My Sister’s Keeper: 4. Monday: Brian Summary & Analysis

Back in the present, Brian is watching sparks shoot out of an incinerator chimney at Brown University’s medical school, whose dean is standing next to him. Nobody is inside the building except for the body that started the fire, which was disposed of after an anatomy class. Brian contemplates whether to bring a hose up, and the dean impatiently asks if he’s going to do something. But Brian, knowing that bringing in a hose would spread biohazardous waste, is leaning more towards keeping the furnace closed and letting the fire burn out. He tells the dean that he’s going to wait and see.

Brian goes home to eat his first of two dinners, which he spends with his family before the night shift. Sara prepares a pot roast, and Kate comes down looking worse due to her dialysis. Jesse, who is required to eat with the family, comes in smelling of marijuana, which Kate complains about. Sara asks them to stop arguing, and Kate asks where Anna is. Everyone realizes they haven’t seen Anna since this morning. Kate shows off a shirt with a crab and the word Cancer on it. Sara, upset and holding back tears, tells her that she’s a Leo.

Anna comes in and sits down. She avoids Kate’s question about where she’s been and does not serve herself. This strikes Brian as unusual, since Anna is usually talkative and vivacious; her lack of energy throws off the feeling of the entire dinner. He asks Anna if she’s okay, but Anna, thinking the question is for Kate, looks over at her. When she realizes Brian is talking to her, she deflects his questions and hurriedly serves herself food. Brian reminisces about when he would sing to the kids in the car when they were little.

Kate notices that Anna’s locket is missing and asks if she lost it. Anna responds by saying that she’s just not in the mood to wear it, which again strikes Brian as strange, since she’s never taken it off as far as he knows. Sara tells Kate to change her shirt, but Kate says that it’s no more offensive than Jesse’s metal band shirts. Sara cuts into the roast and is dismayed to find that it’s overcooked, but Brian is able to cheer her up by making a joke about cooking it even more with a blowtorch. Just then, Brian realizes that Anna has left the table—and, more than that, nobody even noticed.

Brian returns to the station and has dinner with his coworkers: Red, who’s cooking; Paulie, who’s reading a newspaper; and Caesar, who’s writing a love letter to his newest dalliance. The guys tease Caesar about his affair and ask Brian to give him advice, since he’s the only one in a successful marriage. Brian compares a woman to a fire: they’re beautiful and can bring you light and warmth when contained, but they require an offensive approach when they get out of control. Paulie jokes that Caesar needs to keep his date away from crosswinds.

The men sit down for dinner—Brian’s second of the evening. They reminisce about the last time they had to deal with a stuck dead body, where an overweight man who died of heart failure was too heavy for the funeral home to transport. They also discuss who will have to clean up the body at Brown, but Brian suspects that the fire was so hot that there will be nothing left to clean. Paulie states that at least this one isn’t arson, since the town has had a rash of intentional fires in the past month. Caesar jokes that maybe the man in the furnace was a “suicide arsonist,” and Paulie adds that maybe he burned himself to lose weight. Brian, offended by their callousness, leaves the table and goes up to the roof.

On the roof, Brian looks at the stars. If he weren’t a fireman, he would be an astronomer due to his love for the heavens, which remind him that the world is much bigger than him. Anna’s real name is Andromeda, which is a reference to the Greek myth of a princess who was captured as a sacrifice to a sea monster but ultimately freed from her chains. He hopes that his children will have a similarly happy ending, but he knows that it likely won’t be so for Kate; he’s gone from dreaming about her wedding to having no expectations of her survival at all. Although she’s defied the odds, he knows she’s going to die; her kidneys have begun to break down from the strain of her treatment. He looks through his telescope and muses about how stars are just fires that burn for millennia. When they run out of fuel, they explode into supernovas, whose deaths are tremendously bright and visible to everyone.

Earlier, after his first dinner, Brian asks Sara if she thinks something’s wrong with Anna, but Sara brushes him off, saying that Anna’s doing fine “compared to Kate’s kidneys and Jesse’s sociopathy.” Brian is at a loss as to what it could be, so Sara posits that perhaps Anna is just being a teenager. Brian tries to think back to when Kate was 13, but all he can remember are her treatments, not the ordinary parts of her life. Sara asks Brian how Kate looked to him, and though he noticed her jaundiced skin and tired posture, he lies to Sara and says that Kate looks great. Sara tells him to tell the kids goodnight and goes to sort Kate’s medication.

Back at the station, things are quiet. The hatch to the roof opens; Anna has come to see Brian. He’s initially worried something has happened, but Anna simply wants to visit, having been dropped off by Sara. She looks through his telescope, and Brian takes the opportunity to look at her, noticing that she’s starting to enter womanhood. He asks her if she has anything she wants to talk about, but she counters by asking him to talk to her. He tells her about the constellation Vega, which is a part of Orpheus’s lyre, then tells her the story of Orpheus himself and his lover Eurydice, whom Orpheus wouldn’t let be taken by Death. Anna asks to stay the night with him, then asks if Orpheus’s attempt to save Eurydice worked. Brian says no, and Anna is unsurprised and resigned.