What Came After (15 page)

Ultimately the doctor said they weren’t one hundred percent sure. He didn’t say it in front of Penny. He told Weller at the table in the front room while she was still sleeping. Early in the morning and the shadow of the hospital still heavy over the park below. He said they’d had their very best people on it and they’d consulted with specialists in Boston and Los Angeles and not one of them was one hundred percent sure either. They weren’t sure about the root of her trouble and they weren’t sure about how they might correct it. They had theories, and they had a protocol worked out, but there were going to be uncertainties on every hand. They would have to see what they could see.

The doctor was apologetic. In spite of his white coat and his neatly trimmed beard and his youthful canid vigor he looked beaten. Beaten by the conclusion they’d reached, and beaten by having to confess it now to Weller. Admitting failure or the possibility to one like him. An interloper from the Empowerment Zone.

Weller asked how it could be. How it could possibly be that they weren’t sure. Hadn’t doctors in a hospital like this seen everything before?

“It’s environmental,” the doctor said.

“Environmental.”

“Something she breathed,” he said. He drew a long finger across the tabletop. Tracing the grain. “Something she ate. That’s about all we know.”

Weller sat stunned for a minute. He looked out the window at single pigeon flapping against the wire mesh of the park. He kept looking. Watching it try to escape into a world that would have eaten it alive. “Then it’s definitely a mutation,” he said.

“Yes. A mutation. Meaning if we correct it surgically, it might come back.”

“But you
could
correct it.”

“We could. As I said though, it might come back. It probably would.”

“If you don’t know the cause of it, how can you know that for sure?” Not even looking at the doctor. Not able to.

“We have to make certain assumptions. And I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.”

The pigeon gave up and Weller turned back to the doctor. His face ravaged. “I guess I thought you’d have seen a lot of problems like my daughter’s.”

“We used to see them. The literature was full of these cases for years. People got into things they shouldn’t have gotten into because nobody knew. Nobody knew the risks. They thought food was food.” He sighed, either remembering or imagining. Impossible to tell because it was impossible to tell his age. “The system got overloaded. All of those people so terribly sick and too many variables to be sorted out, given the funding. Funding that dried up pretty rapidly, seeing how quickly those cases disappeared from the literature. They were just kind of a blip, if you look back on it now.”

“A blip. They were people.”

“A spike then. They came and went. Anyway, the insurance companies would have gone bust if they’d had to keep on covering all of them. It’s better now.”

“Better now that you don’t have to look at them.”

“Well.” Rethinking his position. Smiling. That doglike grin. “Better now that we all know what to avoid.”

Weller kept on. “But you have to look at
her,”
he said. “You have to see
Penny.”

“And I assure you that we’ll do everything we can on her behalf.”

“Money’s no object.”

“That’s right.”

“No expense will be spared.”

“Correct.”

“All right then. When do you get started?”

*

The good news, her father told her, was that there wouldn’t be any surgery. At least not right off. No knives and no lasers.

“Well,” the doctor put in, “maybe some lasers.”

Penny’s jaw dropped.

“Depending,” said the doctor, which didn’t help much. “You won’t feel a thing, though. Before or after. Not a thing, I promise.”

Penny was sitting at the end of the upholstered table in the examining room. The bright overhead lights were dimmed, and screens along the walls pulsed with images from inside her skull. Three-dimensional fly-throughs in constant motion and various digital cross-sections arranged like geological records. The doctor before her smiling wolflike and her father in a chair to one side. Looking at the doctor and deciding that his mouth must have been remade that way at some point. Wondering why they hadn’t fixed it. Wondering if maybe they had.

The doctor pointed to his own eyes and said he’d had cataracts taken off years ago with a laser and it hadn’t bothered him in the slightest. These days he saw better than ever. Twenty-twenty. Nothing to it.

Penny asked was that what she had.
Cataracts.
Saying the word carefully because it was new.

The doctor said something like cataracts. Not exactly but almost. They’d try some other treatments first, though, and maybe they’d shine some light in there later on if they had to. That’s all a laser was, he said. A little light you shined in places.

Penny nodded.

Regardless, he said, they’d use it only if the other treatments didn’t work. Some injections they’d be giving her.

Penny asked what he meant by injections and he said they were like the blood that the nurses had been taking but the other way around. Putting something in instead of taking it out. He pointed to the cannula taped to her forearm and said we’ll use that and it won’t hurt a bit.

*

After three days Carmichael’s assistant came back, not for a report but to sit down with Weller. Ten days had passed altogether and her employer was running out of patience. “He’d been under the impression that they’d operate and she’d recover and that would be that,” she said. “He wasn’t counting on this delay. These complications.”

“I’m sorry,” said Weller.

“I am too.”

“I guess that’ll teach him to play doctor.”

It was early in the day and Penny was still sleeping. They sat on opposite sides of the table. She’d given up on maintaining the niceties of status, so it was just the two of them face to face. Weller would never have it any other way without her having to remind him, and the very act of reminding him was a loss of status right there, so what was the point. “The doctor tells me it will be a couple of weeks before we know anything,” she said.

“A couple of weeks at the inside.”

The flowers on the table were still blooming, but not by means of any miracle. New arrangements arrived fresh every morning, from
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Carmichael
and
Your friends at PharmAgra.
Contractual clockwork. No flower anywhere in the hospital was permitted to fade for even a moment.

“Mr. Carmichael doesn’t like waiting,” she said.

“I don’t care much for waiting either. But I think the results will be worth it.”

“I’m not talking about waiting for Penny.”

“I know you’re not. I am.”

“But you think it’ll be worth it, you said.”

“I do.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Because we want you to get started for Washington right away.”

Weller laughed.

“Tomorrow morning. First thing.”

Weller laughed again.

“It’s not a laughing matter.”

“I know.”

“Look,” she said. “You’re confident about your daughter, we’ve established that. Mr. Carmichael has been extremely patient, we’ve established that. But I’m here to tell you that he’s not going to wait forever.”

“He can wait a little bit longer.”

“No. It’s time.”

“It’s not time. Not yet.”

“You’re not acting in good faith.”

“I’m acting in good faith toward my little girl. If he hadn’t expected that, he wasn’t paying attention.”

She pushed her chair back a quarter of an inch. “I could send both of you home right now. You and Penny. Find you in breach of contract and stop her gene therapy and send you home.”

“Carmichael would kill you if you did that. He’d lose the car.”

“You’re not the only individual capable of doing the job, Mr. Weller.”

He thought for a minute. “Something tells me I am.”

“Then go home.” Rising. “I’ll speak to the staff and have her released.”

“Carmichael will have your head.”

“He relies on me too much,” she said, pushing in her chair. “If he has to have somebody’s head, he’d rather have yours.”

She was out the door and down the hall and signing something at the nurses’ station when he figured it out.

“My wife,” he said. “Send somebody for my wife. Get her here to look after Penny, and I’ll be on my way.” He knew that the assistant would go along with it. And he could hardly wait to get back and wake up his daughter and give her the news. Her mother was coming.

*

The reunion was too brief. Liz was exhausted from travel and aghast at the needles in her child’s arm and amazed at how her husband looked in those suits. The three of them couldn’t get enough time together. They sat up talking too late for their own good and they slept halfway through the morning like a pile of housecats or emperors and when they finally roused up there were clothes hanging in the closet for Liz as well. Clothes and a half-dozen pairs of shoes in just her size and a soft white bathrobe that matched Penny’s and made the two of them feel like twins. As if they could have felt any closer at just that moment.

Weller didn’t ask Liz how she felt about the progress Penny had made in spite of her old doubts. He didn’t need to, and it wouldn’t have been kind. To turn such a good thing into the results of a contest. In return, Liz didn’t say how worried she was about everything it might take for him to hold up his end of the bargain. He’d done so well so far. Letting hope give birth to hope.

Careful of Penny’s arm, her mother bathed her in a tub. Both of them knowing that she was too old for this kind of thing but what of it. You made exceptions. The tub was like nothing she’d seen before, big enough for two people and plumbed all over with nozzles and air jets that they didn’t try. The supply of hot water was endless, and even with an exhaust fan whirring overhead the mirrors steamed up. Weller sitting outside the door listening to them. To the squeak of his daughter’s skin against porcelain. To the soft murmur of his wife’s voice. That second a thing he hadn’t even realized how painfully he’d missed. The particulars of her. Each little aspect. You get started on something and you go where it takes you and you set aside other things because you don’t have any choice. Because if you didn’t set them aside you would never be able to go on. And then if you’re lucky enough you get back to where you started and you realize your mistake. You realize how difficult it is to keep everything in your heart at the same time. How impossible. You can only keep so much and still go on. You come back for the rest if you’re lucky enough.

The tub drained and the door opened and Penny emerged in a cloud of white terrycloth inside a bigger cloud of white steam. Borne up by both of them. Her mother staying behind and drawing more water for herself, and Weller coming to his feet and stepping inside and closing the door and embracing her. Helping her out of her clothes. Her warm skin in the warm room. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. Thought of having her brought down here to be with Penny. To be with both of them. Another of those thoughts you can’t keep in your mind all at once, there are so many. He latched the door and they heard their daughter turn on the television and in the front room the buzzer sounded, meaning someone was at the door. Penny switching off the set and the sound dying and the damp slap of her feet on hardwood. Silence, and then her voice coming back high,
Daddy Daddy it’s Mister Carmichael he says it’s time.

They took their own pace anyhow. Opening the door a crack and saying tell him to have a seat and latching it again.

“He’s waited this long,” Weller said low, “he can wait a little more.”

Letting the water run.

SEVEN
Make Straight in the Desert a Highway

It was just a little chopper. A little Black Rose chopper that darted and gleamed like a bug. Land anything much bigger on the roof of One Police Plaza and it would be the fall of Saigon all over again. Everybody going nuts. Plus who knew if the building could take the weight. The concrete work had deteriorated and lengths of rusty iron rebar were showing through in places with cement crumbling away and falling and there wasn’t anybody left to inspect anything anymore. All of those city offices had been closed up for years. Nobody trained to staff them and no money to keep the lights on and civil engineering itself a thing of the past. National Motors had a few oldtimers around who could still use a transit, but they were jealous of them and you couldn’t subcontract them out for anything. That old knowledge just draining away.