Moonbird Boy (25 page)

Bo frowned. "That was Zach. I was there, Ann. I saw them leave that note."

"Then you can help put this Zach in jail."

Bo wiped sand from Molly's nose with her shirttail. "What's your connection to MedNet?" she asked.

In the silence that followed, the Jack Russells careened in an arc against the edge of the sea and then ran like small white deer to fling themselves beside Ann Lee Keith on the sand.

"It's a long story," she answered over the sound of panting, "involving a man named Alexander Morley."

"Morley died last night of a heart attack in Phoenix."

"Good." The older woman smiled bleakly. "On my next vacation I'll take a trip to dance on his grave."

"And the story?"

"May shock you," Keith said softly.

Bo squinted at the sun, which seemed to be creating elongated bubbles in the stratosphere. She could see them at the edge of her field of vision, pulsing in and out of visibility. An optical illusion, of course. It meant she needed to get out of the glare.

"I'm not easily shocked," she told Ann Keith, "but I am, among other things, manic-depressive, and the sun is beginning to do weird things with the air. Usually it's still cloudy at this time of the morning. My apartment is only a few blocks from here. Would you mind if we...?"

"Of course," Ann Keith said, standing immediately and clipping the terriers to their red leashes. "Light sensitivity seems to be shaping up as a cornerstone of manic-depressive illness, doesn't it? It's even been documented in children of manic-depressive parents and may actually be a causal factor in the etiology of the illness."

"You seem to know a lot about this," Bo said, carrying Molly with one hand wrapped under the round, pink stomach. The puppy made paddling motions with her paws.

"I'm a neurophysiologist ... or was."

"Was?"

"What I am now is merely a teacher of neurophysiology. I'll tell you the whole story. It's surprising that Adam didn't tell you himself."

"Neither of us was in great shape when we first met," Bo said. "I'm afraid he wasn't making a lot of sense and I wasn't listening, anyway."

"No wonder you got along so well," Ann Keith laughed.

It was a rich, husky laugh that sounded, Bo thought, like wooden poker chips poured onto a felt table. Her father had a box of wooden poker chips, red, white, and blue. She could almost see the colored discs drifting in the air beside an empty lifeguard tower on the beach to her right. It was definitely time to get out of the sun.

"Your home feels comfortable; I like it," Keith said after they were settled in Bo's living room. Molly had gone to her box for a nap, and the Jack Russells were positioned like Victorian statuary at the feet of their mistress.

"So tell me," Bo said, breathing mist from the iced Coke in her hand.

"Adam was always a strange child," Keith began without preamble, carefully placing her iced tea on one of the raffia coasters Bo had found at a garage sale for a nickel apiece. "He never outgrew his night terrors, had learning problems that defied diagnosis, but also occasional bursts of talent and brilliance, especially where words, word games, poetry, drama, that sort of thing were involved. Adam never knew his father, my husband, Duncan. Dunk was killed in the crash of a private plane when Adam was a year and a half old.

"When Adam was three he began to memorize cigarette commercials on television. Then it was a fascination with the names of plants, which he'd invariably recite in three syllables. 'Oak' was 'the oak tree,' 'tulip' was 'to a lip,'
etc.
Nothing clinical, you understand, just strange. Accompanying this was a complete inability to comprehend parts of a whole, fractions. To the moment of his death I imagine that Adam still thought one fourth plus one fourth equaled two eighths. So by his sophomore year in high school he was in remedial math classes while making A’s in English and, particularly, in French. He was nearly obsessed with French, listened to French popular music, subscribed to Paris Match."

Here she stopped to watch for some reaction from Bo. When there was none, she said, "Do you know what ‘mort’ means in French?"

"Um, dead," Bo answered. "But that doesn't necessarily mean he named himself 'dead.' He may have chosen 'Mort' because of Mort Sahl, the famous stand-up comic. Maybe Sahl was his inspiration."

"Please let me finish, Bo," Ann Keith said, stroking one of the terriers with a trembling hand. "Adam's schizophrenia hit during the summer after his sophomore year. It hit suddenly, it hit hard, and it never let up. He was only sixteen. By the time he was eighteen he'd been hospitalized over thirty times, nearly starved to death in the streets once before the police found him, had to have two toes amputated after they froze. Every medication available at the time was tried, nothing worked. On his eighteenth birthday Adam told me he didn't want to live if there was no hope he'd ever get well. He was barely shaving, just a skinny, terrified boy. A month later he tried to kill himself."

Bo was silent, felt her apartment walls detach from the ordinary world and become nothing but a space in which she and Ann Lee Keith already knew a reality too painful to define for those on the outside. Her sister, Laurie, Bo remembered with love, had been a slender youngster of twenty when her acute depression left her no option but death.

"There were subsequent attempts," Keith continued, her head bowed, "each more serious than the last. Adam was missing for weeks at a time, living in the streets. Late in that year he brought a girl to the house. He said the girl was pregnant, and that it was his child."

"Bird's mother," Bo interjected. "Who is she? Where is she

"She called herself Frito," Ann Keith sighed. "I arranged for her to enter a church-sponsored residential program for pregnant teenagers. She told the staff there that her name was Cyndi Lauper, but of course that's just the name of a singer they all admired. That's the name on Charles's birth certificate, on the line where it says, 'Mother.' Cyndi Lauper. She was, obviously, a deeply troubled young woman. She used drugs, left the program several times only to return when she was sick and hungry. The day after Charles was born, she left and didn't come back. A month later her body was found in an abandoned building frequented by drug users. I like to think that she fought to stay alive long enough to give birth to her baby. Her body is buried in our family plot. Anyway, after she left they called me to come and get the baby, or else convince Adam to release him for adoption.

"Adam was lost in his own torment, not competent to make that, or any, decision. I had taken the legal steps necessary to sign the release form myself, but something made me find Adam and force him to accompany me to the facility where they were keeping the baby. He was psychotic that day, but fighting hard to keep it under control. When he saw the baby, he..."

Bo studied the melting ice in her Coke as the other woman took a deep breath and then said, "These memories are so difficult now. You don't happen to have a cigarette, do you?"

Bo grinned. "As a matter of fact, yes. It was your son, by the way, who badgered me into quitting. But I got a little manic the other night and bought a pack. Only smoked one. They're out on the deck."

"It figures," Ann Keith nodded minutes later, pacing the redwood boards still shaded by the building and taking shallow drags on one of Bo's cigarettes. "He was always trying to get me to quit. I finally did, but he never knew. Amazing how one never stops craving them, isn't it?"

Bo had pulled a deck chair into the shade for herself. "What happened when he saw his son?" she prompted.

"He began to cry, to sob. The baby looked so much like him, you see. I don't know what was going through Adam's mind, but he finally said three things. He said the baby would be named Charles, because Baudelaire wrote ‘Fleurs du Mal’, and Duncan, for his father. He begged me not to send the baby away. And then... and then he begged me either to find a way to help him, or to let him die. It was an ultimatum. He was absolutely desperate and absolutely serious. I knew that the next suicide attempt would be the last."

"But there was no suicide," Bo said. "Adam got better."

Ann Keith lit another cigarette and watched a pelican glide by, far at sea. "I've never told anyone what I'm about to tell you," she said. "It can't be proven; Adam's body has been cremated. And if you repeat this, I'll deny ever having said it."

Bo measured the woman, the manicured hands and red linen blazer, the intelligent blue eyes that both were and weren't Mort Wagman's eyes. Ann Lee Keith had once been a woman of great feeling, even drama, Bo recognized. That earlier personality lay in patches now beneath the mature one, hammered by experience to a steady, muted glow. Ann Keith was a survivor, Bo sensed, and a decent person.

"Why would you tell me whatever this is?" she asked.

"You have the power to give my grandson to me, or to keep him from me. If I were in your position I would want to know everything I could before making that decision. You have asked why Adam severed contact with me for over two years. I could lie to you, blame his behavior on the illness. But you'd know I was lying, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, I believe my grandson is in danger. Surely you can see that nothing but the whole truth will do now."

Intuition throbbed around Bo. It felt like a warm cloak on the skin rather than a process of the mind. It was what her grandmother had called "the sight," even though, Bo thought, it involved feeling more than vision.

"I've already seen the whole truth," Bo said, standing to face her friend's mother. "I saw it in your son's kindness and see it now in your courage. Don't tell me your secret. It isn't necessary in any event. The court will release Charles to you; you're his grandmother, you want him, and you can provide for him. Meanwhile, I'll release him to you immediately. All it will take is a phone call."

The Jack Russells were circling, curious, aware that something had changed. Bo scratched one behind his ear as she watched Ann Keith stub out her cigarette thoughtfully. The activity of the dogs and the scent of cigarette smoke reminded Bo of Mort at the lodge, pacing in a circle beside her, urging her to quit smoking, telling her he'd stop pacing if... But there was something else. Mort had said something else, Bo remembered. He'd said dogs circle around because their ancestors circled to nest in high grass. He paced in a circle, he said, because somebody, "somebody in my family," he said, put animal brains in his head.

Bo felt her eyes move upward from the dog to those of Ann Keith in dawning realization. Dr. Ann Lee Keith, a neurophysiologist renowned for her research on fetal cell implants! The deck, the dogs, the sea—everything seemed to diminish and fade in contrast to the awareness unfolding in Bo's mind.

"Oh, my God," she said softly. "Was it one of these dogs?"

"Adam did tell you, didn't he?" Keith nodded. Her voice was soft, almost amused.

"I thought he was still psychotic. He also told me he was going to marry a frog. I thought it was all just nonsense."

"Not all. Would you like to hear it now?"

"Only if you want to tell it," Bo answered. "Off the record."

"Thank you, Bo Bradley," Ann Keith smiled, "for being who you are. I do want to tell it. How about another iced tea, and then I'd like to get my grandson. Will that do?"

"I'll call the hospital right now," Bo agreed.

"Hospital? Why is Charles in a hospital?"

"I'll explain," Bo said, following Ann Keith and three terriers into her own living room, which did, she thought, feel comfortable. And the dachshund puppy carefully leaving a puddle on Andrew's newspaper on the floor beside the couch was an especially homey touch.

Leaning on the counter as Bo stirred another glass of tea, Ann Keith explained that Alexander Morley had made escalating monetary offers for the use of her name as one of MedNet's board of advisors. "I was the cutting-edge name," she told Bo. "I was published everywhere, got grants just by asking. My name on an advisory board meant the endeavor was not only competent but ethical, neither of which term has ever been applicable to MedNet. They're charlatans, the worst sort of avaricious medical fakes. I rejected Morley's offers for years. Any connection to that nest of sharks is instant death in the medical community. They're universally despised by serious medical practitioners and researchers. But at the end I needed money for Adam's surgery. A lot of money. To get it, I sold out. That's why my name is on their letterhead. They bought me. And overnight I was persona non grata everywhere. The university keeps me on as a professor only because I had tenure before this happened. Frankly, I wouldn't blame them if they threw me out."

"And this surgery," Bo prodded gingerly. "Did you really...?"

Ann Keith jabbed at an ice cube in her glass. "Do you understand that my son was going to die?" she asked. "There was no question in my mind then, nor is there any now, that I did the right thing. I didn't perform the surgery myself. That was done by a Scandinavian neurosurgeon in a private European clinic. It's really quite simple and not at all dangerous, as invasive brain surgery goes.

"I had promised Adam I'd help him, Bo. There was nothing else I knew to do, and even that was entirely experimental. So I took MedNet's money and, well, I won't go into the details, but I was able to get the necessary fetal brain cells through a medical lab. They were from a canine embryo of three weeks' gestation. The embryo had been removed as part of another experiment, although its siblings were not. I extracted, prepared, and packed the cells, flew with Adam to Europe, and the surgery was performed. I assume you understand the principle."

"Fetal cells will grow into whatever they were supposed to grow into," Bo recited, "even when transplanted to a different organism, and the host organism is less likely to reject them than it is the same cells from an older donor."

"Sometimes. There have been exciting results using this technique with Parkinson's disease, but of course the fetal brain cells used were not animal, but human, donated by women undergoing abortion. The ethical considerations are so overwhelming that research in this area is difficult. As an alternative, another focus now is on development of 'engineered' cells grown in labs rather than taken from embryos. It's far too early to predict whether or not these cells will perform."