The other administrator chimes in: “Do you think emergency surgery was an overly aggressive choice given her heart condition?”
Her phone buzzes again. Another call from Mark; she silences it and sets the phone in her lap. “If she wasn’t bleeding we could have waited to do a more extensive cardiac workup. But given all the variables, getting her into surgery was the only viable option.”
“Did your personal relationship with the patient cloud your judgment? I understand she was your neighbor.”
She’s surprised by this question. “I would have made the same choice with a stranger.”
The lawyer nods at the two administrators. “I think that’s all we need.” He turns off the audio recorder.
“That’s it?”
“Unless there’s something else you want to add.” His finger hovers over the button on the recorder.
She wants to say, I wish it had gone a different way. Ashmina was opinionated and demanding, and she often didn’t follow Ginny’s medical instructions. But she liked her. They’d known each other for years as neighbors, but had grown closer when Ginny became her doctor. She wants to say she tried to save her friend and failed. But instead she says, “I did the best I could. But my best wasn’t good enough that night.” She clips her phone and pager to her waist and stands up. “If that’s all you need, I’ve got a gallbladder starting right now.”
* * *
—
Ten minutes into her case, a circulating nurse pokes her head inside the OR. “Dr. McDonnell, your phone keeps ringing.”
“If it’s my infectious diseases consult, tell her I’ll call her at lunchtime.” Ginny sweeps her pinky finger into the incision she’s just made below her patient’s belly button. Her chief resident, Dr. Dawson, places the Hasson port and begins suturing it into place.
The nurse comes back with Ginny’s phone. “It’s your husband. Do you want me to answer it?”
“Damn.” She never called Mark back. “Tell him I’m in the middle of a case.” She holds out her hand to Dr. Dawson. “Laparoscope.”
The nurse answers the phone and listens for a few minutes. She looks uncomfortable.
“Here, hold up the phone,” Ginny says, and the nurse reaches the phone a few inches from her ear. “Mark, it’s me. I’m scrubbed in. What’s going on?”
Mark talks quickly. “School’s canceled—today of all days.”
“Okay…”
“My presentation is today. This is my big chance—”
“Right. I remember.”
“And I’ve got a car full of kids who have nowhere to go.”
“Kids?” She positions the laparoscope and checks the angles. “We have one kid.”
“I’ve got Peter. And Peter’s neighbor is—”
“Mark,” she interrupts. “Tell me what you need.”
“I need someone to watch these kids.”
“Don’t we have a babysitter you can call? What about Mrs. Bloom next door?”
“Mrs. Bloom moved to California four months ago. You know that.”
“Right. Well…”
“Can you meet me at campus?” His voice has a desperate edge to it, and it’s clear he already knows her answer.
“I’m in the middle of a gallbladder. I won’t be done for at least another hour.”
Mark is silent on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry, Mark.” Dr. Dawson waits to position the trocar ports. “I have to hang up. I’ll call you when I’m done.” She waves the phone away and inserts the forceps into the lateral port, grasps the apex of the gallbladder, and lifts its underside.
* * *
—
Mark tosses his phone onto the passenger seat and maneuvers the Jeep around two minivans. It was pointless to call Ginny. He feels a surge of irritation for all the times he’s had to deal with these kinds of situations alone.
“Livi, who’s at home right now?” he asks.
“At my house?”
“Yes, at your house.” He taps his thumb on the steering wheel.
“Nobody.”
“Your mother’s not there?”
Peter interjects, “What’s wrong with mold?”
“It’s not like the mold in your fridge,” Mark answers. “Livi? Your mother?”
“She’s in Portland.”
Mark takes a deep breath.
“What kind of mold is it then?”
“Peter, I don’t know. The kind that can make you sick I guess.”
“What about your dad, Livi?”
“He doesn’t live there.”
“Where’re we going?” Noah asks. Mark has taken the turn toward campus automatically.
“He doesn’t live in town?” Mark asks Livi. These questions are hopeless.
“I don’t know where he lives.”
“I never saw any mold in the reading resource room,” Peter offers.
“I guess I’m taking you three to work with me.” Mark thinks for a minute, his thumb setting a manic pace on the steering wheel. “You’ll have to sit in my office and wait for me.”
“Your office?” Livi scrunches her face into a pout.
Noah has the football again. “Can’t we go to the food court in the campus center instead?”
Mark recalls Livi’s arm around Noah’s waist. He weighs the awkwardness of showing up at work with three eleven-year-olds against his desire to keep an eye on those two. “You need to be where I can keep track of you. Besides,” he adds brightly. “I’m giving a talk you’ll find interesting. You can sit in the back.”
“What kind of talk?” Livi is skeptical.
“It’s about—” He stops himself from saying The Predictive Power of the Non-Migratory Movements of the Northwestern Spotted Frog. “It’s about how animals react to geothermal changes in the earth, and could predict a natural disaster like a volcanic eruption…”
In the rearview mirror, only Noah is listening. Livi has pulled a library book out of her backpack. Peter kicks the back of the passenger seat despondently.
Rain speckles the windshield and Mark turns on the wipers. His annoyance with Ginny has drained away. He doesn’t feel angry anymore, just small and alone. This feeling isn’t new; it’s as familiar as his Jeep’s worn steering wheel in his hands.
FIVE
THE CONFERENCE ROOM on the fifth floor of Hurley Hall smells of dust and burnt coffee. Mark stands at the front of the room with his laptop, and the large-paned windows behind him rattle in the wind. His colleagues and a few students mill about in the back of the room near a folding table with a stack of dented pastries and two large stainless steel carafes, one for coffee, one for tea. Slowly, everyone moves toward the rows of folding chairs, paper cups in hand.
The kids are already settled in the last row. Noah and Peter try to stuff whole muffins in their mouths; Livi reads her library book. Mark scans each face in the crowd for the dean and doesn’t find him. There are a lot of empty seats.
At five after nine, he begins. He projects a picture of Mount Etna on the screen behind him. “On January fifth, 2012, hot ash erupted from the top of Mount Etna. But the mountain goats that roam its cliffs didn’t have to run from the lava that began pouring down the sides of the mountain…because they had disappeared from their native habitat the day before. In 2009, in Italy’s Abruzzo region, residents noted that toads had mysteriously disappeared in the middle of their spawning season. Then, three days later, an earthquake killed more than three hundred people in the city of L’Aquila. What did these goats and frogs know that humans didn’t?”
His bald-headed department chair, Fred Hellerman, sits in the front row. Mary Clarke, still wearing her rain slicker, takes up two seats a few rows back, her head bent over her phone. When she looks up flecks of rain obscure her glasses. She offers Mark a distracted
smile. There’s Randal Stepp; his snub nose always reminds Mark of a muskrat. And one of his upper-level undergraduate students, Claire something, scribbles energetically on a notepad in the back row. There’s still no sign of the dean.
“They knew danger was coming. But how?” He summarizes the many documented instances of animal behavior predicting earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Fruit bats in Ghana, highland cattle in the Himalayas. At his back the spat spat of rain hits the windows. His graduate student Katie now stands in the doorway to the conference room. She wears jeans and a gray fisherman’s sweater, her hair wild from the wind outside. She gives him an apologetic shrug that says, “Sorry I’m late.”
He projects a picture of a northwestern spotted frog with a tracking collar fastened to its leg. “It’s clear animal behavior holds the key to predicting a wide range of natural phenomena. And Oregon, with its unique geological properties, is one of the best places in the world to study the predictive power of animal behavior in earnest.” He opens the real-time data from his research ponds, and points out the bright green dots, each representing a single frog, as they move across a gray screen.
“My research on Broken Mountain has shown a predictive correlation between the movements of the frogs that mate in ponds B, E, and F and the geothermal activity in hot springs and steam vents located less than a mile from the ponds.” He clicks to the live video feed from Pond F, although there’s not much to see at this time of day, just horsetails and murky water, the glint of a water bug, the ripple of a frog moving under the surface of the water.
He allows that his study of the northwestern spotted frog is a small one. “But I believe my data points to a disturbing trend—” He clicks to a bar graph showing how the movements of his frogs have changed over the last four years, the way their behavior has become increasingly erratic. “A trend that suggests Broken Mountain is not actually dormant.”
At that his department chair, Fred, sits up in his chair, sets his coffee on his knee. “Now, Mark,” he interrupts. “We’ve all experienced the mountain’s seismological blips. But there’s just no data coming out of volcanology or seismology to support such a large claim. You’re getting ahead of yourself again—”
Mary and Randal are nodding.
“This is our town. The place we’ve made our homes,” Mark says. Mary holds up her hand, but he ignores her. “Where we’re raising our kids.” He looks at Noah sitting with his friends. “And as a community we are woefully unprepared for an eruption.”
“The thing is, Mark”—Mary gestures at the bar graph—“your sample is statistically tiny.”
This is like his last talk all over again. They’re not listening. How can he get them to listen?
Randal chimes in. “Has anyone been able to repeat your findings? There are a lot of possible explanations for what you’ve recorded. Ground water pollution, climate change—”
“How many of us know the protocol for sheltering in place if Broken Mountain blows,” Mark says, “and covers the entire valley in volcanic ash? How many of us have the proper supplies—”
“You’re making it sound as if it’s imminent,” Mary says. “Even you don’t think that’s true.”
“We’re all competing over the same money,” Randal says to Mary, loud enough for Mark to hear. “I think it’s leading some people to inflate their results—”
“I don’t know if there will be an eruption in our lifetime.” Mark talks over Randal. “But what about our children’s lifetime?” He looks at the kids again, and Noah gives him a concerned smile. “We owe it to them to take these findings seriously. To investigate further, in a comprehensive way.”
He hurries to click to his next slide, a picture of the globe, with clusters of little yellow triangles representing animal populations in seismic hot spots. “Imagine a network of sensors, attached to the sea lions that populate the Oregon coast, with the power to predict the next tsunami, or to the mountain goats that roam the side of Mount Jefferson, with the ability to warn us of an impending eruption.
“Picture a global observation system that would allow us to use animals as sentinels for our own well-being.” In the audience Mary wipes her glasses and shakes her head. Katie still hovers in the doorway. “I call this method Disaster Alert Management using Nature, or DAMN for short.” A few people snort at the acronym, but he presses on. “DAMN could save countless lives. But to make it a reality we need to implement large-scale tracking of animal behavior across the state of Oregon, and eventually across the globe. And that requires a commitment to significant long-term funding.” He directs this statement at his department chair, but Fred is frowning into his coffee cup.
The video feed from Pond F is still open on his computer screen, visible to him but not the audience. A dark figure has walked into the video frame. A man. It must be a hiker who’s lost his way, or a ranger. Mark frowns. There are signs posted all around his ponds. They warn people of his ongoing research; they ask them to steer clear so they don’t corrupt his data.
“We appreciate your enthusiasm, Mark,” Fred says. “And maybe with a larger data sample…”
But Mark is only half listening. It’s hard to get a good look at the man on the screen because the hood of his jacket obscures his face. The man raises his arm and…
The video screen shudders and goes black.
* * *
—
Mark drives fast up the mountain through the pelting rain, and the kids bump against each other in the backseat. He’s told them where they’re headed, that his equipment was damaged and he’s got to go retrieve it, but Noah’s face is skeptical in the backseat.
“Why are we driving so fast?” he asks. “Is something wrong?”
“I just want to get up there as quick as possible. Maybe I can still salvage the camera.” The road climbs, and the forest grows thick. He parks the Jeep at a trailhead. Pond F is half a mile up the mountain, so there’s no way around it—they’re going to have to walk. When he tells the kids they’ll have to hike to get to the camera they groan in unison.
He thinks about his wife in the bright white of the operating room, telling other people what to do. “Come on. I can’t leave you here,” he says, and they straggle out of the car.
Livi and Peter don’t have proper shoes, but Mark has a couple of ponchos in the back of the Jeep. “It won’t take long,” Mark says. “Let’s go.”
They trudge up the trail, the earth slick under their feet. Mark goes first, then Noah, followed by Livi and Peter. Livi refuses to put the hood of her poncho up, and the rain plasters her hair to her face. Peter’s sneakers squish with each step.
Mark knows this trail so well he could walk it in his sleep. His legs know its turns and hollows; his nose knows its sodden earth and decomposing leaves. His mind is on his talk and his colleagues’ interrogations. On his expensive camera that some asshole decided to destroy. They pass the turnoff for Pond L, and Pond E; in five more minutes they’ll reach Pond F. Behind him the kids struggle up the rocky and increasingly steep path.
Pond F is a glint of light through the dripping trees. It looks like it always does. There’s no sign of the figure he saw on the video feed. The camera is attached to a western white pine tree. He pulls it down and inspects it. He shakes his head. There’s nothing wrong with it. No damage at all.
He tells the kids, “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” and they huddle under a large hemlock. He looks for footprints, for crushed vegetation. Any sign of a recent human presence, but he finds nothing.
The rain agitates the surface of the pond. He walks a little ways into the shallows. His boots sink into the mud and make a sucking sound with each step; a weedy funk fills his nose. A dark green streak moves through the murky water. There’s the pop of a bulbous eye, the spring of a green leg—his frogs diving under pondweed and through slough grass.
He squints thr
ough the rain, into the forest. He knows these woods as well as his own living room. He’s spent half his adult life here, observing, recording. He sees nothing that strikes him. Nothing at all.
He shakes the mud from his boots, chooses a direction at random, and pushes his way into the brush. He steps over disintegrating logs, the air heavy and sweet with decay. Blackberry brambles catch at his elbows and knees, and he waves them away. He pauses at an old logging road, overgrown with cedar saplings, listens to the tiptiptiptip of the rain against wet leaves and the mewing call of a green-tailed towhee. The wind picks up and the rain turns sideways. There’s a metallic taste in his mouth. He ought to go back; he’s left the kids alone too long. The ground shudders—
A man emerges from a thicket of brambles. He steps into the overgrown road, and wet leaves blow against his legs. It’s amazing how much the man looks like…Mark blinks. The man looks exactly like…him. Only he’s filthy. His clothes are torn and ragged. He moves across the road at a diagonal, shoulders slumped. Dirt streaks his face. His eyes are tight with pain, or fright.
Mark backs away. He stumbles, reaches for a tree trunk, and holds on hard with a shuddering hand. But the man appears oblivious to his presence. He’s crossed the road now, limping slightly; he moves slowly toward the trees.
Feet crash through the brush behind Mark. “Dad!” Noah yells. The kids tumble onto the road, red-faced and scared. “Was there an earthquake?”
Mark holds up his hand. “Stop.” He turns back to the man.
But he’s gone.
Mark scans the forest. “There was someone there,” he says. “Did you see him? A man—”
“What was that?” Noah’s voice breaks. “That shaking?”
“You shouldn’t have left us there.” Livi hugs her poncho.
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