A TEST OF SURVIVAL

C H A P T E R 3 (continued)
Gus’s diplomas were stored in a box on lower shelving to the left of the office door. M.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. Ph.D. in Pharmacology.

On the middle shelf stood a small red-framed photo of his son Leo, a sixth-grade school picture showing a sober-faced kid with his father’s stick-out ears and his mother’s high cheekbones and dark eyes. Gretchen Judd’s cousin had sent it to him; it was primarily through letters exchanged on the sly with Alta Tomasini that Gus was linked to Leo’s life. Before the baby was a year old, Gretchen had resumed her maiden name of Judd and married a sometimes-employed respiratory therapist named Dwayne Cooper. The man wanted to adopt Leo, Gus wouldn’t consent, and up went the wall between Gus and his son, brick by brick, through truncated phone calls and thwarted visits and the bland lies that issued forth from Dwayne Cooper’s power seat two thousand miles away. Leo’s at the park. Leo’s asleep. Leo’s at soccer camp. Once, in frustration, Gus called Alta. “He’s a jealous man,” was all Alta would say. “But basically good, Gus. A good parent.” Gus wanted to ask, is Gretchen fighting him on this? But he didn’t. He thought he knew the answer.

By the time Leo was seven or eight, the boy didn’t need anyone’s help maintaining the wall. Gus paid his last strained visit to his son a few months after Dwayne Cooper died in a motorcycle accident. Leo had been ten years old. Gus drove up to Milwaukee from a meeting in Chicago, unannounced and unwelcome. You left on purpose, the boy told him. My real Dad didn’t.

Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, an opus Gus Ephraim no longer heard so much as breathed, had entered its third movement when Gus’s heart and respiration rates shot up. He broke off reading, checked the master drug list for Gretchen’s assay, then picked up the phone and punched Dani’s extension. The cheap office walls trembled as her footsteps pounded nearer and shook again when she flung open the door, banging it against the bookshelves.

Gus let out air, his shoulders slumping.

“Oh, Gus,” Dani said, one hand to her throat. “Nothing? I’m sorry.”

He got to his feet and waved her over. “Take a look. Look at this.”

Dani pushed her glasses into her hair and focused first on the control slide, then on slide sixteen. She did it again.

Irregular islands of pink-stained cancer cells crowded the Day Zero slide of Gretchen Judd’s tumor. But Day Four slide sixteen was an open sea peppered with debris, a few small clumps of surviving cancer cells, and bigger clumps of blue-stained dead ones.

Dani swapped out the slides yet again. “What is this?”

“Cisplatin and gemcitabine.”

“My God. How lovely.”

Guided by intuition and hypothesis, Gus had experimented with two drugs, assuming a mechanism of synergy between them that might deny Gretchen’s cancer cells their capacity to repair damaged DNA. It worked. Now Gus could make a phone call to his ex-wife free of artificial hope.

It was a moment too luminous for speaking. The bells of celebration were clanging in his brain but the circumstances - that this was Gretchen’s life smeared on slide sixteen and Dani studying it – constrained him.