by Nate Kenyon
“Dr. Wasserman, surely you know that something unusual is going on with her. It’s not ethical to continue drug therapy in her present condition. Anyone can see that she’s perfectly lucid and capable and she’s being held against her will. Now if you’ll just listen to what I have to say—”
“Don’t you preach ethics to me. What sort of treatment I choose to administer does not concern you any longer. You’re through here as of this minute.”
Jess felt her control slipping a little. “Why didn’t you show me her complete file, Doctor? Is there something you don’t want me to see?”
She was learning a great deal about Evan Wasserman now, and what she saw didn’t suit him. Anger made his eyes red and piggish and his underarms itch. She could tell by the way his shoulders twitched.
He was moving now, around the desk, close enough to her so that she could smell his breath. “This experiment is over. I will see that you are reprimanded and that your school records show this as a permanent black mark. You’re a fool, Miss Chambers, if you believe the things others are preaching. Sarah Voorsanger is a very sick young woman and her delusions are barely being held in check. I’m sure she would be better served if you were out of her life.”
Bullshit. “If you would just think this through, I’m sure we can—”
“I’ve done enough thinking. Give me your temporary staff pass.”
“I forgot it at home,” she lied. “The guard out front knew who I was.”
Some emotion surfaced briefly in his face and he seemed to fight it down. For a moment she wondered if he would frisk her. “I want you to turn it in to Jean Shelley as soon as you get back to school. She’ll have some words for you, I’m sure. Good-bye, Miss Chambers.”
She refused to give him the satisfaction of watching her slink out with her tail between her legs. “What are you afraid of, Doctor? That I’ve found out the truth?”
“The truth about what, for God’s sake?”
“Sarah, and what you’ve done to her. You had to know I’d see something sooner or later. Why did you allow me in here? There has to be some reason.”
“I’m not going to listen to another word of this nonsense.” Wasserman marched over to the intercom on his desk and pressed the button. “Andre? Come in here please, and escort Miss Chambers to her car.”
“I can find my own way out,” she said. “Thank you.”
As she walked toward the half-open door she caught movement in the hall. A white-haired man in a navy blue suit; not an orderly, or a patient. Too well dressed. He smelled of money. A family member? She glanced back at Wasserman and caught him white-faced and sweating, evasive, like a man exposed in a lie.
He closed the door behind her. She heard a lock click into place.
In the hallway, the man had disappeared. She hurried to the corner, but then the big orderly was coming toward her again.
“Excuse me, Andre, isn’t it? This is embarrassing. I was wondering, that man in the blue suit? I met him last week but I can’t remember his name.”
“Out,” the orderly said. “Right now.”
He followed her all the way to the parking lot, folded his arms, watched her from the walkway. She got into the car and sat for a moment in silence, and resisted the childish urge to pound her fists against the steering wheel. Sarah was still inside somewhere, alone and probably scared to death, and there was no way to reach her.
Jess thought about their return trip from Patrick’s church, poor Sarah awake now and staring absently out at a crimson wash of autumn leaves, poor, lonely Sarah; something terrible is going to happen. I know it.
Nothing’s going to happen to you.
I don’t want to go back. Ami ever going to get out!
We’re going to find a better place for you. I promise.
If my mom can’t take care of me, I want to live with you. Will you please help me!
A stiff breeze lifted brittle leaves from the corners of the parking lot and sent them tumbling end over end. She could hear the dry hiss of their passage. It sounded like the whispers of a thousand ghostly voices. She took a deep breath and let it out. Goddammit, Wasserman, this isn’t over. I swear it isn’t. She put one hand on the PET scan inside her bag. Maybe, just maybe, she had something.
Thank God for Charlie’s car. The orderly was still standing and watching her as she left the parking lot. She resisted the urge to give him the finger, and waved genially instead. If he was aware of the sarcasm, he didn’t show it.
—30—
Jess Chambers drove Charlie’s car too fast through crowded city streets. She cursed at stoplights and tested the brakes on more than one occasion, earning the glares of her fellow motorists. But all that went unnoticed.
She was thinking of the changes in Dr. Evan Wasserman since she had first met him, only weeks before: the breakdown in his control, the cracks appearing along his formerly smooth surface. What are you hiding, Wasserman? You’re scared to death of her, aren’t you!
But that wasn’t it exactly. This was what really bothered her, his discomfort aimed not entirely at her but somewhere. She turned onto Washington Street and drove through Brook-line, moving away from traffic, using this time to calm herself again and think. The man in the blue suit, Wasserman’s face when he caught a glimpse…
Important pieces were missing. She needed answers, and there was only one other place she might find them.
This time when she rang the doorbell there was nobody to answer the door. She went around the back of the house, stepping carefully past pruned juniper hedges and pine bark mulch. The smell of freshly watered soil touched her nostrils, and with it came a feeling of calm, of peace. She flashed back to fields of rustling corn, the smell of turned earth, of September rainstorms. It washed away the stink of the city.
Professor Jean Shelley sat in front of a garden table on the grass. On the ground was a large, silver bowl and a folded towel. She kept her back and neck rigid under a cotton sweater, watching birds flit to the feeder. Jess stood for a moment transfixed. From this angle, she could see clearly how swollen Shelley’s wrists and ankles were, how worn she looked. Death comes gradually and then all at once, like headlights around a corner at night.
Shelley turned her ghostly face slightly but did not look at her. “I thought you might come back. I’m sorry I didn’t answer the door but I’m not feeling well enough at the moment.”
“You should have someone here with you.”
“That’s thoughtful, but I prefer to be alone.”
“I won’t stay long.”
“Then please, find a seat.” Jess took a chair from the deck and set it on the grass. “Good, good. Now how did your little trip turn out?”
Jess told her about the afternoon at Patrick’s church and the events immediately following: the meltdown in the computer, her recent visit with Wasserman. “I spoke with him this morning, actually,” Shelley said, when she had finished. “He told me you were no longer welcome at the hospital. He wanted me to speak to the school administrative office and have you expelled.”
“Did you?”
“Of course not. I don’t think you’ve done anything I wouldn’t have done, in your shoes, and I feel guilty enough for my part in this. But you’ve been missing classes. I know your grades are starting to slip. You need to be careful not to let this consume you.”
Jess opened her shoulder bag. She took out the PET scan and handed it over. “It’s from Sarah’s private file,” she said. “The one I didn’t get a chance to see. Can you tell me what it means?”
Shelley looked at the scan for a long moment, and put it down on the table between them, where it sat like an unwanted visitor. She seemed to be struggling with something. “Let it go,” she said. “It’s out of your hands now. Go back to school, take back your life. Be young.”
“I can’t do that, Professor.”
They were silent for a moment. Jess burned with impatience, but let it simmer under the surface, waiting for the right time.
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br /> “Let me ask you a question,” Shelley said. “Forgive me for being blunt, but I’ve been thinking about this since you came to visit before. That man who taught you to fly. Did he try to…touch you? Do something inappropriate?”
Jess was surprised by the question. She considered what to say. “Yes. Once he did.”
“And you stopped him?”
“I thought it was disgusting, it made me angry. I was hurt. I was old enough to know about what he wanted to do.”
“I wondered. His gift of the plane seemed like an offering. Only once, though? He never tried again?”
“No. He seemed genuinely sorry, like he had slipped. But we never talked about it and I didn’t go see him much after that. Things were different between us. Something had changed.”
Shelley seemed satisfied with the answer. She nodded. “Sometimes we take too much responsibility for others, don’t we? We assume that they’ll act as we do, with decency and respect. And when they don’t we take it upon ourselves, we take in their sins and we try to erase them from memory in any way we can.”
“I guess so. But it isn’t as simple as all that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Professor Shelley, I saw a man today with Dr. Wasserman, he was well dressed, white hair, short and stocky. I hadn’t seen him before. Do you know what he might have been doing at the hospital?”
Shelley didn’t seem to hear her. When she spoke it was with distance, and tinged with a dull anger. “I don’t think I’ll be going back to school,” she said. “I’ve been feeling very nauseated lately and my strength is gone. I just don’t see the value—”
“Professor, please. You’d said before I’d have the truth. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Do you know anything about acute lymphocytic leukemia? It’s a brutal disease. Your bone marrow makes too many immature white blood cells. These cells never develop into lymphocytes, as they should. Here are the symptoms. First you feel a shortness of breath, exhaustion. Your skin is too pale. This leads to bruises and cuts that do not heal. Finally, there are infections, as the dwindling number of white blood cells can no longer fight off germs.
“First-line treatment is chemotherapy. Next is a bone marrow transplant. I tried both. There is no third option.”
They sat in silence for a moment as a breeze rippled through the flower heads and rustled the trees. A smattering of red and orange leaves drifted down to settle upon the ground.
“Evan has always suffered from a lack of self-worth. It’s important you understand that. His father had run up a tremendous debt and he was determined to show that he could overcome it. In trying to save the business, Evan accepted a very generous sum of money to help study Sarah and catalog the results. But he couldn’t get her to cooperate. There was…an accident. Two men died in a fire. Sarah felt responsible. She withdrew from him, fought him; he was frightened to death of her and what might happen if she lost control again. And he was beginning to feel the pressure. I finally convinced him that if we brought in someone who could relate to Sarah in a slightly less professional manner, connect to her as a friend and mentor, we could use that to our advantage.”
“You have some sort of hold over him, don’t you?”
“We have a history. I met him in grad school, there was something briefly between us, he thought it was more. He’s still in love with me, even after all these years. I suppose I use it, just like anything else.”
“What did you think would happen when I found out the truth?”
“That you would have won her trust by then, and that I might win yours in the end. That’s it.”
Jess watched a pigeon strutting across the grass, looking out of place here. Two people, dead. It made better sense to her now. Wasserman’s evasive manner, his slow disintegration, the fear in his eyes. But something important was still missing. “Where did the money come from that kept the facility afloat? Who is the man in the blue suit?”
“Does it matter? People are interested in her for the same reasons they have always been interested in things like this. Power. They don’t care where it comes from or why. They just want it.”
Bitterness tasted sour at the back of Jess’s throat and she swallowed it away. “You lied to me from the beginning.”
Shelley shook her head. “I never really lied, Jess. I just didn’t tell you all of it. As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“You should have given me the chance.”
“Maybe so. But it’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?”
“You’re still her legal guardian, you can move her. All you need to do is petition child and welfare services—”
“You haven’t been listening to me. It’s out of our hands now.”
“But goddammit, why?”
“I’m tired,” Shelley said. “There are too many others involved now. Sometimes you have to bow your head and admit defeat. Maybe you don’t believe that. But you’re young.”
“What are they going to do to her? They’re going to keep pushing her until she breaks, aren’t they?”
“Now, don’t you jump to conclusions. I’m sure she’ll be treated gently enough. The Wasserman Facility is still a licensed institution, Evan won’t want to risk—”
“So you’re not going to help me,” Jess said. Anger made her cheeks feel hot and her skin prickle. “Goddamn you. You’re a coward.”
“I want you to understand something, all right? I’m not an evil person. I’m not uncaring. I did what I could for her, and what I thought was best for all of us. But I don’t have much time now, and I’ve got to make a choice. I have to choose how to live the last of my days. I can’t be bothered with this anymore.”
They sat in the silence of the afternoon. Jess rose to her feet and blinked back tears of frustration. Betrayal stung like acid. Shelley had been a mentor, someone she had trusted. No way. You’re not going to see me break down. She turned to go.
“There’s one other thing you’ll want to know,” Shelley said, stopping her in her tracks. “Remember I told you that there were signs of abuse on Sarah? Hitting little kids wasn’t the only thing Ed Voorsanger was doing at that house. When Evan ran some genetic tests we found out that Ed was Sarah’s natural father. He never admitted it and his wife wouldn’t hear a word. Of course Annie never talked about it, never talked about the rapes, the sexual and physical abuse she must have been suffering from her father for years. She couldn’t. But those tests proved it to be true.
“After that was when things really began. Suddenly Sarah became very interesting to a lot of people. It’s in her genes, Jess, some sort of mutation, and something like that can be isolated. It can be enhanced. Replicated.”
Jess turned away again. She walked in stunned silence across the spotless stretch of lawn, toward manicured shrubs and pine mulch, into the shadows of the house. She tried to keep her mind from dwelling on the images that had sprung unbidden into her head.
“You’re fighting something you can’t possibly win,” Shelley called after her. “You can’t turn back the clock. Even if you saved her, do you really think it would stop whatever pain you feel? Do you think it would silence those voices in your head?”
“Good-bye, Professor Shelley.” The words felt strange in Jess’s mouth. “God be with you.”
—31—
As she left Shelley’s drive, trees looming over the car like threatening hands, Jess calmed herself enough to think. She thought about how the psychiatric system might deal with a child that was out of control. Foster homes, juvenile halls, outpatient facilities couldn’t hold her; this child was not only violent but utterly beyond the realm of anything humanity had ever seen, or could understand. Where would they put a child like that?
Buried, she thought, they would bury her where no one would ever come looking. In a maximum-security mental ward, for instance. Psychiatry preferred to bare its soul behind closed doors. But then why bring in anyone from the outside? Why risk the exposure?
&
nbsp; An answer to that had already been given. Wasserman’s desperate attempt to save the hospital had led to his involvement with some very bad people, and he had done everything possible to reach Sarah again and pull her out of wherever she had retreated to in her mind.
But that wasn’t all of it. Jess still couldn’t rationalize Wasserman taking such a huge gamble. He had to know the chances were good that she would find out what he was doing and expose him. There was something else happening here, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
She thought of Annie and the abuses suffered at her father’s hands, the years of silence and the birth of an unwanted child. A genetic mutation. Annie carried it, and her father did too; mixing those genes again had produced something far beyond the capabilities of either of them.
Was that it? A twisting of genes, a double helix bent in upon itself, triggering the awakening of something long dormant and nearly forgotten?
Perhaps. But thinking of it in that way reduced Sarah to a lab experiment. She was more than that, much more.
I could petition for a hearing through Child and Welfare. I could call the police. But by the time anything was done, if anyone listened to her at all, she had a feeling Sarah would be gone. One way or another.
As she crossed the bridge and pulled into traffic on Cambridge Street, she glanced in the rearview. A dark blue Crown Victoria ran like a sleek, smooth shark three cars back. She had seen the same car ten minutes earlier. She watched as it turned into traffic and merged into her lane. Two men in the front seat, looked like maybe one more in back. Difficult to tell.
She turned left onto Harvard Avenue as the light blinked to yellow. The Crown Victoria swung across the intersection and through the red, causing others to slam their brakes, honk, and gesture out their windows. Boston drivers. She was worried now, but not much. Yet.
She debated whether to swing into the liquor store lot and see if the Crown followed, but decided to keep going. Traffic was always heavy here, with cars parked along both sides of the street and little stores lining the sidewalks. Thrift shops and unfinished wooden furniture stores attracted the college crowd. People darted and bobbed and weaved in and out of doorways. Nobody was paying any attention to the cars in the street.