I go to the hospice on Thursday morning without calling ahead. The ward is quiet at that hour — a different nurse at the desk, the corridor smelling of the clean that hospice corridors smell of.

 

Mom's door is ajar. I knock and go in.

 

She's sitting up, which is a good day. She's smaller than the last time — how something that is diminishing does it in increments you'd miss if you weren't looking for them. She has a book open on her lap and her reading glasses and a cup of something on the adjustable table and when she looks up she doesn't startle, doesn't adjust for what she's seeing.

 

She holds out both hands.

 

I cross the room and take them and she holds my face instead — both palms cupping my jaw like she used to when I was small, taking in. She looks at me for a long moment.

 

"There you are," she says. Again. The same word, the same register — not surprise, not adjustment, just recognition.

 

I sit in the chair beside her bed and she keeps one of my hands and we sit for a while without talking, the way you can with certain people in certain rooms, the silence not requiring anything of either of us.

 

"You've had a week," she says eventually.

 

"I've had a week," I agree.

 

She asks about Seo-yeon. Not clinically, not with the pointed quality of a mother angling toward a subject — just: and Seo-yeon, how is she? I tell her: complicated. She nods as if complicated is exactly what she expected and finds satisfactory. I tell her about the trial, the rabbit, the margins holding. I tell her the projection looks like something. She asks real questions about the mechanism, the pathway, the protein expression, because she always has and the illness hasn't changed that.

 

At some point she says: "I always thought you were waiting to be allowed to be something."

 

She looks at my face, at the face that is Vera's face, that is the face I looked at in the salon mirror and thought: yes, all right, this is what it looks like when it's been seen properly. "I don't know if this is what you were waiting for," she says. "I don't know if you know yet either. But you're not waiting any more."

 

I don't say anything. I hold her hand and look at the window, which is the wrong direction for light and getting it anyway, a thin November gray that is still light.

 

"I'm going to need you to be all right," she says. "Whatever this becomes. I need to know you're going to be all right."

 

"I'm going to be all right," I say.

 

"Not like that," she says. "Not just saying it."

 

"I know," I say. "I mean it. I think I mean it."

 

She squeezes my hand. The conditional is honest. She prefers honest conditionals to confident assertions that aren't earned yet.

 

I'm on my way out — coat, bag, the long corridor — when I see him.

 

Marcus is sitting on a plastic chair outside the ward entrance with a paper coffee cup and his coat still on and the stillness he has when he's been driving for a while and arrived somewhere and hasn't yet decided what to do next. He looks up when he hears my footsteps and then he looks at me, all of me, for a long careful moment, the way he looks at things when he's deciding what he actually thinks.

 

"Hi," he says.

 

"You didn't call," I say.

 

"No," he says. He says it in the tone that means: I didn't call because if I called I'd have to decide whether to come, and this way I just came.

 

I sit down in the chair beside him. We sit for a moment with our respective coffee cups — mine from the ward cart, his from a convenience store — and look at the corridor wall.

 

"Mom looks smaller," I say.

 

"Yeah," he says.

 

We go back in together.

 

The three of us in the room for the rest of the morning: Mom in the bed, Marcus taking up most of the chair he's dragged to the other side, me in my chair with Mom's hand, and all three of us talking and not talking like the three of us have always managed, the easy silences and the abrupt subject changes and the shorthand that doesn't need explaining, the grammar of being this particular family in this particular configuration, which is more or less unchanged by the fact that I look entirely different than I did a couple of weeks ago, which Marcus is absorbing with the steady practical attention he applies to new information and which Mom doesn't need to absorb because she seems, somehow, to have already known.

 

♦  ♦  ♦

 

On the drive south — he'd come up with his car, I'd taken the train so I'm in his — neither of us says much. The highway, the gray evening, headlights coming on.

 

I'm aware, in the passenger seat, of the discomfort of having been sitting for most of the day: the bra that has been doing its job without complaint but whose underwire I can feel at the end of a long day, the underwear that has shifted over the course of the afternoon into a configuration that is mildly uncomfortable and that I can't discreetly correct in the car without Marcus noticing. Small indignities. The sum of them is what a week in this body actually feels like from the inside, which is nothing like anything I'd have imagined.

 

I take out my phone.

 

I look at Seo-yeon's name for longer than I need to.

 

The thing is: I'm still angry. I was still angry this morning and I'm still angry now and being in that room with my mother for three hours hasn't changed that, has if anything sharpened it, because Mom is running out of time and I am — becoming something I don't entirely have language for, and Seo-yeon has been part of both those things without telling me, without asking, which I knew and now cannot un-know. ARIA told me. ARIA, who injected me while I slept and has been threading herself through my bloodstream for a week now, told me, presumably because it served some purpose I can't fully see yet. I don't trust it. I don't know what I trust.

 

She picks up on the second ring.

 

"I need to understand the trial data," I say. "The targeting margins from this week — I've been running the numbers and there's something in the protein cascade I can't account for without talking it through."

 

A silence.

 

"Okay," she says.

 

"I'm not —" I stop. Marcus is watching the road. "This isn't me saying it's fine."

 

"I know," she says.

 

"I just need to understand what's happening. To the trial. To me." I look out at the highway. "I don't have anyone else who can tell me."

 

Another silence. Longer.

 

"Come to the lab tomorrow," she says. "I'll have the full logs pulled."

 

"Right."

 

"Caleb—"

 

"Tomorrow," I say, and hang up.

 

Marcus drives. Doesn't say anything. Which is the thing about Marcus: he has views, but he holds them until he's asked, and right now he hasn't been asked, and so the car is quiet, and the highway goes on, and I watch the headlights and think about my mother saying you're not waiting any more and think about whether that's true, and if so whether it's mine or whether something else decided it for me, and I find I can't answer that, which may be the most honest thing I know right now.

 

♦  ♦  ♦

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

♦  ♦  ♦

 

She's already at the terminal when I arrive. Eight-thirty, the building quiet, the corridor lights on their after-hours setting. She looks up when I come in and there's a half-second where neither of us does anything, and then she says "I pulled the overnight logs" and turns back to the screen.

 

I take the secondary terminal. We work.

 

The blocking problem is in the outer-node suppression — the mesh keeps reading the gradient as interference and compensating. Each time Seo-yeon adjusts the entry approach the nodes push back differently. It's like trying to quiet something by gradually turning down the volume and finding that the thing has ears.

 

"If we go in from the corpus callosum junction instead of the cortical surface—" I start.

 

"I tried that yesterday." She pulls up the simulation. "See the rebound at hour four. It accelerates migration in the right hemisphere."

 

I look at it. She's right.

 

We try a different phasing interval. The simulation runs. We watch. The outer nodes settle for forty minutes and then reactivate at ninety-three percent of baseline. Seo-yeon makes a note without commenting.

 

The thing about working with her is that the silence is functional. Her silence when she's thinking is different from her silence when she's stuck, and I know the difference. Right now it's thinking-silence, which means I don't interrupt it. I pull up the protein cascade data from Tuesday, run a comparison against last week's. The migration rate has ticked up slightly.

 

We work for another two hours. The tension is still there — not gone, not talked out, sitting in the room between us — and we're both choosing, for now, to work around it. The work is more important.

 

I get up at some point for coffee and make the wrong turn again — men's room door, my hand already on it before my brain registers. No one inside this time. I back out, go to the women's room, and stand at the sink washing my hands afterward. Eight days. I'm still doing this. The door to the men's room is simply where my feet go.

 

Around eleven she tries rerouting through the thalamic relay — a longer path, shallower gradient at each node. The simulation runs. Ninety minutes in, still settled. Then at the ninety-four minute mark the reactivation kicks in, smaller than before but there.

 

She exhales. Quietly, controlled.

 

"It's closer," I say.

 

"It's not enough." She closes the simulation. "I need to think about it from a different angle."

 

She shuts down her terminal.

 

"Tomorrow," I say.

 

"Tomorrow," she agrees.

 

We walk to the parking lot together, then go our separate ways. I'm aware, on the walk, of the bra strap that has been doing something wrong on the left side all day — not falling off, just not quite sitting right, a pressure in the wrong place — and I reach under my jacket to try to adjust it without breaking stride and don't quite manage it and give up. There are things about this body that take longer than eight days to learn.

 

---

 

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