sick. His ears rang. He nodded again.
“Her surgeon, Bill Thorpe, asked me to see her. I’ve been adjusting her seizure medications. I’ve met your wife.”
“
Ex
-wife,” Cyrus said automatically, fishing for something else to say.
“Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?” Alex said. “Would you like me to walk over with you?”
Cyrus reached for the doorknob. He wanted to get out of the building into the cold air. “She just had another seizure.”
“Let me call over and make sure one of the other attendings sees her right away. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I should transfer her care to a colleague.”
Cyrus swallowed and nodded. “That would be good.”
“Let me say this,” Alex added. “She’s a lovely girl. A perfectly lovely little girl.”
Eight
It was late and the neurology ward was quiet. When Alex was a young boy in England staying with his grandparents in the village of Gressingham, he and his brother used to sneak into the parish church around midnight. The heavy oak door in the old Norman tower was always unlocked so they really weren’t being delinquent but it felt naughty and dangerous and that’s why they were drawn to it. The dark, narrow nave was full of musty dead air. He’d touch the smooth pulpit and nervously whisper to his brother about an imagined noise coming from the large tomb in the chapel. These were the things he remembered, walking through the ward that night.
Standing outside Room 919 he looked around to see if anyone was in the corridor. It was still deserted. He went inside and quietly put on a sterile gown, gloves, and mask.
Tara O’Malley was asleep. Though another neurologist had taken over her case, he was drawn to her in a new context: no longer his patient, she was the daughter of a man who was pursuing him.
He picked up her chart and flipped through it. She’d been seizure-free for several days. Her blood counts were coming back, her infection clearing. She’d be going home soon; but her last MRI was disturbing. The tumor was on the prowl.
He stood over her. Her plump lips parted with each breath.
Pretty as a china doll
, he thought. Cyrus O’Malley was going to miss her.
Nine
The last leaves of the season were whipping past the big windows and settling onto the quadrangle. That Saturday, Alex was alone in his lab, his skin prickling with anticipation. He liked being the only one there, uninhibited, flitting from bench to bench, reagent to reagent, machine to machine, humming, singing snippets of pop tunes stuck in his head, waiting for the LC-mass spec to spit out his data. No prying eyes. No small talk. No seemingly innocent questions to answer.
He was on the brink.
He could feel it
.
It was neither guesswork nor intuition: he was a very good scientist, plain and simple. He likened his quest to one of those big, concentric circle mazes where you start on the outside and draw your way in until your pencil stops dead center. There was heaviness in the air and lightness in his head. Would today be the day he was going to reach the center?
Every set of samples inched him closer. Every experiment had chipped away at the mantle of rock, exposing more of the crystal gemstone at its kernel.
Poor Thomas Quinn had not died in vain. He took comfort in that, he really did. The two-minute sample of Thomas’s cerebrospinal fluid had revealed a small telltale spike at 854.73
m/z
. At three minutes, the value was off the charts.
854.73.
To Alex, there was no more important number in the world, the mass-to-charge ratio: the precise peak on his mass spectrometry instrument where his beautiful unknown showed itself over and over. He had first laid eyes on that peak two years earlier when a brilliantly simple experiment in mice yielded the same result time after time. The idea had come to him in a
eureka
-type of flash, so obvious in retrospect that he was pained it had taken him so long to think of it. Emboldened, he started to climb the evolutionary
“Her surgeon, Bill Thorpe, asked me to see her. I’ve been adjusting her seizure medications. I’ve met your wife.”
“
Ex
-wife,” Cyrus said automatically, fishing for something else to say.
“Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?” Alex said. “Would you like me to walk over with you?”
Cyrus reached for the doorknob. He wanted to get out of the building into the cold air. “She just had another seizure.”
“Let me call over and make sure one of the other attendings sees her right away. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I should transfer her care to a colleague.”
Cyrus swallowed and nodded. “That would be good.”
“Let me say this,” Alex added. “She’s a lovely girl. A perfectly lovely little girl.”
Eight
It was late and the neurology ward was quiet. When Alex was a young boy in England staying with his grandparents in the village of Gressingham, he and his brother used to sneak into the parish church around midnight. The heavy oak door in the old Norman tower was always unlocked so they really weren’t being delinquent but it felt naughty and dangerous and that’s why they were drawn to it. The dark, narrow nave was full of musty dead air. He’d touch the smooth pulpit and nervously whisper to his brother about an imagined noise coming from the large tomb in the chapel. These were the things he remembered, walking through the ward that night.
Standing outside Room 919 he looked around to see if anyone was in the corridor. It was still deserted. He went inside and quietly put on a sterile gown, gloves, and mask.
Tara O’Malley was asleep. Though another neurologist had taken over her case, he was drawn to her in a new context: no longer his patient, she was the daughter of a man who was pursuing him.
He picked up her chart and flipped through it. She’d been seizure-free for several days. Her blood counts were coming back, her infection clearing. She’d be going home soon; but her last MRI was disturbing. The tumor was on the prowl.
He stood over her. Her plump lips parted with each breath.
Pretty as a china doll
, he thought. Cyrus O’Malley was going to miss her.
Nine
The last leaves of the season were whipping past the big windows and settling onto the quadrangle. That Saturday, Alex was alone in his lab, his skin prickling with anticipation. He liked being the only one there, uninhibited, flitting from bench to bench, reagent to reagent, machine to machine, humming, singing snippets of pop tunes stuck in his head, waiting for the LC-mass spec to spit out his data. No prying eyes. No small talk. No seemingly innocent questions to answer.
He was on the brink.
He could feel it
.
It was neither guesswork nor intuition: he was a very good scientist, plain and simple. He likened his quest to one of those big, concentric circle mazes where you start on the outside and draw your way in until your pencil stops dead center. There was heaviness in the air and lightness in his head. Would today be the day he was going to reach the center?
Every set of samples inched him closer. Every experiment had chipped away at the mantle of rock, exposing more of the crystal gemstone at its kernel.
Poor Thomas Quinn had not died in vain. He took comfort in that, he really did. The two-minute sample of Thomas’s cerebrospinal fluid had revealed a small telltale spike at 854.73
m/z
. At three minutes, the value was off the charts.
854.73.
To Alex, there was no more important number in the world, the mass-to-charge ratio: the precise peak on his mass spectrometry instrument where his beautiful unknown showed itself over and over. He had first laid eyes on that peak two years earlier when a brilliantly simple experiment in mice yielded the same result time after time. The idea had come to him in a
eureka
-type of flash, so obvious in retrospect that he was pained it had taken him so long to think of it. Emboldened, he started to climb the evolutionary
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