Page 163 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Coulda been a lot worse. Bullet coulda struck an artery. You woulda bled out.” He shook his head. “Gunshot wounds are bad, especially if you’re shot in the thorax.”

Another long silence. Finally, Paul said quietly, “I just wish you’d shown Mom this level of care.” The words had just come out of him.

A long pause. “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You didn’t want to support Big Medicine, or whatever you called it. So you let her die.” Paul’s heart was hammering rapidly. It had come out, and he hadn’t meant it to.

“Is that what you think?”

Paul didn’t reply.

“Your mother went in and got checked out, and they told her it was inoperable and she had ten months to live. So she refused to take any medication. I argued with her, but that was totally her call. Her decision.”

Paul was stunned into silence.

“She didn’t want you to know,” his father went on.

“Why—why not?”

“She didn’t want you to know that she was refusing medical care, because she thought you’d try to talk her out of it.”

“And she refused even palliative care, too?”

“Everything.”

Dumbfounded, Paul said, “And—why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”

“Would you have listened?” Stan said.

A long silence. Paul didn’t know what to say. Yes, he would have tried to talk her out of it. Guilty as charged. His father, not exactly the most psychological of men, was probably equally hamstrung.

He wondered why his father had never tried to establish a détente.

Then again, neither had he.

“You have a point,” Paul said. “I wish—”

What to say?I wish you’d told me this twenty years ago? I wouldn’t have cut you off for all these years?But that was too painful to admit.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. He left it vague, unspecified. Sorry for what? He didn’t say.

His father didn’t ask.

Stanley put his hand on top of Paul’s knee. “Water under the bridge,” he said.

106

Carnegie Mellon University was located in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, next to a large park. They parked on Forbes Avenue and walked to the Gates Hillman Complex. His father moved stiffly, as if he had arthritis. Along the way, Paul noticed a camera mounted to a streetlamp pole and wondered if it was the university’s or the government’s. He pulled the visor of his Mets cap lower over his brow. His father, he noticed, had done the same with his filthy fishing cap.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Building was a funky-looking structure rising from a ravine on the west side of the campus. Most of the buildings on the campus were classical looking, yellow brick with copper roofs that had turned green. But the Gates Building was modern, ten levels, each seemingly placed haphazardly atop the other, cantilevered, with black zinc shingles in a diamond pattern.

Inside, a long spiral walkway dominated the lobby.

“Stanley Brightman, in the actual flesh!” cried Professor Moss Sweetwater when they arrived. “Never thought I’d see you again!”

Professor Sweetwater was clearly a proud eccentric. For one thing, he wore turquoise-aqua socks. His office contained a big rolling whiteboard covered with numbers and strange characters and a standing desk.

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