Dr. Jordaan ran through the procedure details, the science, the finances. “So what do you think? Do you need to talk with the rest of your family, or do you want to go ahead and schedule this?”
David looked at Julie, all hope. She sighed. “We still have to talk it over at home.”
She made the decision and waited for Val to come around. Her own parents had been so paralyzed over choice she’d ended up making decisions for them, too. Things she had to justify in her head, so later she could justify for them when they asked why the power was off (“because it was a choice between the rent and the electricity”) or the cat was gone (“he was sixteen and in pain—I took him to the vet”) or whatever other big thing they’d forced her to take on when she shouldn’t even have had a say.
It wasn’t fair to make that comparison. Val was careful, not indecisive; a brake on Julie’s own tendency to keep issues from dragging out. Julie gathered her own information to complement David’s brochures, read clinical reports, wrote a position paper and bullet points to counter her wife’s fears, like it was another issue for Representative Griffith to consider. She’d prefer Val’s support, but she’d settle for a grudging endorsement until Val came to understand that Julie had David’s interests at heart.
CHAPTER SIX
VAL
Val drew the line at attending the procedure, then erased it, then drew it again, then erased it again. In the end they all went, a Saturday-morning outing for the modern family. From the passenger seat, she counted how many pedestrians they passed without Pilots before they passed somebody with the implant, about seven to one. The blue lights were eye-catching advertisements, if nothing else.
David drummed his fingers on the window as Julie drove, a massive sound in an otherwise silent electric car. Val would normally have told him to knock it off, but she was perversely happy that at least he had the sense to be nervous. Sophie slept in the seat next to him, though she had just woken an hour before. Another side effect to weigh against benefits: no seizures yet today, but a comatose ten-year-old.
Julie had been the one to meet with the doctor and make the arrangements, so this was Val’s first visit to the Pilot Installation Center. She’d expected something more hospital-like outside, and the inside didn’t match her expectations, either. Private waiting rooms, warm and inviting, full of comfortable-looking armchairs and couches rather than the metal and plastic torture devices where they’d spent so many hours waiting for Sophie’s doctors. It didn’t even smell like the hospital; it smelled like fresh-baked cookies.
“That can’t be hygienic,” Val muttered under her breath. “And what’s with ‘Installation Center’? Is it a clinic? It sounds like someplace you get your computer set up.”
Either nobody heard her, or they ignored her. Sophie broke away to investigate a shelf overflowing with children’s books. Val kept an eye on the kid as the nurse explained everything they’d already read and heard, trying to nod when she thought she was supposed to. Maybe she needed an implant herself, so she could watch Sophie and listen and process without losing anything. She had definitely missed something, because David looked crestfallen.
“It’s okay,” Julie said to him, putting her arm around his shoulder. “It’ll be ready by the time you have to study for exams.”
Val remembered something from the brochure, though she couldn’t recall having pointed it out to David. They would do the installation that day, but the device wouldn’t be activated for another month.
“Your head has to get used to having something else in there,” Val said, pleased to have something to contribute to the conversation. “Plus you have to attend a couple of orientation sessions to learn how to use it. If that’s a sticking point, it’s not too late to change your mind, you know. Ha.”
She knew she shouldn’t have added those last bits, and David responded with a vicious shake of his head, punishment for both the pun and the implication he might not be fully committed. “I want this, Ma. Mom understands.” He looked to Julie for support.
“Your ma knows,” she said. “She’s here, isn’t she? You’re allowed to change your mind, but we’re committed if you are.” She shot Val a glance that Val read as back off.
“Mom is right,” Val said. “We’re here. Ready when you are.”
The nurse had apparently finished her checklist, because she beckoned to David and pivoted on her heel.
Val watched their boy disappear through a mahogany door. “That’s it? Off he goes?”
“Looks like,” Julie said. “Feels odd we aren’t supposed to follow, but I guess they’d tell us if we were.”
“I can’t believe it’s an outpatient procedure. Since when is brain surgery so easy?”
They settled near the corner where Sophie sat reading in a beanbag chair. Val picked up a celebrity gossip magazine and was amazed to discover it was the current month’s issue; another difference between the hospitals and this pay-to-play “Installation Center.”
Julie pulled out her tablet and started typing. Her fingers moved quickly and surely. As always, Val was impressed by her wife’s ability to put aside the things she couldn’t affect and concentrate on something else. Val flipped the magazine open to a random article.
She was still on the same page ninety minutes later when a nurse emerged to invite them into a recovery room where David dozed under mild anesthesia, his boyish face looking younger in slack-jawed dopiness. They’d shaved a patch of honey brown curls from the right side of his head. He looked lopsided. A bandage above his ear was the only evidence of the surgeon’s trespass. Beneath that bandage was a hole, raw
