THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  Tripoli was immediately on the phone, calling her obstetrician who notified the hospital. Then he bundled Molly into the car. Now she was losing blood even faster. It felt like it was gushing and, despite the pads, the car seat was completely soaked.

  “Don’t worry. Don’t worry,” he kept repeating as he swerved down the curves to town, siren and lights going full blast. He tried to imagine losing the baby, losing her, and knew it was beyond anything he could humanly bear.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, smiling weakly. The contractions were coming, intense and close now. It all seemed too fast, too early. Please, dear God, she whispered, let me keep this one.

  A team of nurses and two trauma doctors were waiting for her in the emergency room. Tripoli was shunted aside and told to wait as the staff drew the curtains around her. After a hasty examination, Molly was rushed directly into surgery without even a chance for him to say anything more than to wish her luck.

  Tripoli was left to pace the waiting room, weaving between the others who sat in their orange plastic chairs staring blankly up at a game show running on the overhead TV. After an hour, he couldn’t take it any longer and, placing himself in the corridor leading to the surgery, started cornering nurses and staff every time one of them came through the double doors leading to the operating suites.

  “Molly Driscoll,” he kept saying. “How's she doing? And the baby? Is it okay?”

  No one seemed to know. Or wanted to talk. He wasn’t sure which.

  Finally, one of the nurses headed into the surgical unit stopped to talk to him.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, adjusting her scrubs. “You’ve got Dr. Wozniak. He's the best there is.”

  Tripoli looked as if he were going to cry, and she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Please, just go back into the waiting room. We’ll call you as soon as we know anything. I promise.”

  It was hours before Dr. Wozniak appeared through the double doors. The man looked exhausted. His face was furrowed, there were splotches of blood on his green scrubs, and his gait was ominously slow. Tripoli leapt to his feet. At first the doctor failed to notice him, and it seemed to take an extraordinary time for him to close the short distance separating them.

  “Oh,” said the doctor, startled when Tripoli took hold of his arm.

  “Well?”

  “She's lost an awful lot of blood,” he said, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening,“but I think she’ll be okay. We’ve now got her stabilized.”

  “And the baby?” he hung onto the doctor's arm.“The baby!”

  “A girl,” said Wozniak, covering Tripoli's hand with his.“A nice, plump little daughter. Seven pounds, two ounces and a professional screamer.”

  When they let Tripoli in to see her, Molly lay in bed, her eyes shut, her skin as white as the linens. Slowly she opened her eyes, saw him, and then smiled a little. “Good police work, Trip,” she said through lips that were dried and cracked.

  A young nurse brought her the baby and placed it in Molly's arms. When Tripoli saw his child, he lost control and started to weep. Molly was crying too, and the nurse slipped discreetly out of the room.

  “You did it!” he said, his voice choked as he examined the infant swaddled in a blanket. The baby was round faced and fine featured, a layer of silky, dark hair covering her head. She was beautiful. Perfect.

  “You don’t know how much I love you,” he said the next day as he watched Molly nurse for the first time, the baby drinking eagerly at her breast. The color had returned to Molly's face, and she was propped up in bed, looking clearly victorious.

  Gazing up from the suckling infant, she smiled at him. “Yes, I know,” she said, and there was a radiance on her face that gave her the look of a young girl. Four days later, they released her from the hospital with strict instructions not to climb stairs or exert herself in any other way until she was fully healed.

  “What do doctors know?” she laughed as she gingerly made her way up the flight to their bedroom. “What am I supposed to do, sleep on a mattress on the living room floor?”

  Tripoli cooked, did the laundry, and cleaned the house, but it was impossible keeping Molly confined to bed. Every day she gained more strength; even the doctor was surprised at how quickly she recovered.

  “Come on, already, I’m not exactly an invalid,” she objected when Tripoli insisted on waxing the floors in the kitchen.“Give me that mop, willya?”

  They called the little girl Rachel, and Molly never let her out of her sight. She had surprisingly delicate features and a heart-shaped face like Molly's with a pouty little bow-shaped mouth. Her fingers were long and fine and, when Molly nursed her, studying her closely, she could see that Rachel's eyes and wide brow were clearly Tripoli's. The baby was also blessed with a happy disposition, hardly ever complaining. Indeed, she always seemed to be smiling.

  A week after her release, Trip bought her a new computer and Molly was back working on her articles. The inbox on her computer was daily filled with emails from a contingent of volunteers strategically placed around the globe. A network had organized itself spontaneously, and Molly, somehow the rallying point, suddenly found herself acting as the clearing house. Daily observations on the flora and fauna flowed into her computer from everywhere. Her database was getting so comprehensive, the observations so accurate and incisive, that scientists were beginning to contact her for data.

  The energy companies that sold fossil fuels were still insisting that the fears of global warming were being fed by alarmists, but it didn’t take much fancy research on Molly's part to see otherwise. In less than two years, the mean annual global surface temperature had jumped nearly a full degree. Her observers, which included physicians, were reporting a recent surge in vector-borne and infectious diseases, especially in tropical and subtropical regions. The warm weather was intensifying the transmission of malaria, and there were explosive outbreaks of dengue, hantavirus, and cholera.

  Scientists who had been observing the ice sheet in West Antarctica were now writing to her with warnings that, because of rapid melting, huge portions of the shelf were in danger of breaking loose.

  “The massive ice sheet,” wrote a Harvard geophysicist in his email, “sits suspended on bedrock above the sea. According to my calculations, if it drops into the ocean, it can and will set up a soliton—a massive and destructive wave—that will inundate coastal areas around the world and leave ocean levels permanently raised.”

  As she continued to receive such news, Molly's writing took on a new urgency and her column, “Just Listen,” now syndicated daily in papers across the country, was experiencing a burgeoning readership.

  “Another three major papers in Europe and two in Asia just signed on,” exclaimed Wally Schuman during their regularly scheduled morning phone conference. He had stepped down from his management position at the paper and was now devoting himself to Molly's column as well as a nonprofit organization he had created and called “The Daniel Foundation.” Unsolicited donations were coming in every day to support the research and development of innovative energy-saving appliances. The fund had already helped a number of inventors to start building prototypes and apply for patents. Molly's column was helping that effort in no small measure.

  “Just keep doing what you’ve been doing,”Wally urged.“People need to hear what you have to say. It's exactly what Daniel would want you to do.” Wally, however, like most everyone else in town, was convinced that Daniel was now long dead.

  Each day, when Molly sat down to write, she envisioned her readership as an audience of two: Danny and the old man. There was still hope. If people would just modify their habits, lessen their consumption, she urged, the Earth's warming could be arrested, maybe even reversed. But it had to happen now.

  Then, a large fire broke out in the northern Amazon where Brazil and Venezuela met. The rain forest there had turned tinder dry, and all it took was a bolt of lightning to set the jungle ablaze. In a matter of days, it covered several hundred
thousand acres and sent up a black pall of smoke that swirled around the rotating globe. When Tripoli left in the morning for work, Molly could see that the sky was encased in a thick, brown haze. That same evening, the sunset began far earlier than normal. It was unnaturally brilliant, a flaring reddish-orange that looked like a laser-light show and lasted for more than an hour.

  In town, Tripoli noticed how the people kept staring up at the menacingly brown sky as though mesmerized.“I didn’t worry about it before,” said Kesh in the diner, pouring Tripoli a second cup of coffee at lunch.“But did you see that sky today? This is serious shit. I’ve a grandchild on the way. What kind of world am I bringing that kid into?”

  In Washington, the government was still debating about what action to take. Leaders in capitals from Paris to Berlin to Tokyo seemed paralyzed. An unplanned experiment was being carried out on the Earth, its outcome unforeseen, yet nobody could agree on anything.

  Yet every day without fail visitors appeared on Molly's doorstep. There were locals, but also people from New York and Chicago and as far away as Oregon.

  “I’d like to do something,” said a troubled woman from Anaheim,“something to lessen the harm that I’ve done. What would Daniel want me to do?”

  “You’re doing it already, just by coming here,” said Molly by way of encouragement and the woman smiled. “You’ve been watching, you’ve been listening, you see. Now go back and talk to people, organize them, rally them to put pressure on their elected officials.” The woman left energized and Molly was surprised by how little it sometimes took to galvanize people.

  Josh Miller was now delivering three and sometimes four heavy sacks of mail every day. Her readers sent faxes and emails, and the newspaper was besieged with urgent calls all asking for Molly's help. All she knew was that the political leaders weren’t listening to the people, and the people weren’t listening to each other.

  “It was just like Daniel said,” said a frightened Mrs. Ruzicka, appearing unannounced at the farm early one morning. Molly hadn’t seen the woman since the day that Daniel had disappeared and Molly had questioned little Kevin at the mall. Hefty Mrs. Ruzicka had bicycled all the way from town to say, “If only Daniel and that old man were alive. They could have helped. I’m sure. People would have listened to them. My husband and I certainly would have.”

  Molly knew that bad news, like good, came in droves. It was Ed's call that confirmed her deepest fear.

  “It's Rosie.” His voice was breaking.“You know that dry cough she had. And the way she was always tired.” He couldn’t go on, and didn’t have to. Molly could guess. “I kept pleading with her to go the doctor, but…”

  “Where's she now?”

  “Up at the hospital. She's really sick. I’m back home with the twins. I don’t quite know what to do.”

  Molly called Tripoli, who came straight home. She left him with little Rachel and went directly to the hospital.

  They had Rosie in a semi-private room, screened off from the other occupant. When Molly saw her, she could hardly believe what she saw. Rosie's skin was completely yellowed. Her cheeks looked as though they had collapsed. She was being catheterized, and they had bottles of saline and drugs plugged into her veins.

  Rosie slowly turned her head, and when she noticed Molly standing at the foot of her bed she gave a weak smile.“Liver cancer,” she said hoarsely.

  Molly, unable to speak, took her hand.

  “Just like I thought,” said Rosie. “Every day when I worked at that body shop they were poisoning me.” Then she started to cry quietly.“I wanted so bad to see my boys grow up and now I’ll never have the chance.”

  Molly wanted to say that it wasn’t like that at all, that Rosie would survive this, but even without talking to the doctors she could see it wasn’t true. She couldn’t even brave the lie. So she sat with Rosie silently holding her hand, sat with her for a couple of hours until Rosie drifted off to sleep.

  Molly's mind was in turmoil. She worried about the twins, tried to envision what would happen to them in Rosie's absence and who would care for them. She felt heartsick. Wrapped up in her own problems, her pregnancy, and her writing and her life with Tripoli, she had neglected Rosie. She knew Rosie hadn’t been well, yet she hadn’t bothered to visit her, making do with phone calls. And then there was that lie, that wall she had erected.

  She headed down the Trumansburg Road back into town, cut over the inlet bridge, and drove to Spencer Street.

  Ed was beside himself. “They told us it's bad. Very bad. She doesn’t have much time left.” He broke down and wept in the kitchen, sopping up his tears with Rosie's apron that lay abandoned on the counter.“I love her so much, and now…I don’t know how I can go on,” he confessed. He had to look after Rosie, keep on working, take care of the babies. He was trying to get one of Rosie's cousins to lend a hand. Or somebody in his family.

  “We’ll help. You don’t need to worry about that. Trip and I are here. You can count on us.”

  Weekdays, while Ed held down his job, Molly had three children. Three pairs of diapers to change. Two sets of bottles and meals to prepare while she nursed Rachel. Mounds of dirty laundry that needed washing.

  Nevertheless, with Tripoli's help, she squeaked in time to keep reading and writing. “I couldn’t manage all this without you,” she said, following Tripoli as he carried out a heavy basket of laundry to hang on the line.

  “I didn’t exactly plan to spend half my life running a daycare,” he said, wrestling a sheet, a pair of clothes pins gripped in his teeth. “But you gotta do what you can. Poor Rosie.”

  Ed came by each night after visiting Rosie at the hospital and picked up the twins. Often, however, he was so exhausted that he crashed right there on their sofa, too tired to even eat, and they tiptoed around him, letting him sleep the night.

  Rosie came home from the hospital and her Aunt Betty took care of her days, leaving Ed to attend to her at night. When Molly went to see her, she was now so weak she couldn’t even get out of bed to urinate, and had to ask for a bedpan. It was hard to fathom the speed with which she was wasting away. Ed kept besieging the doctors. What about chemotherapy? he kept asking. Okay, if not that, then a liver transplant. But the cancer had already spread to her adjoining organs, to Rosie's spleen and pancreas. It also appeared to be metastasizing into her bones and spine leaving Rosie in almost constant pain.

  Finally, Molly suggested to Ed that he consider moving her to the hospice.

  “Hospice?” he repeated with a shudder. It meant the end of the road, and he couldn’t bring himself to even contemplate the prospect. Molly realized that the trip had already been started a long time ago.

  In order to be home to help Molly during the day, Tripoli pulled as much night duty as he could. In the city, the deadening heat lingered on through the long fall nights, and cruising the streets at three in the morning, Tripoli could still see people sitting on their stoops and porches dressed in sweaty undershirts and shorts trying to catch the relief of a breeze. Paradoxically, crime in the city was down. There were fewer stickups and burglaries, fewer domestics and assaults. People were just too wrung out from the heat to fight, steal, or otherwise disturb the peace.

  Tripoli spent the hours of daybreak watering the garden and picking the daily crop while Molly and the baby still slept in the silent house. He was thankful that they had a good, deep-drilled well. Other peoples’ wells had run dry and they were hauling water from the lake—a once pure and glacially deep lake that was now sprouting smelly algal blooms along the shore.

  In his pocket, Tripoli still carried the tracing he had made from the old Hermit's book. And when, moving through town in the dead of night, he started thinking about the fish gasping in the lake, about his neighbors squeezed by food prices as they struggled to put meals on the table for their kids, when he permitted his horizon to expand and consider the problems of people elsewhere in the state, the country, the world, he would take out that piece of paper, unfold it and ru
n his fingers over those ancient Hebrew letters.

  To the chosen others who follow and are granted the right to gaze on these hallowed works, the keepers of the Sacred Spirit of Anterra, holders of these eternal truths. May this flame continue to burn and shed its light on this noble planet, hear the word of Anterra.

  Smoothing that wrinkled paper as it lay on his lap, Tripoli felt a surge of comfort…and hope. For Anterra, he began to realize, was the divine spirit of the world, both mother of the Earth and father of the sky, the keeper of mountains and oceans, the protector of humankind and nature. Anterra had been defiled and forgotten and now lay seriously ill. More than ever, people desperately needed direction, someone to remind them of their fundamental connection to this spirit, of their absolute dependency on the Earth and their venerable responsibility to it…to what the books had called “Anterra.”

  One morning, instead of going home, Tripoli took a detour and drove out to the Danby Forest. As he walked through the woods, the sun was just rising up over the lip of the horizon, and the birds were beginning to chirp. When he came upon the site of old Matthew's hut, he was taken aback by the sight of people. There were nearly two dozen of them, both men and women. They were gathered in a large circle around the remains of the building. The rubble, entangled now in brush and weeds, stood illuminated in a shaft of the red fiery light penetrating the opening in the forest. Someone had laid bouquets of wild flowers on the remains of the hut. There were rows of candles burning in little glass jars. And the people, their heads bowed, were praying, the low hum of their voices resonating through the forest. Tripoli's skin broke out in goosebumps and, before they could notice him, he silently slipped away.

  Rosie's twins had started walking and, when Tripoli was left in charge, he had his hands full. One of the twins would take off towards the kitchen while the other would head for the stairs, as if they had worked out some diversionary ploy. They would hoist themselves up on a chair and pull dishes off the table, yank books off the shelves, and dump food out of the refrigerator, spilling whole pitchers of juice and jars of jam. Nothing was safe from their eager clutches. They were intensely curious, and whenever Tripoli turned away for a second they were riffling through Molly's papers or banging away on her computer keyboard.