The Fever

by Megan Abbott

  Her eyes suddenly darted to one side, like before, the whites glowing.

  Then a light went on somewhere and Kim’s hands dropped from her throat, skin bright and raw. Clawed.

  She faced the camera again.

  “And I heard Deenie Nash is here now too.

  “I heard her talking last night. I knew she had to be here.”

  Kim’s eyes burning, the knowing look there as she said:

  “Deenie’s the one.”

  Her finger pressing until it turned white, Deenie shut off the phone.

  * * *

  “The parents of Kimberly Court confirmed through their family doctor that, due to an allergy to a component of the vaccine, their daughter never received the HPV shot,” the newscaster announced.

  Tom had never thought it was the vaccine, never believed it.

  But he had the sudden sense, as his phone filled with voice mails from parents, and texts, and e-mails, that everything had become much, much worse.

  Now that the definable horror, the specific one, had been eliminated, a pit had opened up beneath them. Beneath all these parents. All parents.

  If not that, what?

  He picked up his phone.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Diane in Billing. Please leave a message.”

  Her voice cool, professional, friendly.

  He left a message with no confidence she would ever call back.

  Then remembering what Deenie had said.

  Dad, who was that woman, anyway?

  The woman in the parka, who could she have been? CDC? He didn’t think so. Sometimes on TV, CDC officials wore uniforms. She didn’t even have an ID badge.

  And there was something else about her. Her stance. The way one leg was behind her, her hips angled, knees slightly bent.

  Like a cop.

  * * *

  Straight-backed, Deenie sat on her bed, thinking about Kim Court, guessing who had watched the video, knowing it was everyone, everyone in the world maybe. All wondering what Kim meant when she said, “Deenie’s the one.”

  And the even crazier part: Deenie Nash is here now too. I heard her talking last night. I knew she had to be here.

  Like there might be another version of herself out there, in the hospital, with Lise.

  Once, Skye told them about a cousin who could astrally project himself. He used to visit her at night and she thought she was dreaming until he asked her once, When did you get the new pajamas, the blue ones with the rainbows?

  Part of her wished she could do that. She tried to imagine what Lise looked like now, if she looked different, better, something. But then the picture came to her, that mottled buckling in the middle of her forehead.

  She turned to face her bedside table. Behind the empty Kleenex box, the gumball desk lamp, there was a picture frame draped in electric-blue Mardi Gras beads. Middle-school graduation, she and Lise, cheek to cheek, cap tassels pressed into open mouths. The old Lise. Lise with a forehead scraped with acne, Lise with a snuggle of flesh around her beaming face.

  But it was hard to picture the Lise of now, or of last week at least. The Lise who poked her head around Deenie’s locker every morning to say hello, except on the morning it happened, when Deenie never went to her locker. Because of what she’d done with Sean Lurie.

  The only Lise she could picture anymore was the one convulsing on the classroom floor. The surprise in her eyes.

  It was like the surprise in Sean’s eyes. That instant he’d realized the truth about Deenie, knew her secret, or thought he did.

  Lise and Sean, their matching stuttered-open expressions.

  They weren’t the same thing, except maybe they were: You didn’t tell me. You should have told me. You didn’t tell me it was going to be like this. You should’ve told me. Deenie, why didn’t you tell me.

  Or maybe it was like the look in her own eyes, Sean pressed hard against her. A look she herself never got to see: I didn’t know it was this. If someone had told me it was this. If.

  She didn’t remember turning the phone back on.

  “Mom,” she said, the phone shaking in her shaking hand. Had she really pressed her mother’s name? “Mom, can you come here?”

  * * *

  The phone was ringing.

  Not Tom’s phone, not anyone’s phone. The landline, which almost never rang except right before Election Day, which sat on a table in the hallway like a blistered antique.

  “Is this Deenie Nash’s dad?”

  “Yes,” Tom answered.

  “Um, can you let Deenie know she doesn’t have to come in tomorrow?”

  “What?” Tom said, then realized it must be someone at the Pizza House. “Oh, okay. I’ll have her call you if she doesn’t plan on coming.”

  There was a brief pause. “No, I mean, Deenie should just take the night off. And Sunday too, okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Another pause.

  “We’re just being careful, sir.”

  “So you’re closed for business?” Tom said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Who’s going to be working?”

  “We just don’t need Deenie,” the man said. “That’s all.”

  “Listen, none of this has anything to do with Deenie,” he said. “Though your concern for my daughter’s health, since I’m sure that’s what this really is, is admirable.”

  Phones rang in the background, pots clattering, for several seconds before the man spoke again.

  “Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Nash, but none of us really know what this has to do with.”

  “Where did you get this idea? What made you think my daughter—”

  “Sir, I don’t think anything. I just know I got a call about when she’d last worked a shift. And I hear things. I live here too, you know.”

  Tom hung up.

  Laptop open, he watched the Kim Court video again. The whole video. Filled with gaping eyes and throat clutching and then the worst part. The crazy talk about Deenie being in the hospital too. About Deenie being “the one.”

  It was the ramblings of a confused, overwrought girl.

  The vaccine theory hadn’t made sense. Nor had the elaborate theories about bats and toxins. But most of all, the notion that his daughter might be some kind of Typhoid Mary scything her way through Dryden.

  He remembered watching a documentary about her on public television.

  Her peach ice cream was highly regarded and often requested—that’s what they said about Mary, a cook for the wealthy, a carrier who infected dozens of families.

  He pictured Deenie at the Pizza House, hands blotted with flour, grinning at him from the back, the steel dough roller rattling before her dainty frame.

  The PTA meeting was in a half hour, and he wanted to get there early.

  * * *

  “I’m so glad to hear your voice, baby,” Deenie’s mom kept saying, had said three, four times.

  “I didn’t feel like talking. A lot’s been going on.”

  “Deenie,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re going through all this alone.”

  “I’m not alone,” Deenie said, all the urgency she’d felt when she’d first called draining away and something else, older and warier, taking its place.

  “No, I know,” her mom said quickly. “I’m just sorry you’re going through it without me.”

  Deenie grabbed for the Mardi Gras beads, rolling them between her fingers, trying to listen, or not listen.

  “I keep hearing all these conflicting things,” her mom said, her voice filling the silence. “The vaccine. All those antivaccine people. I remember when you all had your measles shots in fifth grade. Your dad trying to explain to everyone how vaccines work. I bet that’s what he’s doing now.”

  Deenie didn’t say anything.

  “And the congressman keeps talking about the lake.”

  “What about the lake?” Deenie said, her spine stiffening.

  “I always wondered about that lake. That smell.”

  Deenie felt her
hand cover her mouth.

  “It used to be so beautiful,” her mom was saying, “and then it changed.”

  “Mom.”

  “Is it still thick like that, like a bright green carpet on top? Does it still smell like animal fur?”

  “Are you coming, Mom?” Deenie blurted, her jaw shaking.

  “No” came the reply just as quickly.

  The pause that followed felt endless, Deenie’s hand aching from squeezing the phone so hard.

  “Come stay here, baby,” her mom said, voice speeding up. “I’ll get in the car right now. I’ll pick you up by midnight. You can stay here until—”

  “No, Mom. No!” Her voice rising, that shrill tone only her mom could bring out of her, all those months and months after the separation, slowly understanding what her mother had done.

  “Deenie, it’s not safe for you there,” she said. “They don’t know what it is.”

  “Dad takes care of me.”

  “I can take care of you. Deenie, I always—”

  “You were never good for anything,” Deenie said. “Except ruining everything.”

  * * *

  Eli’s eyes scanned the team showcase.

  Glancing at the clock on the wall, he noticed it was almost seven. It had been hours since that smoke with Skye, hours spent on the thawing practice rink that seemed to pass in an instant.

  There was a lot of noise echoing from the gym. They were setting up for something. It seemed a bad time to hold a game, a college fair.

  He stopped at last year’s trophy, a gold-dipped puck presented by the mayor, dusty ribbons, the team photo, sticks slanted in perfect symmetry.

  And the big photo from last year’s interscholastic banquet.

  There were other players from Dryden, and from Brother Rice, Star-of-the-Sea.

  He was thinking of what Brooke had said, about the boy with Lise.

  In the picture, everyone wore the same dark blue blazers, the same button-down shirts and shiny loafers, the same ironic grins.

  They all looked like him.

  * * *

  Her head hot and her room smaller than ever, and Deenie couldn’t believe she’d called her mom, hated herself for it.

  Her phone kept ringing, but she didn’t want to turn it off because it might be Gabby.

  She was remembering, again, the hundred muffled conversations in her parents’ bedroom and doors slamming and her mother crying in the basement, echoing up the laundry chute. She couldn’t figure any of it out at first and then finally one night she’d heard it, her dad’s voice high and strange through the walls. Couldn’t keep your legs together couldn’t stop yourself look what you’ve done look what happened.

  The next morning, they sat Deenie and Eli down at the dining-room table and she told them she was leaving, a roller bag upright between her knees.

  The entire time, Deenie’s eyes were trained on her dad sitting there next to her mother, not saying a word, head down, thumbnail gouging a notch in the table.

  * * *

  Tom wasn’t sure at first where the sound was coming from, or what it was.

  But then he moved toward the kitchen and heard the distinctive chugging of the washing machine.

  He walked down the rickety steps, thick with layers of old paint.

  Deenie didn’t seem to hear him at first, the washer grinding to a halt. Quickly, almost furtively, she jerked the lid open, lifting her Pizza House shirt from the depths of the old Maytag.

  He watched as she held up the shirt to the lightbulb hanging above.

  As she pressed her face against it.

  “Deenie,” he called out, standing at the foot of the basement stairs.

  “Yeah, Dad,” her voice came, a hitch in it. She didn’t turn around but pulled the shirt from her face, slapped it onto the lid.

  It was dark down there, he couldn’t quite see, but it felt private. Not illicit, just private.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said you didn’t want to work tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, still not turning her head. “It just doesn’t seem right to go to work. With everything happening.”

  Her hands were tight on the shirt, red and wet.

  14

  From the rain-whisked parking lot, Tom could see the gym burning bright as a game night.

  Streaking past him, a Channel 7 News van, its antenna corded like a peppermint twist.

  In the distance, he could see Dave Hurwich having a heated discussion with a woman in a yellow slicker and matching hat, a container of some kind in her arms.

  Walking faster, Tom passed a trench-coated reporter standing at the foot of the building’s front steps, a camera light illuminating his face as he spoke:

  “Though school officials claim the purpose of this hastily scheduled meeting is to address all parental concerns, it is hard not to see a connection to tonight’s revelation.”

  Another reporter ten feet away, fingers to earpiece:

  “If Miss Court never received the much-discussed vaccination, many parents are saying that calls into question the most pervasive theory for the outbreak.”

  The reporter held the microphone out to a woman in a purple anorak beside him. Tom vaguely recalled her from Parents’ Night.

  “The vaccine was a red herring,” the woman said sternly, leaning over the microphone. “So where does that leave us now? It could be anything. That’s just not acceptable!”

  Tom kept walking.

  A small group was gathered at the school’s front door. At the center, a man with headphones and a Channel 4 baseball cap was talking to Assistant Principal Hawk.

  “This is a public meeting, isn’t it?”

  “This isn’t a school-board meeting,” Hawk said, his face bone-white and wet, his Dryden Stallions baseball cap soaked through. “This meeting was called by the parent-teacher association. We need to respect their privacy.”

  “But you’re a public school, aren’t you? What makes you think—”

  Tom hurried past, ducking his head, nearly tripping over the long licorice cords snaking from the van.

  “Is that the Nash girl’s father?” he heard someone say.

  He didn’t stop. He just kept going.

  * * *

  Her mom left two long messages that Deenie let play as the phone rested on the counter and she ate her cereal.

  She turned the radio louder so she could hear even less.

  It shouldn’t have been a surprise that her mom wouldn’t come. It wasn’t a surprise.

  In the past two years, she hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the house, more than an hour in Dryden. When she picked them up, she waited in the car as if there were police tape draped across the entryway.

  Sometimes, peeking under the sun visor, her mom would look up at it like it was haunted.

  Deenie threw the rest of her cereal into the sink and opened the refrigerator, considered a bottle of beer nestled in the back corner. She had only had maybe ten beers in her life, but it seemed like what you did, what one did in a situation like this. As if there had ever been a situation like this.

  The news report came on with that plunky news music.

  …called by Sheila Daniels, mother of Lise Daniels, and her attorney, possibly to discuss attempts to move her daughter to the medical center at Mercy-Starr Clark. The press conference will be held on hospital grounds at ten o’clock tonight, after the school’s PTA meeting is expected to end. The hospital denies the story, asserting that any such event on their property requires permission to assemble and they have received no such request.

  Deenie sat back down, thinking of the hospital, of being in the parking lot the night before, the closest she’d been to the thing that was happening. It was happening there. With Lise.

  And then hearing Kim Court’s voice, her eyes muddy ringed.

  Deenie Nash is here now too…I knew she had to be here. Deenie’s the one.

  She picked up her phone
, trying Gabby again.

  “Deenie, I don’t want to talk.” Gabby’s voice sounded soft and sludgy, like when she had strep, her tongue furred white.

  “But what happened today? Weren’t you going to the hospital for more tests?”

  “Yeah. I’m home now.”

  “What did they do to you?”

  “I don’t know, Deenie. More blood, gross stuff. More head-shrinking. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Deenie paused. She pictured Gabby like a ball rolled tight and there was nothing she could do to unpeel her arms from her legs, unfurl her head from her chest.

  “Is Skye with you?” Deenie asked, then felt embarrassed.

  “What? No.”

  “Did you see the videos?” Deenie tried again. “Kim Court?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I’m not watching anything. My mom said I couldn’t watch anything. Deenie, I don’t want to talk about it. Okay? Please.”

  But Deenie couldn’t stop herself, her voice pushing forward.

  “Gabby, we have to do something. What if we went to the hospital? Maybe, with everything going on, we could try to see Lise now—”

  “No” came Gabby’s voice, loud and urgent. “I’m never, ever going back there. What is wrong with you, Deenie? What do you think is going to happen if you go? That Lise is dying to see you so much she’ll come out of the coma?”

  Deenie didn’t say anything for a second.

  “Coma?” she said at last. “What do you mean, ‘coma’? I thought she was just unconscious.”

  There was no sound on the other end.

  Then a vague clicking, like a tongue across the roof of the mouth.

  “Deenie,” Gabby said finally, “people aren’t just unconscious for four days.”

  “But we don’t know…she may be conscious now. We don’t know.”

  There was a muffled sound, but Deenie couldn’t hear what it was, her forehead wet and tingling. She felt so far away from Gabby. Like with everything lately, even before this, all Gabby’s adventures with Skye. The only other time she remembered feeling that way was a few years ago. That time Gabby stayed with them for almost two weeks. Every night, Deenie tried to get her to talk and she wouldn’t. A few times, though, she heard Eli talking to her downstairs and Gabby laughing, and it had to be Gabby but didn’t sound like her laugh, or like Gabby.