B
y their third week, they had worked out a communications routine with Jenny. She would call every fourth night at a designated time from public phones in Kalamazoo to public phones around Lake Placid.
The good news was that Ted had made contact with a couple of street-wise guys who could get them phony licenses. It would cost two thousand dollars and they would need photos and signatures under new names. Jenny would drive out in a safe car to be swapped for Chris’s rented van, which Ted would turn over to a chop shop. Before they hung up, Jenny mentioned that Wendy’s book had been published to good reviews, and because of all the publicity it had made some local best-seller lists. “Too bad I’ll miss the book tour,” Wendy said grimly.
Four nights later Jenny arrived in a two-year-old Ford Explorer. In case she had been followed, Chris met her at a highway rest stop twenty miles away. When he was certain that nobody had tailed her, he led the way to the cottage.
Jenny had brought forms to sign and a Polaroid for IDs. In blackened hair and beard Chris would not be easily mistaken for the TV photos. And Wendy was now a blond and twenty-five pounds lighter than in her author photos.
Jenny had not been to the lodge for nearly fifteen years. Besides the remoteness, it was not her kind of place. Nor Ted’s, whose idea of a getaway was Las Vegas.
“Better you than me,” Jenny had said, looking around the old place.
“But we had some good times,” Wendy reminded her, still amazed at the fact that Jenny had arranged for their new IDs and driven all the way out here by herself and undetected. Sometimes Jenny’s reaction was so unpredictable that Wendy felt guilty for ever underestimating her. The element of danger seemed to have given Jenny new resolve. Perhaps new motherhood had created a greater sense of family, sharpening her protective instincts.
“Between the snow and mud, the bugs and mice, this place would drive me crazy. But,” she added, “I supposed it’s a good place to raise kids. They’d be far from all the rot out there. Unless, of course, you got one of those awful satellite dishes. Gosh, the stuff they’re showing on television these days. No wonder kids are so screwed up.”
Following dinner, they settled by the fire while Jenny showed them photographs. She had brought maybe two dozen—all of Abigail at Christmas dolled up a variety of different outfits and sitting among mountains of presents. “She’s getting so big,” Wendy said.
“Too big. Her babyhood is just flying by.”
“How’s Karen doing?” Chris asked.
“Karen? Who’s Karen?”
“Your other daughter,” he said, suddenly feeling a chill of embarrassment.
“Kelly.”
“Kelly,” he said, and slapped his forehead. “What’s the matter with me?”
I’ll tell you what’s the matter
, a voice inside whispered.
It’s happening: Your brain is dying
.
Wendy shot him a look of concern. She knew what he was thinking.
Like how you forgot where you left the axe this morning, and how you have to make lists to remind you of things, and how you put the milk in the pantry and the cereal in the fridge the other day, and how
simple
head calculations you now have to do on paper, and those moments of disorientation when you step into the next room
.
Wendy had said it was stress and anxiety, but he knew better. He could almost feel clusters of brain cells clot and die.
His eyes dropped to the photo of Abigail and thought how he would never see his son grow up. How he would never know Adam as a boy or young man. How in two years, if he were still alive, he would look at Adam and not know who he was from all the other alien faces in the world. Like Sam.
A particularly virulent form of Alzheimer’s
.
He’d rather die first than put Wendy and Adam through that.
“She’s better, thank you,” Jenny continued with an exaggerated singsongy voice that said she had nothing else to say about Kelly. “But would you believe it that in just five months Abigail will be two years old? I’m going to have a big party. Which reminds me.” Without missing a beat, she pulled a bright red package from her bag. “Belated Merry Christmas.”
Wendy unwrapped it and froze. It was a copy of
If I Should Die
. She studied the cover and dustjacket copy and photo. Then she put the book in a desk drawer and left the room without a word.
Perplexed, Jenny looked at Chris. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”
There was one thing Chris hadn’t forgotten. March third. “Tomorrow was to be the publication party.”
But the gaps in Jenny’s thinking had less to do with pathology than thoughtlessness, Chris concluded.
“Oh, I forgot. Well, it’s not like you’ll be living in hiding forever. You’re getting yourself a lawyer, right?”
Chris tried to shake his mind clear. “We’re working on that.”
For a moment they both stared into the fire which sputtered and flamed vigorously.
“So,” Jenny said finally, “tell me about this Elixir stuff. Does it really work?”
Chris wished Wendy hadn’t broken down and told her. “On lab animals it does.”
“What does it actually do?”
“It appears to protect them from diseases associated with aging.”
“Like what?”
Like Alzheimer’s.
Like Alzheimer’s.
Like Alzheimer’s.
And he saw Methuselah whipping through complicated mazes as if wired.
“Arthritis, cancer, heart disease.”
“Oh my, that’s wonderful. And somebody thinks it’s good enough for people.” She rubbed a kink in her neck. “Frankly, I could use a little of that myself. Ted, too. He’s pushing fifty.”
Chris could hear Wendy upstairs in the baby’s room. It was feeding time. He could also hear the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the corner. In a year he could be brain-dead.
“Is it possible to see what the fuss is all about?” Jenny asked. “The Elixir stuff?”
“There’s really nothing to see.”
“Christopher, I’m not going to tell anybody,” she said with mock hurt.
Jenny had driven seven hundred miles with hot IDs for two fugitives at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list, so he could not in good faith refuse her. “It’s just that we’ve been walking a tightrope up here.”
Jenny got up. “I understand perfectly. You’re under a lot of stress.”
Chris nodded.
Stress
.
He got up and led her downstairs to the wine closet. He unlocked it and pulled out one of the trunks. Two hundred and twelve ampules had been packed like glass bullets in styrofoam.
“Oh my,” Jenny said. She removed one and held it up to the light. “And this can keep you alive indefinitely?”
“It it appears to have some such effects on monkeys.” He played coy to discourage questions, but she was impervious. Being a former nurse, she wondered how they had figured out the proper dosages to give the animals. Chris explained it was trial and error until they determined that a fifteen pound monkey was could tolerate 10 milligrams.
“So, for a 150-pound man it would be ten times that, right?”
“I guess.”
“So, how long could one of these keep a monkey going?”
“About ten years each.”
“That much?”
“It’s very concentrated, so it would have to be cut with saline. I’m getting cold,” he said, and made a move to leave. The questions were making him uncomfortable. So was the pull of those ampules.
But Jenny disregarded him. “Is it just one shot and they go on and on?”
“More like once a month.” He wanted to go back upstairs.
“And if they don’t get their monthlies?”
“They die.”
“I see.” She held up the ampule. “Do you ever get tempted yourself?”
He felt the skin across his scalp prickle. “Nope.”
He made a move to close the trunk when Wendy called down from upstairs. He stepped outside the closet to hear her better. A moment later he stepped back in. “One order of zinfandel,” he said.
“I second the motion,” Jenny chortled, and stepped outside while Chris hunted for a bottle.
He went to secure the trunk, but Jenny had already done that. For a moment it puzzled him that she had taken such liberty. And he would have said something, but she was already on her way upstairs. Just like Jenny: driven by presumptions and tidiness.
Chris locked the door and headed up, thinking about how good the wine would taste. Maybe he’d have just half a glass. If his brain cells were dying, what the hell difference would a little wine make?
The next morning before she left, Chris asked Jenny if she would call the Rose Hill nursing home in Connecticut to check on Sam’s condition. She agreed and he gave her the number and some instructions. A little after ten, Jenny drove off in the van. In her handbag she carried the photos of Wendy and Chris and sample signatures. Also, two ampules of Elixir.
On their eighteenth night, Chris drove to a call box outside a fire station in Rumford. The street was dark and deserted. A little after nine, Jenny’s call came through. But after a few seconds he could tell something was wrong. Had the authorities cornered her? Did she and Ted fear they were getting in too deeply? Was it a money problem?
“Chris, I’m sorry. It’s your father. He’s dead.”
“Oh no.”
“I did just as you said: I identified myself as an assistant prosecutor from Massachusetts … .”
“When did it happen?” Chris asked.
“Ten days ago. They said his remains were cremated, which was the home’s policy when next of kin couldn’t be located. I’m sorry, Chris.”
He felt the grief well up in him, but he pushed it back. “Thank you, Jenny.” He hung up and headed home, concentrating on driving under the speed limit.
He arrived at the cottage around eleven. Wendy and the baby were in bed. But he knew he would not be able to sleep. He knew he would have to confront the full force of his grief and guilt. So he sat on the couch and turned on the television.
One of the channels was playing
The Wild One
with a lean, young Marlon Brando swaggering about the screen in tight jeans and a hurt truculent look. Today he was a three-hundred-pound bald and wheezy mound of fat draped in black tunics to hide what time had done to him.
Chris watched the movie with the volume off. The only sound was that of the sleeting rain against the windows. With his glasses off, the picture was fuzzy. But that made no difference, because all he could see was Sam lying in his bed, a pathetic shriveled shadow of the man he had been, dying in an institution made up of hands and feet and mouths moving without sense.
Chris knew that Sam hadn’t had long, that his organs would give out as he languished in a vegetative state. But what ate at Chris was that he had not had the chance to say goodbye. That life had turned so bizarre he could not even risk visiting his father one last time.
Blankly he stared at the TV and proceeded to drink a six-pack of beer, one can after the next—brain cells be damned-until his head was a throbbing mass and the geometry of the room took a non-Euclidian slant and the fuzz on the screen sharpened into shapes and forms that pulled him in.
Green. The black and white had turned a dazzling green. He was walking on a vast lawn between Sam and his mother Rose. They were at Campobello, Hyde Park, New York. He could see it with brilliant clarity—the great white house with the high windows. The massive white marble tombstone of FDR. Then he was rolling on the lawn and his seven-year-old legs were cool from the grass. He was wearing navy blue pants with black-and-white saddle shoes and a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.
“Hey there, slugger!”
Then grass shifted and became a dirt diamond at Goodwin Park in Hartford, and Sam was at the pitcher’s mound with a bucket of baseballs and Chris at the plate with his Louisville Slugger. Sam held up a clean white hardball. “What do you say we give this one a run for its money?” And Chris swung with all his might and cracked the ball up to the clouds.
The next moment Sam was climbing aboard the dive boat on a reef off Boroko on the southern coast of Papua New Guinea: his body still lean and bronze, joking about the giant grouper that had spooked him, handing Chris a triton shell. Chris held the shell up to his eye imagining he could see around the curves spiraling forever inward … until he was peering through a window of the nursing home where he spotted Sam in the bed … .
Chris climbed through the shell window thinking how odd it was that Sam was sleeping in his navy blue jumper shorts with a white polo shirt and socks and saddle shoes. But Sam’s face was not tanned and full, but thin and dry and spotted with age. His hair was a wispy cloud across a sad pink skull. He breathed in short raspy starts through a raw toothless mouth.
So that he wouldn’t injure himself, Sam’s hands had been bound to the sides of the bed. Chris untied one and pushed up the sleeve of his johnny. The arm, strapped with an IV needle, was like a stick covered with old wax paper. Sam looked like a mummy of himself.