There was a woman in the room, a grown-up. Max thought she was very pretty, even glamorous.
“This is Miss Pretaskaya,” he said, “from the Moscow Polytechnic University.”
“Please,” she said, extending her hand, “call me Luba.”
Max shook her hand and sat down.
Luba explained how his footage from The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon was the talk of the film program at the school, and asked whether Max would have any interest in a scholarship to study film and television when he completed high school.
Max fainted.
When he came to, he accepted. He would go on to be one of the most successful directors in the history of Russian cinema.
***
Jackie Stone went on with her life. A day never passed without some reminder of her dad—a song on the radio, a reference to a card game they used to play, just an undefined scent on the wind. As time wore on, the memories blurred and the pain of loss eased. That’s not what Jackie wanted—she wanted to feel hurt, anger, and sadness for the rest of her days. She thought it was the only way to honor her father. But that wasn’t how the world worked; while time doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds, it does provide just enough scar tissue to allow people to move on.
After the ordeal of her trial was over, Deirdre asked Jackie if she could have anything, what would it be. “The only good things that happened in the last year are because of you, sweetheart,” Deirdre had told her. “Tell me what you want.”
It didn’t take Jackie long to answer.
Three months later, after their visas had been issued and processed, Max and his mother crossed the security barrier at the airport in Portland, Oregon, and into the terminal. Max walked right up to Jackie, who was trying to look around him for the boy whose photo she had so often seen online.
“Solnyshko,” he said. Jackie was startled; it took a second to focus her attention on the boy standing in front of her. A bit overweight, unruly hair, a complexion like the surface of the moon.
“Max?” she asked.
“Da.” His answer was one of resignation. “I did not know how to say to you that I am not boy in picture.”
Jackie started to laugh, and Max hung his head in shame. He was taken aback when Jackie threw her arms around him in a hug that would have made a Russian bear proud.
“I am not understanding,” he muttered into her shoulder.
“Oh, Max, I am just so happy to see you.”
The two teens spent a week together touring every part of Portland, and even drove to Seattle for a day. They held hands, but they never kissed. It just didn’t feel right to either one of them.
When Jackie bade him good-bye at the airport, they both promised to stay in touch and to meet again.
It was a promise they would keep many times throughout the course of their lives.
Jackie followed in her father’s footsteps. She majored in public policy at Hood River State College and pursued a career in politics.
She would visit her father’s grave every year on the anniversary of his death. For a while, Megan and Deirdre came with her, but after a couple of years, they lost the impetus. Jackie never stopped going, and never forgot her father. He was with her, always.
***
While the high-grade glioblastoma multiforme had no progeny in the traditional sense, its seed had been planted in Megan and Jackie Stone. It was there in the form of a slight but identical variation in each of the girls’ DNA. It was a marker waiting to be noticed. The hammer on a pistol, waiting for a trigger.
But not all markers are noticed, not all triggers pulled. It would be many, many years before either girl would find out whether her own dormant Glio would awake.
But those are stories for another time.
Acknowledgments
This book was a long time in the making. The story went through several iterations before it ever reached a publisher’s desk. In the first draft, Glio wasn’t even anthropomorphized … he was just a brain tumor.
I played, I tweaked, I wrote, and I rewrote. And along the way a tribe of friends and family provided invaluable feedback. I offer my heartfelt thanks to the following early readers of the manuscript: All one hundred students at the 2014 Denver Publishing Institute, Bob Almassy, Carol Almassy, Bobbi Gilligan, Tom “71” Gilligan, Carl Lennertz, Tess Murch, and Matt Strollo.
Thanks to my bookseller friends Janet Geddis, Paul Hanson, Allison Hill, and Christine Onorati for reading the early manuscript, and for their never-ending support.