Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
By the afternoon, Brandon has been admitted to the hospital.
The MRI of his brain shows a tumor. It’s on the left side, the part that gets exposed to the most radiation, and is infiltrating his frontal lobe.
It could explain his recent personality changes, the neurologist tells Winona over the phone.
Brandon Pendersen has fucking brain cancer, and I—we all—assumed he had just become an incompetent jerk.
We’d watched him decay before our eyes and said nothing.
Now there’s another patient in a different ICU fighting for his life because none of his colleagues had the foresight to investigate whether his erratic behavior was actually pathological.
“Left-sided brain cancer,” Brandon mutters when I visit him after my cases. He looks oddly at peace. When he smiles the right side goes up higher than the left. I’d thought he was sneering this whole time, but it was actually a neurological deficit. “What am I? A textbook?”
I laugh. All our radiation training modules have emphasized the same thing—that proceduralists who use fluoroscopy are more prone to this particular kind of disease because our left sides get the brunt of radiation exposure.
We wear lead-lined caps and goggles to minimize the damage, but we’re still significantly more likely to get it.
But Brandon is young, having just scratched forty, and shouldn’t yet have been at high risk.
“I should bring our fellows down here,” I joke. “Show them the scans. Strike some fear in their hearts.”
“Especially Paul. Might get him to wear his thyroid shield,” Brandon quips. Then he closes his eyes. “Has anyone been able to get Leila?”
I swallow.
“No,” I say gently. Not for lack of trying.
Between me, the neurologist, and Brandon himself, we’ve probably called and texted Leila twenty times.
Her phone goes straight to voicemail. When I call her coworker to ask after her, he says that she’s doing three mitral clip procedures in a hospital forty miles away today and might be tough to reach.
It’s an odd excuse. We’ve worked with Leila in the lab; we know she can access her phone. Winona, who has a full panel of clinic patients today, has managed to answer our calls, arrange alternate pickup plans for Sophie, and is driving in as we speak.
Brandon looks, for the first time, like he’s in pain.
“You think I’m pathetic,” he says quietly.
I freeze.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
Brandon’s grin is wry.
“Sure you do,” he says. “You’ve thought it from the beginning.
That I was a stereotype, leaving my wife and kid for this young woman.
Thinking with my dick. I’m not wrong, am I?
” When I don’t respond, he nods, accepting my silence as confirmation.
“But it wasn’t that simple, Sean. I…needed her.
In a way that I can’t describe. She was the girl of my dreams. She was in my dreams. I could never… not think of her.”
Brandon’s monitor beeps in the background, but it’s overtaken by the ringing in my ears. Brandon dreamt of Leila. He left Winona because he dreamt of her, maybe the way I once dreamt of Julian. And now he is lying in a hospital bed, impossibly old, impossibly sick. And my hair is white.
My mind takes in this information and draws the parallels, but when it tries to settle on the obvious conclusion, it grinds to a halt.
Occam’s razor, I remind myself again. The simplest explanation is often the best one.
But the simplest explanation—Julian and Leila are the cause of our rapid aging—is nonsensical.
But no more nonsensical than what’s happening to us.
Because here we sit, Brandon forty going on eighty-three with a left-sided brain cancer he shouldn’t have developed for many more years, me with hair that turned silver-white overnight.
My heart is off to the races, and I clutch the side rail of Brandon’s hospital bed, trying to keep myself upright.
I can’t deny what I see with my eyes, feel with my hands, what the CT scans and MRI see in Brandon’s brain.
Oh god. Was this…intentional? Were we prey all along?
I’ve been silent for too long, because Brandon clears his throat.
“I’m tired,” he says. “Thanks for checking in, Sean.”
It’s far from the only thing he needs to thank me for, but I interpret it as the dismissal that it is, steel myself, and stand.
“Don’t die,” I tell him from his hospital room door.
He cracks a small smile and tosses me a weak thumbs-up.
“I’ll try my best.”
I barely notice that I’ve made it home until I slide into my spot in my apartment’s parking garage.
My body has gone through the motions, automatically taking me down the right streets and dodging pedestrians so that my mind can focus.
The evening is eerily quiet, and I sit in my car so long that the automatic light turns out and I am shrouded in darkness.
I can’t stop thinking about Brandon’s wizened face.
Wrinkles deep as crevasses, blue eyes bleary and ringed with white. She was in my dreams, he said.
Onix greets me at the door and joins me on the couch.
I pet him with one hand and with the other pull out my phone and open my photo gallery.
I scroll back three years, to the last time Brandon and I were on good terms. The man looking back at me nearly knocks the breath out of my chest. I’ve never been attracted to Brandon, but it’s obvious that he was a handsome man.
Vain too. Looking at him here I remember how he’d spent three months testing different types of pomade to induce the best front swoop, how tenacious he’d been about applying sunscreen so that he wouldn’t be the “only one aging” between the three of us.
I keep scrolling. Past birthday parties and nights out, past conferences during which I’d still throw my arm around his waist for pictures.
And then I land on one.
It’s the Palette company dinner. Leila had just taken over for the last device representative assigned to our cath lab, and she stands, beaming, next to Brandon in a baby-pink minidress.
Brandon looks to the camera, but I note what I failed to that night—that his hand is low on her hip and his grip is tight.
Two weeks later, I’d walk into the supply room to find them making out behind the balloon pumps.
I zoom in on Brandon’s face. Study it closely. It’s his hairline that catches my attention first, and I scroll up a picture, taken just two weeks before. I’m not mistaken. Where there had once been a full, straight line, there is suddenly a widow’s peak.
I call Winona. She’s driving from the suburbs during rush hour and picks up immediately.
“I have to tell you something,” I say to her. “You’re going to think I’m losing it, but please, hear me out.”
“One second, Sean,” Winona responds. “I’m in the car with Leila. We’re heading back to the hospital.”
My blood runs cold as ice.
“Hi, Sean,” Leila says, in a small, sweet voice. “It’s been a while.”