Part Six: The Rest of the Flight
They talked for the remaining hour of the flight.
Not continuously — there were silences, and the silences were not uncomfortable, which is a specific thing that happens when two people are in a conversation that has already crossed some threshold of realness and that doesn’t need to be filled with sound.
He asked about the illness. He asked with the specific precision of someone who is already doing something that is not quite examination but is close to it — building a picture, not from the test results he had not yet seen, but from the sequence: when the symptoms had started, what they had looked like, how they had changed, what the responding doctors had said and what treatments had been tried and what had and hadn’t responded.
Elena answered everything. She had spent weeks learning to answer these questions — she had developed, out of necessity, a level of medical literacy about her daughter’s specific situation that she would not have had under ordinary circumstances. She was not a medical professional and she knew she was not a medical professional, but she had been present for every test and every result and every consultation and she had asked questions when she didn’t understand and had taken notes when she did, and the notes were in her phone and she showed him some of them.
He read them with the concentrated attention of someone for whom reading medical notes is not separate from thinking but is part of it.
“The inflammation pattern,” he said, almost to himself. “And the lack of response to the standard course—”
“Yes,” Elena said.
“Has anyone tested for—” He named something. She did not know the word in English and he noticed and translated it and she recognized the condition, partially, from her own research.
“They mentioned it,” she said. “One of the doctors. But they said the testing was inconclusive.”
“The testing for that is often inconclusive with the standard panel,” he said. “There’s a more specific test. I use it routinely.” He looked at Lucia. “I’d like to run it.”
Elena nodded. She was aware that she was nodding to things she did not fully understand, which was a feeling she had become accustomed to across six weeks and that she had made peace with. You could not fully understand everything, especially not in the language of medicine, especially not when you were this tired. What you could do was find the people who understood it and trust them, which was what she had done when she had spent every available resource getting on this plane.
She had, she thought, trusted in the right direction.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked. “Pediatric medicine.”
“Twenty-three years,” he said.
“Why children?”
He looked at the question for a moment. People who do something for twenty-three years have usually made a settled peace with the reasons they do it — they have told the story enough times that it has worn smooth, has become the polished version. But he seemed to be going to the actual thing rather than the polished version.
“Because children are straightforward,” he said. “They cannot tell you what’s wrong in words, which means you have to actually look. You can’t rely on the patient’s self-report, which is both the hardest part and the most honest part.” He paused. “And because—” He stopped. “My son was ill when he was very young. A different illness, a long time ago. There were doctors who knew things, and there were doctors who looked carefully, and the ones who looked carefully were the ones who helped.” He was quiet. “I wanted to be one of the ones who looked carefully.”
Elena looked at him.
“Did he get better?” she asked. “Your son?”
“He did,” he said. “He’s twenty-six now. He’s studying architecture.” A pause that contained something private. “He has no memory of being ill.”
“That’s a good thing,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is.”
Lucia shifted in his arms. He adjusted automatically, with the practiced ease of someone for whom this adjustment is reflexive. Lucia settled back into sleep without waking.
