Free You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin

meeting, trying to stay focused.
    “The point is,” Lucy said, pacing beside my whiteboard while she dug her fingertips into her arms, “what are we looking at? Too many holes. Gaps and flaws. If you make a mistake, just let somebody know. Copy me on the e-mail. Put up a red flag. We’re gathering an enormous data dump here, of course slips occur. But if Dr. Aaron and I aren’t warned to catch them, we’ll have big trouble downstream.”
    Recently we’d experienced quality-control problems. Crammed around my office, sitting on folding chairs or perched on the radiator, our team of fourteen was more than half composed of recent additions, many to leave in the next year or two for other labs, med school, further training. Listening to Lucy, I tried to concentrate on the milestones rather than the headaches. I knew too many researchers who’d been undone by the pressure to publish, raise more money, swim faster. And what was lost was the satisfaction of knowing truth: the thrill of discovering an answer to the question each experiment posed.
    Each airtight, flawless, beautiful experiment.
    Half an hour later, I thanked everyone, proposed a revised schedule for incorporating new data, and called it a day. Five minutes later, Lucy was back in my doorway. She said calmly, “Tell me, why do we have to go through this every time?”
    “Just the way it goes.”
    “We hire too many gunners, is what it is, not enough plain-Jane control freaks. But why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Do this,” said Lucy. Her features and shoulders sagged. “All of this.”
    “Listen, I’m late picking up a friend.”
    Lucy stretched her forearms on the doorframe. “You should see yourself. You look like three bucks.”
    “I’ll take it that’s not a compliment.”
    “What I would give, Victor,” she said, turning away, “for the NIH people simply to magically appear and say, Yes yes, take the money, have fun.”
    Ten minutes later, I was stuck in a line of cars. I nearly slammed on the horn several times out of frustration. A few years earlier, they’d built a Walmart in Ellsworth, and now it caused traffic jams for miles along the one-road concourse off the island. I stared at the wipers, wondering if Regina was burlesquing somewhere miles behind me.
    Years in the past, someone thought my wife was a knockout, one night long ago in a restaurant. A night I didn’t remember.
    Since Wednesday I’d kept some of Sara’s index cards in my shirt pocket, her notes about how we met, how I’d neglected her apparently just when Broadway called. I’d stayed up nights rereading them. One night I tossed them in the kitchen trash with the tangerine peels and coffee grounds, only to run down to retrieve them the next morning. Having them on me meant I could avoid going back to Sara’s office to read the rest.
    And she was right: in some cases, I didn’t agree with how Sara remembered things. I remembered celebrating her success in our little living room by the fireplace with champagne. I remembered lovemaking, late-night conversations, snuggling in bed. Our unspoken signals: the hand-squeezes to silently say I love you. Me playing the bleary-eyed bulwark when Sara was overcome with anxiety and couldn’t sleep. I remembered her nerves, and how I took care of her. How I went to the drugstore at two a.m. because she’d broken out in hives, worrying about that play. And if I had been neglectful, balanced against Sara’s enormous need for attention, for regular, escalating affirmations, then surely there was a good reason we both were forgetting: a grant, a paper, something at the lab.
    But about that dinner she described, I drew a blank. Which didn’t necessarily mean much. We probably had dinner with Russell a hundred times in New York. But for this one night to have mattered so much to Sara that she chose it as a point when our marriage turned a corner, and yet to figure so lightly in my own recollections?
    There was a moment in New York that