Invisible (33 page)

I stared at him. “You’re exaggerating.”

“Wish I was.”

“If that were true, it wouldn’t still be on the market.”

“Right, just like tobacco. Nano money makes tobacco money look like a joke.”

“You’re talking billions.”

“
Trillions
. Trillions upon trillions. I told you. Nano’s the wave of the future.”

A little girl skipped past, followed by her parents holding hands and swinging their arms. Did I imagine the coconut scent of sunscreen trailing after them?

“Nano’s completely unregulated. You could put radioactive waste in sunscreen and the FDA would look the other way. Same thing’s true everywhere, not just here in America.”

“The government monitors everything.” Look at the hoops I had to jump through to order dynamite for a shoot.

“Ah, but that’s the thing. That’s the beautiful irony of it all. The government has taken a wait-and-see approach. Regulators don’t have a clue whether or not nanoparticles are safe. They approved its use without checking first, but now the research is starting to come in. And you know what? I predict that even so, the government will find some way to justify its continued use.”

“I don’t believe in a government that’s blind to the needs of its citizens.”

He laughed. “Look it up. Scientists aren’t keeping silent. They’ve written hundreds of research papers. More are coming out every day.”

Here was the playground beside the Lutheran church, kids on swings, parents on benches. “I’ve never heard of any of this.”

“You will. It just has to get to the sexy stage. This one might do it. These Chinese scientists showed that if you inject lab mice with nano zinc, they go into organ failure and die. Doesn’t happen with regular zinc. Just nano.”

“What kind of organ failure?”

“Kidneys, primarily. But like I said, the FDA says that since it’s just zinc, same stuff they stick in vitamins, it’s got to be harmless.”

There was a buzzing in my ears. Children’s laughter floated over. Traffic moved along the street. Sunlight dappled the pavement, fell across our bodies in long patterns.

Sunscreen. The Australian dive guide had warned me. I couldn’t wear it diving the coral reefs. It killed the tiny polyps that lived inside the coral, turning the delicate rosy-hued coral to white skeletons.

“I don’t believe it,” I said slowly.

“Believe it.”

“If it’s so terrible, why do you sell it?”

“Someone’s going to. Might as well be me.”

He had his gaze set on the kids on the swings, their bodies leaning back, their feet tilted toward the sky. “It’s too late, you know,” he said. “We’ve already released nanoparticles. We can’t get them back. They’re too small. We don’t know how.”

A childhood memory surfaced: robins pecking at something in the middle of the street. I’d stopped on my bike, curious. A car approached, going fast. Some birds flew away, but some didn’t. They were killed instantly. I went running into the street, waving
my arms, but the next car forced me back to the safety of the side of the road. Some birds flew off; some stayed and were struck. Over and over, the scene was repeated until there were no more birds in the air or on the branches. They all lay on the road.

I told Julie when I got home, sobbing.
How could they be so greedy?

It was their nature
, Julie said.
They couldn’t help themselves
.

“My sister used to work at Gerkey’s.” My voice sounded like a stranger’s. “She just died of kidney disease.”

He halted, took a long look at my face, then shook his head. “So it’s already started.”

Everyone used sunscreen. Those laughing children on the swings. The people eating lunch on the benches. That mother sitting on the blanket and holding her baby in her lap, a sunbonnet fitted over the small, round head. No doubt the baby’s arms and legs were covered in it. No doubt that mother had taken care to rub it into her baby’s skin. She thought she was keeping her child safe. “If this stuff is everywhere, and it’s as dangerous as you say, then why is it only just now showing up here?”

He folded his arms and looked across the pretty little park studded with fruit trees.

“Well,” he said at last, “I guess it’s got to start someplace. Might as well be Black Bear, Minnesota.”

 [PEYTON]

I
N 1979, THE FIRST MANNED SUBMERSIBLE BOAT
, Alvin,
was scooting along the barren ocean floor when its headlights picked out something surprising in the vast blackness: eight-foot-tall creatures shaped like white straws. They clustered around the cracks in the bottom of the ocean, where the earth’s molten interior sent out gasps of hot, poisonous air. Tubeworms. They’d been there for hundreds of thousands of years and no one ever knew. No one guessed that anything could possibly withstand such terrible conditions
.

The worms themselves are red, frilly headed, and shy, ducking back into their tubes the moment they feel threatened. When they’re born, they suck up as much bacteria-rich water as they can. Then they seal themselves off, becoming creatures without legs, eyes, internal organs, or mouths. What they do have is an entire kitchen staff trapped inside their skin: the bacteria, once swimming around in the open ocean, now work inside the worms, converting the metals in the vent water into nutrients for their hosts
.

Tubeworms grow fast and can live for hundreds of years. Not
much fazes them. But they’re completely dependent on their environment. If a vent closes up, the tubeworms die, simple as that
.

Everything has a stopping point. By the time you see the signs, it’s too late to do anything about it
.

Peyton examined the broken pieces of the hummingbird feeder. The plastic bowl had cracked apart before and her mom had painstakingly re-glued it, but this time, the edges were crumbly. Too many harsh winters when they’d left it hanging too long had compromised the plastic. She could squeeze out an entire tube of superglue and it wouldn’t do any good. Pulling out the trashcan, she dropped the plastic pieces in. That made the first thing lost since her mom’s death.

Her arm smarted where LT had scraped his fingernails across the skin. A car door slammed. She looked up to see Dana walking up the driveway, carrying a small gray suitcase.

“Hi,” Dana said.

Peyton hadn’t seen the suitcase before. “Hi.”

In the kitchen, Dana set the case on the kitchen table and raised the lid to reveal a shiny white plastic machine.

LT was right. Dana’s machine did look like a Dustbuster. “Is that what you used at the plant yesterday?”

Dana nodded. “But it turns out I had it set for the wrong thing.”

“Oh.” That didn’t sound good. She felt her way forward. “And now you know what the right thing is?”

“I think so.” Dana picked up the machine from its foam bed and pressed a switch. The thing started to hum. “I’m looking for nanoparticles.”

“In my
house
?”

Dana glanced at her. “It’s all right. I’m just checking.”

But it wasn’t all right. Dana’s hands were shaking.

“I want to call my dad.”

Dana nodded. “That might be a good idea.”

Which only scared Peyton more.

Dana started in the kitchen. Holding the machine in one hand, she moved it around the room, stopping for a moment to press a button and watch the little window on top. Pantry, cabinets, stove, refrigerator. Peyton imagined her pacing through Gerkey’s, doing the same thing. Her aunt’s calm deliberateness was both reassuring and unnerving.

“Anything?” she said.

“Just normal ambient levels.”

Peyton rubbed her upper arms and followed Dana as she walked through the dining room, stopping by the hutch holding their special glasses and Thanksgiving platter, the small desk where her mom sat to pay bills. Then they went into the living room with the fireplace where they hung Peyton’s Christmas stocking, the front hall closet crammed with coats. Dana spent a long time in Peyton’s parents’ room, going over the bed, into the small closet, pulling out the bureau drawers, then checking the hall bathroom they all shared, opening up the medicine cabinet and uncapping the hand lotion her mom applied every night, the face cream she rubbed onto her cheeks.

They traipsed down to the basement and walked along the walls, crisscrossed the entire floor. Every few minutes, Dana stopped and took a reading, then glanced at Peyton to give her a reassuring smile. They went back upstairs. Dana stopped outside Peyton’s bedroom. “Mind if I check in here?”

“Okay.”

Dana pushed open the door and stepped inside. The water burbled in the aquarium. Light shined in through the half-closed slats of the blinds, falling across the mounds of clothes, the unmade bed, the books stacked every which way. Behind them, the back door banged open.

“Peyton?” her dad called.

“In here, Daddy.”

He was there in an instant, his hand on Peyton’s shoulder. “Dana, what are you doing?”

But Dana wasn’t listening. She was staring at her machine. “I got something.”

Her voice was unsteady. Dana looked all around, turned in a little circle, then stopped and stared at the ground, at the dirty laundry mounded there by her feet.

Her father’s fingers dug into Peyton’s shoulder. “What the hell does that mean?”

“The level just jumped.” Crouching, Dana lowered the monitor and pressed the switch again.

“That’s impossible. We don’t have asbestos in here.”

“I know.” She raised her face to both of them. Her eyes were dark and hollow. “But you do have something else.”

The lab coat lay on the deck, bundled in plastic bags. Peyton half expected the bags to untie themselves and spring open to puff the powder back up into their faces.

“I’m not sure that’ll do any good,” Dana said. “But they have to ship the stuff in some sort of container. Something that must be impenetrable.” She yanked off the latex gloves she’d put on to dispose of the lab coat, turning them inside out as she did so. They went into another bag, and then another, all tied with quick vicious knots.

Peyton hadn’t been wearing gloves when she unbuttoned the coat. She’d carried it into and out of the car with her bare hands. She’d dropped it on top of her clothes and forgotten all about it.

“You said this guy was a salesman,” her dad said. “Not a scientist.”

“Yeah, but he was right. I checked it out. Those websites he was talking about are real. I can show you. They’re written by real professors at real universities.”

Her dad rubbed his face. “You can’t believe everything you read online. Even you should know that.”

That was true. Peyton’s teachers were always saying that.

“Look, the bottom line is I got a reading a hundred times above ambient level.”

Peyton had seen the number herself, an endless course of digits that flickered across the small gray screen.

“Instruments don’t lie. There’s something really wrong here.”

“So you got a high reading. I’m not debating that. What I’m saying is you don’t have a clue what it means. Everyone puts nano zinc into sunscreen. They’ve been doing it for years. That’s nothing new.”

“What’s new is that scientists in China found that it causes acute renal failure in mice.”

“In
mice
. Inject mice with enough stuff and you can make them sick with anything.”

“It can’t be a coincidence, Frank.”

“I agree. It’s not a coincidence. You were looking for it.”

“Fine.” Dana crossed her arms. “Let the EPA decide. They’ll know what to do. We need to notify them anyway.”

“So they can what, tear my house apart?”

“I’m talking about Gerkey’s. I got one high reading off a piece of clothing that’s been lying on the floor for days. Can you imagine what the readings would be like in the middle of the factory?”

“I was wearing a mask,” Peyton said suddenly. “When I was mixing it. So it’s okay, right?”

Her dad slid his arm around her shoulders. “Absolutely.”

“We don’t know that,” Dana corrected grimly.

Her father’s hand squeezed, hard. “Of course we do. If OSHA says those masks protect us, then they do.”

“Don’t lie to her just because she’s a child.”

Her dad released her, gave her a little nudge. “Peyton, go inside, please.”

“No way, Dad.”

“Go.”

His voice was flat, final. She let the screen door bang behind her to convey just how helpless and furious she felt, and stomped all the way to her room. Throwing herself on her bed, she stared at the ceiling. She wasn’t three years old. She probably knew more about chemistry than they did, combined. Her mom wouldn’t have shooed her away. She would have sat down and discussed all the angles. But she had kept that notebook and its contents from Peyton. So maybe she didn’t know her mom as well as she thought.

Voices came through her opened bedroom window. She crawled to the side of her bed and peeped out through the slats. The two of them stood squared off, Dana with her back to Peyton, straight, her narrow shoulders thrown back, her hands clenched into fists.

“… another word,” her dad said.