Any Clearer Light

by Anonymous

Summary:

Every guy, every phase, every thing she had ever taken an interest in was downstream of something Conrad had already left his fingerprints on.

Notes:

TW: medication use, cursing, infidelity, anxiety/panic attacks, emotional distress, graphic depiction of death

Chapter 1

July, 1996. Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Conrad had the laminated whale card he’d begged for at the dock tucked under one elbow, edges gone soft from his fingers: blows and dorsal fins, chevrons and flukes, a whole alphabet of backs. He knew their names the way other kids knew baseball teams. Humpback. Finback. Minke. Stellwagen Bank was printed across the top of the card in big blue letters, and he could say it right, could point to it on the cartoon map and tell you that’s where the cold water met the warm water, where sand els glittered in clouds and the whales came to feed.

He told everyone who would listen, which were mostly his mom and the wind.

Jeremiah pressed his face to Conrad’s sleeve and whined up at the horizon. “I can’t see anything.”

“You will,” Conrad promised, grave as a captain. The word slipped out the way he’d heard grown-ups do it when they already knew the end of the story.

A deckhand in a faded ball cap pointed with two fingers. “Eleven o’clock—blow.” The speaker on the roof crackled. Everyone pivoted and sucked their breath the same way. One big boat of lungs. Out there the water lifted and sighed, a white cotton puff rising and shredding into glitter. The smell came a second later, seaweed and something old as a basement.

“I don’t see it,” Jeremiah said, smaller now, cheeks sticky with sunscreen and a smear of grape Popsicle. He bounced once in his own life jacket, plastic buckles clacking like teeth.

Conrad nudged Jeremiah’s chin with the edge of the whale card until his brother’s face turned, lined up with the patch of ocean Conrad had chosen, and hooked two fingers in the stiff webbing of Jeremiah’s life jacket to tug him back from the slick rail. For a second it looked like he might slip down.

“There,” Conrad said. “Wait.”

The surface dimpled. A dark knuckle rose and slid, and then came the back: huge and gentle, a hill moving under a blue sheet. The dorsal fin was a little hook, exactly like on the card. A hush fell over the boat so complete Conrad could hear the water licking the hull. The whale blew again and the sun caught the mist and made a tiny, secret rainbow. Jeremiah gasped so hard he squeaked.

“I still don’t—” Jeremiah started, and then a tail lifted, scalloped and barnacled, black and white like somebody’s flag. The fluke paused at the top of its own sky, water sheeting off in glass strings, and Conrad felt a hot, bright ache behind his eyes.

Jeremiah blinked up at him, then at the place where the whale had been, and nodded so fast his hair flopped. “I saw it,” he said, already louder, already telling the whole deck. “I saw it. I saw the tail.”

Conrad pressed the laminated card flat against the rail and matched the picture to the world. The captain’s voice crackled again. Something about mother and calf traveling, shallow dives. Conrad didn’t need the reminder. He was a boy who collected things he couldn’t put in his pockets: the shape of a dorsal, the way a blow sounded like someone saying hello into their cupped hands, the quiet that came after.

Jeremiah tugged his sleeve. “What kind was that?”

“Humpback,” Conrad said, and tapped the drawing with one finger. “See it? The spout—and the back’s round. Not like finbacks. Finbacks go like, pshh—” He made a taller noise, a taller hand.

He pointed again, at the hundred colors of blue and the place the whale would come up next if the world kept behaving. “You’ll see it again.”

---

 

 

June, 2004. Cousins Beach, Massachusetts

When Conrad came back from his afternoon swim, Belly had taken over the living room like it was a dugout and she was the whole team. One sock on, one off, sprawled crooked across the sofa with her summer packet sliding off her knees, she gnawed absentmindedly at a thumbnail, then the cap of her pen, then back to the nail like she was rotating through snacks. The TV was off, the windows open. The house breathed salt and warm wood and the faint plasticky smell of inflatable rafts drying somewhere on the deck.

“Sit up,” he said, automatic as a seatbelt beep. His hair was still wet and itchy from the pool, towel over one shoulder. “And don’t bite that—there’s ink and weird chemicals. You’ll get sick.”

She sat up straight so fast the packet smacked her shins, put both feet on the floor, knees together, hands folded primly on top of the worksheet like a school picture. The pen cap sat on the coffee table, shiny with teeth marks.

“What is leukemia, Conrad?” She widened her eyes at him, equal parts expectant and lost.

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. For a second he had no idea what to say—like the word had pulled a rip current under him.

He leaned over the back of the sofa, braced a palm on the cushion near her shoulder, and tipped his head to squint at a photocopied page that said Life Science: Human Body Systems in cheerful bubble font.

“It’s—” he tried again. “I mean—okay. You have lots of different kinds of cells in your blood. Red ones carry oxygen. White ones fight germs. In leukemia, some of the cells that are supposed to grow into the good white blood cells start… growing wrong. Like they forget the directions.”

He drew a little spiral in the air with his finger, searching. “They make too many of the wrong kind, and they push out the good ones. So you get tired, or sick a lot, or bruise easy, because the stuff in your blood that’s supposed to help you isn’t there.”

Belly looked down at the word again. “So it’s blood cancer.”

“Yeah.” He slid his knuckles against the page to keep it from sliding off her knees again.

She nodded, then reached for the pen cap. Conrad plucked it first and set it farther away with a small clack.

“Seriously,” he said, gentler. “Don’t chew it.”

“I don’t even notice I’m doing it,” she said, almost apologizing. “It’s like my mouth is bored.”

Her handwriting was big and careful, as if neatness might protect the letters from meaning what they meant. “What about… can you catch it?”

“No,” he said quickly. “It’s not like a cold. It’s not your fault, either.” He sank onto the arm of the sofa and used his free hand to spin the pen away from her again when it drifted back. Outside, a gull yelled at something that didn’t matter. “Doctors don’t always know why it happens. Sometimes it just… does.”

“Okay.” A beat. “So if your blood forgets the directions, the hospital gives it new ones?”

Conrad’s mouth twitched. “That’s… kind of what chemo is. Or they give you new blood-makers—like a bone marrow transplant—from somebody whose directions are working. It’s more complicated,” he added, because it was, because everything was.

Belly wrote chemo in smaller letters, then shaded the O like a little lifesaver ring. She sat there very straight, eyes on the page, and Conrad was suddenly annoyed at her summer packet, annoyed at the world for being the kind of place where an eleven-year-old had to put the word cancer between lunchables and trampolines.

He was fine though. It was different for him.

He didn’t know how they would ever tell her his mom might be dying of that. Not the name (she’d said it herself once, offhand, God, I’d rather it be anything but breast cancer), but the idea of it. He’d listened once through the cracked office door at Dana-Farber, forehead pressed to the cool strip of glass, while someone, maybe not even a doctor, maybe a nurse practitioner, said it was “going away,” like it was a houseguest with top manners.

Zach, who played central back on the club soccer team and once hit him in the thigh so hard with a foam roller he limped for two days, told him his grandmother had breast cancer for nearly seven years. “And she beat it,” Zach said, shrugged. “It was gone in the end.” Conrad had nodded and believed that was helpful.

Belly raised her hand. “Can I stop now?”

“Finish the symptoms question,” he said, and when she groaned he reached over and tapped the line with the back of his knuckle. “Two more minutes. Then get Steven. We’re riding waves.”

---

 

 

October, 2011. Stanford, California

Conrad was eight and a half minutes late to HumBio 154 and knew it down to the half, because he had counted them under his breath while coasting from the Oval to the Quad. He slid off at the door and didn’t have the time to hook the board under the nearest seat with a U-lock through the rear truck.

He slipped into the room sideways. The first group was halfway through CML.

Someone had written on the board in block letters that were trying too hard to be legible: t(9;22)(q34;q11) → BCR–ABL1 (p210); Constitutive TK activity → ↑proliferation; Imatinib (Gleevec) 400 mg QD: ATP-site inhibitor

Agnes looked up at him from the second row with the same measuring expression she used on him when he claimed he didn’t need coffee: a pointed, quiet you’re not special.

He shrugged the apology with one shoulder. Monday classes sucked. He had missed his loop around the dish and his legs were humming with a shallow, irritable burn that made it hard to uncurl his fingers. He was, in the clinical sense, tweaking.

Tyler said “blast crisis” like it was a Greek island he wanted to visit someday and tapped his slide of blue-stained marrow blasts as if the class might forget what cells were if he didn’t keep reminding them.

By the time the second group took the front, the room had warmed to the smell of dry erase markers and bike sweat. The tallest girl in the trio cleared her throat. “So,” she announced, cursor hovering over a photograph of a knitted pink hat, then fleeing to a schematic of DNA repair, “BRCA1 and BRCA2 are tumor suppressors that fix double-strand breaks. When they don’t, cells go bad. Targeted therapy: PARP inhibitors.”

“Newest trial,” the girl said, with the slight high she got from the word newest as if it were a brand drop, “the I-SPY 2 study—U.S. multi-center, adaptive design—showed adding a PARP inhibitor, veliparib, plus carboplatin to standard neoadjuvant chemo in triple-negative increased pCR from about twenty-six percent to fifty-two percent in the TNBC subgroup. And pCR correlates with better survival, like, three-year event-free survival in the ninety-percent range if you hit pCR, closer to the seventies if you don’t,” She clicked to a Kaplan–Meier curve that looked like a pair of parted curtains.

“Also,” the guy next to her added. “there’s olaparib. It was approved for BRCA ovarian, but in breast the international OlympiAD trial showed improved progression-free survival, seven months versus four-ish, no overall survival difference at the first read, but quality of life scores were better.”

Conrad watched the curves cross airlessly on the slide and thought about the word better applied to suffering.

They finished, and opened for questions with the air of divers rechecking the buckles on their masks. Conrad lifted his hand because sitting on it hadn’t made it go away.

“Yes,” Professor Patel said.

“I have two,” Conrad said. “One: you’re presenting targeted therapies as if they’re just ‘smarter chemo,’ but PARP inhibition creates a dependency on synthetic lethality that’s elegant in cartoons and miserable in a human body. Are you factoring in how the pain of treatment, nausea, neuropathy, marrow suppression, the whole buffet, shifts a patient’s threshold for what counts as benefit? Would you still recommend it if you knew her disease wouldn’t respond, or respond for four months, and she’d spend those months sick.”

He could hear his own pronoun and didn’t change it. “Two: you cite pCR like it’s a moral endpoint. Do you think pathologic complete response should be sold to patients as a promise of survival when we don’t have OS in hand, or is that paternalism dressed up as hope?”

The tall girl said “um” and then “we,” and then tried again and ended up on “guidelines,” which she held up like a saint’s medal against a house fire. “We’d follow guidelines,” she said. “Shared decision-making. We’d explain side effects and probabilities and, like, respect patient autonomy?”

“What does respect look like when someone’s vomiting through a mask?” Conrad asked, smiling a little when the girl wouldn’t meet his eyes. The world was full of people with no fucking idea what they were talking about. He knew he ought to feel lighter, but he also knew he would never in this lifetime. “How do you quantify ‘worth it’ when your metric is months you can’t remember.”

The guy with the Kaplan–Meier curves cleared his throat. “Quality-adjusted life years,” he offered.

“Sure,” Conrad said. “Put a number on it so you can turn it in on time.”

Later, Jere called while Conrad stood in front of the CoHo counter, staring at a turkey sandwich sweating under cellophane and a row of Cokes beading, unable to choose between food he didn’t want and sugar he didn’t. Behind him, somebody coughed in a weaponized way.

Jere started in without preface. Classes, the social chair turning rush into a hostage situation, the philanthropy stunt that was a party with nicer fonts, and Belly not “backing the play,” not signing the waiver, not showing up to be grinned at under a banner about cure rates.

“Jesus fuck, Jere,” Conrad said, cutting across him. He walked the arc of the Quad colonnade, light knifing at his eyes from the sandstone. “Let her off the hook. She’s not your mom. Your mom is a date carved in fucking stone.”

Dead air. Then Jere, tight: “Don’t talk about her like that, Con.”

Conrad walked until the sun shoved him into shade; he picked a eucalyptus and slid down the trunk, grit grinding through his shirt. The light off the sandstone was so bright he could barely keep his eyes open; everything vibrated like heat was a sound. Bikes hissed past, a longboard rattled somewhere, and for a second he pictured his own getting lifted clean from under the chair by someone with quick hands and no shame, and felt almost relieved at the thought of something simple finally happening.

“Mom or Belly, Jere?” he mocked, tipping his head back until the red pulse of the sun beat behind his eyelids.

“I should’ve never brought her up to you,” Jere said. He shuffled. “Whatever. Forget it.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Conrad agreed.

***

Dr. Caffrey wore two kinds of cologne. One was something citrusy and generic, like what you’d spray on a suit you never got around to dry cleaning. The other was darker, tobacco, or synthetic leather, or whatever they were calling masculinity in a bottle that year. Together, they made the office smelled like a barbershop had been sealed in a Ziploc with a bowl of oranges and left on a radiator.

After the second appointment, Conrad started taking a cetirizine an hour beforehand so he wouldn’t sneeze like a junkyard cat in April the entire fifty minutes.

He saw Caffrey every other Tuesday at 3:10 p.m., a fifty-minute “hour” that cost him three hundred and twenty dollars out-of-network (CPT 90834 on the superbill, hand-signed in a pen that bled blue through the paper) because he was depressed, but not the kind of depressed that got you a bed, a bracelet, and an on-call resident if your psychiatrist didn’t catch your fall in time. Functional misery. You could drive on it.

He showered. He went to class. He turned things in on time and didn't write about death unless it was assigned. He wasn’t suicidal, just “struggling with ideation and dysregulation in periods of acute internalized stress.” Which meant, basically, that some mornings he woke up and felt like he’d been hit in the chest with a truck of invisible bricks, and then spent the rest of the day pretending that wasn’t true.

Dr. Caffrey was fixated on "processing through language." It was a professional tic. Conrad could see the shape of the word journaling coming before the man even said it, like a train seen from a distance. Write it down, Dr. Caffrey said. Write the feelings. Write the shape of the thoughts. Treat it like shouting into the ocean.

He tried. He opened a blank document and listed what he could fit into a single, controlled breath:

1.My mom is dead

2.My dad is a cheating piece of shit who pays my tuition

3.My brother is fucking my—

He stopped there every time. It read like someone else’s life.

Dr. Caffrey told him his symptoms were consistent. He’d said it softly, like he was telling him his dog was blind in one eye and had just never noticed. “The physiological cascade matches the literature,” he said, which was the kind of sentence that made Conrad want to punch drywall.

The reality was simpler: sometimes he was fine, and then suddenly, he wasn’t. No warning. No edge. Just tingling hands; vision narrowing into a long tube of heat and light; the air going thick like gelatin; and the certainty, absolute certainty, that he was going to die in a lecture hall or a Safeway checkout line or on a fucking Bird scooter somewhere on El Camino.

It happened once during CHEM 35 lab, right around the TA passed out glassware kits and a laminated sheet on recrystallization. Conrad was pipetting acetanilide into a small Erlenmeyer under the fume hood when it hit and everything collapsed from there.

His throat locked. He pretended to take notes while his skin peeled off in invisible sheets, like he was being unwrapped. The fluorescent lights hummed louder than they had ten seconds ago, and the smell of ethanol and acetone stuck in his sinuses like static. The student next to him leaned over and asked if the sample was supposed to turn cloudy. He couldn’t answer. His nervous system felt like it had been flooded with dish soap. He counted to five, then ten, then twelve. Five minutes later, he left the lab and threw up in the bushes until his mouth tasted like bile and Red Vines.

Later, Dr. Caffrey asked what had “activated the response.” Conrad stared at him and said, evenly, “Probably the part where they told us one wrong drop on bare skin can eat down to the bone.”

He said it like a joke, but Caffrey didn’t laugh. He just nodded and wrote something on his legal pad, underlined it twice.

He tried medication, briefly. It made him feel like he was floating six inches above his own body, like one of those old scuba suits, metal, heavy, impossible to move in. He stopped after three days. Didn’t tell Caffrey.

Laurel called him regularly. Once, on a Thursday night, her voice was half-static from the book club or writers’ thing she was at. “If you ever need anything,” she said, earnest and a little sad. “I’m here for you, okay? Always, Connie.”

“Yes, of course. Thanks, Laurel,” he said, and meant it, and also knew he would never call. Never say hey, I had a panic attack on the 522 and ended up blacking out a bit against a vending machine outside Keck Science Building, because the thought of throwing up in the shared bathroom was unbearable.

He passed by a paper on Dr. Caffrey’s desk once. Something clinical, something peer-reviewed. “Writing Trauma: The Role of Reflective Narrative in the Treatment of Adolescent Anxiety Disorders.” He didn’t touch it.

He could already guess what it said.

---

 

 

July, 2012. Cousins Beach, Massachusetts

Conrad spent the late afternoon doing laps around town, easing through yellow lights and forgetting to turn at the places he meant to, taking the rotary by the liquor store twice for no reason except he’d already committed to the wrong lane.

He drove out past the last subdivision where the cul-de-sacs end in a shrug of dune grass, realized he’d missed his exit, and came back on the frontage road. He stopped for coffee because he wanted to feel different and instead got the same; sat in the lot and watched his phone creep from 32% to 36%.

Fifteen minutes later, he almost sideswiped a parked car while making a half-assed left onto Shore Road. Jerked the wheel last second and ended up at a dead stop, half in the intersection.

The other driver threw his door open and started marching toward him, red in the face and practically vibrating with rage. “What the actual fuck is wrong with you?”

Conrad didn’t answer right away. He just sat there, blinked, hands still on the wheel, trying to figure out if the guy looked familiar because they had a membership at the club or because he’d once trimmed their hedges.

He opened the door slowly, stood up. “Sorry, man. That was on me. You okay?”

The guy looked at him like he’d just run over his dog. He blinked twice, the anger leaking out like someone had punctured it, and said, “Hey. Fisher. It’s fine, dude.”

He shifted his stance like he was going to apologize but didn’t, rubbed the back of his neck, and climbed back in his car. “Drive safe,” he added.

Conrad said “Hope your car’s alright” to the way he pulled away slow, like he felt worse about yelling than Conrad did about nearly sideswiping him.

He then took the far beach (the one people say is too windy, too empty, good for dogs and arguments), and parked in a diagonal nobody had painted. The sand was hot enough to sting through his sneakers, then cooled to a squish at the tide line. He sat where the foam reached and retreated and pretended the ocean had a schedule he could check.

A sand crab the color of raw ham wobbled toward the wet. He watched it hesitate at the edge and then vanish in a fizz of bubbles.

His mom had three drawers of shells, carefully mislabeled in pen that bled when she got sunscreen on her hands: scallop, auger, moon, whelk. He had wrapped them in newspaper after the funeral and stacked the boxes deep in the garage, behind the cooler that smelled like old bait and the folding chairs with rust freckles on the hinges.

His phone sat on his thigh, a small weight with its own pulse.

get it tgt, dude. Agnes, 9:07 a.m., the message that had been waiting there all day like a dare. don’t be such a little bitch

He looked at the words until they stopped meaning anything. He could hear her voice if he wanted to.

yeah, he typed, and sent it.

***

He turned back when the dashboard clock clicked 11:39. Late enough that if Jere and Belly were camped in the living room, at least one of them would be half asleep, which meant fewer giggles and fewer invisible hearts sketched between them with their eyes or whatever the fuck.

He palmed the key, eased the door, and tiptoed down the hall past the bathroom with the damp towel that never dried, past the framed lighthouse print Julia thought was classy. Jere’s door was mostly shut.

Whatever they were saying were too low for him to make out. Allowed himself three seconds (he counted them off, one-two-three) to close his eyes and call up her face as it is when she’s listening, that way her attention narrows and brightens and sucks to a point, like she’s enchanted on principle even if the topic was Jere explaining K/D ratios in Halo or whether you’re supposed to ice a sprained ankle twenty minutes on, twenty off. It didn’t matter.

He opened his eyes when he heard her breath catch. An exhale that almost turned into a laugh, then didn’t. The blank of the hallway wall swam a little, slate turning to blue turning to nothing in particular as his vision adjusted. He gave a passing thought to swan-diving out the window and Jackson Pollocking the pool deck with gray matter, until a slap and Belly’s groan cut through the fantasy.

“Just like that, Bells,” Jere said, panting, and Conrad could hear the dull creak of the headboard under his grip, could practically see the muscle pulling in his back, his arms locked to keep the thrusting steady.

Oh, what the fuck, he thought dully, already half there just remembering the tight, vice-like grip of her pussy, the way slick caught the light when he thumbed over her clit, dipped his ring finger in just enough to feel the moist, burning walls of her. He knocked the back of his head against the wall, and unzipped. Ran his thumb over the head, listening to the rapid, wet slaps of balls meeting skin in quick succession.

“My hair,” Belly complained, fondly, and then muffled a string of pants and fuck, oh my god and his brother’s name. Jere was a terrible name to moan over during sex. It sounded like something you’d yell down the hallway in a dorm because the Wi-Fi was out, not while you were getting railed.

He was leaking so much it didn’t even count as a dry jack. He tightened his grip around the base for a little control and thought about how Belly used to sit on his dick in his chair, right there in his room, close enough for him to lean forward and put his mouth on her bare shoulder, sucking a mark there, while he shoved her top up just enough to get both hands on her tits, bra twisted halfway around.

“Conrad,” she’d breathed, hand fumbling over his desk, knocking pens and papers everywhere until she somehow found his mouse and clicked his doc shut without saving.

“Oh,” she said, squeezing him so nervously it felt like she might wring his dick clean off. “I’m—sorry, Con. Did you—”

“Keep it down,” he told her, his voice flat, steady, like it cost him nothing to say. His hand skimmed over her stomach, slipped under the elastic, and closed around her pussy, filling his palm, the heel of his hand pressing into her mound while his fingers found the ridge where he was inside her. “Move, Belly. You can do it,” he said. And she did.

It was so easy to sink into that, her begs practically in his ears through nothing but a thin wall, that he probably missed the way she always groaned when a cock pulled out. The next time he opened his eyes, Jere was just there. Planted in the doorway in nothing but his briefs, mouth hanging open like he’d forgotten how to close it.

Jere’s face had gone a sick, chalky shade, the blood had abandoned ship all at once, leaving him with the waxy, corpse-pale look of someone about to be sketched for a medical textbook.

The last five summers in this goddamn beach house had all been the same. Gray with the occasional spark, sharp enough to hurt if he let himself replay them before chasing it down with enough Ambien to tranquilize a horse.

He was so tired. Bone-tired. Probably had been his whole life. He’d stopped giving a fuck a long time ago. He grinned at Jere without much behind it, gave himself a few slow strokes, and zipped up.

“You fucking psycho,” Jere said, barely a whisper, and Conrad only picked it up because they shared blood. He knew the line was loaded before Jere even cocked it.

Conrad shrugged. Go tell her, he tipped his head toward the silent room. Belly hated falling asleep with dry cum, and in the mornings she’d scrub at herself like crazy until her skin went red.

Jere stood there, silent and motionless, the hallway dim enough that his blond curls had gone the color of wet sand, and his biceps were crosshatched with red nail marks, as if something feral had taken him down and left him there.

Conrad leaned against the doorframe and watched, waiting for him to commit to a move. It was almost pleasant, the idea of Jere making a choice unaided—like spotting a rare animal in the wild. Barring that, maybe he’d invent something on the spot, one of those half-assed plans he usually passed off as strategy. Conrad would take either.

Roughly forty seconds in, Conrad figured it shouldn’t take this long for even Jere, whose moral compass was less a compass and more a vaguely magnetic paperclip, punching him in the face or yelling really wasn’t that hard a decision. It wasn’t some moral crossroads; it was a coin flip.

When Jere finally met his eyes, Conrad felt something go off in his head, less an epiphany than the snap of a frayed wire inside a live circuit. It was that crazy, unhinged, whimsical sort of revelation that made him want to clap his hands over his mouth, because it was so stupidly, cosmically funny. The sheer fact of it hit him with the precision of a dart in a barroom wall.

Jesus fucking Christ. He laughed, dry and soundless, and ran a hand down his face, probably smearing his own pre-cum across his nose.

The only reason Jere was still standing there was because even he knew, deep down, that if Belly found out Conrad still wanted her, she’d come crawling back. And that scared the shit out of him. Lost and rattled in the exact same posture he’d had at six years old, padding barefoot into Conrad’s room in sagging pajama bottoms to whisper, Con, I think Bloody Mary’s in the closet.

He had stood there with the same taut shoulders and white-knuckled hands, bargaining with the universe without even realizing it. Back then it was a sleepover myth about a homicidal bathroom mirror ghost. Now it was the equally ludicrous prospect that telling Belly her shitty ex had been jerking off in the hallway would detonate something he wouldn’t be able to get back under control.

Conrad remembered that kid she once dated. The one who wouldn’t shut up about whales and other marine crap. He’d forgotten the name, but the image stuck: cargo shorts, sunburned neck, probably one of those laminated cetacean ID charts tacked over his bed.

When Conrad was into whales, hoarding National Geographic specials and shelling out four hundred bucks for a Franklin Mint pewter humpback sculpture with “limited edition” etched into the base, that kid hadn’t even been born. Didn’t exist. Every guy, every phase, every thing Belly had ever taken an interest in was downstream of something Conrad had already left his fingerprints on.

“You can’t,” Jere whispered. “She’s my—Con,” he said. “C’mon.”

Conrad nodded. It wasn’t like he was going to argue with that. She could be somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s best friend, pen pal, niece, girlfriend, wife, mother, for fuck’s sake, and she’d still be his Belly. Jere knew it, too.

“Please,” Jere said. “We’re getting married.”

Two weeks into the seventh-grade spring field trip, some overpriced outdoor center in Vermont with faux-rustic lodges and water filtration stations installed by REI, Marissah Carroway told Conrad she was going to marry him.

She liked his eyes, she said. Said they looked like they belonged in an old painting. That they changed colors depending on if he was looking at her or not. They’d just come down from a “forest mindfulness” walk, the kind where the instructor told you to feel the bark and express your feelings about a tree. Marissah stole one of the twigs meant for whittling and bent it into a circle. She asked him where he wanted the wedding to be.

Conrad blinked. Thought about how the sea made him feel. Big. Small. Wasn’t sure which one was better. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sea is nice.”

She agreed immediately, as if they’d both known it all along, and said, “Then we’ll do it in Positano.” That was settled. The rings dried and broke by the time the bus pulled back into Boston.

Few years later, their dad took them to a gun range off I-93 as some kind of father-son weekend. The paper targets were silhouettes with torsos drawn on in red and yellow rings. When he hit dead center, the hole flared and spat, tore it jagged. He looked down at the pistol in his hand and thought: this wasn’t what precision should feel like. It felt like he’d ruined something.

On the ride home, Jere was hyped up, narrating every shot like it was a Red Sox replay. Conrad just stared out the window, mildly desperate for a strawberry lemonade.

He wondered sometimes if Jere had ever thought about what kind of wedding, or whatever counted as a commitment, Belly would want. The exact picture in her head. Not just the dress or the guests or the goddamn orchids, but the thing itself, the gravity of it. The way it would anchor her, or the way she might still float off anyway. What she craved in it. What he craved in it. He wanted to know if Jere had ever been curious enough to ask her, or if he’d just assumed she’d be fine with whatever he built.

Sometimes he wondered if he was assuming the same thing too. If he was just as lazy about it. He couldn’t tell if Belly was fine with whatever he built for real, or if she’d just gotten used to it.

He tried to remember a time she’d actually asked for something and not just adjusted to whatever he put in front of her, and came up with nothing that wasn’t small: coffee instead of tea, windows open instead of shut. Never the big stuff. Never the architecture.

Conrad looked at a half-dressed, freshly fucked 21-year-old Jere, shaky, hollowed out, waiting, and knew he’d still have to make the call for him. Whether or not he’d ever made a good one was beside the point.

“Yeah,” Conrad said, giving him and the shut door one last look before turning toward his own. “Okay, Jere.”

---

 

 

March, 2014. Denver Colorado

Conrad sat at Gate B47 with three hours to kill and eleven drafts of his personal statement saved on his laptop under a folder named, inaccurately, “Final.” The airport WiFi was barely functional, the charging stations were monopolized by teenagers and middle-aged men with duffel bags, and the bench seat he had staked out was too close to the food court the smell of reheated Panda Express to coil into his throat like shame.

He’d taken the 6:50 a.m. United from SFO to DEN, a standard delay tacked onto his arrival by a stalled baggage carousel and an inbound maintenance issue.

His undergrad pre-health advisor (technically no longer his, but she still replied to emails) had told him, in the careful, overly sympathetic tone of someone paid to navigate ambition and grief in equal measure, that he should touch on his mother’s death in the statement, but not center it. Everyone and their dog had written the cancer essay. Dying moms, drunk dads, disabled siblings. It wasn’t about how sad you were, it was about what you did with the sadness.

“If you don’t watch it,” she told him, “you’ll turn your personal statement into a very, very overwrought eulogy.”

Conrad knew she was right, but it was getting utilitarian faster than a welfare audit.

What he had now was Draft 12. It read, mostly, like a research summary with a few soft admissions of humanity wedged between citations. He’d spent an entire section trying to explain why he was interested in oncology without saying the word “mom.”

He scrolled, then stopped. Highlighted paragraph three. Re-read it.

Working as a research technician in a translational oncology lab at UCSF gave me a clarity I hadn’t anticipated. There was something grounding in the repetition: pipetting the same volumes, spinning down samples at 4000 rpm, watching carefully as a line of color deepened in the well plates. Signals of expression, inhibition, failure, or promise. I spent hours with colorectal carcinoma lines, most of them with known p53 mutations, and I started to recognize the faint differences in how cells behaved under different protocols, as if they were trying to say something back. The calibration this work demanded mirrored the emotional triage I’d performed after my mother’s diagnosis. I don’t want to become an oncologist because of her, or not just because of her. I think the field would’ve found me anyway.

The buzz of boarding calls rang out overhead. His flight to Aspen was delayed by 37 minutes, according to the screen, which had stopped refreshing sometime around gate change number three. He didn’t mind. It gave him time to sit still, do nothing, and pretend that counted as preparation.

He could see the snow piled up beyond the tarmac, greyed by jet exhaust and the dirty streaks of plow tires. Some kid behind him was trying to convince his dad that the Starbucks app would give them points if they scanned the receipt.

He thought he needed help. He wanted his family, even though he’d see them in four hours. Not his dad. Not just Jere, who’d always been close but wasn’t there in the way that counted. He wanted his mom. He wanted the feeling of being known and loved without needing to prove himself in 5,300 characters.

He scrolled back to the top of the draft and read the opening line:

When I was sixteen, I thought I understood medicine. I knew where the liver was. I didn’t know how to sit with a family while the heart monitor slowed to silence.

He deleted the sentence. Typed it again. Deleted it.

He opened a blank new doc on the flight, the screen brightness dialed down to practically zero. His knees had been jammed into the seat ahead for twenty straight minutes, throbbing with that economy-class ache that felt both vascular and existential.

He knew that if he said the right thing in the right tone and offered the right smile, he could get the woman in 15C to straighten up her seatback along with her kid’s number in the process, or whatever gendered variation that was, and the names of the future grandchildren she already had planned. Instead, he folded the tray table back up, hunched like a question mark, and typed with the laptop flat on his lap.

When I was thirteen, my younger sister asked me what leukemia was. I explained white cells, bone marrow, remission, as if repeating words I barely understood could insulate her. I wanted her to feel safe because I didn’t have any real answers either.

I don’t remember the exact moment I decided to apply to medical school. There was no lightning bolt, no formative encounter in a rural clinic, no cliffside car accident that called for triage. I don’t even like blood that much. I do, however, remember the first time I wished I could make someone well. My mom had fatigue so deep she sometimes couldn’t lift her head from the pillow to answer me.

By eighteen, I had earned my NREMT certification and was pulling BLS shifts through an EMS unit affiliated with The Miriam Hospital in Providence. We responded to everything, cardiac arrest, overdoses, domestic incidents, nursing home collapses, children found unresponsive in public parks. I saw three pediatric deaths in nine months. One boy seized so hard he fractured his jaw before we could stabilize him. A girl aspirated a gummy bear and coded in her father’s arms. One early morning, I sat in the back of the rig with a child who had been shot in a drive-by and was still wearing his backpack. I learned how to lift a stretcher without jolting an unconscious body. I learned to speak clearly while my gloves were wet. I thought I had learned what it meant to stay silent while someone’s world ended, too. But I hadn’t, not even close.

By twenty, I knew much better what exactly caused the swelling in my mother’s arm, the persistent cough no one could help, the excruciating tightness in her chest, because by then, I had learned, and she had been gone. It wasn’t the clinical side of medicine that stayed with me after watching someone you love become smaller every day while still pretending, for your sake, that none of it hurt as much as it clearly did. I began to understand this as a kind of moral grammar in medicine, or an unspoken contract that says: we will try everything, and when that fails, we will still be here. Nowhere is this covenant more visible, or more sacred, than in oncology, where cure is not always possible but presence always is.

He stopped there. Stared until the letters began to ghost and blur. Then he closed the page. There was time to rework it later.

I’m going to see Belly, he told himself. I’m going to see Belly in four hours. Ask how she’s doing. How work is. Tell her about the time a Warriors fan tried to jump him outside a Gordo’s for wearing a Celtics cap in the wrong ZIP code. Remind her she skis like a malfunctioning Roomba 4220 on black ice and that Jere shouldn’t have been allowed to take her anywhere with altitude. Hi Belly, nice seeing you. Is that a growth spurt or did Jere finally let you borrow his ego shoes?

He opened the AMCAS portal and skimmed through his application list, mentally estimating the mileage from highway exits and Logan to whichever lecture hall they call a medical campus.

In seven minutes, he scrubbed everything east of Texas. Left the desert and the coast. His hands stayed steady, which was something. Surgeons needed that. He’d always been better at doing what was necessary than what was wanted, which was probably how he’d gotten this far. He liked summer heat anyways.

 

Chapter 2

December, 2018. Los Angeles, California

“Conrad,” Belly said, dragging the vowels, voice tiny. The rhythm was familiar, like she was half-listening to someone else and about to apologize for needing him. Conrad knew the drill, braced on cue. It never landed.

“I’m at LAX and they won’t give me the car,” she said, in the kind of pouty tone that made it hard to take her seriously. “I have my license, my card—everything. It’s not like I’ve got a DUI or something.”

“Yeah, totally,” Conrad said, flashing a sheepish smile at Ms. Marín. Her blood pressure finally down to something resembling normal after a few days of bouncing like a pinball. One-twenty-two over seventy-eight, a minor miracle considering she’d come in with a thunderclap headache and a left-sided facial droop. The MRI ruled out a bleed, but the attending still thought it looked like a late-onset hemiplegic migraine, which Ms. Marín decided was “bullshit” until the magnesium, fluids, and a couple nights of sleep in a room with actual lighting control started to kick in.

She waved him off with two fingers and an amused glance. “Long as you’re not on with the pharmacy about me again.”

“Fair enough,” he said, already turning toward the corner.

He answered. “I’m sure it’s just some mess on their end. Hey, just let me talk to whoever’s at the counter, alright? I’ll sort it out. It’ll be fine, Bell.”

She’d started throwing fits after 22 at anyone who still called her Belly. Steven constantly changed her name in his phone just to provoke her into breaking a Waterford vase. He only stopped after Taylor told him one day she’d slip something like Comet instead of chili powder into his protein powder, and the only person they knew who had the slightest idea how gastric lavage works lived 2,700 miles away. It was funny on its own, but Steven’s impression of her voice over the phone took it to another level.

“Hey, this is Conrad Fisher,” he said, once the voice came over. “Isabel’s on the reservation, and she should be authorized to pick it up. I’m happy to verify anything or send over updated info if that’s what you need.”

“Hi, oh, yeah, Mr. Fisher,” The guy said. “So the issue is the payment card doesn’t match the name on the reservation. She’s listed as an additional driver, but we can’t release the vehicle unless the primary cardholder is here in person, or we have a matching card in your wife’s name.”

He could practically hear Belly gasp, a real, audible one, and ignored her. That’s what she got for calling him for help, honestly.

“Who’s the primary cardholder?”

“It’s Adam Fisher.”

“Right, that’s my dad,” he said, and it felt surprisingly satisfying. Like cosmic petty revenge. She was legally and financially tied to him in one way or another forever. “But she’s the one picking it up. Is there a way to just switch the reservation over to her entirely? Same car, same pickup, I’ll rebook it online if that’s faster.”

“Honestly, yeah. If you rebook it in Mrs. Fisher’s name and put her card on file, that’d be the easiest. Otherwise, Mr. Fisher’d have to come down here in person.”

“No problem. He’ll cancel the original and make a new booking under her name right now. I’ll call you back or give you a confirmation number once it’s processed.”

He thanked the guy, told Belly to get herself something to eat, and then called his dad’s assistant, rebook it in Belly’s name with her card info (which she texted him), sent her the confirmation number, and texted: try again in 5. should be fixed. worst case, say my name three times and tell them I’m paying your parking tickets too

About forty-five minutes later, he finished his last in-room visit of the 18-hour shift and checked his phone again in the locker room, now that his vision had rehydrated enough to make out the screen. Belly had sent him an emoji, a cartoon bear hugging a giant red heart with ribboned lettering that said “U da real MVP.”

don’t text and drive, he sent. No reply. He made it home in twelve minutes, seven of them at red lights, and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

***

There was a point, somewhere around week nine of anatomy, when Conrad became convinced that fluorescent lighting did actual psychological harm. Not just the mild existential abrasion everyone tolerated in grocery stores and DMV waiting rooms, but real, measurable injury. Like it filed down the human spirit at a cellular level.

He’d never confirmed it with data, but walking the pre-dawn halls of Reagan's neurology ward, he was prepared to stake his medical degree on it.

The hospital ran on halogens, highlighter pens, and cortisol. Neurology was his last core rotation in his sub-i (technically fourth-year, functionally somewhere between a first-year resident and a very motivated whiteboard), and it meant rounding at 6:15 on patients who had gone speechless overnight, or whose left arms floated like kelp in the current. You could learn a lot from a limb, apparently. Motor drift, pronator drift, the quiet insult of a dropped reflex.

He once shadowed a stroke fellow who documented at 110 WPM and called everyone under 40 with a TIA “a future TED Talk.” They’d rounded on post-ictal patients with three-letter syndromes and family members who brought full manila folders of printouts from the Mayo Clinic. His attending once pointed at a CT perfusion scan with a dry “well, that’s fucked,” which Conrad wrote down verbatim in his notes before deleting.

Conrad had already done internal medicine (grueling, if tolerable), surgery (brutal, if masochistic), and pediatrics (haunting). Pediatrics was the one that stayed with him, in a vague sense of moral vertigo. He didn’t hate kids. He hated what could happen to them.

Adults came with pasts: comorbidities, histories, charts thicker than the kid’s entire lifespan. Kids came in whole and went out broken, and the why was often unknowable. There were cases that felt more intimate than anything else he’d done in medicine: pulling a soft toy from a collapsed crib, or asking a nine-year-old if they felt “sad more days than not,” as the checklist required.

These were people who hadn’t even finished their Lego phase. The boy with a femur fracture from a scooter crash who grinned through morphine. The girl with lupus nephritis who said her favorite flavor of Jello was “whatever the pink one is.” They flinched when blood was drawn but said thank you anyway. He found that particular brand of resilience disturbing, like watching a glass hold pressure it was never designed for.

He was also about eighty percent sure he hadn’t just yapped straight through his Chilean sea bass about all his metaphysical hang-ups on pediatrics and neurology, but Belly was looking at him closely, silent, and reached across the table and laid her hand gently over his.

Conrad opened his mouth, couldn’t say anything, and immediately felt stupid for it. His throat locked up around something raw and formless, and he didn’t dare move a muscle. Just stared at her hand where it rested over his, her knuckles smaller and paler than he remembered.

“I like what I do,” Conrad said, after a long moment.

“I know,” she said.

Then she pulled her hand back, carved off a generous piece of seared scallop, and transferred it to his plate, balanced neatly across the spoon and the dull edge of her knife.

He almost laughed. Fussing over me now, huh, Fisher? Do you know you’ve got sauce on your mouth, and that lipstick, probably called something like Sunset or Dirty Martini, now looks like the inside of a raw peanut? He kept his eyes on the scallop she’d just given him, trying to back out of the sharp, hot edge of feeling pressing behind them. Would’ve been funny, if something actually fell.

It seemed like the right time to ask something like, what brought you out here, how long you were staying, where you were staying, if the car was running fine, because you can take mine. But he couldn’t bring himself to it. It would’ve come out all wrong anyway. And he already knew everything.

He knew where she was staying—room 532 at the Fairmont Miramar, five floors up in the Ocean Tower, with a brass light dimmer that stuck halfway and a velvet armchair. Knew her return flight—Southwest 1437 out of Burbank, Monday night, 7:15 PM. Knew she was here for a symposium co-hosted by West Virginia and USC, something about long-term cognitive outcomes in post-collegiate athletes.

He got the info the way anyone would, if they had no shame and a CS-major friend who now worked at Palantir or one of those firms where everyone wore Allbirds and the company paid for your oat milk. Mason Yu, class of ’17, wore suits ironically and said things like “privacy is a spectrum.” He’d looked up from his laptop exactly once to say, “I’m only doing this because I’m sure you’re not gonna end up on Dateline, Fisher.” Then sent a ZIP file in twenty minutes.

Sometimes Conrad went back in just to look. Not for anything in particular. Just stared at the credit card trail like it meant something: flowers from Wilson Farm in Lexington in 2015, peonies and tulips and once, weirdly, sunflowers. A Costco run the same weekend, for what looked like granola bars and a 24-pack of Diet Coke. A sundae in Valencia, Spain, devoured oceanside on some random beach in 2017. A pair of sunglasses, billed to a boutique in El Born.

She lost them within two days. He could tell because she bought a second pair, cheaper, broader frames, slightly orthopedic in vibe. According to the Google Shopping thumbnail, they’d covered most of her face. Of course, he’d never seen her wear either.

I saw the charge for that 1973 U.K. hardcover of Awakenings eleven days before it showed up on my doorstep, he wanted to tell her. The one you bought for my birthday. The year before. She found it in Cambridge, at a secondhand store that smelled like radiator dust and yellowing paperbacks. The same store he bought The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in high school.

Laurel had mentioned once, casually, proudly, over a phone call, that Belly might even want to get a doctorate. “Can you imagine?” she’d said. “Dr. Fisher and Dr. Fisher.”

Conrad could not, actually. She got the wrong kind of Doctr and he got the wrong kind of Fisher.

But he did imagine taking a redeye back to New England, landing before sunrise, walking the hard, ice-laced curbs of Mount Auburn Cemetery where the paths curled like old bone through manicured hills. He imagined sitting on the damp moss that edged the gravestones, where the grass still slept under frost, telling his mom all about it until the first crocuses broke through the thawed earth nearby.

“I’m so full,” Belly announced, nudging her plate away with the flat of her hand. The overhead light caught in her hair. Caramel and silky now, no frizz, no ponytail crease, and he could almost feel the texture just from looking at it. “Hey, you wanna know a trick for getting them to bring out petit fours?”

She grinned at him, and he shook his head, helpless.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell me.”

***

“The eye is immune privileged,” Agnes said. “So is the brain. The testicles. Places the immune system isn’t allowed to patrol. It’s a security compromise. The tissue’s too delicate, too irreplaceable. So evolution made a deal—better to lower the defenses than risk friendly fire in a vital organ.

“But here’s the creepy part: it’s not just that the immune system can’t go in. It’s that it doesn’t even know what’s in there. It’s never seen those antigens. So if the barrier’s broken, like with an eye injury, say, the immune system suddenly sees those proteins for the first time and thinks, foreign invader. And it attacks.”

She tapped the rim of her whiskey glass. “There’s a condition called sympathetic ophthalmia. You injure one eye, and the immune system takes out the other. The healthy one. Blinds it out of principle. Like vengeance. For something it never understood.”

“Wow,” Belly whispered, chin in her palm. She blinked, and leaned down to dig through her tote. She pulled out a fistful of tissues, two hair ties, a leaking pen, and finally, triumphantly, a beat-up yellow legal pad with a bent corner.

“So,” she rushed out. “If the brain’s immune privileged, and there’s a breach, like with repeated impact trauma, does it act like the eye? I mean, do the glial cells go after things they’re not trained to recognize? Could that explain some of the chronic aggression or depressive episodes we see even years after athletes’ retirement? Not just the mechanical damage, but the immune confusion?”

Agnes tilted her head. “That’s not a bad way to think about it,” she said. “It’s not the same mechanism as sympathetic ophthalmia, but the idea’s similar. Privileged spaces mean naïve immune recognition. When that’s disrupted, by trauma, ischemia, whatever, it’s like opening a locked room in a house no one’s visited in years. The dust flies up. In the brain, it’s mostly the microglia. They’re not peripheral immune cells, but they’re the resident macrophages of the CNS. After repeated trauma, they get what we call primed. Meaning: less threshold for activation, more inflammatory—”

Conrad stood, muttered something about fresh air. Neither of them even batted an eye. That was the Belly effect. The way she listened and engaged with everything, like she was watching the start of a story she already loved was that magnetic Conrad had never seen a single person in his life who didn’t fall straight into it and forget the way out.

Still, he needed to get the hell out before Agnes launched into something like, Microchimerism. Fetal cells that crossed the placenta and stayed behind like ghosts. Children carrying pieces of their mother’s immune history in their marrow. Memory with no language. The body misfiling love as a threat. If she said one more sentence like that, he might genuinely lose it in the middle of a bar that charged forty-seven dollars for a cocktail.

Sometimes he thought he was healed. Not whole, but operational at least. Then something stupid would break the surface. A photo, a glance, some people’s faces caught in the same frame, and suddenly it felt like someone was spot-welding the split-open plates of his early twenties back together with molten metal.

In moments like this, it came back with the force of a remembered season. Those too quiet nights stretched like plastic wrap. The ache in his stomach from forgetting to eat, or being too nauseous to try. The sour taste of bile and toothpaste. That he’d run out of future at twenty-one.

“Usually I’d recommend exposure therapy,” Agnes had told him once, years ago, at Green Library, second floor, deep corner. She was sipping some turmeric-ginger juice that looked and smelled like industrial solvent. He was busy trying to keep the condensation from his own bottle of lemon water from dripping onto his keyboard. “But in your case, I think the subject would kill you.”

He partly wished someone else had said it first. Someone who didn’t know him that well, so he could at least pretend it wasn’t true. He had managed to dodge five Thanksgivings and three Christmases over the years (Fourth of Julys were much easier. It had been his mom’s favorite, which meant technically he could celebrate it wherever he wanted), citing everything from call shifts to weather delays to “just couldn’t swing it this year.”

But sometime around mid-2016 he’d quietly decided he needed to go back whenever it was socially expected of him. No more excuses. Even if it meant sitting through Jere’s annual updates on the Series B funding round of his startup, now with six full-time engineers, three interns, and an ex-Google product manager they poached from a WeWork happy hour.

Even if it meant watching Jere wear layered cardigans and winter coats Belly picked for him, looking like someone who moisturized and flossed and forwarded tax documents before April. Looking happy, satisfied. Someone who knew exactly where he was going next, and how to pack for it.

“Well,” Agnes said, pushing open the door, and Belly followed a beat later. It was a breezy night, too quiet and temperate for Cedars to be imploding badly enough to call Agnes back, so Conrad assumed she was in a decent mood. Probably got to spend the night making gluten-free meals for her foster kittens or whatever it was normal people did for emotional regulation.

“I closed the tab,” Belly announced, victorious. She was also apparently losing a fight with her own bag, trying to wedge her wallet and half a receipt roll’s worth of junk back in without dropping her phone. Agnes rolled her eyes and held the bag open so she could jam everything in like a raccoon packing for college.

“Later, guys,” Agnes said, and a matte black Ducati Scrambler beeped awake as she flicked her key fob. The engine gave a low, smug hum.

“Wow,” Belly said, almost involuntarily. She glanced back at Conrad, eyes wide, and mouthed it again, slow, exaggerated: wow.

Conrad grinned, shrugged like he had nothing to add. He met Agnes’s eyes again—still sharp, still dry, with that quietly surgical way of looking at him like she could see straight through all the places he thought were under control.

Still think the subject’s gonna kill me? he asked with his eyes. She didn’t blink. for once, there was no answer in her eyes. She slid on the helmet like a scalpel, flipped the visor down, and rode off.

Belly dozed off a few times on the way back. The second time, she slammed her head so hard against the window that Conrad winced, but kept both hands on the wheel. She jerked awake like she hadn’t just been unconscious, tried to play it off with a neutral face, stole a glance to check if he noticed, and after about thirty seconds, dozed off again.

The 10 was quiet by LA standards, glittering with leftover brake lights and the occasional flick of a cigarette out a window. Downtown shrank behind them. They passed under the La Cienega exit. A billboard for Korean skincare.

The lights started to soften as they moved west into Santa Monica’s particular brand of curated glow. Storefronts all glass and unscuffed tile. Sidewalks with no visible trash, just hushed couples and runners who didn’t sweat. Conrad didn’t bother with music. The silence felt earned.

He pulled up to the Fairmont’s private drive, looping past the lit-up palms and the valet kiosk with its too-handsome college kid in a blazer, and put it in park.

Then sat there for two minutes, watching her. Hair mussed on one side from the window. A faint red line across her collarbone where the seatbelt had pressed. She stirred eventually, rubbed her cheek with the heel of her hand, and smiled at him softly, sleepily.

For a second, it almost looked like she still adored him that much. The kind of much that made anything possible. Say get out, and she would. Say stop calling me, and she would. Say disappear, and she would. Say set the house on fire and wait for him inside, and she would.

“I’m leaving tomorrow night,” she told him, a little awkwardly.

“Oh, not Monday?” Conrad asked, too fast. The second it came out, he knew he’d fucked it. Royally. He wasn’t supposed to know that.

“No, no,” She looked confused for a beat, then smiled again. Jesus. It was just that easy with her. “Taylor and I are throwing an early bday party for Steven. You know that axe-throwing place in Brooklyn he’s been obsessed with? We booked one near home. He’s gonna lose his mind.”

“That sucks you can’t come,” she added, breezy.

You didn’t even ask, Conrad wanted to accuse. Then he remembered—of course they had. Probably a dozen times over a dozen years. Got “no” every time.

Play safe, Bell. Instead, it came out flat and quiet, something shapeless and small, but still the closest he’d gotten to saying anything that mattered: “I missed you.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then leaned over to kiss his jaw. “I love you,” she said.

The she got out.

And Conrad sat there, proven, yet again, that it’d been more than a decade and he was still the same big, fat coward he’d always been.

---

 

 

June, 2019. Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Jere called the week he booked “an East Coast homage” and overused the word quaint so many times Laurel threatened to revoke his planning privileges. She had a new book coming out that month and brought the manuscript everywhere, even on the boat, until Belly told her if she so much as opened Scrivener on the yacht, she’d fling the laptop straight into the Atlantic.

John almost couldn’t make it. He thought he was teaching a summer session. Turned out the course got canceled for low enrollment.

“Didn’t get three students,” he said, shaking his head.“Look at this weather. Can’t blame people for wanting to touch grass.”

Steven made a face behind him. Laurel caught it and burst out laughing. Everyone else followed.

They tried to fish, once or twice. Taylor insisted on keeping a log of what they caught and what they cooked, even if they only reeled in seaweed and served Ritz crackers with canned smoked oysters from the mainland. Belly and Taylor swore, daily, solemnly, that they’d wake up early enough to see the sunrise. It was day five. They hadn’t made it once.

Conrad had. More than once, actually. He was having fun. Real fun. Sometimes he looked up from his mug of coffee or whatever Jere had made him try that morning (sea buckthorn tea, or oat milk matcha with collagen powder) and saw them all laughing in the morning light. Steven waving his arms around mid-story. Taylor holding court. Laurel in a linen wrap.

Belly reaching for something, eyes crinkled in a smile. And in the sunlit blur behind them, he swore he saw his mom there too. Just a little. Just enough. She wasn’t older, and was just smiling.

One night they all ended up sleeping on the yacht, curled in every direction like college kids on a bad Airbnb floor. He woke before dawn, thanks to the warped body clock he never quite got rid of. For a second he forgot where he was. No pager, no hospital, no hallway light. Just the water underneath, quiet and cold and holding them up.

Jere was already on the deck, vaping. Legs stretched out, hoodie sleeves pulled over his hands like a kid. Conrad joined him without a word. Just leaned against the railing and stared out at the water.

The air was salty and cold enough to sting the inside of his nose. Out on the far edge of the horizon, the sea started to change. Pale gold bleeding up from the dark.

“Seasick?” Conrad asked finally, after Jere pulled his vape away with a click.

“Oh, shut up,” Jere said, hoarse, and reached into the front pocket of his hoodie. Fished out a cigarette and handed it over. Right. To Jere he was that kind of dinosaur. Fourteen months older and aged like milk. Used a physical planner and paid cash for gas.

They smoked in silence for a while, the sky turning lighter in increments they didn’t bother remarking on.

Then Jere said, “You ever get those dreams where you’re the last person left on earth?”

Conrad didn’t answer, but he didn’t look away either.

“Like, you go to sleep,” Jere went on, “and everyone’s around. And then you wake up and it’s just...quiet. Like somebody unplugged the world. And in the dream you keep looking for them, like maybe they’re just hiding. And then you wake up again, like actually wake up—and realize, oh. Some of them really are gone.”

He scratched the edge of his jaw, looked back at the water. “Anyway. Shit sleep last night.”

For the first time in maybe forever, Conrad thought he might not have been the only one who hadn’t come out of the past decade unscathed. That somewhere across the coast, another person might’ve been lying awake too, staring at a popcorn ceiling or a bedroom fan or the glow of a router light. Tossing and turning over things they couldn’t name, couldn’t fix, couldn’t let go. Maybe even over the same things.

“We had a huge fight last year,” Jere said. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. “She kept waking up with these brutal headaches. Felt sick. And I knew her vision was all messed up, like, couldn’t even find her phone in the morning. I booked her an MRI ‘cause I thought it’s a fucking brain tumor.” He gave a short laugh.

“Sounds like tension headaches,” Conrad said, useless. Statistically, brain tumors in women under 30 in the U.S. were something like 0.01 percent. “Or maybe sleep apnea. Look, if you’re worried, I can get her in—”

“Conrad.”

“Yeah.”

“Did—did mom ever say anything to you?” Jere asked. He still refused to look at him. Just kept his eyes on the edge of the horizon. The sun cracked the surface line, spilling light over everything. There was a thin line of bruised pink, then amber.

“You know. About,” he vaguely waved a hand that seemed to draw a shaky circle around them. He then muttered a soft fuck.

Conrad could’ve told him the truth. For once. Jere was a grown-ass man, with a retirement plan and a Costco membership and all the rest. He didn’t need his big brother standing guard like an emotional TSA agent anymore.

Mom had said take care of your brother. She hadn’t said ruin your life over it. She hadn’t said swallow every goddamn thing you ever wanted, hold it down like a pill too big to go down right, just so Jere could keep thinking the world stayed in orbit for him. Yeah, she said stuff. But that wasn’t why he let go. He let go because Jere was his fucking brother. And he loved his brother.

That’s the kind of answer Jere probably wouldn’t buy in a million years, though. Right after pigs start doing tax returns.

“No,” Conrad said. “She didn’t.”

“All right, then,” Jere said. For a moment, it looked like he saw straight through him. Then he smiled, all Jere, easy.

Conrad leaned back against the fiberglass console, the glare slicing across his face. It found the bridge of his nose and lodged there, bright enough that he had to squint just to make out the sea and the skyline behind it. The sun had cleared the horizon in full now, ascended, a white, searing disc that blistered across the flat Atlantic like a thrown coin.

“Guess it’s time to go harass some stripers,” Jere decided.

---

 

 

August, 2019. Los Angeles, California

“My mom,” Halperin said, standing with her hands stuffed into her cardigan sleeves, visitor badge still clipped to the hem, and nodded toward the window. The chairs inside were arranged in pairs around IV poles, partitioned by partial curtains, most of them occupied. One woman slept with her mouth open, nasal cannula tugged slightly sideways. “She looks all of four foot eight, but she’s a damn fighter.”

Halperin looked like someone who worked in city government or maybe taught high school. “Cedars gave her about three months.”

Conrad nodded. The chart had her at Stage IV pancreatic adenocarcinoma with hepatic involvement and early ascites. She’d come over from Cedars after an ERCP went sideways— cholangitis, sepsis, the whole workup.

GI had re-done the stent, ID had followed for ten days of meropenem, and now she was back on the outpatient chemo protocol like nothing had interrupted. Labs were holding. Appetite borderline. Still reading the Los Angeles Times in full, underlining in pen.

“She doesn’t want soft talk,” Halperin said. “I don’t care what the other families say about waiting until people are in a better headspace. That’s not her. You talk to her like you talk to anyone else with a clock running. She can take it. She’s taken worse.”

Conrad had heard every version of that hallway speech before. It usually came laced with unspoken fear, relatives circling the truth like it might go off in their hands. He usually wait them out, nod where appropriate, and let them finish before saying, as evenly as possible, that there was a federal statute older than he was that bound every licensed physician in the country to disclose a patient's condition fully and directly, provided the patient was competent. Whatever the family wanted, it didn’t override that.

“I’ll make sure,” he said now, “that my team and I give her the full picture. No omissions. Nothing softened, unless she asks us to.”

“She won’t.”

Through the glass, Ms. Halperin reached for her water cup.

“She asked for a doctor who doesn’t wince,” her daughter added.

“Well,” Conrad said. He made a mental note to mention it to Belly in his weekly miscellaneous update. “I don’t have the title she’s asking for yet. Might still be the right person anyway.”

***

Conrad ran before sunrise, five miles along empty streets that smelled like sprinklers and hot asphalt cooling. Shower, badge, rounds. He ate whatever the hospital cafeteria was calling eggs that day, plus burnt coffee, plus a banana he pocketed for later and forgot about until noon.

On service he charted standing, wolfed down cold fries between pages, got snapped at by his attending for missing a buried lab value, then nodded, “got it,” and fixed it before the elevator doors closed. Scrubs came from the linen room’s vending machines, stiff and papery; when he could, he flirted just enough with the girl at central supply to swap him a softer green set. It was a whole economy down there. She knew.

Post-call or on his one real day off, he pointed the car west. El Porto when he just wanted waves and no conversation, Malibu when he wanted to pretend the sky was larger. He paddled out, got tossed, got better. On the sand at Hermosa he ended up in pickup volleyball with strangers who spoke in quick hand signals and nicknames, and he played until his shoulders reminded him he had a job that needed them.

He talked about getting a dog, sometimes a cat, and then didn’t. Instead, he ended up nursing a stunned Anna’s hummingbird he found by the parking structure. Sugar water in a bottle cap, a shoebox with air holes, a day of quiet clicking from its tiny beak. When it was strong enough, he took the box to his balcony, opened the lid, and the bird shot out, a green spark, and didn’t look back.

He didn’t think he’d actually touched every acre of California in nine years, but it felt that way, like his shoes had memorized the map. The state sorted itself in his head by muscle memory: the 405’s slow river of brake lights; the brown ribs of the San Gabriels; the cottony Tule fog by smell, the flatness of the Central Valley seen from a gas station at dawn. Joshua Tree’s boulders, the blemish of wildfire on distance.

He hadn’t been everywhere. It just felt like the state had already told him all its stories and was waiting for him to ask better questions. On those nights, he sometimes didn’t have enough to text Belly about it.

He’d open the thread and stare at the blinking cursor, then type something like: Long day. Surfed badly. Attending in a mood. Belly was a phone-calls person, not a text novelist; she liked to hear the shape of a breath between sentences. But she was busy, and the hours that made sense for her never quite lined up with the hours he had to give.

So he picked the most boring piece of his day, the one that didn’t invite a clever reply. It was inventory. Proof of life. He figured there were enough small, silly things in there for her to scroll when she had the appetite.

When she did call, he’d pace the balcony, phone hot to his ear, listening to the background noise on her end: the scrape of a chair, a faucet, some far-off laughter.

Later, alone, he’d draft and delete a dozen messages he didn’t send. The good ones always felt too heavy for text and too light for confession. He saved them as notes instead. In the morning he ran, and the state unfolded again under his feet, ordinary and exacting, and it comforted him that the road never ran out even when it felt like it did. He told himself the same thing about her.

Ms. Halperin died twenty-nine days earlier than Cedars said she would.

She had rallied that Monday. Sat upright and cracked a joke about the hospital art. Asked Conrad what kind of name that was, and if he ever thought of changing it. Her pulse was thready but holding. No new orders were placed except a gentle shift in her meds. And then on Wednesday, she was gone.

Conrad didn’t know why it got to him the way it did. She was hardly the first. Hardly the last. There were patients who died young and violently, who clutched his hand and begged not to be alone.

Whatever it was, he stepped outside after the paperwork was done, leaned against the cinderblock wall of the ambulance bay, and called Belly.

He told Belly everything. He told her that he didn’t know what he expected, he just thought there’d be more time. He said it like a confession, like a flaw in himself.

“I think she would’ve liked you calling me,” Belly said.

He laughed at that, hoarse and short. “She would’ve had notes.”

“Probably. And a scarf to match.”

He sat in his car with the phone on the passenger seat, still connected. Neither of them talking. The sun was going down. The hospital behind him still buzzed, full of numbers and schedules and gentle lies meant to soften the fall. He stared at the sky until it stopped looking like anything.

“Do you miss me, Bell?” He asked, offhand. He didn’t know why he asked. Maybe because the sound of her voice made the rest of the day recede. Maybe because she felt near in the wrong way.

She was probably just in love with the same defiant ghost of her teenage years, and she clung to that because she’d never really seen the version of him that followed. He had spent years hiding out, ducking from his own narrative. And now he was back, whole enough to ask for something, and it felt like a kind of payback.

“I miss you every day,” she said lightly. “But I like that you’re in a… safe place. I can miss you from far away, you know. It doesn’t change anything,” she promised.

Conrad had no words for that. Something about it landed too squarely in the space between comfort and grief. Like she’d outgrown the question before he asked it.

Ms. Halperin once squinted at him, hard, and for so long that Conrad started to worry and reached for his penlight, only for her to say, “you look sadder than my daughter, young doctor.”

I really don’t think so, he thought. This had happened quite long ago for me.

The doubt started after the question. Or maybe before. Maybe it had been coiled there the whole time, unnoticed, threading through the years like mold behind paint. It didn’t matter. He’d spent all these years circling around it, dissecting it, outrunning it, and no matter how he tried to deny or pretend, it had been there from the beginning.

Had been there in the moment he pressed his cheek to Laurel’s belly, soft and round under her T-shirt, and closed his eyes. The mattress had dipped gently beneath him, still warm from the sun through the window. The whole house smelled like summer, the salt of waves blown inland, a trace of freshly baked bread, her shampoo, the faint and impossibly clear, the echo of a Bell.

***

In the morning, he ran.

He drank two liters of water and ran until his legs quit tracking where they were going. Sidewalk, shoulder, scrub. The sun came up behind him, and the city stayed asleep.

Then he drove to Malibu. Just keys, wallet, sunblock smudged on with the back of his hand. He parked in the dirt along PCH and walked barefoot across the gravel shoulder, then broke into a run when he hit sand.

When the tide met his toes, he didn’t stop. The water climbed his ankles, then his knees, then wrapped cold around his waist like an old dare. It was Pacific water, wide and sun-warmed and soft with sediment, but for one dizzy second, he swore he could smell Boston.

That sharp, brackish tang of the Atlantic in early fall: rusted iron railings, low tide, cold kelp left too long on the dock. It smelled like the harbor at dusk. Like standing barefoot on a pier behind his grandparents’ house, shivering not from cold but from the closeness of something enormous. It felt like swimming home.

Notes:

Everything in this fic proceeds with the major settings and events of canon intact, except for the part where Jeremiah cheats—that didn’t happen here.