CHAPTER TEN
INTERLUDE
ASU’s accelerated graduate school program was unique. In a period of six years, you got your undergraduate degree and a PhD, compared to the typical eight or nine years. I plunged headlong into the genetics curriculum. Three years in, I was starting to make the shift towards a dissertation project. However, I’d also picked up a beautiful but temperamental distraction.
Her name was Jane. We met in a pottery class, of all places. I only took it to meet the fine arts credit, but Jane was an art history major. She took classes in just about every medium. She preferred two-dimensional stuff like sketching and painting, which is why it had taken her so long to get around to clay.
We started dating in early fall, and by winter we were spending almost every day together. Because I was still living at home with Mom and Connor, Jane and I spent most of our time at her place. She had a dingy two-bedroom apartment close to campus, so it was convenient. Of course, she also had a crunchy, tree-hugging roommate named Summer who I couldn’t stand, but nobody’s perfect.
Jane and I would sit on her lumpy couch and binge old Aaron Sorkin TV shows. She needed me there to keep her steady, but I didn’t mind. It was easy. After two years of working my ass off with no social life, I liked easy.
My course work suffered, though. I admit that. I missed some classes, and I didn’t put nearly enough time into my laboratory work. The unexpected turning point came in springtime. March 15th. I remembered because it was the ides of March, and I expected a vaguely threatening prank phone call from Connor at any moment. Beware the Ides of March. My phone did ring, but it wasn’t him. It was mom.
“I should take this,” I said.
Jane rolled her eyes and refused to hit the pause button.
“Hi, Mom,” I whispered, stepping outside to Jane’s tiny porch.
“Connor,” she said. Her voice sounded thick, and I thought maybe she’d gotten into the box wine a little early.
“No, it’s Noah. You called me.”
“Connor,” she said again. “He fell. We’re at St. Luke’s.”
I don’t have a distinct memory of hanging up or running to my car. The next thing I knew, I was shoving my way into a cramped hospital room to find Connor in a paper gown. He looked pale, but at least he was conscious.
“What happened?” I blurted out.
“He fell down the stairs,” Mom said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but she was holding it together.
“Halfway down the stairs,” Connor said. “I tripped, that’s all.”
“You said your legs gave out,” she said.
“It was an accident. Could have happened to anyone.”
He didn’t believe that; though. I could see the uncertainty on his features. Damn, it was hot in the little room, and my sudden arrival had put everyone on edge.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
He brought his hand up to his cheeks, feeling around. “What do you mean?”
“You must have hit it, what, five or six times?”
“I didn’t—” he started, and then smirked when he caught on. “Oh, really?”
Mom swatted at me, but a smile flickered across her face. Our banter always either calmed her. Or annoyed the tar out of her. Often it depended on the status of the box wine. I wondered if she’d tapped it already that afternoon.
Dr. Miller barged in and said without preamble. “Hello, Parker family.”
“Hi, Dr. Miller,” we chorused.
“What happened?”
“He collapsed on the stairs,” Mom said.
“Halfway,” Connor said.
Dr. Miller did her routine exam of Connor’s extremities and reflexes. She ordered an MRI of his legs to be sure it wasn’t a circulation issue, but her frown told us what she really thought.
“How bad is it?” Mom asked quietly.
“He should avoid stairs as much as possible,” Dr. Miller said. “Physical activity is only going to get harder for him, and we don’t want to risk a more serious injury.”
After that, her bedside speech was more of the same. The disease continued its relentless course, and all we could do was take steps to help Connor avoid further injuries. He didn’t seem to be hurt this time, but we were lucky. Things like broken bones would be very hard for him to recover from.
I left the hospital in a kind of stupor. We’d gotten lucky this time, but the accident offered a grim reminder of the future Connor faced if I didn’t do something about it. Which meant I had to buckle down and get back on track, if I wanted to go through with my plans.
“Where did you go?” Jane demanded, the moment I got back to her place.
“The hospital.”
“Why?”
“Connor fell,” I said.
“I didn’t know what happened. You just left.”
She didn’t ask about him or his condition. She never asked. I’d told her everything when we first started dating, but she didn’t like the idea of me “playing God” so she tuned it out. Now, I remembered the pale look of fear on my brother’s face, and her attitude made me furious. “I have to go,” I said, not looking at her.
“Again? Why?”
I took a breath and forced myself to meet her eyes. “Because it’s over. We’re done.”
I stormed out of her apartment and didn’t look back.
The rest of the breakup involved things I’d rather not put into words. It was hard, but I escaped relatively unscathed. Or so I thought. Only later did I realize that I’d left something important at her place: my backup data drive. Of course, I realized this after spilling a soda on my laptop, causing it to go dark. With my entire thesis work on it. Six months of coding and debugging that, as it turned out, had never made it to the cloud because of Jane’s crappy wi-fi service. I needed my drive, and getting it was going to suck.
As my car rumbled down the narrow street beside her run-down building, the familiar stomach-tightness settled in. I didn’t want to face Jane, especially so soon. But I backed out now, I’d never work up the courage again.
I blamed my Systems and Data Recovery instructor for this impending awkwardness. He’d instilled me with my obsession over backing up stuff on portable hard drives. I thought I was so damn clever to keep it at Jane’s place, both so it would be in a different physical location from my home laptop, and so I could work on my project whenever I was there. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to keep it at Mom’s house.
I coasted into an open spot and put it in park. Shut it off and prayed that the trembling whine didn’t represent my jalopy’s final death rattle. I climbed out and didn’t bother locking the doors. I never kept anything valuable inside. Two of the door locks didn’t work anyway.
My feet found the solid spots in the sea of broken pavement that passed for a sidewalk up here. Loose gravel crunched under my shoes. As I climbed the rickety stairs, I tried to focus on what I was going to say. A month had passed since I’d last been here, but the stomachache felt like it had never stopped.
The sun had bleached the door’s paint to a sickly sea green. Pale, colorless voids marked the spots where the numbers (2-0-8) had fallen off years ago. I knocked four times, half hoping that no one would answer. Muffled sounds from the other side dashed those hopes. The cheap deadbolt clicked.
The door swung open wide enough to reveal the face of Jane’s roommate, Summer. Thin braids of her blonde hair hung in disarray around her thin face. She saw me and wrinkled her nose. “What do you want?”
I managed not to snarl, but only just. Summer and I had never gotten along. “I just came for one of my drives.”
“Jane’s not here.”
Faint sleep lines marked the right side of her face, even though it was almost ten in the morning. I pretended not to see them. “It’s a shoebox in her closet.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
The first tendrils of cold dread settled about my shoulders. “I think I stashed it on shelf in the corner. Where you wouldn’t see it.”
“I’m pretty sure she burned everything of yours.”
“Not this.” I whispered it like a prayer. Even Jane at her worst would know what the drive meant to me. Would she have destroyed it? God, I hoped not. “At least let me look.” My mouth twisted and fought me, but I managed to add, “Please.”
Summer let out a long sigh, like I was asking her to give up a kidney or something. “Fine.” She turned and walked away, leaving me to push the door open so I could come in. I made a beeline for Jane’s bedroom.
“She didn’t come home last night,” Summer called over her shoulder.
I shook my head. “Not my business anymore.” And not my problem, either.
“She didn’t come home the night before, either.”
The way she said it rankled me. Like she saw the wound and wanted to rub salt in it. I glanced back. “Don’t you have a rave to get to?”
She snickered and stalked off to the kitchen.
Jane’s room smelled like her, felt like her. Charcoal sketches plastered her “art wall” opposite the door. She sketched constantly, mostly vague cameos of total strangers she saw during the day. She’d gotten even better since I’d been here last, but I knew her style in the way that you know your parents’ handwriting. The ghost-faces that stared back at me might be mistaken for black-and-white photographs.
As many times as I’d been here, I never felt comfortable in this place. I tried not to look at Jane’s bed. Did my best not to check where the pillows were, and whether or not the sagging mattress bore two indentations instead of just one. I didn’t want to know.
The closet door hung ajar, and Jane’s mishmash of clothes—almost all of them black or blood-red—made a bruised tangle inside. I reached over them, back to the corner where I’d stashed my box.
Nothing. “Shit!” I whispered. Stupid of me to think she’d leave it, after the way things ended between us. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Hi.”
I flinched at the quiet, familiar voice. Jane stood in her doorway with her art-bag and easel draped over her shoulders. She’d dyed her hair again, a yellowish green. Such a waste of her natural color. She was alone. Probably just coming back from drawing class. Damn Summer for making me think otherwise.
“Hi,” I said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to get my hard drive, the one with the backup code.” Please let it be here. How long would it take me to rewrite that simulation engine? A couple of months, at least.
“What for?” Jane asked.
“I need something on it.”
Her lips trembled. “I think that’s the last of your stuff.”
“Yeah.” I fought to keep my face still. Sadness, bitterness, and longing all fought to show themselves on it. I have to be strong.
She looked down and away from me. “Bottom right corner.”
I crouched and fumbled beneath her clothes. My fingers closed on the familiar smooth cardboard. I dragged the box out. Still feels heavy. I fumbled the lid open, not daring to breathe. The hard drive nestled inside in a pile of packing peanuts. Relief flooded me. I sagged against the closet door. “Thank the lord.”
“Is that all you came for?” Her voice carried a dangerous undertone.
Uh-oh. “Well, yeah, I-”
She scoffed. Turned away from me. “It’s fine. Just go.”
We stood there in awkward silence. A part of me wanted to stay. The foolish, impulsive part. The wiser part knew that I should leave. And I might as well do that before I lost my nerve. “Well, see you.” I walked to the door, trying not to look at the pillows or the bed, or her face.
As I slid past her, she shook her head and muttered, “Asshole.”
I halted in my tracks. A spike of anger flared up in me. “What, for taking what’s mine?”
She sniffed and covered her eyes. Couldn’t even look at me. “Whatever. You should go.”
She didn’t mean either thing. I knew that, and I wavered. It would be so easy to go back three steps and put my arms around her. She’d let me do it, too. Maybe the relief of holding her again would help me get past the pain.
That’s the thing about Jane: she was the worst thing and the best thing that had ever happened to me. The allure of that emotional roller coaster ride beckoned. But I couldn’t let myself slide into that dangerous comfort zone again.
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I said.
Summer poked her head out of the kitchen. “What’s taking you so long, jackass?”
Such a delightful roommate. I glared at her and stalked out. I didn’t even close the door. That old Jane-induced darkness threatened to bubble up inside me. I clenched my jaw and shook it off. It’s over now. It’s done.
And I had work to do.