Mirrors (8 page)

“Danny adored these,” Emma said, fingering a groove that outlined what I imagined to be a horse-drawn chariot.

“And these,” Kristine added, holding a piece of driftwood. She ran her fingers across it.

“You remember Danny’s hair,” Kristine laughed, “so frizzy in the moist ocean air.” She dropped to her knees, smoothed a patch of sand, and sketched a head with spirals atop it. “ ‘Brillo-boy’—that’s what we called him at the beach.”

We walked to the promontory where the ebbing sea had left a series of tide pools, many rimmed by pinkish-green algae. In one, I saw a sculpin fish dart away. Further out, sea palms stood like miniature trees brazenly daring the waves to douse them.

“He felt restored here,” Emma said. “This beach invigorated him.”

I could see why: In the Pacific’s throbbing blue was an oceanic heart, its pulse reaching the shore in swells.

“Come,” Emma said. “Let’s go to the other end.”

We retraced our steps past the parking lot before continuing to the hill along the southern end of the bay. A path through a carpet of ice plants brought us to the summit which afforded a view of swells morphing into thunderous waves that crashed below, each striking the seabed with sufficient force to shake the ground. In the surge of white water that followed each wave, a roar ensued as loud as a passing train.

“This is where Danny came to work out his problems,” Emma said. “Relationships and the like.”

A year earlier, Danny told me he had proposed to a woman, a joyous event for a man with a self-professed slow-start on the dating scene. A letter inked shortly after that delivered the crushing news that his fiancée had been unfaithful; marriage no more.

After watching the sea, we returned to the parking lot where we sat at a picnic table beside the cars. Above, the last of the mist had peeled away to leave a blazing blue sky.

“Danny’s illness was horrific,” Kristine said, clenching her hands. “Intractable pain, vomiting, and bleeding. He drowned in blood.” She beseeched me with penetrating eyes. “Dr. Muñoz asked repeatedly if he could have eaten shrimp, but
you
know Danny: it was impossible.” She paused, then: “I think it was a drink that poisoned him.”

I raised my brows.

Emma explained. “A juice he drank every morning while commuting to his surf shop in Half Moon Bay. Just before dying, he told us he thought it was the drink that sickened him. It hadn’t tasted right. He saved the bottle with the remnants and asked us to pick it up from his cabin.”

My heart skipped. “Do you have it?”

Emma went to the car and returned with a paper bag, wrinkled and twisted at the top. She extracted a half-filled bottle containing an orange fluid and handed it to me.

“Did you tell Dr. Muñoz about this?” I asked.

“Yes, but he made little of it. He was convinced Danny ate shrimp without knowing it.”

I studied the label …

Electric Jolt

Electrolyte Replacement Fluid for Serious Athletes

♥

Made with Minerals from the Sea.

In small print below a picture of a flexed arm with magnificent biceps was the manufacturer’s name:
BioVironics Pharmaceuticals and Neutraceuticals, Germantown, Maryland
.

“May I keep this?” I asked.

Emma nodded.

Germantown, Maryland
. I knew the name well. The day before, I was on the outskirts of Germantown when I received the summons from my supervisor at PAHO to call Randy Flagstaff.

I wondered now whether the town might bring other un-pleasantries in the form of this juice called
Electric Jolt
.

Compared to private
colleges, the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a bargain, although I couldn’t have gone there had it not been for work-study. My mother had exhausted her savings to pay for my brother’s education so when it came my time to go to college I had to work my way through bussing dishes, guiding tours, and shelving books. My least favorite task was manning the all-night reading room during exam week. The work was as menial—checking out reserve readings and performing clean-up duties—as it was disruptive of the circadian rhythm. Every hour, I toured the room to keep awake, passing insomniacs and last-minute crammers who hovered over books with bottles of caffeinated tablets beside them. Dawn never came soon enough.

I thought of that job as I flew back to Washington, D.C. after leaving Kristine and Emma. I had driven to the airport directly from Bean Hollow State Park to catch a flight standby, but because the only seats that remained were middle ones, I was sandwiched between two hefty men. In the meantime, behind me, a gaggle of cheerleaders traveling to a competition prevented me from napping. To pass time, I reviewed the slides Muñoz and Bjornstad had presented on Capitol Hill, disturbed still by what I believed were missives personalized to my life.

After deplaning, I placed a call to someone I thought might help explain the elusive missives. Two features convinced me they came from a published source: the precise punctuation—as in the use of commas in
But she, surrendering to …,
and
… he lived under the earth,—
and, as Bjornstad had noted, the spelling of
chimaera
in the missive,
… not that rich chimaera.
In my unabridged dictionary at home, the spelling of “chimaera” was listed as an older, less employed version for “chimera,” making me think the missive had been lifted from a dated work.

I listened now as my phone rang.

“Squills,” a voice answered.

Lawrence P. Squills was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. During my sophomore year, I took a course in nineteenth century literature that he taught, a decision I came to regret. Tall and gaunt, he came to class each day with a stack of books under one arm and a pipe dangling from his mouth. He peppered students with questions and searched for those who hadn’t done the readings. When he found his target, he was merciless. For that reason, I did my homework assiduously although it spared me little pain because he discovered one of my innermost angsts: reading aloud. It was a phobia I developed in middle school when a teacher had me read a sonnet aloud before the class. The wires in my brain somehow crossed to produce an anxiety short-circuit. I panted as my heart raced and beads of sweat dripped down my face. I felt like I’d been asked to read a novel rather than fourteen lines. Three-quarters into it, I made the mistake of looking up. A sea of faces gawked at my discomfort.

Thereafter, I did what I could to avoid reading before others: I feigned sore throats, laryngitis, dental problems—
anything
to keep from reading aloud. Professor Squills, having discovered the pathology, insisted I read at almost every class thereafter. When I tried to drop out of the course, he called me to his office.

“I won’t sign it,” he announced, waving the drop form.

“Why not?”

“Because, you need to face your fear, and I’ll help you do it.”

“Which fear?” I asked.

He smiled. “You have more than one?”

“Look, I want to drop the class because I need credits elsewhere to apply to medical school.”

“Anton Chekhov and W. Somerset Maugham became doctors, but they found time for literature. Can’t you?”

“Fine, give me hell,” I said. I left his office empty-handed.

In class, he continued to call on me to read, although he did so with a different tack: He assigned only a few lines each time and praised me after I finished reading them, not in a way that made me feel like a teacher’s pet, but with a crisp “Yup” or “Great.” Slowly,
painfully
, the burden eased but not entirely.

“Congratulations, you stuck it out,” he told me after the course ended.

I thanked him.

We met periodically thereafter in his book-lined office. During one visit, he told me we shared an experience.

“Which?” I asked.

“My father left me, too. That’s when I turned to books. I found refuge in them.”

At graduation ceremonies, I introduced him to my mother. It was the last time I saw him, but in the years that followed, we kept in touch through Christmas cards.

I greeted him now on the phone.

“Are you calling from a conference?” he asked. “I hear voices in the background.”

“I’m at an airport.”

I told him about the outbreak and my CDC affiliation.

“Missives?” he asked.

I read each aloud.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I know their source, but let me check something first. May I call you back?”

“Will five minutes do?” I asked.

“
Five minutes
?”

I told him I had always wanted to see what it’d feel like to assign a professor a deadline.

With the three-hour
time change between coasts, it was 10 p.m. when I arrived home. I found Eve in the bedroom unfolding a Batik maternity dress she purchased six months earlier in Indonesia shortly after learning she was pregnant. She traveled to Indonesia after quitting her job at
Qantas
to volunteer at a shelter for battered women, a cause she held dear. With plans to move to the U.S. after that to prepare for marriage, she felt it was her last available window to volunteer.

She set the dress down as I walked into the room.

“Did they feed you?” she asked as we hugged.

“Nothing,” I replied.

She shook her head. “They treat people like cattle now. How about we go out for a bite?”

We stepped into a hot, heavy night. Beads formed across Eve’s forehead as we walked, and we stopped periodically to allow her to catch her breath. Eventually, we came to a small grill, and she sighed with relief in the cool air.

“Last night was a bear,” she said. “The baby kept poking me in the ribs with its feet.”

“Did you nap today?”

“Briefly … until the doctor called.”

I sat straighter. “What did he say?”

She dabbed her mouth, her large brown eyes peering over the napkin. “He wanted to schedule a Caesarian-section so a surgeon could biopsy the breast mass at delivery.”

“Great idea.”

She frowned. “You know how I feel about Caesarians. I told him I wanted to deliver naturally.”

“What did he say?”

“He relented, but reluctantly. He didn’t want to delay the biopsy.”

“Nor do I.”

She took my hand. “Step-by-step, Jason.”

When it came to health care, Eve was less main stream than I. After learning she harbored the
BRAC1
gene that placed her at increased risk for breast and ovarian cancer, she turned to Ayurvedic medicine, Buddhism, and Zen philosophy. She began meditating regularly.

“There’s more travel ahead,” I warned her. While riding home from the airport, Bird called to insist I go to Ecuador with Muñoz.

“Yes, I heard. Randy Flagstaff dropped by today.” She reached into her purse and extracted a small package. “He left this for you.”

Inside were a cell phone, passport, and business cards with the inscription:

Oscar Fields

Sales Manager

Omega-3-Seafood

Frederick, Maryland

“Your identity,” she explained.

“Seafood?” I mumbled.

“You’re traveling as a prospective buyer.”

I found it odd to see my photo in a passport paired with the name
Oscar Fields
and a birth place of Iowa.

Eve took the passport and set it down. “Are you ready to talk about your trip to California?”

I hesitated.

“I visited Danny’s house,” I said after a while. “I found a letter he was writing to me in which he said someone had broken into his home and took the letters I’d written him.”

“Why would they do that?”

I shook my head and told her about the rest of the trip.

After eating, we walked home along empty streets, although with traffic almost absent, the black SUV that trailed us was hard to miss. At least Flagstaff was true to his word: a security detail had been assigned.