by Lisa Tucker
For a full week it went on like this, but she told herself the first week had to be an exception. But then the next Monday, the day Ben had agreed to take off so they could spend it together, looking for a house, he left at six-thirty in the morning again. When she woke up she was confused, reaching for him across the king-size hotel bed, finding nothing, not even a note. At eleven-thirty she decided to take a break from her own work and take him lunch and find out what was going on. The hotel was on the Penn campus; she walked over to the deli and bought them sandwiches, spinach and turkey and provolone, which she knew he liked. She even went to a bakery to get butterscotch brownies, his favorite.
When she got to the lab she saw a group of twentysomethings at the benches, preparing vials and plates. Probably grad students or postdocs. She went down the hall and found Ben and Richard in a conference room. They were both talking animatedly, and Ben was standing at the chalkboard, writing furiously in an unreadable code of circles and arrows and letters, obviously trying to convince Richard of something. She waited a while, but when it looked like this wasn’t going to end anytime soon, she stepped inside. “Ben?”
He turned around and smiled. “Babe, hey, what are you doing here?”
“I brought you lunch.” She idiotically held up the deli bag. “I thought we could eat together.”
“Oh. I can’t stop for lunch yet. Do you mind waiting?”
Before she could answer, Richard told Ben, “Let’s quit for a while.” He laughed. “I can use the break to figure out where you’re wrong.”
“Fine,” Ben said, and he laughed, too. He picked up his coffee and took Amelia’s hand. “Want to eat in my new office?”
He took her around the corner. The office didn’t have his nameplate yet, but someone had taped up a large index card reading “Benjamin Watkins, MD, PhD.” It wasn’t Ben’s handwriting, but Ben had taped up one of his favorite sayings: “Experiments must be reproducible: they should fail the same way every time.”
Inside, the office looked uninhabited. The phone wasn’t hooked up yet. The walls were bare. Even the whiteboard had nothing on it. Ben’s laptop was on the desk, still in its case, and the bookshelves contained nothing except one of Ben’s notebooks and an unopened box of pens. The picture she’d given him of her was back at the hotel. He kept forgetting to take it with him.
“Good sandwich,” he said. “Thanks.” He was obviously hungry because he ate it and the brownie quickly. Unless he was trying to hurry back to Richard.
She asked him what had happened to their plan to look for a house. “I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.” His voice was sincere. “How about this weekend? Will that work?”
She nodded, but she was still annoyed and she impulsively decided to go ahead and ask him the other, bigger question that had been haunting her since she found out she was pregnant. It was the wrong time to bring this up, but she wondered if there would ever be a right time in the foreseeable future.
She started off carefully, reasonably. “When I was in the hospital on Thanksgiving, I had a very large copay. The insurance I have for myself and my staff is really only for catastrophic illness. It won’t even pay for my obstetrician.”
He was sitting at his desk with his hands folded, but one or both of his feet were tapping against the floor. She could feel the vibrations. He said, “We’ll have to get you a better insurance policy.”
“The easiest way to do that is for us to get married. HUP is giving you great benefits.”
“I see your point, but I don’t think better insurance is a reason to get married.”
She tried not to sound angry. “How about that I’m having your child?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good reason to get married, either. It may be, but I—”
“How about love?” She couldn’t help it; she was both angry and really hurt. “That is, if you still love me.”
“Why would you say that? You know I do. But I told you about my parents’ divorce. It was a nightmare. I’m just trying to ensure we don’t make a mistake.”
Ben was thirteen when his parents divorced, and it was true, the divorce was horrible. His father, a biology professor, had gone on “sabbatical” to Las Vegas and developed a serious gambling problem; Ben had seen him only one time since, years ago, an uncomfortable reunion that Ben preferred not to talk about. His mom had to support three children on her salary as a middle-school librarian. They lost their house and moved into a tiny apartment. His two sisters hadn’t even finished college because they didn’t get scholarships and they couldn’t manage working and going to school part-time. His older sister, Diane, worked at Home Depot. His younger sister, Melissa, was on disability because she’d hurt her back in a warehouse. Both of them had already been married—and both were divorced. Diane had two boys. Melissa was engaged to a new man Ben had never met. All of them still lived in the tiny college town in Kansas where Ben grew up. Amelia had never been there, though she assumed that would change now that they were in the States for a while. At the very least, when the baby was born.
“You can never be sure,” Amelia said, because she believed this.
“Love doesn’t work that way.”
“I can be surer than I am now. We haven’t even lived together in one place for more than a few weeks. We have to give ourselves time to adjust to living and working together here in Philly. Find a place. Settle down. Get through this pregnancy and then decide.”
She sat back and stared at him. “You want to wait until after our baby is born?”
“I don’t know. Can you give me some time to think about this? I’m really focused on getting myself online here in the lab.” He reached over and took her hand. His foot was tapping against the desk now; the thumping sound echoed in the empty room. “I know you believe in the work Richard and I are trying to do. Trypanosomiasis is a disease that afflicts only the world’s poor. It deserves my full attention right now, don’t you think?”
She said yes, but she wanted to say “What about me, Ben? Do I deserve any of your attention? I’m not an interesting problem, but I do need you, and waking me up to talk a little about your work and have sex isn’t my idea of a relationship.”
But she couldn’t say any of that because Richard was standing in the doorway. “Can I borrow Ben back? I may have thought of something he hasn’t considered.” He laughed. “A miracle.”
And off they went, leaving Amelia in the ugly, empty office to finish her sandwich and a brownie she didn’t even like that much. While she was sitting there, she gave in and let herself think about Matthew. He’d always wanted her to come to lunch with him at Astor-Denning, but she never would. Maybe he’d felt like she did right now: rejected and alone.
Ever since that night at Matthew’s, she’d been at war with herself, trying not to see any positive qualities in him. She’d spent days forcing herself to focus on the crimes of Astor-Denning, and Matthew’s own crimes while he worked for them. She even made a list of AD’s misdeeds, which included:
1) Not only creating patient advocacy groups like Pain Matters, but extensively funding existing patient groups to use them to persuade the general public that arguably rare diseases like adult ADD were actually widely undiagnosed and exclusively neurobiological in origin—that is, treatable only with drugs.
2) Enlisting the media in all their causes, including hiring celebrities to go on talk shows and talk about their high cholesterol or bone loss or whatever and how it was “cured” by one of AD’s medicines. The public had no idea that these talk show appearances were really paid advertisements.
3) Downplaying clinical trial results that showed that any of their drugs didn’t work. Using “thought leaders” to sign off on ghostwritten scientific articles that emphasized some trivial benefit of one of their drugs, while ignoring the fact that the drug wasn’t much better than a sugar pill for the disease it supposedly treated.
And on and on. Amelia’s list was eleven pages long—and this was without the dozens o
f additional crimes listed in the “contingencies and liabilities” section of AD’s own annual report. Matthew loved to point out that it was normal for pharmaceutical companies to be sued constantly by consumers, and maybe it was true, but what about the federal and state civil and criminal investigations into everything from their marketing practices to kickbacks and antitrust? Naturally AD’s annual report boasted that every action against them was “without merit” and would be “vigorously defended against,” but somehow, every year, they still paid millions in government fines. But why should this stop them? Even the largest government fines levied against pharmaceutical companies weren’t significant compared to the billions in profit. In this way Big Pharma was like the mafia: gladly paying off governments around the world so they could continue on their merry way, doing whatever they wanted.
And Matthew had not been some low-level “innocent” at Astor-Denning, no matter what he was implying with his question about their forty-one thousand employees. In retrospect, Palm Beach really had been the beginning of his rise to power, despite what he’d said at the time. Galvenar was now AD’s biggest-selling drug, and Matthew had won several industry awards for launching it. That he’d somehow had time to run his “alliances” division, too, and even be involved with Galvenar’s clinical trials (according to Ben) was just more proof that Matthew was an incredibly ambitious guy who really could have ended up being the head of that company someday. Meaning, or so Amelia had always thought, that she’d obviously been right to break up with him. If Big Pharma was like the mafia, then Matthew was like AD’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather .
But what if Michael Corleone had left the business? Would Kay, his ex, have found herself feeling so incredibly confused? Could she have even found herself comparing the good man she lived with now to the corrupt guy she’d escaped, as Amelia did as she walked back to the hotel?
Admittedly, at that moment, it was hard not to compare Matthew’s attitude about marriage to Ben’s. They were the only two men she’d ever lived with, and Matthew had actually wanted to marry her. He’d even bought her a beautiful engagement ring before that Christmas party when he’d planned to ask her. He’d tried to give it to her a few weeks later, during dinner at their favorite seafood restaurant in Center City. He said, “You don’t have to tell me yes right now. Wear it for a while and see if it persuades you.” She was annoyed, thinking he was suggesting that the mere sight of an expensive ring on her finger could affect her judgment about something as important as marriage. Now, unfortunately, she could see another possibility. Maybe he’d been afraid she would say no.
Even when they were arguing constantly, Matthew would have married her if she’d gotten pregnant. She knew this because the subject had come up only a few weeks before Palm Beach. Her period was even later than usual, and he said if she really turned out to be pregnant this time they would get married right away so he could put her on his insurance. Ironically enough, she’d told Matthew she wasn’t going to get married for such a flimsy reason.
“Insurance is a flimsy reason?” He was in the shower; she was sitting on the clothes hamper, straining to hear him. “Since when? You’re always going on about the need for a national health-care system.”
“I have my own money.”
“Good for you, but if something goes wrong and the baby is premature, your entire trust fund could be wiped out trying to pay the hospital bills.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take rather than get married when we’re not happy.”
“And the baby?” He stepped out and grabbed a towel, which he threw around his waist. “I suppose you’ll raise our baby without a father, too?”
“I could do that,” she said, but her voice wavered. “If I had to.”
“But you don’t have to, and you know it.” He walked over to the hamper. “Look, if you are pregnant, we’ll just have to figure out how to be happy. We can do that for little Egor or Brunhilda, can’t we?”
She didn’t say anything, but she couldn’t help smiling. He’d been joking about naming them Egor and Brunhilda forever.
A few days later, when her period started, she was alone and crying, knowing they wouldn’t be forced to figure out how to be happy. No Egor or Brunhilda, just the two of them, fighting their way to the inevitable end.
Now, sitting in the hotel, staring at email she didn’t have the energy to answer, it struck her how easily Matthew had said “our baby.” Ben called the baby “it” or “the pregnancy.” She told herself this didn’t mean anything, but it was hard not to feel like it was somehow depressingly significant.
She did a long blog post about Big Pharma’s newest ridiculous arguments against reforming the Medicare drug program, but her heart wasn’t in it. What was she doing in this hotel in West Philadelphia when she’d loved living in New York? What if she’d made the worst mistake of her life? She wanted Ben’s baby, but she wanted Ben, too. Maybe it wasn’t enough that he was a good person if he never had time to be with her.
Around five, she tried calling him and telling him she wanted to go out for dinner. He said he’d be there by eight-thirty; she reminded him she was pregnant and couldn’t wait that long to eat or she’d get nauseated. He mentioned that there was a good Italian restaurant downstairs, and she thanked him for his kind suggestion. He didn’t hear the sarcasm and said, “See you soon, babe.”
Unfortunately, he came home late again. She was already in bed and he joined her, saying he was worn out, too, but then he was so jittery and restless that it took him forever to fall asleep. When she finally drifted off, his light was still on and he was still leaning against the headboard, chewing his lip, scrawling page after page in his notebook. The next day, Tuesday, when he came in at nine-thirty, so exhausted he couldn’t even tell her anything beyond how exhausted he was, she couldn’t help asking if Richard was spending fifteen-hour days in the lab, too. When Ben said no, because his wife “didn’t understand the mission,” Amelia started crying. Ben was obviously surprised, but he held her and said he was so lucky to have found his soul mate. She was about to ask him if they could go downstairs to the restaurant and have dessert when she realized he was already asleep. She took off his Doc Martens and sat them under the chair where he’d thrown his coat, so he could find them in the morning; then she went downstairs and ordered a slice of strawberry cheesecake. But after one bite, her stomach felt queasy and she left the rest untouched.
On Wednesday she woke up extremely depressed, but she tried to make the best of it. She talked on the phone with her assistant Ethan. She emailed Sara for an update on the Galvenar situation in Jakarta. She walked to the campus bookstore and bought books about pregnancy. She worked on an article about an NIMH doctor who’d accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Pfizer in “consulting” fees. But by afternoon she was still profoundly lonely, and it took everything she had not to walk over to Matthew’s apartment to check on Danny and Isabelle.
She had good reasons to be concerned about those children. What if Matthew had gone back into his depression and the kids were in trouble? What if he was thinking of breaking his deal with her, now that he no longer worked at AD? True, Danny probably would have called her, but what if all three of them just needed cheering up, like she herself did? Would it really be so bad to spend the afternoon at Matthew’s place?
Yes, of course it would. If she couldn’t control her mind, she absolutely would control her behavior. So she sat in the hotel, trying not to think about him—and failing, again, still. Around dinnertime, she blinked and saw him standing at the stove in Baltimore, holding out a spoon of soup, saying, “For you, I have included zee fresh mushrooms. Taste and tell chef if it pleaseth mademoiselle.” She reminded herself that Matthew was the only person who had cooked for her since childhood, and even her dreams were about food these days. She knew her mind was telling her to eat more. If only she could. She was ravenously hungry and it seemed so unfair that almost everything—certainly everything good—made her
sick.
But most of these memories had nothing to do with food, meaning there was no way to explain them away. She was taking a bath when she suddenly remembered him taking her to the oral surgeon’s office when she had her wisdom teeth removed. She’d been scared of the anesthesia and Matthew said he’d try to talk them into letting him stay with her during the surgery. “Just in case the dentist is a serial killer,” he said. She knew he was making fun of her, but still, he convinced the oral surgeon that he had to stay with his girlfriend, and the last thing she remembered as she was counting backward from a hundred was Matthew smiling at her, holding her hand.
She was trying to work on an editorial when she found herself thinking about the day they moved into their little rental house in the Philadelphia suburbs. Matthew had just carried her across the threshold when they discovered a woman from the rental agency waiting in the living room to take them on a walk-through and give them a copy of the signed lease. With a completely straight face Matthew told the agent, “We left her wheelchair in the car. I have to go get it.” The poor woman stammered out something sympathetic and Matthew set Amelia down. “A miracle! This house has healed her!” Amelia hit him, but she was laughing so hard her sides hurt.
