The Body Human (2 page)

But he’s right about one thing: I don’t owe this town anything.

I stack the supper dishes in the sink and get Jackie started on her homework.

The next day, I drive down to the Food Mart parking lot.

There isn’t much to see. It rained last night. Next to the dumpster lie a wadded-up surgical glove and a piece of yellow tape like the police use around a crime scene.
Also some of those little black cardboard boxes from the stuff that gets used up by the new holographic TV cameras.
That’s it.

“You heard what happened to Dr. Bennett,” I say to Sean at dinner. Jack’s working again. Jackie sits playing with the Barbie doll she doesn’t know I know she has on her lap. Sean looks at me sideways, under the heavy fringe of his dark bangs, and I can’t read his expression. “He was killed for giving out too many antibiotics.”

Jackie looks up. “Who killed the doctor?”

“The bastards that think they run this town,” Sean says. He flicks the hair out of his eyes. His face is ashy gray. “Fucking
vigilantes’ll
get us all.”

“That’s enough, Sean,” I say.

Jackie’s lip trembles. “Who’ll get us all? Mommy…”

“Nobody’s getting anybody,” I say. “Sean, stop it. You’re scaring her.”

“Well, she should be scared,” Sean says, but he shuts up and stares bleakly at his plate. Sixteen now, I’ve had him for sixteen years. Watching him, his thick dark hair and sulky mouth, I think that it’s a sin to have a favorite child. And that I can’t help it, and that I would, God forgive
me,
sacrifice both Jackie and Jack for this boy.

“I want you to clean the garage tonight, Sean. You promised Jack three days ago now.”

“Tomorrow.
Tonight I have to go out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I be scared?”

“Tonight,” I say.

Sean looks at me with teenage desperation. His eyes are very blue. “Not tonight. I have to go out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I—”

I say, “You’re staying home and cleaning the garage.”

“No.” He glares at me, and then breaks. He has his f
a
ther’s looks, but he’s not really like his father. There are even tears in the corners of his eyes. “I’ll do it tomorrow, Mom, I promise.
Right after school.
But tonight I have to go out.”

“Where?”

“Just out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I be scared? Scared of what?
Mommy!”

Sean turns to her. “You shouldn’t be scared, Jack-o-lantern. Everything’s going to be all right.
One way or another.”

I listen to the tone of his voice and suddenly fear shoots through me, piercing as childbirth. I say, “Jackie, you can play Nintendo now. I’ll clear the table.”

Her face brightens. She
skips
into the living room and I look at my son. “What does that mean? ‘
One way or a
n
other’?
Sean, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he says, and then despite his ashy color he looks me straight in the eyes, and smiles tenderly, and for the first time—the very first time—I see his resemblance to his father. He can lie to me with tenderness.

Two days later, just after I return from the Food Mart, they contact me.

The murder was on the news for two nights, and then disappeared. Over the parking lot is scattered more TV-camera litter. There’s also a wine bottle buried halfway into the hard ground, with a bouquet of yellow roses in it. Nearby is an empty basket, the kind that comes filled with expensive dried flowers at Blossoms by Bonnie, weighted down with stones. Staring at it, I remember that Bonnie
Widelstein
went out of business a few months ago. A drug-resistant abscess, and after she got out of
Emerton
Memorial, nobody on this side of the river would buy flowers from her.

At home, Sylvia James is sitting in my driveway in her black
Algol
. As soon as I see her, I put it together.

“Sylvia,” I say tonelessly.

She climbs out of the sports car and smiles a social smile. “Elizabeth!
How good to see you!”
I don’t answer. She hasn’t seen me in seventeen years. She’s carrying a cheese
kuchen
, like some sort of key into my house. She’s still blonde, still slim, still well dressed. Her lipstick is bright red, which is what her face should be.

I let her in anyway, my heart making slow hard thuds in my chest.
Sean. Sean.

Once inside, her hard smile fades and she has the grace to look embarrassed. “Elizabeth—”

“Betty,” I say. “I go by Betty now.”

“Betty. First off, I want to apologize for not being…for not standing by you in that mess. I know it was so long ago, but even so, I—I wasn’t a very good friend.” She hesitates.
“I was frightened by it all.”

I want to say,
You
were frightened? But I don’t.

I never think of the whole dumb story anymore. Not even when I look at Sean.
Especially not when I look at Sean.

Seventeen years ago, when Sylvia and I were seniors in high school, we were best friends. Neither of us had a si
s
ter, so we made each other into that, even though her family wasn’t crazy about their precious daughter hanging around with someone like me. The
Goddards
live on the other side of the river. Sylvia ignored them, and I ignored the drunken warnings of my aunt, the closest thing I had to a family. The differences didn’t matter. We were Sy
l
via-and-Elizabeth, the two prettiest and boldest girls in the senior class who had an academic future.

And then, suddenly, I didn’t. At Elizabeth’s house I met
Randolf
Satler
, young resident in her father’s unit at the hospital. And I got pregnant, and Randy dumped me, and I refused a paternity test because if he didn’t want me and the baby I had too much pride to force myself on any man. That’s what I told everyone, including myself. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know what a common story mine was, or what a dreary one. I thought I was the only one in the whole wide world who had ever felt this bad.

So after Sean was born at
Emerton
Memorial and Randy got engaged the day I moved my baby “home” to my dying aunt’s, I bought a Smith & Wesson revolver in the city and shot out the windows of Randy’s supposedly empty house across the river. I hit the gardener, who was helping himself to the
Satler
liquor cabinet in the living room. The judge
gave me seven-and-a-half to ten, and I served
five,
and that only because my lawyer pleaded post-partum depression. The gardener recovered and retired to Miami, and Dr.
Satler
went on to become Chief of Medicine at
Emerton
Memorial and a lot of other important things in the city, and Sylvia never visited me once in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Nobody did, except Jack. Who, when Sy
l
via-and-Elizabeth were strutting their stuff at
Emerton
High, had already dropped out and was bagging groceries at the Food Mart. After I got out of Bedford, the only re
a
son the foster-care people would give me Sean back was because Jack married me.

We live in
Emerton
, but not of it.

Sylvia puts her
kuchen
on the kitchen table and sits down without being asked. I can see she’s done with apologizing. She’s still smart enough to know there are things you can’t apologize for.

“Eliz…Betty, I’m not here about the past. I’m here about Dr. Bennett’s murder.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“It has to do with all of us. Dan Moore lives next door to you.”

I don’t say anything.

“He and
Ceci
and Jim Dyer and Tom
Brunelli
are the ringleaders in a secret organization to close
Emerton
M
e
morial Hospital. They think the hospital is a breeding ground for the infections resistant to every antibiotic except
endozine
. Well, they’re right about that—all hospitals are. But Dan and his group are determined to punish any doctor who prescribes
endozine
, so that no organisms develop a
resistance to it, too, and it’s kept effective in case one of
them
needs it.”

“Sylvia,”—the name tastes funny in my mouth, after all this time—“I’m telling you this doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“And I’m telling you it does. We need you, Eliz…Betty. You live next door to Dan and
Ceci
. You can tell us when they leave the house,
who
comes to it, anything suspicious you see. We’re not a vigilante group, Betty, like they are. We aren’t doing anything illegal. We don’t kill people, and we don’t blow up bridges, and we don’t threaten people like the
Nordstrums
who get
endozine
for their sick kids but are basically uneducated blue collar—”

She stops. Jack and I
are
basically uneducated blue collar. I say coldly, “I can’t help you, Sylvia.”

“I’m sorry, Betty. That wasn’t what I meant. Look, this is more important than anything that
happened
a decade and a half ago! Don’t you
understand
?” She leans toward me across the table. “The whole country’s caught in this thing. It’s already a public health crisis as big as the Spa
n
ish influenza epidemic of 1918, and it’s only just started! Drug-resistant bacteria can produce a new generation every twenty
minutes,
they can swap resistant genes not only within a species but across
different
species. The bacteria are
winning
. And people like the
Moores
are taking a
d
vantage of that to contribute further to the breakdown of even basic social decency.”

In high school Sylvia had been on the debating team. But so, in that other life, had I. “If the
Moores
’ group is trying to keep
endozine
from being used, then aren’t they
also fighting against the development of more drug-resistant bacteria? And if that’s so, aren’t they the ones, not you, who are ultimately aiding the country’s public health?”

“Through dynamiting.
And intimidation.
And murder. Betty, I know you don’t approve of those things. I wouldn’t be here telling you about our
countergroup
if I thought you did. Before I came here, we looked very carefully at you. At the kind of person you are.
Are now.
You and your husband are law-abiding people, you vote, you make a contribution to the Orphans of
AIDS
Fund, you—”

“How did you know about that? That’s supposed to be a secret contribution!”

“—you signed the petition to protect the homeless from harassment. Your husband served on the jury that co
n
victed Paul Keene of fraud, even though his real-estate scheme was so good for the economy of
Emerton
. You—”

“Stop it,” I say. “You don’t have any right to investigate me like I was some criminal!”

Only, of course, I was.
Once.
Not now. Sylvia’s right about that—Jack and I believe in law and order, but for different reasons. Jack because that’s what his father b
e
lieved in, and his grandfather. Me, because I learned in Bedford that enforced rules are the only thing that even halfway restrains the kind of predators Sylvia James never dreamed of. The kind I want kept away from my children.

Sylvia says, “We have a lot of people on our side, Betty. People who don’t want to see this town slide into the same kind of violence there is in Albany and Syracuse and, worst case, New York.”

A month ago, New York Hospital in Queens was blown up.
The whole thing, with a series of coordinated timed bombs.
Seventeen hundred people dead in less than a m
i
nute.

“It’s a varied group,” she continues.
“Some town lea
d
ers, some housewives, some teachers, nearly all the med
i
cal personnel at the hospital.
All people who care what
happens
to
Emerton
.”

“Then you’ve got the wrong person here,” I say, and it comes out harsher than I want to reveal. “I don’t care about
Emerton
.”

“You have reasons,” Sylvia says evenly. “And I’m part of your reasons, I know. But I think you’ll help us, Eliz
a
beth. I know you must be concerned about your son—we’ve all observed what a good mother you are.”