Heat and Light (30 page)

Which was true enough: their first (and last) monthly bill had given him chest pains.

“Do you know what that was costing us?”

A different kind of wife would feel a responsibility to help. A different kind of wife would get off her ass and get a job, something Shelby will never do.

“Well, what am I supposed to do? I can't do the laundry without getting a headache.”

“You use it for
laundry
?”

“Just the kids' clothes,” says Shelby.

For weeks, now, he's made phone calls. There is no one left to call.

P
astor Jess's car is in the driveway, as always; and yet the house looks deserted, the windows dark. Shelby rings the doorbell and waits. Later she won't recall making a decision. She will remember only that the doorknob turned easily in her hand.

“Hello?” she calls.

The house is quiet inside, but the stillness seems phony—as though party guests are hiding in the closets, ready to jump out and yell
surprise.

“Hello?”

She climbs the little staircase to the living room and promptly sneezes. She understands, then, that the place is empty. She can tell from the sound of her sneeze, shockingly loud in the silent house.

Shelby has never been alone in this house, and yet the feeling is familiar, from dreams. In the dreams she is herself, but younger—a girl, always. She lives here with a mother who is definitely not Roxanne and a father who is and isn't Pastor Wes.

She does not, in general, like the smell of other people's houses.

In her dreams Crystal is always alive.

The living room is sun filled and homey, plants hanging at the windows, colorful pillows strewn across the couch. The plants look green and healthy, and yet there is a gravity to the empty room, as though something terrible has happened here. On the coffee table is an empty mug, a string hanging over the rim. Somewhere
a clock is ticking. Shelby thinks of the Israelites fleeing the Angel of Death, skipping town right in the middle of supper, and sneezes again.

Compared with her own house, the living room seems complicated, layered with artifacts. She studies the framed photographs on the wall. Pastor Wes and Pastor Jess on a roller coaster. On horseback. In college sweatshirts. In wedding clothes. Pastor Wes looks out from each photo in mute comprehension, as though he sees Shelby moving through his former house and is glad she's come.

She moves aside the pillows and stretches out on the sofa.

If she lived in this house, she would instantly become a different type of person, an effect she has experienced before. In the farmhouse she felt paralyzed by other people's tastes and opinions, the sturdy ghosts who'd picked the curtains and laid the carpet and hung the clock on the wall. In the farmhouse any sort of change was inconceivable. She'd been unable even to move a chair.

Three sneezes in a row: a wish, a kiss, a disappointment. She blames it on the books piled everywhere. Even if you dusted every week, books were impossible to keep clean.

A brand-new house had seemed, at first, a rare opportunity. For months, a year, she studied furniture catalogs, the Home Shopping Network, trying to think a home into being. The task was more difficult than she'd imagined. The new house was like a blank sheet of paper, waiting for her to write on it. In the end she had nothing to say.

She wanders through the dining room, the kitchen. The bathroom smells of shampoo, a recent shower. A book,
A Prairie Home Companion,
sits on the back of the toilet. Shelby opens the medicine chest and studies the bottles on the shelves, Midol and contact lens cleaner and Clairol Natural Effects, which according to its label covers gray instantly.

She is more than surprised, she feels somehow deceived, that Pastor Jess dyes her hair.

A wish, a kiss, a disappointment. They said it as children, she and Crystal, when either of them sneezed. What exactly did it mean?

When Crystal was sick, and again in the weeks before Braden's surgery, the entire congregation had prayed for Shelby. Each Sunday morning she felt lifted up in their arms, a kind of sacred crowd-surfing. At the social hour she no longer stood alone, awkward and tongue-tied. Women approached her and asked solicitous questions. She was kissed and hugged, praised and blessed.

A wish, a kiss, a disappointment.

She peeks into the bedroom. The bed is unmade. More books are piled on the nightstand. Bits of discarded clothing—a sock, pink underpants—dot the floor like bird droppings.

At Crystal's funeral the praising and blessing reached a glorious crescendo. It was in many ways the best day of Shelby's life. Not because she wished her sister dead. (She didn't.) Because it was finally her turn.

She has never told anyone this.

In the kitchen she studies the contents of the refrigerator, bottles of skim milk, diet cola, salad dressing, and wine. She stands there a long time with the door open, something she is always scolding Braden for doing.

If she lived in this house, she would become the type of person who read books while sitting on the toilet.

In the distance a car door slams.

Shelby is startled but not afraid. Voices outside, chatting, laughter. She takes a seat at the dining room table just as the front door opens, and thinks,
surprise.

Pastor Jess looks shocked to see her, her hand actually fluttering to her heart. “Shelby! Goodness, you scared me. What are you doing here?” She wears sunglasses and a flowered sundress, her arms bare. Behind her is a short man Shelby doesn't know.

Shelby waits.

Finally the realization dawns. “Did we have an appointment? Oh, no! Shelby, I'm so sorry. It completely slipped my mind.”

Still Shelby waits.

“It's my fault,” says the man, his hand at the pastor's back. “I'm the one that stole her away.”

Shelby thinks,
Who are you?

“This is my friend Marshall,” says Pastor Jess, as though she hears the question. “This is Shelby Devlin, from the church.”

“Devlin,” the man says. “You live out Number Nine Road? That's my crew that's drilling your well.”

That contaminated your water, Shelby thinks. That poisoned your daughter. Pastor Jess is consorting with the enemy, the worst kind of treason.

Another silence.

Marshall looks adoringly at Pastor Jess—who is, frankly, not even all that pretty. He gives her shoulder a squeeze. “I should go. I have an early morning tomorrow.”

No one has ever looked at Shelby that way.

“No, wait.” Pastor Jess lays a hand on his arm. “Shelby, let's reschedule for another night—tomorrow, maybe?”

The request is stunning. Shelby has explained a dozen times that Thursday is Rich's day off, the only day she can possibly come. Now, with Rich on day shift, she could theoretically come tomorrow, but she isn't about to make it easier for Pastor Jess. It's the principle of the thing.

“I can't,” she says firmly.

“Oh. Okay.” Pastor Jess glances at her watch. “It's getting late. Let's just plan on next Thursday. I won't forget, I promise.” She offers a conciliatory smile. Shelby would like to slap her.

“Okay,” Shelby says.

Again Pastor Jess touches Marshall's arm. (So much touching!) “You wait here. I'll walk Shelby to her car.”

Shelby follows the pastor down the stairs and out the front door,
ignoring Marshall completely. In addition to being short, he has a small stain, ketchup maybe, on the front of his shirt. His very ordinariness offends her.

Envy and jealousy are not the same thing.

Pastor Jess closes the door behind them. “Shelby, I have to say, I wasn't expecting to find you sitting at my kitchen table.”

Envy is coveting what a person has. Jealousy is wanting to be chosen over someone else.

“The door was unlocked,” says Shelby. “I was worried.”

“Why?” Pastor Jess looks confused, as though she truly doesn't remember (maybe she doesn't) that it was Shelby who found Pastor Wes, alone in the house, on the day he died; Shelby who called 911 and rode with him in the ambulance, holding his hand. How could you forget a thing like that?

Shelby stares at her mutely. There is so much she wants to say. She thinks of Marshall waiting inside for Pastor Jess. She is envious of them both, jealous of them both.

She wonders if he knows the pastor dyes her hair.

“I'm sorry about tonight. I truly am. We can talk about it next week,” says Pastor Jess. “I'll see you in church on Sunday, Shelby. Drive safely.”

Shelby gets into the minivan and closes the door.

M
ack is leaning over the kitchen sink, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, her forearms pink from scrubbing. She looks startled when Rena comes downstairs in her uniform.

“It's Friday,” says Mack.

“That's the rumor.”

“You never work Friday.”

“It's just until Steph comes back. I couldn't say no, considering I'm off all next week.”

“You are?” Mack looks genuinely surprised, as though this is new information. As though Rena's work schedule isn't hanging in plain sight, stuck to the refrigerator with an udder-shaped magnet.

“I said I'd drive Shelby and Olivia to Pittsburgh. And”—casually, as though it's just occurred to her—“there's that rally in New York.”

“With Dr. Trexler?”

“Yes,” Rena says.

There is a silence.

“He wants me to learn about the process. To see how it works.” She isn't asking permission, exactly. She is simply explaining herself.

“Why?”

There's more, much more, Mack could say. In her eyes Dr. Trexler is no better than a politician, a TV preacher, the Jehovah's Witnesses who periodically come calling.

“Your meeting at the library, that's different,” she says slowly.
“We live here. Our farm is here. But if people in New York want to lease their mineral rights, what does that have to do with Dr. Trexler? He doesn't even live there.” For Mack it is quite a speech.

Rena thinks, He lives in the
world.
He cares about the
world.

Mack thinks, Don't leave me.

“Is his wife going with you?”

Rena feels a sudden dread, as though she's been caught in some misdeed. Naturally she said that Lorne was married. It's the sort of white lie she tells reflexively, to manage Mack's anxieties. At one time these deceptions seemed harmless. Now she isn't so sure. When Calvin was small, he won a carnival goldfish in a tiny bowl. When they replaced the bowl with a larger one, the fish grew to fill it. Mack's jealousy has grown to the size of a sturgeon, because Rena has made room for it.

Rena says, “I'm not sure.”

Her instinct, always, is to avoid strife. Conflict paralyzes her, the barest whiff of anger or discord. She will lie outrageously, if necessary, to make other people comfortable. It's a quality she deplores in herself, an impulse Mack would never understand—Mack who was born brave, a hero in her heart.

“We haven't worked out the details yet.”

Mack eyes her with suspicion, or maybe Rena is imagining it. Being questioned alarms her: sick in her stomach, her ears pounding. Panic chokes her like a hand around her throat. Mack has no idea, of course. How could she? There's so much Rena has never told her.

(I am a filthy little whore.)

Mack looks around for a towel and, finding none, dries her hands on her dirty overalls. “But you already told him you're going.” It isn't a question.

“Yes,” Rena says.

SHE IS LATE FOR HER SHIFT,
something that never used to happen. Time has become slippery. Distracted by daydreams, she loses min
utes or hours. She moves through the day in a fog, a delicious slow heaviness she remembers from long ago, a time in her life that now seems imaginary: the wild improbability of Mack in her bed, Mack who was a girl and a boy at the same time, every lover she could possibly want.

Young Rena had been electrified by her own audacity. Making love to Mack was the bravest thing she'd ever done—the only one, really. At the time it seemed a revolutionary act. Only later did she understand that Mack was not so different from the gruff coal miners she'd known all her life, stubborn silent men their wives complained about or made excuses for but basically accepted, because that was how men
were.
Men were nothing like the heroes in romance novels, the grubby paperbacks her mother bought by the dozen at rummage sales and read compulsively—with the covers torn off, as though anybody was fooled.

(Her mother, who considered Freddy Weems quite a catch. Who seemed not to notice that Rena had grown clumsy—falling down stairs, walking into doors.)

Teenage Rena read the same books, not understanding, yet, that the Lances and Brads were female creations. They bore no resemblance to actual men—who were, more or less, like Mack.

She had never met, or even imagined, a man like Lorne.

She parks in the staff lot and waves to Jo, the charge nurse, who sits on the steps near the loading dock, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper.

“You made the
Herald,
” Jo calls.

Rena approaches, shading her eyes. She has never spent any time on the steps, which the nurses call
the smoking lounge.
Ten feet away, a delivery truck idles loudly; a cafeteria worker tosses trash into a giant Dumpster. An air duct blows a hot breeze, kitchen noise, a smell of dishwashing. It's hard to imagine a more unpleasant place to sit.

Jo reads: “‘Rena Koval, a local dairy farmer and a nurse at Miners' Hospital, called the meeting to order.'”

The Dumpster lid closes with a metallic thud.

“Look, I know you don't agree with what we're doing,” says Rena, “but we're meeting again next month. Maybe you should come check it out before you make up your mind.”

“Why?” Jo looks mystified. “What's that going to do for me? I don't have a gas lease.”

“You're part of this community. The entire community is affected.” It's what Lorne is always saying, though the words sound less convincing coming out of her own mouth.

“Anyways,” she says lamely, “you're welcome to come.”

She circles around to the front entrance and crosses the lobby to Medical A, where a nurse named Agnes Lubicki mans the desk. She is older than Rena, a plain, sturdy woman with a heavy brow and no time for chitchat. Rena has never met a less charming person, or a more capable nurse.

A call light rings.

“Uh-oh. It's Chicken Little,” Agnes says with a rare smile.

Even Agnes is in on the joke.

“Wait,
what
? Shelby Devlin is here?”

“The daughter was admitted last night. Chicken Little brought her in to the ER. Dr. Stusick discharged her this morning. I don't know why they're still here.”

Rena hurries down the corridor toward the children's end. She finds Olivia sitting up in bed, wearing a pink quilted bed jacket over a frilly nightgown. Her hair, still damp, shows comb marks. Shelby sits beside the bed, reading
Prevention
magazine.

“Rena! I thought you worked in the Emergency Room.”

“I work everywhere. Shelby, what happened?” Rena takes Olivia's chart from the foot of the bed. “How are you feeling, sweetie? Don't you look pretty.”

“I ate all my breakfast,” Olivia says.

“Good girl. I hear you're going home today.”

“No, we're not,” says Shelby, a weird tremor in her voice. “We're going to stay here until somebody helps us.”

Rena replaces the chart. “I'm going to step out in the hallway and talk to your mom for a minute. She'll be right back.”

Shelby follows her out of the room. “Dr. Stusick came to see her early this morning.
Very
early. I wasn't here yet. I think he's avoiding me.”

“I'm sure that's not true,” says Rena, who is not at all sure.

“But I didn't even get a chance to
talk
to him! How can he send her home if we still don't know what's wrong?”

“Look, I understand your frustration. But she's holding down her breakfast. We can't keep her here if her symptoms have resolved.”

“But I told Dr. Stusick about the water. I
told
him! I made a copy of the test results and everything. Methane migration. It says so in black and white. He still didn't believe me.”

“He said that?”

“Not in so many words, but I could tell. Maybe we could talk to him together. He'll listen to you.”

“He usually comes by in the afternoon.” Rena glances at the clock. “Technically Olivia has already been discharged, but if you can sit tight a while longer, I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you. He's a good doctor, Shelby. I trust his judgment.”

“Well,
I
don't.” Shelby's face is very red. “What does he know? He's never spent more than two minutes with Olivia. I'm her mother. I can tell she isn't all right.”

BACK AT THE NURSES' STATION,
Agnes is eating a salad. Jo flips through a supermarket tabloid, stopping to study a photo spread:
STARS WITHOUT MAKEUP.

“Can I help you?” Rena asks the old man approaching the desk.

“I'm looking for a patient,” he says, and gives a name. “I understand he was brought in a few days ago.”

“He's on Medical B. This is Medical A.” The hospital is all on one floor, its five wings—the ER, the ICU, Surgical, and two Medical—connected by a central hub. “I can take you there.”

She leads the man down the corridor. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”

“It's possible. I'm up here all the time.” He hands her a business card from a silver case.
P
AUL
Z
ACHARIAS,
A
TTORNEY-AT-
L
AW
.
“You must see quite a few worker accidents in the Emergency Room. Falls, that kind of thing.” He takes more cards from the case. “The next time it happens, maybe you could pass these along.”

“We're not allowed to do that,” Rena says.

At the dinner break she takes her cell phone out to the lobby. She listens to a message from Mack, about a livestock sale in Somerset County. Then she calls Lorne Trexler. The call goes straight to voice mail.
Hey, it's Lorne. You know what to do.
Despite having heard this greeting more times than she can count, she thrills at the sound of his voice.

“I'm at the hospital,” she tells his voice mail. “Olivia was admitted last night. She seems fine now, but I'll know more after I talk to the doctor. Call me tonight?”

Tonight. With Mack at the livestock sale, they can spend the entire evening on the phone, something Rena wouldn't normally do. Normally she'd make room for Mack's jealousy.

Back on Medical A, she finds Shelby Devlin lurking near the nurses' station.

“Rena! I've been looking everywhere for you. Dr. Stusick still hasn't come, and I have to go pick up my son.”

“Easy,” says Rena. “Take a deep breath. I have your cell phone number. I'll call you the minute he comes.”

“I already told her that,” says Jo. “But she insisted on talking to you.”

Shelby grasps Rena's arm. “My pastor is coming to see Olivia.
She'll be here any minute. Can you tell her to wait for me? Please just tell her I'll be
right back.
”

“Good Lord,” says Agnes, watching her go. “Someone give her a Valium.”

“She's a little high-strung.” Rena recalls, vividly, the time two-year-old Calvin caught bronchitis, his spiking fever, her own panic. There's no misery in the world like having a sick kid—an anguish Jo and Agnes, both childless, simply don't understand.

“That old guy in the suit,” says Jo. “He's been here before.”

“You didn't recognize him? From TV?” says Rena. “You know:
For forty years I've stood up for the little guy.
That billboard on Drake Highway.”

“Great. Lawyers.” Jo looks truly angry. “Are you happy now?”

“That's not the point. The point is,
someone
needs to—” She feels a hand on her shoulder.

“Rena,” says Dr. Stusick. “Can I borrow you for a minute?”

He leads her into an exam room, closing the door behind them.

“You just missed Shelby Devlin,” she tells him. “She's very anxious to speak with you.”

“What else is new? She calls my office every day with some new theory or other. Now it's the drinking water.” He pauses significantly. “Of course, you know this already.”

Instantly Rena's face goes hot.

“I understand you told her the water was making Olivia sick.”

“I didn't say
that,
exactly.” Rena's scalp is sweating, her chest, her lower back. “But, well, they
are
living on top of a gas well. Have you driven out Number Nine lately? You can see it from the road. It's maybe two hundred feet from the house.”

Dr. Stusick doesn't respond.

“Their water has been tested by two different labs. Did Shelby tell you that? They both found high concentrations of methane.”

Still no response.

“I know she's a little—emotional,” says Rena. “But the Devlins aren't the only ones having problems. Her neighbor down the hill had his well tested, and it's the same story. Methane migration. Two weeks after they started drilling, both of those wells went bad.”

She notices, then, the tiny red marks on her left arm. Faint scratches, crescent shaped, left by Shelby's fingernails.

“Look, I don't know anything about gas drilling,” says Dr. Stusick. “I have no opinion one way or the other. But when it comes to effects on human health, there isn't a lot of data.”

“Okay, but
something
is making her sick. Isn't it at least
possible
the water has something to do with it?”

“Anything's possible, but there's nothing in the literature. If there's any connection between methane in the water supply and acute pediatric gastritis, nobody has written a paper on it.”

Rena, who has done the same literature search, knows that this is true.

“Rena, you're a fine nurse. What you do on your own time is your business. But when it starts to affect patient care, we have a problem.” He glances at his watch. “I should go. I have rounds to finish. But I want you to be careful with Mrs. Devlin. She isn't a rational woman.”