Let it go.
I was a fool.
“How?” Mitch asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t turn it off, Dr. McLure. I can’t stop seeing. I can’t …”
A cold chill crawled up my spine.
“You’ll just have to discipline yourself not to notice,” I said, knowing it was the wrong answer.
“The lymphocytes may kill the biot, which would solve your problem,” Donna remarked.
That was about three o’clock in the afternoon.
At four the next morning Mitch McGovern leapt from the fifth-floor window of his apartment building in Brooklyn.
The EMTs found him still alive. His last words, as best they could make them out, were cryptic.
“Ripped me apart,” he said. “Oh, God.”
While that was happening, though, I was holding Birgid’s head as she choked over the toilet bowl. She was wracked by violent coughing. The water in the bowl was red.
The noise, or perhaps just some instinct, woke Sadie. She came in wearing a nightgown.
“Go to bed, sweetheart,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
There were tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t want her to see me cry. I didn’t want her to see her mother spraying blood like some horror-movie victim.
She ignored me. Sadie did that, back then. Nowadays, too. Instead of leaving she found a scrunchie and used it to gather her mother’s hair into a ponytail.
Then I left Sadie to hold her mother’s head. I went to my library and poured a
drink and swallowed it.
Time was running out.
FOUR
“Mommy is going to die soon,” Sadie said.
She had come to me in my library. She sat on my lap. I drank whiskey, moving my arm around her, and couldn’t help but bring the glass close to her face.
I wanted her to leave me alone. I was stressed. I thought I was as stressed as I could be without having a stroke. But at that point I didn’t even know that Mitch had killed himself.
“I’m doing my best, Sadie,” I said.
“I know,” she said. And she wanted more from me, some comfort, some sentiment. Some … She wanted me to tell her it wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t do that. Worse, I didn’t want to because I was suffering, and some dark part of me wanted everyone to suffer along with me.
These are not good things for me to remember. I don’t like the man who sat there drinking whiskey and barely paying attention to his distraught daughter. Ever since then I have tried to make up for that moment and others like it.
I think Sadie has forgiven me. I have not forgiven myself.
“Okay, Birgid, we’re going to give you twilight sedation. You’ll be conscious, though you may fall asleep.”
We did it in my lab. Donna and me, with Marty and Prim helping out. We needed to know if we could reach the tumor. Then we could figure out what to do about it. But step one was to see if we could reach it without being thwarted by the body’s immune response.