Death Spiral (8 page)

Three different versions, and only one truth.

Eight

School's out for the day by the time we get back. Groups of students amble around getting ready to attend whatever afternoon clique they're part of—yearbook, football, cheerleading, art club. I say good-bye to Anj and wander toward a small grove of trees on the east side of campus at the corner of Leedam and Mill.

I sit under this granddaddy hickory, listening to a woodpecker working a tree somewhere, watching the clouds shape-shift as they float across the sky. A chickadee flutters onto a branch, investigates my presence with a cock of its head, then flits off to forage somewhere else. A red-tailed hawk circles and vanishes into the gray. Mom taught me the names of birds. She knew the names of flowers and insects, too. I asked her once why all those names and labels mattered. Knowing what things are called gives order to the world, she told me; makes the whole damned ride less lonely. I didn't understand back then. Maybe now I do.

“What happened to you, Mom?” I say to the sky. “You're dead, but I still have so many questions.”

The only answer is the chatter of a squirrel.

I rest my head against the tree and think about Melinda. She didn't lie about Mom being in the clinical trial, but what about the side effects? Blaming her symptoms on a clinical trial I knew nothing about and saying she needed to see a doctor would've been a pretty clever way to pull my heartstrings and get me to give her money.

Then again her symptoms were the same as my mother's. That hardly seems like a coincidence. Suddenly I have a dozen question for Melinda, a dozen things that don't make sense. I find the flier in my bag where she wrote Al's number, get my phone, and dial. The phone rings and rings. Just as I'm about to hang up, he answers.

“Uh, hi…this is Faith Flores. I met you the other day. Melinda gave me this number and said I could get in touch with her.”

“Well, you can't.”

I pick up a pebble and rattle it in my fist. “Um. Okay, well then, is there another number where I could reach her?”

Al makes a disgusted grunting sound. “Not unless you know how to communicate with the dead.”

The pebble slips through my fingers and drops to the ground. I press the phone to my ear and lower my voice. “What happened?”

“Shit, kid, how should I know? That woman was so messed up. Said she was clean, but cops say there was heroin. Who the hell knows? I wasn't there when she kicked it.”

“Wait! What about the side effects from the clinical trial?”

“Was she feeding you that shit?” he sneers. “That woman was always going on about one thing or another. Paranoid about everything. All that junk'll do it to you. Thought everyone was out to get her. One time she thought I was putting poison in her water and she didn't drink nothing till she got so sick I had to drop her at the hospital. Side effects, my ass. She swore she wasn't using, but why else would that creep show up?”

“You mean the Rat Catcher?”

“Yeah. That's him. Lowlife scum.”

“But what if Melinda really was clean?” I say, thinking about my mom. “Maybe the Rat Catcher had been her dealer in the past, and maybe she was going to rat him out to the police. Maybe he came to stop her.”

“Just forget about all that,” Al says. “A kid like you don't need to go messing around in this stuff. It's dangerous. Forget you was ever at Melinda's place.” I hear something on the other end that could be a sigh or a sob, or maybe just a nose blow. Whatever the bodily function of Al's sound, when he speaks again, he's lost the angry edge. “Forget you ever saw anything. I'm sorry I couldn't help.”

Silence, and the line goes dead.

I sit there, staring at the phone, my heart hammering until I realize I'm shivering. I grab a beanie from my bag, but it doesn't take away the chill. If only the weather was my problem. The problem is Melinda's dead. Mom's dead. The Rat Catcher was at both their places, and it's all a little too much to be a coincidence.

What was Mom doing? What kind of dangerous thing was she messed up in? What didn't she tell me?

I've struggled on my own with the questions for almost two months. I can't listen to the solo conversation in my head anymore without going crazy. (“What do you think Faith?” “I don't know what do
you
think, Faith?”) I have to talk to someone. I can't talk to Aunt T about the past, and bringing Anj to my old place was bad enough. I'm not telling her about some drug dealer called the Rat Catcher. That leaves Jesse.

I gather my knees to my chest and taste the cold winter air on my lips as I consider the possibility of bringing Jesse closer into my life. He already knows my mom was an addict. He knows about Melinda and the Rat Catcher. He's smart. Energetic. Not shallow. Pretty cute (okay, nothing to do with it.) All in all, New Boy seems like the real deal—non-asshole material that might be worth trusting.

I decide to go look for him and see what he thinks.

***

I find him in the library, sitting in front of a computer, studying a picture of a DNA molecule. His face is reflected in the screen, so it looks like the double helix is printed on his forehead.

“It's a miracle something so small could hold the entire instructions for growing an organism,” he says without looking up.

“A miracle?”

“Yeah, but not in the Jesus-walking-on-water kind of way, more like the holy-shit-how-did-that-happen kind of way.”

Sunlight filters in through cracks in the blinds as I slide into the seat next to him. “Okay, sure, but if you don't mind me asking, why are you sitting here contemplating the miracle of life at 4:30 in the afternoon?”

“Extra credit for bio. I got a B on my last science paper at my former school.” He looks at me with a grimace. Before I can ask what's so terrible about a B, he says, “We don't
do
B's in my family. I'm making up for the crime.”

I watch as he rifles through a notebook and clear my throat. Then I clear it again.

“You need something to drink?” he asks, tossing me a plastic water bottle without looking up when I clear a third time.

“No, I'm good. Just a tickle.”

I'm getting ready to begin my story, to tell Jesse about Melinda and the conversation with Al, about the appointment with Dr. Wydner and what I found out, when someone at the table behind us squeals. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see a senior girl I recognize from the halls throw her arms around a girl I've never seen and shriek about her acceptance to U Mass. They giggle and hug until the librarian, Mrs. Carter, wags a finger at them, and they lower their voices to whispers.

The details of my day slip away as this reminder of a different anxiety rushes in—college. I mean a year and a half and then high school is over and then what? I'm not about to parasitize Aunt T and linger around her place forever, mooching handouts. Sure, I'd love to go to some killer college like everyone else around here, but it's not like Mom left a pot of gold hidden somewhere for me to inherit. I have what? Two hundred dollars? From what I've heard, college costs a bit more than that these days. I scroll through my mental list of life-after-high-school possibilities: community college, applying for financial aid, a job, riding off into the sunset and nobody ever hearing from me again.

Jesse pokes me in the arm with his pencil. “I think you were about to say something. Either that or you were going to clear your throat again.”

“What? Oh, right.” I will away the post-high-school turmoil and turn my attention back to more immediate concerns, but before I can utter a syllable, another squeal erupts from the college crew as the girl delivers her news to a boy who's just joined them. This time Mrs. Carter lays down the law. She tells them if they can't keep their enthusiasm to an appropriate level, she will personally escort them to the gymnasium where Coach Johnson will be glad to run them until they're too tired to talk.

Once Mrs. Carter has delivered her dissertation on library etiquette and the glee club goes quiet, I lean in closer to Jesse. “Melinda's dead,” I begin. I give Jesse a detailed description of what happened today, including what Al told me about Melinda and the Rat Catcher. I omit the part about visiting my old place and my fear that Mom might've still been a junkie and skip to Dr. Wydner and what I learned at the clinic.

“I asked Dr. Wydner if there were side effects from the treatment, but he said he couldn't comment.” No sooner have the words left my lips than something occurs to me. I sit up and reach for the keyboard. When in doubt, Google. “Just because Dr. Wydner said he couldn't discuss side effects doesn't mean there aren't any.”

“RNA 120?” Jesse asks, standing up behind me and reading over my shoulder as I type. “What's that?”

“The name of the treatment in the clinical trial,” I say, staring at the screen.

The search brings up a few technical research papers with words like antisense RNA and protein encoding and adenovirus. Might as well be Chinese. There's one thing that might be of use: a name. I click on it.

Dr. Monroe, assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics at Philadelphia University, has recently patented a new antisense RNA drug therapy called RNA 120 to help break the cycle of heroin addiction.

I look up Dr. Monroe's name and find out that the professor's still at the university, then I slide my hands off the keyboard and turn to Jesse. “It looks like I'm going to the city tomorrow. You in?”

Jesse rocks back on his chair, kicks his feet on the table, and sighs. “Sorry. Tomorrow's out. I have an alumni interview on Friday. Some Harvard lawyer whose kid goes here. Doc wants me to get an early start on the whole brown-nosing thing. Most people wait until senior year to rub shoulders with the elite. Not me. Doc set up a meeting for me with the college guidance counselor tomorrow morning, so she can coach me on what to say. He wants to make sure I don't screw up and actually sound like a real person.”

I hear the eye rolling in Jesse's voice. Try as I might to imagine him in a shirt and tie, spewing bullshit about how excited and qualified he is for the Ivy League, I can't. He seems so willing to bow to Doc. Jesse might be all Rage Against the Machine on the outside, but I wonder how much rebel he really is on the inside?

I turn off the computer and shake my head. “Shit, Jesse, do you even want to go to Harvard?”

“Not really,” he says, scribbling on his jeans with a pen. “Maybe someday. I have other things to do first.”

“Like what?”

He doodles down the length of his thigh and traces circles around the tear on the knee. “Live. Travel. See shit.”

“Well then, maybe you should try telling that to Doc.”

Jesse gives a bitter laugh. “You don't tell Doc things. He tells you.”

“Fine, but—”

“There are no buts.” His chair clanks to the floor. “That's the law of the Schneider universe. Doc makes rules. Everyone else follows.”

Mrs. Carter calls out, breaking her vow of library silence, and tells us it's time to get going. She's closing the library, and if anyone would like to check out materials they should please do so now. Jesse throws his things into his backpack and checks out a book about the discovery of the double helix. I gather my stuff, and we leave.

“I'd give you a ride,” Jesse says, stopping when we reach the front door, “but I'm meeting Seth, from bio. He's doing the extra credit, too.”

Before I can decide if I'm ready for a good-bye hug, or if I'm still in the eye poke phase, Jesse wraps his arms around me. At first the embrace is your ordinary give-your-pal-a-hug variety, but quickly it becomes more than that. He pulls me so close I can feel the beat of his heart, smell the spice of his shampoo.

“Good luck, tomorrow,” he whispers into my ear. “Text and tell me what you find out.”

He drops his arms and trots off down the hall to find Seth, leaving me standing there, still wobbly from the hug, thinking it's not luck I need. It's answers.

Nine

My phone rings the next morning before it's light out. I fumble around for where the ringing's coming from and finally find the phone on the bedside table under
The Sun Also Rises,
compliments of Jesse.

“Surprise! It's me,” comes Jesse's voice before I'm even alert enough to say hello. “Wake-up call. I have an idea.”

“Don't you ever sleep?” I mumble, rubbing my eyes.

“Sleep, what's that? Read about it once.” He sounds far too chipper for whatever ungodly hour it might be. “Okay, here's the deal. I'm coming to get you and we're going out to breakfast. You dressed?”

I bolt upright and check the clock, then groan. “You really are crazy. It's five o'clock, and it's dark out, and if wearing flannel pajamas counts as being dressed, then yes, I'm dressed. And no, I am not going out to breakfast, and besides, what's open this early?”

“Denny's—come on. I'm outside.”

“What?” I leap out of bed, awake now, and run to the window. I can just make out the rusty hatchback parked outside the house. Jesse flashes the one working headlight, illuminating the fact that not only is it pitch black out, but it's snowing.

“You coming or what?”

“Coming.” I sigh and laugh. Somehow Jesse has a way of making anything sound like a good idea.

I throw on the same clothes from yesterday, grab my bag, and tiptoe into Aunt T's room to leave a note about where I've gone.

In the subtle glow from the hall light, I can just make out the sweep of Aunt T's blond hair, the slight upturn of her nose, the way she sleeps with her hand draped across her forehead. I stand there for a second, disoriented—it's like seeing Mom, only older. I look away and wonder how two sisters, same gene pool, raised in the same house by the same people, could have such different outcomes?

If I were to write the story of Mom and Aunt T, I'd call it
A Tale of Two Sisters
and the synopsis would go like this: Once upon a time there were two girls who lived in a small house by the Hudson River. The older sister was level headed and calm, born of a soft September breeze, while the younger sister was wild and angry, born of ocean waves and thunder. The older sister listened to female singer songwriters and R&B. The younger sister listened to death metal and rap. The older sister liked to stay in and read. The younger sister liked to stay out and party. The older sister turned eighteen and got into college. The younger sister turned eighteen and got into drugs.

The end.

Just as sadness and anger stick their nasty little fingers into my chest and get hold of my heart, the phone vibrates in my pocket. I grab it and check the screen.
U coming or not?
I reach into my bag, thankful for the distraction, and find a piece of paper. I use the light from the phone to scribble a few lines to Aunt T about getting to school early to do some work, then drop the note on her dresser and leave.

I hear Modest Mouse blaring from Jesse's car the second I open the front door. I'm surprised someone hasn't called the cops for noise violation. I'm surprised the dude has any hearing left.

“You're insane,” I say, climbing into the car and turning off the stereo. Like me, Jesse's wearing the same clothes as last night. The difference is, his appear slept in. His hair has seen better days, too. The back is sticking straight out and the top straight up. His eyes are red, but he's smiling.

“You got that right. Hungry?”

“Starving.”

“Then Denny's it is.” He twists his head to the left and backs out of the driveway. “Home of the twenty-four-hour Grand Slam.”

The snow is falling harder now. The roads glint slick and silver. Besides a few semis, we're the only ones out. I watch a ribbon of orange break through the black sky. Maybe it's because I'm still half asleep, or maybe it has to do with sitting next to Jesse, but for the first time in forever, I feel still inside, like a prayer.

A few minutes later, Jesse pulls into the Denny's parking lot and the spell is broken. I open the door to the outside world and follow him into the restaurant.

The second we're seated he slides a green spiral notebook across the table. “Read this.”

I glance at him and open the notebook. The first page is filled with notes under the heading
Gene Therapy
, so is the second page and the third. The notebook is at least a quarter filled with scribbled notes. “What
is
this?”

“Research.”

“On what?” I ask, though from the title it's obvious.

“Gene therapy,” he says from behind a menu. “Vectors.”

“Whose is it?”

He peeks up over the menu. “Mine. I looked it up last night.”

“Wow, you weren't kidding about the OCD thing. What did you do, stay up half the night?”

He drops the menu to the table, stretches his arms over his head, and yawns. “All night. Insomnia rules.”

A tired-looking girl with spiked blue hair arrives to take our orders. I order two blueberry pancakes, Jesse orders the Grand Slam breakfast special, and the girl plods off to the kitchen to place our orders.

“Okay, here's the thing,” he says the second she's gone. “After you looked up that RNA 120 stuff, I started wondering what it was. I did some research, and I found out it's kind of like a gene therapy. Check this out.” He grabs back the notebook, flips through a bunch of pages, and somehow in all the scribble manages to find the one he's looking for. “‘The first step to gene therapy is designing a delivery system to introduce a new gene or turn off the old one. The delivery system for gene therapy is called a vector. Viruses are the favored vector.'”

“Viruses?”

“Like flu, mumps, HIV. That sort of thing.”

“HIV, as in AIDS?” I massage my temples. “Are you saying they were injecting my mother with the HIV virus, so they could get a new gene into her body to make her heroin cravings go away?”

“Not HIV. But yeah, something like that.” Jesse closes the notebook and chugs his entire glass of water without stopping for a breath. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and keeps going. “They take out the bad genes from the virus, put in some new ones, and let the virus do its thing.”

“Which is?”

“To get the new gene to the cell, so it can make more copies of itself.” He holds my eye for a second with his. “Sometimes the body can react to the vector.”

I reach into my pocket and draw my finger over Mom's initials engraved into the lighter, the groove of the A, the blunt lines of the F. “React like how?”

“Like die. I read an article about this eighteen-year-old kid who volunteered to be in a gene therapy trial to treat this rare liver problem he had.”

“And?”

“Four days after the vector was injected he died.”

“That's really depressing,” I mumble as the waitress arrives with our food and we stop talking.

“Anything else?” the girl asks, already looking to the next table where a group of five promises a bigger tip.

“Nothing else,” Jesse says and digs into his eggs.

I pick at my food and look out the window, thinking about the boy and wondering if what happened to him is what happened to my mother, if her death was—as Jesse calls it—a “reaction.” But if that's the case, why did her death certificate say heroin overdose?

I stare out the window, lost in these thoughts, and watch the falling snow. It's coming down hard now. Big, fluffy flakes temporarily cover everything ugly beneath a glistening white surface.

“And what about other side effects?” I ask, clinking the ice in my glass. “Did you find anything like my mom had?”

“Not exactly.” He grabs the knife and smears a glob of butter big enough to have its own zip code across his toast. “But it's possible. I just ran out of time. Give me another few hours and who knows what I'd come up with.” He rips open a packet of strawberry jam, slathers it on top of the butter, and licks the knife. “But I did find out something else.” Jesse slides the notebook back across the table, the page open to a newspaper article from the Trenton Times printed off the Internet. “Check it out.”

May 4, 2013, Trenton, NJ; Mary Wydner, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a local doctor, Dr. Joseph Wydner, was found unconscious last night after a party at a hotel in Lawrenceville. Trenton Police Detective Keith Hadley said investigators determined the girl's blood showed overdose levels of opiates. According to friends, the girl had spent two months last year in rehabilitation for heroin, but had a relapse and recently started using again. She is in Trenton hospital in a coma, and is currently unresponsive

I've barely processed this latest information when Jesse points to the notebook. “Turn the page.”

I do as instructed and find a different article from the same newspaper.

July 3, 2013, Trenton, NJ; Dr. Joseph Wydner was charged with injecting bodybuilders with illegal steroids. The New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners suspended the medical license of Doctor Wydner pending further investigation.

I fill in the blanks as I read, what the article leaves out. Dr. Wydner's heroin-addicted daughter ODs and goes into a coma. He falls apart, loses his job, starts selling steroids and gets busted, so he takes a job running a clinical trial for a biopharmaceutical company at a run-down methadone clinic. The end. No wonder his office was so empty.

A deep sadness shudders through me. The world at this moment seems nothing more than sorrow and death. I pour about a gallon of maple syrup over my pancakes and watch the excess liquid pool around the edges of my plate.

“I have a theory,” Jesse says, stabbing a potato with his fork.

“A theory?” I ask, but my heart isn't in it.

“Dr. Wydner's hoping his kid's going to wake up, right?”

I shrug. “I guess.”

“Come on, man, think about it.” He sounds miffed about my lack of enthusiasm. “It's his kid. He'll do anything to save her. Why not hide the fact that some people might have side effects, so he can help get the drug on the market? If she wakes up, he can get her off heroin and they'll live happily ever after.”

He stuffs the potato in his mouth, and that's the end of the discussion—at least for the time being. He's all about his food now, thank God, because even though his theory about Dr. Wydner covering up the side effects makes sense, there are still the unanswered questions about the heroin and Mom's death certificate and my mind has officially declared itself in overdrive. I need some time to reboot and clear my head before I meet Dr. Monroe and find out what the professor has to say.

Something nags at me, some unsettled business. For a minute I'm not sure what that something is, but then I remember the other day, when after meeting Melinda, Jesse offered his help. Instead of thanking him for his ideas and concern, and for being the first person to take me seriously about my mother, I had an outburst of assholeitis and told him I wasn't a charity case.

I clear my throat and fidget my hands in my lap. “Thanks for doing all this research. I mean I know you have a ton of homework. You didn't have to—”

“I know I didn't
have
to,” he cuts in. He drops his fork onto his plate with a loud clang that makes me raise my eyes. “But I wanted to. I like you.”

“You stayed up all night blowing off your homework because you like me?”

“What's wrong with that?” he asks, meeting my eyes. Looking into those maddeningly blue blues my brain goes murky, but it's not just his eyes that disarm me—it's the idea that Jesse might really see me for who I am.

I know he wants me to say more, like how I feel about him. I want to tell him I think he's cool and fun to hang around and smart, but I can't. It would mean I want something from him, or worse, that he could have something from me. Instead, I mutter, “Nothing's wrong with it,” and shove a forkful of pancake into my mouth.

We go quiet again. It's hard to shoot the shit after someone's just confessed they like you and your response was to stuff your face with food.

“What was your mother like?” Jesse asks just as I'm about to say something about the weather to try and fill the awkward silence.

I groan. Any conversation but that. It's one thing to talk about how Mom died and what happened to her, another to talk about her as a real person, as in who she was, and what it was like to be her kid. Then again, this is my chance to say something real about how I feel. Like I miss her. Like half the time
I
was the mother, and I hate her for that. Like no matter how bad it got, she always made sure I had clothes. Food. A place to live. Like she always said she loved me and, despite it all, I loved her, too.

I pick at my black nail polish, thinking of the mile long list of things I could tell Jesse. She was impulsive, funny, hardheaded, selfish, a dreamer. None of that seems the right answer, though
.

“Everyone called her a junkie,” I finally say, “but it's not the right word.”

“What's the right word, then?”

“I don't know.” I look down at my half-eaten food. “Screwed-up addict. Functional fuck-up.” I give a hollow laugh. “She did everything she could to hide her addiction from the outside world because if someone found out the truth, they could take me away from her. So hiding her addiction was a way of loving me. Some logic, huh?” I feel the familiar aching void like hunger only no amount of food will make it go away. I reach for the lighter. “She hated herself for it. I know that. I hated her, too. But I also loved her. I don't get that part. How can you love someone who you hate so much?”

I stop talking. I've said too much already. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don't know. Anything. What were you like as a baby?”

“Bald without teeth.”