Page 13 of The Better Sister

“Is there some reason you don’t want him here?” she had asked.

I made the mistake one time of telling Ethan that I thought Kevin’s parents weren’t the best role models for their son, and it obviously had worked its way back to the mom, because she always seemed to think I was judging her.

Honestly, I didn’t trust the woman to keep whatever I said to herself, so I lied. I told her that I needed to get back to the city as soon as possible for a work emergency. I had hoped the story would convince her it was okay for the rest of the house to go back to sleep, but she told me she’d see me in a few minutes and hoped I could come inside for coffee.

Now we were here, and I had to go inside.

“You sure you want me to go with you?” Guidry asked.

I nodded before stepping out of the car.

Before Adam, the only people close to me who had died were my parents. The first to go was my father, five years earlier. It was only the third time he had ever visited me in New York City, and it wasn’t wholly voluntary. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and according to my father, his doctor in Cleveland had told him to “ignore it.”

That was my father’s way of summing up the doctor’s assessment that, at my father’s age of seventy-one, the risk-benefit calculation weighed against intervention. Put another way, the doctor thought my father would die of something else before the cancer caught up to him.

I nagged Dad to see someone in New York.

Dad resisted, telling me that Dr. Millerton was a “good man” who went to “good schools.” I had no doubt that both things were true. But few in the country could match Sloan Kettering, and one of Adam’s coworkers at the US Attorney’s Office was the brother of the chairman of the surgery department. He could get in right away. They’d even accept his insurance. “It’s all about specialization,” I told him. “I guarantee you they see a hundred times the number of patients with exactly your condition compared to Dr. Millerton.”

I flooded him with rankings of hospitals and physicians, studies of successful outcomes at the best facilities, and summaries of all the treatment options available to him. I got the impression he didn’t read a word of it. The Taylor family—myself excepted—had a tendency to act on impulse, not facts.

Mom seemed to resent my efforts. “You made it very clear you wanted to get as far away from this house as you possibly could, but now suddenly you care,” she said. “Maybe it was only me you hated.”

Of course I wanted to get out of that house. According to the outline of the memoir my publisher bought, my life story included an entire chapter dedicated solely to the violence I saw my father heap upon my mother, who refused to do anything to stop it. But I never stopped loving my parents, not even my father. To my mom, though, getting Dad to see a “fancy doctor” was just another way of reminding them that I thought I was better than the rest of the family.

I was so proud of myself when I managed to change his mind. I looked up the football schedule and found a home game where the Giants were playing the Browns. I pressured Adam to make sure he could get good seats from one of his friends who’d sold out to law firm life, which came with perks like season tickets in the suite level.

Who needed all those medical statistics when I had my father’s love of football? Dad finally caved.

I made sure to book him on a flight that landed in Newark. Adam picked him up, and they headed straight to Giants Stadium. My job would come on Monday, when I had him lined up with doctor appointments.

He texted me the view from Adam’s friend’s law firm’s corporate box, with the caption “Worth getting cancer for.” He even added a smiley face, followed by a crying face, followed by a purple devil. I had no idea until that moment that my father knew about emojis.

When I saw the final score pop up on Facebook—Browns 24, Giants 10—I pictured Dad going home and telling Mom and Nicky what a terrific time he had in New York.

But that conversation never happened.

Forty-five minutes after I saw the score, I got a phone call from Adam. Dad was on his way to New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He was in an ambulance. He’d been complaining about acid reflux as they left the stadium, but had chalked it up to all the greasy food he’d binged on during the game. By the time it became clear that it wasn’t merely a stomachache, Adam was stuck in standstill traffic at the Holland Tunnel. He held my father’s hand while waiting for an ambulance to clear a path to them.

I knew he was dead before the doctors ever told me. I managed to beat the ambulance to the hospital. When I told the lady at the emergency room window that I was there to see Danny Taylor, brought there by ambulance with a suspected heart attack, she didn’t even make eye contact while tapping away at her keyboard and telling me I must have the wrong hospital. I explained that my husband had just called from the ambulance and was certain my father was on his way. She made a phone call that confirmed her suspicions: no new ambulance arrivals. She told me to go ahead and wait, if that’s what I wanted to do.

And then a few minutes later, I heard the phone next to her ring, and I watched her answer it. And I heard her say “Uh-huh” and “I see.” And then she got up from her desk, walked around the front counter—outside the bubble of her little window—and headed straight for me.

“We did just have a new case arrive by ambulance.” Both her face and voice were kind, and she placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be a few minutes, but I can take you in the back to wait for Dr. Tan.”

I knew right then that she had already been told the news. Fate found a way of proving that Dr. Millerton—the doctor who was a good man who went to good schools—had been right all along.

I listened stoically as Dr. Tan gave me the details. My father didn’t respond to the EMT’s efforts to revive him. His death was officially called upon his arrival to the hospital. An autopsy would be performed pursuant to New York City’s usual procedures, unless the next of kin objected. He speculated that it was sudden cardiac arrest. “It would have been like the lights just turned out.”

Except that Dad felt something wrong when he was leaving the stadium, I thought. If I had been there, I would have taken him inside to make sure the pain subsided, wouldn’t I? Of course I would have—to make sure nothing was wrong before he got into the car. The stadium would have had defibrillators on hand. But it was too late, so I said nothing.

Adam waited until the doctor had left the room to join me. “I’m so sorry.” He put his arms around me while I cried. “I thought it was best for you to hear it from the doctor directly—in case you had questions.”

I nodded through my tears, agreeing he had made the right decision. Five minutes later, I found Dr. Tan, gave him my mother’s number, and asked him to tell her precisely what he had told me.

So how do you tell a sixteen-year-old boy that his father has died? If you’re me, you don’t. You have Guidry do it.

I was right about Kevin’s mom being the one in the kitchen with the lights on. Her name was Andrea, and she had gotten up to wait. The coffee she offered us was weak, but it was hot and desperately needed.

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