It's Complicated (39 page)

“I picked up on that,” Darla said. Josie could imagine the tongue roll, how Darla would mug, her eyebrows lifting in a goofy face. God, she missed her. Maybe this was the chance to get her out here. Finally. Aunt Cathy didn’t need nearly as much help as Darla claimed she needed. Fear stopped Darla from even visiting Boston.

“Are they being assholes?” she said, coldly. “Because if you need me to—”

“What? What are you going to do, Josie? You’re a hundred pounds soaking wet. You gonna go and raspberry them to death? Shake your finger in their faces extra hard?”

Oh, great.
As if Josie weren’t already teeming with insecurity. A wave of protectiveness rose up in her nonetheless, pushed through by a sense of indignation that these two metro-west Boston spoiled college boys might be hurting Darla.

“Fair enough,” she said. What she wanted to say was something devastatingly visceral, but this wasn’t about her. It was about Darla. Her voice softened. “So, what’s really going on?”

“Well, you knew I already had a fangirl crush on Trevor, so the problem is that now that I’ve spent most of the past twenty-four hours with him, I don’t want to let him go.”

Aha.
An opening. “So don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t let him get away. Come to Boston. Live with me here in Cambridge.”

“You know I can’t do that.”
I know that’s bullshit
, Josie thought. Deep breath, and then—

“Your mama’s fine,” she said, soothingly. “You can come out here. You can go on, Darla. You can move on.”

“I don’t wanna talk about that.”

“Well, I do,” Josie insisted. “And now you have a place to live, you have a guy—”

“Two guys.” Darla’s words hung in the air like a giant water balloon about to crash into Josie’s face, Matrix-style.

“Two guys? You fucked them both?” Was this some trend Josie was missing out on? First Laura, and now Darla? Had
Cosmo
come out with an issue on threesomes?

“No… no,” Darla said, stumbling. “Look, it’s complicated.”

“It’s
always
complicated,” Josie shot back. If she heard that phrase one more time…and now it was pouring out of her own mouth.

“No, actually, it’s not. My life’s pretty fuckin’ simple, Josie. I go to my gas station job, I help Mama with her sugars and I try to find somebody to spend time with who doesn’t think that
Killer Karaoke
is the height of American culture. Other than that, I don’t have a complicated life and now, suddenly, in twenty-four hours it’s become more twisted and more confusing than anything else in my entire life probably since I was four.”

Zing!
An arrow between the eyes couldn’t have hurt—or halted her—more. Forcing a deep breath, she inhaled until her belly filled, distending beyond her waistband, and then deflating, a forced relaxation that she felt in her bones. Good.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It sounds like whatever you’re going through, it’s pretty big.”

“Yup…uh, yes, ma’am.”

“How can I help?”

“Tell me what to do.” Darla laughed, the sound wild and boisterous. “I don’t want Trevor to leave—Joe’s about to take him away. Uncle Mike’s gonna fix his car.”

“Joe’s car is broken?”

“Yeah, he got here and then came into my little purple passion place—”

“Your purple
what
?” Was that code for drugs? Or some hotel nearby that rented by the hour? Or had something on her body gone purple with disease? Josie wished she could have been there more for Darla these past years. This call was clearly a cry for help.

“Oh, never mind.” A long sigh told Josie Darla was as frustrated as she was. Whatever words were flying between the two of them didn’t connect easily to what was going on beneath the surface.

“If you’ve got a place on your body that’s turning purple from passion, Darla, then there are medications for that.”

“It’s not like that.”

“
Ookaaayyy
.” Even the cat ran off this time, spooked by Josie’s tone, her non-phone hand gesturing as if possessed. Josie’s smart mouth was running dangerously close to ripping Darla a new one.

“I don’t want Trevor to leave and Joe’s an asshole but he’s a really, really,
really
attractive asshole and I just…” A long sigh. “I guess it’s all on me, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Josie said. “It’s all on you. I can’t really help you. I’m here to listen, I’m here to give you whatever advice I can, and I’m here to caution you to please, please use condoms.”
Please.

Darla laughed, a belly sound that made Josie’s shoulders drop instantly. “We did. No worries.”

“Okay, good, because the last thing you need is to add a baby to this mix.”

“I know. I know, Josie, I’m watching Jane go through it. Trust me, I do not wanna add a baby to anything right now.”

“Good girl. I’m going to start clearing out my guest room just in case you wanted to, you know, visit. Or uproot your entire life and move in.” A dawning sense of joy filled her at the thought. Rescuing Darla had been her mission years ago; leaving had been wretched. But now…

“Fat chance.”

“Oh, I think the chance is better than you think, Darla,” she said.

Shuffling sounds, and then: “I gotta go, Josie,” Darla said. “Things are about to get even more complicated.”

More
complicated? What could be more complicated than two guys at once? Josie struggled to say the exact right thing, the one statement that would ricochet in Darla’s mind and help her to make the perfect decision—which was, of course, to move to Boston.

“Just remember one thing, Darla,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Whatever you do, it’s your life—not anybody else’s. You get to pick what happens next.”
Click.
Darla was gone.

She knocked softly on the door. She wasn’t nervous—a sense of determination drove her forward, knowing that this was the first of many,
many
arguments that she would be picking on this subject.

“Yes.” Gian looked up. He was balding on top and wore glasses like something out of the 1950s, army-issue thick black rims. His shirt had what looked like a tomato sauce stain on it and it occurred to her for a moment that he could have been Dylan’s incredibly ugly older brother.

“Hey, Gian, I have a question.”

“What’s up?”

“I want to talk about the trial.”

“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t that what we’re here for?”

“I think it’s time to break it.”

“What?” He looked at her in shock and pulled his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his brown eyes, one bloodshot from rubbing, the other quite white and normal looked back at her a bit bugged out. “Why would we break it?”

“I think for ethical reasons we need to. The trends I told you about are deepening.” Barely holding it together, she found her brain taking over.
Quit quit quit quit quit
, it said, racing through what she’d already lost from the trial (
Alex
) and what she was being offered by Laura (
freedom
).

“Deepening,” he said.

“And I’m documenting trends. It’s becoming increasingly evident which patients are on the drug and which are on placebo.”

He studied her carefully. He knew that she knew this stuff inside out. If it had been any other nurse, she knew, he’d have waved her away. “What makes you think that?” he challenged, propping his chin in his elbow, rubbing his upper lip absentmindedly.

She took a seat and pulled out a large folder. “I knew you’d ask that.”

“Of course I’d ask that.”

“That’s right. I knew you’d ask, and so here’s my data.”

“Data. How refreshing—someone who works here who actually believes in the scientific process.”

“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?”

After battling a political nightmare a few years ago where there was a near-corruption scandal involving bribes from a pharmaceutical company to help push a drug along, Gian had been brought in. He had—if nothing else—a strict adherence to policy, squeaky clean, and in that respect, a bit like Alex. In the physical department? He was basically as much like Alex as the Gollum.

She opened the folder and handed it to him. “Look at the response rates; in memory, in reflex, short-term memory, long-term memory, all of these different fields. I keep seeing a growing divide. This folder is the group of people who perform well, or at least stay in place, and this is the group of people who don’t. The metrics just keep showing that the same groups are getting more entrenched in their patterns—and the people who are getting worse are deteriorating at a very alarming rate.”

He put his glasses back on and read over the documents carefully. Josie knew to occupy her mind—if it took forty-five minutes, Gian would sit there and take forty-five minutes. His meticulous nature, right here right now, was playing into exactly what she hoped. She wasn’t setting herself up for disappointment, though. She was resigned to failure this first time, but, if nothing else, she’d plant a seed of doubt in Gian’s mind and get him to at least think about it.

To her surprise, he snapped the folder shut and looked up within about ten minutes. “I see the trend—but we need more data.”

“Are you kidding me?” she said. “That’s not enough?”

“Nope. I’d say we need at least six months more.”

“Six months! Some of these people don’t have six months. Some of these families don’t have six months.”

“I’m not at all unaware of that.”

“Oh, that’s a lovely bureaucratic reply. ‘We’re sorry that your father is slipping into incontinence and doesn’t remember his middle child but we’re not unaware of that,’” she said with a snarky affect. Rage started to fill her, thinking about Ed and his confusion. How he was starting to confuse his daughters for each other and how he’d mistaken her, at one point, for one of them.

“I can’t jeopardize the funding, Josie.”

“Funding?”

“Funding.”

She began to play angrily with the little Dungeons and Dragons figures and a set of magic dice that Gian had sprinkled across the front of his desk.

“Isn’t there an ethics aspect to this for human trials,
Gian
,” she said sharply, “that supersedes funding?” Her anger was coming out and as the tension in the back of her neck got worse it started to blind her, her eyes seeing everything through a lace curtain. Rage roiled up through her veins, spiriting into her fingertips, down her spine into her coccyx, and then dividing in two, running down her legs into her toes.

This was the range of options. If she hadn’t had that conversation with Laura, Dylan, and Mike, if they hadn’t offered her the opportunity to start this crazy business, if she didn’t know
damn well
deep inside herself that she was right and that those people were in jeopardy by being forced to stay in the control group, then she wouldn’t say what she was about to say.

“Look, you can snap at me,” he said dispassionately. “It’s not going to change anything.”

“I know that.” She stood and got right in his face, bending down, mustering as much intimidation as she could, which wasn’t hard given her fury. She shoved her finger right in his face, making him flinch and pull back. “You get this straight Gian—I’m coming in to this office every fucking day until you convene a committee to look over what I’ve gathered. You know as well as I know that there’s a point in any research trial with human beings where if it is a detriment to continue the trial when it’s known, when it’s
known
through data analysis, that the drug is so beneficial that it would be detrimental to keep it from the control group, that the research study can be broken. I am telling you—look at that data because I think it’s time we do that.”

“You’re going to be in my
fucking
office every day if I don’t do what you want?” Oh, now the real Gian was coming out. He had a mouth too. Josie could respect that.

“I’m telling you I’m going to be in your office every fucking day.”

“Then would you mind bringing me a Starbucks?”

“Do you want it poured over your head or your crotch, Gian? Because then yes, I’ll bring you a Starbucks.”

“I’d like it in a cup.” He turned away and began tapping on his computer. “I suppose now I need to make sure I wear one.” He glanced nervously at his crotch. “If you’re done, I’m going to write an email now.”

“All right, Gian. See you tomorrow,” she said, storming out.

It wasn’t until she hit the stairwell that the shakes sank in. She’d left the folder on his desk, but she had five other copies back in her office, ready to deploy every day. There was one thing that her mom had told her over the years. “You are a persistent little shit, aren’t you?” Marlene used to say. Josie had taken pride in it—it's what got her out of Peters, what got her through Daddy’s death, and what got her to make the decision that—
yes
.

Yes.

If she was a persistent little shit then maybe she could persist in letting herself be in charge of her own life.

She slid her phone out of her pocket and dialed Laura’s number.

Josie couldn’t stop thinking about all of the ways that the day had gone wrong. First, she had tried to be clever and helpful, but it turned out all she really could be was stupid. While it didn’t surprise her that all she could manage was sheer stupidity, and a breathtaking level of stupidity at that, it caught her by surprise. Trying to convince Gian was a gesture of good professionalism and compassion, right? She was trying to be helpful, right? And yet, in the end, as was so often true for her, all the good intentions had brought was more chaos.