Sensing Light (8 page)

IV

H
ERB CAME HOME TO
find Martin donning his cleats and shin guards. At three o'clock, they met the other Jaguars at Dolores Park. Although team sports had never captured Herb's imagination, soccer had captured Martin's. Herb embraced the opportunity to share his son's passion. The previous summer, he had even spent eight consecutive weekends in a coaching course so the Jaguars could move up to Class III competition.

Once the boys were done with stretching exercises and dribbling drills, Herb split them into squads for scrimmaging. He was pleased to see the defense, where Martin always played, forcing the offense to the sidelines where angling a shot through the goal was difficult. Martin, as sweeper, was the last defender protecting the goalie. Any mistake he made gave the opposition a fifty-fifty chance to score.

Herb watched the offense methodically pass the ball from one side of the field to the other, even backwards, as they attempted to spread the defense apart. A large enough space opened near the goal for the team's best striker to sprint downfield in time to receive a well-placed pass. He was about to take a shot when Martin arrived and booted the ball away.

As the coach, Herb couldn't demonstrate favoritism.

He calmly called out, “Good move, Martin.”

Martin showed no acknowledgement.

Excellent, Herb thought, he doesn't need to revel in his victories.

Next, Herb had the boys do a passing drill, which required no supervision on his part. He sat on a bench and let himself enjoy watching Martin gracefully swivel and feint.

The boys scrimmaged again. This time, the striker made an excellent foot fake. Martin took the bait. His opponent tapped the ball in the other direction, ran past Martin, and was inside the goalie's box before Martin recovered.

Herb had to clench his jaw to keep from laughing.

“Nice touch, Jeremy,” he shouted neutrally and nodded for them to play on.

In the final half hour of practice, Herb had the Jaguars work on their greatest weakness, defending against corner kicks. It was just a matter of communication, he believed. In the chaos that ensued as the ball sailed from the corner of the field into a crowd of boys jockeying for position directly in front of the goal, leadership was essential. Someone had to see that every offensive player was covered. This had to be the sweeper's responsibility.

But kick after kick, the defenders invariably clustered around the best strikers, leaving others free to score when the ball came their way. Martin repeatedly lost the boy he should have been guarding and doubled up against a player who was already covered. He paid no attention to what the other defenders were doing.

After the offense scored on three successive corner kicks, Herb raised his hands in frustration.

“What are you
doing
, Martin?” he yelled.

The boys looked back and forth between father and son. Martin stood with his arms crossed, waiting for play to resume. He stubbornly ignored his father's question.

Herb recognized his error, but it was too late to retract.

“Scrimmage,” he called wearily and rolled the ball into the middle of the field.

All Herb wanted to be was a better, or at least a kinder, father than his own had been. When Martin was born, he had been confident of his ability to do that. Now he wasn't so sure.

By five, the boys could no longer see the ball in the growing darkness. Herb ended practice with three short whistles and dolefully picked up the orange cones he had set down to mark boundaries on the park lawn.

It was an unseasonably warm evening, and Cecilia asked Herb to go for a walk with her after dinner. Still regretting his lapse on the soccer field, he told Cecilia about it. She was sympathetic but had no advice.

“It's inevitable, honey,” she said. “Sooner or later, he needs to separate from you.”

“At ten? Isn't that a little early?”

“It's uglier when it happens in the teens. Think about my sisters' kids.”

Herb had to assume she was right. Cecilia and Robbie Cohen, his best friend since college, were the only people with whom he had ever substantively discussed parenting. He trusted their judgment more than his own. My God, he thought, what if I had to do this alone? What could be harder than that?

V

G
WEN LEFT THE HOSPITAL
at noon and met Rick and Eva at a nearby BART station. They had lunch at a taqueria Eva chose from the dozens of Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood before driving to Ocean Beach. Now, beneath a hazy, late afternoon sky that seemed finger-painted blue, the three padded barefoot on the sand. An angry surf hurled bright wet sparks at them. Gwen and Rick, holding hands, trailed behind Eva.

The previous weekend, Gwen had cut her hair short. It had darkened to dusty brown in the last year. She expected it might turn gray by the time she turned forty. Since the prospect of coloring her hair was unappealing, she hoped a shorter length would make the transition less noticeable. Her face, creamy white all summer and fall, finally had a tan after three consecutive weekends in the sun.

These free weekends, once morning rounds ended, were the best part of being on a consult elective. Not that she was complaining. Residency wasn't nearly as difficult as she had anticipated. Despite the long hours and sleep deprivation, it felt more like a booster shot than boot camp. Two weeks into her first ward rotation, managing medical problems she almost never saw in the Haight had become routine. Within months, her clinical judgment, acquired over years of outpatient practice, and her life experience of child-rearing and divorce had made her a sage among the other junior residents.

She watched pink seep into the western sky. Advancing shreds of stratus clouds absorbed the pigment. Turning seaward, she bumped into Rick. Eight inches taller than her and still thin with a faint ripple of muscle, he grabbed her to keep them both from tripping. Their eyes met. Rick brushed his lips against hers. He looked southward. They resumed walking.

How lovely, she thought. He can be present and not say anything. How unlike Daniel who always became ominously opaque whenever he did stop talking. Cut it out, she ordered herself. I'm over that marriage.

Eva, now as tall as Gwen, had been tiptoeing on an invisible, curving tightrope just beyond the tide's reach. Skinny and angular, she high-stepped into the shallows, a black-wigged flamingo. Bored with that game, she ran to Rick and tagged him.

“You're it,” she cried.

“Good thing I didn't jog this morning,” he said to Gwen.

While Eva and Rick chased each other in and out of the tide, Gwen brooded over the nasty argument she had with her daughter the night before. Eva wanted her own telephone and her own private number. She had picked out the model—a Princess handset, the same one that came on the market when Gwen was her age. Eva had a precise color in mind to express her true persona—coral green. The idea of a pre-teen having her own phone made Gwen uncomfortable. She wouldn't know how late Eva stayed up at night gossiping. The privilege might spoil her. Gwen certainly didn't have her own phone as a teenager. Too late, after escalation, Gwen remembered the mantra her best friend, Nan, had told her to recite in such situations.

“She's twelve, impulsive, passionate, unsure of herself—a toxic combination—but completely normal, age-appropriate behavior. She's twelve, impulsive…..”

The tension had soon evaporated, like a passing thunderstorm. Still, Gwen worried this might be the harbinger of bigger trouble to come.

Eva came up to her, panting.

“You know, Mom,” she said, “It would be a lot more fun if you joined us. If that's not too much for you.”

Gwen gritted her teeth and smiled congenially. Tag was not too much for her. She could still play three sets of tennis with a speed, skill, and ferocity few twelve year olds could match—surely not Eva who had neither the drive nor the athleticism requisite for competitive sports. Eva must be parroting some insufferable character from a television show. Her patronizing attitude made Gwen reconsider their lunch at the greasy spoon. She hadn't tried to talk Eva into going elsewhere. She hadn't even grumbled about it. Afterwards, Eva
showed no gratitude. Gwen was luxuriating in the languid stroll, basking in unobstructed views of ocean and sky. She didn't feel like running around.

“You know, Eva,” Gwen said, “I'd be more inclined to play if you asked me in a nicer way.”

Eva's eyes narrowed to slits.

When Rick arrived, Eva said, “Mom doesn't want to play with us. She has too many important things to think about.”

“I didn't say that!” Gwen protested.

Eva was standing between Gwen and Rick. She turned to Gwen with a malicious grin then to Rick with doe-eyed innocence.

Rick kicked the sand and looked at his watch.

“Let's turn around,” he said. “I think Billy and Laura will be at the fire pit by the time we get there,
with their golden retrievers
.”

Eva had forgotten what Rick's friends were bringing to the bonfire picnic. She raced off, screaming, “Dogs!”

“Maybe I should get her a dog,” said Gwen. “Would that help?”

“I'm not going to be feeding a dog and picking up its poop every day. Are you?”

“She's old enough to take care of a pet.”

“I think you've got those developmental milestones confused.”

“OK, but if I gave her dog, then maybe she'd get it. I'm her mother, I love her unconditionally. We don't need to be at war. And she'd grow into the responsibility.”

“That's right, and while you're harping, ‘Did you walk the dog? Did you feed the dog?' she'll be resenting all those helpful reminders.”

Gwen giggled.

Rick was relieved to see she wasn't serious about the idea.

“Thanks,” she said and touched his cheek.

They held hands again and followed Eva.

As Rick watched the waves break, his mind wandered to surfing, his main avocation prior to running marathons, which led him to think about his younger sister. Years ago, he had bought her an airplane ticket to California as a college graduation gift and taught her how to surf.

Now she's a partner in a Chicago law firm, he thought with a mix of irony and self-pity, while I'm four years older and still teaching middle school. Hold on, what's with the “while” and “still” in that sentence? Like what I do isn't as important as what she does?

Rick was proud of his little sister's success in a world dominated by white men, though it had ceased to surprise him. He saw what was happening in his own classroom. The boys were so much more vulnerable and inept than the girls. Gwen had told him she'd been an aberration on graduating from medical school in 1969, but now fifty percent of new doctors were women. He had no doubt that in another generation a majority of the educated elite would be women.

Five minutes after the sun's last ruby drop disappeared over the horizon, they were at a campfire being warmed by driftwood flames. A pair of golden retrievers looked expectantly at Eva. They leapt joyfully when she picked up a stick. Eva ran off with the dogs, and the adults flew into conversation about local ethnic restaurants and California nouvelle cuisine. Gwen wasn't shy. She spoke more than Rick did.

He was proud of her charm and confidence. A bonus, he had told a friend, in a beautiful woman who already blows me away by loving passionately without being needy. If she wants, I'll marry her. Yet Gwen had never brought up the subject. He guessed she had even less trust in the institution than he did. Rick had been in long-term relationships before. He had considered marriage once, ambivalently. But if Gwen were to push, he would commit in a second.

A bottle of brandy was circulating. Gwen took a sip and gave it to Rick. A drop remained on her lower lip. Rick leaned over to lick it off.

VI

M
ARCO HAD BEGUN RUNNING
polyacrylamide gels as soon as Kevin left. He turned on an electrical current to separate the proteins in his experimental brews and prepared the equipment and reagents for his next steps. Two hours later, he switched off the current, peeled the slippery panels from their glass plates, bound them to nitrocellulose paper, and immersed the gels in electrophoresis trays. After another two hours, he bathed the blotted sheets in a series of monoclonal antibody solutions and washes. Six hours after starting, he was ready to add substrate for the final stain. Marco traversed the great laboratory, passing floor-to-ceiling windows, to a row of ventilated hoods. His only spectators were the redwood trees just outside, swaying in the breeze.

He envisaged blue bands about to emerge. Up to now he had been too subsumed with each step of the experiment—measuring reagents, manipulating gels, carefully timing each incubation and wash—to imagine how the blots would look. As he poured in substrate, the imminence of having evidence he could photograph and send to the journal editor thrilled him. He concentrated on the undulating sheets of paper, on
where
he wanted to see blue bands appear.

As he lifted each tray onto a rocker, he willed the bands to be in the locations he had predicted, visible proof of his hypothesis. Marco was on a roll. All the nitrocellulose sheets, so fragile they would crack like an egg shell if mishandled slightly, had peeled off the gels without a single tear. The photos would be impressive.

He saw the positive control columns first.

Perfecto
, he thought, as a thick smudge flowered where his control protein ought to be. The negative control strip was pure white. Perfect again. Columns of blue bands appeared.
Exactamente
.

He was satisfied until he noticed the bands increased in size from left to right, not from right to left as he had expected.

“What? No! This can't be. Unbelievable! Did I reverse the enzyme concentrations?
Chíngame, que pendejo soy
!”

Kevin arrived to find him crouched over a lab bench, head in hands.

“Uh-oh. What happened?”

“I don't know. It's all wrong, and I can't figure out why. I remember exactly what I did yesterday when I loaded the gels. The tubes are still in the correct order. How I could have made a mistake?”

“What's the problem?”

“The replicates with more enzyme shows
less
protein on the blot, not more.”

Kevin gave him a sympathetic pat.

“What did I do wrong?” Marco implored.

“You're asking me?”

“Even a contaminant can't explain these results. Maybe, if the enzyme I used acted on another molecule in the cell…which could have blocked the reaction…No, that's ridiculous.”

Kevin had no idea what enzyme or blocking molecule Marco was talking about but felt he had to say something.

“Why's it ridiculous?”

Marco gave him a dismissive frown. Then his eyes opened wide.

“
Sangre de Cristo
!” he shouted. “Of course, the new pathway the Cambridge people just found, it must be here, too. That's the only possible explanation. You're a genius, Kevin!”

Baffled and delighted, Kevin asked, “Can you tell me what we just discovered?”

In a cozy French restaurant on Russian Hill, Marco was elaborating, for the second time that evening, on what a breakthrough this was. His research focused on stem cells obtained from the earliest stage of a developing mouse embryo. A stem cell could proliferate indefinitely, and its progeny could mature into all the different kinds of cells that constitute an adult mouse—gut,
brain, bone, skin, muscle, and more. In theory, a living, reproducing mouse could be grown from a single stem cell
after
Marco and his colleagues had altered its DNA. If feasible, such a technique could advance at warp speed the understanding of how genetics and disease interact.

Marco's unexpected results suggested a new way for scientists to stimulate stem cell growth. He knew precisely what molecules to look for now in order to explain his findings. Before the entrees were served, he had envisioned a set of experiments to confirm his new hypothesis as well as assure his paper's acceptance by the journal. Although Kevin was excited and amused, the terminology of cutting-edge cellular biology was hard to follow. Keeping up his end of the conversation was becoming tedious. He was glad to see Marco turn his attention from science to food.

Marco made quick work of his scallops. As a waitress emptied the rest of a Napa Valley chardonnay into his glass, he reached under her arm to pick at Kevin's cassoulet. Kevin thought ruefully about Marco's daily six mile run—the obvious reason he could eat voraciously and not gain weight. Kevin carefully watched his own diet, rarely had more than one drink, consistently took in fewer calories than Marco, yet still was twenty pounds overweight. Marco had been urging him for months to run with him, promising that he'd slow down to an easy jog. But Kevin hated exercise as much as he hated professional sports. Both were associated with his father's auto repair shop—the heavy engine blocks and transmissions he had lugged around, the radio station always tuned to a game, the frozen bolts and scraped knuckles, the omnipresent black grease.

“I'm…what's the term? I know, thunderstruck,” said Marco. “That's an English word? It sounds German. I'm thunderstruck you can get food this good in America. And it's not even expensive.”

“This isn't cheap,” Kevin remonstrated.

“Don't worry, sweetheart. My treat. It's the least we can do for ourselves after our vacation day was so
abruptly interrupted
. See what I mean. That sounds German too.”

“I'm sorry, baby.”

“Don't be sorry. You were a hero today. Didn't Herb say how much it will help the cause?”

Marco pumped his fist and leaned back to study Kevin. He held up his wineglass.

“I'm so proud of you.”

Kevin laughed self-consciously.

He caressed Marco's thigh under the table and asked, “Is this what…what being in love is?”

“Oh yes,” Marco answered, his eyes sparkling, “I think so.
De veras
, I do.”