‘You have any trouble getting down here?’ Dr Hughes asked, spreading her napkin on her lap. ‘I heard there was a water main break uptown.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I only had to come across the bridge, from Brooklyn Heights.’
‘Ah.’ She held up a crooked, bony finger. ‘Right. You’re in Brooklyn. For some reason I keep thinking you’re uptown. So many other students are, I guess.’ She leaned forward. ‘So. Let’s talk about your fellowship application. I got everything. It all looks good.’
I blushed. ‘Thanks.’
‘You have one more class you need to take to graduate, right?’
‘It’s just an independent study. I can work on it this summer.’
‘Your essays make sense. Your recommendations, of course, are impeccable. As are your grades. If you want to study genetics, Dublin is perfect right now.’ She laced her fingers together. ‘But there’s a problem. You forgot to submit your personal statement. You read the application, right? You were supposed to include one.’
‘I read it.’ I scratched the back of my elbow, listening to Mrs Claus’s plastic body parts squeak. ‘I just…I didn’t know what to say.’
‘And so you just didn’t include it at all?’
‘Yeah. Basically.’
‘That’s not like you.’
And it wasn’t, from what she knew of me. For the remainder of her class, I’d aced every single one of her exams. I loved crossing green flowering plants with white flowering ones and knowing exactly what I would get. I loved locating a mutation on a gene or an indication that a certain gene to code a protein-making enzyme was present.
‘Do you want to do this?’ Dr Hughes inspected me carefully.
‘I do. I think I do. It’s just…I don’t know. When I see the words, Write a personal statement, I just freeze up.’
She dumped some sugar into her coffee, which had magically appeared before her. ‘It’s a simple paragraph. Why you like genetics. Why you want to study this before going to medical school. Why this field speaks to you. We’re not talking Shakespeare.’
I sighed.
‘Perhaps you don’t feel comfortable with making a big change like this right now.’
‘No, I am,’ I answered slowly. Then, realization wound around me. She knew.
I knew this, of course. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
When she leaned forward again, the vinyl booth made a helpless, merciful squeak. ‘I heard about your father. The type of treatment he’s going to try.’
I swallowed very slowly.
‘Leon mentioned it to us,’ she added.
Leon was my father’s partner at the lab. And Dr Hughes’s husband was Leon’s best friend. That first time Dr Hughes and I met here, she’d asked me if I had any other doctors in my family, and I said my father was a medical researcher, studying melanoma. She let out a note of delight and said what a coincidence; a friend of her husband’s did the exact same thing. And then I laughed. ‘It’s not Leon Kimball, is it?’ Dr Hughes’s mouth parted and she said, ‘Yes, how do you know that?’ And it went from there. Afterward, my father told me he had met Dr Hughes and her husband plenty of times-she often came into the office to say hello to Leon, to pick him up so they all could go to lunch. ‘Why didn’t you mention it?’ I asked my father angrily. ‘Hadn’t Leon told you that his best friend’s wife teaches in the biology department at NYU? Isn’t that something that would stick out in your mind, considering I’m a biology major?’ My father had blankly shrugged, telling me not to be so hard on him, that he had a lot on his mind.
‘It starts tomorrow, doesn’t it?’ Dr Hughes asked gently.
‘That’s right,’ I answered quietly.
‘Does it make you uncomfortable that we’re talking about this?’
‘It’s fine.’ Pickle, I thought-a little sadly.
‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s at…home. But, I mean, he’s okay. Really.’
‘It’s just that, I want you to know what you’d be getting yourself into. This is an amazing opportunity for you, if you want it. But it’s a lot of money we’re giving away, the stipend and the travel and the tuition. Please don’t think I’m trying to pressure you, or that I’m not sensitive to the magnitude of your situation right now, but there are other students who could use the scholarship if you’re not interested. And it does mean you’d be in another country for quite a while. It would probably be good to know, one way or another, which way you’re leaning.’
I’d known this whole time she could only sponsor one student. There were so many other people begging for this kind of attention.