The 100 Year Miracle (26 page)

“The medicine you gave me is wearing off.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“I need some more,” he said.

“The supply is very limited. I’m sorry.”

Harry wrapped his hand around the door just under Rachel’s chin to keep her from shutting it. It was getting harder to control her temper. If he wasn’t careful, she would have to slam it closed on his fingers.

“It’s very important,” he said. “I think this may be bigger than you realize.”

It took a large number of the creatures to make each dose, and secreting them away remained difficult. Between what Rachel needed in the tanks and what she was taking herself, there wasn’t much to share, at least not yet.

“I can’t risk diluting my experiments,” she said.

“You don’t understand. I’ve just come from the doctor, and I have results to report.”

He had her attention, and she wanted to go fetch her notebook, write down what he said word for word—word for word in her own code, of course. There was nothing left in English. Not that she needed the notes. She’d memorized them. All of them. That she could memorize them—not just the narrative accounts, that was easy—but she had memorized the temperature readings, nutrient ratios, and animal densities of each and every flask, not to mention times, dosages, experimental conditions. Hundreds of numbers.

Everything just stuck. It was like she’d been struck with sudden-onset eidetic memory. It was incredible. She had noted that, too, in her log. Its potential as a memory and concentration aid beyond even analgesics was more than she could wrap her mind around at the moment. Students with ADHD? Dementia patients? Alzheimer’s? This drug seemed to touch every part of the nervous system and the brain itself. She would not risk Harry seeing her notebook, not even in code. She would memorize what he said to her. She took a deep breath through her nose and readied her mind to do it.

“Tell me,” Rachel said.

Harry shook his head. “Trade.”

“One more dose,” Rachel said.

“No. I want to be in your trial. I want to be a study patient.”

Trial? Rachel reeled. Did Harry believe this was official? Something overseen by the university? Something that would make it all the way to the human trial phase? Rachel wanted to laugh. She supposed it was. She had simply skipped over everything in between. It was the chemistry equivalent of flying a kite in an electrical storm.

Rachel had to word this carefully. “I’ll give you the doses I can for as long as I can, but that’s the best I can offer.”

She could see the tension in the left side of Harry’s body. He was leaning on his cane, and the fingers of his right hand, those still wrapped around the door, were curling in on themselves. She didn’t have to worry about him trying to push in. She didn’t even need her foot blocking the door. He had little strength or dexterity left in that side at all.

Harry pulled his eyebrows down and together. He looked like he was chewing on the inside of his mouth. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“What I learned today,” he said, “it has implications. More people like me need to be studied. They need to test this drug.”

“I know,” Rachel said. “People with all sorts of conditions could be helped, but there are processes.”

“Whatever the steps are, you promise you will include us?” he asked.

“When there is enough of the drug, yes,” Rachel said.

“And I will be one of those people? I’ll get the doses you have now, and then I’ll be in the trial later?”

Harry did not understand. It would be years before a trial would happen through official channels. Of course, years in chemistry was nothing. It was normal. It was unavoidable. Years to people, though, that was different. Harry did not have years. It was sad, but it was unchangeable. She started to explain, to put the words together in her mind, and then she stopped. Why not make the promise? She would know, but he wouldn’t. In the end, what difference would it make but to work out better for the both of them?

Rachel started again. Yes, he would be in the trial. Yes, he could keep seeing his own doctor—Woo, was it?—during the study. Yes, as long as he saw the study doctors, too. She said yes to everything he asked because there was no reason not to.

After he had extracted his promises, Rachel asked for one of her own. He must take careful note of all the side effects and all the symptom relief he experienced. Careful note. She said it again. Times, effects on a scale of one to five, descriptions of everything, what he ate and drank and when. Anything he could think of. But he must not type it and save copies. He could only write these things down, and he must keep the notes on him at all times. He must not let anyone else see them. No one. Not even Tilda. Then he would give the notes to her in the morning. He would not keep a copy for himself.

He agreed. Rachel wanted to make him swear on his mother’s grave, on scout’s honor, on a bible, but she didn’t. She took him on his word because she believed he would not risk being cut off.

She left him in the hallway while she ducked back inside and used what was left in the flasks to mix up another dose. It was a little more than she’d given him last time. She weighed it on her scale and made her own notes. It was a little more than a little more. It was one-and-a-half times as much. It would be good to note the difference in his symptoms and duration of relief.

Harry took the spoon from her at the door, swallowed it with a face, and handed it back. “You’re going to be a very wealthy woman, you know.”

Rachel did not reply. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the monetary value others would place on what she had. It was that, to her, the money was entirely beside the point. She was there to save her own life, and there were only two days left to do it.

*   *   *

Epoxy is a mixture of resin and hardener, which are sold in separate containers to keep them from combusting. The two had to be mixed in a precise ratio, which cured through an endothermic reaction, meaning it gave off heat, sometimes a lot, sometimes, if you weren’t careful, enough to boil and catch fire. The clerk, a man of retiring age, at the marine supply store had warned Tilda to be careful of the vapors. In enclosed spaces, they had been known to cause brain damage and blindness.

If it had been a sales pitch, it had worked. She threw a mask and goggles into her cart, along with a shallow pan for mixing small batches of the stuff, thick gloves, and a stiff brush for applying it, some sail tape and various other odds and ends that had seemed useful at the time. The total for not a lot of things had been staggering.

Tilda, who was wearing the grubbiest clothes she’d brought, pulled on her headlamp and gloves, along with the mask and goggles, and got to work there under the deck. Making sure each area of rot was clean and dry, she mixed the resin and hardener, along with a tint to help hide the patches as best she could. The concoction immediately let off a stench that shot through the mask and into her nose, a caustic, chemical smell that burned her nasal passages and set off a headache as quickly as lighting a match.

Hurrying, both because it would harden on her and because she wanted to get the job done before her vision started to go, she began to apply the epoxy, pressing, filling, and smoothing each area. She had decided to buy the quart rather than the gallon, and by the time she’d moved to the hiking boards, she was beginning to worry it wouldn’t be enough.

When she was done, she pulled off the protective gear and wrapped up the disposable pan and brush, which would never be good for anything again. Wanting to get as far away from the stuff as she could while it cured, she grabbed the sail bag and dragged it to the other side of the deck.

It would take twenty-four hours for the epoxy to harden but far less than that to see what horrors might await within the many yards of fabric in front of her. Unlike bigger sailboats,
Serendipity
had no supplementary motor. It was wind or nothing.

Tilda unzipped the bag and began pulling out handfuls of sail. It had been shoved inside, not folded neatly. Some mariners would argue this was better, that repeated fold lines would weaken the cloth. Tilda considered this an excuse for laziness.

This section of decking was only about seven feet high, plenty high enough to work, but she found herself ducking as she spread the fabric out. It was covered in salt and dirt, was of indeterminate age, and needed, on principle, to be replaced. But when Tilda got down on her hands and knees to run her headlamp over it inch by inch, she found only two small tears.

She scrambled up and went to fill her bucket at the outdoor spigot. Adding a good squirt of dish soap, which sank down into the water like a skinny turquoise snake, Tilda plunged the brush into the water up to her forearm and sloshed it about before she had time to think about how cold it was. Working from top to bottom, Tilda scrubbed the sail, drying it with an old bath towel as best she could, before flipping it over and doing the other side. Then, careful to clear all the grains of sand from around each tear, she unwrapped the sail tape. Using a bit more than the directions called for, she finally finished and stood, running her lamp over each spot one last time. White tape on white sail, the repairs barely showed.

Tilda was feeling good about her work and was just turning to gather up her trash.

“Jesus Christ!”

The man was standing two feet behind her. She jumped back and put a hand to her chest.

He looked chastised. “I’m sorry.”

Tilda put both hands on her hips and turned in a half circle to let herself settle.

“I just saw you under here,” he went on, “and well, curiosity got the better of me.” He held out his hand. “Hooper, UW Biology.”

Tilda dropped her hands from her hips and shook. “I read the article in the paper.”

She had seen him for days, of course, from a distance. He was the one she thought of as Ichabod. Up close, he looked older than she’d imagined.

“This your boat?” he asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “I’m just helping out a friend.”

Almost nothing about that sentence was true, but it was all the truth she felt she owed. He still had some explaining to do.

Hooper nodded. He looked down at the sail by his feet and over to the hull. She could see him looking for something else to say and not finding it. This was a man who knew nothing and cared nothing for boats, which was fine, but it underlined the question hanging between them.

She turned and squared herself to him, crossing her arms over her chest.

He fell to the power of her stare. “I believe you know one of my researchers,” he said.

Now they were getting somewhere, she thought.

“I’m not sure she’s a young woman who many people really get to know,” Tilda said.

“I have to confess I haven’t done the job I should have with her.”

Tilda didn’t comment.

“I was wondering,” Hooper went on, “about her off hours, how she spends her time here.”

“If you’re concerned, you should speak to my ex-husband. He’s the one who has taken her in. I’m just visiting.”

“Of course,” Hooper said. “I don’t mean to involve you. I was just wondering if you could tell me if she’s set up anything inside, anything like a lab.”

Tilda, who had the ability to raise one eyebrow independent of the other, did so. “I take it her lab isn’t sanctioned?”

Hooper gave a quarter of a smile, forced and meant only to avoid a direct answer. His skin was so full of folds and creases, it was as if someone had wadded up a piece of paper several times before trying unsuccessfully to smooth it back out. It was an interesting face if not a handsome one.

“Can I see it?” he asked.

“Her lab?”

“Yes.”

Tilda shook her head. “She’s banned me from the room. Like I said, you’ll have to speak to Harry. He owns the house.”

“I don’t suppose you could describe it to me?”

“Her room?”

“The equipment.”

30.

Harry made Tilda stop at a mailbox on the way to the ferry.

“Why don’t you just put it in our mailbox? The postman will pick it up.”

Tilda realized as she said it that she’d claimed joint ownership of the box. It was a slip of the tongue, but she worried Harry would think she meant something by it. Harry paid no attention to her word choice at all and, therefore, had no thoughts about any of it. He only cared about dropping his thick manila envelope in a big, blue mailbox on the corner.

“No,” he said. “A public box.”

“Why?”

“It’s more secure.”

“What’s in the envelope?”

“Papers.”

Tilda waited for more and didn’t get it.

“Then give it to me. I’ll take it to the post office myself in the morning. That’ll be even more secure.”

“No, the blue box.”

Tilda opened her mouth and closed it. The envelope was on his lap facedown across his knees. He was entitled to his privacy, of course, but people are entitled to all sorts of things that others don’t want to give them.

She sighed to release her frustration. There weren’t many blue boxes on the island, but there was one on the way to the ferry. She couldn’t even claim it was inconvenient, and so when they approached, she pulled up so that Harry’s door was close to it. He still had to undo his seat belt and climb out, but he did that without assistance. His cane was in the backseat, and it stayed there while he walked to the front of the box, pulled down the lever, and dropped his secret envelope into the mouth, which closed with a loud, metal clang.

Then he climbed back in the car, and neither of them said anything else about it for the rest of the night.

*   *   *

The lower levels of the symphony hall were full. Harry no longer had season tickets, so when he’d bought them the day before, he’d had to settle for one of the upper box levels high above the stage and flat against the hall’s outermost walls.

All the people who filled the hall had started out filling the underground garage, where he and Tilda had wound their way down, one link in a whole chain of cars looking for a spot. Then all the people had gotten out of their cars and had gone to stand at the banks of elevators to wait some more. The men stood with their hands in their pockets rattling their keys and change, and the women fiddled with the iridescent olive, orange, and burgundy shawls they had all purchased from museum gift shops. Then the elevators came, and through the doors of the hall they all went, flashing their tickets to the doormen and going to wait some more at the bars that sold wine in plastic cups before the performance. And after they drank it, they all went for a preemptive pee, where only the women had to wait.