The Cure (15 page)

If it was really true, a hundred million dollars would be nothing to these people.

That night as Dylan lay beneath a cheap comforter and an electric blanket set on high, he did not sleep at all. He rose at four as usual and made a pot of coffee and settled in to wait. He would not take the
Mary Lynn
out lobstering that day, or if he did it would be long after sunrise, because he had to wait until they opened for business in Milwaukee’s time zone.

At precisely nine o’clock he dialed the number on the letter, not the one on the letterhead, but the direct line in the body of the letter itself. A woman answered and he told her who he was and why he was calling, and within half a minute he was talking to Lee Hanks, the president and chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers. The man greeted him as if they were old friends and told him to name a place and time, happy to meet him, delighted to have a chance to talk about it, anything he could do to help with preparations?

The next two days went by quickly.

Dylan had to buy a suit. He had to drive to Cambridge to do it, since the last men’s clothing store in Dublin had been closed for nearly a year. While he was there Dylan also bought a black leather briefcase and a legal pad to put inside it. He met with Riley twice more, once at the diner and once at Riley’s little apartment. It was important that he get an executed power of attorney and make sure he had a solid understanding of his client’s wishes, since he would be making decisions on Riley’s behalf at the negotiation table. After two months of working for Riley Keep, Dylan had only just begun to understand he really was a client, and with that understanding came a grudging respect, and with the respect, a deeper fear of losing Hope.

Henry allowed the meeting at the church without asking any questions other than the day and time. Dylan arrived early, feeling uncomfortable and ridiculous with the tie around his neck and his old nylon coat on over the new black suit and his old brown dress shoes. He had forgotten to buy black dress shoes when he bought the suit.

He parked half a block away because he did not want them to see his truck, all beat up like it was. He need not have bothered. Hanks was fifteen minutes late. Dylan stood with his cracked and callused hands clasped nervously behind his back, watching through the conference room window as the man’s stretch limousine glided to a stop outside, followed by two black Lincoln Town Cars. He counted twelve men and women coming up the freshly shoveled sidewalk toward him, almost all of them in black or dark blue woolen overcoats with muted scarves and leather gloves. He felt like David staring out across a frozen battlefield at Goliath and his army.

But they weren’t that way at all. On the contrary, after ten minutes in the room with Lee Hanks and his people, Dylan felt as if he had just made a dozen bosom friends. Hanks declined the chair at the far end of the long table and sat down right beside him. He seemed a remarkably energetic man for his age, which Dylan guessed at sixty-five or seventy. The fact that he was completely bald and clean-shaven made the thick black eyebrow that spanned unbroken across his forehead all the more striking. His dark eyes constantly sought Dylan’s, the flesh around them crinkling with pleasure as he explored Dylan’s interests and background, asking all kinds of slightly personal questions. It was as if the room had narrowed down to just the two of them, as if the others were not listening. Dylan found himself talking freely about his family, their heritage in Dublin going back two centuries, and shipbuilding, and lobstering, and in the midst of the bonhomie when the man asked, “So when did you return to practicing law full time?” Dylan almost answered honestly before he realized what had happened.

The nature of the question meant Lee Hanks already knew the answer, and such a clumsy signal sent on the heels of such skillfully established camaraderie meant this man wanted Dylan to know he already knew the answer. It meant he wanted Dylan to understand he had been thoroughly researched and his weaknesses identified. When Dylan ignored the question and changed the subject Lee Hanks leaned back in his chair and smiled, and Dylan realized he had just lost the first round of negotiations.

It went downhill from there. Without acknowledging in any way that he was toying with a neophyte, Hanks ran the meeting with an iron fist gloved in velvet. He managed to imply sympathy when pointing out the unproven nature of the formula, and shook his head with great regret when Dylan mentioned his client’s “research” on a dozen hardened alcoholics, saying, “I’m afraid there must be some mistake, Mr. Delaney. After all, it would be a felony to conduct trials on human subjects at this stage.”

“They weren’t trials, exactly.”

“Oh, of course not. If something like that had been done, why we’d have to back away immediately. After all, you haven’t even submitted an IND.”

Dylan struggled to compose his face in a way that would imply he knew what an IND was. He put his elbows on the chair’s armrests and built a bridge before his face with weathered fingers. He nodded at what he hoped were the appropriate moments as Hanks and his immaculately dressed people discussed “our contacts at the CDER” and “PDUFA compliance” and “phase one protocols” and so forth. He smiled and shrugged and did his best to deflect questions he did not understand, saying he would have to get back to them on that, check with his principals on it, et cetera, until Lee Hanks asked him something and would not settle for a vague suggestion of an answer later in the week.

“I’m afraid we’ll need a certified letter right away, Mr. Delaney,” he said.

So Dylan had to say, “What was the question again?” and he tried to write it down, spelling some of the unfamiliar words phonetically, with everybody watching poker-faced as Hanks leaned forward and said, “That’s ‘HPLC chromatograms,’ Mr. Delaney.” And then he spelled the word.

Dylan sighed and put his number two pencil down on his brand-new legal pad. He looked around at all of them, and focused on a middle-aged man that he had noticed earlier, a guy with a full head of perfectly cut sandy hair, a square jaw, a yachtsman’s tan, and the bulbous blue-veined nose and rheumy, gimlet eyes of a person who could not postpone his first cocktail until the sun was past the yardarm.

“Sorry,” said Dylan. “I didn’t get your name?”

The man smiled, displaying perfect teeth. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Delaney. I’m Robert Palmer. I run sales and marketing for Mr. Hanks.”

“Ayuh, I thought I remembered that was your line of work from the introductions,” said Dylan. “So lemme ask ya something, if I could.”

“Certainly,” said the man, smiling at a woman across the table who inclined her shoulders slightly as if to say, I suppose we have to humor him.

“I was just wonderin’ what ya think a cure like this is worth?”

The man’s smile disappeared. He pursed his lips. “I’m afraid asset valuation isn’t really my area, Mr. Delaney.”

“Oh, I don’t mean ‘asset valuation.’ I was thinking more like, ya know, what would a fella pay for a dose of this stuff? Say like, a fella who had a real nice executive job and a big mortgage and maybe a weekend place to pay for, and a wife who’s kinda gotten used to jewelry, and a couple of German cars, and maybe a kid or two he’s gonna hafta send to some Ivy League school someplace? Say a fella who used to drink just socially, maybe over lunch or supper just to close a deal, ya know, but can’t seem to wait for lunch anymore? How much do ya think a fella like that would pay to take one pill and get that monkey off his back forever?”

Dylan sensed that Lee Hanks’s eyes never left his face as he asked his question, but one by one the others had turned to look at Robert Palmer, and Dylan felt a little sorry for the man because of course they all knew Dylan had it just exactly right, and yet he couldn’t let this Hanks fella beat him down that way; he had to do something. So he sat and waited with what he hoped was an expression of naïve curiosity on his face until the vice president of marketing said, “I expect a man like that would pay a great deal.”

“Right. A great deal. Okay, we’re talkin’ about a fella who’s pretty well off, so I guess a great deal would be, what, a quarter million dollars? For a guy with a kid at Harvard or wherever? Maybe even half a million. For one dose that cures him forever. That wouldn’t be too much to ask, would it?”

Dylan had to admire the poor man; he was still smiling as he said, “I wouldn’t know.” But the desperate longing in his gimlet eyes made a lie of that.

The woman who had shrugged began to speak rapidly, filling the awkward silence, changing the subject, but Dylan ignored her. Checking his Timex elaborately he said, “Oh, hey, excuse me. I’m sorry everybody, but there’s a thing I gotta do. Feel free to stay long as ya like; we’ve got the room until an elder board meetin’ at seven.” He stood and slipped his brand-new yellow legal pad into his brand-new empty briefcase. “You folks have reservations somewheres? There’s a Budget Inn and an Econo Lodge over on Highway 1, but I guess ya prob’ly saw that on your way in.”

Lee Hanks rose as well, extending his hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Delaney. I know tomorrow’s Saturday, but would you care to continue then?”

Dylan took his hand and looked him in the eye. He did not see respect there, but he did believe there was a reappraisal going on. “Hafta check my schedule, Mr. Hanks. How’s about ya call me in the mornin’? I imagine ya have my number.”

Lee Hanks said, “Of course,” letting Dylan reach the door before asking a final question, “Oh, Mr. Delaney . . . I’m curious. Has your client spent much time in Brazil?”

Puzzled, Dylan turned. He thought of Hope’s stories about her missionary days, and Bree’s shiny black hair and jet black eyes and dark brown skin, and Riley’s strange insistence that his name stay out of this, and Dylan thought it was important to be very careful with the words he used. “I have no idea, Mr. Hanks. Why?”

“It was just a thought.” The bald man smiled. “But you might mention that I asked.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

E
VEN THOUGH
T
EAL
P
OND
was way out in the woods at the far edge of Dublin, even though it was still only twenty-two degrees at noon, and even after working the busy Saturday breakfast shift at Sadie’s Downtown Diner, in spite of all of that, Riley could have run the whole way. He had put on fifteen pounds over the last couple of months, pure muscle on his chest and arms and legs. He tried to do a twenty-minute workout twice a day—sit-ups, push-ups, and squat thrusts every morning and evening—and he made a point of eating right. Alone in his little garage apartment Riley had constructed his own custom exercise equipment, screwing metal rings into the walls and ceiling to hold large springs and chains and weights, which he pushed and lifted and pulled against in certain ways. In addition to his new eyeglasses, he had a temporary bridge to fill the gaps in his front teeth, generic dentures that would hold him over until the dentist fit the custom ones he had ordered. Sometimes he stood before the full-length mirror, turning this way and that in his underwear, comparing himself to Dylan Delaney, feeling like he was maybe gaining on Hope’s handsome lobsterman and feeling all right about the changes to his body at least, even though he still avoided looking at the eyes behind his brand-new glasses and even if he couldn’t bring himself to bare his artificial smile.

Three guys emerged from behind the Wash & Save as Riley cut across the parking lot, one of them a very large man whom Riley thought he recognized. He knew what they’d been doing—he and Brice had warmed themselves beside laundromat dryer vents a few times in their day—and he knew what they had in mind. Before they got to him, Riley pulled three dollars from his coat pocket. He never left his job or his apartment without a lot of dollar bills. With all the homeless alcoholics coming to Dublin since the news shows started talking about the “mystery man” with a cure, you couldn’t walk two blocks in town without getting hit up for a handout.

It was a bad idea to show them all your money at once, so he spread the dollars around in different pockets and tried to be ready with one for every homeless guy he passed. The three from behind the Wash & Save came close, pleading hunger. Sure enough, one of them was the giant from Houston. It was the first real test of Riley Keep’s disguise: his glasses and his teeth, his clean-shaven face and close-cropped hair, and his new clean clothes. The huge man gave Riley a nearly toothless smile and said, “God bless you, mister,” as he took his cash, completely oblivious to the fact that Riley was the man from Henry’s Drug Store, the man who had the cure.

Riley knew their claims of hunger were probably a ruse to garner drinking money, but what of that? What difference would one more bottle make to three men such as these, when Riley had seen to it that they and everybody like them would be healed like him one day?

He longed to shout it from the rooftops. But he would never get the credit. He would never tell a living soul he was the source of the cure, because that would lead eventually to Stanley Livingston, the man they had arrested with Willa Newdale’s wooden cross in his pocket, the man suspected of her murder.

Leaving the giant and the other two beggars behind, Riley hurried on. His lungs burned from the frigid air as he climbed the hill above downtown and followed a narrow gravel road down the other side. It was good that he enjoyed walking. He couldn’t risk a car on minimum wage and tips at Sadie’s diner. If people knew he could afford a car, they would wonder how. After the spring thaw maybe he would get a bicycle, and in a year a cheap, used pickup truck, something people would believe a reformed drunk waiting tables could afford, but for now he had to walk.

In the valley on the other side of the hill Riley’s healthy strides brought him closer to the pond. A miserly sun loitered in the sky above the coast of Maine, doling out its frigid light on his progress. The frozen atmosphere felt solid in his nostrils. It was awfully cold for the Easter season, setting record lows every day with the long and bitter winter showing no sign of retreat. He reached the edge of town, where the boundless northern woods snatched at Dublin’s fringes, the densely packed spruce and pines standing at attention on either side of the road in spite of mounds of snow weighing down their bristles. Suddenly a pure white snowshoe hare dashed headlong across his path. At first Riley thought the rabbit’s panic had been caused by his own crunching footsteps, but then a red fox appeared at the tree line to fix golden eyes on him before slipping back into the shadows. As Riley passed the darkness in the evergreens where the fox had disappeared, he thought of a different forest, a southern place where steam arose from rain-soaked ground instead of from his lungs, where clothing was a liability, nakedness the best protection from the elements, and predators did not bother to hide from a passing human being.

Shaking his head to clear away that mournful place, Riley followed a sharp bend in the road and approached a row of vehicles parked in six inches of fresh powder along the shoulder. He noticed most of them were locked. People had never locked their cars back before Riley and Brice left Dublin, but with the homeless now roaming everywhere, those trusting days were over. Riley glanced at each car door as he passed. Locked. Locked. Locked. It was yet another sadness. But then he came to Hope’s brand-new Mercedes and smiled. Riley had selected that particular make and model because it was the top of the line, and would make Bill Hightower’s car look common by comparison. He had taken the bus to Portland, paying cash at the dealership and waiting until three in the morning to sneak it into town. Today would be the first time he had seen her since he had rolled into her driveway with the headlights off and parked her gift there with the keys and the title in her name on the front seat. He could hardly wait to see her at the wheel, even if she would never know it came from him.

Riley heard unexpected cheers and shouting in the distance. Snow clung to his boots as he left the road and followed a short trail between the pines. Dozens of footprints marked the way, but Riley could have found Teal Pond blindfolded. He had spent hundreds of hours skating on it growing up.

With every step the excited shouts grew louder. Now he heard the old familiar sound of clicking sticks. The pines beside the path thinned enough to grant his first glimpse of the pond in over twenty years. A bunch of kids flew past on the ice beyond the snowy branches, playing eight-on-eight and zipping all around the hockey puck like they were born on skates. The sight and sound of them became a time machine, spinning Riley back through decades to a sheltered world confined to home and school and skating, and just for a second Riley felt he was himself again, living childlike in the moment, clean and pure with nothing to hide, blithely unaware of violence or grief. Drawn forward toward a better past, Riley reached the tree line and the scene before him broadened. His pristine illusions vanished.

He had expected to find Hope alone with Bree and a few other kids. Hockey at Teal Pond had always been something of a secret in his youth—you had to keep it quiet or the cops would come shut down the game—but the trucks and cars along the road should have tipped him off that everything was different now. He saw at least a hundred other people, children and adults strung out around the edges of the ice, dressed in everything from hunter’s camouflage to brightly colored snowsuits. He saw real frames with nets set up for goals at either end of the ice instead of just a pair of some kid’s boots to shoot between. He saw boards laid all around to keep stray pucks from getting lost below the snow, and an actual warm-up tent, maybe thirty feet by thirty, at the north end of the pond beside another cleared-off area alive with figure skaters. Over at the embankment, exactly where Riley and Brice and all their pals once had built timid little fires and kept them small for fear of being found out, he saw people roasting marshmallows at a great roaring bonfire. Obviously, no one cared about the smoke attracting the police anymore, which had been the sole worry of his childhood on this pond.

Against his will came memories of all the other fires that he and Brice had built, in oil drums and in trash cans, and he tried to shut those thoughts away before they ruined everything. Brice was still a gaping wound inside his heart.

Riley spotted Hope skating over near the tent. He made his way in that direction, moving alongside the hockey game, careful to stay on the snow and not step out beyond the boards onto the cleared ice. Some of the spectators he passed had brought lawn chairs, but hardly anybody used them. It was too cold to sit around, so everybody stood in close huddles and stamped their feet and drank from steaming thermos cups and laughed while calling out advice and encouragement to the kids.

Drawing closer to the other end of the pond, Riley looked around but didn’t see Dylan. Maybe he would have her to himself. He tried to keep his hopefulness in check.

On the isolated patch of ice across the pond Hope skated among perhaps a dozen others, some of them content to simply circle, while others threw in something fancy now and then. She was all in white, from her figure skates to her one-piece snowsuit to her matching woolen cap and flowing scarf. People skated singly and in couples all around her, children shooting in and out between the adults’ legs, old folks moving slow with straight knees and much concentration, younger adults carrying on conversations as if skating took no more thought than walking. Hope seemed oblivious to them all. As Riley watched she suddenly flipped around and gathered speed with a short series of backward crossovers, watching out for others over her right shoulder. He saw the little crowd around her part as if on cue; a section of clear ice appeared and she did a step forward followed by a flawless axel, hanging in the air as if weightless, then moving into a graceful camel after her touchdown, arms extended identically, wrists cocked slightly, fingers composed as elegantly as any ballerina. It was executed so perfectly a nearby woman on the ice cried out in amazement and a couple who had been skating arm in arm behind her stopped dead in their tracks to clap. Hope giggled, hiding her face behind white gloved hands and shaking her head. Wooden now with self-consciousness, she melded back into the swirling flow of skaters as if to disappear among them.

Riley couldn’t breathe.

He watched as Hope restrained her fluid skating to simple laps around the ice, gliding smoothly among her community of friends, exchanging laughing comments, cheeks flushed with rosy health, smile as white as freshly fallen snow. Riley saw in Hope the world as it should be—graceful, effortless, lovely—all the words he knew fell short. The seminarian and professor in him thought of something, probably by Shakespeare.
As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.
Or maybe it wasn’t Shakespeare, but what of that? Riley only knew he longed to mix himself with her, to be in her life and to draw her into his forever.

The rhythmic pace of every skater near his ex-wife testified that he was not alone in this desire, for he saw their motions subtly shifting to match hers. It was as if Hope’s energy had soothed the aimless universe, spreading out to set the tempo of all life. Riley recognized this gathering of unity around her, had seen it often through the years. He remembered it surrounding her in high school, when he first fell in love. He remembered it in church, when he first saw its divine source. And against his will he remembered it in a clearing in the forest, in a wide circle of The People, dancing happily in celebration of Hope’s day, holding hands and singing in the smoky sunlight filtered through the soaring canopy, dancing in toward the center together, then backing out again, with Riley between Waytee and a naked man on one side and Hope between two women on the far side, Riley watching from a distance as she laughed in bare feet and a thin cotton shift—laughed, bubbling up and over with her love of life, the entire People moving as one, everybody come together in her honor, matching the rhythm of her steps with theirs, overjoyed because his precious Hope had been born that day and come to live with them. Riley remembered watching from the far side of the circle as the little wooden cross that he had carved for her bounced up and down on her chest with every barefoot dancing step. Riley remembered thinking,
This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.
And with that memory his eyes began to water—tears freezing on his lashes—because in all good conscience he could not think those words and mean them anymore.

How could he rejoice in memories of such a day? It had been the very day he spoke to The People of other missionaries coming, healing men who would make their teeth feel better and take away their bodies’ suffering. He remembered standing in the place of honor at the center of Hope’s birthday circle, telling them to trust the newcomers, as if the doctors were the ones to fear, as if The People were the ones he should protect. Oh, the horrible irony.

If only he had stayed to guide his Christian brothers from the States. He remembered his cowardly resistance to the sabbatical idea, sitting in their tiny cabin in a clearing, the weak satellite telephone signal further eroding his token effort. It was obvious the newcomers would need interpreters, a go-between to warn them of taboos. He was necessary, indispensable. But the missions board had argued well. It was only for two months, they said, a much deserved vacation after all his time away. Allow a month or so to introduce the doctors to The People and then return home to Maine. The doctors will be fine. You deserve a rest.

How those words had tempted him. After four straight years at work for the Lord without a break, he had been so very, very tired. But in the end it was not weariness that led him to the devil. It had been something infinitely worse.

With a worried look from Hope beside him in the darkness of their corrugated cabin, he had listened as the final question came.
Haven’t you succeeded?
What it meant, what he knew they really meant to ask, was had he disciplined their brutishness? And he—almighty Riley, tamer of the savages—could not bear to let them doubt his worth. After all, The People were not killing anymore, or drinking as they once had done. Most were true believers now. They could all be trusted.