“Is there something else?” Rose asked curtly, anxious to get back to work.
The mother held up a finger. “One moment.” She spoke to Silea softly. They seemed to be arguing about something.
“Yes yes,” Silea said, looking annoyed. She turned toward Rose as the mother walked out to the truck. “Ms. Holland, may I ask you an enormous favor?”
“Of course.”
“It’s about my son. About Atik.” She seemed almost embarrassed.
“Is he okay? He’s not sick, is he?”
“No, ma’am, nothing like that. But—there is something we have to do today, and I’m afraid we won’t have time.”
“What is it?”
Silea hesitated.
“Here,” said her mother, bursting back inside clasping a navy blue three-ring binder. She rotated it and placed it in Rose’s hands as if presenting an award or honorary degree.
Rose read the name on the cover—ATIK YUPANQUI—and immediately understood. The binder was Atik’s portfolio, for submission to Crystal Academy. Rose had turned in Emma Q’s days ago, knowing this would be a hectic week, but today was the actual deadline. If the two women had to work in Opal Canyon this afternoon, there was no possibility they would have time to bring Atik’s portfolio back into town before five o’clock.
With an almost tearful surge of understanding Rose started to nod. “Of course,” she said loudly. “I’ll do it on the way to the lab.” Technically she wasn’t planning on going in that afternoon, but they didn’t need to know that, and a drive over to the lower school would take her all of ten minutes. “I will take the—um, Yo llevaré la—una—le—portfolio a la escuela?”
“Sí sí. Thank you so, so much, Ms. Holland.” Silea reached out to clasp Rose’s forearm. “Muchas gracias.”
“It’s no problem, Silea. De nada.” Rose smiled broadly, oddly grateful to the woman for giving her a chance to help, to do something for their beleaguered family. She set Atik’s binder on the counter, and the two women hustled out to their truck.
* * *
—
It took her twenty minutes more to find the cost-share error: a discrepancy in one of the fringe benefit rows. The correction affected this entire portion of the budget, ticking everything up a few thousand dollars that would have to be found elsewhere. She wrote a two-line email to the department’s fiscal tech asking him to address the issue. Just as she was clicking Send her cell vibrated at her elbow.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dr. Holland?”
“Yes, and who is this?”
“This is Darla Robbins.” Mitch Stephenson’s admin. “Dr. Stephenson would like to see you as soon as possible. Does two-fifteen work for you?”
She glanced at the wall clock. Ten minutes. “I’m not in the building this afternoon,” she said, suddenly self-conscious about working from home.
“Two-thirty, then,” said Darla. Not a question.
The short notice was puzzling, as was Darla’s snippy tone. Rose drove in to the med school, and at 2:29 she was jogging up to the fourth-floor administrative suite. Darla waved her into Mitch’s office without comment. She found him speaking in a low voice with a woman about her age who looked vaguely familiar.
“Have you two met?” Mitch stood and came around from behind his desk.
“We haven’t,” Rose said. The woman turned to face her, ID card bouncing from a lanyard on her chest. A grim-faced corporate type with a dead fish handshake and cool skin. An anemone of keys jangled at her waist.
“Jean Byer is the interim associate vice provost for human resource management here at the School of Medicine,” Mitch explained. “She’ll be sitting in.” He gestured at a small conference table in the corner of his office. When they were seated, he cleared his throat. “Rose, two things have come up that we need to discuss with you.”
“Sounds ominous,” said Rose.
Mitch flashed a glance at Byer. “First item,” he said. “Can you tell us how things are going in your lab?”
Rose adjusted herself in her chair. “Well, we’ve got the budget pretty much nailed down. There was a little hiccup with Berlin that I’m hoping to resolve—”
“With that computational neurology lab,” Mitch said.
“That’s—right.” Rose wondered how her chair could know this. “And I have an equipment share I’m proposing with the Marino lab at Hopkins.”
“I’m talking about morale.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your postdocs and grads. How are they handling the stress of the grant prep? How are you handling it?”
“Just fine. I’ve had to pull some late nights, and the lead time isn’t everything I could have desired. But for the most part everyone’s working well together. We’re getting there.”
He shifted, crossed his legs. “Well, here’s the thing. We’ve received some complaints. It seems you’ve spoken sharply to a few of your postdocs in recent weeks. Haven’t set clear expectations for certain tasks, haven’t been organizing workflow among the various studies you have going. Your staff members feel adrift.”
“You mean Franklin Barnes.”
“Not just Franklin. There are others.”
“Oh.” Rose felt chastened, unsteady.
“More than that, you’ve been spending less and less time in the lab. Some days you come in after lunch, some days you’re not coming in at all.”
“Wait, that’s happened maybe three or four days in the last month.”
He held up a hand. “The details aren’t important. What’s important is the message you’re sending. There have been meetings missed or left early, reconciliations unapproved.”
“Mitch,” she protested, “I have five different studies running at the same time while trying to put together this grant that you urged me to take on. So, yes, I’ve had to let some of the postdocs and grads manage themselves more than they’re used to. But that’s because I need all my focus to be on the NIH scheme. And that in turn involves a lot of working from home, because if I’m in the office, I’ll be interrupted every ten minutes. I’ve explained all this to them, several times over. You need to cut me some slack here.”
“Look, Rose, don’t make too much of this. I’m sure you’ll work this out with your staff. Until now we’ve never received a single complaint about you or your lab. Isn’t that right, Jean?”
“That is correct,” said the interim associate vice provost.
Rose sighed. “So what do you suggest I do?”
“Jean?” Mitch said.
“Our office has some strategies we can share with you for supervising personnel,” Byer said. “Some management modules you can go through with one of our specialists.”
“Fine. I can do that.”
“I’ll set something up.” Byer looked pleased with herself.
Rose turned to Mitch. “You said there was a second thing.”
His lips tightened. “There is. What concerns me more than the lab issues—and frankly it’s a concern I share with the dean—is this business about Crystal Academy.”
Rose felt her cheek twitch, two planets colliding. “Excuse me?”
He lifted his fingers into a sharp-angled steeple and air-quoted as he spoke. “What can you tell us about this ‘longitudinal study of intelligence and outcomes’ you’ve proposed to the public school system?”
“There’s—no study, Mitch,” she said, suddenly light-headed. “That’s something that just came out of my mouth a few weeks ago, when I was talking to a school official.”
He looked at his notes. “But from what I’ve been told, you scheduled a meeting with the head of school for this new gifted academy. Told her about some elaborate study you were designing here in the School of Medicine that would draw on testing data from the academy’s initial cohort. You had a number of people quite worked up a
bout it.”
“That wasn’t my intention,” Rose assured him, realizing why Bitsy Leighton was acting so strangely at the lower school the other day: distant, cold even. “Again, it was just an idea. That kind of thing is way outside my area of expertise.”
“Certainly is.”
“It was a slip of the tongue, Mitch,” she said, genuinely alarmed now.
He took off his glasses. “This is a small town, Rose. There’s a certain—well, there’s a certain layer of folks around here who all see each other at the same fund-raisers and openings and so on. Members of the school boards, City Council, the Medical School Foundation Board, our donors. So you’ve struck a little nerve, and I want you to think about it from our position. From Carl Wingate’s position. Carl runs into Shirley Ames, the chairman of the school board, at a cocktail reception. Shirley tells the dean how eager her central admins are to be working with the School of Medicine. And this is the first he’s heard of it. You see the problem?”
A certain layer of folks. Folks like Bitsy Leighton, with her East Coast pedigree. Folks like Kev Zellar, a Princeton man on City Council.
Suddenly Rose understood why she’d been hauled in here. The squabbling among her staff was standard fare for a science lab preparing a major grant application—and it was merely an excuse. Mitch never would have called her to the mat like this if not for the tongue-lashing he’d probably received from above about her bogus study.
Mitch said, “The dean wants this whole thing to go away.”
“So do I,” Rose replied meekly. “It was just an offhand idea, a stupid one, sure. But I’ve never done anything more than talk about it.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. Because this kind of thing is beneath you, Rose. You’re one of the pioneers in the field. No one would be surprised if the MacArthur Foundation gave you the nod. A neurologist of your abilities, faking up some social science bullshit just to win the ear of an admissions committee for your daughter?”
She turned away from the administrators, poised between tears and rage. Byer set her notepad on the table. Mitch intertwined his fingers and leaned forward slightly. “You’ve done meaningful work here, Rose. You are a scientist we like to brag about. None of that has to change, whatever happens in the short term. But truth and integrity are at the core of the science we do here at Darlton, especially in an era of scant resources and diminished federal funding. And frankly, we have to prioritize where we put our investments. A thing like this . . .”
His words pinned her to her chair.
“What are you saying, Mitch? Am I—being pulled from the neuro scheme?”
His right hand lifted a few inches, dropped again to the table.
“Is that what the dean wants?” she asked, incredulous that it had come to this.
He looked meaninglessly at his watch, then at Rose. With a deep sigh he told her, “I’m afraid so.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
BECK
Grand Junction this time. An overnight, meaning a Marriott for $127 plus tax, breakfast not included. The twins sprawled on a double-wide sofa in the lobby while Beck attempted to check in. The clerk wore a white cowboy hat above a big smile that Beck barely noticed, because three of his credit cards had been declined so far and he was afraid to hand over the fourth. Instead he gave her his newest corporate AmEx. It went through just fine, but now there was an unambiguously personal expense on one of his business accounts, which the accountant wouldn’t like at all, even if he paid her on time this month, which he obviously wouldn’t, just as he hadn’t paid Leila, who was now threatening to take him to small-claims court.
Thankfully the clerk hadn’t said anything out loud, because a line of CSOC parents was growing behind him. The card finally went through. She handed him his room keys, and when he turned from the counter, he saw a small group of teammates gathered around the twins.
“Is it true?” Bucky Meltzer was saying to Aidan. “You’re going to ROMO next year?”
“I was going to tell you guys this weekend,” said Aidan, looking both pleased and embarrassed by the attention.
“Hey, it’s awesome, man. You deserve it.” Bucky gave Aidan a high five. The other guys followed suit, then Bucky turned to Charlie. “You too, Char-char?”
Charlie shrugged and looked down at his phone. Bucky okay-thenned with his eyebrows and turned back to the knot of teammates.
“You guys ready?” Beck hoisted Charlie’s bag.
“I got it,” Charlie snarled, pulling his bag off Beck’s shoulders and slumping toward the elevator.
* * *
—
At the hotel bar after team dinner Wade Meltzer bought him a beer and toasted Aidan’s good fortune. “But how’ll you manage the double driving duty?” he wanted to know. “Aidan down to Denver, Charlie out to CSOC Park? Helluva haul.”
“We’ve got it handled,” said Beck. “On my weeks Sonja can take Charlie, then on Azra’s weeks I guess I can take Aidan, because there’s no way she will. Or we could pay our regular sitter to drive him.”
“Damn. Every night?”
Beck spun his empty bottle on the bar. “We’ll see.”
* * *
—
The next morning’s game began with Aidan starting at attacking mid and Charlie again warming the bench. The match should be an easy one, Wade had pronounced, and sure enough the Crystal team looked dominant. But Grand Junction fought back, thanks in large part to a striker named Zeke, tall and lightning fast, the embodiment of hope and gruff adoration for the opposing parents.
“You got it, Zeke!”
“Good one, Zeke!”
“Get ’em, Zeke!”
Zeke was a rangy white kid with sandy-blond hair pulled back in a headband, face washed a ruddy tan. Not the nimblest feet, but he made up for them with size, volume, and a brash attitude with his teammates and coach, demanding the ball, barking orders, arguing spiritedly with the refs—basically having a blast. He reminded Beck of Charlie at his self-confident peak, just a few short months ago.
Twelve minutes in, Zeke drew first blood on a powerful free kick from thirty yards out, putting Grand Junction up 1–0.
“Now I remember that boy, that big foot,” Wade observed grimly. “Kid was great in U-10, but he was injured when we played these guys last year. Looks like he’s back. C’mon D!” he hollered at Bucky and the other backs.
The first CSOC goal came ten minutes later. Taking space, gathering speed, Aidan dribbled up the middle and faked right. He touched the ball with the outside of his left foot, then slowed and dished to Will. Will nutmegged one defender and spun with the ball toward the opposing center-back. The Grand Junction kid defended well, bodying him up and away from the eighteen, but as the defenders closed, Aidan overlapped and got a perfect through ball from Will. The ball bent around the leaping keeper and hit the net in the upper ninety, tying the game.
“All DAY!” Wade Meltzer bellowed, leading the cheer, always the loudest for other people’s kids. “All damn day, boys!” He turned with a big palm opened wide, and Beck high-fived him. “We got these guys. We got ’em.” Wade bent to put his hands on his knees.
The boys jogged back to midfield for the next kickoff. Ten more minutes of play, then the whistle blew for halftime, the game tied at one.
* * *
—
Beck walked off alone, his gaze drawn to a knot of buzzards or vultures circling above a fallow field adjacent to the soccer complex. Six of them, poised above the Rockies, from this distance a long pile of rubble laid out to the east. Must be something big.
He bought a Mountain Dew at a drinks tent, found some shade in a picnic pavilion, and looked at his phone. Three texts from Sonja.
At store cannot buy groceries wtf
Checking account overdrawn. wtf???
CALL ME RT NOW BECK
It had to happen eventual
ly. The fourth credit card he hadn’t tried last night was their main family card, the sacrosanct Visa that Beck and Sonja used for their household expenses. For months Beck had been hiding all the mounting balances from his wife, letting the minimum payment keep that one account in good standing. Problem was, their checking account had been set up to pay the minimum on that card automatically, and as the minimum payment had grown—$100 one month, $250 the next, now something like $800—his cash balance hadn’t kept up, and with all the other balance-kiting he’d had to manage with his other home and business accounts, he’d forgotten last month to make sure there was enough cash in checking for the payment, then didn’t transfer in a cash advance off a credit card to handle this month’s minimum either, let alone any cash withdrawals Sonja might want to make, so now he was utterly fucked. It was all basically over.
He looked up at the sky where the circle of buzzards had narrowed tornadically, descending on the corpse of whatever beast had been lucky enough to die in the middle of that wide, dry plain.
* * *
—
The second half began with both teams playing defensively, feeling out the opponent, waiting for the right break. Fifteen minutes in, the coach took out Will and Aidan, giving the starting striker and midfielder a quick rest before the final push. The game was still tied at one.
Charlie subbed in for Will. Soon after taking the pitch, Charlie had the ball at midfield, looking for a pass, when Zeke, coming back on defense, sprinted up behind him.
“Man on! Man on!” Wade Meltzer yelled.
Too late. Zeke got in a slide tackle, and a teammate recovered the ball. Just a turnover, hardly a disaster.
But things quickly got worse.
The Gifted School Page 31
