by John Saul
“I asked for this table because it’s far from prying ears. No sense whispering our secrets to the world, is there?”
Sally let herself relax a little and glanced around, relieved to see that there wasn’t a familiar face anywhere in the room. A waiter appeared, and she ordered a glass of wine, then turned her attention to Janelle Ransom.
“I suppose you must have thought I was crazy, calling you in the middle of the night,” she began. Jan Ransom made a deprecating gesture.
“Don’t be silly. All of us are like that at first. For a while I thought I was going crazy. I was calling people I hardly know and trying to explain what had happened to my little girl. I suppose I was really trying to explain it to myself.” She fell silent as the waiter reappeared with Sally’s drink. When he was gone again, she held up her glass. “To us,” she proposed. “Lord knows, people who’ve been through what we’ve been through need to stick together.” The two women sipped on their drinks for a moment and scanned the menu.
“Can I ask you something?” Jan asked after the waiter had taken their orders. “Why did you choose me to call? Did I say something the other night?”
Sally nodded. “I don’t quite know how to start …” She faltered. Jan smiled at her encouragingly.
“Start any way you want, and don’t worry about my feelings. One thing you learn after you lose a baby to SIDS is that there are times when you have to say everything you’re feeling, no matter how awful it sounds, and hear everything people are saying, no matter how much it hurts.”
Sally took a deep breath. “You said the other night that you hadn’t wanted your baby—”
“Until she was born,” Jan broke in. “Once she was born, I fell in love with her.” A faraway look came into Jan’s eyes and she smiled. “You should have seen her, Sally. She was the most beautiful baby you ever saw, even right after she was born. None of that wizened-monkey look. She was tiny, but I swear she came into the world laughing and never stopped. Until that day …” She trailed off and the smile disappeared from her face. When she spoke again, there was a hard edge of bitterness to her voice. “I still wonder, you know. I still wonder if it was something I did, or didn’t do”
“I know,” Sally whispered. “That’s what’s terrifying me too. I—well, I hadn’t planned on having Julie either. Even my son was a couple of years ahead of schedule. Funny, isn’t it? Some women want children desperately and can’t have them. And then there are women like us, who do our best not to get pregnant, but nothing works.”
“Forget the pill?” Jan asked.
Sally shook her head. “I’m allergic. I was using an IUD.”
“So much more romantic, right? You know it’s there, and nobody has to stop to install equipment. No worrying about whether you remembered to take the pill. Just a little tiny device and all the peace of mind in the world. And then you’re pregnant.”
“You had a coil too?”
“Uh-huh. It seemed like the best way. You know why? Religion. You want a laugh? I had it all figured out that with the IUD, I’d only be committing one sin, and I thought I could get away with that. The pill was going to be a sin a day, and even though I don’t go to church, I knew I’d have a little twinge of guilt every time I took it. So I went into Dr. Wiseman’s office one day, got my coil and my guilt, and went home and forgot about it.”
Sally frowned. “Dr. Wiseman?” she repeated. “Arthur Wiseman?”
“Do you know him?”
“He’s my doctor.”
Jan Ransom chuckled hollowly. “Now what do you suppose the odds are on that? Two women, the same doctor, the same device, the same failure, and then SIDS.”
Sally Montgomery did not share Jan’s amusement. What, she wondered, were the odds? She began calculating in her head, but there were too many variables.
“… and you have to go on living,” she heard Jan saying.
“You sound like my mother.”
“And like my own. Sally, it’s hard to accept what’s happened. No one knows that better than I do. But there’s nothing else you can do. Nothing’s going to bring Julie back and nothing’s going to make you feel better. All you can do is try to let the wounds start to heal.”
“But I can’t do that,” Sally said quietly. “I can’t just go on as if nothing happened. Something did happen and I have to know what it was.” She held up a hand as Jan started to say something. “And don’t tell me it was SIDS. I won’t accept that It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“But that’s just it, Sally. Don’t you see? SIDS doesn’t make sense—that’s the awful part of it.”
Sally sat silently, her eyes meeting Jan Ransom’s. “Do you think I’m going crazy?” she asked at last.
Jan chewed on her lower lip a moment, then shook her head. “No. No more than I went crazy the first few months. Do what you have to do, Sally. In time it will all work out.” Then she smiled ruefully. “You know something? I was hoping I might be able to help you today—help you cut some corners. But I can’t, can I? All I can do is let you know that I understand what you’re going through. You have to go through it yourself.” She raised her glass.
“Good luck.”
The clinic seemed oddly quiet as Sally walked down the green-walled corridor toward Arthur Wiseman’s office, and the sound of her heels clicking on the tile floor echoed with an eerie hollowness. But it’s not the clinic that seems empty, she decided as she turned the last corner. It’s me. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here, so it seems strange. Strange and scary. Then she stepped into Dr. Wiseman’s outer office. His nurse looked up at her, smiling uncertainly.
“Mrs. Montgomery? Did you have an appointment today?” She reached for her book.
“No,” Sally reassured her. “I was just hoping maybe I could talk to the doctor for a couple of minutes. Would it be possible?”
The nurse turned her attention to the appointment book, then nodded. “I think we can just shoehorn you in.” She grinned and winked conspiratorially. “In fact, it’s an easy fit—I had a cancellation an hour ago, and the doctor was counting on an hour to himself. We just won’t give it to him.” She stood up, then, after tapping briefly on the closed door to the inner office, went in. A moment later she reappeared. “Go right in, Mrs. Montgomery.”
Arthur Wiseman was waiting for her, his hand outstretched, his expression cordial. “Sally! What a pleasant surprise.” The smile melted from his face to be replaced by a look of concern. “Nothing’s wrong, is it?”
“I don’t know,” Sally said pensively, settling herself into the chair next to his desk. “I just wanted to ask you about a couple of things. I’ve been talking to some people, including Janelle Ransom.”
Wiseman’s brows rose a little. “Jan? How did you meet her?”
“The SIDS Foundation. Steve and I went to one of the meetings they sponsor.”
“I see. And Jan was there?”
Sally nodded. “We had lunch today, and I discovered something that worries me. We were both using IUDs when we got pregnant.”
“And?” Wiseman asked.
“And, well, I suppose it just seemed like too much of a coincidence that we were both using IUDs and both got pregnant and both lost our daughters to SIDS.”
Wiseman sighed heavily and leaned back. Here it comes, he thought. When there is no easy explanation for a death, the family turns on the doctor. “Just what is it you think might have happened?”
“I don’t know,” Sally admitted. “It just occurred to me that perhaps the IUD might have … well …”
“Injured the fetus?” Wiseman asked. He leaned forward, folding his arms on the desk. “Sally, that’s patently impossible. In order for you to have conceived, the IUD would have to have been flushed out of your system. And that, statistically, happens in two out of ten cases. I told you that right from the start, if you remember. Except for the pill, which you can’t use, there’s no foolproof method of birth control. And with an IUD, you never know when your body rej
ects it. It happened to you years ago, and you had Jason. Then, for eight years there was no problem. Maybe it was the new device we tried and our mistake was in trying a third kind a couple of years ago. But I’m not sure it would have mattered. You don’t feel it when it’s in, and you don’t feel it when it’s gone. But it absolutely couldn’t have affected the fetus, that I can assure you. The similarities between your case and Jan Ransom’s are simply coincidence. And not much of a coincidence, except for the fact that you both lost your babies to SIDS.”
“Don’t you think that’s enough to make me wonder?” Sally asked.
“Of course it is,” Wiseman said, relaxing back into his chair. “And of course you should have come to see me. But I’m not sure what I can do for you.”
Sally’s eyes moved to the CRT on Wiseman’s desk. It was, she knew, a remote terminal of the computer that served most of the needs of the town. “Perhaps you could show me Julie’s records,” she suggested.
Wiseman hesitated, instinctively searching his mind for a valid excuse to deny Sally’s request. There was none. “All right,” he agreed at last. “But since she was Mark Malone’s patient, I think he should be here too.” He picked up the phone, spoke briefly, and then hung.
“Do you really think we’ll find anything in Julie’s records?” he asked as they waited.
“I don’t know,” Sally said truthfully. “In fact, I’m not even sure I’ll be able to understand them.”
“Well, I can understand them,” Wiseman assured her. A moment later the office door opened, and the pediatrician appeared. He greeted Sally, then looked questioningly toward Wiseman, who explained what Sally had proposed.
“Sounds like a good idea,” Malone said, after quickly reviewing what he remembered of Julie’s records. There was nothing, as far as he knew, that could upset Sally. He switched the computer terminal on and swiftly tapped in some instructions. Then he smiled encouragingly at Sally. “Come around here.”
Sally went around the desk to stand close to Malone as the CRT screen began to fill up with the medical record of her daughter. Other than the birth data, there wasn’t much: the results of the monthly examinations that Julie had been given, the last just two days before she died, all of which, Wiseman explained, reflected a picture of a remarkably healthy baby. Then there was the final report of her death, with a copy of the death certificate.
“I don’t even know what I might be looking for,” Sally said as she scanned the screen.
“You’d be looking for something wrong,” Wiseman told her. “But according to this Julie wasn’t damaged in any way, either before or after the birth.” He looked to Mark Malone for confirmation, and the younger doctor nodded his agreement.
Sally pressed one of the cursor keys on the console, and the record began scrolling upward until the screen was filled with a series of letters and numbers that looked, to Sally’s untrained eyes, like gibberish. “What’s all this?” she asked.
Malone shrugged indifferently. “Test results. Analyses of blood samples, tissue samples, mine samples. All of it very routine and very normal.”
“I see,” Sally muttered. Then she frowned. As the data continued to roll up the screen, a number, set off by itself, suddenly appeared in the lower right-hand corner. Sally took her finger off the cursor key. “What’s that?”
Wiseman stared at the number, frowned slightly, then looked up at Malone. “Do you know what this is?”
“It’s just a code number,” Malone replied. “It refers to a survey being done by a group in Boston, the Children’s Health Institute for Latent Diseases.”
“And they were surveying Julie?” Sally asked. “What for?”
Malone shrugged. “I don’t really know. In fact, I doubt they’re sure themselves.”
“I don’t understand.” Sally moved back to her chair, and faced the two doctors. “This group—”
“It’s called CHILD,” Malone said.
“CHILD is studying children, but they don’t know why?”
“It’s what they call a random survey,” Malone began. He started to explain it to Sally, but she held up a hand to stop him. She knew very well how such a survey operated. She had, indeed, designed several of them herself.
Basically, it involved the use of a table of random numbers to select a small fraction of a population that would accurately reflect the population as a whole. Sally herself had helped the Health Department design a survey of the population of Eastbury a few years back, to determine the incidence of swine flu in the town. It had boiled down to a matter of choices: either survey the entire town, or use a computer to assign everyone in town a number, then employ a table of random digits, itself devised by the computer, to choose a cross-section that would accurately reflect the whole.
To a layman, Sally knew, it sounded like hocus-pocus, but she also knew it was a statistically correct and absolutely accurate method of surveying a population for practically anything. And the beauty of it was that as the size of the population to be studied grew, the proportion of the population that actually would have to be surveyed grew smaller.
In Eastbury, for instance, only a few hundred people had needed to be surveyed in order to project the exact incidence of swine flu within the town.
“I know how studies like that work,” Sally said. “But what’s the study about?”
“As far as I know, it’s just a general survey,” Malone replied. “Apparently their computer constantly scans the records in our little computer—and a lot of others too—and randomly chose Julie for the survey. I think they were planning to track her right through her first twenty-one years.”
“And you let them do that?” Sally asked. She was all too familiar with computers and their ability to pry into people’s lives. “You let them simply invade your records? I thought medical records were supposed to be confidential.”
“But they are,” Wiseman told her as Malone glanced at him helplessly. “I’m sure the Institute assured us when we agreed to the survey that even they wouldn’t know the names of the subjects. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gone along with it” He glanced down at Julie Montgomery’s records once more and smiled at Sally. “All they know about Julie is that child number nine-six-eight-two was a victim of SIDS, plus her medical data. They don’t know her name, and they don’t care about it. Studies like this go on all the time, Sally. You must know that And you also must know that the computers make their selections, then are programed to forget the names of the subjects as soon as they’ve been assigned numbers.”
“And you believe this?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly growing bitter. “How do you think they keep track of their subjects? If no one knows who belongs to what number, how are they going to keep up with their subjects? People move, you know. And someone has to put the data into a computer somewhere, along with the numbers, so that your Institute’s computer can get it out again. My God, Julie’s number—which you yourself just said is supposed to be confidential, is right there on her records for anybody to see!” Wiseman started to interrupt her, but Sally plunged on, her anger growing as she talked. “You’re doctors, both of you, and I won’t question your knowledge of medicine. But I’m a computer expert. I’ve been trained to use them, and I know what they can do. Do you? Do you know how easy it is for computers to talk to each other, to go through each other’s files? Anybody in this country can find out anything about anybody else if he knows how to use a computer and can get the access codes. And if you’re good enough with computers, you can program them to give you the codes that are supposed to hide the secrets.” Sally was on her feet now, pacing the room. “Why wasn’t I told about this survey?” she demanded. “I’m Julie’s mother. If someone was watching my child, I had a right to know about it.”
“Sally …” Malone began, but she ignored him.
“Maybe there was something wrong with Julie. Maybe they knew something was wrong with her!”
Now Wiseman, too, stood up. “Sally,” he said firmly, “I wan
t you to sit down and listen to me.” Her eyes glazed with indignation, Sally stared at him and he thought she was going to bolt from his office. Then, as he and Malone watched, she forced her anger back and sank once more into the chair next to the desk.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t get over the feeling that something happened to Julie—something terrible.”
Wiseman returned to his place behind the desk, but kept his eyes on Sally, searching her face carefully. He could see the signs of stress behind her makeup—the dark circles lurking beneath her eyes, the high color of her cheeks, the strain in the set of her mouth.
“Sally,” he began, his baritone voice filling the room with its soothing tones. “I want you to understand something. There was nothing wrong with Julie. Nothing at all.” He could see her body stiffen and knew she was resisting his words. He turned to Malone for assistance.
“It’s true, Mrs. Montgomery,” the pediatrician agreed. “There was nothing wrong with her, and there was nothing in her records—anywhere—that could lead anyone else to think anything was wrong with her.”
Now Wiseman picked up the thread. “As for CHILD, they’re a highly respected institution. They’ve contributed a great deal of knowledge to the field of medicine, particularly with regard to children. To think that there was anything”—he searched for the right word, and finally found it—“anything menacing about the fact that Julie was a subject of one of their surveys is simply beyond reason.” Dr. Wiseman’s voice dropped, and even through her anger Sally began to feel that he was patronizing her. “Now, what I’m going to do is this,” he went on. “I’m going to give you their address, and I want you to go to them and find out for yourself just what the survey was all about, how Julie was selected for it, and what’s being done with the data they’re collecting. All right?”
Sally smiled at Wiseman, but the smile was cold. “Dr. Wiseman, did you really think I wouldn’t do all that on my own?” She rose to her feet, picked up her bag, and went to the door. Then she turned back to face the two doctors. “Something happened to my daughter. I know you both think I’m a hysterical woman, and perhaps you’re right. But I’m going to find out what happened to Julie. Believe me, I’m going to find out.”