Dr. Levin laughed: a beautiful light tinkle. “He’s lucky to have you. I’ve seldom seen as devoted a friend.”
“We made a vow,” Georgia said, “a long time ago, that we’d be each other’s families.”
“Yes, well,” she said, “from my perspective, I’m awfully glad you followed up that vow with legal power-of-attorney paperwork.”
Georgia smiled, surprised she’d attempted a joke. “I am too. I can’t imagine visiting every day and not being allowed to hear any information. Although you may have noticed I’m trying not to focus on the labs anymore.”
“I have noticed,” she said. “Do you want to hear anything today?”
They looked at Jonah’s bed. From this perspective, they couldn’t see his face; he could be anyone, any wasted form in a hospital bed. “No,” Georgia said. “I mean, yes. Is there anything good?”
Dr. Levin hesitated too long. “We seem to be caught in a one-step-forward, two-steps-back pattern. He weathers one crisis and another develops: acidosis, renal failure, rhabdomyolysis. Still, though, he’s survived the most dangerous period, I think. Liver enzymes are actually a bit improved.”
Tactfully, she left unsaid the thing they were both thinking: he had not woken up. Georgia thought Dr. Levin would say more about his presumptive encephalopathy but she changed the subject. “I have been seeing my patient all over the news today.”
“Oh. Yeah. Things have changed rather significantly.” Georgia felt the knot in her throat start to collect again. “I wish he could know about it.”
“Perhaps he will,” said Dr. Levin. They stood quietly for a moment, looking at him, and then she extracted a piece of paper from her pocket. “I almost forgot. Have you turned off your phone ringer?”
“Yes,” Georgia said, remembering she’d switched it off as she entered the ICU. “I have. Why?”
“Someone is trying to reach you.” She handed over a piece of paper. In unfamiliar handwriting someone had penned:
Message for Dr. Brown (Jonah Tsukada, bed 8). Call Mark McInniss as soon as possible.
“Thank you,” Georgia told her. They walked out of the room together and, in the hall, after a brief clasp of her shoulder, Dr. Levin left her. She dialed Mark immediately.
“Georgia,” he said. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay. I’m at the ICU.” Before he could ask she added, “Nothing new. His labs are a bit better but he hasn’t woken up.”
Directly across from where she stood, she could see into the room of the young mother through the slatted shades on the interior window. Her family stood clustered around her bed, holding hands, their heads bowed. Georgia could not discern the words, but she could make out the cadence of the prayer from an older man at her bedside; his voice, rich and deep, might as well have been singing.
“I’ve been following the news,” he said. “It’s crazy. I even caught it on the TV in my hotel.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t. I don’t want to, at all.”
“Then I’ll do my best to take your mind off it.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m here. I came back.”
She felt her eyes widen. “You’re in the hospital?”
“I’m on my way to Charleston. I finished in Raleigh.”
“Can you—where are you going to stay?”
“I was hoping I could stay with you,” he said.
Across the hall, the prayer had ended. There was a momentary silence and then the siren of a single wail went up. The sob—it sounded like it came from a woman—cut off abruptly after a few seconds, replaced by a many-voiced symphony of grief. Georgia squinted; the monitor above the woman’s bed displayed a flat line in place of the tracing of her heartbeats. A young black-haired man stared sightlessly at the wall, each of his hands clasped by a tiny, bewildered child. Georgia began to walk, very fast, down the hall away from them.
“I’ll see you soon,” she told Mark.
28
CAVALIER ABOUT ETHICS
MARK
All during the drive, Mark burned with anticipation. In North Carolina, he’d had an epiphany: despite the relatively short time he’d known Georgia—okay, the extremely short time he’d known Georgia—he knew for certain he loved her. He wanted to be with her. Even in these few days he’d been apart from her, he’d missed her, he’d thought about her, he’d had the sensation of missing something elemental. This was an experience entirely new to him; in all his forty years, and especially in the twenty-five years since his mother had died, he’d never felt as drawn to another human being.
His mother, he felt certain, would have loved Georgia. Not only because of her lovable qualities but also because his mother had been his advocate—his only advocate—for the things he wanted.
In a roundabout way, these last couple months with Georgia had allowed him to forgive his mother for the deception she’d employed to keep her illness from him. She’d run herself ragged, trying to hide doctor visits and chemo appointments, all the while giving him the impression her world was stable and secure. Much later, when he realized the lengths to which she’d gone, he’d become convinced her death had been his fault. For one thing, in the midst of what must have been the worst time in her life, she’d taken a part-time job solely because he’d been invited to Washington, D.C., to compete in a math tournament. There were all kinds of costs: entry fees, travel and hotel charges, meals. His father, predictably, had balked: he had minimal interest in anything his younger son might be doing, let alone an interest in funding a trip with a bunch of math nerds, and in any case, money was tight.
“We pay for Todd’s baseball expenses,” his mother had said, her voice low and hopeful. They’d been standing in the kitchen—a tiny, hideous alcove dominated by mustard-yellow appliances—while his father rooted through the refrigerator and then the cabinets with increasing irritation. He’d probably run out of beer, which meant this was the worst possible time to bring up a non-sports-related financial request.
“That’s baseball,” his father grunted.
“Mark never asks for anything,” his mother pointed out. This was untrue; of the four of them, Early was the only one who never asked for anything. But in comparison to Todd, who suffered from an excess of first-child narcissism, Mark asked for relatively little.
“No.” His father pivoted, heading for the rickety table in the dining room where he kept his keys in a bowl.
“Ed, I’d be happy to—”
“No,” said his father again. This apparently concluded the debate in his mind, because he extracted his keys from the bowl and banged open the front door without another word. Mark and his mother watched him huff down the sidewalk to his truck and open the door, heaving his bad leg up into the vehicle in a straight-legged arc.
Mark’s mother ruffled his hair. “We’ll figure out a way,” she said.
The way, once she announced it, involved her earning the extra money for the tournament by working a part-time job in a massive industrial bakery. This led to a spectacular fight between his parents, but in the end, Early emerged victorious: she departed three mornings a week at the same time as her boys, returning an hour before they arrived home from school. Tension began to simmer in the evenings—more tension than usual, rather—as the quality of dinner and housekeeping began to slip. Mark experienced a surge of guilt each time his father pointed out with a kind of righteous pleasure each small infraction: they’d run out of toilet paper upstairs, again. Canned soup for dinner, again. An unforgivable omission: no one had signed Todd’s permission form to ride the bus to an away game in Blue Ash.
The day she died, she’d been supposed to attend an after-school meeting about the math tournament. He hadn’t been worried at first, figuring she’d gotten delayed leaving work, as had happened a few
times in the past. When she missed the entire meeting, however, he did grow concerned. His teacher, Mr. Worlitzer, offered to wait with him to be sure he had a ride, but the idea of trying to make small talk with Mr. Worlitzer, who could not have more fully embodied the math geek stereotype if he’d been working from a checklist, was excruciating at the best of times. Mark turned him down. Eventually he walked the four miles home.
No one was home. He waited, getting hungrier. By the time his father’s truck pulled into the driveway, close to midnight, he’d worked himself up into a state of rabbity anxiety. Unable to stand still, he’d worn a groove in the tufty orange shag carpeting in their living room, and his hair was damp with sweat. He flew out of the house and down to the curb, stopping abruptly as he caught sight of his father’s face.
His father stumped past him. Reaching the house, he turned enough to take in his gangly, awkward son, and for possibly the first time ever, there was tenderness and pity in his gaze. “She’s gone,” he said.
* * *
—
It would be a ridiculous exaggeration to say he’d never recovered from that moment. He had; of course he had. But his grief, all tangled up with shock and betrayal at everything that had been kept from him, had taken years to ebb. Now, though: this excitement, this anticipation, this joy he felt in Georgia’s presence—he wished he could share that with his mother. She’d have been so happy for him.
He bounded up the walkway to Georgia’s little house. She flung open the door for him and embraced him with her eyes closed. He knew there had been no change with Jonah—she’d have told him instantly if there had been—and he hugged her harder. Because of his height he was accustomed to stooping a bit when he hugged anyone, but Georgia was tall enough that when she stood on her tiptoes, they made a good fit.
“Wow,” he said, opening his eyes and taking in the tiny kitchenette and the vaulted ceiling of the living area and the ladder to the loft. After the soulless grandeur he was used to in hotels, Georgia’s home was charming: a patchwork quilt thrown over the back of the futon; a collage of old music posters and photos on the wall behind the couch; a bedraggled stream of Swedish ivy snaking down the wall behind the futon.
Georgia followed his gaze to the old posters. “You’re probably wondering if you’ve fallen into a relationship with a person whose psychosocial development was arrested in college,” she said.
“I like it.”
“It’s home,” she said. Before she could say more they heard the telltale swish of the dog door. Georgia appeared to brace herself. “Incoming,” she gasped as Dobby barreled toward Mark, nearly taking him out at the knees. Recovering, Mark sank down and scratched Dobby’s head. “Oh, hello, hello; that’s a good boy,” he said, laughing. He looked at Georgia. “He’s smiling.” He’d always heard that dogs often resembled the humans who owned them, and if this was true, then Dobby fit the bill perfectly. He had one of those big wide-jawed dog heads with a mouth that turned up at the corners, giving him the appearance of a permanent grin. Georgia was the human equivalent: her lively features aligned themselves into a kind of Resting Happy Face.
“Georgia,” he said, the crook of his elbow over his face as he tried to shield himself from Dobby’s enthusiastic slobber. “Why . . . did . . . you . . . select . . . such . . . a . . . large . . . dog?”
“He was a rescue,” she explained. “Anyway, it’s just me here and I thought maybe a big dog would be good protection.” They eyed Dobby as he flung himself down on his forelegs, smiling, his butt in the air, his entire form quivering with joy. “He wouldn’t do that with a criminal,” she added defensively.
“Okay, right,” said Mark. He raised himself to a standing position and glanced at the kitchen, dubious. “Am I going to fit under there?”
“It’ll be close but you’ll make it,” she assured him. “The ceiling height under the loft is seven feet.”
“This place is wonderful.”
“I’m glad you like it. I worried you might not since it’s obviously a bit of a step down from the accommodations you’re used to.”
“I’ll have to take you to Cincinnati sometime,” he said, “to show you the place I grew up in. It was a typical tract house—living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which I shared with my brother, and one bathroom, which I shared with everyone, which was normal at the time. It was fine—I’m not complaining—but it lacked all pretense at charm or individuality. If you lined up a million people, any one of them could have lived there. Your place is infinitely better.”
“Thanks. Let’s go out back and I’ll show you my tools,” she said.
“Well, that’s a come-on if I’ve ever heard one. Try to restrain yourself, please. Or”—he grinned and gestured to the loft—“why don’t you show me whatever’s up there first?”
He could read the desire in her eyes. He swept her off her feet and lowered her gently to the futon. “I don’t think there’s any way I can carry you up that ladder,” he whispered. “How about we stay right here?”
“Not a good idea,” she said.
He felt his eyes widen. “Why not?”
Dobby’s head appeared and stuck itself between them, panting.
“That’s why.”
* * *
—
They lolled on her low platform bed, her head on Mark’s shoulder, watching a battalion of purple clouds float past the skylight. “Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Strangely, I’m not. But I’m going to hit the bathroom. Don’t go anywhere.”
She smiled lazily. “I won’t.”
He scooped up his boxers and tugged them on from a seated position, as the loft ceiling was far too low for a regular person to stand in, let alone him. He could hear a phone ringing downstairs as he eased himself down the loft ladder. His phone, not hers: he must have left it in his jacket. He snagged it on his way to the small bathroom, taking his time washing his hands and face after he’d finished with the toilet, regarding himself in the oval mirror with unfocused eyes.
His phone buzzed again. He almost didn’t answer it. It was Olin, the head of IT for his company, and while he liked Olin, he was so weird that talking with him could be disorienting. But at the last second, he hit the green answer button on the phone.
The majority of the conversation turned out to be fairly mundane. It wasn’t until the end of it that Olin dropped the bomb, and when he did, he appeared to have no idea of the impact of what he’d said. After ending the call, Mark stood completely still for some period of time—one minute; two minutes; five?—and then he walked from the bathroom and climbed the ladder.
Georgia lay on her side, facing him, the swell of one hip outlined by a thin sheet. “Tell me what you did in North Carolina,” she said.
A deep sadness was etching its way through his skin down to his core. He tried to push it back, to sound normal, to enjoy these last few moments of idle conversation before he had to confront her. “There’s no chance I’m going to do that,” he said, “because that would bore you to sleep.”
She raised herself up onto an elbow. “Can you stay longer than one night?”
“I’ve been summoned back to Amsterdam, unfortunately.”
“Is everything okay?”
“My boss generally careens from one disaster to another, so no, probably not. He’s one of those people whose unconventional way of thinking first startles you, then intrigues you, and finally stuns you with its brilliance, which is wonderful for humanity but doesn’t always make for an easy job on my end. I have to clean up after a lot of misfires. But it’s worth it, because Rolly—the guy I work for—is innovative beyond anything I could possibly describe. Oh, and he’s married to a doctor.”
“You haven’t told me much about what your company does.”
“Basically, I’ve told you everything I can. We invest in start-ups working on certain biotechnological ad
vances. Genetic stuff, mainly.”
“That’s . . . vague.”
“Yeah.” He sat up, leaning against the planked wall behind the platform bed. “I had to sign an NDA.”
She sat up too. “You had to sign a nondisclosure agreement? Now I’m really interested.”
“Well, I actually know very little of what happens on the scientific side. But maybe sometime you can come out to California and tour the mothership facility. It’s extremely trippy. Lots of VR integrations, so you’re never really sure if what you’re seeing at any given time is real or not. Rolly loves toys.”
“I’d love to see it,” she said. “Sounds super nerdy and computer-y.”
“Speaking of which,” said Mark, “that was Olin on the phone just now.”
She blinked. “Olin? The IT guy at your work?”
“That’s right. The guy who does all our cybersecurity. He’s the one whose number I gave you when you said you had a computer question.”
“Of course.” Her face had gone blank.
“He said to tell you hello,” said Mark, his tone expressionless, “and he asked how you were doing with your black hat.”
“My . . . what?”
“Georgia.” Mark swung around so they faced one another. He felt his heart kick up into a harsh, jolting rhythm. “He said you asked him to give you the name of a black hat hacker. And I was trying to figure out why you’d specifically ask for the one type of hacker known to be, shall we say, somewhat cavalier about ethics.”
“You want to know why I needed a hacker.”
The Antidote for Everything Page 30