Courage Tree (7 page)

J
anine’s eyes burned from trying to pierce the darkness. For hours, she and Joe had been driving along the route Alison and the girls should have followed from the camp. Joe was at the wheel, and he drove as slowly as safety would allow, while they searched the side of the road for a disabled car hidden by the darkness. They stopped at every restaurant and gas station that was still open at that hour, asking if anyone had seen the missing Scouts. Several sheriff’s cars had passed them along the way, reassuring them that they were not alone in their search. Still, their cell phones didn’t ring. They’d kept in touch with everyone who had remained behind at the parking lot, hoping for good news, but nothing had changed. Nothing except the fear which grew inside all of them as the minutes ticked by.

When they’d reached the camp, they’d spent some time talking with the sheriff who was questioning the supervisor and counselors there, then started to retrace their route back to Virginia. Joe suggested they get a hotel room—actually, he wisely suggested they get two—but Janine couldn’t lock
herself, safe and secure, into a hotel room when she had no idea where Sophie was.

Leaning her head against the window of Joe’s car, Janine closed her eyes. Instantly, a familiar, unwanted image slipped into her mind, as it often did when she was in a moving vehicle and slightly disoriented. She was suddenly flying her helicopter through the smoke above the Saudi Arabian desert. The smell was acrid, filled with the chemicals that she, in her darkest moments, feared had altered something inside her and caused her to produce a child whose kidneys did not work correctly.

If it had been Lucas with her in the car, rather than Joe, she would have told him about those memories, but she had no energy to recount them to her ex-husband. He would have no sympathy for her, anyway.

“Tell me more about this Alison,” Joe said grimly, bringing her back to the present.

Janine opened her eyes to see that they were driving slowly past a restaurant, while Joe tried to determine if it was still open. It was not, and he sped up again.

“Is there a real chance that Alison might have taken off with them?” he asked.

“She’s a free spirit,” she said, only half aware that those were the same words Joe had often used to describe her in their early years together. “She’s made a few mistakes working with the girls, but I just can’t believe she’d do anything that extreme.”

“What do you mean, a few mistakes?”

“Oh, she talked to them about the birds and the bees without getting parental permission, that sort of thing.”

“Well.” Joe let out a sigh. “Let’s face it, Jan. They never got back from this trip, and I know it’s dark, but we’ve scoured this route, and her car is not anywhere along it. Wouldn’t you agree?”

She nodded.

“That has to mean that she and the car and the girls are somewhere we’re not looking. Somewhere they’re not supposed to be.”

The thought was strangely reassuring. “Maybe Holly’s mother…Rebecca…was right and Alison decided it would be fun for them to go to an amusement park or something, and she’ll bring them back tomorrow. She can probably get by without the dialysis tonight, but she
has
to be back tomorrow to get her—” She stopped herself, but Joe knew what she was about to say.

“To get that damned herbal crap,” he said.

Janine turned her face to the window again. “It’s made her feel so much better,” she said weakly. Tears burned her eyes. “I just wanted to see a real smile on her face again.”

“At what cost, Jan?” Joe glanced at her. “Maybe she’ll get a few weeks or a couple of months of feeling good before the disease catches up with her again and kills her.”

“Shh!” She didn’t want to hear him say those words.

“What are you shushing me for?” he asked. “It isn’t news that she’s going to die. The only real remaining chance she had was the legitimate study at Hopkins, but you were determined to do this no matter what I wanted.” He braked the car abruptly. The driver behind them honked, swerving sharply to avoid hitting them, and with a yelp, Janine grabbed the dashboard.

She saw what had caught his attention—a car parked on the side of the road. Her heart still pounded from the near accident as she opened her car window to get a better look. The parked car was huge and looked deserted, a white paper stuck to its antenna.

“It’s a…I don’t know, some big car,” Janine said. “Not a Honda, anyway.”

“Sorry.” Joe apologized for his erratic driving. He reached across the gear shift to touch her hand, a surprising gesture. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said. She would have braked with equal force had she been the one driving.

Joe sighed again. “So,” he said. “Back to Sophie. Here’s what I don’t get. You and I have always talked to each other about how to deal with her, whether we were communicating about her medical care or her behavior or anything. Isn’t that right?”

She nodded. Joe sounded genuinely perplexed, and she felt guilty. She
had
always consulted with him in the past and taken his feelings to heart. Decisions about Sophie had, in every instance, been mutually made.

“I loved that about us,” Joe continued. “I was proud of us. We might have been divorced, but we were still a team when it came to her. Then you go off and do something half-assed like enrolling her in that study. Something that goes completely against what I want.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought it was the right thing. I still think it was the right—”

“What possessed you?” He looked at her. “You’re usually smarter than that. Whatever made you think Schaefer’s herbs could fix what no one else has ever been able to fix?”

“I didn’t go into it blindly,” she said. She heard the weakness in her voice. She always felt weak around Joe, as though being near him sucked the strength and self-esteem right out of her. “Lucas Trowell knows a lot about herbs and he researched the ingredients in Herbalina for me. He really felt it might have a chance of—”

“You know, Jan.” Joe shook his head. The muscles in his cheeks contracted, and she knew he was trying to control his anger. “Lucas Trowell is a
gardener
. He’s not a doctor.”

“He knows a lot about herbs, though,” she said.

“How do you know that? Because he told you so? I think he’d tell you anything to get close to Sophie.”

There it was again. That Lucas-Trowellis-a-pedophile paranoia.

“That’s crazy, Joe,” she said. “He’s been very kind to Sophie. She adores him.”

Big mistake.
Joe nearly lost control of the car, sending it over the line into the middle lane, and again, a driver honked his horn at them. “You keep him away from her, Janine,” Joe shouted as he steered the car back into the slow lane. “I mean it! I am damn serious. I don’t want that guy anywhere near her.”

She hated it when he yelled. Joe had never laid a hand on her, but he didn’t need to. He was big and muscular, and his anger could be so powerful that it alone was enough to frighten her into submission. She lowered herself farther into the seat and shut her eyes.

“What does it matter to him if the treatment works or not?” Joe continued his argument. “Sophie’s not his daughter. She’s nothing to him. Your judgment is all screwed up.”

Eyes still shut, Janine pressed her temple to the window. She was not wrong about Lucas, although she’d twisted the facts of Sophie’s enrollment in the study a bit. It was actually through Lucas that she’d learned of the study; she probably never would have known about it had he not told her.

Lucas had heard a short ad on the radio about a researcher who was looking for pediatric subjects to be in a study of an alternative treatment for pediatric kidney disease. Janine had called about the study and learned it involved an herbal remedy, delivered intravenously. When she told her parents and Joe that she wanted Sophie to participate in the study, they refused to even discuss the matter with her. Instead, they wanted Sophie to participate in a Johns Hopkins study of one more horrid, toxic medication—that if it didn’t kill her—might help her.

The herbal approach had no such side effects, Dr. Schaefer had told her. As a matter of fact, Sophie would feel much better very quickly. Even so, Janine did not enroll her right away. Schaefer was a bit strange, a mousy man of few words
who seemed remarkably unsure of himself to be leading a study of any kind, but she checked into his background and learned he had conducted some research of minor importance in the past, in which his hypotheses had been proven correct. She assumed he was one of those cerebral types who was brilliant despite a nerdish exterior.

Lucas researched the herbs for her, telling her he thought Schaefer might actually be on to something. She’d sat with him in his tree house, studying the computer screen as he pulled up information about each herb from the Internet and translated the scientific descriptions of them into language she could easily understand. Lucas was the only person with whom she could speak rationally about the study, who didn’t scoff at the idea or belittle her for considering it. Her parents and Joe simply wouldn’t discuss Schaefer’s approach as an option.

Still, it wasn’t until Sophie suffered another crisis, one her doctors felt certain spelled the end of her short life, that Janine did something she hadn’t done in many years: she rebelled against Joe and her parents, that mighty, controlling three-some, and enrolled Sophie in the study behind their backs. Their fury had been quick to flare, and Janine would have backed down had it not been for Lucas. He’d lifted her guilt and rebuilt her back-bone. But look where that backbone had gotten her now. Look where it had gotten
Sophie
.

Long, long ago, Joe had appreciated Janine’s independence and daring. They’d known each other since their first year of junior high school, and back then, Joe had often expressed an admiration of her tomboyishness, her competitiveness and her spirit. Something shifted in their relationship during their junior year of high school, though, when Joe became attracted to her as something more than just the girl who could win any race and would accept any dare. They began to date, very quickly becoming a steady item in the halls of their high school. He grew less tolerant of her rebellious side, as he
began to long for her to be more like the calm, faithful, feminine young women who dated his closest friends. One bonus of that wild streak, though, was Janine’s uninhibited sexuality. She’d wanted to lose her virginity, and Joe had been more than pleased to oblige—after first making certain she was on the pill.

She
had
been on the Pill, but as in most areas of her life, she was not terribly careful about taking it. Still, it wasn’t until the spring of their senior year that she became pregnant.

Her parents blamed her, not Joe, for the pregnancy, and they were quick to encourage Janine to marry him. The wedding took place the day after their graduation, in the garden at Ayr Creek, and Janine, a bit overwhelmed by all that was happening, allowed her parents to plan the event. The wedding was traditional in every detail, except, perhaps, for the bloated stomach of the bride, which pressed firmly against the fabric of her wedding gown.

Her parents adored Joe. He was the son they’d never had, and for Joe, the Snyders filled the lonely, empty space only an orphan could know. His mother had abused drugs and alcohol, deserting Joe and his father when Joe was only a year old. His father abandoned him in his own way, by dying in a plane crash when Joe was ten. Joe was then raised by his elderly aunt and uncle. Janine couldn’t blame him for being thrilled by her welcoming parents, even if she had never found them welcoming herself.

Her parents, who taught history in two different high schools at the time of the wedding, helped them out financially so that Joe and Janine were able to rent a small apartment in Chantilly. Janine’s mother bought them things they would need for the baby, and her father built them a crib from a kit. But all during that pregnancy, Janine had a sense of unreality. Her body grew rounder, yet she couldn’t quite grasp the fact that, in a few months, she would be a mother. She was barely eighteen, and not ready, not willing, to settle down.

She was good, at least as good as she could be. She didn’t swallow an ounce of alcohol once she learned she was pregnant, and she stopped smoking. But the physical risks she loved—climbing the cliffs at Great Falls, kayaking in the white water of the Potomac, canoeing the Shenandoah River—she did not give up. She wanted to learn how to fly, she told Joe. Maybe she would even be a stunt pilot or a wing walker. Joe told her to “grow up.” They had no money for her to take flying lessons, he said. He was working at a grocery store, trying to keep food on their table, and Janine thought he’d become remarkably stodgy overnight. It would be years before she understood that Joe’s quiet commitment to his job was a sign of his maturity, and that her wild streak was the hallmark of a self-indulgent, self-centered girl who had no business being married, much less a mother.

It was during one of her canoe trips that her baby decided to be born. Joe was not with her; he was working and would have been upset if he’d known she had gone off with her friends for a day on the Shenandoah. It was a weekend, and she didn’t see why she should have to stay home just because Joe had to work. Yet she knew better than to ask him if he minded. She simply went. She never would have gone if she’d known the baby would come six weeks early.