Epilogue

Ten Months Later

Edward is a good baby. As far as babies go.

I’m sure somewhere out there, there’s some magical dream baby that comes home from the hospital and sleeps through the night every night immediately. If you have such a baby, I don’t want to know about it. And P.S., I hate you.

Most babies don’t do that. They come out of the womb having no sense of when is day and when is night, and they just sleep at random times. And they have tiny little bellies so they need to be fed constantly. It’s not an easy job taking care of a newborn—it’s definitely harder than my primary care clinic at the VA.

But at two months old, Edward “sleeps through the night.” Notice I put “sleeps through the night” in scare quotes. For a newborn, “sleeping through the night” means that they sleep five hours in a row. So if Edward goes to sleep at ten and then wakes up at three in the morning, he’s “slept through the night.” It’s some sort of sick joke.

“Do you need anything before I go?” Ben asks me.

Ben is taking Leah to kindergarten since I’m pinned to the couch with a restless Edward in the crook of my arm. I just fed him, so he can’t be hungry, but he just can’t seem to get comfortable. I’m hoping to get him to sleep in the near future.

“I’m good,” I say. “Anyway, your mom is upstairs.”

Nancy Ross is staying with us for a few weeks to “help out.” Again, note the scare quotes.

Before he goes, Ben bends down to tickle Edward’s tummy. “I’m going to miss you, buddy,” he says. “As soon as you get a little older, you and I are going to a Red Sox game.”

I roll my eyes. Despite the fact that Edward can barely pay attention to the floating smiley faces we hung over his crib, Ben is obsessed with the idea of taking him to enjoy a sporting event. Oh well. As long as he doesn’t try to feed him peanut butter—that’s like poison to babies, apparently.

As Ben kisses Edward’s downy blond head, I note the resemblance between the two of them. Leah obviously favors me, but Edward looks like Ben. They have the same lips and nose, and Edward’s blue eyes already seem to be turning brown like Ben’s. Plus he has blond hair the way Ben did as a kid. Then again, how much can an infant resemble an adult? They all just look like tiny old men.

After kissing Edward, Ben leans in to kiss me goodbye. Our relationship is going as well as it ever has. We still go to marriage counseling intermittently, but mostly, we’ve learned to be a lot more respectful of each other’s feelings. We still fight, but not much. I think we’re well on our way to being a couple of old people holding hands on a porch together.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that his “Sorry Dear” app is selling like crazy. He’s gotten a lot of kudos at work for that one.

As soon as Ben leaves, I hear the clip-clop of my mother-in-law’s shoes on the stairs. She’s been obsessively cleaning our entire house since she arrived, despite the fact that I told her we already pay someone to do that. “They don’t do a good job,” she told me. I mean, it’s nice of her to clean, but she puts everything away in random places and seems to throw things away haphazardly. I wish she’d just stick to vacuuming.

“How’s my grandson doing?” Nancy asks as she comes into the living room, surrounded by a cloud of dust. How can someone nearly twice my age have such an overabundance of energy?

Edward lets out an adorable cough then bursts into less adorable tears. “A little fussy.”

“I bet it’s colic,” Nancy says .

“It’s not colic.”

She shrugs in a way that makes me feel like she still thinks it’s colic. “How much longer till you have to go back to work?”

“Another month,” I say.

I took a three-month maternity leave. Some women take more, but the VA has been really accommodating about letting me come back part-time. I’ll start out working three days a week, which seems perfect. I can’t imagine another three to four months of sitting around the house with Edward, eating pieces of bologna. (I don’t know why but I’m really craving bologna lately.)

I actually miss my patients and wonder how they’re doing in my absence. But one patient I won’t be returning to is Herman Katz. He’s gone to live upstate with his daughter.

Mr. Katz did as well as could be expected after his stroke. He completed a course of rehab at our small inpatient unit at the VA, and by the time he was done, he was able to walk again with a quad cane and regained some of his speech. Enough that when I came to visit him during his last day in rehab, he was able to say in a slow, careful voice, “I’ll miss you, Dr. McGill.”

I checked Mr. Katz’s notes from his time in rehab, and it’s funny that he didn’t have any of the myriad of complaints that he used to come to my clinic with. He never asked if he had cancer. I wonder if the stroke put things in perspective for him. Or maybe he just didn’t have the words to express his worries anymore.

Either way, he seemed really happy to be going home with his daughter and grandchildren.

“Do you want me to hold him?” Nancy is eyeing my screaming son.

“Yes,” I agree gratefully, even though I know that she won’t get him to stop crying when he’s like this. I just want a break at this point.

Nancy scoops Edward up in her arms and makes cooing noises at him. He throws back his head and wails, enraged by her attempts to comfort him. She strokes his tiny head gently.

“Goodness, Jane,” she says, “where did all this blond hair come from? It’s incredible.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

Nancy starts dancing Edward around the living room, which helps very, very slightly. He’s still not thrilled though. “Well, you’ve got red hair and Ben’s got brown hair.”

“Right,” I say, “but I thought Ben had blond hair as a child.”

She shakes her head. “Oh no. Well, maybe dirty blond. But not light like this.”

I furrow my brow. “Really?”

“Genetics is so odd,” she muses. “I suppose blond hair is recessive. ”

“I’ve got some relatives with blond hair,” I say, because I think I do.

The truth is that whenever I look at all that blond hair, I’m reminded of someone else who was very important to me who had a head full of thick blond hair.

Ryan isn’t on the map anymore. I’ve searched for his name on Google, even going so far as to add “obituary” to my search terms. But nothing ever comes up. He could be in Italy, admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He could be in China, gazing up at the Great Wall. Or he could be dead. I have no idea.

The last time I heard from Ryan was five months ago. I got a blank email with the subject, “Happy Birthday.” I didn’t recognize the email address, but I was certain it was from him. I replied to the email, but it bounced. Wherever Ryan was, he didn’t want to correspond with me. He only wanted me to know he was thinking of me—nothing more.

I miss him. He’s responsible for saving my marriage, even if that wasn’t his intention. He’s the only reason I have Edward right now. After all, Edward was conceived the night that I returned to Ben after kissing Ryan. That was the night I realized that no matter what, I was going to make my marriage work.

I hope Ryan’s still alive.

“Maybe you should take Edward,” Nancy says. It’s not a suggestion. Edward is actively freaking out now, seemingly energized by the dancing session. She shoves him into my arms.

I think just the relief of being away from his grandmother calms Edward down. He hiccups in my arms, breathing hard, his little face still bright red. I smooth some of that blond hair out on his sweaty scalp. And I plant a kiss on the forehead of my son, Edward Ryan Ross.

Did you enjoy reading The Devil You Know ?

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In the meantime, after the acknowledgements, please enjoy a short excerpt of my last book, Brain Damage …