The Cure

by Athol Dickson

  “Did you tell him about the baby?”

  “Bree! Get upstairs!”

  The softness vanished from her daughter’s face. With a clipped “Yes, Mother,” she spun on her heel and stormed away.

  Riley said, “What was that about a baby?”

  Hope turned back to her work. Barefoot in the kitchen, doing women’s work. The future gaped before her, black and bottomless. How could she have failed her daughter so completely? “We were talkin’ ‘bout your money, and the fact that I won’t take it.”

  “But what baby is she talking about?”

  She had to head this off. She went on the offensive. “You shoulda told me she was standin’ there! What’s the matter with you?”

  He took the bait. “I didn’t know.”

  “She’s too young to hear about this stuff between us, Riley.”

  “I agree.”

  “All right, then, just so’s you know.” Then, in case he wasn’t totally distracted, she added, “And I will not take your money.”

  “You don’t need my money. Dylan said half of it is yours already.”

  Hope paused, her hands cold on the chicken. She had not thought of that. She understood they had named her in the lawsuit because she was Riley’s wife, but in the madness that her husband and her daughter had inflicted on her life she had not thought it through.

  She heard more sirens, at least three altogether. There was a time when she would have phoned to find out what was going on, but her town was in other hands now. Whatever the problem, let Bill Hightower and the governor and his army sort it out.

  She said, “How much money is there, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. It changes with the stock market. Some days we get another hundred thousand, some days we lose a hundred.”

  “On average, then.”

  “It’s grown to around seven million, last time I checked.”

  “Altogether?”

  “Your half.”

  Seven million dollars to her name. If the number had been smaller, she might have been more tempted. But this was something she could never hold inside her mind. It was purely theoretical, a number like that, and therefore easier to deny. She shook seasoning on the chicken breasts and said, “You keep it.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, don’t knock yourself out tryin’ to change my mind or anything, Riley.”

  “I don’t care one way or the other, so long as you’re happy.”

  “Happy?” She laughed. Then, “Don’t you wanna ask me why I won’t take it?”

  “I know why.”

  “You don’t know a thing.”

  “I do. It’s the five thousand dollars.”

  It surprised her that he understood. She kept her back to him and flipped the chicken breasts to sprinkle on more seasoning. She did not want him to see the confusion he had planted in her. Yet on reflection, it should be obvious why she would not take the money, even to Riley. She thought about the two homeless alcoholics in New Jersey who had walked into a newspaper office and set themselves on fire to protest the price Lee Hanks planned to set on the cure. Dead, both of them, and on front pages all around the world. She thought of the massive wave of outrage rolling through the country, the picketing and sit ins, the rallies and marches, good people throughout the nation rising up against the injustice of it. She said, “You also need to take back that car and mortgage money.”

  “All right.”

  “All right. Now tell me ‘bout this lawsuit.”

  “I don’t know a lot about it yet. Dylan just got a copy himself. He said it’s about the patent rights. Some woman named Dale Williams says she invented the formula and I stole it from her.”

  “Did you?”

  A pause. “No.”

  She noted both the pause and the lack of indignation. Not “Of course not!” but simply “No.” She felt a sudden rush of pity. He was such a simple man, naïve in so many ways. It was why he had fallen so completely to the bottom in the face of undiluted evil. Like a little boy, he would be surprised when the judge or jury saw through his lies. He would be putty in their hands. She asked, “We both know you didn’t figure out that formula yourself, so where’d you get it, Riley?”

  “I . . . I sort of found it.”

  The poor fool. “Where?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not? If you didn’t steal it from this woman, why can’t you tell me where it came from?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “Okay, how’d she know it was you behind the patent if you didn’t get it from her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dylan told me you set up some kind of company to hide behind, right?” It was all over the news about BHR Incorporated. She had already figured that one out—Bree, Hope, Riley. But BHR and Riley weren’t the only defendants named in the lawsuit. Her name was in the complaint, so she had a right to ask these questions. She said, “I think it’s important to find out how she knows who you are. You guys worked really hard to keep it secret. You didn’t even tell me. But this Williams person knew anyway. She even knew about me.”

  Riley said nothing.

  Hope said, “Maybe she found out from Dylan.”

  “Dylan wouldn’t do that.”

  “You trust him.”

  “He’s a good man, Hope. You and him . . . I see why you like him so much.”

  Hope thought of Dylan, of how she had suspected the worst of him when the car and mortgage payments came, wondering if he had done something illegal to get his money, wondering if he was some kind of criminal in spite of all the ways he had shown himself her friend, in spite of all the times she had watched his lips while he looked elsewhere, longing to kiss them, to tell him everything there was inside of her, to press herself full length up against him. She thought of all the lonely nights wrestling with her demons, desperately resisting the apparent equation of abandonment and adultery. Weren’t they much the same? Her husband had chosen alcohol over her. Was that not infidelity? Oh, how often she had longed to release herself to the common sense of that. But in her weakest moments, when Dylan’s handsome kindness nearly overwhelmed her, she had been unable to elude the plain sense of her Savior’s words, so she had whispered, “Rescue me,” and although she did not understand the reason for her torture, Hope had tried to accept it as a necessary part of something greater than herself, and by so doing, somehow, she had survived.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s a good friend.”

  “Is that all he is?”

  She didn’t know the answer to that question so instead she said, “I understand why Dylan couldn’t tell me about this. He said you wouldn’t let him. But I still wanna know why you didn’t say anything. Why’d you make me find out this way?”

  “Do you remember your last birthday in Brazil?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We went shopping in Mãe do Deus a few days before, remember? I bought you that box of chocolates, and you gave them all away to the kids?”

  She said, “Yes,” and could not help thinking those children would have had children of their own by now, and without the excuse of onions her eyes began to well up again.

  Riley said, “I carved a little wooden cross for you. I took some of that gold foil from the chocolates and used it as an inlay.”

  “Why are you talkin’ about this? I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I’m answering your question, Hope.”

  She saw their faces, their perfect, angelic laughing faces, all of them, and Bree. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “I remember seeing that cross around your neck, when we were all dancing at the party, but I can’t remember seeing it again after that.”

  She stopped her work and turned toward him, to implore him. “Can we please just change the subject?”

  He remained at the window, staring out. And beyond him, through the glass she saw a rising column of black smoke in the distance.
So the sirens had been fire trucks in the streets of Dublin, down at the bottom of the hill.

  He said, “You wanted to know why I didn’t tell you about the cure. I’m trying to explain. I gave you that cross, and you wore it at the party, and the next time I saw it was here in Dublin, in the police station, when they pulled it out of my pocket and said it belonged to Willa Newdale.”

  “What?”

  “I kind of remember someone giving it to me, putting it in my hand and asking for the cure, but everything that night got all balled up and my head wasn’t working right yet—I mean, I was still pretty messed up, I’m telling you, even though I was sober—so I can’t remember for sure how it got in my pocket, Hope. I swear I can’t. But I keep thinking if I knew how it got there, where it came from, I’d understand everything.”

  “I don’t . . .” She had been staring at the distant smoke above her town. She had missed what he was saying. “What was that about the police station? You had something that belonged to Willa?”

  “I had something that belonged to you, unless you gave away that cross.”

  She began to understand. She thought of the bruised and shaggy man who had reappeared with the dawn at the end of her driveway as if rising from the curvature of the frozen earth. She thought of the televised image of a silhouetted form in the back of Bill Hightower’s car, the “mystery man of Dublin,” the one who had broken into Henry’s store with all those homeless people the night a kind old woman disappeared. She said, “You’re the one Steve’s been looking for. He thinks you hurt Willa.”

  “I didn’t do anything to that woman.”

  There was a pleading in his eyes—he clearly did not think she would believe him—and in spite of her defenses, she crossed the kitchen to stand behind him by the window and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Riley. I know that.” He turned, and his eyes contained the same pathetic hopefulness she had just seen him give to Bree. She removed her hand. She did not want to lead him on.

  He said, “Did you give that cross to Willa?”

  The telephone began to ring. She did not move. Now that she understood the reason for it, Hope let the memories come. The phone rang on unanswered as she remembered Riley, shyly offering the crude little trinket, the finest kind of gift he could manage under the circumstances, and more than enough to swell her heart with adoration. She remembered The People, coming to their camp to lead them back, a grand procession to the meeting place in honor of her special day, a great party with slaughtered pigs and the juice of araca-boi, that bright yellow kind of guava they so loved, and memories of dancing, and endlessly exaggerated fireside stories about her four years among them told by all the old ones, and laughter at their magnificent lies, and children running everywhere and the thought occurring to her that surely there was something of Eden in that place. And memories of later, when the old man came alone to offer her the finest birthday gift of all, reaching up to touch the little wooden cross around her neck and saying, “I see Jesus very very much.” Her thirty-second birthday. She was forty years old now, which seemed almost as impossible as the cross somehow in Riley’s pocket in spite of so much time and distance between then and there and here and now.

  Standing close beside her husband at the window in the kitchen, with smoke rising from the bed of fog that lay over Dublin down below, and the telephone still ringing, ringing, ringing, Hope asked, “Are you sure it’s the same cross?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. I gave it to Waytee.”

  Riley shook his head, looking through the glass. “Did you . . . did you find it later?”

  She knew exactly what he meant. She too looked out the window and saw the column of smoke getting thicker, rising from a hidden source beneath the settled mist down in the valley, and she knew the fire was bad, and she saw the clearing, the charred and blackened village, the long and shallow pit that she and Riley dug, and filled, and covered as their final act of ministry, and little Bree, last of all The People, bathed in blood and crying in the bushes.

  “I never saw that cross again,” was all that Hope could say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  FROM THE NATIONAL GUARD’S COMMAND AND CONTROL POSITION, Chief Steven Novak struggled to see through the wicked thick fog blinding Dublin as nearly a full block of houses burned, some at least two hundred years old. The invisible flames roared beyond the mist, which glowed an eerie orange and yellow. Even with all three of Dublin’s fire trucks on the scene it seemed pretty obvious the fire was out of control. And in spite of all the troops hanging around with rifles, the chief saw people running in and out through the gauzy mix of fog and smoke carrying televisions, stereos, computers—anything light enough to carry. Sometimes the soldiers caught them, but most of the looters seemed to vanish in the ether. Steve Novak seethed with impotent rage.

  Colonel Peterson stood on the far side of a row of haphazardly parked Humvees, surrounded by a bunch of do-nothing weekend warriors who did not have enough moxie between them to stand up to a domesticated kitten, much less this army of homeless predators that had descended on his town. Steve had just wasted five valuable minutes trying to get the colonel to authorize deadly force, but the man insisted it was not necessary. Homes that had been in families for eight generations were being burned to the ground, and it was not necessary. Innocent people were making frantic choices about whether to save photo albums or the family Bible as they fled the fire, only to have their belongings ripped from their hands by phantoms who emerged from out of nowhere and disappeared into the fog again. Meanwhile, this so-called soldier insisted it was not necessary for his men to fire their weapons. Steve had asked the coward if someone must get murdered right out there in the middle of the street before he started shooting. The colonel—a dentist under normal circumstances—had suggested Steve should be more professional and remain calm.

  With a puff of wind the fog parted for a moment across from Steve’s position, and he caught a glimpse of old man Summerset standing on his front steps holding a shotgun at something like port arms while burning cinders fell around him and his two grown sons doused the shingles on his roof with water from a pair of garden hoses. The chief crossed the street.

  Yelling above the roar of the nearby inferno he said, “Mr. Summerset, did ya see how this got started?”

  “Ayuh,” called the old man, his clear blue eyes on the mayhem down the street. “Was a bunch a them bums from away. Them drunks.”

  “Did ya see ‘em set the fire?”

  “Naw, but I seen ‘em just before they did it.”

  “Where were they?”

  With the shotgun the old man pointed toward the far side of the street. Steve looked that way but all he saw was an iridescent flickering in the mist.

  Mr. Summerset said, “Over at the apartment behind ol’ lady Harding’s place, where that new fella lives. Mad as hornets, they was. Standin’ all ‘round her garage. Yellin’. Wanted that fella ta come out pretty bad so’s they could clean his clock, seemed ta me like.”

  “Did they get their hands on him?”

  “Dunno. Mebbe. I went in ta get my gun.”

  “Who’s this fella you’re talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “Dunno his name. New fella, like I said. Works over at Sadie’s.”

  One of the old man’s sons overheard the conversation and called out, “It’s Mr. Keep, Chief. Mayor’s ex lives over there.”

  Steve frowned. “What would they want with him?”

  “Ain’t you seen the news this mornin’? He’s the one invented that medicine for drunks, got everyone so riled up ‘bout the price an’ all.”

  “Riley Keep?”

  “Ayuh. Somebody suin’ him, I guess. Say he stole the medicine from ‘em. Say his wife did too from what I hear.”

  Riley Keep. The chief visualized the man, who had always seemed like a pretty good egg to him. Kind of quiet. Maybe a little nervous. Steve was used to that. For some reason a lot of solid citizens
got nervous around the police. But now that he thought about it, there was something a little different about the man. Steve always had the feeling they had met before. And if it was true what old man Summerset’s boy said about Riley and the cure . . . Steve thought about the homeless fella he had interrogated the night Willa Newdale disappeared, and in his mind he compared the eyes and nose and upper cheeks, and suddenly he felt like an idiot.

  Then he thought about a news report that named Riley and Hope. If there was a mob after Riley because of that story and if the story also mentioned Hope Keep, chances were they’d go after her next.

  He turned without a word to hustle back toward his Explorer. He considered calling for backup, but that fool of a colonel needed all the help he could get, so Steve didn’t want to pull his guys away from the area, especially not when he could be at Mayor Keep’s house in under five minutes. Besides, remembering the way Riley Keep had stonewalled him in his own interrogation room and then hidden in plain sight right there in Dublin all this time, Steve decided he would see to that particular fella himself.

  He almost had his truck in sight when a high pitched scream drew his attention to the side yard of a house on his left. Squinting through the fog he saw a cluster of gray shapes. He heard the scream again and changed direction, heading off that way. Getting closer, he could just make out a woman struggling with a pair of men. He unsnapped his holster, drew his side arm, and ran straight at them, calling, “Stop! Police!”

  Before he could reach them, a ghostly figure came around the far corner of the house and charged into the attackers. The men released the woman, who dropped like a rag doll to the grass. They turned on her rescuer, punching him and kicking him, but the man landed a few good hits himself, and when Steve shouted again, much closer this time, the two assailants turned and ran.