Chapter 21

1
There was good news and bad.

            The good news:

            “The doctor called this afternoon.”

            “He did?” Trevor hung up his blazer but let one sleeve fall off the hanger; the rest of the garment tumbled to the floor. He only turned around and looked at her. He’d been out at the plant for the day looking at progress reports and gauging emission readings. He wouldn’t have been easily reached, even if she’d somehow thought to call Bob Arnold’s line directly, since he was in and out of his office with Trevor playing the tour guide game.

            Barb was sitting on the edge of the bed. She’d told him Adam was out riding his bike, and Patty was looking through a book in his room. It was just the two of them.

            “Christ Barb, what are we looking at?” He’d noticed she was crying. And sometimes it was difficult to determine one form of tears from another. He went over to the side of the bed and took her hand. She only looked up at him, letting the tears fall freely down her cheek and onto her shirt.

            “It’s nothing,” her voice croaked. “A fibrocystic change called Adenosis. The doctor, he had to run the tissue through a few more tests. Said he was going to call yesterday, said he was certain then that it was cancer due to the calcifications. But something struck him yesterday, an inclination he said. A nurse there, she’d found a cyst a few months ago. Just a cyst. But she was so damn convinced it was cancer she did what I did. Got a mammogram, doctor saw the deposits and planned for the worst, and when she outright demanded the biopsy just to be sure, they found out it was benign. Like mine. Oh, goddamnit Trev, I’m so relieved.” She burst out crying and Trevor sat down next to her.

            “So…so it’s not cancer…or cancerous?” He wasn’t sure if there was a difference. The funny thing about academia was the expectation that since you were an expert in your field, the intelligence that encouraged you to achieve a Ph.D. somehow meant that particular scholarly drive applied outside one area of study into all others. That he should somehow know what Adenosis meant, or have been able to tell cystic scar tissue apart from a cancerous clump of cells proliferating like locusts over a once healthy crop.

            Barb patted Trevor’s lap. “Seems like you’re stuck with me a few more years, Mr Kramer. I might just end up seeing what it is we’re doing in this fancy little town.”

            “Is it or isn’t it?” He cocked his eye.

            “Clean bill of health. Maybe take some herbal supplements, but I’ve been on the hippie stuff already. I may just keep these a little longer.” Her smile was devilish when she pushed together her breasts. To Trevor, she looked at that moment like she had under the Redwoods, wearing the wreath of flowers in her hair, so full and flourishing. He would never think of it again as it rotted over time in the mossy underlay. No, that piece would always be in blossom.

            Trevor kissed his wife. In that moment, in spite of what he knew would happen this night, he was truly happy and free. He made love to Barb. They expressed themselves the only way they could, and she cried when he finished. She cried with her head upon the pillow, her hair splashed around her face, her forehead dotted with beads of sweat but she was otherwise pleasant and carefree. And free. Because turmoil was a burden. He breathed into her neck as he lay on top of her, still cupping her breasts, feeling them, feeling that non-cancerous lump she’d found in the shower when she screamed for him, telling Adam and Lew later that morning that she’d seen a spider. That lump was both good news and bad. Sometimes the two were only real together.

2

“Hi dad. You busy?”

            Lew wasn’t really doing anything. He thought that with age the mind sometimes started to wander, but he wasn’t sure if that was the truth now. Now he thought he might have been preserving each moment. The scrapbook he’d been working on was sitting on his lap.

            “Hey baby girl.” He smiled and she returned the favor.

            “I feel like I owe you an explanation.”

            “For what?”

            “Today. The last few months. I don’t know.” She sat down next to him and looked at the book on his lap. “It’s not fair what we asked you to do. To drop everything and come live with us here.”

            “I’d do it again a thousand times, Barb. You know that.”

            “But it’s not fair.” She took the book off his lap and stared down at it for a moment. So much history here. So many memories. “I know the choices I’ve made, I know they were hard on you and on mom. I know that. And I know it was damn hard to get that phone call, to hear me…” she cleared her throat, “to hear me screaming. I know that made you despise my husband, and I don’t blame you. He made an enormous mistake, and I’d like to think coming here will fix that. I do. I don’t know if it’s true, but I hope it is. I love you for doing what you did without questions. You sold your home, dad. For me. My family. To help pay off a bad debt. It’s not fair that I shut you out.”

            “You haven’t shut me out.”

            “But I have.” She flipped through a few pages; the cover was a vinyl red, something Lew must have picked up at the store, the General maybe, with thick stock pages covered in sticky cellophane, behind which he’d taped photos he’d compiled over so many years. Some old and black and white, others newer, but blurred some by exposure. And age. There were pictures of Lew and Betty, back when they were two, and so young and vibrant. Spirits of a different age, but captured as Barb would remember them, ideally preserved. “God I miss her.”

            “Me too.”

            “You don’t ever understand what somebody’s going through, gone through, until you realize you’re no different. When she was sick, I carried a lot of hope. I did. But another part of me couldn’t bear that weight, cause hope is heavy, dad. So heavy. And sometimes you have to carry that weight alone, because you know other people will share it with you, but they will also bring you down with their despair. They can’t help it, of course, but it’s only natural. You confront bad news with a healthy dose of hope and denial and despair. I did when mom was, well, when she was dying. I hoped it wasn’t true, denied it, but in the end my own acceptance of what was happening seemed strongest. If mom could have, she would have died alone, I think. She would have made sure to carry her hope alone, because she wouldn’t want anybody suffering with her.”

            “I don’t think that’s true, Barb. She craved the support. The love.”

            “Yes, she did. I know that. But she probably also saw the good will in our faces, saw it and loathed it because she knew it wouldn’t amount to anything. She just knew.” She stared at the photo by her finger for a moment. It was of her mother, standing in their yard sometime in 1963 or 64. She wasn’t sure. Her hair was upswept and perfect, unmovable and immutable, any wind on that day unable to mar her beauty. She wore sunglasses and nice frilled shorts with a white blouse, her arms crossed and her smile so demure. There was a cigarette in her fingers, just dangling, a small ribbon of smoke frozen above its tip; she wouldn’t know then what that smoke would do, because then she had the world ahead of her. “She was so beautiful.”

            “Yes, she was.”

            “Dad, why are you putting this together? Why are you focusing so much effort on this?”

            “I don’t understand—”

            “Are you okay? I ask only because I feel like we’re both owed a little honesty here. And I haven’t been forthright. Because that weight, that burden of hope, I didn’t need it to, I don’t know, proliferate. That’s a big word, a Trevor word, but it sounds right. I didn’t need hope to expand like a party balloon and just pop if the news was bad.”

            Lew only exhaled. He remembered snapping that picture of Betty. Sometimes time was elastic, and those memories were stronger than the present; he knew why Barb had come in, he knew, because she’d gotten the good call, not the bad, and he’d scared her the other night when he so badly wanted her to confess to him what she was battling. He knew that, so maybe she thought he was sick too. He was, but it was a different kind of sick.

            A head sick, Betty muttered, far back, in that part of his mind where time could be and remain elastic. Where the past and present weren’t so divided. The guy who took that photo wouldn’t have made the same choice.

            To Betty: “The guy who took that photo hadn’t watched you die slowly yet.”

            To Barb: “I am, baby girl. I suspected I might have scared you the other night. But I am retrospective right now. Because age does that to you, and nostalgia requires an outlet.”

            “That’s what this is?”

            “I hope so. I think Adam needs a reminder that his family loves him. An album like this, it takes the best moments, the best parts of you, and lays it bare.”

            “I do love my boy, dad. My boys. I’d do anything for them.” She wiped her eyes. “I know Trevor doesn’t seem that way, I know…I’ve made my excuses. He’s building something here, a future, for everybody, and that sort of grand perspective leaves those in front of you sort of hidden.”

            “That’s not fair to those boys.”

            “I never said it was. But the pressure on him isn’t about being a great father.”

            “That’s automatic, Barb. Or it should be. What he means outside this household, his research, his studies, his writing, that doesn’t allow him to forego his duty.”

            She only sighed. “I never said it did. But right now his priorities are different.”

            “He owes those boys a life. A father.”

             She took her dad’s hand in hers and only kneaded his knuckles. Feeling them. Like she used to when she was a little girl and he was the strongest man in the world. “You’re okay? You promise you’re okay? Adam’s so worried about you, dad. And he’s mad.”

            “I know.” He suddenly felt guilty. The sort of guilt that had teeth. He could feel the leaden weight in his gut, turning and splintering. “A promise is a lie, Barb. You know that. A promise is hope.”

            Barb smiled. “I promised honesty. Dad, I was waiting for a call today.”

            “You said as much.”

            “I thought I was sick…I,” she was crying now, freely, and he only watched her relent and let the tears track down her face. “I found something, a lump,” she touched her chest, “and Trev and I, we’ve been making trips to Davenport, to see a specialist there. Radiologist. Oncologist at the clinic. We thought…we thought it was cancer. You have to suspect that, if you find something, something so…prominent.”

            “My God…”

            “I thought of mom. What she went through. Christ dad, I thought about how she looked near the end. She always appeared so strong, a survivor, but her eyes, they were so scared. And I was always afraid for her, because no matter what she said, how she expressed hope, her eyes had already given up.”

            Lew’s heart was pounding. He ignored that look every time he was with Betty near the end; he ignored the pain, the despair, the despondence, just so he could pretend everything was alright, that the two of them would spend their lives together the way they promised they would before they were married. Because allowing himself to believe the truth was in her eyes was allowing himself the opportunity to understand that ideal life he’d envisioned was never real. Never.

            “I didn’t want you guys to worry. Not until I knew for sure. Because I could only carry so much weight, and Trevor worried enough for the both of us.” She smiled, even through the tears. “He surprised me dad. Maybe he is changing. Maybe this place, Reedy Creek, maybe it is bringing this, our home, back in focus. He was so scared. For me. Sometimes you wonder if a scientist, somebody who only sees the world for its facts and physics, for its tangibles, that he’d likely just move on from that sort of news. Be a shoulder to cry on, but live. But he worried. Every day. I think this is the closest we’ve been in years.”

            Lew remembered Trevor’s confession in the Acura when he picked him up from the police station. How unexpected it had been, how candid and humanizing. Not much the man ever did garnered any respect from Lewis Forsmythe, but that moment, that moment of indefensible weakness proved Trevor could look beyond his ideology to the world that mattered, that he ever really had any control over. Lew’s hand was still in hers, her fingers gentle but forceful.

            “I had a biopsy done. After the mammograms, because the potential was there, it was, that grim potential, and I think the doctor wanted to be certain. He did. He was going to call yesterday but said something struck him, said it was an inclination. I think it was a Godsend. That’s what I think. Because if he’d called yesterday, I would have had to sit you down, sit Adam down, and tell you…” Her voice broke. “Tell you I was sick. And then I would think about mom, and I wouldn’t want Adam…I wouldn’t want Patty…to see me like I saw mom. To see me dying. I just—”

            Lew took his baby girl in his arms and held her, letting her sob into his shoulder. Some of his greatest memories were with her in his arms.

            To Betty: “This is why, Bets. This right here. I think what happened to you, it was hard on our baby girl. Adam and Patty don’t deserve to go through it either.”

            Betty didn’t answer. He thought she might have just been watching, watching her little girl go to her daddy.

            “He called yesterday,” she finished, still heaving, her face still pressed into Lew’s shirt. “It’s not cancer. That luck, that same goddamn hope I thought would work with mom actually worked with me. I found something like a cyst. Even the mammograms got it wrong. But what I found, what expressed such fear from me, it’s nothing but a phantom.”

            “I’m so sorry you felt you had to go at it alone, baby girl.”

            “I know you are. But you deserved to know the truth. Trevor always thought I should tell you. And maybe I should have. But I saw what you had to go through with mom. I saw what that did to you. And I didn’t want to do it to you too.” She offered him a smile. She was beautiful. So much like Betty, he thought.

            I’m sorry you had to watch me die, sweetheart. Betty’s voice was quiet and peaceful. She never owed him any sort of apology, and whatever did exist in his mind, whatever version of her still persisted must have known that.

            Lew wiped his eyes. He wasn’t a crier. If Adam saw him like this, the jokes wouldn’t end. But his baby girl was okay. She was okay. And he knew what that meant. He wasn’t wrong. He’d have to tell Henry tomorrow. He pulled Barb in for one last hug. He felt her breathe, ran his fingers through her hair, and sat this way as if to remember every moment, every detail.

            The real thing was better than any photo album.

3

The bad news:

            She arranged the bottles on the shelf closest to her. It was a prime gig. She was paid by the hour. And there were perks. Though the good doc didn’t run the General, he turned a blind eye to the inventory beyond the pharmacology shelves behind the counter, so she had carte blanche rights, within reasonable limits, to whatever her little heart desired. And after close up time, that often included a trip to the candy aisle for fistfuls of Gummy Bears or Snickers bars. Evenings were slow, and with school already starting that morning, she’d already gone through the rigmarole of directing hasty and procrastinating mothers to the right aisle to pick up binders, loose-leaf paper, and knapsacks with My Little Pony for the girls and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the boys. A lot of the job was pointing out those specifics to people far too lazy to explore for themselves. But she didn’t mind. Because soon she figured Reedy Creek and its small town vibe would be in her rear view; she’d picked up enough about the drug game, or so she called it, to develop genuine drive, and though a few years ago she would have never suspected she’d have any interest in Pharm life (a joke she so often shared with her friends, as in: small towns are just fuckin’ farms and Pharms. You work and get high), now that she’d dipped her toes in the pool, she thought there might be a future there. Not here, in this place, this weird little town. She was born near here. Always just knew the quiet life and she’d grown immeasurably bored of the routine. She had. She thought an influx of big city types would change that, but a lot of those stuffed up metropolitan assholes were already digging the nuclear family vibe, and those that weren’t bored her since most of what they had to talk about was the whole political slide this country had been in since Reagan waxed the floor with Mondale. She didn’t vote. Didn’t care enough, though her parents were staunch Republicans, with bumper stickers on their Chevies that read: The First & Second Amendments Allow Us to Cuss & Shoot Democrats. She thought it was funny. But she caught the bug. She was starting to enjoy the game here, in spite of those few who tried to take advantage of her naiveté, looking to score some hard shit without a prescription, hoping her cutesy small town ignorance was enough to bypass the systemic regulations that divided the General from the Pharmacy. She thought about Clayton Miller. Guys like him. And had she fallen for his pleading, fallen for it like she thought she might have even a year ago, she would have looked at his picture in the Post with a level of guilt that would have continued eating at her. Because her acquiescence would have meant a life. Maybe countless lives.

            She graduated high school. A solid C average, which in the corridors of Reedy Creek amounted to your usual post-school position in the service sector if you wanted to escape the farm, and Main was good for retail. It stayed busy, and was pretty recession proof with the incoming federal subsidies. At least that’s what her dad said. But she needed a bachelor’s degree. Something in science. That’s what Dr Halliburton told her. He said chem was the big one, because medicine was all about balancing equations. That was four years. Then it was prep for the PCAT, which Halliburton promised he would help her prepare for because admissions were tough. It all sounded nerve wracking. Especially when you considered another four years to become a Doctor of Pharmacy. So she had nearly a decade ahead of her where her nose would be buried in the books, and that was a habit she truly never developed when she was getting drunk out in the woods during high school. So she had her goals. And the first one was getting out of the Creek, jumping ship. She knew her folks would be crestfallen, but a part of her didn’t care. A part of her always held one very specific grudge against them for even conceiving her in this place, raising her here. They could have gone anywhere. Anywhere.

            The door opened.

            She looked up through the pill bottles toward the front of the store and its plate glass entry where Main was especially quiet. She adjusted her white coat, pulling out the lapels and exhaling as she went toward the counter.

            “Hi Dr Halliburton.”

            “I’m here for a pick up.”

            “Oh? Well, we’re closed for the night. I thought I locked the door.”

            “You did.” He showed the key in his fingers. “Remember, I run the joint.” The man smiled. He was normal. That’s the best way she could put it. There was nothing extraordinary about him. “You see, I’m having a problem.”

            “What kind of problem?” She arched her back, resting on the counter.

            “My cock is especially hard at the moment. Did you have anything back there that might help, well, soothe it?”

            She flashed her teeth in a wide grin: “Dr Halliburton,” she murmured, her voice demure, almost a purr. And now she was leaning far enough over the counter to show what was under that lab coat, her nametag clipped to the lapel. Sarah Darling. She always quite liked her name. It was one of the few things about herself she adored.

            His brows arched when he noticed her breasts, both so supple, pushed together in freckled mounds through the drooped opening of that coat. He reached forward, his eyes so hungry.

            “Dr Halliburton,” she said. “That’s a naughty boy.” She slapped his hand, bending forward even more, lifting the flaps of her coat as her legs swung upward with her hips as they hinged on the edge of the counter, flashing just the slightest contour of her ass. “I’m still pretty new here, doctor. It might be best if you come around and show me exactly what it is you need.” Her smile was luring, baiting, her eyes flicking from his to his mouth, gauging him, playing with him. Her lips were smeared in red lipstick, her hair pulled back and over her shoulders.

            “Isn’t that against the rules?”

            “Rules are made to be broken, doctor.” She undid one button on her coat. Then another. He watched her fingers easily slide the buttons through their folds, those fingers so young and experienced. The cup of her breasts heaved and he went to touch her again; she slapped away his hand. “Doctor, that’s not very nice. You can watch, but you can’t touch.”

            She retreated into the aisle behind her, opening another button; one breast slipped out of the coat, fully revealed against the lapel, so full and perky, so youthful and taunting, the nipple erect enough now to prove more than enticing.

            “Are you coming?”

            He slowly moved around the side of the counter, pushing back his thinning hair, his wedding ring prominent on his finger but forgotten. Vows, like rules, were meant to be broken.

            Her coat was fully open when he found her in the back, that trail of sex cleaving between her tits and resting comfortably atop the tuft of pubic hair between her pallid legs, her eyes cautious, regarding him with a questioning silence as he stumbled, pulling open his belt and struggling with his zipper.

            “Doctor…I thought you were married?” Her smile was devilish and she licked her lips. Her full, red lips.

            “A man likes dessert after eating,” he said.

            “Then indulge,” she said.

            He came to her, his pants falling around his ankles. She saw him, stiff, protuberant in his white underwear; she saw the longing in his eyes, the look that never changed. No matter how many times they played this game, this late night affair when he was so incredibly demanding, and held her own future in his fingers, held it for ransom. You’re prostituting yourself for a job and some help on the PCATs. She felt him press into her, felt the plush impact of his belly, usually sagging over his waistline, the sign of a man who’d given up, who’d put a ring on a woman’s finger so long ago the passion that once flamed such a decision had extinguished with the ardors of habit. So they sought out new routines just as she sought out favors, and the two could be easily reconciled, couldn’t they?

            “Where is my medicine, Ms Darling?”

            Even his voice had a trembling quality, a tonal banality that was just enough proof sex would always be the only thing on his mind; as he spoke to his wife about his day, he would be thinking of Sarah, of her supple ass, of her firm tits, and she understood what she had was a sort of power over him, just as he held her opportunity, her potential. She took him into her hand, feeling his rigidity, hating it, hating what this turned her into but needing it as well, understanding how wrong it was somehow made it more liberating. Because they were breaking the rules. They were being dangerous.

            “Let me show you,” she whispered, licking his earlobe, feeling him shudder as he lay against her.

            She heard the bell ding at the front.

            “Shit…did you lock the door?” She scrambled to close her coat.

            “I th—think so.”

            She heard footsteps. Coming closer. That sensation of being caught, of understanding the risk was always what made screwing Halliburton so exciting; her imagination would have to be the guide, of course, because when she did look at him, watching him heave up and down on top of her like one struggling to move a heavy couch, sweating from the exertion, cheeks red with burst capillaries, she could only retreat past her own revulsion to guys she would have liked to date. Guys like Ned Stevenson. She watched Dr Halliburton pull up his pants, trying to adjust himself as he scrambled with his belt.

            At first she thought she knew who it was. She had her suspicions initially. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she knew one day there was a chance they would be caught. Wives could be vindictive. This wasn’t her first rodeo. So she was bracing herself for a domestic spat. The guy was wearing a dark hoodie, his face in the shadows. Is that Scarface, the guy Ted and Clarence score bud from? The fuckin’ Corner who came in with the big city parade? But then she thought: no, he was never this tall, never this lanky.

            “Dr Serkis? What the hell are you doing here?”

            It was Halliburton; he sounded cross but embarrassed. His belt was still hanging loose and she could see the hint of his erection through his khakis.

            “We each owe a duty to the Cause. The Adulterer and his Whore.”

            “What? What the hell did you—did you say?”

            Sarah watched the man stumble over his words; he was even more pathetic when he was trying to be intimidating.

            “Does your wife know? Your kids?”

            “Fuh—fuck you.” But then Halliburton surprised Sarah. He started crying. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she knew something wasn’t right. Serkis had always sort of terrified her. She found him handsome, but empty. Like a good-looking vase. “Norris…please, be quiet about this. Please. For me. I…Christ, please, my wife doesn’t have to know this…I…she doesn’t help me anymore…I’m a man…she…” He stumbled over his words, his voice more like a sob now.

            She watched Norris Serkis, Reedy Creek’s general physician and immigrant from whatever God-forsaken city the ethanol here was pulling people from like some farming gold rush, snatch a gun from his waist, his fingers so delicate and precise, enclosed in black leather gloves, and she understood this wasn’t an accident. Maybe Halliburton’s wife sent him. Maybe this is a scare tactic and you’re just a bystander. You’ve seen the way she looks at you. Envious. Maybe she’s always suspected something was going on. But now she knew.

            “Jesus Christ, Norris. Why the fuck do you have a—a gun?”

            “You should be proud. Both of you. You are giving yourselves to something bigger than you.”

            She watched Norris Serkis smile. She didn’t like it. It was false.

            And then she heard the report. The pop. She heard it before she really even saw Norris pull the trigger; she understood, even without a fancy degree, that the speed of light was faster than sound, but her brain couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. No. It couldn’t. Because she heard the pop and then she saw the flash, she saw the explosive flare around the muzzle, and she watched Dr Halliburton, for just that moment, she watched him spiral back, a pirouetting spray of blood behind him, its path clotted with white and gray, with bone and brain, and she knew Norris had killed him, she knew she would never have to feel that man’s pecker as he held her own intellect for ransom, and she looked at the physician, the Human Vase, and he only stared back with those glassy eyes. The pharmacist fell like a rag doll against the back sorting table; pills scattered and bottles clattered to the floor as he folded over and his head struck the linoleum with a wet tap that sounded more like fruit, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, unblinking.

            “I wish you’d had better judgment, Ms Darling. You are more than a temptation.”

            “I don’t understand,” she said, and now she was crying. Because his voice was so kind. So caring. But his eyes were not.

            He aimed the gun at her. She stared at that cycloptic barrel, smoke still fleecing from it in accusing streams. “Now your life will have had meaning.”

            “Please…” she whispered. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done with him…I hated him, I always did. I’m so sorry…he was just, just my way out of here…”

            “So he was.”

            She heard the gun again. But that was all. Sarah Darling died next to the man she loathed. She had so much potential.