by Ashley Ream
Harry crossed his arms and closed his eyes but then felt weird about closing his eyes, so he opened them again. His head was tilted back against the headrest, and his gaze was up at the rearview mirror. Seeing her there startled him so badly that he whipped around, bumping Tilda’s arm, which caused the steering wheel to jerk and her to yell at him again.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Harry was twisted around in his seat, looking left and right and left across the back. He even peered down into the floorboard just to make sure. Becca had been there, and then she was gone.
He turned back around in his seat, and Tilda was still talking. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Harry looked back up into the rearview mirror, but she did not reappear. The fleeting glimpse was all he was going to get, and he didn’t know whether to be terrified or excited. He hadn’t known after last night if he would ever see her again.
“It was clearly something. You’re acting crazier than a wound-up house cat.”
“I thought I saw a spider.”
“You thought you saw a spider in the backseat from the front seat?”
“In the rearview mirror. I thought I saw a spider in the rearview mirror.”
Tilda looked at him for as long as she dared, glanced back at the road, and then gave him another look. She didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him, but that spider lie was just stupid.
“Are you having some sort of episode?” she asked.
“The episode I had was when I bought the other damn ticket. Are you going to the symphony with me or not?”
It was becoming clear to Tilda that everyone around her was losing their minds.
“I’d love to.”
“Great.”
“Great.”
Harry went back to his perch, staring out the side window and trying not to look nuts, and Tilda allowed herself one small shake of her head. There was no way she wasn’t going to bring this up with Dr. Woo. Maybe it was a symptom of the disease progression, or maybe his medication needed to be adjusted. But whatever it was, Tilda thought, it was making him weird.
* * *
After eating a handful of Oreos and washing them down with soda, Rachel had kicked off her shoes and crawled under the comforter fully clothed. When the alarm on her phone went off, she rolled over and looked at her tanks. The room was getting dark. It had been cloudy all day, cloudier than usual, and the only light came from the tanks. From the tanks. Not from the lights over the tanks. Those the timer had switched off half an hour before. The tanks themselves were glowing green.
She sat up and tried not to breathe too hard or otherwise disturb a single molecule in the room, lest it be the important molecule that had kept her arthropods alive. Because holy mother in heaven, they were alive. Rachel stopped herself. She couldn’t know that. All she knew was that there was a green light coming from the tanks. Rachel stayed where she was on the bed with her sweatshirt twisted the wrong way around and her ponytail pulled halfway out. She stayed there and tried to figure out what might be happening that would make her tanks glow green but that would not mean her experiment had worked.
Rachel was a chemist. She could make something burn green if she wanted to, and so could her colleagues. Boric acid mixed with methanol and set on fire, for example. That would be green. Rachel thought about that and got out of bed. She had to stand there for a moment with her fingers on the edge, steadying herself. She wasn’t feeling well, but that wasn’t surprising. Little food and no sleep. She reached for the box of flavored crackers by the bed. She’d eaten some earlier and hadn’t bothered to close the top. Rachel put two in her mouth, wiped her hand on her sweatshirt, and all but tiptoed to the tanks.
She pulled one of the flasks out and held it up next to a lamp she’d switched on. She could see the Artemia lucis floating in the water, little bright green flecks shimmering and pulsing. Their bodies were semitransparent. Only their complex eyes, tiny black dots, were truly opaque. She concentrated on their legs, all twenty-two of them, which were so small they looked almost like hairs. Were they moving, or was it the trembling of her hand?
Shit.
Rachel set down the flask and dug out a clean pipette to extract a sample. Using the lower powered of her two microscopes, she took a quick look. The Artemia lucis would not survive out of the water for any significant period of time. She had not taken a significant period of time to look, but still, the creature died in front of her eyes, giving one last twitch of its legs. She watched as the green light that was strongest along its medial line faded and went out, leaving only the rust brown color of its exoskeleton. The creature had not been long for this world even before she touched it.
She backed away from her microscope, looked at her flasks, blinked, and thought that perhaps, in that microsecond of time, the glow was a little more dim. Rachel smiled. First just a little and then some more. She couldn’t help herself. She did a little Flashdance stompy move right there in the fading glow because while it might be fading, while thousands of the creatures might be dying, they were dying much more slowly than they had before, which meant that she had done something right. Maybe not quite right enough. Some dial somewhere needed to be turned up just a little more, but she was almost there and not one moment too soon.
The adrenaline was almost too much. She was high on biochemicals. She needed to calm down. She needed to think. Rachel walked back to the bed, picked the half-empty can of soda off the floor, and chugged what was left, warm and flat. Then she had another cracker, found the spoon she’d used to take the last dose, and licked it just in case any of the compound was left.
The highest priority, she knew, was to protect her work. She had a lot. She knew a lot. She could keep the bugs alive for longer and longer. She had human subject data. The active compound was a protein, maybe a peptide. It was an incredible amount for only four days’ work. It was prodigious. It was superhuman even. And she would do anything at all to protect it. To protect herself. Jesus, she thought, she’d gotten out of bed. She’d just gotten out of bed like that was something she did. If she’d had to explain to someone the miracle of that, she wouldn’t have been able to. It was as though she hadn’t really been alive before.
Rachel shook herself out of the reverie. She was losing time. She pulled off her clothes—just like that!—and reached into a duffel bag for something cleaner to put on. The bag was empty of anything useful. She went to the closet. Only one T-shirt was left on a hanger. She pulled that out, grabbed some jeans and a sweater from the floor, and put it all on.
With the contents of two of the flasks, she made a quick paste. She didn’t weigh the amount this time, and she didn’t grind it as fine as she had. She was used to it. She didn’t need to count everything anymore, not for herself. She would be more careful with anything she gave Harry, of course, but she knew the right dosage. She swallowed the brown lump and chased it with an Oreo.
Tick-tick-tick went the clock.
She had her shoes and her socks in her hand when she opened the door of her bedroom.
“Hello.”
Rachel clutched her sneakers to her chest and clinched everything. “Who are you?”
“Juno. You must be Dr. Bell.”
Rachel didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled the door closed behind her.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” he went on.
“Who are you?” Rachel asked again.
“Juno.”
Rachel shook her head like a horse chasing away flies, which was what the redundant and useless information felt like to her. She could almost see it in the air around her like small golden lights, trying to get in her ears and into her brain, clogging up the works and slowing her down.
“You said that already.”
He smiled. He thought he was funny.
“I’m Harry and Tilda’s son. That’s my room.” He pointed at the door between Harry’s room and the bathroom. It had been shut the entire time Rachel had been
in the house, but now it was open. She could see part of the bed, neatly made up, and a dresser and a rug. It wasn’t that different from her own room but without all the flowers and pastels.
Rachel wasn’t sure how long she looked at it, but Juno started talking again.
“My mother told me you’re one of the researchers working down at the bay.”
He looked more like his mother than his father. In fact, it was almost like Rachel could see Tilda floating there behind the man’s eyes. They had the same straight nose and pointy chin and the same medium brown hair that fell just right, as though they’d won some sort of hair texture lottery. Rachel remembered hers was falling out of the ponytail, which meant that it was up, which meant that her neck was visible. She reached up and pulled the elastic out with a jerk. That was a mistake she’d never made before.
“I have to go,” Rachel said.
“Okay.”
He stretched out the word, so it sounded like “ooooh-kaaaay.” At least, that’s how it sounded to Rachel with the tickles happening in her head and under her skin.
“Don’t go in my room.”
Juno blinked. “Why? Are you keeping monsters in there?”
Rachel tried to smile. She ordered her facial muscles to do it, but it was too difficult to tell if they were complying. “Don’t go in my room,” she said again.
Rachel dropped her shoes to the ground and then herself. On her butt, she pulled on her socks and tied her shoes. Juno didn’t stay. He walked toward his room without a good-bye and gave her one last look over his shoulder before going inside and shutting his own door.
She needed to get to the hardware store, and there wasn’t much time. The balls of her feet tapped a staccato rhythm down the wooden stairs. She was out the front door and digging the truck keys from her pocket when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. It was the outline of a person—her occipital lobe told her it was a person even if other regions of her brain were less sure. She jerked her head around hard and fast. It was enough to hurt her neck, a little burning where the scars were the worst, but not nearly as bad as she would’ve expected.
As fast as she moved, she was only fast enough to catch a bit of leg disappearing at a trot around the side of the Streatfield house.
Rachel followed her eyes, running across the grass. It was slick with rain, and the pounding of her feet matted it down. She got to the corner of the house and stared down the shallow gulley that separated it from the neighbor’s. She had a clear view down the steep hill to the beach and the water below. What she didn’t see was a person, not anyone at all. And the ghost image, the memory of what she had seen, wasn’t even enough to make a guess. Man? Woman? Rachel didn’t know.
She walked quickly down toward the thick brush that separated her from the sand. She checked under the two-tier decks on either side of her, scanning along the bay in both directions. The wind had picked up, and the caution tape was snapping and twisting. Beyond it, the day shift worked, their coats zipped all the way up. Rachel stepped back, trying not to catch their attention.
The day’s mist was heavier, almost but not quite drops. Already the legs of her jeans were wet and pulling down at her hips, and her hair was sticking to her head. The wind chilled her and made her squint. She shivered and shoved her hands in her pockets. The clouds were low, low even for this place, and sometimes that did things to people. Was someone watching her? Watching the house? Trying to break in? The truth was Rachel did not trust herself. She did not know if she had seen someone or if she had not, and when she turned back toward the truck, she couldn’t keep from looking behind her the entire way.
28.
Dr. Woo saw patients at the Olloo’et Hospital one day a week and spent the rest of his time in Seattle. Harry was starting to wonder if Woo didn’t come out to the island just for his appointments. Harry had not ever, not once, waited. He signed in at the desk, and after a minute or two, not even time to read a decent article from the magazine stack, a nurse would stand in the doorway and call his name.
Tilda stayed in the waiting room without asking, which was fine with Harry. He got up with his cane but kept his weight on his feet as he followed the woman in salmon-colored scrubs back to the exam rooms.
There was a time when most people on the island lived on the island. There were the original island families, of course, but even thirty years ago when Harry and Tilda had come along with others like them, they lived there. They needed doctors and dentists and pediatricians, and there were enough of those to keep everybody off the coroner’s hands before their time. They had taken Juno to the emergency room of this hospital when he was eight and fell off his skateboard. Tilda had sat up with him half the night because the doctors had been worried about a concussion.
Now more and more buyers were picking homes they wouldn’t spend thirty days of the year in. Their doctors were on the mainland, and the hospital was turning into an urgent care clinic that did little more than patch up kitchen accidents and dispense antibiotics for sudden urinary tract infections to patients the doctors would never see again.
Woo had lived on Bay Drive with the Streatfields when they were still the Streatfields, and the three of them had been friends. After Harry and Tilda divorced and property values doubled, Woo, who had never married, sold his house and bought a one-bedroom condo not far from the hospital along with a condo in Seattle, where more and more of his practice had moved.
Harry visited him in his hospital-side condo once. All of his real furniture had been shipped to Seattle, and what was left on the island looked like the sort of mismatched leftovers people send off with their twenty-year-old children to their first apartment, furniture you know will end up soaked in spilled ramen and beer. Harry had found the place depressing, and the two men had found that Tilda had been more important to their friendship than they realized. All conversations had passed through her. She was the apex point in the V-shape of their friendship, and without her, they were just two points without connection. It was the only time Harry saw Woo until he got sick.
Harry had put it off as long as he could. There had been the tingle in his hands and feet for months. Then he started to lose his balance. He tried giving up wine, not that he’d been too much of a drinker anyway, but when that didn’t help and he’d started to fall, he called Woo and asked if he could have an appointment. And now here he was with monthly checkups. Harry didn’t even know if Woo still had that terrible condo. Maybe he just rode the ferry in before Harry arrived and took the next one out once Harry was gone. It wouldn’t surprise him, but he wouldn’t ask anything to confirm it. If it turned out he was coming to Olloo’et just for Harry then Harry would have to put a stop to it. It was too much for somebody to do for him. And if he couldn’t see a doctor on the island, he’d either have to sell his house and move or give up seeing doctors entirely, which would’ve been his choice, but with Tilda around, that got harder. So Harry never asked. Simple as that.
Also Woo always kept the good gowns, not those horrible paper ones that ripped every time you moved. Woo’s exam gowns were real fabric, soft like they’d been washed a hundred thousand times, and, best for Harry, they closed in the back with Velcro. Snaps or ties would’ve been impossible for the past six months, not even if Harry had turned the damned thing around and tried to do it up from the front. But that day was better. That day Harry could have done up some snaps, maybe even in the back.
When the nurse pointed to the gown and left Harry alone to change, he set his cane by the exam table and took off his pants standing up, the way he used to. Then he put on the gown and hopped up on the table, hopped right up there like Juno would do it, where he waited for Woo. Woo was probably waiting in the men’s room until a decent enough interval had passed so that he could knock on Harry’s door, which is what happened.
“How are you feeling, Harry?”
Woo held out his hand, and Harry shook it. Woo’s hands were soft but not too soft, cool but not cold. They were the least o
bjectionable hands a man could have, which was a real bonus at exam time, as far as Harry was concerned.
“I’m feeling all right,” Harry said.
“What does ‘all right’ mean?” Woo asked.
He was looking at Harry’s chart and had taken a pen from the breast pocket of his white coat, settling himself on the rolling padded stool next to the counter with all the swabs and bandages. Under his coat, he wore a blue dress shirt, brown dress pants with a knife-edge crease, and a brown-ish/blue-ish tie with a small pattern Harry couldn’t quite discern.
Woo had gone almost all gray now with just a little of his old black hair underneath, like a silverback gorilla. But his face hadn’t changed at all, not since Harry and Tilda had bought the place on Bay Drive thirty years before. It was strange, and it made Harry realize just how much his own face had changed and that he didn’t really know how old Woo was. Sixties? Seventies? Harry could ask Tilda.
In response to his question, Harry shrugged as if to say “all right meant all right.” He hadn’t decided how much he should tell Woo, and now sitting there in the faded blue gown with the Velcro in the back, that seemed irresponsible. He should have spent the time in the car thinking this exam through rather than having such a stupid argument with Tilda. She had picked a fight with him, and he had let her, and now look where it had gotten him. Harry frowned.
Woo ran through a list of questions and exercises. “Squeeze my hand with your left hand. Tight as you can. Now your right. Can you stand unassisted? For how long? Show me.”
Harry was standing in his bare feet on the cold, blue-flecked linoleum floor. He faced Woo, who was watching him for whatever Woo watched for in these exercises. Woo placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder and applied light pressure. Harry resisted and stayed upright. That was good, Harry thought, but Woo’s face was as unresponsive to Harry’s successes as it was to the passage of time.