Free Remember by Eileen Cook

feral or anything, but by the time my parents got to me as the third kid, they were more laid-back. Marcus and my sister had already done everything. I would always be the kid who did it last, so there was less pressure. Things in our family were good—and then they weren’t.
    “Marcus was in a car accident. It wasn’t his fault, but his best friend was killed. Marcus was trapped in the car with him when he died. They were waiting for an ambulance, but it took too long.” Neil didn’t meet my eyes and instead stared down at his coffee.
    I sucked in my breath, trying to imagine it. Stuck in a car with a cacophonous silence. Alone, but not alone. “He went for Memtex to get over it,” I said.
    “Yep. He was in this competitive grad program and he couldn’t focus. At first it seemed to do the trick. He was backto being Marcus. Then he started having trouble. He wasn’t sleeping right. Memory problems, visual things too—where he couldn’t judge distance right. He’d bump into stuff or drop things. Then there were the mood changes. He was cranky all the time, almost paranoid.”
    “He’d been through a lot; it’s not surprising he was having trouble.” I took a sip of my coffee, the heat burning my tongue. I pushed down a wave of unease.
    “But the Memtex should have helped, right? But it didn’t. He went from depressed to confused. He was on edge. In the end he killed himself. Sleeping pills.”
    I let the breath I had been holding out in a rush. My planned arguments turned to damp ash in my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
    Neil pulled a wad of wrinkled papers out of his bag. “There are people who think Memtex could cause an early version of Alzheimer’s. My brother had all the symptoms.”
    “But wouldn’t his doctor have diagnosed that?”
    “Who thinks a twenty-three-year-old would have Alzheimer’s? No one. And it’s not like a condition that shows up on a test; they can only diagnose it for sure by doing tests on the brain after death. My parents didn’t do that because it never occurred to them it was an option. It makes sense, too, if you think about it: The treatment messes with the memory center, so maybe in some cases it goes too far.”
    The tight knot in my stomach released. It was a horriblesituation, but there were options, other reasons this might have happened. “Try to think of this a different way. Maybe your brother had issues. You said Marcus was an overachiever. He must have felt a lot of pressure. Then, even with the treatment, he’d still been through a horrible accident. The treatment doesn’t promise to eliminate all problems, just dial them down. Maybe even with the guilt reduced, it was more than he could take. I’m not blaming your brother; I’m simply saying that it might not have been the treatment,” I said.
    “It’s not just my brother. There are other people with similar situations.” Neil nudged the stack of paper toward me. He’d printed off a zillion articles to make his point.
    “Thousands of people have this procedure. Hundreds of thousands. If this was happening, it would be an epidemic.” I had the urge to push the papers back to him, but I didn’t want to touch them.
    “Even if only five percent of people have this side effect, isn’t that too many?” His eyes never broke contact with mine.
    “The company tracks all sorts of data. They would know if this was a real concern.”
    “Unless they don’t want to know. How much money does Neurotech make with this procedure? Millions? Billions? Do you think they’re going to walk away from that because a small number of people have a bad reaction?”
    I fought the urge to shove the papers onto the floor. “Yes, they would walk. They’re doctors; they do this to help people,not hurt them. You’re talking about my dad . You don’t know him. If my dad suspected something was wrong, he would do something.”
    Neil stared at me across the table. “If you’re so sure, then why not read the articles?