“People are scared, but they'll do the right thing,” Jack said, the only other time I tried to talk to him about it. Jack isn't much for talking. And so I don't. I owe him that.
But in the city—in all the cities—they're not just scared. They're terrified. Even without listening to the news I hear about the riots and the special government police and half the population sick with the new germs that only endozine cures—sometimes. I don't see how they're going to have much energy for one murdered small-town doctor. And I don't share Jack's conviction that people in Emerton will automatically do the right thing. I remember all too well that sometimes they don't. How come Jack doesn't remember, too?
But he's right about one thing: I don't owe this town anything.
I stack the supper dishes in the sink and get Jackie started on her homework.
The next day, I drive down to the Food Mart parking lot.
There isn't much to see. It rained last night. Next to the Dumpster lie a wadded-up surgical glove and a piece of yellow tape like the police use around a crime scene. Also some of those little black cardboard boxes from the stuff that gets used up by the new holographic TV cameras. That's it.
“You heard what happened to Dr. Bennett,” I say to Sean at dinner. Jack's working again. Jackie sits playing with the Barbie doll she doesn't know I know she has on her lap.
Sean looks at me sideways, under the heavy fringe of his dark bangs, and I can't read his expression. “He was killed for giving out too many antibiotics.”
Jackie looks up. “Who killed the doctor?”
“The bastards that think they run this town,” Sean says. He flicks the hair out of his eyes. His face is ashy gray. “Fucking vigilantes'll get us all.”
“That's enough, Sean,” I say.
Jackie's lip trembles. “Who'll get us all? Mommy…”
“Nobody's getting anybody,” I say. “Sean, stop it. You're scaring her.”
“Well, she should be scared,” Sean says, but he shuts up and stares bleakly at his plate. Sixteen now, I've had him for sixteen years. Watching him, his thick dark hair and sulky mouth, I think that it's a sin to have a favorite child. And that I can't help it, and that I would, God forgive me, sacrifice both Jackie and Jack for this boy.
“I want you to clean the garage tonight, Sean. You promised Jack three days ago now.”
“Tomorrow. Tonight I have to go out.”
Jackie says, “Why should I be scared?”
“Tonight,” I say.
Sean looks at me with teenage desperation. His eyes are very blue. “Not tonight. I have to go out.”
Jackie says, “Why should I—”
I say, “You're staying home and cleaning the garage.”
“No.” He glares at me, and then breaks. He has his father's looks, but he's not really like his father. There are even tears in the corners of his eyes. “I'll do it tomorrow, Mom, I promise. Right after school. But tonight I have to go out.”
“Where?”
“Just out.”
Jackie says, “Why should I be scared? Scared of what? Mommy!”
Sean turns to her. “You shouldn't be scared, Jack-o-lantern. Everything's going to be all right. One way or another.”
I listen to the tone of his voice and suddenly fear shoots through me, piercing as childbirth. I say, “Jackie, you can play Nintendo now. I'll clear the table.”
Her face brightens. She skips into the living room and I took at my son. “What does that mean? ‘One way or another’? Sean, what's going on?”
“Nothing,” he says, and then despite his ashy color he looks me straight in the eyes, and smiles tenderly, and for the first time—the very first time—I see his resemblance to his father. He can lie to me with tenderness.
Two days later, just after I return from the Food Mart, they contact me.
The murder was on the news for two nights, and then disappeared. Over the parking lot is scattered more TV-camera litter. There's also a wine bottle buried halfway into the hard ground, with a bouquet of yellow roses in it. Nearby is an empty basket, the kind that comes filled with expensive dried flowers at Blossoms by Bonnie, weighted down with stones. Staring at it, I remember that Bonnie Widelstein went out of business a few months ago. A drug-resistant abscess, and after she got out of Emerton Memorial, nobody on this side of the river would buy flowers from her.
At home, Sylvia James is sitting in my driveway in her black Algol. As soon as I see her, I put it together.
“Sylvia,” I say tonelessly.
She climbs out of the sportscar and smiles a social smile. “Elizabeth! How good to see you!” I don't answer. She hasn't seen me in seventeen years. She's carrying a cheese kuchen, like some sort of key into my house. She's still blonde, still slim, still well dressed. Her lipstick is bright red, which is what her face should be.
I let her in anyway, my heart making slow hard thuds in my chest. Sean. Sean.
Once inside, her hard smile fades and she has the grace to look embarrassed. “Elizabeth—”
“Betty,” I say. “I go by Betty now.”
“Betty. First off, I want to apologize for not being…for not standing by you in that mess. I know it was so long ago, but even so, I—I wasn't a very good friend.” She hesitates. “I was frightened by it all.”
I want to say, You were frightened? But I don't.
I never think of the whole dumb story any more. Not even when I look at Sean. Especially not when I look at Sean.
Seventeen years ago, when Sylvia and I were seniors in high school, we were best friends. Neither of us had a sister, so we made each other into that, even though her family wasn't crazy about their precious daughter hanging around with someone like me. The Goddards live on the other side of the river. Sylvia ignored them, and I ignored the drunken warnings of my aunt, the closest thing I had to a family. The differences didn't matter. We were Sylvia-and-Elizabeth, the two prettiest and boldest girls in the senior class who had an academic future.
And then, suddenly, I didn't. At Elizabeth's house I met Randolf Satler, young resident in her father's unit at the hospital. And I got pregnant, and Randy dumped me, and I refused a paternity test because if he didn't want me and the baby I had too much pride to force myself on any man. That's what I told everyone, including myself. I was eighteen years old. I didn't know what a common story mine was, or what a dreary one. I thought I was the only one in the whole wide world who had ever felt this bad.
So after Sean was born at Emerton Memorial and Randy got engaged the day I moved my baby “home” to my dying aunt's, I bought a Smith & Wesson revolver in the city and shot out the windows of Randy's supposedly empty house across the river. I hit the gardener, who was helping himself to the Satler liquor cabinet in the living room. The judge gave me seven-and-a-half to ten, and I served five, and that only because my lawyer pleaded post-partum depression. The gardener recovered and retired to Miami, and Dr. Satler went on to become Chief of Medicine at Emerton Memorial and a lot of other important things in the city, and Sylvia never visited me once in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Nobody did, except Jack. Who, when Sylvia-and-Elizabeth were strutting their stuff at Emerton High, had already dropped out and was bagging groceries at the Food Mart. After I got out of Bedford, the only reason the foster-care people would give me Sean back was because Jack married me.
We live in Emerton, but not of it.
Sylvia puts her kuchen on the kitchen table and sits down without being asked. I can see she's done with apologizing. She's still smart enough to know there are things you can't apologize for.
“Eliz…Betty, I'm not here about the past. I'm here about Dr. Bennett's murder.”
“That doesn't have anything to do with me.”
“It has to do with all of us. Dan Moore lives next door to you.”
I don't say anything.
“He and Ceci and Jim Dyer and Tom Brunelli are the ringleaders in a secret organization to close Emerton Memorial Hospital. They think the hospit
al is a breeding ground for the infections resistant to every antibiotic except endozine. Well, they're right about that—all hospitals are. But Dan and his group are determined to punish any doctor who prescribes endozine, so that no organisms develop a resistance to it, too, and it's kept effective in case one of them needs it.”
“Sylvia—” the name tastes funny in my mouth, after all this time “—I'm telling you this doesn't have anything to do with me.”
“And I'm telling you it does. We need you, Eliz…Betty. You live next door to Dan and Ceci. You can tell us when they leave the house, who comes to it, anything suspicious you see. We're not a vigilante group, Betty, like they are. We aren't doing anything illegal. We don't kill people, and we don't blow up bridges, and we don't threaten people like the Nordstrums who get endozine for their sick kids but are basically uneducated blue collar—”
She stops. Jack and I are basically uneducated blue collar. I say coldly, “I can't help you, Sylvia.”
“I'm sorry, Betty. That wasn't what I meant. Look, this is more important than anything that happened a decade and a half ago! Don't you understand?” She leans toward me across the table. “The whole country's caught in this thing. It's already a public health crisis as big as the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, and it's only just started! Drug-resistant bacteria can produce a new generation every twenty minutes, they can swap resistant genes not only within a species but across different species. The bacteria are winning. And people like the Moores are taking advantage of that to contribute further to the breakdown of even basic social decency.”
In high school Sylvia had been on the debating team. But so, in that other life, had I. “If the Moores's group is trying to keep endozine from being used, then aren't they also fighting against the development of more drug-resistant bacteria? And if that's so, aren't they the ones, not you, who are ultimately aiding the country's public health?”
“Through dynamiting. And intimidation. And murder. Betty, I know you don't approve of those things. I wouldn't be here telling you about our countergroup if I thought you did. Before I came here, we looked very carefully at you. At the kind of person you are. Are now. You and your husband are law-abiding people, you vote, you make a contribution to the Orphans of AIDS Fund, you—”
“How did you know about that? That's supposed to be a secret contribution!”
“—you signed the petition to protect the homeless from harassment. Your husband served on the jury that convicted Paul Keene of fraud, even though his real-estate scheme was so good for the economy of Emerton. You—”
“Stop it,” I say. “You don't have any right to investigate me like I was some criminal!”
Only, of course, I was. Once. Not now. Sylvia's right about that—Jack and I believe in law and order, but for different reasons. Jack because that's what his father believed in, and his grandfather. Me, because I learned in Bedford that enforced rules are the only thing that even halfway restrains the kind of predators Sylvia James never dreamed of. The kind I want kept away from my children.
Sylvia says, “We have a lot of people on our side, Betty. People who don't want to see this town slide into the same kind of violence there is in Albany and Syracuse and, worst case, New York.”
A month ago, New York Hospital in Queens was blown up. The whole thing, with a series of coordinated timed bombs. Seventeen hundred people dead in less than a minute.
“It's a varied group,” she continues. “Some town leaders, some housewives, some teachers, nearly all the medical personnel at the hospital. All people who care what happens to Emerton.”
“You have reasons,” Sylvia says evenly. “And I'm part of your reasons, I know. But I think you'll help us, Elizabeth. I know you must be concerned about your son—we've all observed what a good mother you are.”
So she brought up Sean's name first. I say, “You're wrong again, Sylvia. I don't need you to protect Sean, and if you've let him get involved in helping you, you'll wish you'd never been born. I've worked damn hard to make sure that what happened seventeen years ago never touches him. He doesn't need to get mixed up in any way with your ‘medical personnel at the hospital.’ And Sean sure the hell doesn't owe this town anything, there wasn't even anybody who would take him in after my aunt died, he had to go to—”
The look on her face stops me. Pure surprise. And then something else.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Is it possible you don't know? Hasn't Sean told you?”
“Told me what?” I stand up, and I'm seventeen years old again, and just that scared. Sylvia-and-Elizabeth.
“Your son isn't helping our side. He's working for Dan Moore and Mike Dyer. They use juveniles because if they're caught, they won't be tried as severely as adults. We think Sean was one of the kids they used to blow up the bridge over the river.”
I look first at the high school. Sean isn't there; he hadn't even shown up for homeroom. No one's home at his friend Tom's house, or at Keith's. He isn't at the Billiard Ball or the Emerton Diner or the American Bowl. After that, I run out of places to search.
This doesn't happen in places like Emerton. We have fights at basketball games and grand theft auto and smashed store windows on Halloween and sometimes a drunken tragic car crash on prom night. But not secret terrorists, not counter-terrorist vigilante groups. Not in Emerton.
Not with my son.
I drive to the factory and make them page Jack.
He comes off the line, face creased with sweat and dirt. The air is filled with clanging machinery and grinding drills. I pull him outside the door, where there are benches and picnic tables for workers on break. “Betty! What is it?”
“Sean,” I gasp. “He's in danger.”
Something shifts behind Jack's eyes. “What kind of danger?”
“Sylvia Goddard came to see me today. Sylvia James. She says Sean is involved with the group that blew up the bridge, the ones who are trying to get Emerton Memorial closed, and…and killed Dr. Bennett.”
Jack peels off his bench gloves, taking his time. Finally he looks up at me. “How come that bitch Sylvia Goddard comes to you with this? After all this time?”
“Jack! Is that all you can think of? Sean is in trouble!”
He says gently, “Well, Bets, it was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn't it? He's always been a tough kid to raise. Rebellious. Can't tell him anything.”
I stare at Jack.
“Some people just have to learn the hard way.”
“Jack…this is serious! Sean might be involved in terrorism! He could end up in jail!”
“Couldn't ever tell him anything,” Jack says, and I hear the hidden satisfaction in his voice, that he doesn't even know is there. Not his son. Dr. Randy Satler's son. Turning out bad.
“Look,” Jack says, “when the shift ends I'll go look for him, Bets. Bring him home. You go and wait there for us.” His face is gentle, soothing. He really will find Sean, if it's possible. But only because he loves me.
My sudden surge of hatred is so strong I can't even speak.
“Go on home, Bets. It'll be all right. Sean just needs to have the nonsense kicked out of him.”
I turn and walk away. At the turning in the parking lot, I see Jack walking jauntily back inside, pulling on his gloves.
I drive home, because I can't think what else to do. I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven't gone to since I got out of Bedford. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn't know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.
And it doesn't work.
It's been too long. I've had Sean too long. Jack has made me feel too safe. I can't find the stony place.
Jackie is spending the night at a friend's. I sit
in the dark, no lights on, car in the garage. Sean doesn't come home, and neither does Jack. At two in the morning, a lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and Ceci's house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.
Jack staggers in at six-thirty in the morning. Alone. His face droops with exhaustion.
“I couldn't find him, Betty. I looked everywhere.”
“Thank you,” I say, and he nods. Accepting my thanks. This was something he did for me, not for Sean. Not for himself, as Sean's stepfather. I push down my sudden anger and say, “You better get some sleep.”
“Right.” He goes down the narrow hallway into our bedroom. In three minutes he's snoring.
I let the car coast in neutral down the driveway. Our bedroom face the street. The curtains don't stir.
The West River Road is deserted, except for a few eighteen-wheelers. I cross the river at the interstate and start back along the east side. Three miles along, in the middle of farmland, the smell of burned flesh rolls in the window.
Cows, close to the pasture fence. I stop the car and get out. Fifteen or sixteen Holsteins. By straining over the fence, I can see the bullet holes in their heads. Somebody herded them together, shot them one by one, and started a half-hearted fire among the bodies with neatly cut firewood. The fire had gone out; it didn't look as if it was supposed to burn long. Just long enough to attract attention that hadn't come yet.
I'd never heard that cows could get human diseases. Why had they been shot?
I get back in my car and drive the rest of the way to Emerton Memorial.
This side of town is deathly quiet. Grass grows unmowed in yard after yard. One large, expensive house has old newspapers piled on the porch steps, ten or twelve of them. There are no kids waiting for school buses, no cars pulling out of driveways on the way to work. The hospital parking lot has huge empty stretches between cars. At the last minute I drive on through the lot, parking instead across the street in somebody's empty driveway, under a clump of trees.
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