Dr. Simon nodded. His eyes were rheumy. “Such a steadfast woman. That was how I thought of her. Steadfast. She was very pretty, and a very good dancer, but she never lost sight of the fact that her first mission was to those children. A wonderful mother. Stephen was lost without her.”
“So Stephen hitchhiked. He carried Rebecca, and Grant and he hitched a ride with a logger,” Dr. Andrew continued, nodding at us. “He got Grant and Rebecca to the emergency room. Then he turned back. Rachel was crying, but she was in the proper restraints. Stephen told … his son … my nephew, Garrett, not to move her …”
“He got back and she was dead,” Simon Tabor said. “Not a mark on her anywhere. They never determined the cause of death.”
“Stephen was haunted by that. He thought he should have known. I think it was one of the reasons that he became a coroner.” Dr. Andrew shrugged, and seemed to shrink in his dark coat. He said, “Allie. Stephen. My brother …”
I nodded, moved aside as old Simon Tabor pulled away from Andrew and began to march toward their car. For some reason, the night felt colder. The wind was finally bucking up. Simon walked straight and did not flinch from the gusts, his level shoulders a testament to a life of mental puzzling and physical exertion. Then, as if to himself, the old man said, “She wouldn’t have lived very long, in any case. Those children didn’t have a chance back then, not even as much as these young ladies here.”
Dr. Andrew said, “Who do you mean, Pop?”
“You know, the kids we treat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Xeroderma Pigmentosum, Andrew. Stephen’s girl had XP. Rachel. The only one of the four who did.”
“Little Rachel. Stephen’s younger daughter. You’re saying she had XP.” You see people do this in movies, but Dr. Andrew literally took a step back and seemed to stagger in his sensible, waffle-soled, black dress boots. He whispered, “What are you saying?”
“Andrew, this was why I changed my research focus from cystic fibrosis. I had grown up with a boy, our next-door neighbor in Chicago, a truly brave lad. On spring nights, I would hear him coughing, his parents percussing his back. That horrible, wet sound. Danny … Danny Angstrom. That’s right. The parents had three healthy children, just the way that Stephen and Merry did. Then came Danny. Just like this little girl …”
“Rachel was a normal, healthy baby, Pop. I watched her grow. After they came up here, I saw her all the time.”
“You were in London. You saw her a few times.”
“Right, yes. Of course.”
“Stephen knew, of course.
“But Father, you told us that the reason that you changed your focus to XP was the complexities of the disease and its genetic variation …”
“Well that goes without saying, that it was compelling,” Dr. Simon Tabor said, seeming to lose interest. Touching the brim of his wool hat to us, he motioned to Andrew to open the car doors. Andrew pressed the button and the Mercedes’ big lights blinked. The horn gave a muted bleat.
But Dr. Andrew didn’t move.
“Pop!” Dr. Andrew cried. “My son has two children! My own three children were never tested for XP. They would have needed to be tested when they were children. And my grandchildren could have been tested before birth.”
The old man muttered, “Your children are fine. So are your grandsons. Those boys are just fine.”
“They should have had testing in the first trimester. What were you thinking? If this is true … then, for three generations, you orphaned me from my own family’s genetic destiny. Pop! Listen to me!” Quieter, Dr. Andrew said, “You didn’t care, did you? It would have been … compelling. You’re like him.”
We didn’t have to ask whom he meant.
The old man opened the passenger door of the silver Mercedes. He muttered something Juliet and I could barely hear—something about a family’s privacy and his concern being for Stephen’s family and their grief. He closed the door with a sharp clap. Dr. Andrew stood there with us. He clutched the sides of his head. I almost reached out for him. Juliet held on. Her wrist was half the width of mine, and her grip was like her chains, nothing I could have broken, with all my strength.
“All this with Garrett, and now … I’m afraid I don’t know what my father is talking about. I almost hope that he’s experiencing dementia. You don’t understand what this would mean.”
“Oh, we do,” Juliet said. “We really do.”
“My children, and their children …”
“They could have been us.”
“Yes, but it’s not as though … when you put it that way, it sounds terrible,” Dr. Andrew said. “No one would choose for a child to have XP.”
“Juliet, he’s right,” I said, desperately sorry for this man, deluded in the safety of his own empire, tricked by close-up magic.
“I’m sorry, of course. But still, welcome to our world, Dr. Andrew,” said Juliet. “Family secrets are a bad business. In your family, bad secrets are tradition.”
In the muted light from the electric torches, Dr. Andrew’s eyes were wide and limpid as a deer’s. We knew that the Bergeys, father and sons, were close by. We knew that when the real work of burial could begin, they would steal in, like ghosts, and set up some big industrial lights. Many times, the real grave was filled at night, out of the sight of people who could not bear the sight. But the Bergeys were trained, as all people in this business are trained, in patience. There were a few businesses like funeral homes.
Bakeries. Fishing.
If no one in the family did it before you, why would anyone ever choose to do it?
Medicine was sometimes this way, too, a legacy of pain and achievement. Dr. Andrew said, “Please. Forgive me, Juliet. I didn’t know.”
“We forgive you,” Juliet said. Her grip on my arm loosened—now a touch, tender, like a link. “You’re of them but not like them. You’re a good person, Dr. Andrew.” The terrible knowledge of what might have happened on that lonely road on a Christmas Eve twenty years ago, of who might have been Garrett Tabor’s first and tiniest victim swung between Dr. Andrew and us, like a dark pendulum. “It’s time to go now, Allie.”
I said, “I know.”
As we started down the hill, I glanced back at the star-covered blanket over Rob’s casket, and I saw that Dr. Andrew had continued to walk away from us, up high, to the hilltop, where he stood silhouetted against the bright night. We couldn’t see his face. But his hands were lifted, as though he were reaching for something.
Juliet and I made our way, sticking close together, careful not to slip in the places before the snow gave way to the hardpack road. Suddenly, she said, “I’m going to go to college, too, Bear. I want to be like Bonnie. I want to be FBI.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Let’s pretend it is, until we know it isn’t,” Juliet said. “None of this was possible.”
I was ravenous, my hunger as rude and demanding as life itself, but I did not want to go to the Timbers. Juliet and I would ride through the night, and find our own place.
Behind us was the past. We would always belong to it. It was beloved, intransigent, impenetrable, coils of darkness and rings of light. The past was closer to us than what lay ahead. Still, we had to leave it. We had to look away.
Just then, a banner of fireworks shot out above the ridge at Torch Mountain, fragmenting wheels and fonts of blue and red and gold. What was it? Not New Year’s Eve. Perhaps a wedding. Yes. Fireworks often accompanied a winter wedding. I touched the ring on my hand.
Then Juliet and I held hands and began to run, as if to try to catch up, our faces polished by the distant sliver of light. I was eighteen. It was a new year.
And technically, it was already morning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction, and while I did my best, all the errors in it are entirely mine. Thanks are due to Bonnie Sommers-Olsen, medical counselor and friend, to Dr. Gay, expert in everything, to authors Mitchell
Wieland and Wiley Cash, and especially Richard Adams Carey, who taught me more than I knew that I didn’t know. Gratitude is owed to The Corporation of Yaddo, where I wrote the final pages of this book in the fall of 2012. Thanks to Karen Cooper, founder and publisher of Merit Press, for her support of my need to try to be a great writing editor. Thanks to my colleague Meredith O’Hayre for her patience with my many ineptitudes and Monday-morning humor. Great gratitude goes also to Soho’s Daniel Ehrenhaft, for believing in this strange and out-of-character story, to Jane Gelfman, for twenty-seven years agent and best friend, to Pamela, to Jean, to Gemma, to Carol, to Ann, to Bobby, my bro, to Tom, Kathy, Greg, Susan, and Lisa, who occupy the permanent suite in my heart, and to those who own the land—Rob, Dan, Martin, Francie, Merit, Mia, Will, Marta, and Atticus.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, What We Lost in the Dark
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