Conundrum (34 page)

I stared at Neal as if seeing him for the first time.

There were so many things I wanted to say, but the words withered away.
Outrage grew in my heart over the little brother who had been so manipulated. Whose life had been stolen away without his noticing.
He was a changeling; some troll had come in the night and whisked Neal off and replaced him with a block of ice, the story I remember from the Maurice Sendak picture book
Outside
o
ver There
.
Changelings could be exposed by dangling them over a fire, but what could I do to expose this heinous crime of my mother’s? It was too late to leave an inverted coat or an open set of scissors next to the bed to protect him.
If my memory was correct, t
he troll who stole the changeling would slowly drain the life from the child until it died or became an empty shell, a chim
e
r
a
, an unrealized dream that never c
a
me to fruition.

One last look at Neal’s face validated the truth of my suspicion
and filled my
heart
with a tremendous sense of sadness
. Attempting speech would be a waste of time.

I got in my car, backed away from my brother, and drove through downtown San Rafael
on autopilot
.
My mind grew oddly quiet on the drive home. Whatever anger and outrage I
radiated
vanished as if sucked away into a vortex.
At that moment, I could not summon any feelings at all.

A strange ennui engulfed me. I just wanted to get home and curl up
next
to Jeremy on the couch, watch some corny old movie
,
and eat popcorn.
I needed quiet, unruffled calm, for a few days at least.

Was that too much to ask for?

Chapter 22

Jeremy returned to work the following week, and I spent most of my days looking through ads in various newspapers and checking out possible rentals. There didn’t seem to b
e
any places suitable for all our animals—at least, not a place we could afford.
We kicked around the idea of defaulting on our construction loan, but knew our credit would be ruined. That was something we could tackle with the lawyer
later
—figuring out a way to force the transfer over to the new owner of the property—Ha
r
v Blake. I thought back to the way my mother had finagled a loan for us—one that
hadn’t
require
d
either her name on it or the attachment of the property
,
so p
leased to
help us
stand on our own feet
.
Clearly, e
ven then, she had made sure to keep her distance, so that if things ever fell apart, her finances wouldn’t be involved.

I hadn’t heard from her or Raff since Jeremy’s accident; neither had I heard from Neal—although, it was not as if I expected to. Their corporate silence was just what I anticipated. I toyed with the idea of calling Julie, to apologize for that fiasco in San Rafael, but figured she would contact me
—
if ever she desired to do so again. She knew Neal’s name—he was listed in the phone book. She could pursue him if she dared.

Jeremy had exhausted his list of customers who had rural property. Although he didn’t find anyone with a rental, he did receive a couple of offers to board our animals, should that prove necessary.
I had put off my trip to the city library, wanting to
find us a place to move to first, but after perusing all the For Rent ads in three newspapers, I
gave up my search for the moment and sped off in my car to the city.
Sitting around waiting for a miracle just made me edgy, so the thought of going into denial for a few hours appealed to me.
We had ads running in the papers and posted on bulletin boards. Our “eviction” date was looming two weeks ahead. We
needed
to make a decision soon, but it would have to wait one more day.

Thankfully Jeremy
was
heal
ing
quickly
, without any real residual pain or permanent damage.
Because
our truck had been paid off, the insurance company sent us a check that allowed us to buy a fairly new vehicle for Jeremy, and he settled on a five-year-old Ford F-350 the color of his eyes. He seemed content with his purchase and back in the swing of work. Immersing himself in the affairs of running the feed store settled him into routine and lifted his spirits. I noticed, in fact
, a sort of lightheartedness, as if a huge burden ha
d
been lifted off his shoulders. No doubt, removing Ruth Sitteroff from the equation of our lives made that difference.
Like an algebra problem: solve for
x
and get your answer. Replace
x
with the correct number and everything balances. We
had
replaced the weight of my mother’s judgment with the breath of freedom. A
s
much as I still hurt inside, I
,
too
,
felt relief
.

I had my mother to thank, I supposed. As I drove over the Golden Gate
B
ridge and looked out at the sailboats slicing
through
the white-capped waves in the
b
ay,
I thought how strange it was that, in the midst of this horrible family war, Jeremy and I
had
found refuge in each other in a way we hadn’t in years.
W
e rediscovered our love for each other in a
fashion
that surprised me.
It wasn’t as if we
had
rallied together to fight my mother, joining forces and finding consolation in a shared mission. It felt more like we’d been set free from a long pr
i
son confinement, the bars formerly keeping us a
t
finger’s reach now removed so that we could fully touch and hold one another—not just physically but emotionally as well.

While Jeremy’s injuries healed, we slept nestled in each other’s arms. But as soon as he felt able, he reached out to me as we slid under the covers and reexplored my body with a passion I hadn’t seen in many years. With my miscarriages hanging over us,
and
Jeremy’s awareness of my worries over not getting pregnant—and wanting to get pregnant
—
our lovemaking
the past three years had been stifled and burdensome. So much was implicit in our joining, so much expected beyond the simple desire to please each other.
That desire to please
had
lost out in
my
greater need to reproduce.

I had forgotten what it was like to touch my husband and elicit joy from the
mere act of running my hands over his skin. I reacquainted myself with all the lines and textures of his body, and he did the same with me. Something that seemed so simple, so natural, had gotten enmeshed and confused, and rather than need to untangle it all, we surprisingly found
ourselves completely unfettered and free to feel again.
Sufficient in itself was our lovemaking
, which turned playful and easy, much to my astonishment.

Even as I walked into the library and down the stairs to the reference section,
my
face flush
ed h
ot, recalling last night’s amorous play. It seemed so incongruous to our external crisis—this joyous calm, this feeling of safety in the midst of a raging storm.
But I knew its fragility—our fragility. I cherished th
e
se intimate moments and did not take them for granted. They were an unexpected gift, one I was determined to treasure.

After nearly an hour, I found two scientific periodicals with articles on
radioisotope
thermoelectric generators—RTGs.
One focused primarily on the future for such generators, briefly touching on their present use, mostly in Russian lighthouses as a source of low-level electrical output for the beacon. The other periodical was just what I’d been looking for—a physics slant that went into great detail about the construction of the generator and its housing.
And the risk of danger.
Due to the recent Challenger disaster, the Galileo mission, schedule
d
to launch that year, had been postponed, and the article about the spacecraft contained a section on some of the components aboard, including the RTG.

I perused the information that detailed what Ed Hutchinson had told me. The use of RTGs as power sources on spacecraft
seemed extensive. The SNAP generators
had been aboard
the Pioneer, Voyager, and Apollo missions, which would involve the
designs
my father had worked on.
The RTG was considered simple by the standards of nuclear technology, with the main component a sturdy container of radioactive material, which served as the fuel. Thermocouples were placed in the walls of the container, with the outer end of each thermocouple connected to something called a heat sink. The radioactive decay of the fuel produced heat that flowed through the thermocouples to the heat sink, generating electricity in the process.

I skimmed the bit on how thermocouples converted the heat into electrical energy and read the passage on radioactivity. I got a quick lesson on radioisotopes and learned that the half
-
life of the material needed to be short enough so that it decayed sufficiently quickly to generate a usable amount of heat. The need for a quick decay in the safest manner limited the number of possible isotopes, with
p
lutonium 238
—s
ometimes written as
238
PU
—
as the best choice. This was the radioactive material used in the SNAPs my father designed and that were constructed by
the
Penwell Corporation while he work
ed
there.

Plutonium 238 had a half
-
life of 87.7 years and emitted low gamma and neutron radiation levels. Many of the Russian lighthouses used a cheaper isotope—strontium 90—which was more dangerous and resulted in numerous accidents and even fatalities when some abandoned lighthouses
had been
broken into by scavengers.
I couldn’t find any accounts stating those exposed developed leukemia, but it made me wonder
if
radiation poisoning
led to leukemia
.

The subhead
“
How Safe Are They?
”
c
aught my eye. Here’s what I read: “RTGs may pose a minimal risk of radioactive contamination. If the container holding the fuel leaks, the radioactive material may contaminate the environment. F
o
r spacecraft, the main concern is that if an accident were to occur during launch or a subsequent passage of a spacecraft close to Earth, harmful material could be released into the atmosphere.
.
 
.
 
.
A consequence of the shorter half
-
life is that plutonium 238 is about 275 times more radioactive than plutonium 239, which is used in nuclear weapons and reactors. The alpha radiation emitted by either isotope will not penetrate the skin, but it can irradiate internal organs if plutonium is inhaled or ingested. Particul
a
rly at risk is the skeleton, the surface of which is likely to absorb the isotope, and the liver, where the isotope will collect and become concentrated.”

I seemed to recall Ed telling me that—that the radiation would have to be inhaled or ingested
to cause damage
. So
if
my father had
volunteered for that experiment—either knowing it was dangerous, or assuming it wasn’t but turned out to be
—he may have inhaled or ingested some of the radiation. That is, assuming the experiment had anything to do with the SNAPs. Maybe it involved something altogether different.
I was back to
and, or
,
and
not.

I sighed and put down the magazine. Without knowing more than I did—which was practically nothing—I couldn’t draw any conclusions. My mind kept returning to something my mother had said that day at lunch. She had run into someone, my father’s best friend—what was his name? Dave Lerner. Supposedly, he had told her
that
others had contract
ed
leukemia from exposure during that experiment. Of course, she could have made that up, and I knew it was more than likely a lie—to cover up the line of reasoning that
would lead
to my finding out about her affair with Ed Hutchinson. But what if she had spoken the truth? What if she actually had run into Lerner and he
’d
said just that
? That was a possibility.