THE LAST BOY (57 page)

“Don’t worry,” she laughed, “I’ve been through this once before.”

He kissed her brow and her lips. He tasted the salt on her neck, then he went back to work.

Like a man possessed, Tripoli kept tilling the soil and expanding the garden, appending row upon row. He put in two dozen additional tomato plants, did five long rows of corn, placing them beside hills of squash and cucumbers. Then he made a second planting of beans, placing them in tight proximity to the corn. Close to the
marigolds he clustered peppers and eggplants, cabbage and brussels sprouts, using the very methods of companion planting that he had seen Daniel employ in his tiny garden. When Molly wiped the sweat from her face to discover him stringing yet another line, she asked, “What are you planning to do? Feed the whole of humanity? We’re only two, you know.”

“No, no,” he corrected. “Three. No four. No wait, five!” He laughed, then watched Molly as she returned to cultivating the row and thought how perfect the moment was. Together they had created something good and honest and lasting. Who would have thought it?

Molly turned to catch him staring at her. “What are you looking at?” she asked, a half-smile on her face.

“You, Darling. You.”

May, June, July, and August were busy months for the two of them.

Early each morning before heading into work, Tripoli was in the garden, harvesting the first crops, loading them into his new car to make his daily drop-off at the local soup kitchen and pantry run by the church.

“Lou, these are absolutely amazing,” said the old priest, taking a fresh potato from the basket and hefting it in his hand. It must have weighed a good pound or more. While other gardens were being infested with insects or withering in the hot, driving winds, their garden was producing vegetables the size and taste of which were the talk of the town. “What's the secret?”

“No secret at all. Just following some of Daniel's rules.”

“Well, you’re making a lot of families very happy.”

Molly was writing, but she was also traveling. She was given invitations to speak all around the state. She addressed government groups, women's clubs, unions—whoever wanted her to speak or was willing to listen. In the middle of her eighth month, so big she
was hardly able to sit behind the wheel, she drove to Albany and spent two days meeting with state legislators.

When she got back late that night she was beaming.

“I met with the governor!” she exclaimed when Tripoli came out to help her in with her bag. “We had dinner!” She told Tripoli how she had spent three hours with the governor trying to convince him that he should lead a drive to resurrect the rail system, getting him to imagine a high-speed train running down the spine of the state; what it would do for the economy, what it would do for his image, how the history books would hail his efforts. “And there I was in the governor's mansion. Me. Molly Driscoll. A nobody. Having dinner with him! Just the two of us.”

“Were there candles and soft music?” he asked, and she laughed. “I mean, maybe I should be jealous?”

Her water broke early in the morning. It happened on the seventh of September, a good week before the doctors had planned to induce labor and do her C-section. The pains began only minutes later. The contractions were sharp and hard. They seemed far more intense than when she had started labor with Danny. Then she noticed she was bleeding. At first it was just a trickle, then it came in a steady flow, bright red, oxygenated blood running out of her.

Tripoli was immediately on the phone, calling her obstetrician who notified the hospital. Then he bundled Molly into the car. Now she was losing blood even faster. It felt like it was gushing and, despite the pads, the car seat was completely soaked.

“Don’t worry. Don’t worry,” he kept repeating as he swerved down the curves to town, siren and lights going full blast. He tried to imagine losing the baby, losing her, and knew it was beyond anything he could humanly bear.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, smiling weakly. The contractions were coming, intense and close now. It all seemed too fast, too early.
Please, dear God, she whispered, let me keep this one.

A team of nurses and two trauma doctors were waiting for her in the emergency room. Tripoli was shunted aside and told to wait as the staff drew the curtains around her. After a hasty examination, Molly was rushed directly into surgery without even a chance for him to say anything more than to wish her luck.

Tripoli was left to pace the waiting room, weaving between the others who sat in their orange plastic chairs staring blankly up at a game show running on the overhead TV. After an hour, he couldn’t take it any longer and, placing himself in the corridor leading to the surgery, started cornering nurses and staff every time one of them came through the double doors leading to the operating suites.

“Molly Driscoll,” he kept saying. “How's she doing? And the baby? Is it okay?”

No one seemed to know. Or wanted to talk. He wasn’t sure which.

Finally, one of the nurses headed into the surgical unit stopped to talk to him.

“Don’t worry,” she said, adjusting her scrubs. “You’ve got Dr. Wozniak. He's the best there is.”

Tripoli looked as if he were going to cry, and she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Please, just go back into the waiting room. We’ll call you as soon as we know anything. I promise.”

It was hours before Dr. Wozniak appeared through the double doors. The man looked exhausted. His face was furrowed, there were splotches of blood on his green scrubs, and his gait was ominously slow. Tripoli leapt to his feet. At first the doctor failed to notice him, and it seemed to take an extraordinary time for him to close the short distance separating them.

“Oh,” said the doctor, startled when Tripoli took hold of his arm.

“Well?”

“She's lost an awful lot of blood,” he said, the furrow between his eyebrows deepening,“but I think she’ll be okay. We’ve now got her stabilized.”

“And the baby?” he hung onto the doctor's arm.“The baby!”

“A girl,” said Wozniak, covering Tripoli's hand with his.“A nice, plump little daughter. Seven pounds, two ounces and a professional screamer.”

When they let Tripoli in to see her, Molly lay in bed, her eyes shut, her skin as white as the linens. Slowly she opened her eyes, saw him, and then smiled a little. “Good police work, Trip,” she said through lips that were dried and cracked.

A young nurse brought her the baby and placed it in Molly's arms. When Tripoli saw his child, he lost control and started to weep. Molly was crying too, and the nurse slipped discreetly out of the room.

“You did it!” he said, his voice choked as he examined the infant swaddled in a blanket. The baby was round faced and fine featured, a layer of silky, dark hair covering her head. She was beautiful. Perfect.

“You don’t know how much I love you,” he said the next day as he watched Molly nurse for the first time, the baby drinking eagerly at her breast. The color had returned to Molly's face, and she was propped up in bed, looking clearly victorious.

Gazing up from the suckling infant, she smiled at him. “Yes, I know,” she said, and there was a radiance on her face that gave her the look of a young girl. Four days later, they released her from the hospital with strict instructions not to climb stairs or exert herself in any other way until she was fully healed.

“What do doctors know?” she laughed as she gingerly made her way up the flight to their bedroom. “What am I supposed to do, sleep on a mattress on the living room floor?”

Tripoli cooked, did the laundry, and cleaned the house, but it
was impossible keeping Molly confined to bed. Every day she gained more strength; even the doctor was surprised at how quickly she recovered.

“Come on, already, I’m not exactly an invalid,” she objected when Tripoli insisted on waxing the floors in the kitchen.“Give me that mop, willya?”

They called the little girl Rachel, and Molly never let her out of her sight. She had surprisingly delicate features and a heart-shaped face like Molly's with a pouty little bow-shaped mouth. Her fingers were long and fine and, when Molly nursed her, studying her closely, she could see that Rachel's eyes and wide brow were clearly Tripoli's. The baby was also blessed with a happy disposition, hardly ever complaining. Indeed, she always seemed to be smiling.

A week after her release, Trip bought her a new computer and Molly was back working on her articles. The inbox on her computer was daily filled with emails from a contingent of volunteers strategically placed around the globe. A network had organized itself spontaneously, and Molly, somehow the rallying point, suddenly found herself acting as the clearing house. Daily observations on the flora and fauna flowed into her computer from everywhere. Her database was getting so comprehensive, the observations so accurate and incisive, that scientists were beginning to contact
her
for data.

The energy companies that sold fossil fuels were still insisting that the fears of global warming were being fed by alarmists, but it didn’t take much fancy research on Molly's part to see otherwise. In less than two years, the mean annual global surface temperature had jumped nearly a full degree. Her observers, which included physicians, were reporting a recent surge in vector-borne and infectious diseases, especially in tropical and subtropical regions. The warm weather was intensifying the transmission of malaria, and there were explosive outbreaks of dengue, hantavirus, and cholera.

Scientists who had been observing the ice sheet in West Antarctica
were now writing to her with warnings that, because of rapid melting, huge portions of the shelf were in danger of breaking loose.

“The massive ice sheet,” wrote a Harvard geophysicist in his email, “sits suspended on bedrock above the sea. According to my calculations, if it drops into the ocean, it can and will set up a soliton—a massive and destructive wave—that will inundate coastal areas around the world and leave ocean levels permanently raised.”

As she continued to receive such news, Molly's writing took on a new urgency and her column, “Just Listen,” now syndicated daily in papers across the country, was experiencing a burgeoning readership.

“Another three major papers in Europe and two in Asia just signed on,” exclaimed Wally Schuman during their regularly scheduled morning phone conference. He had stepped down from his management position at the paper and was now devoting himself to Molly's column as well as a nonprofit organization he had created and called “The Daniel Foundation.” Unsolicited donations were coming in every day to support the research and development of innovative energy-saving appliances. The fund had already helped a number of inventors to start building prototypes and apply for patents. Molly's column was helping that effort in no small measure.

“Just keep doing what you’ve been doing,”Wally urged.“People need to hear what you have to say. It's exactly what Daniel would want you to do.” Wally, however, like most everyone else in town, was convinced that Daniel was now long dead.

Each day, when Molly sat down to write, she envisioned her readership as an audience of two: Danny and the old man. There was still hope. If people would just modify their habits, lessen their consumption, she urged, the Earth's warming could be arrested, maybe even reversed. But it had to happen now.

Then, a large fire broke out in the northern Amazon where Brazil and Venezuela met. The rain forest there had turned tinder
dry, and all it took was a bolt of lightning to set the jungle ablaze. In a matter of days, it covered several hundred thousand acres and sent up a black pall of smoke that swirled around the rotating globe. When Tripoli left in the morning for work, Molly could see that the sky was encased in a thick, brown haze. That same evening, the sunset began far earlier than normal. It was unnaturally brilliant, a flaring reddish-orange that looked like a laser-light show and lasted for more than an hour.

In town, Tripoli noticed how the people kept staring up at the menacingly brown sky as though mesmerized.“I didn’t worry about it before,” said Kesh in the diner, pouring Tripoli a second cup of coffee at lunch.“But did you see that sky today? This is serious shit. I’ve a grandchild on the way. What kind of world am I bringing that kid into?”

In Washington, the government was still debating about what action to take. Leaders in capitals from Paris to Berlin to Tokyo seemed paralyzed. An unplanned experiment was being carried out on the Earth, its outcome unforeseen, yet nobody could agree on anything.

Yet every day without fail visitors appeared on Molly's doorstep. There were locals, but also people from New York and Chicago and as far away as Oregon.

“I’d like to do something,” said a troubled woman from Anaheim,“something to lessen the harm that I’ve done. What would Daniel want me to do?”

“You’re doing it already, just by coming here,” said Molly by way of encouragement and the woman smiled. “You’ve been watching, you’ve been listening, you see. Now go back and talk to people, organize them, rally them to put pressure on their elected officials.” The woman left energized and Molly was surprised by how little it sometimes took to galvanize people.

Josh Miller was now delivering three and sometimes four heavy sacks of mail every day. Her readers sent faxes and emails, and the
newspaper was besieged with urgent calls all asking for Molly's help. All she knew was that the political leaders weren’t listening to the people, and the people weren’t listening to each other.

“It was just like Daniel said,” said a frightened Mrs. Ruzicka, appearing unannounced at the farm early one morning. Molly hadn’t seen the woman since the day that Daniel had disappeared and Molly had questioned little Kevin at the mall. Hefty Mrs. Ruzicka had bicycled all the way from town to say, “If only Daniel and that old man were alive. They could have helped. I’m sure. People would have listened to them. My husband and I certainly would have.”

Molly knew that bad news, like good, came in droves. It was Ed's call that confirmed her deepest fear.

“It's Rosie.” His voice was breaking.“You know that dry cough she had. And the way she was always tired.” He couldn’t go on, and didn’t have to. Molly could guess. “I kept pleading with her to go the doctor, but…”