Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“Come on in,” Miles said.

Chloe was agog as she crossed the threshold. The spacious entryway was decorated with leafy shrubs growing from planters built into the walls. A rock formation along one side of the room featured a waterfall that lent a sense of tranquility to the surroundings.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Chloe said.

“Kitchen’s this way,” Miles said.

As Chloe followed Miles, her head moved from side to side, taking the place in. “What’d it cost you to buy this joint?” she asked.

“I had it built,” Miles said as they reached the kitchen. He pulled on a handle that appeared to be attached to a panel in the wall, but it was actually the door to a massive refrigerator.

“I could park my Pacer in there,” Chloe said.

Miles grabbed two bottles of water and handed one to Chloe.

“So what did it cost you to build this place?”

“Just under eleven million,” he said.

Chloe put her water bottle on the counter and walked into an adjoining room. “Fuck me,” she said.

Miles followed to see what she was looking at. She was standing in the media room, looking at a screen that covered one entire wall.

“You can watch something if you want,” Miles said. “I’m probably gonna pack it in soon. It’s been a long day. Remote’s right there. It does everything.”

“You got some beer in that fridge?” she asked, looking at him.

“Uh, yeah.”

Chloe went back to the kitchen, used both hands on the refrigerator handle and pulled it open as though it were a bank vault. She peered inside, grabbed a can.

“Bud Light? Seriously? You got an eleven-million-dollar house and the fridge is full of Bud Light? I thought you’d have some fancy-shmancy craft beer or something.”

Miles shrugged. “I like it. But if you look in the back I think I have some of the fancy-shmancy stuff.”

“No, no. I like this. I’m just surprised.”

Miles set down his water bottle. “Grab me one.”

She reached into the fridge for another one and tossed it his way, but the can bounced off his chest, hit the floor, and rolled under the edge of the counter.

“Sorry!” Chloe said.

“Shit,” Miles said. “Shit shit shit.”

She bent over to retrieve the can and set it on the counter. “Better not open that one for a while. What happened?”

“I don’t have the coordination I once did,” he said. “I saw the can coming, but my arms didn’t get the message from my brain fast enough to catch it.” But he was moving his arms now, looking at them with a mix of wonder, bafflement, and disappointment. “Jesus.”

“Let me get you another one,” Chloe said, going back to the fridge. This time, she cracked the can open and held it out to Miles. He reached for it tentatively, and once he had his hand firmly around it, he nodded and Chloe let go.

He took a sip.

“This is why I want you to take a test.”

Chloe, trying to make light of what had just happened, said, “Written or oral?”

Miles sighed. “We talked about this. A genetic sample. You don’t even have to go anywhere. They’ll come to the house, it’ll take two seconds.”

“I’ve done that. When I sent in my DNA sample to WhatsMyStory I had to spit into a tube.”

“But they weren’t necessarily looking for — look, if we compare your sample to mine, there are certain genetic markers that’ll show whether you’ll develop what I’ve got, at some point in the future.”

“Who really needs to know this the most?” she asked. “Me, or you? Why do I even need this information right now, especially if there’s not a damn thing I can do with it? I think this is about you. If I test positive, then — wait. Is positive if you have it, or is positive if you don’t have it, because that kind of news would be positive?”

“Positive is if you have it.”

“Okay, so if I test negative, then you don’t have to feel all guilty that you’ve passed something on to me. Is that what this is about?”

Miles looked down.

“We all got to die from something, right? So I take this test, we get the result, and we find out, hey, good news, no signs of whatever it is, but guess what? I’ve got some rare kind of cancer. Something you weren’t even looking for. And then I got that shit to worry about for who knows how many years when if I didn’t know I’d be a lot happier. You following me?”

“Yes,” Miles said. “I do. But—”

“How will I be better off knowing?”

“You could... prepare.”

“Prepare,” she said, nodding. “Okay, let’s say, twenty years ago, you knew what was going to happen to you. What would you have done differently?”

He had to think about that. “I’m not sure. I think I would have taken things a little more seriously. I wouldn’t have wasted my time.”

“How did you waste your time?”

God, she could be infuriating, he thought. “I would have applied myself more.”

“So you could get a house like this a couple of years sooner? Would that have made you happy? And didn’t we already have the happy discussion? You know what? There’s a lot to be said for wasting time. You can’t spend your whole life on a treadmill. Sometimes you have to jump off and go sit on the beach. Sometimes you have to pick up a good book and sit in a hammock and fall asleep. And don’t forget getting actually wasted . I’m something of an expert on that.”

Miles sighed. “How’d you get to be so goddamn wise so young?”

“Maybe I’m not all that wise, I just look that way compared to you.”

Miles glared at her.

“Please don’t tell me that’s no way to talk to my father,” Chloe said.

Miles turned away, exhausted. Chloe, sensing it was time to offer a concession, said, “What about this? I’ll do your dumb test, but I don’t want to know the result. You can know it, and whatever it is, whatever it finds I’m going to die from, you can keep that to yourself because I don’t need to know. That a deal?”

Miles thought about that. He said, “Deal.” Chloe extended a hand and they shook on it. “I’ll set it up. We can get it done tomorrow.”

“How long for the results?”

“I have connections with a private lab that can expedite things. Maybe even the same day.”

Chloe nodded cynically. “With enough money, you can get whatever you want as fast as you want it.”

“Pretty much.”

“Does that apply to pizza, too? Because I’m so hungry I could eat a bucket of deep-fried beaks.”

“I thought you were a taco person.”

Forty minutes later they had a large pizza delivered to the door. Double cheese, pepperoni, black olives, green peppers. Chloe found two plates, put three slices on each of them, and set everything down on a coffee table in the media room. She went back into the kitchen for two more cans of beer.

Miles dimmed the lights before they got comfortable on the enormous black leather sectional. Chloe, sitting to his right, reached for the remote and said, “I’ve never seen anything on a screen this big, except in a theater.”

She hit some buttons and a streaming service filled the screen with movie thumbnails.

“Pick anything you want,” Miles said, biting into his first slice.

Chloe, with one hand holding a slice and the other wielding the remote, wandered through a screen filled with selections. “Seen it, seen it, seen it, liked it, don’t want to see it, saw it and hated it, didn’t see it — oh, what about this?”

“ Little Women? ”

“Yeah. Did you see it?”

“No,” Miles said.

“Because you thought it would be a stupid chick flick?”

“No. I just didn’t get to it.”

“You should see it. I’ve watched it twice.”