Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (73 page)

Mrs. Polchak brightened. “A walk is just the thing. Why don’t you two take a nice walk, while I go in the kitchen and throw two hours of hard work in the garbage?”

“This is what’s known as a ‘guilt trip,’ ” Nick whispered to Riley. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

They left by the back door. Twenty yards away, tucked in the trees against the hillside, the greenhouse glittered like a faceted jewel in the passing moonlight. They followed a well-worn path toward the greenhouse door.

Nick glanced over at Riley. “So what did she say about me?”

“She said you’re a nut, and if I want to open you up, I’d better have a big hammer.”

“That’s better than I hoped for,” Nick said. “Wait here a minute.” He stepped into the greenhouse and emerged a moment later with two shining objects. He handed one to Riley; it was a small mason jar with the lid ring holding a coffee filter in place across the open mouth.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.” He turned and headed for a second path that curved slowly uphill and disappeared into the woods. Riley followed him to the edge of the trees, stopped, and peered into the darkness.

“Where are we going?” she called after him.

“This way. You’ve got to see this.”

Riley took a deep breath and plunged into the shadows after him, where strips of bright moonlight illuminated the path in a zebra pattern. She caught up to him at a place where the trees suddenly gave way to a great, open meadow.

They walked together to the top of the rise. “Welcome to my world,” he said.

The hill sloped gently away from them to form a vast, shadowy
meadow that seemed to rise and fall like the ocean at night. Thin pockets of mist lay in the hollows, and around the edge of the woods, thick stands of locust and maple stood guard in uniforms of deep blue and violet. And everywhere, as far as the eye could see, were the gentle, silent, floating green lights of a thousand fireflies.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Nick reached slowly into the air and clapped his hands together once.

“Look.” He opened his hands to show a glowing smear of light across his palm. “Luciferase. It’s the enzyme that produces their light. Did you know that 95 percent of the energy used by an incandescent light bulb is given off as heat? A hundred years of technological advancement and that’s the best that your species can do. But this little guy gives off almost 100 percent
light.
Incredible!”

He reached his arm into the air again and a moment later brought it back, holding out the edge of his hand to show a single black insect, tipped with orange and glowing with soft green light. “You’re looking at the state insect of Pennsylvania,” he said. “New Mexico’s is a
wasp.
Fireflies are really beetles, not flies at all. In a few weeks, they’ll all be gone.” He slowly extended his hand to her. She held out her own hand, and Nick took it, allowing the tiny creature to crawl off of his hand and onto hers. But Nick held her hand a little longer.

They waded forward into the ocean of soft green lights.

“I’ll bet I know how to tell the males from the females,” Riley said. “It’s the eyes. The females see everything going on around them, and the males are all clueless.”

“Nice try. The truth is, every one you see is a male. Most people have never seen a female firefly.” Nick dropped to his hands and knees and began to search through the thick grass. “Look—here’s a female.”

Riley saw a tiny green glow coming from the tip of a blade of grass.

“The females stay on the ground. Each species of firefly has its own flash pattern. The females flash their signal, and the males fly overhead and flash back. When there’s a match, that’s
amore
—most of the time.”

“Most of the time?”

“See that one?” He pointed across the meadow. “That’s a Big Dipper firefly—a
Photinus pyralis.
He lights his lamp, dips, and then curves up again—see? He writes the letter J over and over again. Now, somewhere in this meadow is a female
Photinus
—but there are also a few
Photuris
ladies too. They’re much larger than the Dippers, and they’ve learned to mimic their flash pattern perfectly. If the male
Photinus
picks the wrong lady, it’s dinnertime—and he’s dinner.”

“Love is a risky business in the insect world,” Riley said.

“In the human world too. Get attracted to the wrong female and you can get eaten alive.”

“Is that your personal experience or just a scientific observation?”

Nick removed the lid from his jar and began to move among the tiny lights, reaching and bending and scooping at the air.

“At the beginning of the firefly season, there are hundreds of males for every female. The male soars over the meadow, flashing, searching, like Diogenes with his lantern. He spots females everywhere, but none of them are for him. Suddenly he sees it—can it be? Yes! It’s
his
signal! After endless miles of flying and thousands and thousands of flashes, he’s found his ladylove. He soars down into her waiting arms,” he said, with arms extended, “and she bites his head off.”

“Why do you think they keep trying?”

“Because they have brains the size of pinheads,” Nick said. “What’s
our
excuse?”

Riley sat down now and watched Nick as he moved about the meadow. Sometimes he stretched and sometimes he stooped. Sometimes he stood perfectly still and waited. Then he would start again, almost running across the field, arms sweeping back and forth before him. Riley smiled, imagining that even after the fireflies were gone he might come to this field late at night and run, like a child, for the sheer joy of movement.

The moon was bright, but the sky was littered with clouds. At one moment she could see him perfectly, a cobalt figure with a gleaming glass jar. An instant later he was only a silhouette, barely visible at all.

“Riley,” he called out. “Where are you?”

Riley sat perfectly still.

“Riley!” he called louder.

Silence.

“So
that’s
the game,” he said, and began to retrace his steps back across the field toward the rise. There was a flash of moonlight and he whirled around, taking a quick accounting of every potential shape and shadow—then darkness again. Riley sat in a small hollow, blending almost perfectly with the ground around her. He was now very near, and once he passed so close that she could hear his breathing, so close that she felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Still she said nothing.

He stopped and turned. He was looking almost directly at her. He stepped forward, stopped, and stared more closely, as if by concentrating he might somehow draw extra light from the coal black sky. He stepped closer; closer; now he was only a few feet away, and the air seemed supercharged between them. Riley held her breath and stared up at him. Another step, and then he bent slowly forward, staring into the strange shadow before him.

At that moment the moon slid out from behind a black cloud, and Nick found himself staring into Riley’s green and brown eyes, ablaze in the blue white moonlight. They both found themselves strangely short of breath. Riley rose to her knees; Nick dropped to his and took her in his arms. She blinked hard once, and he instinctively blinked back.

“It’s been a long time,” Nick said. “What do I do now?”

“I think you’re supposed to kiss me.”

Nick hesitated. “I think I forgot how.”

“They say it’s like riding a bicycle.”

“I was never any good on a bicycle—I used to fall off a lot.”

“Like you said—love is a risky business.”

And then they both remembered.

They were interrupted by the sound of Nick’s cell phone. He slid it out of his pocket and opened it. “What?” he said with obvious annoyance.

“Nick, it’s Leo. Have you felt anything yet?”

“I was starting to. What do you want?”

“Is this a bad time?”

“The worst. Hang on a minute.” He motioned to Riley; she edged up beside him, and he held the phone away so she could hear as well.

“I finished the shredding,” Leo said. “The program just ended and printed out a copy of all the original documents. Most of them were ordinary financial records—a Visa charge summary, a mutual-fund statement of activity, health insurance explanation of benefits—that sort of thing. But there were a few items in the confetti shredding that I thought you should know about. One was a brochure from an outpatient surgery center in Penn Hills. You don’t suppose your boy had a knee repaired or a wart removed, do you?”

“It’s possible. What are the other items?”

“Three prescriptions from a Canadian online pharmacy. The drugs are called Neoral, Immuran, and Orasone. I have no idea what they are.”

Nick looked at Riley.

“Neoral is a cyclosporine,” she said. “Immuran is an azathioprine, and Orasone is a corticosteroid. They’re all immunosuppressants, and they’re commonly prescribed together—after transplants.”

How can I help you, Mr. Polchak? The receptionist tells me you have some concerns.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No, sir. My name is Allen Reston. I’m the COO—more like an office manager, really. You could say I run things here at Westmoreland Surgery Center.”

Nick glanced around at the office. The room was precise in every detail, lit with the same antiseptic fluorescence as a procedure room. The desk was a curving slab of white maple with a contoured laminate base. The desktop was bare except for a matching black desk set and a flat panel monitor. The computer itself, like all other functional components of the room, was tastefully hidden from sight.
The walls were dutifully adorned with three sterile landscapes, which provided about the same warmth and assurance as the teddy bears on a phlebotomist’s smock. Nick’s plum-colored chair, ergonomically designed, forced him to sit more erect than he liked; it made him feel as though someone were pushing him from behind.

“I blew out an ACL on the tennis court,” Nick said. “Now my doctor says I need laparoscopic surgery.”

“Did the same thing myself,” Reston said. “I guess it’s the weekend warrior thing; you think you’re still twenty-five, but your knees have other ideas.”

Nick nodded. “I’m a little uncomfortable about having the procedure done here.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Well, it’s not a hospital. I mean, if something goes wrong in a hospital, you’ve got state-of-the-art medical facilities.”

At this, the man broke into a smile. “You’re a little behind the times, Mr. Polchak. How much do you know about freestanding surgery centers?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.”

“These places started popping up everywhere about a dozen years ago. Hospital ORs were increasingly overcrowded, and they realized they could lighten the load considerably if they began to conduct minimally invasive surgeries off site.”

“That’s what I was afraid of—I get bussed to relieve someone else’s overcrowding problem. I get second-rate care.”

“There’s nothing second-rate about Westmoreland Surgery Center,” Reston said. “A decade ago, ambulatory surgery centers only performed the simplest procedures: endoscopies, breast biopsies, lesion excisions—and that’s all that some centers still do. But more aggressive facilities—like this one—developed into fullfledged, freestanding surgery centers. At Westmoreland, we now do an entire range of surgical procedures: gynecological, urological, vascular, and orthopedic. We’re constantly increasing the number of procedures we can perform.”

“But you can’t compete with a hospital for quality of care.”

“Why not? Our surgeons are on the staff of several local hospitals; if you choose to go to a hospital, one of our surgeons may perform your procedure there.”

“But surely hospitals have better facilities—the equipment and all.”

“Westmoreland Surgery Center has two state-of-the-art surgical suites. They are identical to the ORs in any major hospital—except for the instrumentation, of course.”

“The instrumentation?”

“The cost of medical equipment is enormous—a single surgical laser can cost almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Hospitals have the funding to purchase their equipment outright; we avoid the capital outlay by using an equipment outsource company. Suppose you need a procedure that requires the use of that surgical laser; instead of buying one—and charging your insurance company for it—we can lease it for a single day. The outsource company can provide blood bypass equipment, instrument trays—anything we require, depending on the procedure we’re doing.”

“Clever,” Nick said. “That would allow you to do almost any procedure a hospital can do.”

“Almost.”

“Just out of curiosity, what keeps you guys from going all the way? What keeps you from performing, say, brain surgery?”

Reston leaned as far back as his ergonomic chair would allow and considered this. “In theory, we could—that is, we could at least set up to perform the procedure—but what we’re not set up for is long-term convalescent care. No intensive care unit, no month-long hospital stays. This is an
ambulatory
center, Mr. Polchak—strictly outpatient.”

“So you knock out a wall and add a few beds. Surely brain surgery is more profitable than vasectomies.”