by Julia Kent
He wanted to punch something.
All of this made the very real and visceral fact that his grandpa was falling apart somehow more abstract. The interaction between his grandpa and Madge seemed perfectly normal, cognitively fluid, from a distance. That was how everything looked, though, right? It all looked okay from far away. Life didn’t get complicated and sad until you got up so close that you could almost taste it.
The yearning inside him that had drawn him to go to the appointment, to ask her out for coffee, still pulled at him. Her form faded as she marched down the street, as far away as quickly as possible from him, and something in him loosened. It was a sense of need. Not sexual need, an emotional need to bring her back, to apologize, to hold her, to have her arms snake around his waist, her cheek pressed against his chest, to go for long walks, to drink coffee, to make her dinner, to explore and have fun, and have not-fun. What would it be like to just do laundry together? To clean the house? To have a baby? To go on big trips? The banal, simple things that everyone took for granted.
What would it be like if he could take back that doctor crack? Oh, if anything could be pulled back on the thin string of second guesses, and shoved back into his mouth, eagerly chewed and swallowed, so that the words were not out there anymore, he would do it. His principles were valid. Under no circumstances did he want his grandfather’s research trial jeopardized. The information could help thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, even if it meant that Ed experienced no benefit. That was how science worked.
Alex trusted science. Rigor, objectivity, measurement, re-measurement, trial and error, replication. All of those principles were absolutely critical for a drug’s success. You couldn’t do much of that with emotions. Could you measure them? Not really. Could you be objective? Hell no. Could you be rational at all times? If you could, he wondered how that would feel. He did a pretty good job of being mellow, but on the inside, he was just as wracked with indecision and confusion as everyone else, maybe to a lesser extent, but those feelings still ricocheted inside him.
Half stalking her at work when she hadn’t replied to his many communication attempts, he hadn’t been sure whether she wanted anything to do with him. Perhaps she was spurning him by not answering him, but now? Now he was certain he had managed to make her believe he was just a big asshole.
An image of Dylan’s hairy butt flashed through his mind when he thought the word “asshole.” This was not one of his better days.
Her phone rang. Great. She cringed and held her eyes half shut, like watching a horror movie scene you can’t bear to handle full-on, as she looked at the phone number. Not Alex. Whew.
Why was that whew tinged with disappointment?
Darla. Her niece. Cousin. Whatever you call her. Her cousin who was seven years younger and who called her Aunt Josie because Josie had helped raise her. Josie picked up the phone.
“Darla, what the hell are you doing calling me?” That was one hell of a way to greet someone, but Josie knew this wasn’t going to be good news. Someone had died, her mother was in jail, or Darla was pregnant. Or maybe it was buy-one-get-one-free day and two of those had happened.
“Oh, just slumming.” Darla’s tone was clear—Josie was being a jerk.
She softened and laughed. “You okay? You finally going to take me up on my offer to move out here?”
“Nope,” Darla replied, the word clipped and clear. Hmmmm, Josie wondered. No mention of a death or jail. That must mean…
“That’s not what I want to talk about.” Here it came. A baby. Everyone around her was having a baby. Maybe Josie needed a baby so she’d be part of the “in” crowd.
“You talk about what you want to talk about, then.” Just get it out, Darla.
“I need to talk about a man.” Darla’s accent had always amused Josie. You would think that they would both have the same post-Appalachia, not-quite-Yinzer Pittsburgh accent, but they didn’t. Maybe because Josie’s dad hadn’t been from the area, or maybe because Darla was so bold in how she spoke, but Josie had ditched most of her central Ohioisms from her speech patterns, while it seemed Darla had absorbed them all and more.
“A man? How can you talk about a man? There aren’t any men out there.” The last guy back home Josie had dated was Davey Rockland, who had managed to fail out of the police academy because he couldn’t keep track of how many bullets he’d shot from a clip. When you can’t manage basic arithmetic up to fifteen or so, it’s time to just go become roadkill.
“No kidding,” Darla muttered, “but I actually managed to find one.”
“So, who is this man you found?”
“I literally found him, Josie. He was naked, wearing nothing but a guitar on the side of the road.”
Huh? Did Darla just actually say what she thought she said? The cat leapt onto the counter and headed toward the salad Josie was working on. One good shove later and she had an offended cat, tail up and puckered asshole sauntering away.
“What?” Josie barked, struggling to pin her phone between her cheek and shoulder while covering the food with plastic wrap to protect it from the feline menace.
“I’m not kidding.” Darla’s mantra. Even at three or four her stock phrase had been “I’m not kidding,” one hand jauntily on her cocked hip, an insulted expression on her face.
“He was just standing there on I-76, wearing a guitar and a collar and sticking his thumb out, and so I stopped.”
“Did you fuck him?” This sounded like the start of a good Penthouse Forum story.
“Wow, way to be blunt, Josie.” She paused. Josie could imagine Darla biting the cuticle of her thumbnail, shoving her giant mane of blonde curls over her shoulder, buying time to decide how best to tell the truth. “Yeah, of course.”
Victory! “How can I be blunt if I’m right?”
“You can be both.”
“I often am, but don’t accuse me of being too blunt when, in the end, the direct question I’m asking relates exactly to what you’ve actually done.” Boy, that sounded wayyyyy too officious, even in Josie’s head. She opened her mouth to say something to lighten the conversation when Darla spoke.
“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” Darla snapped.
“So, what do you want to talk about?” Where was this going? Was she pregnant or not? If she was, she would just blurt it out. Darla wasn’t the type to keep anything to herself. Whatever was going on had to be complicated if it didn’t pour out of her in the first few seconds.
“I want to talk about this man.”
“What’s his name?”
“Trevor.”
“Trevor what?”
“Trevor Connor.” Josie could hear the grin in Darla’s voice. Trevor Connor. She knew that name.
“Trevor Connor…where have I heard that name? Why is that so familiar?” Josie asked. She knew it wasn’t someone they’d grown up with. How was Darla dating someone whose name she knew?
“Wait a minute!” she practically screamed. “Trevor Connor? From Random Acts of Crazy?” A year ago one of the teenage granddaughters of one of Josie’s patients had been blasting a song that Josie loved. One thing led to another and she’d downloaded “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer” and sent it to Darla. The rest was history. Her niece had become a serious groupie for this tiny little local band, but Random Acts of Crazy was growing. Were they touring in Ohio already? If so, why Peters? Of all the places you could perform in Ohio…
“Yup.”
“Darla.” Calm seeped into her voice. It occurred to her that Darla might be calling her, high as a kite, and rambling on about something that wasn’t real.
“Yeah?”
“Are you on something? Because you don’t just conjure a naked man on the interstate, wearing nothing but a guitar, who happens to be the lead singer of your favorite band.” Compassion filled her. This was not what Josie had expected, and her shift in focus went from her pending date to her far-flung niece. “Honey, do you need me to call someone?”
“I swear to God, Josie, I am not making this up.” The tone in her voice was believable. If this were true, then how did Trevor Connor get to Peters? It was all too crazy.
And random.
“Okayyy,” Josie said, skeptically. “And you fucked him?”
“Yup.”
“Any good?” Wincing, Josie forced herself to ask the question. While Darla and she were adults now, there was still an ick factor in talking about sex.
“Hoo boy,” Darla chirped.
“That good?” A flicker of her and Alex pressed up against the stone wall by the river sent shivers through her.
“Yup.”
“So what’s your problem?” Please don’t be pregnant.
“My problem is that I don’t know what my problem is and Trevor is about to leave any minute now and I’m going to pick up his friend Joe, who—”
“Joe? Joe as in Joe Ross, the bass player?”
“Yup.”
“Quit saying ‘yup.’” This one-word answer shit drive Josie nuts.
“Yes, ma’am. Is that better?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Okay then, ma’am.”
“You’re telling me that you’re hanging out with the bass player and the lead singer of your favorite band in the middle of Peters?”
“Yup—yes, ma’am, I mean.”
“You know they’re from Boston, right?
“Well, outside of Boston, some suburb named Sudborough.”
Josie snorted. “More like Snob-borough.”
“I picked up on that,” Darla said. Josie could imagine the tongue roll, how Darla would mug, her eyebrows lifting in a goofy face. God, she missed her. Maybe this was the chance to get her out here. Finally. Aunt Cathy didn’t need nearly as much help as Darla claimed she needed. Fear stopped Darla from even visiting Boston.
“Are they being assholes?” she said, coldly. “Because if you need me to—”
“What? What are you going to do, Josie? You’re a hundred pounds soaking wet. You gonna go and raspberry them to death? Shake your finger in their faces extra hard?”
Oh, great. As if Josie weren’t already teeming with insecurity. A wave of protectiveness rose up in her nonetheless, pushed through by a sense of indignation that these two metro-west Boston spoiled college boys might be hurting Darla.
“Fair enough,” she said. What she wanted to say was something devastatingly visceral, but this wasn’t about her. It was about Darla. Her voice softened. “So, what’s really going on?”
“Well, you knew I already had a fangirl crush on Trevor, so the problem is that now that I’ve spent most of the past twenty-four hours with him, I don’t want to let him go.”
Aha. An opening. “So don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t let him get away. Come to Boston. Live with me here in Cambridge.”
“You know I can’t do that.” I know that’s bullshit, Josie thought. Deep breath, and then—
“Your mama’s fine,” she said, soothingly. “You can come out here. You can go on, Darla. You can move on.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that.”
“Well, I do,” Josie insisted. “And now you have a place to live, you have a guy—”
“Two guys.” Darla’s words hung in the air like a giant water balloon about to crash into Josie’s face, Matrix-style.
“Two guys? You fucked them both?” Was this some trend Josie was missing out on? First Laura, and now Darla? Had Cosmo come out with an issue on threesomes?
“No… no,” Darla said, stumbling. “Look, it’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated,” Josie shot back. If she heard that phrase one more time…and now it was pouring out of her own mouth.
“No, actually, it’s not. My life’s pretty fuckin’ simple, Josie. I go to my gas station job, I help Mama with her sugars and I try to find somebody to spend time with who doesn’t think that Killer Karaoke is the height of American culture. Other than that, I don’t have a complicated life and now, suddenly, in twenty-four hours it’s become more twisted and more confusing than anything else in my entire life probably since I was four.”
Zing! An arrow between the eyes couldn’t have hurt—or halted her—more. Forcing a deep breath, she inhaled until her belly filled, distending beyond her waistband, and then deflating, a forced relaxation that she felt in her bones. Good.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like whatever you’re going through, it’s pretty big.”
“Yup…uh, yes, ma’am.”
“How can I help?”
“Tell me what to do.” Darla laughed, the sound wild and boisterous. “I don’t want Trevor to leave—Joe’s about to take him away. Uncle Mike’s gonna fix his car.”
“Joe’s car is broken?”
“Yeah, he got here and then came into my little purple passion place—”
“Your purple what?” Was that code for drugs? Or some hotel nearby that rented by the hour? Or had something on her body gone purple with disease? Josie wished she could have been there more for Darla these past years. This call was clearly a cry for help.
“Oh, never mind.” A long sigh told Josie Darla was as frustrated as she was. Whatever words were flying between the two of them didn’t connect easily to what was going on beneath the surface.
“If you’ve got a place on your body that’s turning purple from passion, Darla, then there are medications for that.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Ookaaayyy.” Even the cat ran off this time, spooked by Josie’s tone, her non-phone hand gesturing as if possessed. Josie’s smart mouth was running dangerously close to ripping Darla a new one.
“I don’t want Trevor to leave and Joe’s an asshole but he’s a really, really, really attractive asshole and I just…” A long sigh. “I guess it’s all on me, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “It’s all on you. I can’t really help you. I’m here to listen, I’m here to give you whatever advice I can, and I’m here to caution you to please, please use condoms.” Please.
Darla laughed, a belly sound that made Josie’s shoulders drop instantly. “We did. No worries.”
“Okay, good, because the last thing you need is to add a baby to this mix.”
“I know. I know, Josie, I’m watching Jane go through it. Trust me, I do not wanna add a baby to anything right now.”
“Good girl. I’m going to start clearing out my guest room just in case you wanted to, you know, visit. Or uproot your entire life and move in.” A dawning sense of joy filled her at the thought. Rescuing Darla had been her mission years ago; leaving had been wretched. But now…
“Fat chance.”
“Oh, I think the chance is better than you think, Darla,” she said.
Shuffling sounds, and then: “I gotta go, Josie,” Darla said. “Things are about to get even more complicated.”
More complicated? What could be more complicated than two guys at once? Josie struggled to say the exact right thing, the one statement that would ricochet in Darla’s mind and help her to make the perfect decision—which was, of course, to move to Boston.
“Just remember one thing, Darla,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Whatever you do, it’s your life—not anybody else’s. You get to pick what happens next.” Click. Darla was gone.
She knocked softly on the door. She wasn’t nervous—a sense of determination drove her forward, knowing that this was the first of many, many arguments that she would be picking on this subject.
“Yes.” Gian looked up. He was balding on top and wore glasses like something out of the 1950s, army-issue thick black rims. His shirt had what looked like a tomato sauce stain on it and it occurred to her for a moment that he could have been Dylan’s incredibly ugly older brother.
“Hey, Gian, I have a question.”
“What’s up?”
“I want to talk about the trial.”
“
Yes,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
“I think it’s time to break it.”
“What?” He looked at her in shock and pulled his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his brown eyes, one bloodshot from rubbing, the other quite white and normal looked back at her a bit bugged out. “Why would we break it?”
“I think for ethical reasons we need to. The trends I told you about are deepening.” Barely holding it together, she found her brain taking over. Quit quit quit quit quit, it said, racing through what she’d already lost from the trial (Alex) and what she was being offered by Laura (freedom).
“Deepening,” he said.
“And I’m documenting trends. It’s becoming increasingly evident which patients are on the drug and which are on placebo.”
He studied her carefully. He knew that she knew this stuff inside out. If it had been any other nurse, she knew, he’d have waved her away. “What makes you think that?” he challenged, propping his chin in his elbow, rubbing his upper lip absentmindedly.
She took a seat and pulled out a large folder. “I knew you’d ask that.”
“Of course I’d ask that.”
“That’s right. I knew you’d ask, and so here’s my data.”
“Data. How refreshing—someone who works here who actually believes in the scientific process.”
“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?”
After battling a political nightmare a few years ago where there was a near-corruption scandal involving bribes from a pharmaceutical company to help push a drug along, Gian had been brought in. He had—if nothing else—a strict adherence to policy, squeaky clean, and in that respect, a bit like Alex. In the physical department? He was basically as much like Alex as the Gollum.
She opened the folder and handed it to him. “Look at the response rates; in memory, in reflex, short-term memory, long-term memory, all of these different fields. I keep seeing a growing divide. This folder is the group of people who perform well, or at least stay in place, and this is the group of people who don’t. The metrics just keep showing that the same groups are getting more entrenched in their patterns—and the people who are getting worse are deteriorating at a very alarming rate.”
