She turned off the television set and wrapped her arms around her waist. What would happen? she wondered. To Eddie, to the rest of the children? To her?
“The Free Press and channel sixteen both say there are four cases of meningitis in LaSalle County,” she said to Sarah.
“Holy Cow. Sounds like an epidemic.”
“But only two of the cases were in my children, as far as I know. My day care had nothing to do with the other two. I think. The director of public health said there was no evidence of an epidemic and people shouldn’t panic.”
“Now what?”
“The health department guy said I didn’t have to do anything, at least not right now. I’ve been cleaning this morning. It can’t hurt.”
By ten o’clock in the morning—after pushing the two Stratoloungers into the center of the living room so she could clear out the cookie crumbs, dog hair, stray toys, and lost barrettes that had been kicked under the furniture—she was vacuuming the carpet. When finished, she shoved the Stratoloungers back against the wall.
“This’s going to be the cleanest house in the state,” she muttered under her breath. Next, under the couch. She slid the vacuum’s upholstery attachment from side to side beneath the sofa skirt, inched it forward with each sweep, and thought about the reporter.
How did he find out about Amanda? About her? Who gave him her phone number? Amanda’s mother? Unlikely. Anna? Couldn’t be. Who would do that to her?
Next she cleaned the bookcases. Her library, as she liked to call it, contained mostly children’s books, which were stacked on the bottom shelves and used too often to get dusty. The book on top of the pile, Rain, Hail, and Lightning, was Davey’s favorite. He liked to make thunder noises as she read about the storms. She wondered if Davey’s mother would bring him back, if the other mothers would pull their kids out as well. Was Amanda in the ICU? Would she and Eddie be okay?
When she finished cleaning the living room, she changed the linen on her bed and scrubbed the bathroom floor with Lysol and a stiff brush, paying particular attention to the base of the toilet. Even though she repeatedly told the little boys to aim in the potty, not at the potty, sometimes they missed. She couldn’t be held responsible for that. She mopped the bathroom floor every night. How much more was she expected to do?
She hadn’t heard from the Campbells for two days. Presumably Chris hadn’t caught Eddie’s meningitis but she needed to be sure. She didn’t want to bother Anna at the hospital again, so she called their house, hoping to find her at home. At least, her parents were likely to be there.
As the dial tone rang in her ear, she hoisted herself onto the kitchen stool. Under the table, Beefeater lay curled into an O, his nose wedged between his rear feet. This was one of his favorite places, perfect for snatching fallen food. The curve of the dog’s spine, with its row of bony knobs barely visible under his slick Jack Russell hair, reminded her of a rosary. Beefeater lived a charmed life, confident of his next meal, able to sleep away the afternoon without a worry. Besides, he was her automatic crumb cleaner-upper. He kept the kitchen floor spotless.
Anna had never said much about her parents, except that they lived in Baltimore. She assumed Anna’s mother would share her daughter’s sense of style. She vaguely remembered Anna saying, upon returning from a visit to Maryland when Chris was two, that her parents’ home “wasn’t childproofed.” There was something about lipstick on the dining room wallpaper, a vague reference to what she assumed had been an unpleasant situation.
Although she had never met Anna’s mother, she recognized her voice immediately. It carried the same measured pace, the same remote quality as Anna’s. She tried to imagine Anna’s mother. Probably trim, like Anna, with sprightly movements. Her hair would be streaked with gray, or possibly pure white, or maybe skillfully dyed, and her face, with Anna’s high forehead and narrow, hazel eyes, would be relaxed and knowing, while the folds of skin that ran beside her cheeks would be deeper than her daughter’s.
“Both Jake and Anna are at the hospital,” Anna’s mother said. “Yes, Eddie’s still in the ICU.”
“And Chris?”
“He’s standing right here and would love to talk to you.”
“Hi, Rose Marie.” Chris’s familiar voice sounded like a cherub singing—rather, a worried cherub singing. “Mommy’s at the hospital. Eddie’s real sick.”
“I know, honey. I bet you miss your mommy.”
“I want to go to the hospital.”
“Of course. Are you having fun with your grandma and grandpa?”
“Grandma made pancakes that said ‘C’ for Chris.”
She smiled as she pictured him stuffing the pancakes into his mouth. “You’re being a brave soldier, Chris. Maybe you can come to my house next week, even if your grandma and grandpa are still here.”
“Bye.” Chris was gone; the dial tone buzzed in her ear. He had sounded healthy, as chipper as ever.
“But Meghan’s still fine, right?” she said, watching wind blow through the trees out the kitchen window. Meghan’s mother was on the phone, had just told her they’d made other arrangements for Meghan’s care for the next week or so.
“We need to be sure there isn’t a problem. You understand, I’m sure.”
“Well, I don’t know what to think. I’m just glad all of the other children are healthy.”
“We’ll let you know what we decide.”
After she hung up, she walked to her bedroom. Beefeater lay on her bed. “Move over,” she said and lay down. Sawyer’s mother had also read the article in the paper and had called just a few minutes before Meghan’s mother. They were all abandoning her. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Her mind was in a muddle. Nothing made sense.
Chapter 22
Jake
Rain pelted the glass pane beside his shoulder. He thought he heard hail. He turned away from the computer and toward the window. It was only rain—thick, lead-like drops driven by the wind. A flash of lightning shot through the room. Two breaths later, a clap of thunder rattled the glass, gently nudged his body. He listened while it trundled off into silence.
Spring storms—the crashing, the thrashing, the wildness—took him back to his youth, to the times when he hid in Buckthorn’s cave, when he got lost in the woods behind the school, when he swayed like a bear cub from the top of an apple tree, and when, during midnight thunderbolts, he huddled under his quilt—safe, warm, and dry. There was an odd comfort in those storms. They were always the same. After the flashes and the racket and the blowing, they always stopped and the world became quiet again.
Outside, it was wet and blustery, but inside, in the residents’ room where he slumped before the electric blue-gray of the computer screen, the air scratched at his nostrils. It smelled of oily hair, sweaty clothes, stale pizza. X-rays of someone’s femur and a discharge summary from a referring hospital cluttered the table where his elbows rested next to a cardboard box with stale bagels, yesterday’s sign-out sheet, and a postcard from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
He stared at the words and numbers—the results of Mr. Bender’s laboratory tests—on the computer screen. Hemoglobin—normal. White count—normal. Differential—normal. Hepatic enzymes—normal. So, why was this guy jaundiced? he wondered, twirling a paper clip between his thumb and index finger. Maybe his liver was giving out and the enzymes had been elevated earlier but now were on their way down—the ominous arc of a dying organ. He decided to order additional hepatic function tests.
The thunder and lightning had stopped and now he felt the lulling rhythm of the rain. He glanced at his watch. Almost four o’clock in the afternoon. Things were winding down, both the storm and the workday. If he finished his patient notes soon, he might be able to go home early, but first he would check with Anna and visit Eddie. Fortunately Anna’s parents were still around. He couldn’t deal with Chris’s exuberance tonight, at least not alone. He needed a buffer, someone else to absorb a portion of his son’s energy. He’d been up half the nigh
t—four admissions and two open-fracture reductions—and was exhausted.
He stared at Mr. Bender’s lab results again, but the numbers seemed to pass through his eyes, through his brain, and out again without sticking. Far in the distance, he heard one last roll of thunder, a grumbly straggler at the tail of the storm.
The rain on the window brought it all back. They were speeding down Huron River Drive in his friend’s ancient El Dorado convertible, the top down, Gary at the wheel, Monica huddled in the middle. It had begun to sprinkle. Gary kept driving up U.S. 23, toward Independence Lake. Soon the raindrops were fat and heavy and slapped at their faces like a wet mop. Finally Gary edged the car to the side of the road to unfold the convertible’s top. Yanking at the rusty levers and pulling at the unruly canvas, his friend filled the air with profanity.
“Why don’t you help him?” Monica had said. She pulled her sopping-wet hair away from her eyes. Her blouse, soaked through, clung to her chest.
“What do I know about convertibles?” he said. “Besides, I have to see a man about a horse.”
With that, he stepped into the woods to take a leak. The rain was diffracted by the birch branches overhead. When he returned, the top of the El Dorado was up, Monica sat alone in the front seat, and Gary was wiping his greasy hands on a fistful of wild grape leaves. Jake stopped just short of the car and stared at its top. A piece of faded Levi’s was stitched to the roof’s black fabric with orange thread. He burst out laughing. That denim patch was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He bent over and held his sides. He could barely breathe. Finally, weak from giggling, he crawled into the front seat, put his soaked arm around Monica’s wet shoulders, ran his damp fingers through her wet hair, and planted a juicy kiss on her wet cheek.
Now, as he remembered the patch from the blue jeans, he couldn’t figure out what had been so funny. He could see the mended convertible top clearly and even chuckled to himself as he recalled the peals of laughter, but he no longer understood the humor. Must have been something mystical about the rain and the old car and the evening. And, of course, there was the magic of Monica.
He clicked on the next patient’s laboratory results but still couldn’t concentrate on the numbers. They swam like hieroglyphics on the computer screen while thoughts of Monica filled his brain. For the past day, she had seemed to follow him everywhere: to the scrub sink, into the john, to the Coke machine. Where was she? Right now, at this very moment, where on the planet Earth was she?
Slowly, as if from the bottom of a bog, the idea bubbled upward into his head. It’d be harmless, he thought.
No, it’d be ridiculous. He twirled the paper clip.
He wanted to know what’d happened to her.
Leave it alone, he thought. He shut down the laboratory results page and aimed the computer’s arrow at the Internet Explorer icon.
Just for the hell of it.
Jeez, drop it and go see Eddie, he said to himself. With his finger trembling against the mouse, he aimed the arrow at the stored addresses in the search engine and double-clicked on www.Google.com.
He glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching. A urology resident, his forehead pressed against his folded arms, dozed at the next table. A medical student closed the chart she had been reading and walked out the door. Why be so secretive? he wondered. The residents connected to Google every hour of every day. They looked up the URLs for Cabela’s or Amazon, hunted for bed-and-breakfasts in Saugatuck and Traverse City, trolled for stores that sold Rockport shoes. Did they check up on former girlfriends or boyfriends? Probably. In fact, he was sure of it. He typed “Monica Daley” into the advanced search window and hit Google Search.
As the computer ticked through its files, a sense of creepiness folded over him. Peeping Toms are sick, he told himself. They’re loathsome, vile. Still, when the list of 540 items popped up, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the screen.
Did he really want to be a voyeur? Is that what Jake Campbell had become? Was Chris and Eddie’s dad a sneak? Dr. Dunwoody had advised him to be a father but he hadn’t warned against being a stalker.
He opened the first link—Monica Daley, a librarian in Seattle. The second Monica Daley ran a women’s clothing store in Rochester, Minnesota. The third sold car insurance in Miami. No. No. No, he said to himself as he clicked his way through the list.
Then he found it. Monica L. Daley, MD. Yes, he thought, his fingers sweaty on the keyboard, his intestines twisting behind his belt buckle. Her middle name was Lynn. On the staff of a hospital in Maine. He clicked on her name. Her link in the staff directory popped up. Pediatrician. Graduated from Ohio State University. Residency at Boston University. Board certified. No photo. Clinic phone number for appointments. No office number. He needed her office number.
He searched Google for the American Medical Association. On the site page, he hit the tab that said “AMA Membership List.” An error message popped up. “You must log in to access this page.”
“Shit,” he muttered.
Then he remembered. Dr. Dunwoody had paid AMA dues for all the ortho residents. His heart pounded. He opened his wallet. Wedged between his Blue Cross card and his Western Michigan University alumnus card, he found the AMA membership card, his member number in the upper-left-hand corner.
Soon after he logged in, he found her, along with an office phone number. His thoughts raced. Shut down the computer. Keep going. Go see Eddie. Call her. He reached into the wastebasket beside the desk, pulled out a slip of paper, jotted the number on the back of what turned out to be a pizza receipt, and slipped it into his pocket.
His options collided and fused into a kind of mental quicksand that held him in its grip. He lifted the phone receiver, punched nine, heard the tone of the outside line.
He held the receiver away from his ear. He looked at it and at the number he had written on the receipt. Then he set the receiver back on the phone and headed for the pediatric ICU.
Chapter 23
Anna
It was only five days since she and Eddie left home. Seemed like a month. No, more like a century. Their house still looked the same, two stories tall, murky blue front door, siding the color of putty. The deep taupe trim had always reminded Anna of a snail’s shell. She looked up at the roof, squinting her eyes against the cloud-draped sun. The shingles were still shabby; a tiny maple tree had sprouted in the eave over their bedroom. Had she really lived in this house at all? Her memory of the place was like a crooked dream, as if she had known it a long time ago, in another life as a different person. The house seemed very wrong.
Jake had urged her to come home. “Even a short visit would be better than none,” he said, his voice tired. She had never heard him beg before.
Even her mother begged. When Anna heard, “Now, dear, be reasonable,” she was propelled back to her childhood, back to the time when the next words had been, “practice your piano lessons” or “change that sweaty shirt” or “wear a jacket—the night is cool” or “eat your broccoli.”
The final straw, though, came from Chris. “Come home, Mommy,” he had pleaded over the telephone. The tension in his sweet voice was like a thorn in the honey.
Jake stopped the van in the driveway. “Here we are,” he said.
A Subaru was parked in front of the garage door. She knew it belonged to her because the bumper sticker—faded and peeling off the lid of the trunk—said, “It’s my RIGHT TO CHOOSE what happens to my body.” She had been eight and a half months pregnant with Chris when she marched in that Freedom of Choice rally, her swollen feet beating what seemed like miles of pavement. Her pelvis was so unhinged in preparation for the birth that she thought she would come apart with each step. After the rally, soaked to the skin by an unexpected downpour, she had ripped the protective backing off the sticker and slapped it on her car. Considering the rain, she was amazed it had stuck at all. Yet, almost four years later, wrinkled and sun bleached, it still clung to the green paint.
“Jake . . .” Sh
e took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She needed to place the fragments of her memories in the right order. “I drove Eddie and Chris to the emergency room. How’d my car get home?” In the days and nights she spent at Eddie’s side, she hadn’t thought of the Subaru even once.
“Your dad rode with me to the hospital yesterday. No, the day before. No . . . I don’t remember when. He drove it home.”
“Oh.” She exhaled into the word. Arranging for a ride, finding the right parking lot at the hospital, locating her green car among the other green cars—the whole process of getting it home seemed an unsolvable problem. Yet, here it was.
“Whose is that?” She pointed to the Taurus beside the Subaru.
“Your folks’ rental.”
She nodded as she held her head, trying to quell the ache that pounded behind her eyes.
Chris’s toy backhoe lay half buried in the sandbox beside the garage, and the old tire twisted slowly from the end of the rope tied high in the oak tree. A child’s brown flannel jacket dangled from the groove of the tire. Chris must have left it there and no one noticed. If she had been home at the time, she would have noticed, would have instantly spotted it there in the tire, would have put it back in the closet.
Without thinking, she placed her foot beyond the loose brick on the back stairs, the one that used to wobble when she stepped on it. As she pushed open the back door, the curtain that covered the window brushed against her hair. Somewhere in her sewing cabinet was the leftover material, a piece of dull citron-colored gauze with thin blueberry stripes. She worried about prowlers when Jake was away at night and had made the curtain a week after they moved in.
“Mommy,” Chris screamed, racing from the kitchen. He rammed full force into her leg and clung to her as desperately as a shipwrecked sailor grasps a piece of driftwood.
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