Page 15 of Gone Before Goodbye

“The seven fourteen.”

“I’ll pick you up. You’ll tell me all then.”

Porkchop disconnects the call. Maggie’s eyes travel across the wedding photograph again, her mind blank and everywhere all at once.

From the kitchen, Sharon calls out, “Maggie?”

She wrestles her eyes from the photograph, inhales, and, taking a cue from her nephew, forces up a smile. When Maggie enters the kitchen, Sharon is sitting at the table, per what Cole said, her laptop open, papers strewn as though someone had dropped them from a great height. There is an open bottle of red from the Château Haut-Bailly. Just seeing it leads to a deep pang in her chest that has nothing to do with her sister’s recent desire to drink to excess.

“What are you doing?” Maggie asks.

Sharon looks up. “Coding to enable a hyperdimensional generativeinterference through stochastic gradient descent optimization of artificial intelligence by leveraging—should I continue?”

“Please don’t.”

Sharon takes off her reading glasses. “So how was the event?”

“Pretty good, actually.”

“Liar.”

Sharon is a genius. For real. Maggie had been a top student—high school salutatorian (damn Stuart Kleinman beating her for the valediction spot by .003 GPA points), driven from a young age to be a physician like her parents—but her sister Sharon had been a true polymath, what teachers and administrators used to call “academically gifted” or “overly advanced” or most commonly, “child prodigy.” Sharon could have graduated high school at the age of eleven, but the truth is—a truth her parents both understood early on—child prodigies don’t make it long-term. Think about the ones you knew growing up. Where are they now? See? They end up paralyzed by anxiety or abandon too many hobbies or spiral into self-doubt and self-hate or… Who knows?

They crash and burn.

Her parents, understanding this, encouraged excelling, but they insisted on routine and normalcy. Dad loved to quote Flaubert on the subject: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so you may be violent and original in your work.”

But it was never easy for Sharon. Her brain couldn’t—still can’t—slow down. Her neural signaling and power impulses and transmission synapses, whatever—they all ran too hot. Brain activity is commonly referred to as electrical, and hers would surge until the fuse blew. She couldn’t ease up or pace it. Even the smallest mistake would cause Sharon to obsess, blow it out of proportion, self-flagellate.

“Who gave out Mom’s award?” Sharon asks.

“Bonnie Tillman.”

“Oh, good. Mom liked Bonnie.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“What?”

“Never mind. And Mom never liked her. She said she’d make a great doctor.”

“Same thing to Mom,” Sharon says, which was true.

Sharon too had served in the military, albeit for a clandestine branch of the army, breaking codes and developing AI, refining advanced reconnaissance software. At some point, Sharon and her husband, Tad—Cole’s father—turned to doing tech work privately, building an app that could in fact change the world. Sharon had designed a more advanced “humanoid AI” in the hopes the device might enhance and improve well-being through constant and immediate access to experts. Would you like to speak to your physician at any hour? Sharon’s anthropomorphic AI version of your favorite doctor is always available for a chat. Care to consult your attorney twenty-four seven, though this version of them has the wisdom of a thousand attorneys? Sharon’s app can do that. Do you sometimes need an emergency session with your therapist, maybe in the middle of the night, but of course, they aren’t available? Well, the AI version is there for you twenty-four seven, and for a small fee…

You get the gist.

On a practical level, the possibilities are an endless wow. But the moral implications started to weigh on Sharon, slow her down. Tad, who saw the dollar signs and realized, perhaps correctly, that someone might beat them in this global race, didn’t like that. He stole their patents by having Sharon sign papers she didn’t understand, and then he ran off with his assistant. The subsequent divorce had been brutal. Sharon tried every legal avenue to remedy the situation, but Tad’s father was a powerful federal judge, and if you think our legal system is about truth or fairness or equality, you’re either not paying attention or delusional.

Now Sharon is in heavy debt with no recourse.

Kind of like Maggie.

Yes, the McCabe Girls, raised by the Doctors McCabe to excel and be so accomplished, have been sidelined by enormous financial burdens, legal peril, and yes, scandal, with seemingly no options left.

Except, maybe, perhaps, who knows, Maggie’s old mentor in New York?

“Tell me the truth,” Sharon says. “How was the event really?”