Page 11 of The Husband Hour
“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.
He named him Polaris. What kind of name is that for a dog from a six-year-old boy? But he loved the stars.
Could it be a coincidence?
Matt slipped from the auditorium. The sunlight outside was blinding after the half hour he’d spent in darkness. Matt rushed into a coffee shop and pulled his laptop from his messenger bag while standing in line to buy the coffee that would rent him table space.
Squeezing into the corner of a long wooden communal table, Matt gave a cursory nod to the pretty blonde who smiled at him. Then he put on his headphones to discourage conversation and did a quick search for the Polaris Foundation. He wasn’t surprised to come up empty. A lot of public foundations didn’t have websites. Next, he tried the foundation-center database. He hadn’t used the site in a long time, not since the early days when he’d searched for any type of Rory Kincaid foundation. At the time, he’d had no doubt someone in Rory’s family would start a foundation in his name, and he’d been right: his brother Emerson had started the Rory Kincaid Scholarship Foundation for student athletes. But that had proved a dead end because Emerson wouldn’t speak to him and Lauren Kincaid wasn’t involved.
Matt’s login failed. His subscription had run out, and the credit card he originally used had been maxed out long ago. Without hesitating, he pulled out his debit card and used it for the subscription. This is how one slides into bankruptcy, he thought. But it was a fleeting concern, because within thirty seconds he had a name attached to the Polaris Foundation: Lauren Adelman.
Heart pounding, he dug deeper, searching for the Polaris Foundation’s IRS form 990-PF.
The address was in Longport, New Jersey.
Chapter Seven
The boardwalk had seemed to stretch to infinity when Lauren was a kid. It was her very own yellow brick road, with the ocean on one side and beachfront homes on the other. Her grandmother, dressed in a velour sweat suit with her hair and makeup perfectly done, took her for a walk every morning. She had seemed so old to Lauren, even though now, doing the math, Lauren realized she had probably been only in her early sixties.
Lauren looked down at Ethan and wondered if she seemed very old to him. She wondered, too, if he shared her joy at the boardwalk or if he was just going along because she’d invited him and he was a polite kid.
“Your mom and I came here every weekend in the summer when we were your age. And in August we’d stay for two weeks and my dad—your grandpa—would come on the weekends when he wasn’t working.”
“I don’t have a dad,” Ethan said.
Oh, good Lord. Quick—subject change!
“Um, your mom said you’re going to play soccer in the fall?”
“Yeah. I did it last fall too.”
“Is this with school?”
He shook his head. “Lower Merion Soccer Club.”
