Invisible

by Carla Buckley

  Peyton picked up her pen. It had something to do with the thyroid. Or was it the adrenal glands? Maybe it was a skin disorder.

  Brenna held out her palm. “Which one’s the heart line?”

  Peyton tapped the end of her pen on the line curving around the meat of Brenna’s thumb.

  Brenna bent over her hand. She’d moved on to green ink, and her hand was looking tattooed. Brenna had a real tattoo, high on her hip bone, of a horseshoe. If Peyton got a tattoo, it would be of an Irukandji jellyfish, which was half an inch long and deadly. Or maybe a manatee, ugly and ponderous, but utterly peaceful and wise.

  “Thyroid. Thank you, Hannah.”

  Thyroid, Peyton wrote. She couldn’t even remember what the thyroid did, let alone what diseases affected it. She’d better study all the thyroid diseases, because, sure enough, Mr. Connolly wouldn’t test them on Graves’ now that he’d mentioned it in class. That was how he separated the wolves from the sheep. The sheep would dutifully study Graves’ while the wolves ignored it and leaped over to hyperthyroidism, or whatever it was called.

  “Moving on to Mendel’s laws. Which alleles does someone with blood type O have?”

  Okay. This was blood typing. That was a big topic. They’d spent over a week on genotypes and Peyton had found it fascinating. She had planned to do something for the science fair on it, but then her mom had been hospitalized with her first infection. After that, Peyton had lost interest in the subject.

  “So if both parents have blood type A, what blood type must their child be?”

  “Which one’s the life line?” Brenna hissed.

  Peyton sighed. Seriously? “It’s the other one.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Come on, people. You should know this.”

  It was no use. She could write down every word he said from now until the end of school and she still wouldn’t pass the final. There had to be another way.

  “By the way.” Brenna leaned over confidingly, her black-rimmed eyes wide-open with false sincerity. “That sweater just does not work.”

  Yeah, Peyton would give that fashion tip the weight it deserved, seeing how it was coming from a girl with a pierced belly button and raccoon eyes.

  After the bell rang, Peyton went up to the front of the class, where Mr. Connolly sat filling in the attendance sheet. “I’ll be with you in just a second, Peyton.”

  Mr. Connolly wasn’t so bad-looking, for a teacher. Obviously, Dana thought he was still hot. Maybe if he were younger, not wearing a tie but regular clothes, his hair longer in the front so that it came down to his eyes . . .

  He looked up and she blushed.

  “So, what’s on your mind, Peyton?”

  “I need to talk to you about making up the work I missed.”

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about that. You’re behind on a few other projects, too.”

  She’d had the time. That wasn’t the question. But she just couldn’t get her head into the same room as her work. “I guess I can stay after school and make it up.”

  “You need an extension?” he asked gently. “It’s not a problem.”

  “Like summer school?” She’d already stared at the pages in her textbook a million times. Staring at them in June wouldn’t make any difference. “I can’t. I’m working.”

  “Right.” He tapped his fingers on his desk, thinking. “How about this? How about you pick a topic and write up a report? Fifteen sources, minimum, twenty pages double-spaced.”

  She felt a glimmer of interest. “On anything I want?”

  “Anything that falls within the parameters of this class.”

  “How about blood type and how it’s passed from parent to child? I’d start with my family.” She had all her mom’s medical data. All she’d have to do was find out hers and her dad’s.

  “I like it. You’d need to expand the scope, though.”

  “I’d have to ask a bunch of people for their blood types.” People would do it. It wouldn’t be like asking them how much they weighed or earned. Blood type was totally impersonal. No one would care.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  [DANA]

  BRIAN MET ME AT THE GLEAMING GLASS DOORS OF his brand-new factory. I was surprised to see him there; I thought he’d have me directed to his back office.

  “Hi,” I said. “Thanks for fitting me in.”

  “Sure.”

  A uniformed guard sat behind the long reception desk. I eyed him and raised my eyebrows at Brian, who shrugged. “Sign of the times,” he said. “You need to sign in, too.”

  I dutifully wrote my name on the line. The guard handed me an adhesive label that read visitor and I pressed it onto my shirt.

  “Why don’t you come on back,” Brian suggested, “and we can discuss this.”

  Apparently this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped. I picked up the gray suitcase and followed Brian across the spacious lobby and down a hallway.

  “That the monitor?” Brian nodded to the case in my hand.

  “Yes.” It was a ten-thousand-dollar air sampler that I didn’t normally keep in the trunk of my car, but I’d planned to use it in Chicago and had neglected to remove it before heading north to Black Bear.

  “Interesting. I thought you did demo.”

  “I do. This is part of the follow-up work we do after a building comes down. I use it to make sure we haven’t released anything hazardous into the air.”

  He frowned. “You won’t find anything hazardous here.”

  I didn’t reply. Doc Lindstrom had said workers breathing in sand dust were susceptible to kidney disease. This wasn’t a sand factory, but it was a factory. There had to be all sorts of things in the air. “This place is huge,” I said as we crossed another hallway. “And I hear you’re still expanding.”

  “Just got a military contract.”

  “Military?”

  “Sunscreen, Dana. That’s all.”

  We entered a suite of offices. A woman sat behind a desk and smiled up at us. “That salesman called again,” she told Brian.

  “Pass him on to Jim,” he said.

  “I tried that. He’s persistent.”

  “Well, just keep telling him I’m busy, and sooner or later he’ll get the point.” He pushed open the door to his office.

  A room filled with sunlight. A desk stood along one side, and on the other, covering the entire wall, stood the largest fish tank I’d ever seen, aside from the Baltimore Aquarium.

  “Wow,” I said, walking over. It was gorgeous, filled with brightly colored fish weaving through the corals and sea plants. Anemones waved and infinitesimally tiny starfish clung to the sides of the glass. “Are those live corals?”

  “You bet,” he said. “They were just fragments when I got them. Now look at them.”

  Dozens of them, orange and yellow and purple, from flat fungus-like ones along the bottom to branched ones growing along the back to rippling ones that waved their plump tentacles around. “Peyton takes care of this?”

  “She’s the only one I trust. She helped me pick out that lavender coral, and she’s the one who convinced me not to try seahorses. I admit it. She may have been right about that.”

  “She has a tank, too.”

  “Sure. I helped her pick it out. She was just a little kid when she first saw my tank. From that day forward, she had her heart set on getting one of her own.”

  A framed photograph of a woman was on the wall, her arms around two pretty little girls in matching blue dresses. She had to be his wife.

  “So, Dana,” Brian said. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Something airborne. Maybe something got released when you built the new plant.”

  “Nothing that would make people sick. Besides, this is a green plant. Even the paint’s nontoxic.”

  I hadn’t known that, but I pushed on. “It has to be something new, something that’s changed only within the last few years. How about a new candle scent?” Those cloyi
ng aromas used to make my eyes water.

  He was shaking his head. “I discontinued the candle line five years ago. It wasn’t a profitable segment for us. Now we focus on specialty creams and lotions.” He held up a hand. “And I haven’t reformulated any of them. We pride ourselves on using the old family formulas. The same ones we used back when you worked here.”

  So he remembered.

  “Look,” I said. “I know this makes you nervous, my coming in here and suggesting your plant’s making people sick. I hope I’m wrong. But what if I’m right?”

  “You can’t be. We’d know.”

  Apparently not. “What are you afraid of ?” I said, and that sleepy look vanished and became acute, the calculating businessman emerging behind the former doper, a Brian I’d never seen before. I felt a prickle of unease.

  “Fine,” he said. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”

  We started in the lobby.

  “Looks like a Dustbuster,” Brian said as I pulled the small white machine from its padded case.

  “Same principle.” I held the monitor horizontally so the rubbing alcohol wouldn’t drain out, and switched it on. A double dash pulsed, then disappeared. A few seconds later, a number glowed in the small black window.

  Brian leaned in. “What’s that mean?”

  The number was similar to the one I’d taken outside to establish an ambient baseline. “It looks like the air’s fine here. Let’s check the clinic.” Where Julie had worked.

  No one was there but the nurse, a young woman wearing regular clothes and an ID hanging from a lanyard around her neck.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling with uncertainty.

  “Don’t mind us,” Brian told her carefully. “We won’t get in your way.”

  “No problem.”

  I walked over to the desk where Julie had once sat. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, just a telephone, a computer, glass jars of cotton balls and Q-tips. I pressed the button on the monitor, and was both relieved and disappointed when the number came up showing there was nothing in here, nothing at all.

  The daycare was a riot of primary colors, noise, and motion. One woman tended the small children, while another rocked a baby in a rocking chair, neither of them Sheri.

  “Is Sheri working today?” I asked.

  Brian looked to one of the women, who answered, “She called in sick this morning.”

  Logan must have taken another turn. I wished I hadn’t said anything the night before. I wished I’d waited until Joe and I were alone.

  “Still nothing, right?” Brian said.

  I glanced at the monitor. “Right.” Which was great. Which was fantastic. Little kids were everywhere, coloring, playing, laughing, climbing a little plastic slide. A spike in here would be devastating. “Let’s try the gift shop.”

  Rows of bottles and jars lined the glass shelf. Fragrance wafted through the air. Brian said, “Lemon verbena,” and I nodded. The clerk watched curiously as I walked around, pressing the button and reading the display. Nothing.

  Brian checked his watch. “I’ve got a conference call,” he said.

  “You said I had thirty minutes,” I reminded him, and he set his jaw but allowed me to push past him. I did the women’s locker room by myself. It was painted industrial gray and had a row of showers, mirrors, and even a scale. What, did Brian think after a day of work, all a woman wanted to do was see how much she weighed? It told me something about his wife. She’d had that careful look about her in that photograph on his desk.

  “Anything?” he asked when I emerged.

  “No. See if there’s anybody in the men’s locker room, would you?”

  The men’s locker room showed nothing, and neither did the cafeteria, filled with the aromas of tomato and beef, and people who stopped their conversation to stare at me.

  The storeroom was impressive, lined with long metal shelves filled with huge containers. Fat canvas sacks lay on the floor. I stopped and read one label. “Stearic acid?”

  “It’s a vegetable fat. It’s used as a thickener.”

  I went on to the next one. “Zinc oxide?”

  “Reflects sunlight. Are we going to go through these one by one?”

  “Just tell me. Are any of these new?” Padimate O. Glycerin. Lecithin. Dimethicone. Methylparaben.

  “I told you. Everything’s the same. Everything we use is FDA-approved. No weirdo additives, nothing bought under the counter.” He had his arms crossed and was leaning against the wall. “We’re a family-owned business, Dana. We don’t screw around.”

  I took readings, at the front, back, and center of the room. Still, the monitor kept saying, Nope. Nothing here. “Let’s check Manufacturing.”

  “Julie didn’t go into the manufacturing area.”

  “It’s the most obvious place. We have to check.”

  “Look, Dana. It may just seem like hand lotion to you, but it’s an incredibly competitive industry. You have no idea. We’re just the little guy, trying to hold our own against the giants. You’d never even get this far in Procter and Gamble. You wouldn’t even get in the door.”

  “I just want to run the machine. I won’t even look at what they’re doing.”

  “Three hundred people depend on me for their livelihoods.”

  “You want me to sign a confidentiality agreement?”

  He hesitated. For one incredulous second, I thought he’d take me up on it. Then he turned on his heel and I followed him down the long white hallway to a double door without windows and a lockbox attached to the wall. I remembered when it was just a door, propped open with a shipping crate.

  “Wow,” I exclaimed. “You really are serious about security.”

  “I told you. It’s a competitive business. There’s a lot of money in skin care.” He punched in a code and swung open the door. “You have to glove up.”

  This wasn’t the small, low-ceilinged room I’d once worked in. This place was two stories of blazing white. Pipes ran along the ceiling and fed down in spirals to rows of industrial-sized bins and funnels, manned by lab-coated people wearing paper masks over their noses and mouths. Conveyor belts looped around the exterior. Electrical boxes were mounted at regular intervals.

  Brian handed me a paper mask. “This, too.”

  People watched me as I walked around. Their gazes darted from me to Brian, and then to one another. Brian stopped to speak to one woman in a long white lab coat. I frowned down at the machine in my hand. Could it be malfunctioning? No, it would display a code if there were something wrong. It was working perfectly.

  “What about runoff ?” I asked.

  “We stopped running waste into the lake when Brian took over.”

  Not Brian’s voice, but Frank’s. Surprised, I looked up. Frank stood there in his gray coveralls, wiping his hands on a dirty rag, and wearing a face mask. His eyes regarded me coldly. My heart suddenly thumped with guilt, as if I were a little kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “What is that thing?”

  “I told you,” I said. “I think something made Julie sick. I’m testing the air in here.”

  “It’s all right, Frank,” Brian said, turning back. “She’s not finding anything.”

  “You don’t have to put up with this on my account,” Frank told him.

  I bristled at that. “I want to check the lake.”

  The three of us stepped out into the warm spring afternoon and wended our way through the trees, the matted pine needles cushiony beneath our shoes. A bird cawed high above. A hawk, my father would have said. I gritted my teeth. It was being here that was summoning him back into memory. Peyton had brought him up, too, as we sat sipping tea in the predawn. Julie had apparently painted Peyton a nice portrait of a man who liked birds and carried around binoculars. I hadn’t been as careful as my sister had been. I’d let my anger show.

  The trees rose behind us as we stood on the shore, the lake peaceful and still in the clear sunshine.
No ripples or gurgles of underground pipes pushing debris into the water, no muck limning the sand.

  “What did I tell you?” Frank had pulled off his mask and now it dangled from a finger. “Sorry, Brian.”

  Talking through me as though I wasn’t even standing there.

  “No problem,” Brian replied easily. “I think this was good. It calmed people down seeing Dana walk around with that thing. You know how riled up they got before.”

  “Before what?” I asked.

  The two men exchanged a glance, but neither replied.

  “You mean, before, when Julie was asking the same questions?” I said. “Were you humoring her, too?”

  “Of course not,” Brian said.

  He was so calm, as though none of this involved him. “What if it was your wife, Brian? Wouldn’t you want to know what had made her sick? What if it was one of your little girls hooked up to those machines?”

  “Hey,” Brian said sharply. “That’s enough,” Frank warned.

  I wheeled around. “That what you told her? That you’d had enough?”

  “I never told Julie what to do.”

  “But you didn’t help her, either, did you? You didn’t support her, or try to get to the bottom of anything. You just let her feel that she was crazy, thinking what she was thinking.”

  “She was running around talking to people, exhausting herself. She’d drag herself home at all hours. It was pointless. She was sick and she needed to rest, and focus on getting better.”

  “What she needed was for you to believe in her.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I know my sister loved you.” My sister, who’d believed in fairy-tale endings, had died knowing they were all a lie. No one lived happily ever after.

  Frank’s jaw tightened. “Meaning what? That I didn’t deserve it?”

  I’d never thought so, and he knew it.

  “Look,” Brian said to me. “You ran your samples. Take this path around the building. It’ll lead you to the parking lot.” He turned to Frank, dismissing me. “Got a minute? I’ve got a call I’d like you to sit in on.”

  The two men walked back through the trees to the building. I watched them go, my gaze settling on the taller figure, and knew I’d been right. Brian wasn’t to be trusted. But having that confirmed didn’t make me feel better.