Stories We Never Told

by Sonja Yoerg

  Jackie strode to the bathroom. After she’d changed the baby, she left him swaddled on the rug at her feet and washed her hands. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, challenging herself to deny what she had seen. Her vantage point hadn’t been straight on, but the feeling his look conveyed was obvious to her: hostility. To a child.

  If Harlan wanted to have lunch with her, she decided, he’d have to share her with Daniel.

  Back in the living room, she proposed this to Harlan. “It’s easier for Grace, too.”

  “I came all this way, Jackie.” He stood and came closer.

  “I know.” Jackie cupped the baby’s head in her hand. It just fit.

  He gestured to the upstairs. “Can’t Grace cope for an hour or two?”

  The image of Daniel standing in front of Harlan flashed in her mind. “The question is, Harlan, why can’t you?”

  “Really, Jackie. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.” And he left.

  That day was the beginning of the end. When Jackie returned home and was no longer distracted by babies, she and Harlan returned to their usual routine, during which he gave her the usual attention. But something had changed for her. During an unguarded moment, she had seen how he felt about Daniel and, by extension, about children generally. What else was hiding beneath his impeccable exterior? She had excused his faults, allowed his perspective to dominate, but now a crack had appeared, and every insignificant and monumental issue that had bothered her pushed through to the surface. Jackie didn’t berate him, but whenever he acted, well, like his worst self—controlling and exacting and overly assured—she called him on it. He was not amused.

  One night at his house, she confronted him about living together, whether he would ever seriously consider it. He tried to deflect, but she volleyed the question back at him, coated with frustration. “You won’t give me a straight answer, will you?”

  “Jackie, calm down. Please.”

  “I’m fucking sick of being calm!”

  “Don’t be a child.”

  “Answer the damn question!”

  “Jackie—”

  She stormed to the door, and grabbed her bag. Her eyes went to the watch on her wrist. She clawed open the clasp, pulled it off, and threw it into the dish on the hall table.

  Harlan was behind her. “Jackie!”

  His tone was admonishing, chiding. She turned to shout at him again, but as they locked eyes, her heart stopped.

  His face was steel. His eyes empty.

  She backed up, her knees giving way, her stomach slick. Go! Go! Her mind overruled.

  She yanked open the door and fled into pelting rain to her car.

  “Jackie!” He shouted from the porch, in the dry.

  She was hardly aware of the drive home. She entered her house, went to her bedroom, stripped off her soaking clothes, and got into bed. She lay there sobbing, her phone ringing again and again. What seemed like hours passed. She got up, put on pajamas, drank three glasses of water, and sank down on the floor beside her bed.

  Her phone rang. She answered it.

  “Jackie. I’ve been so worried.”

  She couldn’t answer. Her throat was sealed shut.

  “Why do you want to ruin what we have? Why do you insist on it?”

  She began crying again, her face raw, her head pounding.

  “I’ll come to your house tomorrow at one o’clock. You’re free until three, right?”

  She didn’t have to answer. He knew her schedule. If she had had other plans, he knew those, too. He also knew she was sitting on the floor with snot running down her chin, eviscerated by regret, and wouldn’t be doing anything else for a very long time other than asking herself why she’d fallen in love with this man, while at the same time wondering how she could live without him.

  “I’m hanging up now, Jackie. I hope you feel better.”

  She felt as if she had the stomach flu, something that made you retch, something that emptied you, but only for a day or two.

  The doorbell rang at precisely one o’clock the next day. Jackie was still in her room, on the floor, and did not answer.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jackie is reviewing patient consent forms for a new study and drinking her third cup of coffee. She hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in the two weeks since Miles’s Thanksgiving pronouncement. Several times each day Jackie recites a mantra about being grateful for what she has. It isn’t working. Losing her hope of becoming a mother has left a void that gratitude for other things cannot fill. It might be easier if she could blame Miles, but she can’t; they both bear responsibility for not addressing the issue sooner and more thoroughly. Jackie is left with a jagged sadness that slices into her repeatedly and unexpectedly.

  Learning that Nasira moved in with Harlan has not helped. Every morning Jackie vows to put it out of her mind, to ignore how wasting time on Harlan dashed her hopes for a family, and every day, as soon as she sees Nasira, she fails. (Between the mantras and the vows, she could start her own religion.) By the time evening rolls around, Jackie convinces herself Nasira must have returned to her own apartment by now, so she checks, just a quick drive-by on her way home. She chastises herself for giving in to morbid curiosity, especially since Harlan and Nasira have called her out on it, but it doesn’t stop her. Driving by a house doesn’t seem like a major moral transgression, or so she rationalizes.

  Only two windows of Nasira’s apartment face the street, and when Jackie cruises by, they are always dark. Nasira’s car is usually there, but that doesn’t mean anything. From Harlan’s house, the Metro is more convenient for most destinations, and the university is within walking distance. Nasira might have moved in because of the burglary, but she is staying for other reasons. And Harlan is allowing it—after dating for less than three months. Three years in—years—all Jackie got was a weekend in Asheville.

  Jackie’s stomach sours from all the coffee, and she sets her mug aside. Harlan must be madly in love with Nasira, so much more than he ever loved Jackie. What other explanation is there? That he is getting old and becoming afraid of living out the rest of his life alone? If so, why didn’t he come to that revelation earlier? Are men really so deeply in denial about aging?

  Jackie forces her attention back to the monitor. She strives to make the consent forms simple for her subjects to understand while still accurately portraying the details of the study. Her procedures are not invasive and carry minimal risk, but parents are more relaxed when they know exactly what to expect and what not to. Her research isn’t designed to provide a diagnosis or solve behavioral problems.

  “Jackie?” Tate, one of Jackie’s graduate students, stands in the doorway, her laptop balanced on her forearm. She wears a knitted beanie and a quizzical expression. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Right now?” Jackie glances at the computer clock and clicks on the calendar icon. “Yes, another forty-five minutes or so. What’s up?”

  “Something weird’s going on.” Tate comes around the desk, pulls up a chair, and clicks open an Excel spreadsheet. “I’ve been going over the analysis of the eye-tracking data from the four-year study.”

  “Yes. I’m presenting the interim data to the board at Autism America tomorrow. I already sent the director the slide deck.” Jackie asked Tate to rerun the data analysis, mostly to give her practice.

  “So, on this spreadsheet are the numbers that I used for the analysis.” Tate points to the screen. “I copied them from the spreadsheet below it, the one with the formulas that compile the raw data.”

  “Okay.” It’s all familiar to Jackie—she’s been working with this structure for years—and she wonders why Tate is being so deliberate in her explanation.

  Tate looks at Jackie, her brow creased. “The results you got aren’t coming up. I mean, your results are saved on another spreadsheet, but when I run the analysis of variance, I get something different.”

  Jackie zeroes in on the numbers, an array of cells, four by thirty-four. The stud
y has a total of fifty-eight children, each of whom is tested every six months starting at six months of age, but so far only thirty-four have reached the two-year mark. They fall into two groups: low-risk, those with no family history of autism spectrum disorder, and high-risk, those with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD. The table shows only one eye-tracking measure; for each behavior, they recorded results in one table like this. The study will be over in about two and a half years, when all the children turn four, but the foundation wants a snapshot of the study’s progress.

  “Are you running the analysis with the Excel add-on or SPSS?” The lab has always used SPSS for statistical analysis, but the Excel programs are improving. The two programs run the same test, so the results should be the same. But using SPSS means exporting the data from Excel, a possible source of error.

  “I did both. They agree with each other and don’t match yours.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Right?” Tate is perplexed but also distressed. She knows how crucial this experiment is.

  “Tate, we’ve got all sorts of backups. It’s just a matter of figuring out what happened.”

  Tate nods. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve checked the table I used for the analysis, and it looks solid. I thought maybe some stuff was accidentally deleted, but there are no missing cells or anything obvious like that.”

  Jackie is tracking Tate’s logic. The young woman is unusually methodical and thorough; Jackie trusts her completely, but everyone makes mistakes.

  “Okay, so it’s not the stat program, and it’s not a problem in the compiled data, at least as far as you could tell. So either I messed up completely, or something else has been changed lower down.”

  “That’s where I got to. I didn’t want to go scrambling around in the formulas, though. It’s password protected for a reason, right? And the only other thing to check is the raw data, and those files scare me.”

  Jackie smiles. “I can see why. But, again, we’ve got backups.” Something in Tate’s expression gives Jackie pause. “Tate, about the changes in the results. Was it anything important or just slightly different numbers?”

  Tate rubs the bird of paradise tattoo on her arm. “You know how your results were really encouraging?”

  “Sure. Having significant results at this stage is exciting. Especially the eye-tracking data.”

  “Well, it’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “Look.” She clicks to a sheet with two line graphs, the old results and the new ones. Each data point is bracketed by the confidence intervals, making the shift in the results obvious.

  Jackie stares at the screen, unbelieving. “How is this possible?”

  “I have no idea.” Tate picks at the skin on her knuckle. “I’m worried I did something.”

  “Please don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” Jackie forces confidence into her voice. In truth, she’s alarmed. She has a presentation to give tomorrow, and her data might be corrupted. “I’ll take it from here, Tate. I appreciate you bringing this to me. As soon as I know what happened, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Okay, Jackie.” Tate closes her laptop and goes to the door.

  “Oh—and I’m going to talk to everyone as soon as I can—but do you happen to know who might’ve been in that spreadsheet since my analysis, since last Thursday?” Because lab assistants and grad students come and go, everyone in the lab except Jackie uses a shared log-in instead of having separate accounts, so it’s not easy to know who logged in.

  Tate thinks a minute. “Kyle probably wasn’t, since he’s up to his ass with his own study. Sorry. Language.”

  “It’s fine. I guess Rhiannon and Reese aren’t around much, either, because they have finals coming up.”

  “Haven’t seen them at all. So Gretchen. And Nasira has been learning how to upload the raw data from the iPads, so she might have been in there? Or maybe she’s using a separate spreadsheet to practice?”

  “Thanks. That helps.”

  Tate gives Jackie a thumbs-up as she disappears down the hall.

  Nasira. It’s almost as though Jackie were expecting it. Although it makes no sense whatsoever.

  She has no time to think about Nasira. On her computer, she mouses over to OneDrive, where all the files are stored, enters her log-in information, and opens the spreadsheet Tate was showing her. Her nerves jangled, she reviews the eye-tracking analysis and also the other results she is due to present tomorrow, comparing them to the information in her PowerPoint presentation. To her chagrin, everything Tate said is correct. Jackie copies the compiled data into a new file and runs the analysis in Excel. Same result as Tate’s. An unpleasant tingling sensation runs up her limbs. Either the formulas that compile the data have changed, or the original data that feeds into them has. Neither is good news. And who knows how widespread the problem is or how long ago it started? She might have to audit every single study—a nightmare scenario. The thought that she might have published results based on faulty data makes her nauseous. It won’t just tarnish her reputation; it could end her career.

  A notification pops up on her phone. Time to leave for class. She packs her laptop, puts on her coat, and leaves the building. The air is frigid and the sky a gunmetal gray.

  Think, Jackie. What’s the plan?

  All the data files, the Excel spreadsheets, are on OneDrive, which keeps every version that is saved. Once a day, everything on OneDrive is automatically backed up on the university’s network. There has to be some way to figure out what was changed and when. Vince Leeds is her go-to IT guy, and with any luck he’ll have a clever trick to deploy. Pinpointing the nature and the date of the changes should help her figure out how it happened. Beyond that, she can’t guess what will transpire.

  The sleuthing will take time, which she does not have. Without confidence in her results—already in the hands of Deirdre Calhoun, the foundation director—she cannot give the presentation tomorrow. She’s tempted to plead illness, but rejects the idea. Her professional integrity is sacred.

  Jackie pulls out her phone and calls Calhoun, who picks up on the second ring. Knowing the director appreciates efficiency, Jackie gets right to the point.

  “I’m calling with some unfortunate news. I reviewed one of the analyses I was planning on presenting, and there’s a glitch in the data.”

  “A glitch?”

  “Yes. Everything is backed up, so it’s not a serious problem, but until I find out what happened, I cannot share any results.”

  “I see.” A long pause. “This casts something of a pall over your work, Dr. Strelitz. Especially since the results you sent seemed so encouraging.”

  A pall? “I take data management very seriously.” Jackie avoids the term “data security.” “I’ll let you know immediately once I understand what the issue is. It’s my top priority.”

  “I’ll notify the board.” Another long pause as the director deliberates Jackie’s transgression. “We’ve been enthusiastic about supporting your work, but might have to take a closer look at further funding.”

  “I understand and will be in touch. And please communicate my regrets to the board.”

  “I will.”

  Jackie closes the call. That went well. Undoubtedly Calhoun suspects she fudged the data to grease the wheels for her upcoming grant submission. Jackie hates the idea of her reputation slipping in the eyes of the foundation, but the call was unavoidable.

  At the building entrance, a student jogs past her. Jackie’s late. She hurries into the lecture hall, her heart beating too fast, her stomach in knots. She sheds her coat, attaches her laptop to the projector, and clicks open the file for today’s lecture. The students tuck their phones away (for now—they always come out eventually). Jackie takes a sip from the water bottle she carries in her bag and wills herself to calm down. Luckily, she has taught Methods for Behavioral Science several times and, unlike other classes, the course content only changes if Jackie updates the examples.

&n
bsp; Jackie looks out at the sea of heads. “Good afternoon, everyone.” She glances behind her to ensure the image is focused properly. The slide is of a road sign, with arrows labeled “Right” and “Wrong” pointing in opposite directions, and a third arrow in the middle, “It Depends.” In her distress, she’d completely forgotten today’s lecture topic: ethics.

  Vince Leeds arrives at the lab conference room at seven thirty the next morning, his hair still wet from showering. Rosy patches of eczema stand out on his pale skin. He’s wearing an ironed button-down shirt instead of his usual plain long-sleeve T-shirt, and Jackie wonders if this is for her.

  “Good morning, Vince. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for helping me with this—especially so early.”

  “Hello, Jackie.” He pulls at the cuffs of his shirt. “I’m always happy to help you if I can.”

  Jackie gestures at the coffee and muffins on the table. “Fuel.”

  “Thanks.”

  He takes a coffee, pours in three sugars, and sits beside her, perching on the edge of the chair. He’s nervous, more than usual, but Jackie doesn’t dwell on it. She has limited time to get him up to speed. The spreadsheet in question is open on her computer. She shows him the graph with the discrepant results and gives the dates that she and Tate ran their analyses.

  Vince frowns. “I know a little about your methods from your talks, but can you walk me through how the data are handled?”

  “For this study or generally?”

  “Generally first, I think. You don’t know how big a problem you have, right?”

  “Right. So, during a session, the observer captures the behavior in real time using a form on an iPad. Usually we have more than one observer. For some studies we rely only on video, like for tracking eye movement, and code the data later.”

  “You use Access to create the data entry form for the iPad, right?”

  “Yes. We customize it for every study, but the basics haven’t changed for years. We also record all the sessions on video as backup.” Jackie clicks back to the screen that shows all the lab’s files on OneDrive. “The next step is uploading the data from the iPad into a file here. Each study has its own file, an Excel spreadsheet, but they are all set up the same way.”