What We Saw at Night (20 page)

“Your dad’s coming,” Marty said. “But he sent an ambulance. Don’t object, I know. You probably think it’s dumb. But he’s worried, and I would be worried. They called the hospital and apparently your friend was already in there, and naturally your parents thought you were hurt when you didn’t come home, before sunrise?”

“It’s how you live, when you have XP,” Rob said.

“I’m sorry,” the guy said. “That’s a bummer.”

“Don’t be sorry. We should be thanking
you
. We just got caught by the sunrise. We came out here to make a video for a friend,” Rob finished awkwardly. “She had it way worse than we do.”

Nicola
.

Right. In theory, we’d come out here for her. I tried to justify how sick and ashamed I was by desperately thinking that my recent epiphany explained everything:
No, we weren’t creating this video tribute (that never happened) for you, Nicola; we were creating it for YOU, Mrs. Burns, who tried to take your own life after learning you would never see your daughter again …
but that line of thinking only made me want to vomit. There was only one reason we were trapped under Rob’s car right now. We’d only come out here for ourselves.

Rob shifted on his side in the gravel and rolled over so he was facing me again. A faint, sad grin played on his lips. “Allie, when we’re older, we should open a night water park, completely lit with solar fixtures from below.”

“Instant millions,” I said. “In Las Vegas.”

The sound of sirens whooped, at first far away. Then, there they were, the paramedics around the Jeep, debating
what to do, at least for the two minutes it took Jackie to arrive in her all-terrain minivan.

“Why are you standing there?” Mom barked at the multitude of booted feet.

“We’re assessing effective transport,” a firefighter said.

“Use some of those tarps to make a canopy and give them both Hazmat equipment to put on while you get them to the hospital. That sun is lethal.”

“We aren’t carrying biohazard suits, ma’am.”

“Give them turnout gear, then, ordinary fire suits and helmets.”

My mother squatted down next to me and lifted the edge of the blanket “What the hell are you idiots thinking?”

“You’re all heart, Jack-Jack.”

“Is it the full moon? First, your poor friend Nicola, and now Juliet’s in the hospital. There’s been about a full decade of weirdness packed into these past few days. How do I explain this?”

“You mean, what will people say?”

“No,
Allie
. It’s just you live almost seventeen years with a person and, suddenly, in one night, her best friend is in the hospital and she’s trapped under a car with her boyfriend.”

“Adolescence?” I offered.

Mom’s face twisted into a grimace and disappeared. I felt Rob’s fingers intertwine with mine. Then I closed my eyes and let the paramedics take over.

I
was lying on a bed waiting for the okay to shower when Juliet appeared. She wheeled into my room, her leg extended on a padded board, a pole with an IV at her side.

“You have that syndrome that chronically sick kids get, like overdeveloped conscience syndrome,” she announced.

“You made that up.”

Juliet laughed. “I did. You have it though. You always feel like you’re inconveniencing somebody.”

“I am always inconveniencing somebody. I’m an inconvenient person.”

“But you’re not. We didn’t ask to be born this way, Allie. The world owes you one. Not the other way around.”

Bonnie came in and drew the curtain so that I could undress and shower. “Juliet, you need to leave. Jackie Kim’s orders.”

“Allie doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen,” Juliet said.

“I’m sure she wants her privacy,” Bonnie said.

“Actually, I’m fine if she stays,” I said. “Tell my mom. It’s cool.”

“She’s my best friend,” Juliet added. “I saw her boobs before she had boobs. Not that she really has boobs now.”

I swallowed, watching Bonnie’s face soften as I remembered the first time Juliet and I got bras. It was one of the summers when she had a month or six weeks off from the hours and hours of gym work and indoor running that was necessary for ski jumping. My mother took both of us to the mall, at night. (We didn’t have to wear full gear, just sunglasses, ball caps and long-sleeved shirts, so we looked only like lepers instead of aliens). Juliet wanted a push-up bra that wouldn’t adapt to the style.
“They’re too far apart,”
Juliet had told my mother.
“What’s going to happen to me if they don’t grow and they stay pointing different ways? I’m going to have to get one stick-on cup for each one.”
We ended up buying every conceivable bra, training and otherwise, just to be safe.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” Bonnie said.

I slipped out of my clothes and tossed Juliet her ski mask, which had been stuffed into my back pocket since last night. I gratefully spent the next twenty minutes rinsing the grime from my hair and teeth and every cleft and crevice of my body, before dousing myself with the hospital lotion that reminded me of home, since my mother used vats of the stuff. For me, it was like Vicks. Nicola told me once that when her older brother went to college and got a cold, rubbing Vicks on his chest for a cough made him homesick.…

I examined my scratched and blotchy face in the mirror. In my own home—in my own context—I never saw how truly pale people are who are never exposed to sunlight. My skin was perfect, but looked like the unblemished petal of a funeral-parlor lily. Blush might have helped, but there was no makeup called XP, for X-tra Pale. Searching that pale face,
with its eyes in a state of perpetual alarm, I didn’t even recognize the real Allie. I didn’t know where she was. But the real Juliet was waiting outside. I pulled on my hospital pj’s.

Afraid as she had been, how much could Juliet know now? Did she know that someone had screwed with Rob’s phone?

I reentered the room, my burden of questions caged in the back of my throat, just as Rob waltzed in, waving a DVD. He wanted to make us whole again, or as whole as we three could be. I almost had to laugh. The DVD was “The Best of David Belle, Volumes I-III.”

“Let’s commence the theater portion of the entertainment, ladies,” he said, cleaned up and looking normal except for the purple hollows under his eyes. “Allie, your doctor said we could hang for another couple of hours.…” He broke off, seeing Juliet’s tight lips.

We were all on edge. Who wouldn’t be? My mother was right about a full decade’s tragic weirdness packed into less than a week. But also, we just weren’t used to being awake during the day. It made everything feel strange.

“I have popcorn and ginger ale being delivered—although not beer, which my father frowned upon for some reason,” he said. “Cheesy popcorn for you, Juliet, if you share.”

He paused. “Can I see your wound?”

“That would involve seeing part of my ass, and that’s off limits to mere mortal eyes,” Juliet replied.

“Not what I hear,” Rob said. “I’ve heard it’s a staple of cyber-assity.”

“If you let me keep all the cheesy popcorn, I’ll show you,” Juliet said.

“Juliet, I’d rather have the popcorn. I’ve seen your fabled ass covered and uncovered since you wore your big
girl Huggies, and it’s not one of the seven wonders of the ass-ential world.”

“Rob, you wound me even more!” Juliet cried. “If there were an Iron Harbor Parade of Asses, it would be on it, at position one or two.”

“What about Caitlin Murray?” Rob asked.

Together, Juliet and I said, “Seriously?”

Juliet added, “That ass has all the stability of, like, Nerf.…”

Then I ruined it. Maybe even on purpose. I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t put on an act anymore. I said to Rob, “Did you get sunburned at all?”

He shook his head. Without a word, Juliet started wheeling past him. We both watched her disappear into the hall.

“Wait,” I whispered.

I jumped after Juliet and clamped my hand down on her shoulder.

“You’re together,” she said. “It was a dumb promise.” She smiled, not stopping, and waved one hand. “No, Allie-Bear. It was dumb. When you care about someone, and you’ve done it, you can’t just stop. It’s fine. It lets me off the hook.”

“No, Juliet. That’s not it. It’s way more important that I talk to you than him.”

I ran back to the room where Rob was now greeting his dad, displaying the DVD and assessing the bags of junk food. “Rob, I have to talk to her for a while,” I informed him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mr. Dorn. I mean, Dennis.”

Rob nodded. “I get it. Come on, Dad. We’ll go to my room. The view’s better. My sun-block shade has graffiti.”

The four of us laughed uncomfortably. Rob’s dad, looking far older than his fifty-something years, closed the door behind them.

I turned to Juliet and sat on the bed. “We’re alone. We have two hours.”

“I have to tell you things you don’t want to know,” Juliet said. Her ski mask still lay perched on her extended leg, seeming to mock me, us, the whole situation.

“I already know more than you think I do. I know about my mom’s friend, Gina. And about the doctor, Lauren Wilenbrand.”

Juliet’s eyes bored into mine. “You see how that works?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dr. Andrew is Gina’s boss. Dr. Andrew is Lauren Wilenbrand’s boss. Gina is training for a certificate as a nurse practitioner in genetic disease. Lauren wants to be chief resident. Garrett’s so good at this. He doesn’t have to just keep secrets. He’s the puppet master. He gets women to keep secrets for him. It’s all to their advantage. Me, too.” Juliet raised her own hospital scrubs, pointing to her tattoo on her belly. “I’m worried, Allie-Bear.”

I nodded, suddenly thinking of Nicola again, suddenly angry. Afternoon sunshine threatened us from a tiny crack in the blackout shades. “In hospitals, this is the time most people die,” I finally muttered.

“I thought they died just before morning,” said Juliet.

“That’s all night is, just before morning,” I said. “People start dying right after dinner and they die all night.”

“True enough,” Juliet agreed.

“So you owe it to me to tell me everything. I’m not going to leave you. I just need to know. From the beginning.”

Juliet wheeled herself over to the end of my bed and let out a deep breath. “First of all, those years when I was competing, they were years without rules,” she began. “So I went from a life that was
only
rules to total freedom. Or as
much freedom as I could have. My mom couldn’t come with me every time. It cost too much. When she didn’t, well, like everyone else, of course, she trusted Garrett. Before he was a coach, Garrett trained to be a nurse. No big shocker, he’s a Tabor. But he’s also an RN. Did you know that? Who better to manage your daughter and be sure about her cares and precautions?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even really focus on her specific words as she went on and on. She barreled right into their relationship. The first time they had sex, Juliet was fourteen and a half, in eighth grade. A year after we’d gone to buy our first bras, a year after she began having her periods. As she spoke, I wanted to give Penguin back and embrace them both. I wanted to hold her like the child she still was.

“No one knew what we did,” she said. “Because of XP, I always had a private room, so that no one could jump up and open the drapes on some beautiful snow-blinding Utah slope. Garrett did a bed check every night. He was never intrusive, but nobody tried to stuff their beds with pillows and sneak out for beers. We were all too competitive.”

It began with the massages he gave Juliet to keep her from cramping up. They simply grew longer and more intimate. Garrett made sure his suite always adjoined hers. What hotel wouldn’t want to provide for the little wonder girl who gutted her way through the hills in the sky despite her grave skin disease? To the Juliet she was then, this was a love affair, the best way to break out of the prison built by our genes. What she was describing to me now was in fact the rape of a little girl. She didn’t articulate it as such because he still had hooks in her. Juliet said that there was nothing between them sexually anymore, and there hadn’t been for years. But he enticed her with freedom.

Later that fall, in November, Garrett Tabor planned to take a break from coaching and join Stephen and Andrew on a research mission in Bolivia. Now that Dr. Andrew’s sons were both on staff, he could take a break for research, too, which was his real passion. Dr. Andrew was insanely certain that using retroviruses to implant normal DNA into our lousy DNA would basically get our genes to repair themselves. That’s making a very long story very short. The most famous retrovirus is HIV, the one that causes AIDS. AIDS used to go so fast and just gallop through people and kill them because how quickly retroviruses mutate. You’d be treating one thing and the cells would change and you’d be facing another strain of virus. That’s why something awful can turn out to be so useful. The retroviruses can cause cells to mutate
back
to the way they were before they changed into the light-sensitive mutation that causes XP. And then, all the new cells after that would be normal, at least theoretically. They could even do it on unborn babies.