The 100 Year Miracle (15 page)

She would fix this. She could and would fix this. She could never fix this. The previous test was a fluke. There was another benign explanation for the relief she experienced. Not true. She simply needed better, less decayed samples. She needed to stick to the protocols. What scientist, what scientist at all, would spend years of her life chasing a fairy tale?

Tears rolled down Rachel’s cheeks while her neurons flung the competing messages, like tiny sparks, back and forth over their network. She carted the tanks into the bathroom one by one, stopping only to wipe her eyes and nose on the back of her hand. She washed and disinfected everything she could then used a long fireplace lighter to flame an alcohol mixture off the metal surfaces.

She did it because it had to be done, because this had to work.

Rachel had been six years old when it happened. It had been summer, and summer in the Arizona desert pushes everything down low. People and animals creep along with their bellies to the ground, slipping down into hidey-holes wherever they find them. Popsicles melt after the first bite, and public pools have to be topped off every few days for all the evaporation. Children have to choose then between the heat outside and the sharp-edged people inside, and you can measure the balance of things by how many little ones huddle in whatever shade they can find, holding on to basketballs and toy baby strollers they have no energy to play with.

Rachel had lived with her mother in a fourplex that was one of twenty other fourplexes all huddled together just behind the Taco Bell, which was open, and the dollar store that had closed. The buildings all looked identical, and visitors, not that there were many, often got lost. There were no helpful signs labeling one building from another or pointing the direction to any rental office.

On that day, Rachel had come down to the kitchen to find Darren, her mother’s latest boyfriend, along with a pot of water boiling on the old stove. Rachel remembered some things very clearly and other things not at all. She remembered the wallpaper border by the ceiling pasted up by a former tenant. It had been mauve with flowers on it. Rachel remembered a stick of butter on the counter half melted in the summer heat. She remembered there had been dishes from the morning cereal and dishes from whatever the adults ate and drank the night before in the sink. She did not remember where her mother had gone that day or even, really, what Darren looked like.

He was by the stove, and Rachel must have been hungry, or maybe she had just been brave. The macaroni lunch wasn’t progressing at all, and she could see the water had been boiling for some time, the level having dropped down in the pot, leaving a white line where it had started, as hard water sometimes does. Rachel had said something with what her mother had begun calling her “smart mouth”; although for the life of her, she did not remember what.

Darren grabbed her by the arm, which was bare. She remembered that. She had been wearing a little green-and-white-striped tank top that was small enough almost for a doll, and his hands were big enough to wrap all the way round one of her biceps. She had struggled, kicking and hitting as she tried to break free. And then she had. She had broken free, or maybe he had just let her go, but either way she had turned all the way around, her back to him. She had been intending to make for the sliding glass door on the other side of the room, but Rachel never got that far. Intending to run was all she managed to do before the water hit her.

Darren had picked up the pot and tossed the boiling water down her back. Rachel remembered the first moments. She remembered feeling the pain and not knowing what had happened. Then she’d seen the water at her feet, and she had known, and the knowing lasted for only one moment before the reel broke. Rachel had nothing else, nothing until weeks later in the hospital where she’d been forced to lie on her stomach for what seemed to be forever and certainly was. She hadn’t known how she’d gotten there and had not thought to ask. The nurses had said that, in a small way, she was lucky. It could have been her face. She would still be beautiful from the front. And she would, after all, live.

Her mother would not. The guilt of it ate at her from the inside out. It took fourteen years, but it got her in the end. When she died, the doctors said it was cancer, but Rachel knew better.

In the present, Rachel wiped her cheeks and forced her mind down to the task in her hands. Wash, wipe, flame, acid rinse. Again and again until all the tanks and all the flasks and all the tubing were clean.

She set everything back up in her room. She prepared half the flasks with purified water, using a pipette to add the necessary nutrients and then a sufficient amount of green algae to feed them. In the other half, she filled the flasks with raw seawater, hypothesizing that some unknown element, some symbiotic relationship, might be necessary for the
Artemia lucis
to survive. Then she added in the new samples. It was only enough to fill a few flasks. She would need to make more trips. Rachel looked at her watch. Half an hour had passed since she’d taken the second dose. After a deep breath, she put her fingers to the bruising on her face and pushed.

It did not hurt at all.

She pressed so hard her fingers turned white, and still she felt nothing but mild pressure. Then she bent forward and touched her toes—careful this time. Results were promising. She could do it. She could reach them.

Rachel sagged onto the bed and took a shuddering breath. She gave herself a moment, just one, to be grateful. It would be okay. She was okay. She opened her eyes and pushed up. There was so much work to do. She picked up her plankton nets and sample jars. The two other tanks still needed to be filled and their settings adjusted and recorded and monitored. It was clear the analgesic in the
Artemia lucis
decayed very quickly upon death. She would need to keep them alive to isolate the compound. She would need to keep them alive and breeding. She had three days left.

*   *   *

Tilda climbed the deck stairs, tried the sliding glass door, and found it unlocked. Inside, she kicked off her shoes, setting off Shooby, who galloped out of the library to survey the situation, and then went back to alert Harry of her triumphal return.

In stocking feet, she headed for the kitchen. “Aww. Dammit.”

She lifted up her foot and looked at the bottom.

“What did you do?” Harry called.

Tilda could hear him shuffling down the hall toward her. “I stepped in something wet. In my socks.”

Tilda pulled off the offending item and then the other. And now that she was looking, the puddle, which was small, wasn’t really a puddle at all. It dribbled all the way down the hallway.

“What did you spill?” Tilda asked.

“I didn’t spill anything.”

“Well, someone did.”

Tilda knew exactly what the spill was and who had done it. She wanted to see if Harry would admit what had happened or cover for their new houseguest, but he, having said all he was going to on the subject, did neither. Barefoot, Tilda went to the kitchen for a towel. Harry followed her.

“You didn’t come home last night,” he said.

“Of course I did.”

“I was awake.”

“Well, if you were awake, then you should know I came home.”

“You came home this morning. That is not the same thing.”

“It wasn’t morning.”

“Three a.m. is morning.”

Tilda took the towel from the drawer and went out to the hallway to mop. Harry and Shooby both followed her, and neither offered to help.

“This woman you’ve taken in,” Tilda said, “that’s a bit sudden.”

“How could it be anything but sudden? She’s only here for six days, and I just met her.”

“Are you sure inviting a complete stranger into the house is a good idea?”

“What do you think she’s going to do? Steal the silver?”

“I don’t know what she’s going to do,” Tilda said. “I don’t know her and neither do you. That’s the point.”

“She gave me a hand. We talked. I liked her. It seemed like she needed some help. I helped. End of story.”

Tilda had made it all the way to the back of the house, scooting the towel along with her foot, using it to mop up each dribble as she came to it. Done, she bent over and picked up the damp towel. It was sage green with white checks. She remembered it from many years before. It was one of the few things Maggie hadn’t replaced.

“It’s not really the end of the story. It’s the start of a new one, and I just want to be sure it’s a good one. That woman seemed a little pushy this morning.”

“Her name is Rachel,” Harry said. “And she’s not half as pushy as you.”

“You need to be resting and taking care of yourself. You need a regular schedule. Dr. Woo has been very clear about that. If you have a parade of researchers coming in and out of the house, it’s disruptive.”

“It’s my house. If I want a parade, I’ll damn well have a parade. Not to mention that one person hardly counts as a parade.”

“Harry—”

“This isn’t a democracy, and you don’t get a goddamn vote, Tilda. The only person traipsing in and out of here at odd hours, creating a disturbance, is you.”

The hand Harry was using to grip the head of his cane was like a claw, and his knuckles had gone white. His neck was flushed red coming out of the collar of his white button-down shirt. He had missed a button, and Tilda couldn’t help but notice the shirt needed a good bleaching and pressing. She wondered if it had been laundered at all before he put it on and if he needed help with getting it fastened or if the button was an isolated incident.

“My presence here is a disturbance?” Tilda demanded. “I seem to recall you asking me to come.”

“Maybe that was a mistake.”

Tilda drew herself up to her full height. She was just above average while Harry was just below, and when she did stand right up, putting as much distance as possible between every vertebrae, she could put her eye to his.

“Are you asking me to leave?” she demanded.

“Don’t be hysterical.”

It was clear that this conversation had gone further than Harry had intended, but he was unwilling to back down. A noncommittal insult did the trick. Harry turned away from her and maneuvered himself with two twisting clomps of his cane into a ninety-degree turn. Able-bodied, he would have stomped off in a huff. This was the slow-motion absurdist version, which might have been funny if Tilda weren’t so angry. It was all she could do not to throw the towel at his head. She did the next best thing.

“She—Rachel—told me you fell last night while I was gone.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.”

“She said you were down on the beach by yourself and that you fell. You hurt the dog.”

Harry didn’t answer. He was heading back toward the library, his safe harbor, to hide. Not that he needed a space to hide, Tilda knew. He had always been capable of hiding in his own head and locking up all the doors and windows once he was there.

“Did you call the vet?”

No reply.

Tilda was following him, and they’d made it to his doorway. Harry shuffled into the library, and she was on his heels. “You don’t have anything to say about that?” she asked.

Harry was clomping toward his piano as fast and as forcefully as he could. “Carrying on with that damn kid next door makes you look like a bloody fool,” he said and dropped down onto the bench in front of the keys.

A flush spread across Tilda’s chest. She opened her mouth to throw something back at him, something equally hurtful. And then she didn’t. Her mouth was open, but sound did not come out. She froze there, just for a moment, long enough for Harry to swing his head around to see what in the Sam-damn-hill was the problem now. Tilda closed her lips, and Harry followed her eyes.

Becca looked at them both from inside the photo frame. Her hair blew in her face, and the dog ran and the waves broke, just as they always had. Her coat was just as red and the scene just as gray, but just as it was exactly the same, it was completely different because Tilda had not seen the photo before. At least not in decades. All the other photos of their daughter had been boxed away, hidden in the attic or sent off to other family for safekeeping. Harry had thought the purge would be temporary, just until Tilda could breathe again, and he had not objected. He did not feel, given that he had done the most horrible thing that it was possible for anyone to do, that he could object to anything at all. But he had saved this one photo and hidden it here in his space where no one went but him.

Except now Tilda was here, and the three of them were together.

Tilda stood in place, staring at the photo. She said nothing. Harry said nothing, and then she turned and walked away with the wet towel in her hand, and nothing was said at all.

18.

Rachel had slept for three hours and was up and dressed in jeans and the same hooded sweatshirt she had worn on and off for days, scribbling into the notebook perched in her lap. She had completed another experiment, grinding a sample and running it through a small centrifuge that separated the animal body solids from the liquids. It had yielded important results. The liquids had no painkilling qualities at all—she had tested that on herself—leaving the solids as the only possibility.

Rachel couldn’t write fast enough. She was trying to hold twelve different thoughts in her head at the same time. It would take a lot to distract her, something like a bear falling down the stairs outside her bedroom door. At least, it sounded like a bear. It was enough to convince Rachel to put down the notebook and stick her head out.

Harry was halfway down the steps, having begun his fall from who knew how high. He no longer had his cane. It had clattered all the way down to the foyer below. Rachel shut the door tight behind her and took the stairs two at a time to reach him.

“I was going to take a nap,” Harry said.

His hair, which was unkempt all the time, was even wilder. The bald spot on the crown of his head, which Rachel now had a clear view of from above, was the size of a small egg and vulnerable looking, like it might be as soft and unfused as an infant’s. Half of his collar stood up, and his heavy fisherman’s sweater was pushed up on one side.