Courage Tree (29 page)

A
lthough it was very early in the morning when Zoe opened her eyes, sunlight already peeked through the cracks in the bedroom ceiling, and she could tell it was going to be a beautiful day. Yet, that realization did nothing to lift her mood. She’d gone to bed feeling as low as she’d ever felt; this morning, she felt even lower.

What the heck had happened to her life? A few years ago, she’d been married to a fine and loving man, she’d had a career that was the envy of most entertainers. It had been on the downhill slope, to be sure, but she’d still had fans who would pay any amount to see her sing or dance or act, and the critics loved her movies, even if the general taste of the public had shifted. She’d lived in beautiful surroundings, and when she’d been able to put her fears about her career on hold, her life had seemed exciting and full.

Now look at yourself,
she thought. No husband, no career, no house on the beach. She had to use a damn
outhouse
, for heaven’s sake. She’d actually enjoyed the isolation and the challenges at first, back when she’d had the shanty and the
woods and all of West Virginia to herself, but now she felt trapped in those same woods with her daughter, whom she loved, despite the fact that she was beginning to think of her as unlovable. And she felt painfully responsible for an eight-year-old girl, a child she could not help without gravely harming her own child—as well as herself.

“Good morning.”

Lifting her head from her leaf-stuffed pillowcase, she saw Marti sitting sideways on her sleeping palette, her back against the wall. She was reading one of the paperbacks Zoe had brought with her to the shanty.

“Good morning.” She returned the greeting, then looked across the small room at Sophie’s bed. Sophie was facing her, her eyes open, a look of resignation on her face. The skin around her eyes was noticeably puffy, even in the dim, early morning light.

“How do you feel today, Sophie?” she asked

Sophie didn’t respond right away. The only sign that she was alive at all was the slow blinking of her eyelids.

“Sophie?” she repeated. “How are you?”

“I think I’m going to die soon,” Sophie said finally. Her voice possessed an eerie calm.

“Well, aren’t we dramatic this morning,” Marti said.

“Why do you say that, Sophie?” Zoe asked, alarmed.

“’Cause I know,” Sophie said. “I mean, I’ve known for a long time that I might die. I’m not really scared or anything.”

“You’re not going to die, honey,” Zoe said. It seemed the right thing to say. But Sophie was not fooled by platitudes.

“You don’t understand about kidney disease,” she said. “I can’t live without dialysis.”

“How long will it take you to die if you don’t get it?” Marti asked.

“Marti!” Zoe was appalled at her daughter’s insensitivity. Worse, she had the uncomfortable feeling that, if Sophie
could
say how long it would take her to die, Marti would start counting the days.

“Well, she’s talking about it like it’s no big deal,” Marti said.

“I don’t know how long it will take,” Sophie said. “I’ve never done it before.”

Zoe had to smile at the smart-ass tone of the little girl’s answer.

“How can I help, honey?” She raised herself up on one elbow, a twig or something from her makeshift pillow cracking beneath her weight. “You told me it’s important for you to watch what you eat. What would be best for you?”

“Protein,” Sophie said. “Meat. Chicken.”

“Well, I can probably find a rabbit or a squirrel that I could kill with my rifle, and we could have that for dinner if you like.”

“You forgot we can’t have a fire,” Marti said.

“I don’t want you to kill anything,” Sophie said.

“Kill one of those mangy dogs, why don’t you?” Marti suggested.

Zoe ignored her. “There’s a kind of fish that I’ve caught here that’s pretty tasty,” she said, remembering the mild flavor of the dark-scaled fish. “How about I try to catch one of them? Fish is good protein.”

“Okay, I guess,” Sophie said.

“Well, I hope you both like sushi,” Marti said.

“Marti, we’re going to have a fire,” Zoe said, startling both of them with her impatience. “I am going to feed this child. If we hear a plane or something overhead, we can pour water on the fire and get inside, okay?”

“It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind, Mother,” Marti said.

Zoe got out of bed and walked across the room to Sophie’s palette.

“Let me take a look at your foot, honey,” she said, lifting the covers from Sophie’s feet.

Sophie lay still as Zoe carefully unwrapped the bandage. The swelling had gone down a bit; the wound didn’t look nearly as angry and raw, and she felt enormous relief.

“It’s much better, Sophie,” she said. And Sophie raised her head to look at her foot herself. “The antibiotics are working.”

Sophie dropped her head to her pillow again. “If only they could fix the rest of me,” she said.

“I know, honey,” Zoe said, standing up. “I wish they could, too.”

She sat on a rock near the stream, her bucket and net at the ready, watching for one of those dark-scaled fish to swim by. Usually, they were plentiful. Today, when she really needed them, they seemed to have disappeared from the stream. And the lack of them was giving her way too much time to think.

She thought of Marti’s reluctance to have a fire. Those two words,
Marti
and
fire
, elicited discomfort in her, and she was afraid she knew why. For many years, those words had been joined together in her mind, although she’d tried hard to fight the cerebral link she’d formed between them. How old had Marti been when the fire occurred? Eleven? Maybe only ten?

Zoe and Max had been called back from New York, where they’d been filming a movie, because there’d been a fire in the Malibu house. The nanny’s room had been destroyed, positively gutted, and at first everyone thought that the young woman had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand. But after the fire investigators searched more deeply into the cause of the fire, they determined that it had been set, deliberately, sometime in the middle of the night. It had started with a gasoline-soaked rag, which had been tucked in the corner of the room and ignited in some way. And a gasoline-soaked rag would not simply appear in the nanny’s room, unless someone had placed it there.

Max tried to make a case for the nanny having done it herself. She was depressed, he argued. She drank a little.

From her hospital bed, her arms burned, the nanny pleaded ignorance, but Zoe and Max ignored her protests and made a public show of firing her. The incident was in the headlines for a few days, and Zoe doubted the poor woman had ever been able to find work again. But it had been critical to keep the spotlight off the person whom the fire investigators saw as the real culprit: Marti.

Marti denied having had anything to do with the fire, however, and there was no real proof that she’d been involved, so it was easy for Zoe to discount the investigators’ theories. Oh, my, how good she’d been at denial in those days! Don’t ask, don’t tell. That might have been the mantra of the Garson-Pauling household. Neither she nor Max ever wanted to ask Marti if or why she had done something wrong, because then they would have had to deal with the answers. It was far easier to let things slide. And let them slide, they did.

When Marti was being evaluated for entry into boarding school, the counselor had a long talk with Zoe.

Did Marti ever wet the bed? the counselor had asked.

“Yes, until she was twelve,” Zoe had admitted. Max had spanked Marti for her bed-wetting, which he viewed as pure belligerence on her part.

“Aha,” the counselor had replied, jotting something down in her records, and Zoe thought she’d better watch how she answered the questions from then on.

“Did Marti like to play with fire?” the counselor asked. “Did she like to strike matches? Was she fascinated by flames?”

“No,” Zoe said. She blocked the fire in the nanny’s room completely from her mind. It was amazing how easily she could do that.

“Any cruelty to animals?” the counselor asked.

Zoe thought of the kitten, but there had never been any proof that Marti’d had anything to do with the demise of that little ball of fur.

“No,” she’d said. “Why are you asking me such strange questions?”

“Oh, we ask all our parents these questions,” the counselor explained. “You see, there’s a triad of behaviors that predicts some possibly disturbed or violent behavior in later life,” she said. “Bed-wetting in late childhood, fire-setting and cruelty to animals. So it’s just something we like to rule out, as a matter of course, when we’re interviewing a candidate for the school. We don’t see much of it here, of course. It’s mostly something you see in kids who’ve been neglected or abused.”

“Oh,” Zoe had said.

She’d managed to finish the interview and make it all the way out to the street before getting violently sick to her stomach.

It was a moment before Zoe realized that one of the dark fish was right in front of her in the stream, practically taunting her as it dodged between the rocks. Reaching forward with the net, she scooped it up easily and dropped it into the bucket. Another fish just like the first one nearly swam into her net, and there was yet another right behind that one. There must be a whole school of them, she thought, and she caught a few more before deciding she had enough to make a good dinner for the three of them.

And she would make it over a fire. She would study Marti’s face across the flames and wish to God that she had her daughter’s childhood to do over. She would give Marti all the time and love in the world, all she had deserved and been deprived of. But she didn’t have the past to live over. She only had the present, and she would do everything in her power to keep Marti from returning to prison. Marti needed help; she was willing to admit that now. But it was not the sort of help prison could provide for her.

Sophie was sitting on the front step when Zoe got back from the stream. She looked a bit better than she had that
morning, although maybe it was just because she was sitting up and her face did not look quite so swollen.

“I caught our dinner,” Zoe said. “Let me get a knife from inside and I’ll clean the fish out here with you.”

“Zoe?” Sophie looked up at her. “I want to go home.”

Zoe placed the bucket on the ground, then sat next to her on the step.

“I know you do, honey,” she said. “I wish I knew how to make that happen.”

“I want to see my mom,” Sophie said.

Zoe looked over her shoulder. “Where’s Marti?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“Inside. Reading.”

Zoe glanced toward the open living room window, then returned her attention to Sophie, as she struggled to find the words that would help the little girl understand her predicament.

“Your mother took very good care of you, didn’t she?” she asked, finally.

Sophie nodded. “Yes.”

“And I need to take very good care of my daughter, too,” she said. “I’m afraid, Sophie. I’m worried about you, that’s true, but I’m even more afraid for Marti.” She lowered her voice, uncertain if Marti was in the living room or the bedroom. “She’s…not very well. Her mind isn’t right. I didn’t realize that. Or else, I just didn’t admit it to myself. But I can’t let her go back to prison. I know that must be hard for you to understand, but prison would be the worst place for her. She would never get well there. And she would only suffer.”

Sophie chewed on her lip and looked ahead of her, toward the clearing. “If
my
mom was Marti’s mom,” she said, “and if she was here with us, she’d find a way to get help for both of us. My mom would figure it out.” She got up from the step and hobbled around the side of the shanty toward the outhouse.

Zoe watched her go, then stared down at the fish, crowded together in the water-filled bucket. Was Sophie right? she wondered. Might another mother be able to come up with a solution to this dilemma? If she could, she’d be a much better, a much braver mother than Zoe could ever hope to be.

J
oe pulled into the hospital parking lot just before noon. In a few hours, Janine would be on her way back to West Virginia to continue what he was certain was a futile search for Sophie. He didn’t know how to stop her, or how to comfort her, and it hurt him to realize that Lucas would probably know how to do both. That pain paled in comparison, though, to his certainty that Sophie was dead. His daughter—
their
daughter—was gone, and Janine, the person he needed as his partner in grief, could not grieve with him. She was too busy holding on to the slim hope that somehow Sophie had survived her ordeal.

All night long, Joe had thought about how he should handle the situation with Lucas. So, he had kidney disease. And
maybe
he’d had a daughter who had died of the same malady, but frankly, Joe had his doubts about that. Still, those facts could not explain why Lucas had lied about working at Monticello, nor did they explain why he had that kiddy porn in his recycling bag.

The only thing he could think of to do was to confront Lucas. He would tell him what he knew and get his response.
And if Joe’s suspicions were correct about the man, he would demand a promise from him to leave Janine alone.

Lucas’s room was directly across the hall from the nurses’ station, and as Joe walked toward it, he was able to see straight into the room through the open door. He stopped walking when he spotted a man and a woman locked in an embrace, silhouetted against the large window. Was it a double room? he wondered. Was that Lucas’s roommate embracing his wife?

He started walking again, entering the room and turning toward the first bed, expecting to see Lucas lying in it, but the bed was empty. At the sound of Joe’s entry, the woman looked over the man’s shoulder to see who was intruding on their privacy.

She dropped her arms from around the man’s neck. “I’ll be back later, babe,” she said, drawing away from him, and only then did Joe realize it had been Lucas in her embrace. Lucas was holding the woman’s hand, but he let go of it when he spotted Joe.

The woman walked toward the door, smiling at Joe as she passed him, and he saw that she was pregnant, at least six or seven months so. Anger rose inside him as she left the room. True, he wanted Lucas to be proven a cad, but not to this degree, and not at Janine’s expense.

“What the hell is your story?” he asked Lucas, once the woman was out of earshot.

Lucas sat down in the chair next to his bed. He was attached by an IV to a bag of clear liquid, which hung from a pole above the bed, and he moved the pole out of the way so he could see Joe more easily.

“Come over here, Joe,” he said. He motioned toward the chair near the end of the bed. “Have a seat.”

With a few long strides, Joe crossed the room and sat down. He stared at Lucas, who was dressed in a flimsy blue-and-white hospital gown, and who still looked pale and a bit
bloated from his near call with death. But he felt no sympathy for the man sitting across from him.

“What’s your game?” he asked.

“That was my ex-wife,” Lucas said.

“And is that your baby she’s carrying?”

Lucas smiled. “No. We’ve been divorced for several years. She’s remarried. When she heard I was in the hospital, she came down from Pennsylvania to see me. We’re still friends.”

Joe no longer knew what to believe when it came to Lucas Trowell. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“Look, Lucas,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m dealing with here. I know you’ve got something to hide. You somehow turn up working at Ayr Creek, with the same disease as my daughter, and as I’m sure you know, it’s not the world’s most common illness. I know you never worked at Monticello.” He thought he saw Lucas flinch at that revelation. “And, I admit this was way out of line of me, but I went by your house the other day, and I saw a magazine in your recycling bin that had a picture of a nude little girl in it. So, since you insist on hanging around my wife—my ex-wife—and since you spent so damn much time with my daughter, I think I have the right to know exactly who you are and what you’re up to.” Joe heard the sudden break in his voice; he hadn’t expected the rush of emotion that accompanied his words. The thought of Lucas being anywhere near Sophie was unbearable.

Lucas licked his lips and leaned back in the chair, eyes closed, and for a moment, Joe thought he was simply going to sleep. But finally, he spoke.

“I’m not a pedophile, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, opening his eyes again. “I don’t know what magazine you could possibly be talking about. The Monticello thing—” Lucas looked out the window “—that’s a little harder to explain, but trust me, I have my reasons for tampering with the truth there.”

“I
don’t
trust you,” Joe said, standing up in disgust. “You’ve
lied left and right to Janine, who’s completely honest and…unsuspecting. You lied to Donna and Frank, and apparently to the Ayr Creek Foundation that hired you. You have zero integrity. What gives you the right to ‘tamper with the truth,’ as you call it? Where do you get off?”

“Look, Joe.” Lucas’s voice sounded quiet and controlled after Joe’s outburst. “Sit down again, please.”

Joe was tempted to walk out of the room, but something in Lucas’s solemn demeanor compelled him to take his seat again.

“I didn’t want to tell you this,” Lucas said, “at least not now, but it looks like you need to know, or else there’s going to be a major misunderstanding between us.”

“Tell me what?” Joe asked. His gut was churning.

“I developed kidney disease when I was in my teens,” Lucas said. “I started dialysis about ten years ago, when my kidneys completely failed on me. I was married then…to Sandra, the woman you just saw in here. We had a daughter named Jordan, who inherited this disease from me, but she had it much worse. Her kidneys failed when she was just six. Her mom gave her a kidney, just like Janine did for Sophie, and Jordy did pretty well with it at first, but then she rejected it.”

“Same as Sophie,” Joe said.

“Right. So she was back on dialysis again.” Lucas shook his head, and there was some anger in his eyes. “What a lousy way for a kid to have to live, you know? Needles and machines and the restrictive diet and all.” He looked out the window again, lost for a moment in his own memories. “Anyhow,” he finally continued, “she ultimately died. She was ten. She had an infection that went systemic. Killed her in a couple of days.”

Joe wondered if Lucas was telling tales again, but the fact that his daughter now had a name,
Jordan
, somehow made her real. It made her very much like Sophie. Besides, Joe recog
nized the pain in Lucas’s face. He saw that pain each time he looked in the mirror.

“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to believe Lucas was telling the truth.

“Thanks,” Lucas said. He drew in a long breath. “Well, I was actually a botany professor at Penn State back then,” he said. “And…well, I’ll get to that in a minute.” He looked perplexed and offered Joe a half smile. “It’s hard to know what to tell you next. I knew I had inherited my illness from my mother’s side of the family,” he said. “I asked her who else in the family had kidney disease. She mentioned a couple of my cousins, along with an uncle and her father. And then she told me that she’d always worried about a son she’d deserted when she was very young.”

Joe held his breath. What the hell was he saying?

“I’m talking about you,” Lucas said.

Joe stood up. “That’s crazy,” he said.

“You and I are brothers, Joe.”

Joe didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Too many lies had come from this man’s lips, and this one was too far-fetched for him to swallow.

“I don’t blame you for looking so shocked.” Lucas nearly smiled. “I was, too. She was always such a good mother, such a moral person. It seemed completely out of char—”

“Why didn’t she ever try to find me?” Joe asked. He’d never said those words out loud before, but they’d played on his mind every day for over thirty years. “She knew where I was.”

“She was ashamed, and it was very difficult for her to talk about,” Lucas said. “She told me she got married when she was eighteen and that she was a heavy drinker and used drugs. She didn’t get along with her husband and she felt saddled by her baby. By you.”

“So, she left,” Joe said, sitting down again. “I was a year old.”

“Yes, that’s right. She moved to the Philadelphia area and
eventually got herself straightened out. She met my father there, and they got married and had me. My father knew about the baby she’d left behind, but he was the only person who did, until she told me. I felt a need to find you, to meet you, to see if you had inherited this disease or…” His voice trailed off, then he shook his head. “Whew. I guess I have to tell you everything. I guess—” He stopped talking as a nurse walked into the room. Joe waited out the silence impatiently, as the nurse checked Lucas’s IV bag, then left the room again.

“We don’t look a bit alike,” Joe said. He was still clinging to denial.

Lucas smiled. “If you could see our mother, you’d know that we’re brothers,” he said. “You have her eyes.”

“Does Janine know any of this?”

“No,” Lucas said. “And please, Joe, the rest of what I have to tell you needs to stay between us. I know you don’t like me, but I’ll have to trust you with this. Please. I think you’ll understand when I tell you. Okay?”

Joe was uncertain how to answer him. “I guess that depends on what it is you’re going to say,” he said. He felt no brotherly love toward Lucas.

“Fair enough,” Lucas said. He eyed the glass of water on his night table, and Joe recognized the same look of thirsty longing that Sophie often wore when she’d already had her allotment of water for the hour.

“When Jordan got sick,” Lucas said, “I began doing some research on my own time. I was very interested in herbs and other plants that were thought to have medicinal qualities, and I did a lot of reading about those that were thought to help people with kidney problems.”

“So that’s why you thought Schaefer might have been on to something with his Herbalina,” Joe said.

Lucas smiled again. “No, that’s not quite it. I actually began taking some of the herbs myself. I noticed no improvement, or at least, very little. But then I began giving some of them
to Jordan. There was a definite improvement in her condition. She was able to go longer between her dialysis treatments. I kept playing around with the formula, finally coming up with the idea of using it as an IV infusion, but Sandra wouldn’t let me do that to Jordan. That scared her, understandably. Jordan died while we were still arguing about it, but her death was completely unrelated. Still, it broke up our marriage.” Lucas looked down at his arm, where the IV was attached. He touched the tape holding the needle in place gently, absently, then looked at Joe again. “Sandra always wanted a family,” he said. “Now she’s found herself a guy who won’t pass on any deadly disease to her children.”

Joe winced. “That must hurt,” he said, surprising himself with his sympathy.

“Well, it did at first, but not now,” Lucas said. “Now I’m just happy for her.”

“So…I’m not following you about the herbs,” Joe said.

Lucas nodded. “I knew I was on to something with them,” he said. “I also knew that no one would listen to a botany professor’s theory on using herbs in treating end-stage kidney disease. So I did some research into physicians who might take my work seriously and who would be willing to take the risk of…posing as the head of the study, when I was actually the one doing the research behind the scenes.”

“Are you saying that Schaefer’s study is really
your
study?” Joe asked, incredulous.

“Yes. Schaefer agreed to head up the study after I told him about the results I’d had with Jordan. He doesn’t really get it, though, but that doesn’t matter, as long as he’s got me working behind the scenes. Herbalina’s working, Joe, whether you want to believe that or not. I don’t care if Schaefer gets the credit for it. I just want to help those kids who are suffering like Jordan and Sophie did.”

Joe shook his head. “You are even more of a crook than I thought you were,” he said angrily. “You lied every which way
about the study and you took those children—those little lives—and cut them off from treatment that was proven to work and put them on—”

“The formula we’re using still needs a lot of work.” Lucas ignored his outburst. “And I’d like to find out why it doesn’t work with adults and how I might be able to change it to make that happen. But my time’s running out. I should be getting dialysis four times a week now, for four or five hours each time. It’s getting harder for me to find a way to earn a living with that sort of interruption in my work, and it eats away at my research time, as well. The formula needs tweaking, but I’m having trouble putting enough time into it these days to do what needs to be done.”

Joe shook his head again. “This is just…My mind is boggled, Lucas,” he said.

“Back to you and Sophie for a minute,” Lucas said. “I really wanted to find out if you might have had any children with kidney disease. So, when I found out that you did, I had to figure out a way to get Sophie into the study. I wanted my niece to have a chance at getting P.R.E.-5. That’s Herbalina.” Lucas looked a bit uncomfortable. “I knew how to garden,” he said, “but I certainly didn’t have the background to get the job at Ayr Creek. So I had a friend fake the Monticello reference for me.”