It was Lin’s idea to abandon our fledgling work on Broca’s aphasia and move on to Wernicke’s. I could see her rationale: the Broca’s patients stammered and stuttered with a palpable frustration, but they got their words out. For the most part, their language was intact; only the ability to transfer it into speech had been hamstrung by a stroke, a fall down the stairs, a head injury sustained while they waded through some desert country in the uniforms of the free world. They could still comprehend, still hear their wives and daughters and fathers encouraging them on. It was the other victims—the ones with damage farther back in their brains, much like Bobby Myers—who suffered the more sinister loss. Language, for them, had become an inescapable labyrinth of non-meaning. I imagine it must feel like being lost at sea.

So, yes, I want to go back. I want to forge ahead with the serum and—when I’m ready—inject that potion into Mrs. Ray’s old veins. I want to hear her tell me about Quercus virginiana and Magnolia stellata and Syringa vulgaris in the way she did when she first came to my home, identifying the live oaks and the giant, starry trees and the lilacs with a scent that no perfumer has been able to match. She considered them God’s gifts, and I tolerated that. Whatever might be up there, he or she or it did a crackerjack job with trees and flowers.

But I don’t give a shit about the president or his big brother or, really, any man.

“Well, Dr. McClellan?” Reverend Carl says.

I want to tell him no.

Chapter Thirteen

THIRTEEN

Christ, it’s hot in here. There must be a leak in the air-conditioning compressor again. Wouldn’t that be just our luck?

I get up, jeans sticking to the backs of my legs, and go to the kitchen to refill my glass with water. “Patrick, can you give me a hand for a sec?” I call. He makes the rounds in the living room, collecting empty glasses, and joins me.

While I’m pressing one glass after another into the ice dispenser, he takes hold of my left wrist. “You don’t want that back on, do you?”

I shake my head, out of habit.

“You should look at it like a trade, babe. They get something and you get something.”

“I should look at it like what it is,” I say. “Fucking blackmail.”

He sighs like he’s been holding the entire universe in his lungs. “Then do it for the kids’ sake.”

The kids.