“If I ever catch you doing this when you drive, I’ll ground you for a year,” Brad warned hypocritically.
Abbie just continued to shriek.
“Heck, if I get caught, they’ll be grounding me for a year. I can just hear the police now: ‘And you’re the editor of that rag? Make my day! You have the right to remain silent . . .’“
Brad laughed. Let them catch him. The radio was on, his daughter was happy, and he felt good. No, he felt great. Two months into their new life, and everything was under control—and some things were better than merely under control. Thomasine Lyons, as Exhibit Number One. He still didn’t know if they were falling in love, but they were falling somewhere, that was for goddamn sure. Twice now they’d made love—ambrosian, honey love. And they were seeing each other almost every day. Going steady, he would’ve said back when he was seventeen.
Even the damn dog wasn’t such a pain in the ass anymore. Yes, Brad concluded, life was sweet. After Hurricane Heather, they deserved some smooth sailing.
“OK,” Brad announced as he turned the radio up. “You ready?”
“Ready!” Abbie responded, not knowing or caring what it was she was ready for. With Daddy in this kind of mood, it had to be good.
“This one’s a classic. Here we go!”
It was “Under My Thumb,” the great Rolling Stones tune. How many years old—and it still sounded incredible.
Brad cranked the volume until the speakers were shaking the door panels. He rolled the window down. The air was invigorating. Not yet eleven, and the mercury had already shot up to fifty. The sun was breaking through the cloud cover. Crazy weather up here in New England, Brad thought again. Who knew what tomorrow would bring? Maybe a heat wave or a solar eclipse.
The Mustang hurtled on down the road, only her seat belt keeping Abbie from flopping side to side, Brad intent on hugging that fine line between cheap thrills and accident. Soon they were nearing the center of town. Brad brought the speed down a bit and stopped the fishtailing—over Abbie’s loud protest. They were passing houses now, and every one of them seemed to have a yard full of children, amazed at how their world had been transformed while they’d been sleeping. It was an odd juxtaposition: snowmen and snow forts next to trees draped with wet toilet paper, left over from last night’s Halloween naughtiness.
“This is the only way to listen to rock ‘n’ roll,” he shouted over the chorus. “Real loud!”
He looked over at his daughter and exulted. Yes, the frosting on the cake was Abbie’s happiness.
Except for her occasional nightmares—Brad could think of nothing but to let them run their course—she was as happy as she’d ever been. She’d made plenty of friends, including a very good one, Jimmy. Her teacher praised her kindergarten performance. Mrs. Fitzpatrick couldn’t imagine a better afternoon helper. And seeing her mother Columbus Day weekend apparently had sated whatever desire she had for Heather’s company, at least for the time being. Since the visit Abbie hadn’t once mentioned her. Visitation rights or no visitation rights, Brad had decided that unless Abbie demanded it, she would not be paying a visit to New York for a few weeks. The court could go fuck itself, as far as he was concerned.
Then there was Thomasine. Unless his daughter had become incredibly skilled at hiding her emotions, it seemed to Brad that not only did Abbie not resent her, but she had become genuinely fond of Thomasine, as Thomasine was of her. Of course, it helped that Thomasine made a point of bringing a treat (Barbie dolls were the favorites) on her every visit. And she’d certainly scored big points this week by bringing over a real live Indian.
Yes, it was a good spell for the Gales, Brad thought as he pulled into the IGA parking lot for their weekly shopping.
At the McDonalds’, life had become hell.
Over the last few days Susie and Hank had convinced themselves their little girl was dying.
They were right.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Monday, November 3
Maureen was too sick to be scared when she was admitted to Berkshire Medical Center. Bundled in a blanket and clutching her Cabbage Patch Doll, she sat stonelike on her father’s lap while Susie mindlessly signed forms and answered the admission secretary’s questions. Dr. Bostwick, who had ordered Maureen in, was due any minute.
It was 8:15 A.M.
Only five days ago the McDonalds had dared hope that things were looking up. An endless ordeal of tests had not disclosed what was making their daughter sick, but a solid week of bed rest and antibiotics had had an effect. On Tuesday her temperature was normal and she ate three healthy meals. On Wednesday she returned to school. She was in school again Thursday and felt so good Friday afternoon that Susie dressed her like Raggedy Ann (unlike last year, when she’d been the Wicked Witch of the West; Maureen went hysterical at the mention of a scary costume again) and drove her trick-or-treating to a couple of houses, including the Gales’.
Midnight Friday her fever returned with the force of a firestorm. Overnight she vomited three times. By sunrise Saturday her sheets were soaked with sweat. Some color had returned to her cheeks during the week, but now her face was gaunt, her eyes sunken and glazed again. She had no appetite, and it was only with patient coaxing that her parents were able to get orange juice into her. It did not stay down, and when her body had finally, agonizingly rejected every last drop of it, she continued on for another ten minutes with dry heaves. Saturday night saw no improvement; during the one short period she was alone in her room, a terrible nightmare awakened her, leaving her quaking. By Sunday morning she was slipping in and out of delirium (she thought at one point that Susie was her grandmother, dead two years) and her temperature was 105. Tylenol didn’t touch it, and on Sunday night, when Susie called, Bostwick said he wanted her admitted first thing the next morning, immediately if her condition worsened overnight.
He arrived at the hospital as Susie was fumbling in her purse for their Blue Cross card.
“How’s our favorite little girl?” he asked Maureen, but he knew, looking at her, just how bad she was: dying, in fact.
The terrible weight of that thought chilled him, and for the first time this whole nightmarish fall, he felt fear—real, gut-clawing fear. In his years of practice he’d lost only one child to disease: Justin Rosenberg, who’d been wasted by an extremely rare case of eastern equine encephalitis. He’d never forgotten Justin, never forgiven himself, even though he knew in his heart of hearts he’d played it by the book, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to save the kid. Unless . . .
. . . “unless maybe you’d diagnosed it a day or two earlier.” Those had been the medical examiner’s words, and they hadn’t been an accusation. They’d simply been a single offhanded comment delivered when the ME had come to the hospital to collect the body for autopsy. Bostwick had never forgotten those words. He heard them in his head now, as stinging as when they’d been delivered.
“Don’t feel like talking, honey?” he continued. “Well, that’s all right,” he said, smoothing Maureen’s brow. “You don’t have to. You just be quiet, and we’ll take care of everything.”
Bostwick opened his briefcase and took out a pad on which he’d written orders: an IV, fifteen-minute observation, a private room. He’d hand delivered a copy at midnight to the hospital so it could be ready for her.
“How long have you been here?” he asked Hank.
“Half an hour.”
“Half an hour?” He was astounded. “Nurse?” he called to the nurses’ station, where two white-uniformed people, a man and a woman, were sitting at a desk, having coffee.
“Yes?” the male nurse answered.
“This is Maureen McDonald,” Bostwick said, gesturing toward the child.
“I know.”
“She’s supposed to have been admitted,” Bostwick snapped.
“I know.”
“Then why the hell is she still sitting here?”
“Because she hasn’t been assigned a room yet, Doctor,
” the nurse said brusquely. It was obvious he didn’t like being challenged.
“Really?” Bostwick said. Hank and Susie, as preoccupied as they were, could feel the anger in his voice, cold and dagger-sharp. “Maybe I’m not making my point, my friend. Let me put it this way: I’ll give you two minutes to get her one, and then I’m going to that phone there and call the administrator of this hospital. Believe me when I say Mort Silverman’s a personal friend . . . who shares my views about incompetents.” He pulled back his sleeve to expose his watch. “Clock’s running,” he said, turning his back.
In fewer than ninety seconds an orderly appeared with a wheelchair. “She’ll be in room two-two-four,” the young man said quietly.
“That’s a private?”
“Yes.”
The orderly helped Maureen into the chair. She made the move without protest or reaction, so limply that it raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Justin Rosenberg had behaved like that the morning he’d been admitted to Berkshire Med, right in this very room.
“You go on up with her,” Bostwick said to her parents. “I have a couple of things to attend to. I’ll be up in a minute.”
“OK,” Hank and Susie said, speaking together. They made no effort to disguise their fear.
Bostwick went down the corridor, through the cafeteria, and into the front lobby, where there was a more private pay phone. He took his calling card out of his wallet. Seeing Maureen had convinced him; he’d waited too long already.
“Atlanta,” he told the long-distance directory assistance operator. “Centers for Disease Control.”
“One moment, please.”
Over the last three weeks there had been tests. So many tests. They’d tested blood, sputum, urine, feces, skin, hair, spinal fluid— every conceivable specimen, short of biopsy. And not just from Maureen McDonald, who’d been picked at like a holiday turkey, but the other children, too, none of whom, no credit to him, was as sick as the girl being admitted this morning . . . yet. If narrowing the possibilities could be considered progress, he had made some. They could conclude now it almost certainly wasn’t any of the streptoccal or staphylococcal infections. Wasn’t salmonella. Or shigella. Or mononucleosis. Wasn’t influenza or any recognizable cold virus. Wasn’t meningitis or encephalitis. Wasn’t any of the long shots they’d tested for: hepatitis, diphtheria, dysentery, dengue fever, trichinosis, malaria, for God’s sake. Wasn’t the really long shot: AIDS.
So what the hell is it?
Bostwick was haunted. So was the Berkshire Medical Center internist who’d been working in tandem with him, Dr. Miller.
Just what the hell?
How many times had they gone over the symptoms? The epidemiology? How many hours had they pondered the age of the children, where they lived, where they went to school, into what toilets they moved their bowels—anything, everything they might have in common? Only recently he’d gotten around to reading Randy Shilts’s awesome account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. The terrible frustration of the initial researchers—the frustration of not knowing what it was—had left Bostwick with a haunted feeling. Like those early doctors, he and Miller were grasping at straws. Sucking wind royally.
Desperate. That was why Bostwick recently was wondering if nightmares might not be a more important piece of the puzzle than they’d assumed.
Every one of the children, as best they could determine, had been experiencing terrible dreams. That fact had come to Bostwick’s attention early on, when he’d started interviewing the children and their parents, almost all of whom were willing, eager, to divulge the most intimate details of their families’ lives in the hope of turning up some crucial clue. As concern had risen, taboos had fallen away. With Bostwick—and later Miller—they’d gone over sexual practices, the proximity of diaper pails to beds, the defecation patterns of household pets, the amount of time leftovers stayed in the refrigerator, whether toothbrushes were shared, how often laundry was done, and on and on and on. Gosselin, the epidemiologist in Atlanta he was trying to reach now, would have been proud of him.
But neither doctor had put much weight in nightmares.
Now Bostwick wondered if they should.
He knew precious little about sleep disorders, or mass hysteria, or mass trances. He seemed to recall from his med school days reading about mushrooms that many years ago had poisoned a French village, causing the entire populace to hallucinate. Whether or not anything like that could cause all of the other symptoms, too, and whether any natural or synthetic hallucinogen could somehow have gotten into food or water, affecting only kids, not adults, were questions he couldn’t answer.
Nor, he sincerely believed now, should he be expected to. Whatever they were dealing with, it was beyond the skills of an ordinary physician to decipher. Beyond the skills even of a talented and educated physician, which is what he’d always prided himself in being. This was a matter for the Health Department. And the Health Department wasn’t doing its job.
True, its staffers had done testing. Obligatory, cover-your-ass-in-a-class-action-lawsuit testing. They’d tested for lead paint (and they’d found it, under too many coats of latex to be highly hazardous), asbestos (none), salmonella (negative), shigella (ditto). They’d taken samples of water back to Boston to see if they could detect traces of carcinogens (no results yet, but it didn’t matter, any dummy could see these weren’t cancer symptoms).
The truth was, this Doc Hough from the Health Department was a clown. The truth was, Morgantown was too small, too far from Boston to matter yet. The brutal reality, Bostwick suspected—it made him angry enough to keep him awake nights—was that not one of these kids was sick enough for the red lights to start flashing. At best they were a blip on a monthly morbidity report. Christ, he thought, tell it like it is. No one’s died. The bastards need a death, don’t they, before they take the hicks seriously? A goddamn sacrifice to the Almighty Public Health God before the dollars can be authorized, isn’t that what we’re talking about here, folks?
Well, he’d make the bastards pay. Before this was all over, he was going to spill his guts to TV, newspapers, the wire services. He swore.
A computer voice enunciated the number for the Centers for Disease Control.
“Thank you,” Bostwick said reflexively. He was concentrating too hard to notice, or care, that a machine had just spoken.
He dialed, gave his calling card number, and the receptionist came on the line. “Good mornin’, this is the CDC,” she said with a drawl that any other day would have been pleasant. Today Georgia Peach was annoying.
“Dr. Raymond Gosselin,” Bostwick said.
“Thank you. That extension, for future reference, is six-one-two-one. I’ll connect you now.”
Saying his name brought the memories back in a flood tide. Raymond Gosselin. A Wisconsin boy, thrown together by fate with Bostwick as a roommate freshman year at Tufts Medical School in Boston. A brilliant kid, one with a sense of humor and a way with women that Bostwick to this day wasn’t sure he really understood. Gosselin defined homely, what with oversize ears, bad skin, and not an iota of talent for dressing. And the ladies loved him.
Couldn’t get enough of him. At a stage of his own development when Bostwick was struggling for a night at the movies with someone, anyone, Gosselin kept a sexual assembly line in full-scale operation. The first year a different partner every weekend, and precious few of them as nerdy-looking as Gosselin himself. Eventually he’d settled down and married one of those women, a classmate Bostwick once coveted.
If forced to give a reason, Bostwick would’ve had to say it was Gosselin’s brilliance that attracted such a crowd of such fine ladies.
He was one of these rare people who seemed to come by knowledge supernaturally; he barely ever cracked a book, yet always scored an A. But it wasn’t innate knowledge that was his mark. In the lab, and later in the clinic, Gosselin was possessed of rare skills. No one Bostwick had ever met had such an instinctive feel
for how the human body worked, how its parts fit together in such perfect harmony . . . until illness interfered. The day of graduation the dean personally told Gosselin he’d never once in almost a quarter century at the school seen such promise.
Gosselin knew that. Gosselin intended to be a star. He had an ego to match his genius, and he intended to leave his imprint on medical history. He wanted prizes, including the Nobel. He wanted to go coast-to-coast lecturing, and eventually he wanted to write his autobiography. Epidemiology, the study of diseases, seemed the perfect specialty to take him there. You could attract great attention, in and out of medicine, by mastering epidemics. In America you could join civilization’s greatest disease-fighting team, maybe even captain it someday. You could make great contributions to mankind, and while they’d had their arguments, Bostwick never doubted that noble notion was also part of the strange mechanism that made Gosselin tick.
He waited what seemed an eternity. “Dr. Gosselin’s office,” a secretary finally said.
“Is he there?”
“I’m afraid not. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Bostwick. Dr. Mark Bostwick. I’m an old—an old classmate of Ray’s.”
“I see,” the secretary said, thoroughly unimpressed. In Gosselin’s rarefied world, Bostwick could see, old classmates didn’t count for doodly-squat. “May I leave Dr. Gosselin a message?” the secretary asked.
“Can you tell me when he’ll be back?”
“Not until the end of the month,” she said, and now she was beginning to sound annoyed. “Thanksgiving week.”
“Is there a number where I can reach him now?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said curtly. “He’s in Haiti. In the field.” She pronounced the word as if it were sacred.
“Well, please have him call me,” Bostwick said, giving his number. “And please tell him it’s urgent. Let me give you my number.”
Thanksgiving.
He wondered if it would be too late.
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