The Immortalist (29 page)

She didn't even have a name for what she was up against.

Seven

TWO P.M.

Cricket stood by the isolation tent, holding Emmy's hand through double layers of blue nitrile gloves. Hank and Jean had gone to the office to gulp down some sandwiches. Cricket couldn't remember when she herself had last eaten.

Aciclovir, the antiherpes drug, wasn't working. The oxygen saturation of Emmy's blood was dropping, slowly but inexorably. The sedative had worn off, and Cricket could see her daughter's neck muscles straining as she breathed. An X-ray showed shadows where fluid was building up in her lungs.

“Emmy, when Jean gets back from her break, we're going to have to put you on the respirator to help you breathe.”

Emmy's eyes opened wide. “Does that mean you'll have to stick a tube down my throat? Please don't do it. Please! I'll be okay.”

“I'm sorry, I have to.”

“How will I be able to talk with that tube in me?”

“You won't. But you won't feel any pain, either. Before we insert the tube, we'll give you a drug to relax you, and then a neuromuscular blocker to keep you from choking.”

“Neuro— . . . That will paralyze me, won't it?”

“You have to trust me, honey.”
But
w
hy should she?
Cricket thought. “Look, Emmy,” she said, fumbling for words, “I'm sorry . . . about this morning. I'm a jerk, and I . . . I lose my head sometimes.”

“Is that news?”

Cricket laughed nervously. “You know, this whole Atlanta idea—maybe it's a mistake. I thought it would be good for you and me. But . . . I shouldn't use you to try to work out my own problems. A good mother wouldn't do that.”

Emmy rolled her eyes. “Mothers do it all the time.”

“I'm serious, Emmy. I love you and you'll always be welcome wherever I am. But I'm not going to force you to come with me.”

Emmy's gray lips trembled. “Am I going to die?”

“Oh, Emmy, why would you even ask such a thing?”

“I feel like I'm going to die. There's something not right inside me. It's like I can't feel my insides anymore.”

“No, you aren't going to die.” Cricket tried to sound confident, but her voice came out almost snappish. “I won't let that happen.”

Emmy licked her parched lips. “If you pulled the plug on me here and now, I wouldn't blame you. After what I did to you.”

“What
you
did?”

Emmy paused while Cricket daubed her lips with a small sponge on the end of a plastic stick. Then she turned her face away. “I . . . I made Dad divorce you.”

“Every child in a divorce thinks that.”

“No, really.”

The conversation was making Cricket nervous. She listened impatiently for Jean's return. “Okay. How did you ‘make' him?” she said, finding silence even more unbearable.

“I told him . . . about you and that French guy.”

“Étienne? You never even met him. What could you possibly have said?”

“That you were having an affair with him.”

Cricket laughed nervously.
She's way off the mark there.

“Be honest, Mom.”

“Emmy, whatever you may have imagined—”

“I found proof.”

“Proof?”
Emmy's voice was faint, and Cricket wasn't sure she had heard her right. There couldn't possibly be proof of something that had never happened. But Emmy was dead serious.

“Do you know you haven't changed your e-mail password in seven years? I have it by heart. Took weeks to figure it out . . . watching you . . . a few keystrokes at a time: monONegavIRales21. It's the name of a virus, isn't it?”

“You spied on my e-mail?”

“I wanted to know what was so important in your life that it mattered more than me and Dad.”

“That was a shitty thing to do.”

Emmy's lips kept sticking together, and Cricket daubed them again with the sponge.

“I found all these long e-mails to that French guy. . . . You'd, like, bare your soul. Tell him things you never talked about at home.”

Cricket remembered those e-mails. Before and after the divorce they had been the pillars of her sanity.

“I googled him.” Emmy went on. “He won that big bicycle race—”

“The Tour de France. He didn't actually win it. Just one of the stages.”

“Plus he was smart. Some famous scientist at the Pasteur Institute. That's like Harvard over there, isn't it?”

“But, Emmy—”

“I hated him.” Her voice was low and hoarse, as though she were speaking from her stomach.

Hate Étienne?
Cricket thought.
Why would anybody hate Étienne?

“Remember when you missed my twelfth birthday?” Emmy asked with a jabbing tone. “Some conference in London. You were with
him
there. You didn't even hurry back. . . . Then I found it—the e-mail where you talked about your affair.”

Cricket jerked her hand out of the isolator sleeve. She reached for her throat, only to have her fingers glide instead against the collar of her helmet.

“I remember it word for word.” Emmy closed her eyes, as if reading from a page still present inside her mind. “ ‘
I live every day with my guilt, Tien.
You say guilt is a useless emotion, and we scientists should be above it. We should live rationally. But a scientist looks at the whole picture—right?—and that includes Hank. If he knew how I felt about you, there's no question he would feel betrayed. Isn't that adultery?
The feeling is what matters. The act of fucking is nothing but an asterisk.
' ”

“No, Emmy!”

“I showed it to Dad.”

“No! Tell me you didn't.”

“I wanted to get rid of you. You and Dad were fighting all the time. I thought you were the one making him drink.”

“Emmy, you had no right.”

“Dad went crazy when he saw the e-mail. Then he got drunk big-time. . . . I felt like shit when I saw him bawling like a baby. I tried to tell myself it was your fault. . . . I hated you for it.”

Cricket listened in disbelief. Yet it explained so much. At the end, Hank had turned on her abruptly, mutely, irrevocably.

“I never wanted to hurt Dad. I never really wanted to hurt you, either. I just wanted you to be gone.”

It made Cricket sick to think how Hank must have felt. He was too proud to accuse her outright. If only he'd had a chance to vent his feelings to her face-to-face. She would have confessed on the spot. She would have borne every recrimination. But, no—she had never guessed at what he knew. Or thought he knew.

“When I heard that French guy died from some horrible disease, I was glad. I'm paying the price now, aren't I?—dying of a horrible disease myself.”

“You aren't going to die, Emmy.”

“I know that voice, Mom. That's your ‘being brave' voice. When you talk like that, I know you're really scared. . . . But it doesn't matter. I'm ready for it. I don't like the person I am.”

“Emmy . . . I don't know how to put this, but you were very wrong about Étienne.”

“You just admitted you loved him.”

“Yes, but not in that way. Tien . . . Étienne . . . he just wasn't made like that.”

“Like what?”

“To make love to a woman.”

Emmy glared at her. “Get out of here!” she hissed. “Are you telling me he was gay?”

Cricket nodded. “Yes, Emmy. He was.”

“I don't believe you. I saw the e-mail. You admitted to adultery.”

“Of the mind, Emmy. Not the body.”

“Bullshit! Adultery of the
mind
? What is that?” Emmy dug her fingers into the thin mattress of the isolator. Cricket glanced at the vital-signs monitor. Emmy's heart rate was shooting up.

“Calm down.”

“So I . . .
lied
?”

With a Velcro-ripping sound Emmy twisted one wrist free of its restraint. Immediately she reached for the IV line in her other arm and began clawing at the tape that anchored it to her skin.

“No! Don't do that.”

“I'll kill myself. I'll rip it out and bleed to death right now.”

Cricket reached back into the sleeve and grabbed Emmy's wrist. Emmy fought back so violently that it seemed the isolator would tip over. Her heart rate went to 180. A couple minutes more and she would go into cardiac arrest.

“Emmy, shut up and listen to me!” Cricket shouted.

Stunned by the tone of her mother's voice, Emmy froze.

“You didn't lie. What Tien and I had
was
a kind of adultery. It wasn't wrong of you to tell Dad. What twelve-year-old girl wouldn't have? Besides, your father and I had already hit the rocks. If our marriage had been strong, this wouldn't have broken us up.”

Emmy fell limp and turned her face away. Cricket reattached the restraint cuff, then checked the vital-signs monitor. Emmy's heart rate was settling down. Her oxygen saturation bounced back up out of the red zone. But not enough.

“You must hate me now.”

“I can't hate you, Emmy. I love you so much I don't even have words for it.”

Just then, the whoosh of the air lock announced that Jean Litwack had returned.

“It's time, Emmy. I need to put the tube in.”

“Can you forgive me?

“I do forgive you.”

Emmy's voice was barely a whisper. “I wish . . . I could forgive . . . myself.”

Cricket drew two cc's from a vial of Ativan and injected it into Emmy's IV port. “Just relax now.”

Jean silently laid out the scythe-shaped, stainless-steel laryngoscope, along with a selection of endotracheal tubes. While she did so, Cricket pushed a syringe full of succinylcholine, a neuromuscular blocker, into the IV.

Emmy tilted her head back, looking into her mother's eyes as she stood at the head of the bed. “I'm scared, Mom . . .” Emmy's whisper trailed off into inaudibility.

“Everything's fine, honey. This will only take a minute.”

Emmy closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep. Cricket watched her breathing movements carefully. When they had almost stopped, she picked up the laryngoscope, tilted back Emmy's head, and said to Jean, “Let's try a thirty-two French tube.”

I'm scared, Mom.
With a shudder Cricket realized that those might be the last words her daughter would ever speak.

Eight

NIEDERMANN SHIELDED HIS
EYES FROM THE
glare of the sun off the white sandstone tiles on the patio behind Weiszacker House. Loscalzo, in sunglasses and a leather jacket too hot for an August afternoon, sat with his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on a small, wrought-iron table, somehow managing to both chew gum and whistle at the same time. Niedermann recognized the tune—an old Sinatra standard, “I've Got the World on a String.”

“I don't like meeting out in the open like this,” said Niedermann. “What you have better be good.”

Loscalzo threw a flash drive onto the table. “There's the video on that disaster in Maputo. Off a cell phone. About three minutes in, our girl comes apart at the seams. Starts screaming about ebola. Talks like she's out in the jungle. It's pretty freakin' scary.”

Niedermann was unimpressed. “That's it?”

“You said this person was a priority.”

“That's old history. I don't give a shit anymore. She's a thousand miles away in Atlanta.”

Loscalzo snickered. “No. Not so far.”

“No?”

“She's right here. Over in that BSL-4 lab. While you were in the Big Apple, her daughter got sick and Doc Gifford said she could take care of her there.”

“That's impossible.”

“I heard it with my own ears. Right here. Few minutes ago. The doc was talkin' on the phone to somebody named Warren G. Niles, an infectious disease doc from Massachusetts General Hospital. He's flyin' out Friday morning.”