“I got it!” yelled Jacky from the hallway.
The rush of the elevator sent a wave of nausea through him. He slid on his sunglasses and tried to breathe deeply, resting his head against the cool steel of the walls as they stopped at floors 24, now 19, now 11 … God, he was getting old. When he was Cleo’s age, he’d been able to stay out all night before work, even squeezing in time for the gym at lunch. Now, if he hadn’t known he was hungover, he would have thought he was dying.
He and Anders had downed a few more beers and finished the highlights, which ended on a high note with a gorgeous goal from twenty-five yards out. The celebratory spirit carried Frank all the way to the basement bar of a restaurant downtown, where Anders knew someone doing something with some magazine. He was downstairs at the bar, the music pulsing around him, and Anders was passing him a shot. Then he was talking to the DJ and buying another round for him, for Anders, for a guy wearing a bolo tie, for anyone. He was in the bathroom cutting lines on the sink with two girls both called Sara who thought everything he said was hilarious. He was on the dance floor again and a song he knew was playing and he was feeling fine, fine, fine. He was crushed in a cab with five other people going to he wasn’t sure where. There’s a party somewhere. Find it. Then he was in his hallway, standing in front of his apartment door, trying to work out how to get the key into the lock when there was one hole, three keys, and he was seeing double.
When Frank finally managed to open the door, he’d found Cleo sitting in the darkness, staring at the front door. The only concession she made to his entrance was to close her eyes against the bar of yellow light from the hallway that fell across her face. The thought of her silently listening to him scrabble to get the keys in the lock sent a pulse of humiliation through him. He closed the door behind him with pointless care, as though still trying not to wake her. When he turned, her stare was so direct it startled him. Why do you do this to yourself?
The truth was, he had no more idea why he drank than why his heart pumped blood or his lungs absorbed oxygen. It just happened. There was no language to explain that, so he had simply stepped around her, leaving her sitting in the dark, and fallen blindly into bed. When he woke up that morning, she was already gone.
In the taxi on the way to the hospital Frank rolled down the window, trying to cool down, and took out his phone. He sat with his thumb hovering over Cleo’s contact for five blocks. When he finally did call, asking her to come meet him there, nothing in her tone of voice revealed either warmth or coolness. Listening to her was like trying to test the temperature of bathwater with biohazard gloves on.
Frank made his way up to the radiology department through the steel swinging doors and found Zoe curled in the waiting area, flicking dispassionately through the New Yorker. She was wearing her usual nouveau bohemian attire of a tiny leopard-print dress, espadrilles, and giant hoop earrings. A passing internist did a double take as Zoe unfolded her legs from beneath her. Frank resisted the urge, as he always did, to bark at her to cover up. He was not her father, after all.
“You’re here!” Zoe leaped from the sofa and launched herself onto Frank for a hug. Her bracelets jangled around his ears.
“You okay?” he asked, patting her shoulders, her face, her hair. “Not hurt?”
Zoe smiled. “Yeah, I’m all right. Better now you’re here.”
“Cleo’s coming too.”
Zoe’s nostrils flared in a familiar motion of frustration. She had an open, leonine face and bronze-flecked eyes that had a light of their own. Her beauty was a mild source of concern for Frank, stemming from an inchoate sense that every really attractive woman he knew was secretly deeply unhappy.
“Why is she coming?”
“Because she’s family now,” he said. “Don’t be like that, Zo.”
“Whatever,” said Zoe.
Frank was baffled by Zoe’s hostility toward Cleo. It had seemed a given to him that she would adore having Cleo as an older sister, especially as the two women were so similar: opinionated, creative, and youthfully, irrepressibly irreverent. Zoe was probably just intimidated; Frank knew she’d get over it and love Cleo soon enough. Everyone else did.
Zoe threw herself back onto the waiting room chair and stared dolefully ahead, occasionally emitting a dramatic sigh. Moments later a nurse with floppy brown hair appeared beside them, clutching a clipboard.
“Well, you seem recovered,” he said.
“This is my big brother,” said Zoe, tilting her chin toward Frank.
Frank saw the familiar flicker of surprise that crossed the nurse’s face. He had been expecting a caramel-skinned brother brother, not a bespectacled, vaguely Jewish-looking white guy.
“Frank, will you ask them why I have to do this stupid test?” Zoe whined.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get all the information,” said Frank, checking his phone to see if Cleo had texted how far away she was. “I’m sure it’s the best thing for you.”
“It is.” The nurse nodded eagerly. “It’s called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and it allows us to see the activity in your brain using electrodes placed around the head. We map it on a computer, and then we will hopefully be able to figure out what’s causing your seizures.”
“They have to put fucking glue in my hair,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” the nurse said with a look of such genuine concern that Frank wondered how long he could possibly last in this job. “We use a pretty strong adhesive on the scalp to make sure the electrodes stay put. But it comes out in a couple of washes, or so I’ve heard from other patients.”
“Yeah, white patients maybe,” said Zoe, shaking her head of thick curls. “Do you have any idea how hard this is to maintain?”
Frank put his arm around her narrow shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Is that really the only way?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s another way,” said the nurse brightly, handing him the clipboard. “We just don’t know it yet.”
By the time Cleo arrived, Zoe was settled on a hospital bed like a supine Medusa, a dozen electrodes sprouting in coils from her head. The nurse had used something called an abrasion gel to exfoliate her scalp before attaching the discs, a process that looked to Frank about as comfortable as having your skull massaged by a belt sander. Zoe had gripped his hand through the whole process, her face flickering from resignation to pure rage.