The Wonder of All Things (12 page)

“Where is he?”

“His father took him home,” Carmen replied.

“We’ll get him down here now that you’re awake,” Macon said. He squeezed Ava’s hand with a hint of finality. “I’m going to go let the doctors know you’re up. Okay, kiddo?”

“Yeah,” Ava said.

“And I’ll get word to Wash, too.”

“Okay,” Ava said.

He kissed her on the forehead once more. Then he stood and, after lingering for a moment, left the room. Then there was only Ava and Carmen together.

“You thirsty?” Carmen asked. “I imagine you’ve got to be.”

“Yes,” Ava said. She closed her eyes. There was an instinct within her to rest them. Maybe, she thought, the next time she opened them she would be able to see.

Carmen carefully rose from the bed and waddled over to where the nurses had brought in a pitcher of water and a Styrofoam cup. “I knew you would start to get better,” she said. “I’m not saying that nothing bad can ever happen to anyone—I know better than that—but I knew that you’d be okay. You’re a kid who can chew glass.” She pressed a button on the side of Ava’s bed and it tilted upward. “Here,” she said, pressing the cup up to Ava’s lips.

Ava drank slowly. Now that she was no longer thinking about her loss of vision, she realized how dry and sharp her throat felt. More than that, she began to understand just how bad the rest of her body felt. Everything was sore and almost no part of her seemed as if it wanted to work. It was like a blanket of stones had been placed over her.

“More?” Carmen asked as Ava finished the cup.

“No,” Ava said. “I mean, no, thank you.”

“It’s not quite so bad, is it?” Carmen asked, placing the cup back on the small food stand that had been wheeled into the room.

“It’s good,” Ava said.

“I mean, this,” Carmen replied. “You and me. This.”

Ava inhaled and held the breath. She thought of all the different ways she could reply. She thought of the snide remarks, the cold acquiescence, all the ways she usually protested Carmen’s having married her father, come into her life. But the breath in her lungs was still uncertain, still laced with fear over her blindness and the pain racking her body and the general confusion of her world.

But, within that breath, there was the fact that she did not want to be alone. The fact that, in spite of everything she had said and done to Carmen, the woman had never resisted, never become angry, never fought back. She only endured the girl’s attacks, one after the other, and did not leave, did not submit, did not become angry or resentful. She behaved like a mother.

Ava did not answer, which, in its own way, was a type of admission that, even in the worst of wars, there can be moments when both sides are willing to have a moment of peace.

* * *

Macon was proud of the security the hospital was managing. It was much better than it had been the first time around, but he hoped this wouldn’t be frequent enough that they might yet improve. The entire floor where Ava was held was guarded by policemen stationed at the elevators and stairwells. Everyone had to have ID just to get out of the elevators, regardless of how much the families of other people on the floor disapproved of it.

It was all necessary, especially now. The doctors had done everything they’d promised to protect Ava, and now that the experiment was over, they took the video and the dog and studied them both, finding that everything they were skeptical to believe—the fact that the girl did, in fact, have the ability to heal injuries—all of it was true. And no sooner than they’d finished analyzing the data did they place the video online, and let the fire spread as quickly and wildly as it wanted.

“Macon? Macon?” a voice called. It was Dr. Eldrich. “You got a second?” He took Macon by the arm and led him into a small, empty office at the far end of the floor. “I wanted to talk to you about Ava. About how the experiment went.”

When they were inside the office Eldrich closed the door. Macon sat at a small desk littered with papers and notes. There was a photograph of a smiling woman and child on the far corner. “What is it?”

There was an excitement in Eldrich’s eyes. “As you know, your daughter healed the subject, the dog. Fully and completely healed its broken leg.”

“That’s what you’ve been telling me for days now,” Macon said.

“Well, we’ve been able to do more in-depth tests,” Eldrich said. “It’s very exciting, really. She healed it better than healed actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“I won’t go into too much of the details, but the short version of it is that there’s no scar tissue. Normally, when a broken bone heals, there’s a mark left. You can always tell, through X-rays or autopsy, that it’s been broken. Well, that’s not the case here.” His hands began to move as he spoke. He made imaginary bones and broke them and put them back together again. “It’s really, really amazing.”

Macon thought for a moment. He got the impression that he should be more interested in all of this, more fascinated by it the way Eldrich was, but he wasn’t. “What about Ava? What happened to her? The whole reason I agreed to do any of this was because you said that it would help you find out more about what’s going on with her body, why she’s cold and tired all the time. I want to know what this is doing to my daughter.”

The excitement in Eldrich waned. “Well,” he began, “we’ve got a few theories on that.”

Eldrich paused. He almost spoke, then stopped himself. Then he sighed and said, “Honestly, we don’t know much. All we know is what’s happening to her after she does these...things, whatever we want to call them. Her red and white blood cells are dropping dramatically. This latest effect, the blindness, we honestly don’t know what caused that. From everything we’ve been able to test, she should be fine. We can’t really spot anything physically that’s causing her to go blind. But, again, her blood isn’t normal right now, so the baseline we would normally use to find out about her eyes is, well, skewed.”

“But she’s getting better,” Macon said. “She just woke up. She can see light now.”

“Really?” Eldrich said, his eyes going wide. “That’s terrific. We’d hoped that might happen.”

“So you can’t tell me much of anything, can you?” Macon asked.

Eldrich paused. “I can’t tell you the things you would want me to tell you,” he said. “I don’t know the why of any of this. I don’t know the how. Hell, I’m even having a hard time telling you the what.”

“Would it offend you terribly if I told you that you’re giving me a headache the size of Russia? That wouldn’t upset you, would it?” Macon rubbed his temples. “Is there a point here? Anywhere on the horizon?”

“I’m sorry,” Eldrich said quickly. “It’s just so exciting. During the autopsy—”

“Autopsy?” Macon interrupted. “What autopsy?”

“The dog’s,” Eldrich said. “It’s dead.”

At last, there was silence.

“What are you talking about?” Macon asked after a moment.

“Heartworms.”

“Wait...what? I thought it had a broken leg?”

“It did,” Eldrich said. His voice was solid and calm now that he was again doing what he knew very well how to do: talk about science and research and not about people and daughters and feelings. “It had a very bad fracture, which—”

“Which Ava fixed,” Macon interrupted, almost yelling. He stood and walked closer to Eldrich with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Very suddenly, he was the sheriff again. “Ava fixed that. She healed it. You told me that as soon as it happened.”

“Yes, she did,” Eldrich answered, his voice beginning to waver again.

“So what the hell are you talking about the dog’s dead?” Macon poked the man in the chest with a finger. “Did you kill it?”

“What?”

“Did you all kill it? Wanted to dissect it, maybe? Try to see what happened from the inside out.”

“You’ve been watching a lot of television, haven’t you?” Eldrich quipped.

“Answer the question,” Macon demanded. “Why is the dog dead?”

“Heartworms,” Eldrich said again. Then, before Macon could interrupt, he continued. “It had heartworms the entire time. I promise you. Had them the whole time.” He held up his hands to keep Macon from speaking. “Yes, the animal had a broken leg, but that was just one of its problems. It also had heartworms. Well beyond the point of medicine doing anything for it. It was only a matter of time before the animal died. That was part of the reason we chose it for the experiment.”

Macon’s jaw clenched. “Okay,” he said slowly, finally beginning to believe Eldrich’s version of things. “But what about Ava—what Ava did?”

“Yes,” Eldrich replied. “She fixed its leg, but not the heartworms.”

Finally, Macon took a step back from Eldrich. His head was swimming with questions. There was an image of the world—this new world in which his family lived—and the image was beginning to crack at its foundation.

“I don’t understand,” Macon said, even though he was beginning to understand perfectly well.

“Neither do we,” Eldrich replied. “But it does explain the situation with Wash, doesn’t it?”

“What situation with Wash?”

“His cancer,” Eldrich said flatly. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”

* * *

“Does Wash know?’ Macon asked. He stood in the doorway of Brenda’s house. He didn’t bother to come inside or say hello before the question spilled from his mouth.

Brenda fidgeted, as though she had been expecting the question, and yet she was unable to escape the sting of it. She wore an old white-and-yellow flowered dress and an apron. Both were worn and tattered—she wore nothing for fashion, only for practicality or out of habit. Macon had seen her in this particular dress and apron more times than he could remember. But, today, they seemed more tired from use than before. There was a white stain on the bottom corner of her dress. The woman smelled of bleach and sweat.

“No,” Brenda said flatly. “He doesn’t. And I’d thank you to keep it that way.” She turned and walked into the house.

“Dammit, Brenda,” Macon said. Finally he crossed the threshold and came inside. The smell of bleach was overpowering. It stung his nostrils. “How long have you known?” he asked. There was little hospitality in his voice.

“A week now,” Brenda said flatly, “more or less.”

There was a scrub bucket filled with water on the floor next to the couch. The smell of bleach poured out of it. Brenda walked over to the bucket, drew a sponge from the tepid water, got down onto her hands and knees and began scrubbing the floor. “Mind that you don’t track all that mud in here,” she said to Macon over her shoulder. Then she added, “They told me over the phone. What kind of a thing is that to tell a person over the phone? You’d think they’d call us into the hospital for something like that, wouldn’t you? Or maybe even come out here. But I don’t suppose people do house calls anymore, do they? Not even for telling a woman her grandson has cancer.”

“Jesus,” Macon said. He stepped forward across her newly cleaned floor, tracking in dirt from outside and not noticing. “How did this happen? Were you going to tell us about it?”

“I asked you to mind my floor,” Brenda said evenly.

Macon looked down at his feet, then at Brenda. “To hell with the floor, Brenda! Dammit. How could you keep something like this to yourself? How could you not tell us? Hell, never mind that, how could you not tell Wash? How serious is it?” Macon paced. His hands gesticulated with each new question. His mind shifted from thoughts of Wash to thoughts of Ava to thoughts of the both of them at once.

Since they were five years old they’d been inseparable. They were in every class together at school since kindergarten, and when school was over they spent the afternoons together. During summer break you couldn’t find one without finding the other within arm’s length. It was a bond that’s hard to come across in the world these days, Macon had always mused. Nowadays, nothing lasted forever. People relocate. They move away. They die. The world comes and takes people from your life, year by year. But he had hoped for something different for Wash and Ava. He saw a childhood friendship that would eventually blossom into a young romance—if it hadn’t already. Then maybe they’d marry, and on and on. It was a dream that he had never realized he believed in. And now it was all in question.

Wash was like a son to Macon. The sheriff had already lost a wife, his daughter’s health was precarious, his new wife was struggling with a pregnancy that, as much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, was not guaranteed...and now Wash had cancer.

“Jesus, Brenda,” he said finally. He spoke slowly and with exhaustion. His anger at the old woman was replaced by exasperation as the truth of the situation filled his head. Still ignoring her newly cleaned floor, he walked across the room and sat on the couch. “Let’s talk this out, Brenda. How serious is it?” he asked again.

“How serious?” Brenda said, almost laughing. “Can you name a case when cancer in a child wasn’t deadly serious?” She stopped scrubbing the floor and heaved a heavy, fatigued sigh. She stood and, after rubbing the soreness from her knees, walked over and sat on the other end of the couch. Her face was flushed and sweat beaded upon her brow. Her long red hair was pulled in a ponytail that had been coming undone from the exertion of her work. She rested her hands in her lap and began massaging them.

It was then that Macon noticed how red they were. Her hands looked as though she’d touched scalding water. They were raw. “You think I’m cruel, don’t you?” Brenda asked. She straightened her back and faced him. “You ask yourself, ‘What type of a person doesn’t tell a child that they’re sick?’ You want me to make it make sense for you?” Her mouth tightened. “I’ve got my reasons. And it’s not your child. You’re not responsible for him. You don’t have to look into his eyes when the time comes to tell him that he might be dying.”

“He needs to know,” Macon said softly.

“And he will know,” Brenda replied. “I’m just not ready yet.” She looked over at the scrub bucket waiting by the end of the couch. Then she looked at the dirt that had ridden in on Macon’s shoes.

“But how long can he wait?” Macon asked. “How long can you let him go untreated? This is his life we’re talking about here, Brenda.”