Free The Last First Day by Carrie Brown

out the symptoms of Peter’s condition.
    The full lips, he’d said, glancing from the chart in his hand to Peter’s face and then back to his folder, speaking as if to students who were taking notes.
    Large eye sockets, he said. Eyes slightly recessed. Dominant brow, frontal bossing, prominent jaw … Can I see your hand, please? he’d asked.
    Peter’s hands, like everything about him, were large, his fingers long and slender.
    Peter held out his hands, palms up.
    Arachnodactyly, the doctor said. Like the spider. He did not seem to notice Ruth’s growing perturbation.
    Bossing? Ruth said. She stared at the doctor. What’s that?
    The doctor appeared not to have heard her. Sweat a lot? he asked Peter.
    Peter nodded. In the heat, he said. Exercising, he added. He cleared his throat.
    The doctor turned finally to Ruth. Snoring? Getting worse?
    Ruth clasped her hands together in her lap. She did not trust herself to speak, afraid her voice would tremble.
    Haven’t you noticed, the doctor said—he looked back and forth between Ruth and Peter—that he’s getting taller? His shoes getting tighter?
    Ruth had felt stricken. She
had
thought Peter was getting taller somehow, but it seemed so unlikely. He’d lost some weight, and she’d attributed the odd effect of his apparently increased height to that change in his appearance. But he’d complained about his shoes, and just the week before she’d replaced both his ancient wingtips and a pair of sneakers.
    The syndrome, it turned out, was a form of gigantism. Marfan syndrome, the doctor had continued, an uncommon genetic disease, an inherited defect of connective tissue. It was relatively rare, though less so than one might think, he said.
    I’ve never seen it before, actually, he admitted, but there was no reason for them to worry about it much in a man of Peter’s age.
    Other things, he implied, unsmiling, would probably finish Peter first.
    Peter had taken the news with what Ruth considered freakish calm.
    In truth, though, there was little to be done. He had regular echocardiograms, as there could be trouble with deterioration of the walls of the aorta, an enlargement of the heart. (How terrible and ironic, Ruth had thought, if Peter should die because his heart was too big.) But so far he’d been fine. Other than new prescriptions for his glasses—at least every year and sometimes more often—there wasn’t anything else to do in terms of treatment, they’d been told.
    The doctor had put more drops in Peter’s eyes that day and sent him off with a pair of folding cardboard sunglasses, which he had obediently put on. They were much too large, even for his big head, and he had looked ridiculous.
    In the car on the way home, Ruth had glanced at him in the passenger seat. When they left town and the road passed into the woods, the light was like that of the old newsreels that used to play in movie houses when she and Peter were young, flickering and premonitory, disconcerting. But Peter had seemed serene, sitting quietly in the passenger seat, as if not only his vision had been compromised but also his ability to speak or even think.
    He was not a fighter, Ruth had thought then. His strengths were endurance, not belligerence; obedience and compromise, not resistance. If he were told he would soon die, he would accept it without self-pity or complaint. For Peter there would be no raging against the dying of the light.
    Long ago, when they’d been very young, everything for her a kind of now-or-never drama, she had told him once that she hated him, that she never wanted to see him again.
    He had accepted it—had believed her, because it was not in his nature to deceive himself and so he could not imagine Ruth doing so—and had turned sadly away. It had been for them a nearly fatal submission.
    Now she watched him come down the steps of the main building, looking over the crowd of boys and teachers milling around on the pavement below. How was it that they had