Evolution (v1.1)

Nancy Kress, 1995

“Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.

I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Sean and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothesbasket.

“Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”

“Have the police arrested anybody?”

“Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers, all five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”

“Was it in the parking lot?” I’m in that parking lot behind the Food Mart every week. It’s unpaved, just hard-packed rocky dirt sloping down to a low concrete wall by the river. I take Jackie’s sheets off the line. Belle, Ariel, and Princess Jasmine all smile through fields of flowers.

“Yes, in the parking lot,” Ceci says. “Near the dumpsters. There must have been a silencer on the rifle, nobody heard anything. Tom found two .22 250 semi-automatic cartridges.” Ceci knows about guns. Her house is full of them. “Betty, why don’t you put all this wash in your dryer and save yourself the trouble of hanging it all out?”

“I like the way it smells line-dried. And I can hear Jackie through the window.”

Instantly Ceci’s face changes. “Jackie’s home from school? Why?”

“She has a cold.”

“Are you sure it’s just a cold?”

“I’m sure.” I take the clothespins off Sean’s t-shirt. The front says SEE DICK DRINK. SEE DICK DRIVE. SEE DICK DIE. “Ceci, Jackie is not on any antibiotics.”

“Good thing,” Ceci says, and for a moment she studies her fingernails, very casual. “They say Dr. Bennett prescribed endozine again last week. For the youngest Nordstrum boy. Without sending him to the hospital.”

I don’t answer. The back of Sean’s t-shirt says DON’T BE A DICK. Irritated by my silence, Ceci says, “I don’t see how you can let your son wear that obscene clothing!”

“It’s his choice. Besides, Ceci, it’s a health message. About not drinking and driving. Aren’t you the one that thinks strong health messages are a good thing?”

Our eyes lock. The silence lengthens. Finally Ceci says, “Well, haven’t we gotten serious all of a sudden.”

I say, “Murder is serious.”

“Yes. I’m sure the cops will catch whoever did it. Probably one of those scum that hang around the Rainbow Bar.”

“Dr. Bennett wasn’t the type to hang around with scum.”

“Oh, I don’t mean he knew them. Some low-life probably killed him for his wallet.” She looks straight into my eyes. “I can’t think of any other motive. Can you?”

I look east, toward the river. On the other side, just visible over the tops of houses on its little hill, rise the three stories of Emerton Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital. The bridge over the river was blown up three weeks ago. No injuries, no suspects. Now anybody who wants to go to the hospital has to drive ten miles up West River Road and cross at the interstate. Jack told me that the Department of Transportation says two years to get a new bridge built.

I say, “Dr. Bennett was a good doctor. And a good man.”

“Well, did anybody say he wasn’t? Really, Betty, you should use your dryer and save yourself all that bending and stooping. Bad for the back. We’re not getting any younger. Ta-ta.” She waves her right hand, just a waggle of fingers, and walks off. Her nails, I notice, are painted the delicate fragile pinky white of freshly unscabbed skin.

“You have no proof,” Jack says. “Just some wild suspicions.”

He has his stubborn face on. He sits with his Michelob at the kitchen table, dog-tired from his factory shift plus three hours overtime, and he doesn’t want to hear this. I don’t blame him. I don’t want to be saying it. In the living room Jackie plays Nintendo frantically, trying to cram in as many electronic explosions as she can before her father claims the TV for Monday night football. Sean has already gone out with his friends, before his stepfather got home.

I sit down across from Jack, a fresh mug of coffee cradled between my palms. For warmth. “I know I don’t have any proof, Jack. I’m not some detective.”

“So let the cops handle it. It’s their business, not ours. You stay out of it.”

“I am out of it. You know that.” Jack nods. We don’t mix with cops, don’t serve on any town committees, don’t even listen to the news much. We don’t get involved with what doesn’t concern us. Jack never did. I add, “I’m just telling you what I think. I can do that, can’t I?” and hear my voice stuck someplace between pleading and anger.

Jack hears it, too. He scowls, stands with his beer, puts his hand gently on my shoulder. “Sure, Bets. You can say whatever you want to me. But nobody else, you hear? I don’t want no trouble, especially to you and the kids. This ain’t our problem. Just be grateful we’re all healthy, knock on wood.”

He smiles and goes into the living room. Jackie switches off the Nintendo without being yelled at; she’s good that way. I look out the kitchen window, but it’s too dark to see anything but my own reflection, and anyway the window faces north, not east.

I haven’t crossed the river since Jackie was born at Emerton Memorial, seven years ago. And then I was in the hospital less than twenty-four hours before I made Jack take me home. Not because of the infections, of course — that hadn’t all started yet. But it has now, and what if next time instead of the youngest Nordstrum boy, it’s Jackie who needs endozine? Or Sean?

Once you’ve been to Emerton Memorial, nobody but your family will go near you. And sometimes not even them. When Mrs. Weimer came home from surgery, her daughter-in-law put her in that back upstairs room and left her food on disposable trays in the doorway and put in a chemical toilet. Didn’t even help the old lady crawl out of bed to use it. For a whole month it went on like that — surgical masks, gloves, paper gowns — until Rosie Weimer was positive Mrs. Weimer hadn’t picked up any mutated drug-resistant bacteria in Emerton Memorial. And Hal Weimer didn’t say a word against his wife.

“People are scared, but they’ll do the right thing,” Jack said, the only other time I tried to talk to him about it. Jack isn’t much for talking. And so I don’t. I owe him that.

But in the city — in all the cities — they’re not just scared. They’re terrified. Even without listening to the news I hear about the riots and the special government police and half the population sick with the new germs that only endozine cures — sometimes. I don’t see how they’re going to have much energy for one murdered small-town doctor. And I don’t share Jack’s conviction that people in Emerton will automatically do the right thing. I remember all too well that sometimes they don’t. How come Jack doesn’t remember, too?

But he’s right about one thing: I don’t owe this town anything.

I stack the supper dishes in the sink and get Jackie started on her homework.

The next day, I drive down to the Food Mart parking lot.

There isn’t much to see. It rained last night. Next to the dumpster lie a wadded-up surgical glove and a piece of yellow tape like the police use around a crime scene. Also some of those little black cardboard boxes from the stuff that gets used up by the new holographic TV cameras. That’s it.

“You heard what happened to Dr. Bennett,” I say to Sean at dinner. Jack’s working again. Jackie sits playing with the Barbie doll she doesn’t know I know she has on her lap. Sean looks at me sideways, under the heavy fringe of his dark bangs, and I can’t read his expression. “He was killed for giving out too many antibiotics.”

Jackie looks up. “Who killed the doctor?”

“The bastards that think they run this town,” Sean says. He flicks the hair out of his eyes. His face is ashy gray. “Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.”

“That’s enough, Sean,” I say.

Jackie’s lip trembles. “Who’ll get us all? Mommy … “

“Nobody’s getting anybody,” I say. “Sean, stop it. You’re scaring her.”

“Well, she should be scared,” Sean says, but he shuts up and stares bleakly at his plate. Sixteen now, I’ve had him for sixteen years. Watching him, his thick dark hair and sulky mouth, I think that it’s a sin to have a favorite child. And that I can’t help it, and that I would, God forgive me, sacrifice both Jackie and Jack for this boy.

“I want you to clean the garage tonight, Sean. You promised Jack three days ago now.”

“Tomorrow. Tonight I have to go out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I be scared?”

“Tonight,” I say.

Sean looks at me with teenage desperation. His eyes are very blue. “Not tonight. I have to go out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I — “

I say, “You’re staying home and cleaning the garage.”

“No.” He glares at me, and then breaks. He has his father’s looks, but he’s not really like his father. There are even tears in the corners of his eyes. “I’ll do it tomorrow, Mom, I promise. Right after school. But tonight I have to go out.”

“Where?”

“Just out.”

Jackie says, “Why should I be scared? Scared of what? Mommy!”

Sean turns to her. “You shouldn’t be scared, Jack-o-lantern. Everything’s going to be all right. One way or another.”

I listen to the tone of his voice and suddenly fear shoots through me, piercing as childbirth. I say, “Jackie, you can play Nintendo now. I’ll clear the table.”

Her face brightens. She skips into the living room and I look at my son. “What does that mean? ‘One way or another’? Sean, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he says, and then despite his ashy color he looks me straight in the eyes, and smiles tenderly, and for the first time — the very first time — I see his resemblance to his father. He can lie to me with tenderness.

Two days later, just after I return from the Food Mart, they contact me.

The murder was on the news for two nights, and then disappeared. Over the parking lot is scattered more TV-camera litter. There’s also a wine bottle buried halfway into the hard ground, with a bouquet of yellow roses in it. Nearby is an empty basket, the kind that comes filled with expensive dried flowers at Blossoms by Bonnie, weighted down with stones. Staring at it, I remember that Bonnie Widelstein went out of business a few months ago. A drug-resistant abscess, and after she got out of Emerton Memorial, nobody on this side of the river would buy flowers from her.

At home, Sylvia James is sitting in my driveway in her black Algol. As soon as I see her, I put it together.

“Sylvia,” I say tonelessly.

She climbs out of the sportscar and smiles a social smile. “Elizabeth! How good to see you!” I don’t answer. She hasn’t seen me in seventeen years. She’s carrying a cheese kuchen, like some sort of key into my house. She’s still blonde, still slim, still well dressed. Her lipstick is bright red, which is what her face should be.

I let her in anyway, my heart making slow hard thuds in my chest. Sean. Sean.

Once inside, her hard smile fades and she has the grace to look embarrassed. “Elizabeth — “

“Betty,” I say. “I go by Betty now.”

“Betty. First off, I want to apologize for not being … for not standing by you in that mess. I know it was so long ago, but even so, I — I wasn’t a very good friend.” She hesitates. “I was frightened by it all.”

I want to say, You were frightened? But I don’t.

I never think of the whole dumb story any more. Not even when I look at Sean. Especially not when I look at Sean.

Seventeen years ago, when Sylvia and I were seniors in high school, we were best friends. Neither of us had a sister, so we made each other into that, even though her family wasn’t crazy about their precious daughter hanging around with someone like me. The Goddards live on the other side of the river. Sylvia ignored them, and I ignored the drunken warnings of my aunt, the closest thing I had to a family. The differences didn’t matter. We were Sylvia-and-Elizabeth, the two prettiest and boldest girls in the senior class who had an academic future.

And then, suddenly, I didn’t. At Elizabeth’s house I met Randolf Satler, young resident in her father’s unit at the hospital. And I got pregnant, and Randy dumped me, and I refused a paternity test because if he didn’t want me and the baby I had too much pride to force myself on any man. That’s what I told everyone, including myself. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know what a common story mine was, or what a dreary one. I thought I was the only one in the whole wide world who had ever felt this bad.

So after Sean was born at Emerton Memorial and Randy got engaged the day I moved my baby “home” to my dying aunt’s, I bought a Smith & Wesson revolver in the city and shot out the windows of Randy’s supposedly empty house across the river. I hit the gardener, who was helping himself to the Satler liquor cabinet in the living room. The judge gave me seven-and-a-half to ten, and I served five, and that only because my lawyer pleaded post-partum depression. The gardener recovered and retired to Miami, and Dr. Satler went on to become Chief of Medicine at Emerton Memorial and a lot of other important things in the city, and Sylvia never visited me once in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Nobody did, except Jack. Who, when Syvia-and-Elizabeth were strutting their stuff at Emerton High, had already dropped out and was bagging groceries at the Food Mart. After I got out of Bedford, the only reason the foster-care people would give me Sean back was because Jack married me.

We live in Emerton, but not of it.

Sylvia puts her kuchen on the kitchen table and sits down without being asked. I can see she’s done with apologizing. She’s still smart enough to know there are things you can’t apologize for.

“Eliz … Betty, I’m not here about the past. I’m here about Dr. Bennett’s murder.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“It has to do with all of us. Dan Moore lives next door to you.”

I don’t say anything.

“He and Ceci and Jim Dyer and Tom Brunelli are the ringleaders in a secret organization to close Emerton Memorial Hospital. They think the hospital is a breeding ground for the infections resistant to every antibiotic except endozine. Well, they’re right about that — all hospitals are. But Dan and his group are determined to punish any doctor who prescribes endozine, so that no organisms develop a resistance to it, too, and it’s kept effective in case one of them needs it.”

“Sylvia — ” the name tastes funny in my mouth, after all this time ” — I’m telling you this doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“And I’m telling you it does. We need you, Eliz … Betty. You live next door to Dan and Ceci. You can tell us when they leave the house, who comes to it, anything suspicious you see. We’re not a vigilante group, Betty, like they are. We aren’t doing anything illegal. We don’t kill people, and we don’t blow up bridges, and we don’t threaten people like the Nordstrums who get endozine for their sick kids but are basically uneducated blue collar — “

She stops. Jack and I are basically uneducated blue collar. I say coldly, “I can’t help you, Sylvia.”

“I’m sorry, Betty. That wasn’t what I meant. Look, this is more important than anything that happened a decade and a half ago! Don’t you understand?” She leans toward me across the table. “The whole country’s caught in this thing. It’s already a public health crisis as big as the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, and it’s only just started! Drug-resistant bacteria can produce a new generation every twenty minutes, they can swap resistant genes not only within a species but across different species. The bacteria are winning. And people like the Moores are taking advantage of that to contribute further to the breakdown of even basic social decency.”

In high school Sylvia had been on the debating team. But so, in that other life, had I. “If the Moores’ group is trying to keep endozine from being used, then aren’t they also fighting against the development of more drug-resistant bacteria? And if that’s so, aren’t they the ones, not you, who are ultimately aiding the country’s public health?”

“Through dynamiting. And intimidation. And murder. Betty, I know you don’t approve of those things. I wouldn’t be here telling you about our countergroup if I thought you did. Before I came here, we looked very carefully at you. At the kind of person you are. Are now. You and your husband are law-abiding people, you vote, you make a contribution to the Orphans of AIDS Fund, you — “

“How did you know about that? That’s supposed to be a secret contribution!”

” — you signed the petition to protect the homeless from harassment. Your husband served on the jury that convicted Paul Keene of fraud, even though his real-estate scheme was so good for the economy of Emerton. You — “

“Stop it,” I say. “You don’t have any right to investigate me like I was some criminal!”

Only, of course, I was. Once. Not now. Sylvia’s right about that — Jack and I believe in law and order, but for different reasons. Jack because that’s what his father believed in, and his grandfather. Me, because I learned in Bedford that enforced rules are the only thing that even halfway restrains the kind of predators Sylvia James never dreamed of. The kind I want kept away from my children.

Sylvia says, “We have a lot of people on our side, Betty. People who don’t want to see this town slide into the same kind of violence there is in Albany and Syracuse and, worst case, New York.”

A month ago, New York Hospital in Queens was blown up. The whole thing, with a series of coordinated timed bombs. Seventeen hundred people dead in less than a minute.

“It’s a varied group,” she continues. “Some town leaders, some housewives, some teachers, nearly all the medical personnel at the hospital. All people who care what happens to Emerton.”

“Then you’ve got the wrong person here,” I say, and it comes out harsher than I want to reveal. “I don’t care about Emerton.”

“You have reasons,” Sylvia says evenly. “And I’m part of your reasons, I know. But I think you’ll help us, Elizabeth. I know you must be concerned about your son — we’ve all observed what a good mother you are.”

So she brought up Sean’s name first. I say, “You’re wrong again, Sylvia. I don’t need you to protect Sean, and if you’ve let him get involved in helping you, you’ll wish you’d never been born. I’ve worked damn hard to make sure that what happened seventeen years ago never touches him. He doesn’t need to get mixed up in any way with your ‘medical personnel at the hospital.’ And Sean sure the hell doesn’t owe this town anything, there wasn’t even anybody who would take him in after my aunt died, he had to go to — “

The look on her face stops me. Pure surprise. And then something else.

“Oh my God,” she says. “Is it possible you don’t know? Hasn’t Sean told you?”

“Told me what?” I stand up, and I’m seventeen years old again, and just that scared. Sylvia-and-Elizabeth.

“Your son isn’t helping our side. He’s working for Dan Moore and Mike Dyer. They use juveniles because if they’re caught, they won’t be tried as severely as adults. We think Sean was one of the kids they used to blow up the bridge over the river.”

I look first at the high school. Sean isn’t there; he hadn’t even shown up for homeroom. No one’s home at his friend Tom’s house, or at Keith’s. He isn’t at the Billiard Ball or the Emerton Diner or the American Bowl. After that, I run out of places to search.

This doesn’t happen in places like Emerton. We have fights at basketball games and grand theft auto and smashed store windows on Halloween and sometimes a drunken tragic car crash on prom night. But not secret terrorists, not counter-terrorist vigilante groups. Not in Emerton.

Not with my son.

I drive to the factory and make them page Jack.

He comes off the line, face creased with sweat and dirt. The air is filled with clanging machinery and grinding drills. I pull him outside the door, where there are benches and picnic tables for workers on break. “Betty! What is it?”

“Sean,” I gasp. “He’s in danger.”

Something shifts behind Jack’s eyes. “What kind of danger?”

“Sylvia Goddard came to see me today. Sylvia James. She says Sean is involved with the group that blew up the bridge, the ones who are trying to get Emerton Memorial closed, and … and killed Dr. Bennett.”

Jack peels off his bench gloves, taking his time. Finally he looks up at me. “How come that bitch Sylvia Goddard comes to you with this? After all this time?”

“Jack! Is that all you can think of? Sean is in trouble!”

He says gently, “Well, Bets, it was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? He’s always been a tough kid to raise. Rebellious. Can’t tell him anything.”

I stare at Jack.

“Some people just have to learn the hard way.”

“Jack … this is serious! Sean might be involved in terrorism! He could end up in jail!”

“Couldn’t ever tell him anything,” Jack says, and I hear the hidden satisfaction in his voice, that he doesn’t even know is there. Not his son. Dr. Randy Satler’s son. Turning out bad.

“Look,” Jack says, “when the shift ends I’ll go look for him, Bets. Bring him home. You go and wait there for us.” His face is gentle, soothing. He really will find Sean, if it’s possible. But only because he loves me.

My sudden surge of hatred is so strong I can’t even speak.

“Go on home, Bets. It’ll be all right. Sean just needs to have the nonsense kicked out of him.”

I turn and walk away. At the turning in the parking lot, I see Jack walking jauntily back inside, pulling on his gloves.

I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do. I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of Bedford. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.

And it doesn’t work.

It’s been too long. I’ve had Sean too long. Jack has made me feel too safe. I can’t find the stony place.

Jackie is spending the night at a friend’s. I sit in the dark, no lights on, car in the garage. Sean doesn’t come home, and neither does Jack. At two in the morning, a lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and Ceci’s house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

Jack staggers in at six-thirty in the morning. Alone. His face droops with exhaustion.

“I couldn’t find him, Betty. I looked everywhere.”

“Thank you,” I say, and he nods. Accepting my thanks. This was something he did for me, not for Sean. Not for himself, as Sean’s stepfather. I push down my sudden anger and say, “You better get some sleep.”

“Right.” He goes down the narrow hallway into our bedroom. In three minutes he’s snoring.

I let the car coast in neutral down the driveway. Our bedroom faces the street. The curtains don’t stir.

The West River Road is deserted, except for a few eighteen-wheelers. I cross the river at the interstate and start back along the east side. Three miles along, in the middle of farmland, the smell of burned flesh rolls in the window.

Cows, close to the pasture fence. I stop the car and get out. Fifteen or sixteen Holsteins. By straining over the fence, I can see the bullet holes in their heads. Somebody herded them togther, shot them one by one, and started a half-hearted fire among the bodies with neatly cut firewood. The fire had gone out; it didn’t look as if it was supposed to burn long. Just long enough to attract attention that hadn’t come yet.

I’d never heard that cows could get human diseases. Why had they been shot?

I get back in my car and drove the rest of the way to Emerton Memorial.

This side of town is deathly quiet. Grass grows unmowed in yard after yard. One large, expensive house has old newspapers piled on the porch steps, ten or twelve of them. There are no kids waiting for school buses, no cars pulling out of driveways on the way to work. The hospital parking lot has huge empty stretches between cars. At the last minute I drive on through the lot, parking instead across the street in somebody’s empty driveway, under a clump of trees.

Nobody sits at the information desk. The gift shop is locked. Nobody speaks to me as I study the directory on the lobby wall, even though two figures in gowns and masks hurry past. CHIEF OF MEDICINE, DR. RANDOLF SATLER. Third floor, east wing. The elevator is deserted.

It stop at the second floor. When the doors open a man stands there, a middle-aged farmer in overalls and work boots, his eyes red and swollen like he’s been crying. There are tinted windows across from the elevators and I can see the back of him reflected in the glass. Coming and going. From somewhere I hear a voice calling, “Nurse, oh nourse, oh God … ” A guerney sits in hallway, the body on it covered by a sheet up to the neck. The man in overalls looks at me and raises both hands to ward off the elevator, like it’s some kind of demon. He steps backward. The doors close.

I grip the railing on the elevator wall.

The third floor looks empty. Bright arrows lead along the hallways: yellow for PATHOLOGY and LAB SERVICES, green for RESPIRATORY THERAPY, red for SUPPORT SERVICES. I follow the yellow arrow.

It dead-ends at an empty alcove with chairs, magazines thrown on the floor. And three locked doors off a short corridor that’s little more than an alcove.

I pick the farthest door and pound on it. No words, just regular blows of my fist. After a minute, I start on the second one. A voice calls, “Who’s there?”

I recognize the voice, even through the locked door. Even after seventeen years. I shout, “Police! Open the door!”

And he does. The second it cracks, I shove it hard and push my way into the lab.

“Elizabeth?”

He’s older, heavier, but still the same. Dark hair, blue eyes … I look at that face every day at dinner. I’ve looked at it at soccer matches, in school plays, in his playpen. Dr. Satler looks more shaken to see me than I would have thought, his face white, sweat on his forehead.

“Hello, Randy.”

“Elizabeth. You can’t come in here. You have to leave — “

“Because of the staph? Do you think I care about that? After all, I’m in the hospital, right, Randy? This is where the endozine is. This place is safe. Unless it gets blown up while I’m standing here.”

He stares at my left hand, still gripping the doorknob behind me. Then at the gun in my right hand. A seventeen-year-old Smith & Wesson, and for five of those years the gun wasn’t cleaned or oiled, hidden under my aunt’s garage. But it still fires.

“I’m not going to shoot you, Randy. I don’t care if you’re alive or dead. But you’re going to help me. I can’t find my son — ” your son ” — and Sylvia Goddard told me he’s mixed up with that group that blew up the bridge. He’s hiding with them someplace, probably scared out of his skull. You know everybody in town, everybody with power, you’re going to get on that phone there and find out where Sean is.”

“I would do that anyway,” Randy says, and now he looks the way I remember him: impatient and arrogant. But not completely. There’s still sweat on his pale face. “Put that stupid thing away, Elizabeth.”

“No.”

“Oh, for … ” He turns his back on me and punches at the phone.

“Cam? Randy Satler here. Could you … no, it’s not about that … No. Not yet.”

Cameron Witt. The mayor. His son is chief of Emerton’s five cops.

“I need a favor. There’s a kid missing … I know that, Cam. You don’t have to lecture me on how bad delay could … But you might know about this kid. Sean Baker.”

“Pulaski. Sean Pulaski.” He doesn’t even know that.

“Sean Pulaski. Yeah, that one … okay. Get back to me … I told you. Not yet.” He hangs up. “Cam will hunt around and call back. Now will you put that stupid gun away, Elizabeth?”

“You still don’t say thank you for anything.” The words just come out. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“To Cam, or to you for not shooting me?” He says it evenly, and the evenness is the only way I finally see how furious he is. People don’t order around Dr. Randy Satler at gun point. A part of my mind wonders why he doesn’t call security.

I said, “All right, I’m here. Give me a dose of endozine, just in case.”

He goes on staring at me with that same level, furious gaze. “Too late, Elizabeth.”

“What do you mean, too late? Haven’t you got endozine?”

“Of course we do.” Suddenly he staggers slightly, puts out one hand behind him, and holds onto a table covered with glassware and papers.

“Randy. You’re sick.”

“I am. And not with anything endozine is going to cure. Ah, Elizabeth, why didn’t you just phone me? I’d have looked for Sean for you.”

“Oh, right. Like you’ve been so interested and helpful in raising him.”

“You never asked me.”

I see that he means it. He really believes his total lack of contact with his son is my fault. I see that Randy gives only what he’s asked to. He waits, lordly, for people to plead for his help, beg for it, and then he gives it. If it suits him.

I say, “I’ll bet anything your kids with your wife are turning out really scary.”

The blood rushes to his face, and I know I guessed right. His blue eyes darken and he looks like Jack looks just before Jack explodes. But Randy isn’t Jack. An explosion would be too clean for him. He says instead, “You were stupid to come here. Haven’t you been listening to the news?”

I haven’t.

“The CDC publicly announced just last night what medical personnel have seen for weeks. A virulent strain of staphylococcus aureus has incorporated endozine-resistant plasmids from enterococcus.” He pauses to catch his breath. “And pneumococcus may have done the same thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, you stupid woman, that now there are highly contagious infections that we have no drugs to cure. No antibiotics at all, not even endozine. This staph is resistant to them all. And it can live everywhere.”

I lower the gun. The empty parking lot. No security to summon. The man who wouldn’t get on the elevator. And Randy’s face. “And you’ve got it.”

“We’ve all got it. Everyone … in the hospital. And for forcing your way in here, you probably do, too.”

“You’re going to die,” I say, and it’s half a hope.

And he smiles.

He stands there in his white lab coat, sweating like a horse, barely able to stand up straight, almost shot by a woman he’d once abandoned pregnant, and he smiles. His blue eyes gleam. He looks like a picture I once saw in a book, back when I read a lot. It takes me a minute to remember that it was my high school World History book. A picture of some general.

“Everybody’s going to die eventually,” Randy says. “But not me right now. At least … I hope not.” Casually he crosses the floor toward me, and I step backward. He smiles again.

“I’m not going to deliberately infect you, Elizabeth. I’m a doctor. I just want the gun.”

“No.”

“Have it your way. Look, how much do you know about the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century?”

“Nothing,” I say, although I do. Why had I always acted stupider around Randy than I actually am?

“Then it won’t mean anything to you to say that this mutated staph has at least that much potential — ” again he paused and gulped air ” — for rapid and fatal transmission. It flourishes everywhere. Even on doorknobs.”

“So why the fuck are you smiling?” Alexander. That was the picture of the general. Alexander the Great.

“Because I … because the CDC distributed … I was on the national team to discover … ” His face changes again. Goes even whiter. And he pitches over onto the floor.

I grab him, roll him face up, and feel his forehead. He’s burning up. I bolt for the door. “Nurse! Doctor! There’s a sick doctor here!”

Nobody comes.

I run down the corridors. Respiratory Therapy is empty. So is Support Services. I jab at the elevator button, but before it comes I run back to Randy.

And stand above him, lying there crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe.

I’d dreamed about a moment like this for years. Dreamed it waking and asleep, in Emerton and in Bedford Hills and in Jack’s arms. Dreamed it in a thousand ridiculous melodramatic versions. And here it is, Randy helpless and pleading, and me strong, standing over him, free to walk away and let him die. Free.

I wring out a towel in cold water and put it on his forehead. Then I find ice in the refrigerator in a corner of the lab and substitute that. He watches me, his breathing wheezy as old machinery.

“Elizabeth. Bring me … syringe in a box on … that table.”

I do it. “Who should I get for you, Randy? Where?”

“Nobody. I’m not … as bad … as I sound. Yet. Just the initial … dyspnea.” He picks up the syringe.

“Is there medicine for you in there? I thought you said endozine wouldn’t work on this new infection.” His color is a little better now.

“Not medicine. And not for me. For you.”

He looks at me steadily. And I see that Randy would never plead, never admit to helplessness. Never ever think of himself as helpless.

He lowers the hand holding the syringe back to the floor. “Listen, Elizabeth. You have … almost certainly have … “

Somewhere, distantly, a siren starts to wail. Randy ignores it. All of a sudden his voice becomes much firmer, even though he’s sweating again and his eyes burn bright with fever. Or something.

“This staph is resistant to everything we can throw it. We cultured it and tried. Cephalosporins and aminoglycosides and vancomycin, even endozine … I’ll go into gram-positive septic shock … ” His eyes glaze, but after a moment he seems to find his thought again. “We exhausted all points of counterattack. Cell wall, bacterial ribosome, folic acid pathway. Microbes just evolve countermeasures. Like beta-lactamase.”

I don’t understand this language. Even talking to himself, he’s making me feel stupid again. I ask something I do understand.

“Why are people killing cows? Are the cows sick, too?”

He focuses again. “Cows? No, they’re not sick. Farmers use massive doses of antibiotics to increase meat and milk production. Agricultural use of endozine has increased the rate of resistance development by over a thousand percent since — Elizabeth, this is irrelevant! Can’t you pay attention to what I’m saying for three minutes?”

I stand up and look down at him, lying shivering on the floor. He doesn’t even seem to notice, just keep on lecturing.

“But antibiotics weren’t invented by humans. They were invented by the microbes themselves to use … against each other and … they had two billion years of evolution at it before we even showed up … We should have — where are you going?”

“Home. Have a nice life, Randy.”

He says quietly, “I probably will. But if … you leave now, you’re probably dead. And your husband and kids, too.”

“Why? Damn it, stop lecturing and tell me why!”

“Because you’re infected, and there’s no antibiotic for it, but there is another bacteria that will attack the drug-resistant staph.”

I look at the syringe in his hand.

“It’s a Trojan horse plasmid. That’s a … never mind. It can get into the staph in your blood and deliver a lethal gene. One that will kill the staph. It’s an incredible discovery. But the only way to deliver it so far is to deliver the whole bacteria.”

My knees all of a sudden get shaky. Randy watches me from his position on the floor. He looks shakier himself. His breathing turns raspier again.

“No, you’re not sick yet, Elizabeth. But you will be.”

I snap, “From the staph germs or from the cure?”

“Both.”

“You want to make me sicker. With two bacteria. And hope one will kill the other.”

“Not hope. I know. I actually saw … it on the electromicrograph … ” His eyes roll, refocus. ” … could package just the lethal plasmid on a transpon if we had time … no time. Has to be the whole bacteria.” And then, stronger, “The CDC team is working on it. But I actually caught it on the electromicrograph!”

I say, before I know I’m going to, “Stop congratulating yourself and give me the syringe. Before you die.”

I move across the floor toward him, put my arms around him to prop him in a sitting position against the table leg. His whole body feels on fire. But somehow he keeps his hands steady as he injects the syringe into the inside of my elbow. While it drains sickness into me I say, “You never actually wanted me, did you, Randy? Even before Sean?”

“No,” he says. “Not really.” He drops the syringe.

I bend my arm. “You’re a rotten human being. All you care about is yourself and your work.”

He smiles the same cold smile. “So? My work is what matters. In a larger sense than you could possibly imagine. You were always a weak sentimentalist, Elizabeth. Now, go home.”

“Go home? But you said … “

“I said you’d infect everyone. And you will — with the bacteria that attacks staph. It should cause only a fairly mild illness. Jenner … smallpox … “

“But you said I have the mutated staph, too!”

“You almost certainly do. Yes … And so will everyone else, before long. Deaths.. in New York State alone … passed one million this morning. Six and a half percent of the … the population … Did you really think you could hide on your side of … the … river … “

“Randy!”

“Go … home.”

I strip off his lab coat and wad it up for a pillow, bring more ice from the refrigerator, try to get him to drink some water.

“Go … home. Kiss everybody.” He smiles to himself, and starts to shake with fever. His eyes close.

I stand up again. Should I go? Stay? If I could find someone in the hospital to take care of him —

The phone rings. I seize it. “Hello? Hello?”

“Randy? Excuse me, can I talk to Dr. Satler? This is Cameron Witt.”

I try to sound professional. “Dr. Satler can’t come to the phone right now. But if you’re calling about Sean Pulaski, Dr. Satler asked me to take the message.”

“I don’t … oh, all right. Just tell Randy the Pulaski boy is with Richard and Sylvia James. He’ll understand.” The line clicks.

I replace the receiver and stare at Randy, fighting for breath on the floor, his face as gray as Sean’s when Sean realized it was murder he’d gotten involved with. No, not as gray. Because Sean had been terrified, and Randy is only sick.

My work is what matters.

But how had Sean known to go to Sylvia? Even if he knew from Ceci who was on the other side, how did he know which people would hide him, would protect him when I could not, Jack could not? Sylvia-and-Elizabeth. How much did Sean actually know about the past I’d tried so hard to keep from touching him?

I reach the elevator, my finger almost touching the button, when the first explosion rocks the hospital.

It’s in the west wing. Through the windows opposite the elevator banks I see windows in the far end of the building explode outward. Thick greasy black smoke billows out the holes. Alarms begin to screech.

Don’t touch the elevators. Instructions remembered from high school, from grade-school fire drills. I race along the hall to the fire stairs. What if they put a bomb in the stairwell? What if who put a bomb in the stairwell? A lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and Ceci’s house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

A last glimpse through a window by the door to the firestairs. People are running out of the building, not many, but the ones I see are pushing guerneys. A nurse staggers outside, three small children in her arms, on her hip, clinging to her back.

They aren’t setting off any more bombs until people have a chance to get out.

I let the fire door close. Alarms scream. I run back to Pathology and shove open the heavy door.

Randy lies on the floor, sweating and shivering. His lips move but if he’s muttering aloud, I can’t hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn’t resist and he doesn’t help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.

There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling “Randy! Randy! Get up!” Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.

His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away, then returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much slighter, and I’m very strong.

But I can’t carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. “For … God’s sake … Janet!”

His wife’s name. I don’t think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself — I’ll never know how — back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses. Every second I’m waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean’s gray face at dinner: Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.

The stairs don’t blow up. The firedoor at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we’re outside, Randy blacks out.

This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I’m aware of someone running toward us.

“It’s Dr. Satler! Oh my God!”

A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman’s carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.

My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they’ve torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.

Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of it. I pull the car off the road and I can’t stop shaking. Only a few trucks pass me, and nobody stops. It’s twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.

I turn on the radio as soon as I’ve started the engine.

” — in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare’s Hospital in the heart of Manhattan. Beleaguered police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby businesses and at least one apartment house.

“Since the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to endozine, and its simultaneous release of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic countermeasure released an additional set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team, citing fear of reprisals if — “

A burst of static. The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.

I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.

By the time I reach the west side of Emerton, the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look. Had looked. My body still doesn’t feel sick.

Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.

The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker: TO DR. BENNETT. The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody’s garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a styrofoam plate, a stone crucifex, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of The Prophet. There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seashells, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.

When I get home, Jack is still asleep.

I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy Satler. I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from Emerton even in the bad winter weather. About how he’d sit smiling at me through the thick glass in the visitors’ room, his hands with their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her. About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.

I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.

He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don’t rinse it. When I return, he’s asleep again.

I drive to Jackie’s school, to retrieve my daughter. Together, we will go to Sylvia Goddard’s — Sylvia James’s — and get Sean. I’ll visit with Sylvia, and shake her hand, and kiss her on the cheek, and touch everything I can. When the kids are safe at home, I’ll visit Ceci and tell her I’ve thought it over and I want to help fight the overuse of antibiotics that’s killing us. I’ll touch her, and anyone else there, and everyone that either Sylvia or Ceci introduces me to, until I get too sick to do that. If I get that sick. Randy said I wouldn’t, not as sick as he is. Of course, Randy has lied to me before. But I have to believe him now, on this.

I don’t really have any choice. Yet.

A month later, I am on my way to Albany to bring back another dose of the counterbacteria, which the news calls “a reengineered prokaryote.” They’re careful not to call it a germ.

I listen to the news every hour now, although Jack doesn’t like it. Or anything else I’m doing. I read, and I study, and now I know what prokaryotes are, and beta-lactamase, and plasmids. I know how bacteria fight to survive, evolving whatever they need to wipe out the competition and go on producing the next generation. That’s all that matters to bacteria. Survival by their own kind.

And that’s what Randy Satler meant, too, when he said, “My work is what matters.” Triumph by his own kind. It’s what Ceci believes, too. And Jack.

We bring in the reengineered prokaryotes in convoys of cars and trucks, because in some other places there’s been trouble. People who don’t understand, people who won’t understand. People whose family got a lot sicker than mine. The violence isn’t over, even though the CDC says the epidemic itself is starting to come under control.

I’m early. The convoy hasn’t formed yet. We leave from a different place in town each time. This time we’re meeting behind the American Bowl. Sean is already there, with Sylvia. I take a short detour and drive, for the last time, to the Food Mart.

The basket is gone, with all its letters to the dead man. So are the American flag and the peace sign. The crucifex is still there, but it’s broken in half. The latest flowers in the wine bottle are half wilted. Rain has muddied the Barbie doll’s dress, and her long blonde hair is a mess. Someone ripped up the anti-NRA stickers. The white candle on a styrofoam plate and the pile of seashells are untouched.

We are not bacteria. More than survival matters to us, or should. The individual past, which we can’t escape, no matter how hard we try. The individual present, with its unsafe choices. The individual future. And the collective one.

I search in my pockets. Nothing but keys, money clip, lipstick, tissues, a blue marble I must have stuck in my pocket when I cleaned behind the couch. Jackie likes marbles.

I put the marble beside the candle, check my gun, and drive to join the convoy for the city.

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