Page 81 of Just One Look

Frontal Lobe Gone

Luka was silent so long,Elizabeth wasn’t sure he was going to answer her. They’d followed a few different winding streets full of upscale houses and more ferny greenery down to the sea, on which the whitecaps had really gone to town now, walked a few blocks, and were now heading up another road, which she had to assume would lead them back toward Marko and Nyree’s place eventually. Sooner rather than later, she hoped, because (a) the sky had darkened, and a wall of huge clouds, ominously gray at the bottoms, was rolling in from the sea, and (b) she was seriously out of breath. She said, “You seem to have a good sense of direction. Is that common among rugby players?”

“Probably,” he said. “Are we done talking about my life, then? Good.”

“No,” she said. “That was my attempt to ease you into discussing your difficult and possibly embarrassing symptoms by creating a receptive environment.” It was hard to sound professional when you were gasping, unfortunately. Also when you were looking at his rear end in those jeans, not to mention those shoulders and the backs of his arms, which she could see, because she wasn’t quite keeping up. The backs of his arms were truly excellent, and he had the kind of heavy, raised veins in his forearms that gave phlebotomists the shivers. The kind that only a man with that much muscle definition would have.

“Ah,” he said. “By offering a compliment. The best you could come up with was that I have a good sense of direction?”

“I suppose I could have said that you’re a great kisser, or that you have a terrific body. Which I would phrase differently, of course.”

“How would you phrase that, exactly?”

“That you have an exceptional degree of functional fitness.”

“Ah. Much safer, yeh.”

“Patients so often take the other wording the wrong way. So … what was that like, the first time you helped your sister to bed?”

“Like every other time. Embarrassing. Frustrating. She needed to go out and get pissed and get laid to feel like she had a life, or maybe that she was alive. I got it, or I did eventually.”

She waited, but he didn’t go on. “Seriously?” she asked. “Three sentences? That’s your description? I hope you describe your tumor symptoms better than that, or your doctor’s going to tell you it’s migraines.”

“It was more than three sentences. I said, ‘Embarrassing,’ for example. That was a sentence.”

“It was a sentencefragment.”

“It had a full stop after it. It was a sentence.”

She sighed. “Is your sister still like that? I’m gently prodding you to expand on your answer, for the record.”

“Far as I know. She’s found some other way to get to bed, I reckon. It’s been more than fifteen years.”

“And the farm’s a woman thing. Why?”

He speeded his pace even more and said, finally, “Because I have something else to do with my life?”

“It didn’t sound like that, though. It sounded more like cutting you off on the basis of gender. And slow down. This is so uphill. Why is everyplace in Auckland uphill? Also, do youhavea normal-person pace?”

“Yeh,” he said. “This is it. Right. Slowing down.”

“Keep in mind how fast I run,” she said, “and assume I walk more slowly than that. OK, that’s slightly better. Go on about the woman thing. Talk a lot, please, because I’m embarrassed by how much I’m panting. I’m not judging. I’m justasking.”

“Farms can’t keep getting chopped up, down the generations. Before you know it, you’ve got four avocado trees and a shed. Stops being an economic prospect.”

She considered that. “Normally, though, wouldn’t it go to sons?”

“Probably. Which wouldn’t be fair, would it? And as somebody I know put it, I’m extremely well compensated.”

“For now. The average NFL career lasts three years. Which I know, because I’ve treated some of those guys.”

“You have? When?”

“I was in Baltimore, and then I was in Atlanta. Both cities with NFL teams, and I’m …”

“Very good.”

“Well, yeah. And you know why I’ve treated them? Because they keep getting TBIs and disc hemorrhages and worse,that’s why, which is what happens when you send your body on a collision course with other bodies—heavily muscled, fast, highly trained bodies—at high speeds, and then you keep on doing it, not to mention not allowing your injuries to heal between those sessions of high-impact activity, putting you at evenmorerisk. They wreck their spines and brains, not just their knees and shoulders, for that paycheck, for agame,and pay for it the rest of their lives. You can replace a knee. You can fuse vertebrae, too. You can’t replace a brain or reverse a spinal cord injury. They train for, what, twelve years, battering themselves, damaging everything, to earn for two or three or five? And then what? Are they trained for anything else once they’re out? They’re going to have a hard time adjusting, but at least they’re paid a lot, right? Unless they spent it, which they probably did. And what you do is even worse, because I can’t imagine that New Zealand rugby pays NFL salaries.”