“I’m okay, thanks.”
“Are you sure? We can go to Bergdorf’s tomorrow. Maybe a new coat?”
He’d been trying to bribe me ever since Mom got sick. Like he was trying to prove we just needed each other—that the two of us would be enough.
I heard him crying sometimes late at night, when he thought I’d gone to sleep. It had been two and a half years since Mom died, and I still couldn’t bring myself to leave him alone over school breaks. Instead of getting my own apartment, like I’d planned to do as a senior, I would be staying in the dorms again—an easy excuse to need to go home. To make sure he was okay.
“No, really. I’m good. Can we just get lunch instead?”
The relief on his face was palpable. In two months, I’d be back at Parker—which, although just a short trip away on the subway, could feel like the other end of the earth when you were used to circling each other in tight spaces, holding fast to the same lifeline.
“Great,” he said. “Great. I just have to be at rehearsal by six.”
“More than achievable. Can I come?”
“Always.”
The New York Philharmonic felt like a second home. Everyone there knew me from my parents, but I ran into them everywhere. They had wandered the halls of Juilliard when I was a high schooler taking lessons at the Pre-College program there. They taught at Parker. They were participating in half the same music competitions that I was. For all the stories I’d heard from my dad about vicious competition for first, second, third chair—up to and including instrument damage—when I was present, it was like we were family.
My phone rang from my pocket. I froze, all the breath abruptly gone from my lungs.
I had set a specific ringtone for this contact. If—when—I got a call, it would make a sound like cymbals clashing. I’d been waiting to hear that sound for weeks, long enough that the anticipation had mostly worn off. But right here, now, at this table, the sound of those cymbals rang loud in the stilled air.
It was the neurologist.
“What is it?” my dad asked, oblivious. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”
Ifeltlike I was about to be sick. Tiff’s chicken was a sudden weight in my stomach, pulling me heavier against the seat.
“I’ve gotta take this. Sorry. Just. Hold on.”
In the past year, I had done an unholy amount of Internet research on all the things that could be wrong with me. It had started with fatigue. Not the normal kind of tired you get when you spend too many hours in the practice room for your own good—but the kind that made you feel like you were moving underwater, hardly able to keep your eyes open even in the middle of a conversation. Then there was the clumsiness, which at first I thought was me being an embarrassing loser—but it wasweirdthat I would trip over nothing while walking down the street, or practically fall flaton my face when I got out of bed in the morning, or suddenly find myself unable to use the treadmill at the gym because I’d just…fall off it. It was weird that I would drop not one wineglass, but three in the same night. And it was weird the morning I woke up blind in one eye—as if a black curtain had fallen shut and taken the entire left side of my world with it. I’d had blurry vision for a few days before that, but I’d chalked it up to New York summer and allergies.
The eye thing was what made me finally go to the doctor, who took a look in there with his fancy machines and diagnosed me with optic neuritis. He gave me meds to make it go away, but he also gave me a referral to neurology.
Cue the Google spiral.
Brain tumor. Every other conceivable kind of tumor, too. Aneurysm. Multiple sclerosis. Viral encephalitis. Lupus, like my mother.According to WebMD, I was basically dying.
The neurologist had run a bunch of tests, and he’d had me get an MRI of my brain and spinal cord, but he’d been real cagey about what he thought the problem was. At one point he’d even told me it could just be migraines, which had felt a little bit insulting, because I might not be a doctor, but I was pretty sure migraines usually involved an actual headache. And presumably migraines didn’t set your optic nerve on fire.
I told him that my mother had lupus. Had died of lupus. Could this be lupus?
Let’s just see what your MRI says first,he’d told me.
And now, I guess, was the moment of truth.
I fled the room and shut myself away in the parlor. My hand was already sweaty as I punched the screen to answer the call.
“Hi,” I said.
“Is this Marigold Gensler?” Yes, yes it was.
The doctor had me confirm my date of birth and zip code. Iknew this was standard protocol, some kind of HIPAA thing, but the longer he made me talk about nonsense, the sicker I felt. I tried to divine the news from his tone of voice. Was his cadence slow because he was putting off telling me the cold truth? Or was it because he wasn’t in a rush to get it all over with?
“So, I’ve just had a chance to look at your MRI images and talk with the radiologist”—no shit—“and…I’m sorry to tell you, but what we are seeing on your scans is consistent with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.”
He kept talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. My brain had shut off, and I was falling into a black ocean, nothing but the deafening loudness of too-deep water filling my ears. An impossible pressure crushed in from all sides. I couldn’t breathe.
