I Heart Geeks (23 page)

“Why Grand Cayman?”

“Huh?”

“Why would you go to the Grand Caymans for a vacation?”

“Oh it’s a thing Pam and I have. Before she got sick, we were going to go to every place with Grand in the name. Grand Caymans, Grand Canyon, Grand Central Station, Grand Ol’ Opry…”

“Grand Rapids, Michigan,” he added.

“Oh, we’ve been there,” I told him and got a smile as a reward.

“Do what you can to have a break now and then,” Rusach ordered, returning to the original topic.

“I’ll try.” I didn’t mean it.

“I’ll ask one more thing and please do not undo any buttons.”

“Sure.” I felt my face heat again at the reminder of my folly.

“Don’t tell anyone we had this meeting. There’s nothing wrong with it but I don’t want anyone calling into question my actions as being influenced and perhaps unethical. It will…complicate matters.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired.

“Not a peep. Thank you so much. If she gets in, maybe I’ll see you at the hospital.” I don’t know why I added that but I liked talking to him.

He gave me a wry smile. “I don’t think that’s likely. I prefer to stay in the lab. Seeing actual people whose lives depend on me being right, it…” He gave a helpless wave of his hands.

“…complicates matters?” He nodded. “I see. This is goodbye, then.” I rose and held out my hand.

He shook it and peered up at me. “Be careful driving home. You look exhausted. Do you want me to call you a cab?”

I squeezed his hand before letting go. “No, I’ll stay alert. You want me to leave the donuts?”

“No, give the box to the security guards. They’ll appreciate it.”

I left him to his work but I couldn’t resist glancing back after opening the door. He had turned back to his screen and was watching models of proteins fold and unfold. A hand reached out and dropped the chocolate cream donut into a waste basket.

As I rode down in the elevator, several things began to become clear to me. When I stepped out in the lobby, the first guard had been joined by two others. One had a hip on the reception desk and the other two were in chairs behind the desk. I walked over.

“Would you guys like the rest of the donuts?”

My original guard, who had a ‘Larry’ nametag that I had been too nervous to read the first time around, grinned at me.

“Sure, we’ll finish them up for you. Dr. Rusach not want them?” His lechery seemed to have vanished.

“He took a chocolate cream but didn’t seem to like it much. He told you to let me come up, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Larry said, taking the donut box from me.

“I mean, this is a high-powered pharmaceutical lab. There’s no way some girl in a delivery uniform could waltz into the labs, is there?”

“Not really,” said ‘Ken’, taking his donut.

“Larry saw you coming and called up. Dr. Rusach gave him the go ahead after he described you.” This was ‘Steve’.

Larry continued. “Didn’t look like you had any weapons on you but if you hadn’t offered me the donut, I would have asked you to open the box.”

“Hmmm.” I pondered this. “How did you describe me, then?”

Larry spoke through a mouthful of donut. “Pretty redhead wearing a delivery uniform too small for her, looks tired but puts on a fake smile ten feet from the door and adds a wiggle to her walk. A regular Mata Hari.”

“Mata what?” asked Steve.

“Never mind, dude. Anyhow, he said send you up.”

I was suddenly worried what they thought of me, even though a few minutes earlier I was perfectly willing to have sex with Ian Rusach if it got Pam in the door. “I just had to ask Dr. Rusach something. I wasn’t…”

“A booty call,” finished Steve for me.

“Steve, don’t be a dick.” Larry smiled at me. “You looked like a lady with a big weight on her shoulders. Hope Dr. Rusach could help.”

“He did. Thanks, guys.” I turned to go.

“Anytime you want to bring donuts…” Steve suggested. I kept walking and heard his buddies tell him not to be such a dick. I didn’t pay them any more attention. My thoughts were on the kindness Dr. Ian Rusach had shown me.

“She’s sleeping,” Emma whispered when I stuck my head in the living room. Pam was slumped down on the arm of the sofa. A couple of her favorite shows had been on tonight and I wondered if she had stayed awake long enough to watch any of them.

“Everything else okay?” I asked our neighbor.

“Fine. She even ate some food. A whole hot dog with a bun. How did it go tonight?” Emma knew what I had been up to. She thought it was a dumb idea but she also knew me well enough not to bother dissuading me. Emma was in her late fifties, on her own after a second divorce. She was a dental hygienist and our lifeline.

“I met the big guy himself, Dr. Rusach. He listened to me and said he’d try to help.”

“You didn’t have to do any extra persuading?” Emma asked, her gaze pinning me to the wall. I knew I shouldn’t have told her about that part of the plan.

“No, he’s a good guy. We talked a bit. He listened.”

“Good. When do we find out if it’s a go for clinical trials?”

“I don’t know. Soon I hope. Thanks again for looking after Pam.”

“My pleasure. Get some rest, honey.”

“’Night.” I closed the door behind her and went over to Pam. She was making little whiffling noises through her nose. “Pammy.”

“Wha?”

“Hi babes. You fell asleep.” I helped her sit upright.

“Oh, sorry. How was your date?”

“Date?” I hadn’t been on a date for two years, not since Pam started getting really sick. I had a boyfriend at the beginning, Chris, but he had bailed when I started cancelling dates and sleepovers. He didn’t want to share me with a sick relative.

“Yeah, Emma said you had a date.” She looked at me with bright eyes. How could I not go along with the fantasy?

“It was good but casual. We ate some Dolly Donuts together. Talked some. Surfed the internet.”

“Hmmm. Doesn’t sound too exciting. He knows about me?” That was Pam. Cutting straight to the chase. I had tried to keep from her why Chris broke up with me but she was smart and observant. She knew.

“Yes, he knows about you.”

“Oh. Okay.” Pam was drooping so I hooked an arm under one of hers.

“Time for bed, babes.” I helped her up and to her room. I gave her a hand changing into her nightgown. We were past any shyness with respect to her body.

“You like him, Pen?” She looked up at me from her pillow, my beautiful, gorgeous girl, worrying about her sister’s non-existent love life.

“Yeah, he’s a good guy.” I smoothed the hair off her forehead.

“What’s his name?”

I walked to the door and hit the light switch. “Ian.”

I sat in the hospital room chair and watched my sister sleep. Most nights I slept there too. The clinical trial was being held in a hospital on the other side of the city, two hours by bus and I had sold our car a long time ago. It was easier to spend the night than go home. Emma kept an eye on things. I had finished my two violin commissions before the trial started but the store was closed to the drop-in customer. I couldn’t afford to lose that sporadic business but I couldn’t be away from her either. It had been a hard two weeks. She wasn’t responding well to the treatment.

It was quiet at three a.m. I could hear the nurses chatting at the station down the hall. Pam’s monitor beeped slow and steady, along with her heart. I rubbed my hands over my face. Time to try and get some sleep but I wanted to stay awake just until we were past the deepest part of the night: the time when souls could slip away unless there was someone there to keep a hold of them.

There was a quiet tap at the door and I looked up. “Ian! I mean, Dr. Rusach. What a nice surprise.”

He gave me his slow smile. “‘Ian is fine. I’m not really here, just a figment of your imagination.” He was wearing a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck. It was a fine disguise until I remembered he was actually a medical doctor as well as an academic ‘doctor’. “Well, figment yourself down on a chair. No donuts but we have a few snacks going.” I grabbed a random bag and he shook his head.

“I’m fine, thanks. The nurses tell me you spend a lot of time here.”

“Yeah, it’s been a rough road for Pam so I want to stay close.” I looked at her, sleeping in her bed, dwarfed by the machines around her.

“The trial appears to be going well. Admittedly the double mutations are not responding as quickly as the singles, but they are responding.”

I mock frowned at him. “Should you be telling me this?”

“No, but I think you need to hear it.”

“I do, thanks. Nothing better to do tonight again?” I tried to make my question sound casual.

“I thought checking up on you and your sister a worthy activity. I was hoping to learn more about you two.” He tried to make his answer casual as well but he ruined the effect by letting his eyes slide away.

“Ask away.”

“What do you two do for fun, besides planning trips to places that are grand?”

“I’m trying to get back into shape by rollerblading except I tend to fall down. A lot. A friend of Pam’s made her a kind of tricycle from a child’s bike trailer. She sits in it while I skate along pushing her. We go down to the lake. Do the bike trails there.”

“That must be fun.” He sounded envious.

“It is. At home we watch our favorite movies, ones we’ve seen dozens of times. Pam falls asleep a lot so if it’s a movie she’s already seen, there’s no catching up to do when she wakes up.”

“Sounds efficient. What are some of your favorite movies?”

“
Aliens
,
The Fifth Element
,
Mars Attacks
. Stuff like that.” There, I had just set Pam and me up for the title of Nerd Girls of the Year.

“All sci-fi? No horror or chick flicks?”

“Pam can’t stand horror movies and we’re both bored by angst. We do have a soft spot for documentaries about penguins.”

“Ah but that’s the Morgan Freeman narration, isn’t it?”

“Yeah because he really is God, you know!” I started to laugh and he joined me. A warm spot started blossoming in my chest. Then we woke Pam up.

“Hey, it’s the middle of the night!” She had trouble focusing, something I found the most disturbing of all the symptoms she had developed in the trial.

“Look, Pam. Ian came to visit.” I gestured to him to move forward so she could see him better.

“Good to meet you,” Pam told him. “How come you’re dressed like a doctor?”

“I
am
a doctor,” he told her. “Want to see my stethoscope?”

“Only if you warm it in your hand first.”

“Pam!” I pretended to be shocked but I couldn’t help grinning at how well they got along right off the bat. “Ian and I were talking about our favorite movies. I told him what a wimp you were about horror flicks.”

“Aww, now he won’t respect me!” Her eyes were closing again and she was struggling against the impulse to sleep.

“I do respect you,” Ian said. “I don’t enjoy watching people get hurt in the name of entertainment so it’s not my thing either.”

I listened to them and felt a tension in the core of my body relax. I hadn’t known it was there. I let my eyes drift shut and the next thing I knew, a nurse was tucking a blanket over me.

“What time is it?”

“Six in the morning, honey.”

“Where’s Ian?” I wanted to take that back. His visit was a secret.

“Don’t know, honey. It was just you and your sister when I came on shift an hour ago.”

I had had a chance to talk with Ian and I had fallen asleep. I could only hope Pam had sung my praises to him and extracted a promise for him to visit again. She was fast asleep and I needed to go home and shower. I got black looks from the nurses when I used the hallway patient shower facilities.

“Hey, Pammy. I’m going to take a run home, do a few things. I’ll be back after lunch.” She blinked up at me. Was it my imagination or did she look better?

“I like Ian. He’s a good choice.”

“Um, Pammy, I might have stretched the truth a bit there. He’s actually the head researcher at Alltex. We’re not an item.”

“You will be.” Her eyes drifted shut.

Had she said anything embarrassing to Ian after I conked out? Singing my praises was one thing, revealing I was a psycho stalker chick was another.

I stayed wide-awake in Pam’s room the next night, hoping that Ian would show again. The midnight witching hour passed and then the three a.m. witching hour. Still no Ian. I was surprised at the disappointment I felt. To be truthful, he wasn’t my usual type. Chris had been a surfer boy with a beautiful body and no moral fortitude. Always up for a good time but when the going got tough, Chris got going. Ian was quiet, thoughtful, super-science-nerdy and had a low-key compassion that knocked me back on my heels. Obviously, he didn’t feel the same attraction to me or he would be here tonight.

Pam slept deeply. Her improvement seemed persistent and I allowed the first faint glimmers of hope to take up residence in my psyche. We had lived with the certainty of her death for so long, it was really hard to switch gears. There was a tap on the doorframe and I whipped my head around a little too eagerly. Uncool, Pen.

“Hey, Penny.” Ian looked haggard. He was in civvies, no lab coat or stethoscope tonight.

“Ian, what’s the matter?” I asked standing up in alarm.

“We lost a patient from the single mutation group. I’ve been going over the autopsy results.” He rubbed his face but my attention was on the chill sliding up my backbone.

“The trial?” My voice quavered.

He focused on me and saw my distress. “No! Sorry, didn’t mean to tell you like that. It was an undetected heart condition that was exacerbated by the treatment stress.”

“Oh, okay.” I relaxed a bit. I felt sorry for the family of the deceased patient but at least the other subjects weren’t at risk. I looked at Ian again. Fatigue and stress were predominant.

“Looks like someone needs a hug.” Crap, did that just come out of my mouth? But I meant it. He looked at me, baffled, so I took that as an invitation. I sidled over and wrapped my arms around him. I gave a gentle squeeze and felt his arms come around me. I gave his shoulder blade a circular rub like Mom used to do for me when I had bad dreams. His chin came to rest on my shoulder.