it had numerous uses. Next to it the vitamin C, calcium, a bottle labeled furosemide, and several more.
With mounting dread he started tapping the names into his RoamZone, searching through medical websites, those graveyards of hope. At last he had enough overlaps to narrow the noose around a diagnosis.
“… used in the treatment of chronic hepatic encephalopathy, a syndrome observed in patients with cirrhosis of the liver.”
Scar tissue clogging her liver from excessive alcohol consumption.
And there were the symptoms. Wasted muscle in the arms, bloating in the stomach, jaundice, weight loss, fatigue, concentration and memory problems.
The prognosis was grim, the survival rate even lower in patients who continued to drink. Seizures were rare, often occurring only at the acute end stages.
I’m already dead, Evan.
Grief moved through him, pure and immediate. They had come so far to finally see each other with clear eyes. And now to lose her before anything could be built on the foundation they had imperfectly begun to lay seemed profoundly wrong, a joke from the universe itself.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there at the counter, but when he finally moved, his legs had almost fallen asleep. He found a blanket in a guest room and draped it over her.
She moved as the fringe touched her chin, opened her eyes. She stared up at him, and he stared back, and at least they had this, a few moments as fragile as the surface of a still lake.
She finally spoke, breaking the surface tension. “We all know it’s near, but you never think it’s right around the bend. The ski accident, the yielding cough—it’s out there, sure. Your first friend dies, the end of an era. And then come your forties, the decade of breast cancer, heart attacks. Then the fifties, a few acquaintances felled by strokes. You’re not ready to lose your friends yet, let alone be the one who drops, but it happens. Then the next decade…” She paused to catch her breath. “And now I’ll be another cautionary tale, the name people lower their voices to mention when they speak over dinner tables. Veronica LeGrande, did you hear? She died a drunk.”
She reached out and took his hand, her skin papery and thin. “I spent so much time trying to numb what I’d done that I lost all the time to set it right.”
“Set what right?”
“What do you think, sweet boy?”
His face grew hot.
“I don’t have any wailing angels or pitchforked demons to concern myself with,” she said. “No reordering of a will, no woe-is-me final trip through the south of France or the Italian Riviera or wherever the hell people spend their lifetimes wanting to go. Just this. Just you. And him.”
“That’s why you found me now? Because you knew…”
He couldn’t get out the words.
“My whole life was a straight line running away from you. And Andre. We all have the story we tell, the tape that loops in our mind. Mine was that if I looked it in the face—” She stopped herself. “You. If I looked you in the face, I would crumble into dust from shame.”
“But you didn’t,” he said quietly.
She shook her head, wiped her eyes. “No. But what about you? What about the wasteland I consigned you to? What did that do to you?”
He felt a pressure beneath his eyes, his voice full of gravel. “I was a small kid. Powerless. So I made a vow to do so well, to be so tough, so perfect, that I would be invulnerable. That I would no longer have to feel human. I put my mind to it second after second, year after year. And the most awful thing happened.”
“What’s that?”
“I succeeded.”
She stared at him breathlessly. He felt breathless, too.
“But now maybe I have a chance to undo that,” he said. “Because of you. Because of Andre.”
And Joey.
And Mia.
And Peter.
She reached again for his cheek, and in the soft pressure of her palm and the boundless hazel of her eyes he felt something he never had before. A maternal warmth with a depth and breadth and reach like nothing he’d encountered. It was dizzying, terrifying in its scope, like staring at the night sky pinpricked with countless other worlds.
“Jacob,” she whispered. “Your middle name. Evan Jacob.”
He could never have anticipated the rush of emotion that brought into his chest, crowding his throat.
“One more piece,” she said. “Let that be one more piece toward making you whole.”
64
Wear the Brown Pants
They staged the raid from a shooting range north of Vegas