The Way We Fall (25 page)

I had to wait until this morning to write this. Last night all I wanted to do was scream. I don’t think I could have held the pen without snapping it in two.

That connection, the fever, it doesn’t mean anything.

No, that’s not true. It means plenty. It just isn’t going to help us in any way at all.

Dad didn’t get back to the hospital until the evening. I was so excited I didn’t even ask him where he’d been. I dragged him into the records room and pulled out the files. I couldn’t talk fast enough, as if I had to explain everything as quickly as possible or he might stop listening. I had this idea that maybe, if he knew soon enough, we could save Warren. I could already see Gav’s face lighting up when I told him.

After a minute, Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “Kae,” he said.
“Kae.”

He must have said my name three or four times before I really heard him and forced myself to stop.

“I know,” he said. “I saw it as soon as we had our first recovery.”

I stared at him. I felt like I’d run smack into a wall. Like a bird that soared toward what looked like open air and crashed into a pane of glass.

“So why haven’t you done anything?” I asked. “All the people who caught that fever beat the virus! Isn’t there some way we can use that?”

I knew if there had been a way, Dad would already be on it. But I’d been so sure, so relieved. I couldn’t let the idea go without a fight.

“At first we weren’t certain there was a connection,” Dad said. “Our second survivor said he didn’t get sick at all last year. And by the time the third patient recovered, I’d already looked through the files. The fever isn’t a sure indicator, Kaelyn. Not even close. If it was, I wouldn’t have been so worried about you. But there are other people who came down with the fever last year, who caught this virus and died. From the information we have, I’d say the previous infection raises chances of survival to about forty percent.”

“Forty percent is a lot better than the zero everyone else seems to have,” I said. “Do you even know what caused the fever?”

“Yes,” he said. “No one had identified it at the time, but the doctors kept samples, and we analyzed them again after the epidemic started. It was a virus. A virus that was an earlier form of the one we’re facing now.”

Right away, I understood. “That’s why having the fever before made a difference,” I said. “We were already a little bit immune.” Then the rest of what he’d said sank in.

“If you have samples of the old virus, of the one from last summer, you could give it to people who haven’t been sick yet, right?” I said. “Maybe it wouldn’t help people who’ve already got the new virus, but anyone who hasn’t, like Meredith and Gav and Tessa—they’d have a better chance.”

“I wish we could, Kae,” Dad said. “Maybe if we’d known in the very beginning. But with the hospital in its current state, we don’t have the resources available to make sure people survive even the less potent form of the virus. Without proper medication, the fever might be fatal on its own. At the very least, it would weaken a recipient’s body and make them more susceptible to the mutated form, despite the partial immunity. You and Howard and the others had a year or more to recover before your immune system had to fend off the new virus. I talked the idea over with the doctors and the Public Health Agency staff, and no matter how we look at it, the risk just doesn’t balance out.”

“So it’s useless,” I said, my shoulders sagging.

He shook his head. “It did help us in the early stages,” he said. “If we hadn’t been aware of the illness last year, and didn’t have the samples to compare, we wouldn’t have been able to isolate the new virus as soon. Or to start the blood tests and work on the vaccine.”

Blood tests that just confirmed what people already knew. A vaccine that, if it worked, had never returned to the island. But that wasn’t what stuck out to me.

“What do you mean, you were ‘aware of’ it?” I said. “Did you already know I wasn’t the only one who’d had the fever—that it wasn’t just food poisoning?”

“Nell asked for my professional opinion after I brought you in last year,” Dad admitted. “She was concerned because the patients in the previous cases hadn’t been responding quite the way she expected. I told her to monitor the situation carefully. All of the patients had recovered, but it was obvious we could be dealing with something unfamiliar, and we had no way of knowing how the disease might evolve.”

I jerked away from him. “You were worried whatever caused the fever might turn into something worse,” I said. “You kept asking me if I was feeling okay—you weren’t sure it was totally gone. You knew something like this could happen before it even started!”

He looked at me like I’d pulled a knife on him. “It was a condition we’d never seen before,” he said. “Any responsible scientist would have been concerned. But we couldn’t predict the future. We did everything we could with what we knew, Kaelyn.”

“No you didn’t,” I said. “You could have told the hospital to call in Public Health back then, and maybe they’d have found a way to deal with the virus before it got this bad. You could have said we had to stay in Toronto last spring instead of letting us move back. And then none of this would have happened, Mom and Drew would be okay, everything would have been okay!”

I was yelling by the end, and then my voice broke and I almost burst into tears. Dad said something, but I didn’t want to hear it. I just left. Marched out to the car, slammed the door, and leaned my head against the steering wheel. And then the tears leaked out.

I know I wasn’t being totally fair. Of course the hospital wouldn’t have called in the national health agency over a dozen people with a fever. No one could have known how the disease would change. And if we’d stayed in Toronto, it wouldn’t have made any difference to the virus. Rachel’s dad would still have gotten sick, and Rachel, and everyone after, exactly the same, except Dad wouldn’t have been here to help, and everything would have been even worse for the island.

But it would have made a difference to us. Mom would still be alive, and Drew would still be with us, and we wouldn’t be living like this. I’d be able to walk across the hall right now and hear Drew’s fingers clattering away on his keyboard, see Mom standing in the bathroom putting her hair up for the day. I wouldn’t have to wake up every morning and remember that they’re not here anymore, and feel the pain hit me all over again.

I’m not sure I can forgive him for that. Right now, I don’t even want to.

Do you know three months ago I honestly believed that all I had to do was change how I acted, and everything in my life would be okay? That asking myself, “What would the Kaelyn I want to be do?” would solve all my problems. Remembering it now I want to laugh.

What would the new me do? I’ve pissed off the only friend I have left and she might not ever totally forgive me, and I don’t know if my boyfriend is really my boyfriend because we aren’t in a position to do normal boyfriend-girlfriend things like go on dates and have conversations that aren’t about disease and starvation, and Mom is dead and Drew’s missing and most of the other people on the island are dead too, and we still don’t know how to cure this horrible unstoppable virus so it’s going to keep killing more, and the mainland has just about abandoned us, and there’s a gang going around shooting people and setting fire to houses and stealing stuff, and as of today only one of the pumps in the gas station has any fuel left, so soon we won’t even be able to use our cars for protection.

On days like this, the me I am wants to curl up in the corner with my arms around my head. There’s no part of me that isn’t scared. There is no me that knows what to do. I’m already doing my best, and that’s all I’ve got.

Gav showed up at lunchtime today with a box of macaroni, a jar of pasta sauce, and a black eye.

“What happened?” I asked as I let him in.

He headed straight into the kitchen, threw the food on the counter, and grabbed a pot. “My fault,” he said. “They told me Warren started hallucinating last night. But I said I was going to see him anyway. He didn’t know who I was. And whoever he thought I was, he really didn’t like.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, which seemed totally inadequate. Gav smiled at me a little painfully before he started poking through the cupboards. I pointed him to the spice jars.

“Thanks,” he said, and kissed me so quickly I hardly had time to feel it. Then he busied himself sloshing water into the pot and jerking around the knobs on the stove. Every movement said he didn’t want to talk. So I left him to his cooking.

By the time the pasta was ready, he seemed calmer. He still didn’t say very much, though. The four of us plowed through the meal with less than ten words between us. When we finished, Tessa said she’d take care of the dishes, and recruited Meredith as her dryer. Gav looked around and said, out of nowhere, “You can see the mainland from here, can’t you?”

We went up to Meredith’s room, and I handed him the binoculars. “I’ve managed to spend at least a few minutes watching every day since we moved in here,” I said, trying to sound hopeful. “Hard to see much, but lights go on at night, so there must be people around.”

“Patrol boats are still staked out,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think they’ve moved closer to the mainland than they were before—because of the weather probably. But all week I haven’t seen them budge.”

For a while he just looked. Then he lowered the binoculars and set them on the window seat.

“The first time we talked,” he said, “you told me the government was going to look after us. You still think they’ll come through?”

“They have to do something eventually,” I said. “Eventually someone’s going to ask why they haven’t heard from us in ages, and try to see what’s happened.”

“Eventually,” he said. “That could be a really long time.”

“I know,” I said.

I stepped closer to him, hooking my hand around his elbow and gazing over the strait. Through the fog, the buildings across the water seemed to melt into the gray of the sky.

“What would you be doing if everything was normal?” I asked. “If there was no quarantine, no virus.”

He paused. “Doing just enough work to scrape by in class,” he said. “Picking up odd jobs in the evenings to make sure I had enough money to get out of here the second I earned that diploma. Trying to convince Warren he should come with me.” He stopped, the silence more heartbreaking than anything he could have said. After a moment, he slid his arm around my waist. “Probably hoping a certain girl would come too,” he added.

I smiled, but my throat had gone tight. “You think you’d have noticed me if I wasn’t the girl with the inside scoop on the epidemic?”

“Sure,” he said automatically. “Can’t imagine missing you.” He turned, pulling me closer, and leaned in to kiss me.

He said the words so easily, as if there couldn’t be any doubt, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I would have opened up to
him
if I hadn’t seen how he acted when the town was falling apart. I want to believe that we’d have ended up together no matter what, that our feelings go beyond the awful circumstances that’ve thrown us together, but it’s not like either of us can say for sure.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. Because when he was kissing me, and I was kissing him back, I didn’t care. And for a few minutes I wasn’t terrified of how long “eventually” might take.