Chapter Five Max

Rory is sitting across from me in the dining car, riveted to her celeriac-artichoke stuffed crepe. Her eyes have barely grazed mine. She’s obviously mad at me, and I have zero clue why. The not knowing… the excruciating not knowing…

She knows it is excruciating for me, and yet she cuts her crepe with surgical precision, deliberately not telling me what I’ve possibly done wrong. Fork into mouth with a slug’s speed. Chewing, fucking chewing…

I twine my fingers into the linen napkin on my lap, trying to keep my own anger at bay, trying, trying. “Why are you mad at me?” I finally ask.

Okay, maybe I bark it.

The clatter of cutlery, din of conversation, waiters doing their deliberate circles and deliveries and inspections of tablecloths and the clarity of glassware—all of it immediately halts.

“Max.” Caro presses her fingers to her temples, clearly embarrassed by my minor outburst. That’s Caro—proper to a tee. Formal. One of the many things I love about her—Caro’s Miss Manners to the general Aronov philosophy of better messy than perfect.

“Sorry, sorry! Scusi!” I smile at the patrons to my right, an elderly couple dabbing their napkins to their mouths, eyes shooting beams of judgment.

“Ror, you know you’re driving me insane.”

“I don’t mean to drive you insane.” Her calm, sure tone somehow intensifies my feelings of insanity. “We’ll talk later. When I’m ready. In private. Okay? Please chill out.”

“So you are mad at me. Why? What did I do? What do you think that I did?”

She says nothing. Keeps chewing in her irritating, silent way.

I try again. “Why have you been ignoring me? Papa would hate that you were giving me the silent treatment.”

Rory scowls. “Don’t bring Papa into this. He’s already in it, anyhow.”

She’s mad at Papa, too? How could she possibly be? He has Alzheimer’s—impossible to be angry at him or, at least, for him to deserve, or feel, her anger. “I don’t know what that means.”

She nods, doesn’t elaborate. “Anyway, you’re the ones who surprised me on this train.”

“No, that’s your author. Your author is the one who surprised you.”

“My author,” she says pointedly, “is nowhere in sight.”

At that we dovetail into quiet.

“You’re different, Ror.” I shake my head. “There’s something different about you.”

To my surprise, she doesn’t get insulted. Doesn’t say I’m just the same person I always was, and I’m gonna be top of my game again as a news anchor, you’ll see. “I do feel pretty Zen” is all she says calmly.

“Zen?” I don’t think the word has ever once come out of my sister’s mouth. It’s the opposite of the way we were raised: Scorch earth with your passions. Make a mark. Work hard. Give it your absolute all. Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.

“Yes.” Her eyes practically shimmer with earnestness. “Zen. Like I can breathe again.”

“You couldn’t breathe before?”

“No, I couldn’t breathe, not really, and I never stopped to watch the leaves.…”

“The leaves?” I’m not following.

“The leaves?” Caroline begins to laugh. She claps her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, Ror.” Still, her laugh increases in intensity.

I notice, though, that Nate has arched an eyebrow at my sister’s Zen leaves thing, too.

“The leaves.” As ever, Rory’s eyes resemble the murky green, glittery surface of the lake we grew up on. “You know? Leaves blowing in the wind. I never had time to watch them.”

“Watch what?” Nate shakes his head, fork hovering over his Magret duck with red cabbage puree. “Sorry, I’m not following, Ror. What’s there to watch?”

Rory’s eyes widen. “Oh, so much. You could spend your whole life watching the leaves blow in the wind, and you wouldn’t have even seen a thing.”

“Really?” I try to sound interested and supportive as I simultaneously nudge Caroline’s leg under the table.

“Yep. Try it. You’ll never feel as happy as when you’re watching leaves in the wind. Give it five minutes, and your fingertips get a little hot. Ten minutes, and your whole body feels tingly. It’s your soul. You feel it, I swear, like alive inside you. Try it, Maxie.”

Maxie. Thank God, she can’t hate me, if she’s still calling me Maxie.

“Mmm, I’ll be sure to.” I swig from my vodka glass.

“She’s lost it, bro,” I whisper to Nate when Rory’s not looking.

Nate doesn’t smile; his shoulders budge up almost apologetically. Sheesh. I know he wants my sister back, but he’s gotta admit: She’s lost it. We should have intervened sooner. Good we’ve come here when we did. We need to get Rory back on track. Have her sending out résumés again. If she doesn’t want to go back to LA, she doesn’t have to. Maybe Detroit, an easier, kinder market, where she’ll be close to me and Caro, and Papa. If she needs some money to get started, I’ll lend it to her. Hell, I can just give it to her. I’m happy to give it to her.

“So,” says Nate.

“So,” echoes Caro. Then she gets out her phone to snap photos. “I should have remembered before we started eating.”

“I have a feeling picturesque things won’t be hard to come by on this trip.” Rory smiles.

Caro sighs. “I know, more like I’m trying to keep up with the Gram.”

“Yeah?” Rory frowns. “Are you still trying to grow? Or is there less… I mean, do you feel like there’s less pressure now, with your audience and stuff?”

I wince, because I know clearly what my sister’s trying to say, and I’m sure Caro will, too. Does it matter less that Caro has only six thousand followers now that she has a job? A wonderful job, at my company. Still, she’s been trying to build her platform for over a decade.

“It doesn’t matter less. No. I still want… I guess I don’t know what I want exactly. But I see what you’re saying. In a way, working with Max…” Caro’s eyes flit over at me. “Yeah, sure. It takes some of the pressure off. I just—I like posting my outfits and trips. However shallow that sounds.”

“It doesn’t sound shallow! You’re amazing at it.” Rory looks fondly at her.

“You are. Hippoheal is lucky to have you now, too.” And I wholeheartedly mean it. I couldn’t do it without Caro—business or life. My heart does the thing it always does, pitters faster as I watch her, so unassumingly beautiful in the soft light from the tulip-shaped chandeliers.

“Yeah.” Caro smiles, but it’s clear it’s an effort. “I mean, maybe I should fully throw in the towel with the influencer thing. I dunno. Gen Z, man. They’re just different. I’m like a dinosaur when I try to TikTok. My millennial pause is practically an hour long.”

“Your what?” I ask. Sometimes, when Caro talks, I surreptitiously consult Urban Dictionary.

“Never mind.” She waves a hand. “My skinny jeans are out. I look more Elderly Fisherman in a bucket hat than Hailey Bieber cool. Maybe it’s getting time to admit this whole influencer thing didn’t really pan out.”

“No,” Rory says, more fervently than I expect. “No way. You can’t look at it as failing. You have to look at it as you’re in the middle of succeeding.”

“Did you come up with that?” I ask, immediately resolving to use it at an inspirational team meeting.

“I heard it somewhere, I think.”

Caro laughs dryly. “Thanks for the reframe.” But she and Rory lean into each other. I feel a warm glow pass over me. This is the stuff. Being with the three of them. The closest people I have in the world, other than Papa. I’m so glad we all shuffled things around, to come. We needed this. And the trip is ripe with potential—Nate and Rory back together.

Maybe things will finally spark with me and Caro, too.

“So, Ror.” Nate smiles. “Want all the dirt you’ve missed?”

Rory doesn’t smile, and I can tell it’s too soon for her thaw, at least toward Nate. “Sure,” she says without enthusiasm.

Nate’s smile fades a twinge, but gotta give him credit, he plows on. “Well, Maximillions here”—Nate points to me and winks—“Maximillions is all, like, It’s been forever since I was on a vacation. Ror, wanna know what your brother did a few weeks ago?”

I blush. “It was actually two months ago.”

“No, what?” Rory sounds about as interested as if Nate had mentioned he switched his toothpaste brand.

“Went yachting with Jay-Z.”

“I didn’t go yachting with Jay-Z,” I correct Nate, unable to excise the note of pride from my voice. “I did, however, fly out to Saint-Tropez for five days to meet with one of our investors. Jay-Z, on his yacht, true. But it has been years since I’ve been on an actual vaca—”

“Did you get the money?” Rory asks.

“He got a shit ton of money,” Caro says quietly.

“I did. We did, I mean. The company.”

“Wow. Congratulations,” my sister says, but I notice her smile is weary, doesn’t travel to her eyes. “And what about the vaccine? Is it getting close to—”

“Closer,” Caro says before I can answer. “But we’re still a bunch of steps from full approval. After phase two b we’ll move to phase three, and then still—”

“But soon,” I interrupt. “I’m very optimistic. The new trials are going well.”

“And Papa… what about…? I mean, will he…?”

It’s the pivotal question after all, isn’t it? The question that is never, ever, not assaulting my mind. Will the vaccine work on Papa? Will he be able to get it in time? See, Papa has a variant of Alzheimer’s that is more resistant to common treatments. Sure, he takes donepezil and memantine, and does weekly off-label transcranial magnetic stimulation treatments, but has any of it slowed his deterioration? Only slightly.

Years ago, Papa was enrolled in trials for a different Alzheimer’s vaccine, while I was still entrenched in the research that enabled ours. So as I sped along as fast as humanly possible, researching and formulating, assembling a team, Papa was eligible for a now-defunct vaccine. Mine is somewhat similar; both target the amyloid protein that denatures with age and catalyzes the disease. Both could be used to prevent the onset of the disease, but most critically to cure it: to reverse memory loss and plaque formations once already formed. But the vaccine Papa received was later terminated due to issues with its safety profile. Papa was one of the nearly six percent of participants enrolled in the trials to develop meningoencephalitis—an inflammation of the membrane surrounding the brain.

He could have died. In fact, he nearly did.

Which is why his doctors have all uniformly said he is ineligible for any further vaccine trials. Once our vaccine is approved by the FDA, however, it’s a different story.…

So time is of the essence, quite literally.

“We hope,” I finally say. “We hope Papa will get it in time. That’s all I’ve been working toward.” Practically my entire adult life, I nearly add.

“I know.” Rory softens, and it’s almost like the whole thing between us, that I don’t understand, disappears. “How is he?”

I shrug. “The same, I guess. More or less.”

“But…?”

I know what she wants to know. The little things. That he can’t shave anymore. Now I do it for him. The aides are there around the clock, and his saintly nurse, Suzette, but I prefer to take care of the little dignities I can, when I visit. Which is nearly every day. Does my sister really want to know that Papa can dovetail into incoherent babbling, talking about things that make zero sense. That he has a difficult time walking on his own now. That he often stops speaking midstream, his words evaporating, and then switches into increasingly agitated Russian, which is the primary language he learned in school, even though he lived in Ukraine. But I can’t understand him, because he never taught us Russian—after he immigrated to America, all he wanted to do was be an American.

Does Rory really want to know that recently Papa didn’t recognize me? That he asked Suzette if I was her son.

“He’s getting worse. Is that what you really want to hear?”

“He’ll still know you,” Caro puts in, shooting me a frown. “Ror, it’s not exactly as bad as your brother makes it sound. A lot of times when I visit, he still bursts out with Caroline! in his thick accent. Never have I felt like anyone was as excited to see me in my whole life as Ansel Aronov. And his hugs. He still gives you the tightest, biggest, longest hug.”

She smiles, a sad smile, though. Sometimes I forget that Papa is the only father Caro ever really had. She sees him more than Rory these days, although I have to give Rory credit—she was diligent about visiting from LA, once every six weeks like clockwork. It’s only since coming to Italy that she hasn’t seen Papa, but I know from Suzette that Rory calls frequently.

Rory grimaces. “After this trip, I’m gonna go to Michigan and see him.”

“I know he’d like that,” I say. “But, Ror, he wants you to live your life. He’s always wanted us to live our lives.”

“Easier for you to say. You get to see him all the time.”

I shrug. “We all make our choices, I guess.”

“I wish I could be at peace with mine,” Rory whispers.

“Maybe you’ll move to Michigan.”

“Hell, no. Sorry, guys. Sorry. But no.”

“Got it. So that would be a no, then.” I try to say it lightly, but I feel something stiffen in my chest. “Michigan has always been like a shoe that’s too tight on you,” I say, mimicking a phrase she’s said several times. My tone carries a sarcastic scorch that I feel powerless to squelch.

I could have left Michigan after college, too—the mass exodus to Chicago, to New York City, to LA. But Papa was already having memory issues when I was in grad school. I decided to stay. Switch my research to Alzheimer’s. Put down roots in Detroit. To believe in the city’s renaissance—ultimately, with my company, to participate pivotally in it. But Rory’s dreams took her across the country, to the bigger news stations in LA. Justifiably for her career, but maybe she also wanted to escape. Not take a front-row seat at Papa’s decline.

I get it, and sometimes I resent it. But I’m always happy I stayed. Especially because now, I’m on the cusp of saving Papa. If our vaccine works—it works!—it could reverse his disease to a degree. Revert him to a sixty-five-year-old who can function in society. Even if it doesn’t expunge the Alzheimer’s completely, and we get more lucid windows… more lucid moments… everything I’ve devoted, everything I’ve sacrificed, will have been worth it.

“So what’s on tap for tomorrow, guys?” Nate asks.

“Yeah, let’s check out this exalted itinerary.” I run my eyes over the stapled packet Gabriele distributed. “Hiking Cinque Terre. Followed by lunch in Vernazza and seaside relaxation in Monterosso.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Cinque Terre,” Rory says. “Wander the five towns. It’s supposed to be one of the most stunning places on earth.”

This is my very first time in Italy. We didn’t travel much as kids, certainly not across the globe, and my adulthood has involved totally bananas work hours, with very few days off. “It sounds amazing, but it’s all Greek to me.”

“You mean, it’s all Italian.” Caro twists her Cartier panther ring around her finger. It’s new, I know. More than twenty thousand dollars. I looked up the cost. The finest gold, the panther studded with emeralds.

“Sì, signorina,” I say.

Caro doesn’t smile.

God, we got old and uptight, all of us.

Suddenly Rory rises and says, “Guys,” in a way that I suddenly know, know, is an attempt to leave. It’s an indisputable truth that endings aren’t a collective decision. The first person to go begins the unraveling.

“Not yet. Don’t leave yet,” I hear myself plead, and hate myself for it, for needing my sister this much, for being this rocked by her moods and indignances. “We have to talk first! Seriously, enough is enough!” My chest flames with anger. This isn’t fair of Rory. This isn’t fair at all!

“Ror, we need to talk, too,” says Nate. “Please.”

“Ror… no,” Caro says, quietly pleading. “Don’t leave yet.”

Rory’s eyes dart around at each of us. “I…” All of a sudden there’s a lurch, and Rory falters for a step, then catches herself.

We’re moving. We’re on our way.

Applause breaks out in the dining carriage as the train rolls forward. Even the man with the ridiculous pom-pom beret is raising his glass for a toast, if not overtly smiling. He clinks it against his neighbor’s proffered glass, the husband from the Italian couple in the bar car with us earlier. Then the husband inches back over to his wife, slides his meaty hand down her thigh. They make an alluring, handsome pair, and I realize now they are joined by the two preteen kids across, with lush hair and smart attire, who win the award of being the first kids I’ve seen in ages whose faces aren’t buried in their smartphones. I feel myself arch toward this picture-perfect family, like I have my entire life toward people who seem to epitomize the ideal. Old habits, and all. When you were a nerd, decidedly uncool, it’s difficult to excise that instinctive reaction. No matter that I’ve become a respected biotech CEO, you are always, in some part, that little kid version of yourself.

Suddenly there’s champagne popping, and the intoxicating communal cheer ratchets up in volume. My gaze flitters to Rory. She gives me a small smile, and I feel a surge in my chest, like a breeze, clearing up all the cobwebs. Rory will stay for champagne, at least. I realize how anxious I’ve been, how everything’s been tied in the thorniest knots, and here, with the people I love most in the world besides Papa, I can finally relax. Rory will finally tell me why she is angry, and I will apologize, for whatever it is—no need to save face. Relief is on the horizon. I can finally see blue sky from the tops of the trees, and gosh, it’s spectacular.

It’s stressful running a company with such a critical lifesaving mission, stressful running a company that is worth eight figures and soaring, no matter the lack of sympathy that statement can arouse. Still, I’m about to express it, not bemoaning the fruits of my success but rather something cheesy about the meaning of life and what really matters, and everyone will groan but agree.

But then instead, right as my mouth has pitched open, Rory shoves in her chair. “Guys, I need to… I’m so tired. It’s been a long day. I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll start fresh, okay?”

It’s a bucket of ice water sloshed on my head, and I’m suddenly very cold as my sister gathers up her purse and her early copy of Ginevra Ex’s book and rushes off, leaving all of us staring listlessly after her. Eventually we resume eating and talking with the countryside whizzing by in the waning sun—wheat fields, sheep, and churches sprouting unexpectedly around corners. We are on a trip of a lifetime, after all, so no use letting Rory sour our night, even if by leaving, she intractably does. It was only the three of us last night, too, in Monaco, dining at the casino. Gambling. Having ostensible fun. But still, the fact of it builds in my throat, simmers below the surface: It is Rory who made us a foursome. She’s the glue, and now our evening—our trip—is on pause. And we’re just the three idiots waiting for her to deign to press Play again.

My sister, ladies and gentlemen—always, always, the star of the show.