of her