“Yeah, but I’m OK now,” said Jimmy. He didn’t mention nightmares. He hadn’t had one of those for going on two weeks now, almost long enough to be ancient history . . . and certainly long enough that neither he nor mom would connect them with last night’s episode.
“Just to be on the safe side, I took him to Dr. Bostwick this morning,” Ginny said. “He has a Saturday morning clinic. He said he thought probably it was an upset stomach. A touch of a bug, maybe, or something he ate—and we did have fish, although I wasn’t sick. Anyway, Dr. Bostwick gave him a clean bill of health. So here we are.”
“Super,” Brad said. He reflected momentarily and continued: “Bostwick’s the GP, isn’t he? Has an office on Main Street not too far from the paper?”
“Right. And he’s a peach, trust me. A highly competent, wonderfully mannered peach who loves kids, including, presumably, the three of his own. In all the years we’ve been going to him, I’ve never had a complaint.”
“So you’d recommend him.”
“Oh, yes.”
“We’ve been so busy settling in that I haven’t had time to get a doctor. Some parent. I think I’ll give him a go.”
“I recommend him highly. I’ve had him since before Jimmy was born. He delivered him, in fact.”
They chatted on like that awhile, the four of them strolling through sunshine and farm-smelling air. Against Brad’s better judgment, they’d brought Maria. Overwhelmed by the myriad of scents—animals, plants, people, most of them new, all of them intoxicating—the puppy’s nose twitched and twittered so noticeably that Abbie asked if she was going to be all right. “Yes, unfortunately,” Brad said. Straining against her leash, the puppy tried to go a hundred different ways at once. Brad had all he could do to control the fool thing. She was going to be some powerful brute when she was full-grown, that was certain. Good thing Retrievers were so gentle, so good-natured with kids.
They paused at the entrance to the rabbit tent. Bunnies were old hat for Jimmy—he’d even raised one one summer until a fox one night toppled the pen and made short work of old Bugs—but for city-slicker Abbie this might as well have been the Seventh Wonder of the Modern World. Row after row of caged rabbits—cute, contentedly brainless rabbits, maybe two hundred of them, maybe more than two hundred, each and every one chomping enthusiastically on pellets and lettuce leaves, as if they hadn’t eaten in a month and had never seen anything more appetizing in their lives. Black bunnies. Brown bunnies. White bunnies. Long-haired bunnies. Short-haired ones. With tails. And no tails. Giggling, Abbie and Jimmy plunged into the tent, the parents following a few steps behind. Brad wondered how many seconds it would be before Abbie made the inevitable request: When could she have one of her own?
Only looking back would Brad realize that what happened next had been a portent.
What happened was that a 4-H student whose name tag announced her as Carla, and who had raised a dozen of the rabbits on display, and who was watching over her animals the way nervous mothers watch sleeping newborns, asked her two young visitors if they would like to hold one.
“Can we really?” Abbie asked breathlessly.
“You really can,” Carla said good-naturedly.
“Goody!” Abbie yelled.
“Yeah, that’d be fun,” Jimmy said, less keenly. Rabbits were rabbits were rabbits, he’d learned after about three days that summer.
Carla reached into one of the cages and withdrew a fluffy ball of black fur.
“Do they bite?” Abbie asked when Carla held the rabbit out. She would not extend her hands until she had a satisfactory answer.
“Oh, no,” Carla said. “They’re very gentle.”
“Are you sure?”
“Domesticated rabbits are very tame, honey,” Brad elaborated.
“OK,” Abbie said. Hesitatingly she held her hands out.
“There,” Carla said, depositing the rabbit. “That one’s named Peter. Isn’t he soft?”
“Very soft,” Abbie said with amazement. She was even more amazed to discover how warm the rabbit was, how pronounced its heartbeat was, how its nostrils never stopped twitching. She liked everything about this animal. It was at this moment that yes, she decided she had to have one of her own.
“Here’s one for you,” Carla said, handing Jimmy a brown one. Jimmy was a pro at handling bunnies—all that experience before the fox had done its thing. He cupped his hands, and Carla lowered the rabbit into them.
The rabbit freaked.
It was as if making contact with Jimmy’s skin had sent a jolt of strong current through its rabbit body, haywiring the neurons and muscles. First it squirmed, then it flailed its legs, then it hissed—hissed, like a reptile—and then it did what a million years of evolution have taught all mammals to do when under siege.
It bit him.
Jimmy screamed and dropped the rabbit. It hopped a couple of yards away and then stopped, frozen. Brad had to dig in his heels to prevent Maria from attacking it.
“Jimmy!” Ginny yelled. She rushed to her son and clasped his hand. There were teethmarks, but thank God the skin hadn’t been punctured.
“Ow! Oooooow!” Jimmy complained. It hurt, the way a pinprick hurts a few seconds before fading away.
“Oh, I’m s-s-so s-s-sorry,” Carla said. “She’s n-n-never done that before. Honest. I don’t know what got into her. Are you all right? Are you?”
“Yeah, I’m all right.” Brad couldn’t tell if Jimmy was holding back tears or not. Abbie watching so closely probably wasn’t helping the situation any. Especially since she’d held her rabbit without incident.
“Are you c-c-certain?”
“He’s fine,” Ginny said.
And he was. But by silent consensus, that was it for the bunny tent. It was going on noon, and Brad suggested lunch. The vote was unanimous.
Ginny and Brad had hot dogs and beer. The kids had chili dogs, fried dough, candy apples, and root beers and would have gone for the cotton candy and Italian ices if parents didn’t hold the purse strings. If you thought the kid was sick last night, Ginny, my friend, Brad ruminated, just wait’ll the encore tonight. After all this food they’ll be hearing these two in Albany.
The rides opened at one, leaving just enough time to stroll through the vegetable tent. Abbie and Jimmy couldn’t have been less interested, but they tagged along uncomplainingly because the rides weren’t open yet and there was nothing else they wanted to do.
Brad’s fascination with vegetables was newfound. During his first three weeks on the job he’d discovered that up here in the wilds of Berkshire County there was an informal hall of fame for funny-shaped, oversize, off-colored, mutant vegetables. Just yesterday he’d remarked to Rod Dougherty that if he had a nickel for every warped squash some hillbilly had brought into the Transcript in hopes of a photo, he’d be a rich man. What was really bewildering was how these amateur agronomists claimed to have produced these marvels: by feeding them milk in eyedroppers, by tying them, by sweet-talking them, by applying fertilizer whose homemade ingredients were family secrets. A mighty strange hobby, Brad thought. It beat anything he’d seen in New York.
The tent didn’t disappoint Brad.
More mammoth, misshapen vegetables than they were growing in Chernobyl these days. This year had been a disaster for the real farmers—the growing season had been fluky, with drought, a deluge, and then an early frost—but for some strange reason, it had been a banner summer for the current crop of candidates to the Mutagenic Veggie Hall of Fame. There was a 540-pound pumpkin, almost as tall as a man (a 540-pound pumpkin, Brad thought. Jesus). A zucchini squash longer than a hockey stick. Another zucchini squash with dual stems, like a two-headed Hydra. Potatoes shaped like human beings, complete with pimply faces and stubby limbs.
“Ay-yup,” acknowledged a grizzled old coot whose pockmarked face bore an uncanny resemblance to the monster gourds he’d grown. “Been a heartbreak year for corn, but it don’t seem to have hurt the gourds none. Nope.”
&
nbsp; Brad was preoccupied with a display of two-pound beefsteak tomatoes (each nearly the size of a basketball, grown by a correspondingly beefsteak woman wearing a button that proclaimed: I LOVE TOMATOES!!!) when Abbie asked what time it was. She and Jimmy had been growing impatient by the minute.
“My gosh, it’s one o’clock,” Brad said.
“Rides!” Abbie shrieked.
“You got ‘em, Apple Guy,” Brad said as they cleared the tent.
Abbie was no stranger to amusement park rides. She was, in fact, developing into a rides freak. Before she’d mastered walking, Brad and Heather had taken her to a merry-go-round, and she’d fallen in love immediately—whether with the up-and-down motion or the metallic beat of the calliope, or both, Brad was never sure. From the merry-go-round she’d graduated to bigger and braver rides until now not even a roller coaster was too much.
They rode for hours, with Brad and Ginny soon dropping to spectator status. The train. Copter Cups. Tilt-a-Whirl. The Ferris wheel. The Scrambler. The Roundup, a fiendish ride which even Jimmy refused to go on (“I think I’m still a little sick from last night,” he explained, hoping that would let him off the hook with this rides-crazy girl). After a round of corn on the cob, Abbie had her fortune read by “Mother Rosetta, Gypsy” (“You will soon experience great changes,” she predicted). On their way to the ring toss, they ran into Maureen McDonald and her dad, as well as Rod Dougherty, who was doing a feature for Monday’s paper. Abbie came up short at the ring toss, but Jimmy won a Rambo poster (Ginny didn’t want to raise a stink in front of the Gales, but she knew where that poster was headed the instant they got home).
After a trip through the House of Horrors (Abbie closed her eyes for most of it), it was five-thirty. Abbie was pooped. Jimmy was pooped. Brad and Ginny were pooped. But before the Ellises parted company with the Gales, Jimmy took his mother aside and whispered something in her ear. She grinned and nodded and reached into her pocketbook. She handed her son a dollar bill.
“Jimmy would like to give Abbie a present,” Ginny announced.
“A special present.” He corrected her.
“A special present?” Abbie said. “For me?”
“Yup.”
They’re still at the age, Brad thought with equal parts appreciation and relief. Another six months to a year, and he’d be too embarrassed.
“What is it?” Abbie asked eagerly.
“It’s a surprise,” Jimmy explained. “Come on.”
“Can I go with him, Dad?”
Brad looked to Ginny. “They’re just going to that tent,” she said, gesturing toward the flowers display.
“Sure, pumpkin,” Brad said. “Just don’t be long.”
“OK.”
When the two children returned, Abbie was holding a red carnation and beaming. Jimmy had his hands behind his back.
“Was that your gift?” Brad asked.
“Yes!” his daughter exclaimed.
“That must mean you’re friends.”
“We are,” said Jimmy.
“Good friends,” Abbie added. “We have to be, or he wouldn’t have given me a flower.”
“And she wouldn’t have given me one, too. See?” he bubbled, pulling his hand from behind his back. He was holding a carnation, too, identical to Abbie’s. She’d spent her entire allowance on it.
Abbie placed her carnation in a vase and helped Brad arrange the kindling for the fire. Then they went out onto the porch. The sun was gone, but there was light left in the sky, still some leftover heat from the fading day, enough that sweaters weren’t necessary. They sat together on the glider, their gazes fixed across the back field toward the summit of Thunder Rise, colored with a deepening purple. The moon, nearly full, was making its first appearance of the evening. Nature was putting on a show. Brad sipped on a beer, Abbie a can of Slice.
“Dad?” Abbie asked after a spell.
“Apple Guy?”
“Is the moon far away?” She pointed toward Thunder Rise.
“Very far.”
“Like from here to New York?”
“Oh, no. Much farther. Thousands and thousands of miles.”
“Is God in heaven that far away, too?”
“Not exactly . . . It’s more like—”
“I think he must be very far away,” Abbie interrupted. “Because when I talk to him when I say my prayers, he never talks back. I ask him to, but he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he talk back, Dad?”
Brad’s mother, a devout Catholic (a “mackerel snapper,” Brad teasingly called her, but only when she was in the very best of moods), had taught Abbie to pray. Brad had known better than to interfere with Mother’s lessons. Abbie did not pray nightly, as Brad had as a child, but only as the mood swayed her. Brad neither encouraged nor discouraged the practice. Religion—even at five and a half—was a personal decision, he strongly believed.
As for this matter of God not talking back, Brad was stumped. It had been one of the mysteries of his own youth, too. One he’d never solved, along with why God, being so infinitely good, could allow war, famine, horrible car accidents, the leukemia that had claimed a fourth-grade classmate.
“I don’t know why he doesn’t talk back,” he finally said.
“Maybe he can’t hear me,” Abbie exclaimed, as if struck by sudden inspiration.
“Could be.”
“Maybe if I yelled instead of praying, he would hear me.” It was kid’s logic, simple and innocent.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe the old man in the moon would hear me, too. Moon! God!” she yelled into the night. “Can you hear me? It’s Abbie! I’m down here! See? Down here on the porch!”
She stopped.
“They don’t answer,” she said sadly.
“I think it’s too far,” Brad said.
Abbie waved. “Well, maybe they can see me wave,” she said. “Hi, God. Hi, moon.”
Soon it was cold and dark. They moved from the porch to the living room. Abbie brushed her teeth and got into her pajamas. Brad got another beer from the fridge and lit the fire. It caught nicely. Her two favorite Barbie dolls in hand, Abbie settled with Brad on the couch and he read her her good-night story. From a dinosaur book, of course.
“Dad?” she said sleepily when it was almost nine-thirty, well past bedtime.
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Apple Guy.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
Brad felt at peace with himself, here in the little corner of the universe they had claimed as theirs. In less than a month that universe would be turned upside down.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Wednesday, September 24
“Open wide,” Dr. Mark Bostwick said as he moved the tongue depressor into position. “Say ‘ah.’“
“Aaaaaaaah,” replied the little girl. Stripped down to her underpants, she was sitting apprehensively on the examining table. From her seat by the door Susie McDonald watched.
“That’s a girl,” Bostwick said as he shone a chrome-plated flashlight down Maureen’s throat. “Keep it open. Wide. Wider. Nice. Thatta girl. OK. You can close now.”
“Are you finished?” Maureen sounded as if she dreaded the answer. Dr. Bostwick had been going over her now for fifteen minutes. Seemed as if there weren’t a part of her body he hadn’t poked, prodded, or felt.
“Almost,” the doctor said as he tossed the tongue depressor away. “Just want to have a look in the old ears. You won’t even feel this.”
Maureen was stoic as he probed one ear, then the other.
“OK, Maureen,” Bostwick said. “What a good girl. You can get dressed now. And make sure the nurse gives you a lollipop on the way out.”
Turning to Susie, he said, “Her ears are fine. Her nasal passages are swollen. She’s congested. Her throat is inflamed. I don’t think it’s strep, but I took a culture just in case. I’ll hear from the lab first thing in the morning. But I think it’s probably a co
ld.”
He wasn’t sure he believed that.
Most of her symptoms fitted the typical cold pattern—the congestion, throat irritation, runny nose, general feeling of discomfort—but not all. The nausea she felt from time to time didn’t fit. The sharp, sudden abdominal pains she’d been having occasionally didn’t either. If it had been three months farther into the year, even two, he would have guessed she had some kind of lingering flu. But the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which he received, wasn’t reporting a single case of the flu anywhere in the country yet. He seriously doubted this season’s strain had chosen Morgantown, Massachusetts, to introduce itself to America.
“A cold for almost six weeks?” Susie said skeptically. It was her second visit to Bostwick in the last month, and she was concerned. Not in any big way, but enough to demand an explanation—something she was not in the habit of doing from doctors.
“The rhinovirus is a stubborn little critter,” Bostwick explained. “I’ve seen colds linger for six months. I wouldn’t be worried.”
But he was. He was justifiably proud of his clinical skills, but experience had taught him even the best clinicians weren’t perfect. What if he’d missed something? Maybe it was only one out of every thousand cases, but everyone misses. Everyone, no matter how brilliant. That’s what reading biographies of all his doctor heroes and medical school had taught him. Was he doing enough with this kid? Should he be ordering other tests? An expensive battery of tests that in all likelihood would do nothing more than scare the child and panic the parents? Should he refer them to a specialist in Pittsfield? Or would that be overreacting, passing the buck, covering his ass in case of a suit, the way some of his colleagues did.
No, he didn’t feel his usual confidence treating Maureen McDonald.
And she wasn’t the only one.
That was the really unsettling thing. It had taken until now to realize it—to admit it, damn it—but he’d been shaky with several other diagnoses recently. Shaky as never before in his practice, which included hundreds of families from all over the county.
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