The Cure (30 page)

The man’s voice off camera said, “You’re not hiding anymore. Why is that?”

For the first time, the old woman looked directly at the camera. Sitting at the conference table, surrounded by lawyers and guards and the judge, Riley felt as if it had become just him and the old woman. He felt as if she somehow knew he would be watching this. He felt as if she spoke directly to him, as if she was a prophetess, a mentor, an oracle sent for him. She said, “Reverend Keep sold the formula to Mr. Hanks. I should have known he’d do it. In a way, I guess that’s my fault. They know each other from the reverend’s missionary days, and the story Mr. Hanks circulated about the massacre in Brazil made the whole thing out to be the Indians’ fault. Mr. Hanks told the world the Indians got drunk and attacked the team without provocation. I never came forward with the truth, so the reverend has no reason to think Mr. Hanks is anything but a good man who owns a huge drug company. Now Mr. Hanks has the cure and he’s doing what he said he would—he’s pricing it out of reach for those who need it most. And my brother’s dead. And that poor man in the shelter is dead. And I can’t hide anymore.

“I should have done the right thing seven years ago, but it seemed too hard. I was too afraid. I thought it was unfair. Why should I be the one to take the risk? But the thing about being afraid is you have to embrace it, you know? You have to just let it come, whatever makes you frightened, because it’s not the thing you’re worried about that will kill you so much as it is the worrying. Now I know I have to do this, just because it has fallen to me, and no one else. Seven years have gone by. Who knows how many people alcohol has killed in those seven years? A million? Two? All those deaths are on my hands because I was afraid, and Mr. Hanks is about to see to it that they keep on dying, just so he can make another billion off of those who can afford to pay. It has to stop.

“So I’m gonna file this lawsuit, and you say I have to use my real name. That means Mr. Hanks will know it’s me, and he’ll probably find me. If he does—if I’m killed—I want you to make sure the cure gets into the hands of
all
the people who need it, not just the rich ones. And I want the world to know what kind of man Mr. Hanks is. He murdered The People, and if I’m killed, I want everyone to know he murdered me. He’ll make it look different, he’ll lie about it, but no matter how it looks, he’s the one who killed me.” Still staring straight at the camera, the old woman said, “You’ll make sure he doesn’t get away with it, won’t you?”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-F
IVE

T
HE DECISION HAD APPARENTLY BEEN MADE
before they called him to the courthouse, the prosecuting attorney and the judge showing him the video just so he would understand why they were dropping the murder charge. It also seemed the young lawyer from Kansas had engaged in a telephone conversation with Willa—Dr. Williams—just a few hours before the coroner’s estimated time of death, and she was already in her Bangor hotel room while half a dozen witnesses had seen Riley at the hospital down in Dublin, watching over Hope. The prosecution’s theory had been that Riley slipped away from the hospital and went to some location where he had kept Willa Newdale confined after her disappearance, and then he killed her and hid her body in the Mercedes, which was out in the parking lot. Obviously if Dr. Williams had been alive and well and working with a lawyer during that time, Riley Keep was innocent of her kidnapping. And if Dr. Williams had been in a hotel bed in Bangor while the witnesses placed Riley at the hospital, he had not had time to slip away and bring her back to Dublin. Since all the evidence against Riley had been circumstantial, and this new information seemed to cast reasonable doubt on the situation, he became a so-called free man that Saturday afternoon.

Dylan offered Riley a ride to the hospital, assuming he would want to see Hope, but Riley was not ready. He did not think he could face her from a proper distance. It was time to face the facts instead. He might be reconciled with his daughter, but his wife had offered no such possibility, and he still felt the heartbreak that had driven him to flee when she awoke from her coma and asked for Dylan.

Riley knew how it would be. He had been through a difficult time, and she was a fine Christian woman. She would politely say she was glad he was out of jail
again
, and ask about his future plans, with Dylan there beside her. So Riley thanked Hope’s good friend or whatever Dylan really was to her, and he walked out of the judge’s office into the midsummer sunshine, alone.

He had a lot of thinking to get done. He strolled the streets of Dublin for hours, through the sunset and deep into the night. He reached the edge of town, the road out to Teal Pond, and turned around and walked back down the hill, slapping at mosquitoes. He passed the church at least three times—the scene of the crime, where he had chugged Communion wine in his misery, desiring gallons and gallons of it above all things, and where he had later closed his eyes to let fate choose between a thimbleful of that same wine or perhaps only grape juice.

He reached the campus on the other side of town, Bowditch, where he had hidden poorly for a year during his long fall from grace. He turned and walked back downhill again. He paused outside the empty homeless shelter and pressed his nose against the storefront glass, making out a plastic chair in the streetlight’s overflowing glow and a dead housefly on the windowsill. He thought about returning home in the back of a pickup truck with Brice, and sermons about meekness around oil-drum fires, and
Dublin
carved on rest-stop tables, and Willa with the cross around her neck, Willa knowing what he was but coming round that kitchen serving counter anyway, one old woman coming round to save him from a host of savages in the jungles of Maine. He wondered if she had thought she failed him that night. He hoped not. Not after he had seen her clear eyes staring at the camera, speaking from the grave to save him after all.

How humiliating it had been to hear her story and discover that even his penitence had been foolish. He should have followed his first instinct. He had not believed Lee Hanks’s story until the moment when he stepped into the clearing littered with their swollen corpses. He had invested too much of himself to believe The People—
his
people—would return to drunkenness, much less the savagery required to murder servants of the Lord. But then, faced with so much apparent proof, he had become a savage too. He had assumed to full burden of that evil, thinking it was only just and fair that he should following them to drunkenness, and with that false act of contrition had begun the long, slow murder of the last victim in that place, the final child of God to die: himself.

There had also been escape in his addiction, of course, but at the start he had mainly taken it upon himself as penance. If his work among The People had led to nothing but drunkenness and murder, then let him also die from drink; then at least the scales could hang in balance. The sense of justice had been a small comfort when he lay in gutters. Although he had been a failure in the eyes of others, it had let him think his failure was a humble choice. But if Willa’s story was the truth, if The People had not killed in drunken bloodlust, then contrition had never been required and he had simply wallowed in self-pity.

Riley thought he understood the problem now, where he had gone wrong. The only question left was what to do? What did you do when the utter failure of all doing was the problem? You did nothing, of course. Yet how did one do that?

He thought about going back to the jungle clearing to start over from the place where he first went wrong, but that was impossible. There was another place, however, where he could start again, and by sometime around midnight Riley had his plan. He walked to Dylan Delaney’s house, to ask that excellent man for one more service. Then at last the walking wearied him. Because the other jungle was too far to go, because he had decided on the one at hand, Riley passed into the shadows behind Henry’s Drug Store.

The next morning he awoke on the alley bricks behind the garbage bin, still dressed in his courthouse suit. He lay still, staring up at the deep purple sky as darkness fled before the inescapable advance of light. Purple turned to ultraviolet and violet to lavender. Riley watched it happen and thought about his own methodical illumination, the inescapable rising of madness in him, given so he could be cured. Lying in the alley, he saw the death of Reverend Keep, that brave missionary, that bold evangelist. In the growing light he saw that dying man very very well—his confidence, his strength, his wisdom, his need for resurrection. The corpses in a clearing still called out for him to lie down with them in the grave.

Church bells started ringing. Riley Keep rose up.

He tried to make something out of his wrinkled suit, dusting himself off, straightening his tie and tucking in his shirttail. He thought of Hope, who had seen what he had seen and yet remained right where he left her to this day. Riley thought he finally understood how she had done that, and why. She knew how to do nothing, just as all the dead must know. She had been already dead long before they ever reached that clearing. Dead and born again.

He thought of a little girl among the bodies of The People, her wrists bound by a dozen twists of yellow rope, a little girl who always seemed to be alive, and yet had put out her final cigarette and refused a fortune in favor of the way to be a Person.

He thought of an old woman hiding for exactly as long as he himself had hidden, only to stare straight at him from death and say, “You have to embrace it.”

He checked the inside pocket of his suit coat. Dylan’s paperwork was there. He was ready. He set out toward the bells.

Along the way he passed the havoc he had caused with all his good intentions. Plywood over shattered glass, filthy, hateful words painted for good reason on the bricks, piles of garbage still there after all these weeks because the citizens of Dublin had to first rebuild a place to live, had to rebuild homes burned by the homeless, homes that had survived 250 years of hurricanes and blizzards, survived everything that time and nature could throw up against them, everything except the righteous indignation of those who had been cursed by Riley’s cure.

Here and there a campaign poster had been stapled to the plywood. He saw Bill Hightower’s name. The citizens of Dublin couldn’t wait to replace Hope. Riley did not believe she could remain in her hometown, and he knew the fault for this was also his.

They glared at him as he climbed the steps and entered the sanctuary. Accepting their enmity as his due, Riley kept his head down and took a seat in the very back. He knew not everybody felt the same. Henry Reardon was a merciful man. In the courthouse hallway, after the judge had dismissed the criminal case against him, the young attorney from away had explained that the civil suit would also be dropped. It had died with Willa, because the people who by rights should own the formula—Henry Reardon and his church—had decided to let Riley keep the cure. With yet more righteous indignation, the fresh-faced young attorney had said this was a tragedy, for it meant evil men like Riley and Lee Hanks would continue to make fortunes on the backs of the poor. But hearing what Henry had done, Riley understood he had been offered something far more valuable than any formula.

Now he had come to collect.

Riley rose with the others and sang an old familiar hymn. He thought of a toothless old Indian, smiling as he told an old woman that Riley knew the secret, the way to make it last. He thought of thorns plucked prematurely. Well, Waytee, he thought. Here I am, come to make it last. Can you see me very very much from way up there?

They sat down, and Henry made announcements. Then they sang another hymn and passed the collection basket. When it came to Riley, he held the basket for a moment before dropping in a small white envelope. On the envelope was the name of the church, preprinted. Inside was a single piece of paper, which after midnight Dylan Delaney had written and Riley Keep had signed. He passed the basket on and felt the weight begin to lift. He did not worry about Henry’s reaction, or how well he would handle the responsibility of a billion-dollar cure. He thought instead about the Bible in his jail cell, and
blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
He had been taught what it meant, had received the theology of it from learned men in robes, but never understood the common sense of it till now, never understood that only those who deemed themselves too weak yet took no pride in weakness could hope to bear the awful weight of love.

Henry preached a good sermon. Riley tried to pay attention, but his mind kept wandering. He had begun to remember certain other things he had read while lying in his cell. He had begun to remember crosses to be lifted up and carried, and follow me, and follow me.

Then it was time at last. Time to make it last. They passed the silver-plated tray. He took it from his neighbor. He stared at the little plastic thimbles. Grape juice around the outside, red wine in the middle. He thought about an old woman’s tithe, which he had stolen from the house of God Almighty, and the answer to his illness in her handwriting . . .
the urge will return stronger than ever. I used to think there was a way to fix that too, but now I know there isn’t.
Riley thought of all the things that he had tried to fix. He did not want to fix things anymore. He did not want the earth anymore. He merely wanted to be meek.

Taking red wine from the middle with a steady hand, Riley raised it to his lips.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-S
IX

“H
OPE,” SAID THE NURSE
, “I
GOT BAD NEWS.
”
She had been expecting this. Ever since they let Riley go and he had not come to see her, she had been expecting something awful, as usual.

“Your husband was just admitted,” said the nurse. “I’m so sorry, but he’s in critical condition with some kinda poisonin’ or overdose.”

“Overdose?” She stared straight at the nurse, thinking, have faith, there’s a reason for this too. She would not look away. She asked, “Was he drinkin’?”

“Ya got me, sweetheart. I’m just here ta get you ta sign these forms. You’re the next a kin, right?”

“Take me to him, will you?”

“He’s in intensive care. They’re not gonna let ya see him.”

“I don’t care. Please just take me down there.”

“But there’s nothing ya can do.”

“Becky, I’m not gonna argue with you. Either get a wheelchair and help me down there, or I’ll start crawlin’.”

Ten minutes later the nurse parked her beside a window where she could look into Riley’s room. Hope saw Riley lying on a gurney with lots of wires attached to his chest. His face was strangely blue. Dylan came from somewhere to stand by her.

“He was at church,” said the good man who loved her. “I saw him come in. I looked over at him a few times. He stood up and sang the hymns like he was sober, and paid attention during the sermon, then in the middle of Communion he just fell into the aisle.”

She kept her eyes on Riley. “They didn’t find a flask on him or anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

As a doctor and a nurse worked over him, Hope saw something fall from the gurney to the floor. She put her hands on the wheelchair tires and tried to roll herself into the room. Dylan held her back.

“Let go of me,” she said.

“Ya can’t go in there while they’re workin’.”

“I have to!”

“It’s better for him if ya don’t.”

She strained at the wheels, even as the good man held the handles in the back, unmovable. “Let me go!”

“Hope, do ya wanna help him or just make things worse?”

She leaned back in the wheelchair. “See that thing that fell off the bed?”

“What?”

She pointed with her right hand. “That little plastic thing right there on the floor.”

“What about it?”

“Would you please get it for me?”

“Hope—”

“Come on, Dylan! Just go in real quick and pick it up.”

He brought it to her after that, confusion on his face. It was a tiny plastic cup, no bigger than a thimble, something both of them knew well. She took it, put it to her nose, realized what it had contained, and remembered what she’d heard about the cure, what happened if you drank again.

In the first weeks after waking from her coma, Hope had not remembered much about the months before, but the memories rose up in time—of Riley’s return, his sobriety, his extravagant gifts and self-induced poverty, his apparent acceptance of Dylan in spite of Riley’s obvious ongoing feelings for her, and those last few moments before the end of her memories, when the rocks and bricks had come and he had offered up his body as her shield. Hope’s near-death experience had put some things in perspective. She wasn’t angry anymore about the end results of Riley’s recent actions; she saw them for the sacrificial offerings that they were. But she also remembered the infuriating, unending burden Riley Keep refused to set aside, and knew his sacrifices would never be enough for him.

Hope looked from the Communion cup to the man on the gurney. She sniffed the cup again, just to be sure. She frowned. Would Riley throw sobriety away so easily? Could the guilt that so intoxicated him blur his judgment this completely? She stared through the glass at Riley, and for perhaps the ten thousandth time she begged her maker for some kind of mercy for this foolish man.

They kept Riley in the intensive care unit for hours and made Hope wait outside. They tried to send her back to her room, just as they were trying to make her abandon Dublin, but she was unmovable. She would watch the man for days from the hall if necessary, and pray for him, and wait for an explanation for the wine.

It came at last when he awoke for one brief moment. She called to the nurses and they rushed back to his bedside, eager to learn about the poison in his system. They asked him what he took, what he drank, but he did not understand the questions. They asked again and again, and finally Hope heard him moan and say, “The blood of Christ.”

With those words she knew for sure what he had done, and in the midst of whispered prayer she understood the reason, and although in her weaker moments she had sometimes dreamed of something easier, she had kept his clothing in her closet all these years in hopes of just this day.

Although Hope did her best to make Dylan go, he waited with her through the night, and when they rolled Riley down the hall to a regular room, Dylan pushed her right behind him. As they moved Riley from the gurney to a bed, Dylan stood watching over her. It was a double room. The other bed was empty. When they left, Hope said, “Please put me in that one,” and Dylan bent down and easily lifted her, gently carrying her to the empty bed. She asked him to do one more thing; she asked him to push her bed up close to Riley’s. He did that for her too.

Hope touched the good man who loved her and said, “Thank you,” then she turned away from him and reached out for her sleeping husband’s hand.