The Husband Hour(10)
Whatever shortcomings Lauren had, she knew her sister would fill the gap. And vice versa. When Stephanie was flailing in ninth-grade math—tripped up by quadratic functions in algebra—Lauren, a year younger, tutored her. Stephanie might have been the blonde, but Lauren was the golden child—well behaved, smart, caring.
Stephanie had set the course of their school years when, struggling academically, she’d fought her parents when they tried to switch her from public middle school to private school. Why didn’t she want to go to private school? “Because it sucks,” she told Lauren. And so when Lauren finished elementary school, she too chose public school.
“Baldwin Academy is so much calmer. More intimate. It’s a better fit for you,” her mother had argued. This was a time when Lauren was struggling a bit with her weight. The public-school kids could be cruel. Of course, private-school girls were no better. But when parents pay twenty grand a year, the administration has an incentive to enforce some semblance of decorum. Lauren didn’t care; she was going to school with her big sister.
She was less confident that she’d made the right decision when high school loomed. By that time, Lauren had grown to her full height, five foot six. Her high cheekbones and brown eyes had won her comparisons to the lead actress on her favorite show, Alias. She was finally pretty. Nowhere near Stephanie’s loud, flagrant beauty, but pretty enough. Still, starting high school was scary, and starting high school at a big place like Lower Merion was terrifying. So many things could go wrong. You could end up anonymous—a loser. You could end up harassed—tormented on the notorious Freshman Day, the first Friday the thirteenth of the school year. Rumor had it that some girls got their entire ponytails cut off, and some boys were stuffed into lockers.
On the first day, some of Lauren’s friends’ older siblings pretended they didn’t know the younger ones, warned them not to even acknowledge them in the halls. But the scheduling gods had smiled on Lauren and given her the same lunch period as Stephanie. Stephanie, her long blond hair loose and lustrous, her perfect body poured into jeans and a ribbed tank top from a recent shopping spree at Urban Outfitters, had put her arm around Lauren and taken her from table to table.
“This is my baby sister,” Steph had said, first to the sophomores, then to a few tables of juniors. “Don’t fuck with her.”
“Hey, baby sister,” a few boys had said mockingly.
But no one fucked with her. Not once; not ever.
As teenagers, the sisters never had a reason to be competitive. They didn’t want the same things.
At least, not until Rory.
Now, Stephanie pushed her chair away from the table.
“Where are you going?” her mother said.
“Out.”
Stephanie stormed off. Lauren sighed. Drama queen.
“Aunt Lauren?” Ethan said, appearing in the doorway of the dining room. He had a bottle of water in one hand and the package of cinnamon buns from Casel’s in the other. “Can we open these now?”
“We’re still eating dinner, hon,” Beth said.
Ethan looked around the table. “Where’s Mom?”
Lauren and her mother exchanged a look.
“Sure,” Lauren said. “We can open that now.”
Matt slipped into a seat near the back of the NYU auditorium. There were a few open spots closer to the front of the room, but Matt always felt more comfortable near an exit route. Maybe this was a result of his early years working in undesirable locations, or maybe it was just a by-product of his natural impatience.
“Our thinking on head injury is evolving, and the way we research these injuries is changing.”
The irony was not lost on Matt that after avoiding science as much as possible for his entire academic life (there had been one particularly miserable eight weeks of summer-school chemistry), he now spent his free time sitting in dark lecture halls learning about it. His e-mail in-box was filled with event alerts for brain-injury panels the way it had once been stuffed with announcements of Red Hot Chili Peppers tour dates.
“Today, we’re challenging two core beliefs: First, that brain disease is caused by only those severe hits that result in concussions and, second, that brain injury is due to blows that cause the brain to bounce around inside the skull. That theory is incomplete.”
He’d been looking forward to this talk, a public lecture given by a visiting professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, for weeks. He’d requested an interview, but no luck. And considering the way things had gone with Craig Mason last week, it was just as well. American Hero was on pause. Maybe permanently this time.
“We believe long-term brain damage can result from the accumulation of minor blows. And we believe the real damage happens deeper inside the brain than previously thought and that this is a result of fibers within the white matter twisting after impact. Given these two things, sports helmets as they are currently designed do not protect players from concussions and the resulting long-term brain disease.”
The doctor introduced a bioengineer from the Camarillo Lab at Stanford. He’d developed a mouth guard that helped track the force of injury in football players.
“If you look at this screen, you’ll see the g-forces of ten hits,” the bioengineer said. Matt hated charts. He glanced down at the program he’d been handed at the entrance and flipped to the back. The Stanford study thanked a list of donors. Matt recognized many of the names, all the usual suspects in the arena of traumatic brain injury. The few he didn’t recognize, he circled now with a Sharpie. He never knew where he’d find an important lead. At one name toward the bottom, his hand froze. The Polaris Foundation.