“Good thing,” Ceci says, and for a moment she studies her fingernails, very casual. “They say Dr. Bennett prescribed endozine again last week. For the youngest Nordstrum boy. Without sending him to the hospital.”
I don’t answer. The back of Sean’s t-shirt says don’t be a dick. Irritated by my silence, Ceci says, “I don’t see how you can let your son wear that obscene clothing!”
“It’s his choice. Besides, Ceci, it’s a health message. About not drinking and driving. Aren’t you the one that thinks strong health messages are a good thing?”
Our eyes lock. The silence lengthens. Finally Ceci says, “Well, haven’t we gotten serious all of a sudden.”
I say, “Murder is serious.”
“Yes. I’m sure the cops will catch whoever did it. Probably one of those scum that hang around the Rainbow Bar.”
“Dr. Bennett wasn’t the type to hang around with scum.”
“Oh, I don’t mean he knew them. Some lowlife probably killed him for his wallet.” She looks straight into my eyes. “I can’t think of any other motive. Can you?”
I look east, toward the river. On the other side, just visible over the tops of houses on its little hill, rise the three stories of Emerton Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital. The bridge over the river was blown up three weeks ago. No injuries, no suspects. Now anybody who wants to go to the hospital has to drive ten miles up West River Road and cross at the Interstate. Jack told me that the Department of Transportation says two years to get a new bridge built.
I say, “Dr. Bennett was a good doctor. And a good man.”
“Well, did anybody say he wasn’t? Really, Betty, you should use your dryer and save yourself all that bending and stooping. Bad for the back. We’re not getting any younger. Ta-ta.” She waves her right hand, just a waggle of fingers, and walks off. Her nails, I notice, are painted the delicate fragile pinky-white of freshly unscabbed skin.
“You have no proof,” Jack says “Just some wild suspicions.” He has his stubborn face on. He sits with his Michelob at the kitchen table, dog-tired from his factory shift plus three hours overtime, and he doesn’t want to hear this. I don’t blame him. I don’t want to be saying it. In the living room Jackie plays Nintendo frantically, trying to cram in as many electronic explosions as she can before her father claims the TV for Monday Night Football. Sean has already gone out with his friends, before his stepfather got home.
I sit down across from Jack, a fresh mug of coffee cradled between my palms. For warmth. “I know I don’t have any proof, Jack. I’m not some detective.”
“So let the cops handle it. It’s their business, not ours. You stay out of it.”
“I am out of it. You know that.” Jack nods. We don’t mix with cops, don’t serve on any town committees, don’t even listen to the news much. We don’t get involved with what doesn’t concern us. Jack never did. I add, “I’m just telling you what I think. I can do that, can’t I?” and hear my voice stuck someplace between pleading and anger.
Jack hears it, too. He scowls, stands with his beer, puts his hand gently on my shoulder. “Sure, Bets. You can say whatever you want to me. But nobody else, you hear? I don’t want no trouble, especially to you and the kids. This ain’t our problem. Just be grateful we’re all healthy, knock on wood.”
He smiles and goes into the living room. Jackie switches off the Nintendo without being yelled at; she’s good that way. I look out the kitchen window, but it’s too dark to see anything but my own reflection, and anyway the window faces north, not east.
I haven’t crossed the river since Jackie was born at Emerton Memorial, seven years ago. And then I was in the hospital less than twenty-four hours before I made Jack take me home. Not because of the infections, of course—that hadn’t all started yet. But it has now, and what if next time instead of the youngest Nordstrum boy, it’s Jackie who needs endozine? Or Sean?
Once you’ve been to Emerton Memorial, nobody but your family will go near you. And sometimes not even them. When Mrs. Weimer came home from surgery, her daughter-in-law put her in that back upstairs room and left her food on disposable trays in the doorway and put in a chemical toilet. Didn’t even help the old lady crawl out of bed to use it. For a whole month it went on like that—surgical masks, gloves, paper gowns— until Rosie Weimer was positive Mrs. Weimer hadn’t picked up any mutated drug-resistant bacteria in Emerton Memorial. And Hal Weimer didn’t say a word against his wife.
“People are scared, but they’ll do the right thing,” Jack said, the only other time I tried to talk to him about it. Jack isn’t much for talking. And so I don’t. I owe him that.
But in the city—in all the cities—they’re not just scared. They’re terrified. Even without listening to the news I hear about the riots and the special government police and half the population sick with the new germs that only endozine cures— sometimes. I don’t see how they’re going to have much energy for one murdered small-town doctor. And I don’t share Jack’s conviction that people in Emerton will automatically do the right thing. I remember all too well that sometimes they don’t. How come Jack doesn’t remember, too?
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 father’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 another’ ? 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 sportscar 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 any more. 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 sister, 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 Sylvia-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 Sylvia-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 reason 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’d 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 Memorial 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 Spanish 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 advantage 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 convicted 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 believed 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 pe
ople dead in less than a minute.
“It’s a varied group,” she continues. “Some town leaders, some housewives, some teachers, nearly all the medical 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, Elizabeth. I know you must be concerned about your son—we’ve all observed what a good mother you are.”
So she brought up Sean’s name first. I say, “You’re wrong again, Sylvia. I don’t need you to protect Sean, and if you’ve let him get involved in helping you, you’ll wish you’d never been born. I’ve worked damn hard to make sure that what happened seventeen years ago never touches him. He doesn’t need to get mixed up in any way with your ‘medical personnel at the hospital.’ And Sean sure the hell doesn’t owe this town anything, there wasn’t even anybody who would take him in after my aunt died, he had to go to—”
The look on her face stops me. Pure surprise. And then something else.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Is it possible you don’t know? Hasn’t Sean told you?”
“Told me what?” I stand up, and I’m seventeen years old again, and just that scared. Sylvia-and-Elizabeth.
“Your son isn’t helping our side. He’s working for Dan Moore and Mike Dryer. They use juveniles because if they’re caught, they won’t be tried as severely as adults. We think Sean was one of the kids they used to blow up the bridge over the river.”
I look first at the high school. Sean isn’t there; he hadn’t even shown up for homeroom. No one’s home at his friend Tom’s house, or at Keith’s. He isn’t at the Billiard Ball or the Emerton Diner or the American Bowl. After that, I run out of places to search.
This doesn’t happen in places like Emerton. We have fights at basketball games and grand theft auto and smashed store windows on Halloween and sometimes a drunken tragic car crash on prom night. But not secret terrorists, not counterterrorist vigilante groups. Not in Emerton.