A Fight to Remember

Loving You is Never Exhausting Pt. 2

Picking up right where we left off!

Bailey

"Penny for your thoughts?" Aunt Amelia asked, spinning a model of a brain on Mom's desk.

Somehow we'd ended up in the den after the picnic. I went in looking for some pictures of dad, and Auntie A (I shortened her name for fun) trailed in after me... to help I guess. I picked at the corner of the page of the album. There was a lot of pictures, family photos, selfies, pictures of us camping, pictures of us at the hospital. I ran my hand over a picture taken right after I was born. Dad, heavy bags under his eyes, holding me swaddled in a white blanket. But he had this stupid grin on his face, like 'look what I did!'

We had the same smile, mom always said. I looked up from the album into Amelia's deep blue eyes. She looked like him, just a female version.

"How's teaching at John's Hopkins?" I asked idly.

"Well, it's Baltimore, what can anyone say about Baltimore?" She retorted. "C'mon Bailey, give me something here."

The corner of my lips quirked. "Got all these pictures of us, our family. Which is great, but-" I sighed. "What was he like, you know, before?" Now that I was older, I was becoming more and more curious about my dad. My mother had only known him after he achieved success, but what was he like? How did he become him? I didn't know this side of my father. And I needed to know because that was where I was now.

"Before...?" Amelia asked.

"When he was my age, what was he like?"

Amelia sighed, sat down on the chair across from me. Her lips twisted in a thoughtful expression. She picked up the family photo of the five of us that mom had on the desk, glanced at it sadly. "Ambitious, cocky, wanted to save people..." she smiled, "Still annoying as hell." She caught my gaze from her sideways glance and put the picture back on the desk. "Kinda like you actually."

"Like me?" I wasn't sure if I believed her.

"Overprotective, generous, kind... leaps over tall buildings in a single bound." My Aunt's smile grew into a grin.

"You're comparing me to Superman?"

She shrugged, "Superpowers run in the family, I think."

"Really?" Of course she would say that. She'd been one of the best neurosurgeons in the country, second probably to my dad.

"You wanna cure Alzheimers."

I sighed, closed the album and put it on the desk. "I want to do something."

"You're going to med school to be a doctor. A surgeon. Isn't that enough?"

I chewed my bottom lip nervously, "I thought it would be..."

Amelia held her hand palm up and waved it side to side, "but?"

I gestured to the room around us, "All of mom's research, all her cases. Dad's cases. The Grey name. The Shepherd name... Our hospital. We're going to lose it all."

"You don't know that."

"I was looking into clinical trials the other day, looking for something for mom... there's so much regulation it's insane. You know the hard part? She's not sick enough yet. Maybe for some of the drugs, but none of them have proven to be more effective. Her own drug that she developed doesn't even work for her type of Alzheimers."

"Bailey, there are people working at this very moment for a cure, people who know a lot more than you or I... or even your mother."

"She called me Derek the other day." I said.