A Child of the Gods

by Arthur Davis (May 2025)

 

It was all so sudden and terrifying on a perfect, late-July day in the Tuileries.

I had traveled to Paris to spend a week with my parents, who were taking a summer vacation while my father was a guest lecturer of Medieval History at the Sorbonne.

“This was a wonderful idea,” my mother said, dashing to one of the last empty wooden camp tables in neatly organized rows in this section of the park.

My weathered guidebook described the Tuileries Garden (Jardin des Tuileries) as a public garden located between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, France.

“And should I assume you forgot to put the India relish in the tuna sandwiches?” my father asked.

“Honey,” my mother said to me, “why don’t you and I find a separate table from your father where we can dine in peace?”

“What a great idea. Then there wouldn’t be another tuna controversy,” I said, giving my dear father a kiss for being a brilliant, slightly absentminded, sixty-two-year-old darling.

I had bought a steaming hot spinach quiche on the way to the park.

“Look,” my mother pointed as a few of those at nearby tables jumped to their feet—two men in an argument dozens of tables away. There was yelling and screaming. This wasn’t a simple dispute, as the two took off running in our direction.

Suddenly, a heavy backpack was dropped on the end of our six-seat table. The man gave us a quick “excuse-moi” and walked in the direction of what we all now recognized was a theft in progress. Both thieves had women’s handbags in their grasp and were running full tilt down the wide path between the long rows of tables.

The stranger walked directly toward them as they approached. He was wearing a faded Georgetown University T-shirt and looked to be over six feet. When I first looked up, when we all looked up, in that one brief half moment I noticed the darkest blue eyes I had ever seen. The guy hadn’t shaved in days, and his long blond hair was held in place by a rubber band at the back of his head.

A few men were chasing the thieves when the first approached the stranger.

The heavyset thief closed in on the stranger, who stepped aside, and in a blur, his right fist struck twice against the attacker’s rib cage. He let out an excruciating wail of pain and crumbled, scattering a half-dozen women’s purses along the dirt pathway.

The second thief was on the stranger with an open knife in his hand.

“Dear God,” my mother whispered and grasped my hand. “He’s going to kill the guy.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said as the two men collided.

The stranger avoided the thief’s slashing attack, grasped his wrist and, with a twist the ulnar and radius bone, ripped through the flesh of the thief’s forearm.

By then those who had given chase were on the two critically wounded men, kicking and beating them. In the distance police sirens were wailing from every direction.

The stranger walked back in our direction. “S’il vous plaît, mes excuses pour l’interruption,” he said, hefted the backpack over his shoulder and pivoted away.

* * *

I was on a plane back to medical school in Boston two days later.

“My God, he was handsome,” I said, unpacking, and then I showered and got myself back in the game. That meant reading through Doctor Kate Hastings’ notes for the last week of July.

August was an endless blur of six- and seven-day shifts at Boston General Hospital. The torn limbs, the sick on ventilators, the patients who fought so bravely, the amazing nurses and staff, and the world I belonged to overcame any girlish dreams about the stranger, now a vague recall of a distant past.

“This is great. Thanks.”

“No big deal,” Kate Hastings said, giving the taxi driver a piece of her mind as he slowed down approaching every yellow light in order to catch every red one. “Yes,” she said into her cell. I’m in a taxi. Yes. No. Just too tired,” Kate said, mouthing “mother” to me, and disconnected.

“A problem?”

“No. A great mother. I told her, as a doctor my welfare is at the bottom of every patient’s list. She’s wonderful, and I’m sure your parents are too.”

That was the nicest thing she had ever said to me in the eight months of the internship, and the first time that, I understood later from others, she ever offered a colleague a lift home. Before she dropped me off, she invited me to dinner at her parents’ Friday night.

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, getting out of the cab first.

“My father’s in Chicago, so my mom will have a new face to interrogate. Accept at your own risk.”

“I accept, and thanks.”

* * *

“You have a beautiful apartment,” I said to Lauren Hastings.

Dinner was delicious. The three of us pitched in to prepare and serve.

“So, Lindsey, Kate said you were in Paris and you came back unsettled?” her mother said. “Unsettled, right?” she asked Kate.

“Something like that.”

I shook my head in despair. “I’m sensing an intervention coming on.”

Lauren Hastings gave a quick kind of laugh that I’ve always wanted. “No. Nothing so insistent, but I am surprised that you came back without a smile on your face. I’ve been there, once alone and three times with Edward, my husband, and adore the place.”

“I was visiting my parents.”

“Yes, Kate mentioned that.”

I was trapped and let the story unfold.

“A Georgetown University T-shirt?” Lauren asked.

“A very battered, worn shirt that looked like it had trekked across Europe by itself.”

“Unshaven, and long, curly blond hair?”

“He spoke perfect French, like a native, so I’m not sure the shirt has any special significance.”

“How about a tour?” Lauren asked, took my elbow, and walked me from room to room, finished up in her “baby’s” bedroom, as she referred to him.

“He’s adorable.”

“Don’t be charmed by his looks. He will drive you crazy before you know it,” she said as we made our way back to the dining room.

“My mother talk your head off about Brian?”

“Not really.”

“Then you got off easy.”

“You’ve referred to him so often as your baby brother he must be special.”

“We are very close. He’s the brains of the family.”

“Now, you stop that,” Lauren said.

I was as surprised at the reference as Lauren Hastings. “Smarter than you?”

“Brian could spot me thirty IQ points and beat me at anything, anytime, at any subject.”

“Nonsense,” Lauren chided.

“You referring to him as your ‘baby’ brother, I always thought he was so much younger than you.”

“Only by three years,” Lauren said.

“What does he do?”

“As little as possible,” Kate answered with a laugh.

“Kate!”

“Mom, that’s what Brian always says.”

“Brian, like her sister, is very smart. He’s a theoretical physicist at Harvard, where he did his undergraduate and graduate studies.”

“Earning a Rhodes Scholar in between,” Kate added.

“Wouldn’t that make him about your age?” I asked Kate.

“He entered Oxford at eighteen.”

“How’s that possible?”

The evening was turning out to be somewhere between spectacular and amazing. Meeting Lauren was tremendous. She was kind and giving and smart, and getting such compliments from Kate was like an award in itself.

“You commented on the Steinway,” Lauren said. “Do you play?”

“Some. My mom studied piano at Julliard, and I suffered for it,” I said, noticing the clutter of framed photos standing like soldiers on the piano. I walked closer to see what the Hastings family story looked like. So many faces, so many stories I imagined and slowly glanced over the sea of love, and there he was.

My arms went limp. The blood in my body stopped flowing.

Kate lifted one of the dozens of photos off the piano and handed it to me. Handsome, clean shaven, without a rubber band, and with those same riveting blue eyes.

“You knew?” I asked no one in particular.

“Brian was in Paris on business. He was staying with a friend a few blocks from the picnic spot in the Tuileries you described.”

“But the thieves? Who walks into harm’s way?”

“We don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle that is my son. He was on a project for the Department of Defense in Virginia Beach for over a year after getting his PhD and that’s about all we know.”

“And Georgetown?”

Lauren chuckled. “A favorite shirt I understand he won off a female grad student at a strip poker game in the basement labs at MIT. Beyond that, we don’t ask.”

“Never played poker.”

“Then I suggest you never play it with Brian.”

“Or you will be naked in minutes,” Kate added.

“But he could have been killed?”

“Would you like more coffee?” Lauren asked.

I nodded and walked back to the safety of the dining room, photo in hand.

* * *

I got home a little after midnight and collapsed. I awoke around nine and had a cup of coffee, trying to piece together the previous evening.

Another photo of Brian Hastings that had been patiently waiting on the piano was now sitting on my kitchen table. It was a small photo of Brian at two in a jeans overall jumper with a faded yellow T-shirt and two tiny breast pockets Lauren mentioned were usually filled with marbles. So every time he bent or turned, a few marbles flew out, bringing the family to uproarious laughter and Brian to a tearful fury.

It was adorable. A very “temporary” loan from the Hastings family. I stared at him for so long the only interruption was a text from Lauren.

I spent the rest of the morning looking up Dr. Brian Hastings online—pages and pages of scientific studies, references, awards for research on quantum theory and particle physics, and every sort of recognition you might expect from a seasoned scientist of sixty, not someone obviously not yet thirty and obviously trained in hand-to-hand combat.

Kate and Lauren didn’t respond to this and only made a reference to Brian’s few years in the military. There were also references to two published collections of short stories and a well-received science fiction novel. It was consuming, overwhelming, and only piqued my emotional curiosity.

The incident in the Tuileries was all about muscle memory. You don’t learn that in a physics lab. And you don’t walk into what could have easily been life-threatening danger unless you’ve been there before.

Could Kate and Lauren have no idea what their son was capable of? Nothing seemed to surprise them. Brian had no intellectual boundaries, so examples of the impossible just further filled the depth and breadth of his character.

“He recognized his gifts long ago. He believes his role on earth is to honor what he has been given to the best of those abilities, which he does 24/7,” Kate had said during a moment of silence at dinner.

* * *

September bled into October and crap weather. I was invited to their Halloween party, where I met the rest of the family and extended friends and was so taken by Lauren’s husband I had to do a double take. Edward Hastings was an older, equally handsome version of his son.

“So, you met Brian,” Edward Hastings said after he was introduced by Lauren.

“I met someone who looked amazingly like you.”

“I heard.”

“And no one seems surprised at what happened.”

“We gave up being surprised long before Brian said he had to finish college in three years carrying a double major so he could apply to Oxford where two of his favorite scientists were on the verge of retiring.”

“You two must have been amazing parents,” I said as Lauren came to her husband’s side.

Edward gave her a soft, loving kiss. “She thinks we were amazing parents.”

“When Brian won his first award in grade school, one of the teachers asked us what we were doing to get such an outstanding child.”

“Everyone wanted to know our secret,” Edward added.

“And?”

“And we told him what we figured out very early. The key was to get out of the boy’s way and let him do what he does.”

“That’s it?”

“Sorry, there is no magic sauce, only two parents who early on figured out that their son needed a world of space and trust that the child would not fall off the edge of the world.”

* * *

November bloomed biting cold and snowy.

I was notified that I had been chosen for a surgical fellowship, one of three the school gives each year along with a generous stipend. The specter of Brian Hastings hadn’t faded. It remained available whenever I needed a smile. Brian was happy being just who he was, which apparently, was everything.

A true child of the gods.

My parents and sister were coming to Boston to spend Thanksgiving at a friend of theirs. I told Lauren during a casual conversation. She was saddened. “We were going to invite you.”

“I would love to be a part of anything your family does. You know that.”

“I’m pouting. You can’t see it on the phone, but I’m pouting. Brian taught me how to do it, so I get my way with Edward. For God’s sakes never tell that to Edward.”

I just laughed out loud. You have to picture this sophisticated, beautiful woman pouting to grasp the humanity of the family. “You’ll have to teach me.”

“Deal, but Brian’s the expert.”

“Is there anything that kid doesn’t do?’

“You know, so few refer to Brian as a kid, but that’s what he is. Just doing his thing in the playground of life.”

“In spite of having two really terrible parents.”

“That’s the kind of horrible thing Brian would say about us to strangers.”

“Lunch next week?”

“Sold. Look forward to it already. But, please, no more talk of my useless son.”

“Deal.”

Lunch was wonderful. One of Lauren’s favorite cafes. I found out by asking Kate, who was delighted with what was happening between me and her family. Before the end of lunch, we found out that Edward had prepaid for all of it, so we split three deserts.

In the cab ride home, I giggled at one of the stories Lauren told over our first fateful dinner. Lauren and Edward were visiting her parents with Kate and Brian. Brian finally noticed Kate was always getting a big hug and a kiss from her grandmother. When it was Brian’s turn, he got a big hug and kiss and a slight swat on his bottom. He was about five at that time and looked up at his grandmother and asked, “How come I always get a spanking and not Kate?”

His grandmother kneeled down and looked him straight in the eye and answered, “Because you’re going to get into some kind of mischief while you’re here and I’m not going to see it.”

“But I haven’t done anything?”

“You will.”

“That’s not fair,” Brain pleaded, as Edward and Lauren burst out laughing.

“So, are you going to behave?”

“Never mind,” Brian pouted, and walked into the kitchen scrounging around for anything chocolate.

* * *

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. My parents and sister arrived last Sunday and immediately pelted me with questions about Brian. They had googled him too. Apparently my whole family had, suspicious that we hadn’t met.

“If I were Kate’s mother, I would have figured out a way to have you two accidentally meet.”

“Thankfully you’re not Lauren Hastings,” my father said to my mom with a giggle.

* * *

I got out of the cab and stepped ankle-deep into a pile of winter slush in front of the apartment building with Kate’s package in hand.

“You can go up if you want,” the doorman said. “Kate Hastings called and said you would be dropping off a package.”

“Yes. That would be great,” I said, trying to get my soaked foot out of my nearly ruined shoes.

He handed me the keys and saw me into an elevator, which quickly opened on the fourteenth floor.

I was immediately engulfed in a gust of the richest smell I’ve ever inhaled. You could get diabetes from breathing, and I walked off the distance to Lauren’s apartment. I hadn’t made any connection to where the smell was coming from and the direction I was going.

By the time I saw the door half cracked open, I knew I was in trouble.

Someone was there that shouldn’t be or the doorman would have mentioned it. I called Kate then Lauren. Both lines were busy. A woman came out of one of the apartments and I asked her to call the doorman, who came up with the super and a handyman that looked more like a New England Patriots defensive back.

“I just came on,” the doorman said as the four of us huddled near the door.

Suddenly, the door was yanked open. Standing barefoot in jeans was a shirtless Brian Hastings, sporting a four day old growth and rubber band. The doorman told him why we were there, and there was relief all around. The doorman, super, and defensive back made their way downstairs.

“Did you ever finish your quiche?” he asked.

“I…”

“Oh crap,” he said and raced back into the kitchen.

The intoxicating scent was bubbling up from the oven and two large plates of fresh pecan-filled brownies. It was warm though all the living room, and dining room windows were open. I counted two surgical wounds on his torso. One pink gash was recent. Five percent body fat tops at just over 200 pounds. Jesus.

“Come in, come in. My mother’s birthday is the day before Thanksgiving. I came by to make my brownies for her.”

“No,” I said, standing uneasily at the entrance to the kitchen. “It was cold by the time the police and reporters finally realized we weren’t part of the theft.”

“Sorry to hear I made your situation so difficult.”

“The police grilled us for hours. They thought we knew who you were.”

“And you didn’t give me up to the cops?” he said and slid the last steaming batch into the third platter and slipped back into a T-shirt. This time it was USC.

“You win that in a game of strip poker too?”

“My horrible sister talks too much. She thinks the world of you, you know. Katie doesn’t usually impress that easily. So?”

“So?

“So, did you miss me?”

“What?”

“Did you miss me?”

“That’s a trade secret,” I gasped.

“That’s okay. I don’t expect you to admit to it, but I missed you.”

“That’s not funny,” I said, fairly confident that neither his sister nor mother told him about how deeply I was impacted by seeing him just that one time. A girl thing to be sure.

“It can happen, though it’s never happened to me.”

He wrapped each pile of brownies in tinfoil, slipped each on the dining room table, scratched out a note that read, “From your useless son who is crazy about his more-than-useless mother. Happy Birthday. Save a few for me.”

He threw on a flannel shirt and sat me down at the dining room table. He disappeared and returned with heavy, woolen socks. “These belong to my mom,” he said.

I dried off my feet and slipped into the almost dry shoes.

“Better?”

I’m a physician but felt like a schoolgirl who first noticed the quarterback of the football team staring at her. My heart was beating like a maniac, and I couldn’t recall how I got here. “Are they any good?”

He reached into one of the platters and slipped a brownie out and handed it to me. “It’s really too hot to eat.”

I took a sizable bite, rolled my eyes, and groaned. “I have to go,” I said and jumped up like an electric prod was jammed in my backside.

“Wait, we need to talk.”

“About what?’

“About all the things my mother and sister said about me, none of which can possible be true.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. The importance of transparency in the beginning of a relationship is critical to the success of that relationship. Doctors Gibbins & Eddington at the University of Chicago published a classic paper in 2019 on that very subject.”

“Why do I not believe a word of that?”

“Seriously, who would make up such a thing?”

Kate warned me that her brother was a scamp who lived in a world of mischief. “Again, why do I not believe a word of that?”

“Maybe, because my lips are moving?”

“Kate and your mom were right about you.”

“Kate and my mom were right about you too,” he said as I reached the front door.

There is a turning point in one’s life when you can change your future. The incident in the Tuileries was the first. Brownies and this impossible character were my second. How many times in life do you get a chance to grab the brass ring?

“How about, the next time you’re around, you buy me dinner and we’ll discuss what Kate and your mother said about you?”

“That’s not going to be nearly enough time to talk about how terrific I am.”

“Lock up before you leave. I wouldn’t want the place to be burglarized and your inedible brownies stolen.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said as I reached for the doorknob.

“What?”

“The package you came with. The doorman said you were going to leave it.”

I let the package slip from my shoulder and walked to the elevator, hoping he would come and take me in his arms, and with equal urgency praying the elevator would find the fourteenth floor before he came to claim me.

It came, I jumped in and hammered the ground floor button as an apartment door opened behind me.

* * * 

There was something effortless and genuine about Brian Hastings. Choking back the grin that had blossomed in my soul since he dropped a pair of his mother socks in my lap and stuffed a brownie in my face, the man was all child and charm.

He was the kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and pretty much didn’t care who caught him.

The incident in the Tuileries softened, blurred into a distant haze as the little blond fellow in coveralls and pockets stuffed with a treasure of marbles crystallized bright and clear.

Finally, it was all about marbles. And I was just as happy to lose mine, and I couldn’t wait to meet his grandmother.

 

Table of Contents