His tone was admonishing, chiding. She turned to shout at him again, but as they locked eyes, her heart stopped.
His face was steel. His eyes empty.
She backed up, her knees giving way, her stomach slick. Go! Go! Her mind overruled.
She yanked open the door and fled into pelting rain to her car.
“Jackie!” He shouted from the porch, in the dry.
She was hardly aware of the drive home. She entered her house, went to her bedroom, stripped off her soaking clothes, and got into bed. She lay there sobbing, her phone ringing again and again. What seemed like hours passed. She got up, put on pajamas, drank three glasses of water, and sank down on the floor beside her bed.
Her phone rang. She answered it.
“Jackie. I’ve been so worried.”
She couldn’t answer. Her throat was sealed shut.
“Why do you want to ruin what we have? Why do you insist on it?”
She began crying again, her face raw, her head pounding.
“I’ll come to your house tomorrow at one o’clock. You’re free until three, right?”
She didn’t have to answer. He knew her schedule. If she had had other plans, he knew those, too. He also knew she was sitting on the floor with snot running down her chin, eviscerated by regret, and wouldn’t be doing anything else for a very long time other than asking herself why she’d fallen in love with this man, while at the same time wondering how she could live without him.
“I’m hanging up now, Jackie. I hope you feel better.”
She felt as if she had the stomach flu, something that made you retch, something that emptied you, but only for a day or two.
The doorbell rang at precisely one o’clock the next day. Jackie was still in her room, on the floor, and did not answer.
CHAPTER 14
Jackie is reviewing patient consent forms for a new study and drinking her third cup of coffee. She hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in the two weeks since Miles’s Thanksgiving pronouncement. Several times each day Jackie recites a mantra about being grateful for what she has. It isn’t working. Losing her hope of becoming a mother has left a void that gratitude for other things cannot fill. It might be easier if she could blame Miles, but she can’t; they both bear responsibility for not addressing the issue sooner and more thoroughly. Jackie is left with a jagged sadness that slices into her repeatedly and unexpectedly.
Learning that Nasira moved in with Harlan has not helped. Every morning Jackie vows to put it out of her mind, to ignore how wasting time on Harlan dashed her hopes for a family, and every day, as soon as she sees Nasira, she fails. (Between the mantras and the vows, she could start her own religion.) By the time evening rolls around, Jackie convinces herself Nasira must have returned to her own apartment by now, so she checks, just a quick drive-by on her way home. She chastises herself for giving in to morbid curiosity, especially since Harlan and Nasira have called her out on it, but it doesn’t stop her. Driving by a house doesn’t seem like a major moral transgression, or so she rationalizes.
Only two windows of Nasira’s apartment face the street, and when Jackie cruises by, they are always dark. Nasira’s car is usually there, but that doesn’t mean anything. From Harlan’s house, the Metro is more convenient for most destinations, and the university is within walking distance. Nasira might have moved in because of the burglary, but she is staying for other reasons. And Harlan is allowing it—after dating for less than three months. Three years in—years—all Jackie got was a weekend in Asheville.
Jackie’s stomach sours from all the coffee, and she sets her mug aside. Harlan must be madly in love with Nasira, so much more than he ever loved Jackie. What other explanation is there? That he is getting old and becoming afraid of living out the rest of his life alone? If so, why didn’t he come to that revelation earlier? Are men really so deeply in denial about aging?
Jackie forces her attention back to the monitor. She strives to make the consent forms simple for her subjects to understand while still accurately portraying the details of the study. Her procedures are not invasive and carry minimal risk, but parents are more relaxed when they know exactly what to expect and what not to. Her research isn’t designed to provide a diagnosis or solve behavioral problems.
“Jackie?” Tate, one of Jackie’s graduate students, stands in the doorway, her laptop balanced on her forearm. She wears a knitted beanie and a quizzical expression. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Right now?” Jackie glances at the computer clock and clicks on the calendar icon. “Yes, another forty-five minutes or so. What’s up?”
“Something weird’s going on.” Tate comes around the desk, pulls up a chair, and clicks open an Excel spreadsheet. “I’ve been going over the analysis of the eye-tracking data from the four-year study.”
“Yes. I’m presenting the interim data to the board at Autism America tomorrow. I already sent the director the slide deck.” Jackie asked Tate to rerun the data analysis, mostly to give her practice.
“So, on this spreadsheet are the numbers that I used for the analysis.” Tate points to the screen. “I copied them from the spreadsheet below it, the one with the formulas that compile the raw data.”
“Okay.” It’s all familiar to Jackie—she’s been working with this structure for years—and she wonders why Tate is being so deliberate in her explanation.
Tate looks at Jackie, her brow creased. “The results you got aren’t coming up. I mean, your results are saved on another spreadsheet, but when I run the analysis of variance, I get something different.”
Jackie zeroes in on the numbers, an array of cells, four by thirty-four. The study has a total of fifty-eight children, each of whom is tested every six months starting at six months of age, but so far only thirty-four have reached the two-year mark. They fall into two groups: low-risk, those with no family history of autism spectrum disorder, and high-risk, those with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD. The table shows only one eye-tracking measure; for each behavior, they recorded results in one table like this. The study will be over in about two and a half years, when all the children turn four, but the foundation wants a snapshot of the study’s progress.
“Are you running the analysis with the Excel add-on or SPSS?” The lab has always used SPSS for statistical analysis, but the Excel programs are improving. The two programs run the same test, so the results should be the same. But using SPSS means exporting the data from Excel, a possible source of error.
“I did both. They agree with each other and don’t match yours.”
“That’s odd.”
“Right?” Tate is perplexed but also distressed. She knows how crucial this experiment is.
“Tate, we’ve got all sorts of backups. It’s just a matter of figuring out what happened.”
Tate nods. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve checked the table I used for the analysis, and it looks solid. I thought maybe some stuff was accidentally deleted, but there are no missing cells or anything obvious like that.”
Jackie is tracking Tate’s logic. The young woman is unusually methodical and thorough; Jackie trusts her completely, but everyone makes mistakes.
“Okay, so it’s not the stat program, and it’s not a problem in the compiled data, at least as far as you could tell. So either I messed up completely, or something else has been changed lower down.”