A TEST OF SURVIVAL

C H A P T E R 1  (continued)
Gus appeared in the doorway of his office, several yards from Dani. Potato chip crumbs littered his shirt front. He lingered until Dani ceased work and leaned stiff-armed on the drug cart, waiting. Twice now he had loomed in this way.

“That’s a fresh lot?” Gus said. “Did you ….?”

“Yes,” Dani said. “They’re three months old.” A flush of heat suffused her neck and cheeks. She crossed to the spectrophotometer, pulled open a drawer underneath it, and walked the drug log of quality-control scans to Gus. The clipboard slipped from her fingers and clattered on the tile, papers scattering. She gathered them up and thrust them at him. “Lot 76. Ninety-five percent.”

When he actually shuffled through the papers, Dani closed the freezer door, walked past him and waited in his office, out of earshot of the two technicians.

He showed up shamefaced with his hands raised: “I know, I know.”

Dani wound her arms tightly around her waist inside the lab coat. “Then let me work. You’re driving me crazy.”

Gus jammed his hands in his pockets. “It’s Leo. This isn’t intellectual, Dani.”

She went back to pulling drugs. Francine and Roberto had picked up on the tension and the three of them worked on without their usual chatter. Dani wheeled her drug bullets to the safety cabinet and fanned them out on the stainless steel surface. She settled onto her chair, a supply cart to her right and the biohazards waste container between her position and Roberto’s. The silence became gradually more natural as she and Roberto were absorbed in the systematized labeling of their racks, checking and double-checking the drug list against the specified locations in the 96-well culture plates, positioning and repositioning tubes to receive first the cell cultures and then the single or combination drugs. Two sounds dominated: the low, omnipresent whoosh of the lab hood maintaining a sterile air barrier between the techs and the drugs, and the click click click of pipettes making their withdrawals and deposits.

Errors of concentration or carelessness were not tolerated in the Varden-Ephraim Cancer Testing Lab. Of the three technicians, Dani was the least likely to make a mistake. She was a specialist in Gus’s ex vivo assay, she documented every quality measure he wanted, she painstakingly trained and retrained the employees.

This business with Gretchen Judd’s cancer had stirred up old insecurities in Dani and had preoccupied Gus as well, ever since the phone call to their home a week earlier. A boy’s voice, nervous and gruff, asked for Dr. Ephraim. Dani passed Gus the phone with no idea she was connecting son to father. Leo Judd, fourteen years old, had seen Gus infrequently through the years, talked to him reluctantly on the occasional birthday or holiday, and never initiated contact.

My Mom has a bad cancer. I want her to have that test you do. She won’t call you but she’d talk if you called her.

At five p.m., Dani’s and Roberto’s assays were ready for the incubator, where the cancer cells would culture in different drugs for four days. In ninety hours, the dye for Gus Ephraim’s assay would be added to each plate. In ninety-two hours, another stain would be added for the control assay. Then the plates would come out, the techs would prepare the Day Four takedown slides, and they would see. They would see if the esophageal cancer from Los Angeles had surrendered to one or more of the chemo drugs. They would see if the pancreatic cancer from Wisconsin intended to thrive no matter what they threw at it.