by Lisa Tucker
The articles and reprints about pain (and, of course, Galvenar) were part of Astor-Denning’s other, more complicated reason for sponsoring the conference. Which was yet another reason to be glad it was going well so far. Matthew had all the problems he could handle right now, or so he stupidly thought.
He was on the plane, sitting in his first-class, cubicle-like pod, ignoring yet another pep talk from Dorothy. She was kneeling in the aisle, at his elbow, rather than sitting across the aisle in her own personal pod, while he thumbed through the Wall Street Journal , hoping she would get the message and go away. All of a sudden, he knew exactly why Cassie was so upset. There it was, right on the second page of WSJ ’s Marketplace section: the short, simple, and hideous news that there had been a “late addition” to the EU conference roster—bioethicist Amelia Johannsen. A “surprising development,” they said, which Matthew considered the understatement of the year.
At least it was obvious now what Cassie had been trying to tell him. Bookbinders had meant that he needed to see Walter immediately, not in Philadelphia, but in France. This was why she’d used the phrase “alternate flight plans.” She was trying to let him know that he needed to go directly to Paris. She was probably too panicked to figure out a sensible way to say that bad weather in Paris meant he shouldn’t go to Japan, if a sensible way to say such a geographically ridiculous thing existed. He couldn’t think of one at that moment, though he was telling himself that this new development was nothing to panic about because he knew how to manage the problem.
True, he hadn’t expected it to happen so soon—that lying bitch! Put the past behind them, what a crock!—but that it would happen someday, he was positive. And he was ready. All he had to do was use the international first-class personal phone at his elbow, and he could make this go away. No need to fly to Paris, though of course he would since Walter wanted him to, as soon as he did the bare minimum to settle Japan. He’d send Cassie there immediately to calm the boss’s understandable fears.
He had no problem getting through to her this time; Cassie said she didn’t know why his calls hadn’t come through earlier. Maybe a computer glitch in the phone system? Whatever, there was no time to discuss it now. This day was obviously screwed.
Though Matthew had not been in charge of putting together the conference participant list, he had signed off on the final version: mostly scientists and doctors, a few ethicists and policymakers—and, most important, all with personal or institutional ties to Astor-Denning. The only person on the list who was known to be above taking any dollars from Big Pharma was no threat to them, Matthew was sure. But Ben’s soul mate, as he kept calling Amelia—nauseatingly enough—was another story entirely. How she managed to get herself added to this list, the day before the conference started, would be the first thing Walter would ask, no doubt screaming and cursing as though he blamed Matthew, though of course he really didn’t. He never had any idea that the Amelia problem was, in fact, Matthew’s fault, in the past and (fuck it all!) this time, too.
Why hadn’t he thought of this hideous possibility? He knew full well that only Ben had the clout to get anyone added without approval from the sponsors. That only Ben could just call up the WHO organizers, sure that whoever answered would be so impressed just hearing his name that they would agree to whatever he wanted.
Of course the bitch must have put him up to it. Ben was too busy inventing cures for the world’s poor to devote even one percent of his enormous brainpower to the topic of why Amelia had asked him to get her on the bioethics panel. And Ben was too innocent to go beyond the obvious thought that since Amelia was in Paris with him anyway, why not?
Predictably, the WSJ report caused AD stock to start fluctuating as brokers tried to decide what it meant: Nothing? (hold) Galvenar was about to take a serious hit? (sell) The incorruptible Amelia had finally accepted a payday? (buy) It went down; it went up; it went back down; Cassie’s assistant, Geoff, kept watch until the final bell rang. Net result: a loss of almost two percent. Bad, yes, but not that bad until you factored in that the stock had been on the increase for months, and then it was very, very bad. Walter had left Matthew several voice mails (fourteen at last count) to make sure he was aware of that.
All day, Matthew had been calling Geoff every twenty minutes or so for updates. Cassie had quickly left for Paris. At some point, Matthew remembered to ask Geoff to overnight another Motorola international cell and cancel his phone number and credit cards. He explained that he’d been mugged, but gave no details.
He’d been on the plane for seven hours; Dorothy was asleep in her own personal pod and he was exhausted, too. It was time to do the deed, despite how much he was dreading it. Benjamin had always been an early-to-bed, early-to-rise guy, and it was already 10:35 in Paris. Matthew had Ben’s cell number programmed into his phone, but that was just for speed dialing. He knew Ben’s number as well as he knew Cassie’s. Of course he did. Ben was his oldest, closest friend.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Logic of Amelia’s Life
When Amelia was a little girl, her grandmother gave her an adopted child for Christmas. The girl’s name was Esteysi Mariela and she was seven years old, just like Amelia, and she lived in Guatemala, which started with a G , just like Greenwich, where Amelia lived. There the similarities ended, however. Grandma told her that Guatemala was nothing like Greenwich, Connecticut, and Esteysi was so poor that she didn’t have any clothes (other than the pink dress she was wearing in the picture) or a school or a dentist or even a doctor to make her better when she was sick. But now that Amelia had adopted her, Esteysi would have all of this. All Amelia had to do was write to Esteysi once a month, like a pen pal. But she mustn’t forget about Esteysi, because Esteysi was counting on her. Grandma would send the monthly checks, but Amelia would be the real sponsor of this child. She would be the one saving Esteysi’s life.
Amelia thought it was the best Christmas present she’d ever received. She loved little Esteysi and the child Grandma added the next year, an eight-year-old boy named Pablo who lived in Venezuela, and Astrid from Chile, who was nine when Amelia was nine, and ten-year-old Maria from the Philippines, and so on and so on, until Grandma died when Amelia was fifteen. Amelia’s parents thought sponsoring nine needy children was more than enough, and they were glad these children would all turn eighteen around the time Amelia did so she could go to college free of the responsibility of writing all those letters and sending the money, too, now that Grandma wasn’t around. Honestly, Amelia’s parents thought Grandma was something of a crackpot, and they wished she hadn’t gotten Amelia started on what had become an obsession with righting all of society’s wrongs. Other kids wanted cars for their sixteenth birthdays; Amelia wanted a donation to a New York homeless shelter. When would she get over this?
Amelia entered college hoping her professors could answer the question that had bothered her since Grandma had introduced her to poor Esteysi: Why do such bad things happen to innocent people? In her first philosophy class, she learned an answer that was short, if nothing like sweet: Bad things happen to all people. All people includes innocent people. Therefore, bad things happen to innocent people. QED.
The only part of this answer Amelia liked was QED, the abbreviation of the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum , meaning “which was to be demonstrated” or, in simpler terms, “it is proved.” It wasn’t much of a proof, Amelia thought, though she knew her professor was right that the logic was irrefutable if you accept the first sentence, which philosophers call the premise. But when she asked her prof the bigger question, “Why do bad things happen to all people?” he had no answer other than to wave his arms around and say, “This is the world we find ourselves in.” She decided he’d given up, and she stopped caring what he thought. She was premed; once she was a doctor, she would do something to change this.
But Amelia didn’t end up going to medical school. She decided on a different career after her dean broke the news, at the beginning of senior year,
that she wouldn’t be going to Hopkins. The dean emphasized that there were other very good schools, but Hopkins had been Amelia’s dream since she was a freshman: it was the next step in her life plan, the place her parents and all her friends expected her to go. The premeds at her college were all aware that only two students would have their applications supported for Hopkins; they’d even made bets on who would be the second one chosen—since the first one, everybody knew, would be Ben Watkins, a scarily brilliant guy who’d never had a date and was jokingly rumored to be working on a nuclear weapon to express his frustration. Amelia had been the hands-down favorite: she had the grades, the recommendations, and an amazing record of volunteer work that was tiring just to read. Everyone assumed she would do well on the MCAT, and she did; yet her score seemed only average compared to the unheard-of perfect performance by another student, a guy who nobody had picked to win, not even himself. Since Ben had refused to answer three of the multiple-choice questions, saying none of the answers were really correct, Matthew beat out even him.
Of course it galled Amelia that pretty-boy Matthew, a smart-ass who didn’t seem to care about medicine or anything else, had taken her spot at Hopkins. He was an English major who could talk circles around everyone else in the premed group, but she’d never said one word to him. His perfect MCAT score did not change her opinion that he was “obviously” shallow.
How odd that Matthew Connelly would prove to be the logic of her life. It was because of him that she went to graduate school in philosophy instead of becoming a doctor. She did end up at Hopkins, after all, because they had a concentration in the history of science. She convinced herself that it was a better fit anyway, since she’d always loved thinking about the moral issues of medicine more than the gritty, icky details of the body. When Matthew heard that she was moving to Baltimore, he sought her out to tell her about a great apartment building where he and Ben were going to be sharing a place. She didn’t even realize he knew Ben, and she couldn’t imagine the two of them as roommates. But the building was perfect and she moved there, too, five floors above Matthew and Ben’s apartment. Whenever Matthew saw her, in the elevator or in the hall by the mailboxes, he would insist that she come over and have dinner with them. After months of this, she finally broke down, and they became friends.
Amelia considered herself shy, and Ben acted like it caused him physical pain to make small talk; yet somehow Matthew held them all together. He cooked wonderful meals his mother had taught him to make—spaghetti and meatballs, mushroom quiche, chicken fajitas—and he invented weird games like What If. What if you must choose between strangling a kitten and having ten thousand acres of the rain forest pulverized? What if you’re given a chance to meet Shakespeare, but only with your clothes off? What if you could discover a cure for cancer, but you can make it public only if you agree to blow Oliver North? What if you were in Damien’s shoes in Omen II —would you kill yourself after discovering you were the Antichrist, or go ahead and use your evil powers to take control of the earth?
Amelia wasn’t sure when she fell in love with him, but she remembered their first kiss. She’d lived in Baltimore for three years; he was upstairs at her place. She’d called him, crying, after she’d tried to light her oven and caught her hair on fire. He said it wasn’t that dumb, especially if you didn’t know about pilot lights. Then he examined her hair and said it was only singed at the ends. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you can still be the little red-haired girl.” He’d been calling her “little red-haired girl” since he found out she loved Peanuts, but this time she leaned over and kissed him, and he kissed her back. Before long they were sleeping together, but not every night because Matthew didn’t want to leave Ben all by himself, since Ben didn’t have a girlfriend.
When Matthew dropped out of the program at the end of the fourth year—with an MD his adviser said would be worthless without a residency—Amelia certainly didn’t understand the decision, but she was thrilled when he asked her to come live with him in Philadelphia. He told her the reason for leaving was simple: he was sick of not having any money. She thought, as did his professors, that he was being extremely shortsighted, but she also knew she might feel the same way if she were in his shoes. Though she hadn’t known it at the time, she’d discovered that he and Ben had been the only two “scholarship” students in the premed program. She wasn’t sure about Ben’s circumstances, but she knew Matthew’s father had died of liver problems when Matthew was twelve and his mom had died of ovarian cancer right before he started college. He was an orphan , while she had two successful parents and a trust fund from her grandmother. How could she begin to understand what money meant to him?
She admired his stance of refusing to take money from her, even when he’d had to steal food from the hospital cafeteria. This proved he had to be kidding when he always said an ethical position was like a yacht: “I’ll let you know when I can afford to think about buying either of them.”
Still, she was positive he was making a huge mistake taking a job at Astor-Denning, even if he did have more than a hundred thousand dollars in student loans to pay. She’d followed all the news about big pharmaceutical companies fighting to keep Congress from mandating lower prices for poor people, even though pharmaceutical profits had been skyrocketing since the eighties. She told Matthew it sounded like a creepy place to work, but she assumed it would be temporary, and it wasn’t really a problem. While he worked at Astor-Denning, she sat in their adorable little rental house in the suburbs, writing her dissertation about the moral issues of medical research. At night when he got home, he would cook and listen to what she’d written all day. After they did the dishes together, they would sit on the couch and watch a video or, more often, argue about everything she’d just read to him.
The arguments were real, but also, admittedly, a lot of fun. Like any philosophy grad student, she was always up for a take-no-prisoners argument; then too, Matthew usually rubbed her feet while he told her she was “out of touch with the reality of modern medicine” and “touchingly naïve.” They made up at night when they went to bed, and that was a big part of the fun, too. Matthew was such a hot guy back then (and still was, if she was being honest): six-foot-three with thick brown hair and the most piercing blue eyes, not to mention that perfect body, which he never seemed to notice and never lifted a finger to maintain. Every morning, when she got up at five-thirty, to run in the dark around their little neighborhood, Matthew slept on, oblivious to the work being thin required of her (and almost everyone but him). One Saturday, when she confessed how much she hated running, he said, “Stop it, then.” When she said her ass would spread like the wings on a butterfly, he said, “Your simile sucks, but I like the image of you with a fat ass.” Then he grinned that irresistible grin. “Let’s try it. More Amelia to love.”
Of course she was in love with him: he was witty and smart and obviously in love with her, though she wasn’t sure why. Her own mother said Amelia was extremely lucky to have “snagged” a guy like Matthew. “Like in Funny Girl ,” her mother said, referring to a Barbra Streisand musical. Amelia knew what her mother meant. That damned “groom was prettier than the bride” song had been stuck in her head for months when she’d first moved in with Matthew.
But still, he’d chosen her, and that simple fact made her feel even luckier than she had felt as a little girl, comparing herself with the kids in Guatemala. She and Matthew were twenty-six years old; they’d lived together for only a year and they were already talking about marriage and children with a confidence that of course they would do all that, as soon as she finished her dissertation and his student loans were paid off. They would buy a house in their cute little neighborhood—a starter house, Matthew said. They could get a bigger one once they had their 2.5 kids.
Looking back on that time, what always surprised her was just how happy she and Matthew had been. Even years later, when she completely and truly hated his evil guts, she would catch herself remembering those morning
s after her runs, when she watched him as he slept. He slept on his left side, with his hands curled up like a child’s. In the early morning sunlight, she could see the beautiful blond hairs on his arm, and sometimes she reached out and touched them, lightly, just enough to make him smile in his sleep. She wondered what he dreamed about; he never talked about his dreams. She talked about hers all the time and he acted like they were interesting, even when they were plotless and pointless, held together only by her emotions, often fear, usually fear of losing him. If she woke up having one of these nightmares, he always said, “I’m right here,” and collected her in his strong arms, pulling her head against his chest. She remembered the comfort of his heart beating in her ear. She remembered his smell and the way his skin tasted. As much as she wanted to, she would never forget the simple facts of loving him.
During the spring when everything started to change, they were all twenty-seven: Matthew, Ben, and Amelia. The main thing she remembered was that Ben was calling Matthew constantly back then. He’d finished his MD and his PhD in biochemistry and was about to finish his internship (all in only six years—he really was a genius) and he wanted Matthew’s help because he was being courted by dozens of labs after publishing the first article based on his research in the incredibly prestigious journal Cell . Why Ben had to ask Matthew’s advice about everything he did was something Amelia could never understand. Matthew told her to think of them as brothers, and she tried to, especially when Matthew went to Boston at the end of May, using a full week of their precious vacation time to help Ben move into an apartment. But that summer, after Ben was settled in at a great lab working on infectious diseases, he still kept calling, sometimes in the middle of the night. “He’s having some problems,” Matthew said by way of explanation, but of course this didn’t explain anything. It certainly didn’t explain why Matthew himself was becoming so taciturn, unless it was sleep deprivation. Half the time now, when he got home from work, he didn’t want to cook or talk or do anything but sit and stare at the television. When she asked him what was wrong, over pizza or Chinese (since Amelia herself had never learned to cook), he said, “Tired.” When she suggested he go to bed, he said, “I will. Don’t worry.”
