The 100 Year Miracle (20 page)

He made a noise that didn’t mean anything to her.

“Can you do that?” she asked, still in her deep bend like a frog about to make a leap.

“Just do it,” Harry said.

“Yes, your highness,” Tilda said and heaved.

She got him up and standing on his own two feet, even if half his weight was on the railing. She thought about leaving him there and going to fetch his cane, but he didn’t seem like he was in much shape to go down a flight on his feet. What he needed was one of those motorized chairs that go up and down along a track. Tilda promised herself that she’d look into that, but he was in no mood to discuss it then.

“All right,” she said, moving around to his right side. “You’re going to put half your weight on me. We’ll try to go down that way.”

“I can’t move my right leg much just now,” Harry said.

“Is it all right to drag it?” she asked.

“Unless you plan on cutting it off, I don’t see a way around it.”

“Okay then. On the count of three.”

22.

Harry had lost thirty pounds or more since he had gotten sick, but a grown man who had lost thirty pounds was still a grown man. It had taken everything Tilda had to keep them both upright going down the stairs. They had taken a lot of breaks, and there was one point when she was afraid she was going to lose her balance and send them both ass over tea kettle. But there they were.

She’d gotten Harry down to the second floor. He needed to use the bathroom, but he had yet to install any grab bars, which was something else Tilda added to her to-do list. His pride allowed only so much, so Tilda left him there, holding on to the countertop while she went to fetch his cane. It took him a while, but he managed to get himself over to the toilet, down, and back up again. Or at least he told her he did. She stood outside in the hallway on the other side of the shut door.

He let her help him into bed and to remove his khaki pants and cardigan sweater, shoes, and socks. He kept his boxers and his T-shirt on. His right foot was turned in, and his calf and thigh muscle on that side were already shrinking from disuse. His skin, unable to cope with the rapid change and too old to be very elastic anyway, hung a bit around his ruined parts. His bicep, too, was nearly gone, not any bigger than his forearm. His right hand was like his right foot, no longer in the shape it should have been.

Tilda thought she’d want to turn away from these things, that it would be painful to see her former husband like that—ruined, disabled, deformed. But it didn’t bother her, at least not in that way. Seeing the wounds on his body rather than just hearing about the causes of them in his nervous system made Harry seem vulnerable to her. You didn’t blame a wounded bird for pecking at you when you tried to help it.

Tilda covered him with a blanket and turned out the light. In the corner of his room was a wooden chair. It had one of those seat cushions that tie with little bows in back, which was not the sort of thing she would like, but just then she was grateful for it. Her body had been through enough that night. A little cushion was what she needed.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” he asked.

It was dark enough that Tilda couldn’t really see him, only the lumpy black outline of him and the bed, just slightly darker than everything around it. He did not want her to call Dr. Woo, and she had not. But she wasn’t at all confident in that decision. She needed to see how things would go, at least for a little while, before she could close her eyes. Heaven forbid something worse than a fall happened while she was asleep.

“I will in a little bit,” she said. “I’m just going to sit here and rest for a while.”

“I’m fine,” Harry said.

“I know you are.”

Shooby took up his position by the bed, head on paws. He wasn’t sleeping either.

*   *   *

Rachel stood up from the plastic folding chair. She had been sitting in the same position for so long, preserving and cataloguing what the others brought in, it felt like her joints had begun to rust into position. The worst of the side effects had passed. Time felt like time again. Nothing changed shape or size or seemed more scary than before. She checked her watch. She had added the information to her secret notebook earlier, and there had been nothing but improvement since. It was something to feel good about.

Rachel threw another empty can into the waste bag. She was three diet sodas into her night, and it was time to make the trek up the beach and up the hill to the porta-potties by the road. It was enough of a deterrent that she had put it off until it could not be put off any longer, and when she finally made the dash, she made it at speed.

She could not have been gone long, she told herself, not more than five minutes. But when she came back, Hooper had returned from checking the offshore instruments. He was standing in the tent next to the chair she had occupied for two hours, and he was flipping through a notebook.

He was flipping through her notebook.

She did not stop. In fact, when she saw what she saw, she picked up speed and was still moving forward when she got to Hooper and pulled the notebook out of his hands. She kept right on going before slamming hard into the folding table with the computers and microscopes and nearly sending the whole thing toppling over in the sand.

“What has gotten into you?” Hooper demanded.

Rachel kept a steadying hand on the rickety table longer than was necessary. “That’s my notebook. My personal notebook.”

“It was just here,” Hooper said.

Rachel had left her backpack by her chair when she had gone to the bathroom. She had forgotten it in the rush to relieve the pressure in her bladder, but she did not think she had taken the notebook out. In fact, the backpack had been zipped. She pressed her memory, and her memory agreed with her. It had been zipped. He had opened her things and taken the notebook out.

“What are we looking at?”

John seemed to come out of nowhere, but nowhere was only the darkness beyond the light of the tent. The bare bulbs powered by the growling generator—was it getting louder?—were so bright that they made everything beyond them vanish.

“Nothing,” Rachel said.

“Dr. Bell is very protective of her work,” Hooper said.

“We’re all protective of our work,” Rachel replied.

Hooper inclined his head in a way that meant nothing but seemed like a response. “I think you should try to get some more rest.”

“Maybe I should,” Rachel said. “Right now I have more classifications.”

23.

Day Four of the Miracle

Tilda had fallen asleep in the chair. She snored. She had always snored but had been in deep denial of it since they’d been married. She’d slept there with Harry listening until three o’clock when she startled herself awake. Whether it was because of a dream or one of those jerks that come when your unconscious mind plays a prank and tells your body it’s falling, Harry couldn’t say. But he heard her get up and pause halfway to the door. Harry kept his eyes closed. He knew he was being watched, and he wanted to be alone.

When she was satisfied, he heard her leave the room. He heard her right-hand ring click against the stair railing when she started to climb, and he heard the creak one of the third-floor stairs always made. He could never remember which one and couldn’t be bothered to have someone come fix it. Tilda stopped at the creaky stair long enough to hold her breath and curse and then continued up to her own bedroom. He didn’t hear the door shut or the latch catch, and he had been listening for them. Harry, whose eyes were open now, scowled into the dark. He would have to be even more quiet.

By six a.m., Harry would have told you that he hadn’t slept at all, which probably wasn’t the whole truth. Probably a night-vision camera and some electrodes could’ve picked up thirty or so minutes of sleep here and there throughout the night for whatever good that had done. But at six a.m., he was awake. He had gotten himself out of bed with his cane and collected his pants and his sweater and put them on, along with his socks.

Dr. Woo had told him not to wear socks around the house. Harry was supposed to wear either rubber-soled shoes or go barefoot. It seemed socks didn’t offer enough traction for someone in his condition. But the shoes that were out had laces, and his right hand wasn’t up for tying laces. His slip-on shoes were in the closet, and sliding open the closet door might rouse Tilda. And he didn’t like anyone to see his bare right foot. Its deformity was even more repulsive unshod, so socks with a chance of falling it was. He was beginning to get a little bit used to falling anyway.

Dressed, he sat back down in the dark and resumed his listening vigil. It wasn’t long. By 6:15, he heard the back door open.

*   *   *

Rachel had decided she needed more samples, and while she still secreted away a dozen or so of the collection containers in the “food” cooler once it had been emptied of sandwiches each night, she no longer trusted that no one would find them when she wasn’t looking. And if they did find them, they might take them. And if they didn’t take them, they might contaminate them—either on purpose or by accident. She was betting on the former.

To guard against the possibility of sample sabotage, she had taken an X-Acto knife and a flashlight into the porta-potty with her. She had worn her puffy coat that night. The storm front that had been threatening hadn’t kicked up much rain, but the winds were increasing and it was getting colder. The coat made her look like the Michelin Man. It was black, stuffed with down and quilt stitched into poufed stripes. Each one of the poufed stripes was big enough to fit one of the smallest collection containers, bigger than a flask but not much bigger.

When Hooper was away from the tent, she’d stolen eight she was supposed to be classifying and flash freezing. Just before the shift was over, she made her trip to the bathroom. With the jacket off and the flashlight in her mouth, Rachel slit open the outer fabric and pulled out as much of the down as possible. The feathers were small and light, and they stuck to everything, which wasn’t something she’d planned for. Not planning for it made her angry at herself. She couldn’t possibly clean all of them up, not from the inside of a porta-potty in the middle of the night. Anyone who used the toilet after her might see, and if they saw, they might guess. Either they would guess or they would think she was trapping, killing, and plucking seabirds in the bathroom.

Rachel kept going. There was no point in stopping then. She shoved each small container of specimens into the holes she’d made—one hole per quilted row of down on each side of the zipper, four usable rows, eight containers. Afraid her body heat would raise the temperature too much as it was, she couldn’t risk doing it on the inside of the coat.

She made sure no feathers were peeking out of the holes and might be noticeable against the black fabric. The down that remained kept the containers secure and muffled any sloshing. Then she cleaned up the porta-potty as best she could, which involved touching a lot of surfaces she would really rather not.

By the time she was back in the beach house, her thoughts were on loading all of her samples—those of dubious security in the cooler and her secret stash—into the tanks. Any thoughts she had left were devoted to an OCD-level need to wash her hands. She was not in the mood to talk to anyone, and when she carried the cooler up the stairs and saw Harry waiting for her on the landing, leaning on his cane, she was prepared to make herself very clear.

He spoke first. “I have a report to make, and when I finish, you have to give me more of whatever that was.”

Rachel sat the cooler down. It seemed to get heavier every night. “You experienced pain reduction?”

“It was so much more than that.”

Rachel had still been thinking only of her samples and washing her hands. Only the smallest possible part of her mind had been engaged with Harry, but that small portion was a scout, and it sent word for the rest of her brain to suit up.

“Tell me,” she said, turning and putting her cat eyes on him.

“In exchange for another dose.”

“The first dose was in exchange for a report.”

“I’m renegotiating.”

He looked more rumpled than usual. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, his pants looked like someone left them in the dryer for a week, and his hair was taking on an Einstein quality.

“I don’t think you’re in a position to renegotiate,” Rachel said.

“I’m going to try. I have additional information.”

“What information?”

“Side effects.”

“What kind of side effects?”

“A second dose,” Harry repeated.

A beat passed, and then Rachel nodded.

“Deal?” Harry confirmed.

“Deal.”

“I saw things after I took the first dose.”

“What things?”

“Things that weren’t there.”

“Known,” Rachel said, disappointed that she’d traded more of her samples for predictable information. She should’ve been smarter.

“Known, what?”

“Known side effect of the active ingredient. Native people have been making up stories to explain the hallucinations for hundreds of years.” Rachel picked up the cooler. “Eventually, I hope to be able to neutralize the effect.”

“What kind of stories?”

She was heaving the cooler the rest of the way to her door, and her words came out strained and breathy. “They told missionaries that it opened up a path to their ancestors.”

“Their ancestors, like ghosts?”

Rachel opened her door a crack and slid in with her samples. “Ghosts. They used the word
spirits
. It’s a sort of curse.”

“What kind of curse?”

Rachel’s hand was on the door, and Harry could barely see her through the tiny opening she left.

“Sometimes angry or vengeful ancestors would try to coax men across the divide. When a man had been to the land of the spirits, no other tribal members could look upon him for twenty suns without facing terrible misfortune. Women would be struck barren by looking at their husbands before sufficient time had passed.” She spoke as though she had memorized the passage from a textbook.