Lewis nods along slowly. “One week that we’ll enjoy.” He squeezes my foot. “Sounds good to me. And it’ll be easy as pie. At least, we don’t have to worry about faking it anymore.”
After talking late into the night, we end up falling asleep on the couch to a rerun ofGrey’s Anatomyand head to bed in the early morning hours. Halfway up the stairs, still entangled in our dreams, Lewis reaches for me, and by the time we tumble into bed, my hands are hiking up his shirt and he’s kissing me feverishly. When we finally wake up the next day, it’s almost midday and we spend the Sunday lounging, doors and windows open to let in the breeze carrying the smell of dry grass and the sounds of the forest. For breakfast, Lewis makes pancakes that we drown in local maple syrup and sprinkle with cinnamon. Later, we wander to the nearby lake, where Lewis pulls out a chunky book while I swim to the little island off the shore and, sprawled on a warm stone, watch the bobbing heads and neon pink floats of people living in the homes on the far side of the lake.
Later, we pack up the car and drive back to the city with the windows rolled down, the sky glowing beyond us, like the sun tipped a bucket of orange over the horizon. The wind toys with Lewis’s hair, lifts the ends of mine, and flaps the sleeve of my shirt against my arm. On the center console, Lewis runs his thumb over the back of my hand. His other hand is loose on the steering wheel, and he looks content; freckles darker than when we left New York, ears a little sunburned, and the linesaround his eyes relaxed. Unlike on the drive up when he let me DJ, he’s lined up a playlist now, and the melancholic guitar sounds trail us down the freeway.
Lewis is appalled to learn that I listen to music when I work, when he can only focus in complete silence, which is why he stays at his institute late into the night. Something between my ribs goes soft when I picture him walking through a dark corridor, coffee sloshing in a chipped office mug, before he sits down to type out replies to my social media posts.
“Actually, you never told me what it was that got you into science,” he notes as he overtakes a truck on the highway. “I told you my origin story. Want to tell me yours?”
I tell him about Karo’s ski accident, that a crash to the head was all it took for her to fade right in front of my eyes. How scary it was that she stopped recognizing us, and that the doctors—people I’d seen put my broken finger back in place, sew up open wounds, and manage my mother’s diabetes—could only give the advice to wait. To let time pass and see if her brain would recover on its own.
I tell him about studying psychology, and the internships I’d done in clinics with Alzheimer’s patients whose personalities were almost wiped away with the loss of their memory. How the quiet, endlessly prolonged grief of their family members unsettled me so deeply that I knew I had to do something about this. How the further I got in my university career, the more I realized how deep the rabbit hole was, how little we knew, how we’d have to start at the bottom of the pit, excavating the knowledge inch by inch until we could grasp the whole of it and come up with proper treatments.
“Have you thought about your plans?” he asks after I finish my story, picking up my hand and placing a kiss on my wrist. The song peters into silence, amplifying the weight of his question.
The weekend away from the city ended up giving me enough distance to surface from what felt like overwhelming disappointment on Friday night, and I used my long swim earlier to come up with a plan for the future.
“I want to try applying for research money again, but I’ll need a postdoc to tide me over in the meantime,” I tell him. “The Sawyer’s will get busier with the big profs this week, which is probably good timing for networking. Surely some memory lab somewhere in this world needs another brain to get some work done.”
I don’t love the idea of moving again, and I’ll probably have to fit my own research questions around whichever project I’m hired on, but I can’t see another way. Even if it’s hard, I want to keep going, because giving up is even less of an option.
“Anybody who doesn’t want you in their lab is an idiot.” His voice is warm, convinced, and my ears heat up at his quiet confidence in me. “I know you want to do things your way. But my offer still stands—if you want me to see if any of the people I know have open positions, just say the word.”
“Thank you. What about you, though?” I ask back. “Have you thought about seeing your brother again this week?”
Lewis lets go of me, and I watch him swallow as he sets the turn signal. “I don’t think I can make sixteen years of no relationship right,” he murmurs, then, louder, “but yeah, I’ll call him. Seeing Ben for the first time in years with my parents around was probably not the best idea.”
“You could take him climbing,” I suggest. “Might loosen things up.”
“Not sure how Ben feels about sticking his hands in chalk. When I asked Ada about borrowing the car, he was away playing golf with my brother-in-law.Golf.” He releases a gust of laughter. “It’s like my father’s wet dream.”
I shift in my seat so I can see his face, only to find a furrowof anger etched into the space between his brows. “But if he enjoys it?”
“That’s the thing, though. Does he enjoy it? Or did my father’s bullshit work on him so now he’s a perfect carbon copy—the version he never got me to be? Because if he is, I’m not sure I want to know him.”
A million sentences in Benjamin’s defense come to the forefront of my mind: He’s Lewis’s brother, he’s family, so shouldn’t Lewis at least try? But the truth is, I don’t know him. Neither does Lewis, though. “Maybe he turned out like your father, or maybe he didn’t. Don’t you at least want to know? He can enjoy playing golf and go into your father’s businessandbe a decent person, can’t he?”
“He can,” he concedes, voice low.
I trail my hand over Lewis’s shoulder. “So you’ll call him?”
He bites the inside of his cheek, glances over at me. And when he nods, I wonder if life can be like this. Calling each other out, helping each other up, drawing from each other’s strength.
But it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t waste my time thinking about things I can’t have. When we get back to Manhattan, we only have a few days left before we return to different countries, to the east of Germany and the south of the Netherlands, where the future looks uncertain for me. I tell myself that in the ups and downs of life, he can be a tangent. Our paths can intersect for one all-encompassing moment, before they head off in different directions.
Chapter Twenty
On Monday, the concourse in Schermerhorn Hall greets us with a maze of cork boards. My favorite part of any scientific event officially starts today: the poster sessions. Compared to a talk or a lecture, they’re less prestigious, but there’s always something special about seeing the neat boxes detailing experimental designs, the bar charts and scatter plots showing statistical analyses. The most complicated studies broken down into a few key words and a handful of diagrams.
After a short block of lectures in the morning, I seek out the colorful brain maps in the concourse, figuring that the students’ enthusiasm will ignite the spark I so desperately need to court professors for a job. I talk to an American professor who’s leading a lab in Tokyo and exchange email addresses with a researcher working in Melbourne. During the coffee break, as I grab a chocolate chip cookie off a plastic tray, I spot Rosanna Alderkamp at the other end of the room and take a deep breath to gather up the courage to approach her. I sent her my workshop materials and availability for lunch after we talked last week and while she replied with a slew of questions about mycode and the words “Let’s discuss over lunch,” she forgot to confirm a date.
“Frances.” Lewis’s voice comes from behind me. I want to wave him away, but when I turn around, his face is pinched into that nonexpression that tells me something must be going on. After dropping me off at home yesterday, he took the car back to his sister, and I haven’t seen him since.
“What’s up?” I ask, my hand coming up to cup his elbow.
Lewis’s eyes swivel over my shoulder and as they dance around the room, the tension carves deeper into his features. He nods his head to the side. “Can we go outside? We need to talk.”
“What do you mean, it’sgone?” I push out between clenched teeth.
