Robin Cook: Death Benefit

“He is a gifted man. The Lord has looked kindly on him.”

“He is going to make history by personally ushering in regenerative medicine. His work with stem cells will be seminal. I want to be part of it.”

“From my perspective, you already are. From what you have shared, he has taken to you. Not that I am surprised. How can I help?”

Pia looked back down at her hands. She felt a tinge of guilt after all that the mother superior had done for her, and here she was immediately offering to do more. “I believe I will want to do medical research full-time, meaning I don’t think I want to go to Africa.”

There, it’s out , Pia thought. She felt immediate relief. For a few moments silence reigned in the room. Pia suddenly realized how cold it was. “I know this is a rather large change since I offered to go to Africa to repay you and the order for all the help you’ve given me over the years since I aged out of foster care.”

“Your going to Africa was to be for you, not us,” the mother superior said. “Pia, please don’t be rash. I know I’m going to sound very old-fashioned, but is there a man involved? There must be-it is your burden to be so beautiful. I hope to God that Dr. Rothman is being honorable.”

Pia suppressed a smile. The mother superior’s suggestion was so far from reality as to warrant such a reaction. She and Rothman had trouble making eye contact much less something more intimate. “I can assure you that Dr. Rothman has been quintessentially honorable.”

“God has limitless ways to test us,” the mother superior continued.

“Reverend Mother, I don’t believe God is testing me. This does not involve a man, I assure you. I have made my decision because it pleases me and because God has given me a facility for the work. But I would like to repay the convent. Thanks to Dr. Rothman’s generosity, I have access to fifty thousand dollars. I would like to donate this money to the convent.”

“I will be willing to accept any donation but not as repayment. For our services you do not owe us anything. After all, your presence was payment enough.”

“It would please me to donate the money,” Pia said.

“As you will. But I do have another request. I don’t want you to forget us. I trust that you will still make it a point to visit us on occasion. If you forget us, that will be a betrayal.”

Pia, who had been looking past the mother superior at the crucifix, was stopped short. Suddenly, her suit of armor was dented, and she looked down at her shoes, feeling young and small. Betray. Betrayal. When she first encountered the word “betray” in a novel when she was eleven, she looked it up in the school’s big dictionary. The definition seemed just right. That’s what her family had done, it had betrayed her. Betrayal was the tragedy that had stalked Pia ever since she was six, on the day when the police burst through the front door of the apartment she shared with her father and uncle and placed her in the clutches of the New York City foster care program.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 1, 2011, 7:30 A.M.

She knows the man’s important but she can’t remember his name. The girl is standing in front of a long desk, wearing a plain, very loose-fitting, institutional gray shift with her shoulders slumped forward and her hands clasped in front of her, elbows tucked into her sides. Even sitting down, the man is very large, enormous, in fact, and he’s leaning forward, talking to her, not looking her in the eye but right at her chest. She can’t make out what he’s saying. She’s been bad, she’s misbehaved, she’s going to need to be punished, that’s all she knows.

She can hear him now. He’s even bigger than he was before, telling her to stand up straight, to pull her shoulders back. Why is she wearing that shapeless garment? Pia remembers that she’s fifteen or at most sixteen and this is the head of her school, and it’s as if she’s at the back of the room, watching this girl who is her but not her. He pushes his chair back and stands up. Coming around the desk, he approaches her with a cruel, lustful smile. “Pia . . .” he orders. “Pia . . .”

“Pia . . . Pia . . . !” Pia sat up in bed and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Her T-shirt was sticking to the sweat on her back as she stretched forward, listening to George calling to her from the other side of the door. She let him in and hurried to get dressed, vowing that she’d remember to set the alarm that night. Her internal clock used to wake her up at six without fail but the last couple of weeks she’d had trouble sleeping, suffering from a number of recurrent nightmares. She felt exhausted. She’d not had nearly enough sleep. After visiting with the mother superior, she’d gone back to Rothman’s lab. By the time she’d gotten back to her dorm room and crawled into bed it had been 4:23 in the morning.

As she dressed, she found herself mulling over the meeting with the mother superior, and she shared some of it with George on the way to the medical center.

“I’m glad you went,” George said as they walked in the crisp morning sunshine. “I mean, you were never going to join the order, and I can’t see you in Africa doing whatever missionaries do nowadays. I’ve never known any nuns, but I can’t imagine you’re the nun type.” From one of their four lovemaking events, an erotic image of a satiated Pia naked in bed flashed through his mind. He noticed Pia shoot him a look, and he cringed. Could she read his mind? It wasn’t the first time George had this worry.

“I don’t think becoming a nun and taking the vows would have been a problem for me, George. I’m not even saying I’ll never do it. I’ve seen how life is at the convent, and it’s very peaceful. It’s different from the world out here. The sisters support each other. It’s safe.”

George immediately felt uncomfortable, like he was patronizing Pia. He couldn’t blame her for wanting some security in her life with the little he knew of her childhood. But becoming a nun? It seemed extreme. “I guess what I mean is that it seems like a way of avoiding life. There are other ways of being safe besides going and hiding out in a convent.”

“I don’t think of becoming a nun as hiding. It’s the opposite-they have to give all of themselves to the world they have chosen.” They don’t betray each other either, thought Pia to herself. They had reached the Black research building.

“Actually I think you’d be equivalently hiding if you end up spending your whole career working in there with Rothman,” George said, indicating the building with a tilt of his head. His concept of medicine involved helping people directly, one-on-one, having an effect on the lives of people he could see and touch. As far as he was concerned, research was too cold and abstract and populated with asocial martinets like Rothman who were as welcoming and warm as a file full of algorithms.

“So, what about lunch today?” George said, changing the subject and ever hopeful. As he had feared, they hadn’t met up for lunch the day before. In the three-plus years that George had known Pia, they’d never had an official lunch date. They had lunched together numerous times, but not as a planned event. During the first two years they had managed to have pretty much the same schedule so it just happened. But now that George was on a radiology elective and Pia was holed up in Rothman’s lab, he knew that the chances they’d run into each other by accident were slim. But why he was bothering to ask her he had no idea, since he knew it wasn’t going to happen. And why was he always so damned accommodating?

“Sorry, George, I can’t make plans,” she said. “Yesterday I had to spend the entire day and come back at night to work on one of Rothman’s journal articles, and it still isn’t done. On top of that I’ll be meeting with him sometime to find out what he has in store for me for the entire month. I seriously doubt I’ll even be getting lunch.”