Page 37 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
Until, of course, it isn’t.
On Thanksgiving morning, Vera winds up in the hospital for the second time. It happens before I’m awake, and Dad does not tell me the details—a gift, I know. He only holds me on our doorstep, one hand on my shoulder like the lone root tethering me in place, as the ambulance pulls away. Sirens off, because they’ve made her stable and it’s early morning and—for god’s sake—it’s a holiday. No one should have to listen to ambulance sirens today.
When he heads for his car to follow, he lets me decide: I can stay, or I can go with him. I feel tears forming around the words as I say them, regretting the choice in the same moment I make it. “I’ll stay,” I tell him, and he nods, and he goes.
Maren is at home with her whole extended family: her mom’s two sisters from Omaha and her dad’s brother and the whole gaggle of cousins. Her grandparents, too. Sawyer, the only family member I talk to with any kind of regularity, has mostly fallen off the map since meeting her match. And Miller—I have no idea what Miller is doing. If it’s not MASH-related, we don’t speak of it at all.
I am, I’m trying to say, alone.
When I step back into the house even Esther turns away from me, curling into herself in Dad’s spot on the couch. The house isabsolutely silent but my brain feels loud, feels like all my synapses are screaming at once but not in unison. The motherless mashup of my family is disintegrating. Vera will be another person who leaves me behind, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
My phone pings as I’m standing there, a notification from the MASH app.Happy Thanksgiving, it shouts up at me.New category added: number of grandchildren. Take the survey to see your results.
I stare at the screen until my eyes start to water. And then I take my truck keys off their nail by the door, and I drive the forty minutes out of town, and I hike the Thanksgiving trail all by myself.
Vera finds me out there, in the woods. The wind sighs through the trees and I hear her in it, impossibly. She shows up not as she is now, but in all the ways I want to remember her.
Sitting at the antique desk in her library of an office, framed by wall-to-wall bookshelves as she spoke on the phone to a faculty member. Her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, low enough that she could wink at me over them as shemm-hmmed into the receiver. She had a pull-apart model of the human brain on a low table and I’d fumble around with it until my dad came home from work, smoothing my thumbs over the prefrontal cortex, its divots like the wrinkles of a hairless cat.
Gasping in the passenger seat of the truck she gave me for my sixteenth birthday, a rusted-out junker with manual transmission that took me months to learn. Her knuckles going white around each other but the way she said nothing, that she let me learn thehard way, the only way I knew how. And the first time I finally got it right—feeling that catch between the gas and the clutch like I’d opened the portal to a new world—how she clapped her hands and said,I knew it.I knew you were going to get it that time.
Then, of course, this summer. The high-sun days we spent on her back porch, talking about MASH. She didn’t get it when I first told her; she’d never played the game, but when I explained it, she laughed.A child’s vision board, she called it.Manifesting.
“Do you think it would work?” I asked, stirring the ice in my tea. She made it in a giant, rubber-mouthed jar, set out in the sun at the edge of her deck. “In theory, I mean. If you designed this perfect set of questions to get at someone’s nature and nurture configuration. Couldn’t you predict their future?”
“Anyone couldpredictanything,” Vera said. It was one of the most infuriating things about her and also one of my favorites—the way she countered everything, always forcing you to put a finer point on what you were trying to say. “The question is, to what degree of accuracy?”
“Okay, yes,” I said. “If we made a survey like I said, couldn’t we predict people’s futures with a high degree of accuracy?”
“In theory,” she said. “Yes.”
I stopped stirring the ice. “How about in practice?”
Her eyes sparkled. She was sick then, but not the way she is now.
“Shall we find out?”
I grinned. She was the best partner in crime, in anything. “Yeah,” I said. “I think we should.”
I spent every day with her, June to August. We pored over those questions; we revised them ten times, twenty, fifty. I lost count of how many books she gave me to study, how many papers I read online using her old university log-in. She made nothing easy; she wanted me to learn it myself. I stayed up all night coding and then I showed up to Vera’s at nine, where she had breakfast waiting and was ready to talk about the human mind.
Her fingerprints are everywhere on MASH. Without her, it wouldn’t exist at all. And as her body turned on her, I turned our summer project into something she never wanted it to be. I believe in it—the heart of the app, those four future predictors, the ones she helped me build. But every week we add more. Every week my algorithm gets warped by Dr. Blaise Wisener, some stranger a thousand miles away. It should be Vera in this with me. It should always be Vera and me.
That’s what I’m thinking about, my lungs burning with every step up the hillside, when Dad texts me.
She’s going to stay here, he sends, though he doesn’t say for how long.Once she’s set up in her own room, we can visit.
Visit, I think. Like Vera is a stranger or an aunt who lives out of state. Like we need an appointment, or a calendar reminder. Like she is well and truly and finally apart from us.
My phone buzzes again, but instead of the bubble I’m expecting to appear from my dad with another update, it’s Felix.
It’s Felix, on a national holiday, sending a group text to Miller and me. I stop walking.
I just learned some shocking information, he says. Three dots appear as he types and I wait, wondering if Miller is staring at this same text window on his own phone screen forty miles away.
The information is that Switchback Ridge High has a winter formal dance in two weeks.
What’s shocking is NEITHER OF YOU told me about it.
