Extreme
2016
Sunday, late morning
Casey and I sat on her bench in the garden, taking inventory. One by one, I pulled items from the goody bag and set them between us on the wooden slats. Four rows of two. A tile, a stuffed mermaid. A leaf, a napkin. Four pictures.
“Look at your perfect grid,” Casey said. “Just like the ones you used to make on my vanity.”
“Always trying to make sense of the disorder,” I said, smiling.
“And does it make sense, when you arrange it like that?”
“I wish.” I shuffled the items around, messing up the grid.
“Can I ask you something?” Casey said.
“Of course.”
“Are you happy? Have you been happy?” She faced me, her eyes serious, searching.
I clutched the simple armrest of the bench. The bench, so carefully, lovingly made, where happiness had ended for me in one night. “Oh.”
A nonanswer, but it came out in a soft, sustained note that told her everything. I had been safe. I had been busy. I had been fortunate, and successful.
She nodded, reached across our jumble of artifacts to touch my knee. “I’m sorry.”
We sat quietly for a minute before I spoke. “But you have. And I’m glad.”
She smiled. Picked up the leaf from Raptor Rock and examined its glossy chartreuse surface. “Two clues to go. Then, what? My mom shows up with a cake? Better be one hell of a cake.”
“Good thing we’re almost done or we’d need a bigger bag.”
“Are you ready for? You know.” She hitched her chin toward my house. “Clue 7?”
“Later. After the city.”
“Sure,” Casey said. “So I don’t get ten. Why some tourist trap in San Francisco? You design their shirts, but still. It’s such a long drive, and it’s the only place on the list we never went together.”
I knew Clue 10 by heart:
Once glass, this glorious place,
This human aquarium by the sea
Is now burned and abandoned, rubble and ruin
A tourist’s curiosity
Truthful postcards the silly shop sells; buy one so I can tell
We had to get a postcard from a “silly shop” by the “rubble” of the “human aquarium by the sea.” Goofy Foot was near the remains of the Sutro Baths. Alex had obviously Googled my address and seen that the shop was my biggest client.
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” I said. “My theory is she wants you to visit where I live, see my work?”
“Take this shindig out of Coeur-de-Lune, you mean?”
“Yeah. To make sure we stay friends. After.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Casey.”
“Hmm?”
“I want to stay friends after.”
She was working her left hand again, splaying and contracting her fingers, but she relaxed them and smiled. “Me, too.”
“I shouldn’t have stayed away so long. I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re here now.”
“I should’ve—”
“Don’t. You should’ve come back sooner. My mom should’ve been a grown-up. I shouldn’t have thrown the music box. It’s never ending. Life’s too short for if-onlys.”
The words hung in the air, more piercing than if she’d spoken them: especially for me.
“It’s rotten luck, Case.”
“My odds weren’t good. One in two.”
“I thought it was super rare.”
She shook her head. “There are two kinds of ALS. Random, that’s the most common. And familial. I have that. I inherited the gene from my father. Nice of him to leave me something, huh? My mom found out I’d inherited it when I was eighteen.”
“She’s known that long? How?”
She spoke slowly, kindly, teacher to pupil. “My dad died of it, and it ran in his family. She’d known that since I was little, but when I was seventeen she learned that she could have me tested. Senior year, remember when she started losing it? She was sure the test would say I didn’t have the gene, that I’d be on the lucky side. But...” She shrugged.
“So she brought you to the hospital for some DNA test and everyone lied about what it was for?”
Casey extended her left arm in front of her like a lazy ballerina. She turned her palm up, waited. And when I still didn’t understand, she pointed her right index finger and poked the flesh of her upper arm.
She waited patiently for me to catch up, waited for the whirring and clicking in my brain to stop.
Alex’s Blood Magick phase. Her kooky, random infatuation with the dark arts.
Not just another of Alex’s hobbies. Not kooky, not random. It was her way of finding out about Casey.
“Magic with a K,” I said.
“Magic with a K. It was just an excuse to test me without me realizing.”
Casey ran through the details—Alex getting this wild idea one day, reading a book about Blood Magick in the Moonshadow occult store, a gene called SOD1, autosomal dominant inheritance patterns, a man working in a lab near Stanford who was infatuated with Alex, like so many were.
I let the specifics wash over me, needing no more proof of Alex’s subterfuge than my memory of her attempts to get Casey’s blood, her odd excitement in this same garden when Casey finally gave in.
“The lab guy who helped her... Remember him? Gary Summerland, no. Summerling. He drove up a bunch of times. The bald guy with the silver Audi? Serious, not her type? He’s a genetic counselor she’d contacted to talk about my family history. She wasn’t planning to test me at first. She says. And if the witchcraft thing didn’t work she was going to try something else. Anyway, the lab guy still calls her, he’s obsessed...”
I nodded. I could picture the silver Audi, a slender man paying calls all the way from Palo Alto. Our confusion over the fact that Alex let him stick around for so long. “It’s so...extreme.”
“My reaction exactly, when she told me. There’s no way. But then I remembered. It’s Alexandra Shepherd.”
A vial secretly ferried from Coeur-de-Lune down to Palo Alto, Alex sweet-talking a smitten boyfriend in a lab coat.
It was extreme. But it was possible.
“She knew all this time and never said?”
Casey nodded.
“I can’t imagine. Knowing and not being able to tell anyone.”
“I’m glad she never told me. I’m glad I didn’t know.”
“But weren’t you mad?”
“At first. But... It was brave of her. Would you want to know? Have that stalking you your whole life?”
I thought about it. Not even a question: no way. I shook my head.
“And I’ve had so much. Elle, girlfriends, the trips, the store. I’m glad I didn’t know,” she repeated. Though her voice caught at the end.
Would you want to know?
Would you want to know, if you were her?
“Casey,” I said. And I almost couldn’t get the rest out, because the realization was so awful. “Are you sure she never told anyone else?”
“No. I’m grateful to her. I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Not in a million. I’ve thought about it, with Elle in my life now, how hard it would be...” She went on, saying all the things she’d wanted to share with me, everything she’d kept pent up.
I sat next to her, holding her hand, staring at the cutout of the mermaid and ocean waves in the faded wood. I listened.
But I was also outside the garden, just beyond the gate. Eavesdropping in the dark the night after my dad’s funeral. And even over Casey’s voice, and the roaring in my head, I could hear, clear as anything:
She can’t find out.
Can’t you see? She’ll tell Casey. I have to protect Casey.
Would you want to know, if you were her?