Part Two: Claudia
Claudia Reyes had been awake since three in the morning.
This was not unusual in the past three weeks. Since Camila’s diagnosis had become known in the household, the quality of sleep in the house had changed — not just for Rodrigo, but for the staff, who had their own feelings about a four-year-old child and who expressed those feelings differently from one another but who shared a common sleeplessness that the house’s nighttime hours reflected.
Claudia’s sleeplessness had a specific content.
She had been thinking about her brother.
Marco was thirty-one now and worked at a plant nursery in the city where they had grown up, which was not the city where they had expected him to be at thirty-one — they had expected, when he was twenty-two, that he would not be anywhere by now. He had been twenty-two and had received a diagnosis that had a similar quality to Camila’s diagnosis: the careful language, the unanimous professional opinion, the specific number that everyone tried to soften and that was not softenable.
Their mother had refused the number.
Not in denial — their mother was not a woman who lived in denial about hard things. She had refused it in the specific, practical way of someone who has identified a course of action and is taking it. She had heard about a doctor — not through any official channel, not through any referral that a hospital system would have recognized, but through the kind of network that exists in small communities where people know each other’s histories. A doctor who worked in the mountains. Who did not promise things. Who was very old and who had treated cases that the official medicine had finished with.
Marco had spent six weeks in the mountains.
He had come back.
The official medicine had never had a satisfying explanation for this. Claudia’s mother had not required an explanation. Marco grew plants at a nursery and called his mother every Sunday and was, by any available measure, alive, which was the only measure that had ever mattered.
Claudia had been thinking about the doctor for three weeks.
She had been trying to find the courage to mention him for two.
The thing that had stopped her was not fear of Rodrigo’s reaction exactly — though she understood how the reaction was likely to go, because she had been in this household for two years and she knew how Rodrigo operated, the specific combination of practical intelligence and pride that produced a man who solved problems efficiently and who did not receive well the suggestion that the solutions he had identified were insufficient. She had been stopped by the specific mathematics of the situation: what she was proposing was the kind of thing that could be dismissed easily, and the dismissal would close the door, and she needed the door to stay open in case she found the right moment.
The right moment had been difficult to identify.
She sat in the chair beside Camila’s crib at three in the morning — Rodrigo had fallen asleep in the armchair across the room, finally, after hours — and she rocked the crib with one hand and hummed the song her mother had hummed to Marco when he was sick, and she thought about the doctor in the mountains.
The song was old. She did not know where her mother had learned it. It had the quality of something that had been passed through many hands before arriving at the ones that were passing it now, a sound that did not belong to any specific person but that many people had used for the same purpose.
Camila’s breathing, she thought, was slightly more even than it had been at midnight.
Claudia kept humming.
