Souvenir (11 page)

“I remember,” Carson said.

“But
something
turned around for him, and I found out just what when I was over to the co-op last week,” his dad said, turning to continue their walk. “Dave Zimmerman pulls me aside. He says, ‘Hey, what do you know about Spencer Powell?’ And I say, ‘Well, we been neighbors for thirty-some years, till about two weeks ago.’ And Dave says, ‘Then you probably know all about the business with the money.’”

“What business?” Carson asked, more to be polite than because he cared.

“Well, that’s what I said. ’Cause I never heard anything—but you know, I don’t, always; Spencer never let on about the details of things, and I got better things to do than hang around the co-op and gossip like them retired guys. So Dave tells me, ‘This is all in confidence—I trust you, Jim, not to get me in trouble,’ and he starts telling me about the sale of the farm there. Seems that Dave’s wife—you remember Linda, she’s the real estate lawyer—made out a pretty sizeable check when she was putting together all the paperwork—$387,000, which was a little more’n a third of what Spencer got for the place.”

“So I guess he found some way to borrow against the farm, and that solved his problems.”

“You’d think. But that’s the funny thing. He didn’t have any sort of mortgage. Hadn’t, according to the title record, since ’89.”

“Okay…he owed for something else,” Carson said, curbing his impatience.

“Nope. No record on his credit of
any
debt that size—or so says Dave. But get this: the check was made out to Bruce Hamilton personally.”

So, Carson thought,
this
was what their walk was all about. Something was going on between Meg’s father and father-in-law, and his dad hadn’t wanted to bring it up around Val, believing that anything Meg-related might yet be a touchy subject. It felt a little ridiculous, his dad still trying to protect his feelings about that long-ago trouble; he was done with it, moving past, moving on. To prove it, he would talk about Meg plainly, show that the topic wasn’t worth tiptoeing around.

“This money stuff’s not so hard to figure—do you think?” he said. “After Meg married Brian, they must’ve lent Spencer the money to pay the mortgage off the books, you know? A friendly loan between in-laws.”

His dad nodded, one eyebrow raised slightly in what Carson knew was silent acknowledgement of this shift in Meg-related communication. “Sure, maybe, but it’s hard to imagine that kind of generosity—Hamilton giving over the title of the land and no guarantee Spencer’d ever pay it back. I mean, we’re talking
Spencer Powell
here.”

Carson pushed his hand through his hair. Why did they have to keep at this, anyway? Not that he’d admit it after his show of bravado, but all this talk was raising his hackles in a way he couldn’t explain. He said, “I bet it just amounts to some shady bookwork on Hamilton’s part—wouldn’t surprise me any.”

His dad nodded. “Maybe so. But if that’s the case, I wonder why Spencer paid it back like he did, in a regular check made out to Hamilton personally. That’s a big chunk of income to get all at once—Hamilton’ll get hit hard on his taxes, and it might flag an IRS audit.”

“Maybe Spencer wasn’t thinking about that, or figured it’s not his problem,” Carson said.

“Maybe. I can’t help wondering, though, why Spencer’d pay it back at all, if he didn’t
have
to.” His dad scratched his cheek and looked over at the horses, still puzzled by the behavior of a man who’d once been a close friend.

Carson tried to ignore the prod that said there was more to this money thing than what he and his dad could suss out. He was ready to be done with the subject for good.

He said, “You know, I always figured Meg married Hamilton for his money, and now it’s obvious Spencer got good mileage out of it, too. I don’t know what’s up with all that, but none of it really matters, does it? I mean, what any of them did or do hasn’t been our business for a long time. And we have better stuff to think about, don’t we?” He put his hands on his dad’s shoulders and smiled. “For example, getting you fitted for a tux.”

Fifteen

“G
OOD JOB
,” M
S
. H
ENRY SAID
W
EDNESDAY, HANDING
S
AVANNAH HER
graded world history test. The score, in purple ink at the top right corner, read
104
—an A+, short only one of the possible five extra-credit points.

Savannah looked over at Rachel’s test. “Eighty-two,” Rachel said, holding up the paper. “Your fault, for not letting me come over and study with you.”

“
Your
fault, for not studying enough on your own.”

Rachel, dressed today in a tight yellow shirt that made her look chubby—which she was, a little—scooted her chair closer to the aisle and leaned toward Savannah to whisper, “When are you going to tell me who was keeping you so busy last night that I couldn’t even bribe you with peanut-butter cup ice cream?”

It had been a good offer; Savannah was usually glad to hang out with Rachel, and she loved that flavor of ice cream, one of many foods they never kept in her own house because her dad was severely allergic to peanuts in addition to dogs. But she had something else more important to do: finalizing her plans for Miami. “It’s not just a ‘who,’” she whispered back. “It’s a ‘what’ too. And I can’t tell you yet—but I will, I promise.” At the very last minute, so there’d be no chance of Rachel leaking the plan and screwing things up. Well-meaning as Rachel might be, she was too close to her sister, Angela. While Angela could usually be trusted on small stuff, something like this might bring out her righteous-older-sister side. Savannah couldn’t take that risk.

“Okay, fine,” Rachel said, leaning back. “Whatever.”

Caitlin Janecke, the most spoiled of all the spoiled girls Savannah knew, said from the desk at Savannah’s left, “What’s her problem? Is she pissed about her grade?”

Savannah looked at Caitlin’s pink cashmere-blend shirt and belted khaki Hollister shorts, the matching pink ribbon in her perfect blond hair; Caitlin was perfect down to her slim tanned legs and calfskin boaters.
No
, Savannah wanted to say,
she didn’t want to believe you gave blow jobs to three different guys last weekend
—a story that had come from a reliable source: Caitlin’s sister Riley, a freshman in Savannah’s gym class. Riley, by contrast, had been at the same party but done it to only
one
guy, she said, and “ohmigod, it was the most awful, bizarre thing you could imagine!” As slutty as the sisters’ actions seemed, Savannah wished Riley had elaborated just a little more.

Now was not the time to get into any of it, so she just nodded and said, “She didn’t study.”

“Did you?”

Savannah lifted one shoulder. “Not really.”

“
God.
My parents make me study
every
night, and I only got a ninety-one. Must be nice to be so brainy.” The compliment, even delivered so grudgingly, surprised Savannah.

“I guess,” she said, suddenly chagrined. Maybe Caitlin wasn’t
so
bad…and having someone so popular envy her out loud pleased her. Brainy was okay, brainy was good—better than her usual tag of “hippie girl,” usually delivered with a sneer as though she was smelly and unwashed. This school, filled by girls whose parents had too much money, was made for Caitlin clones. As great a prep school as the place was, originality, unless it was in the pursuit of the finer arts like painting or classical composition, was not so welcome here.

And she still had two more years to endure. If she could somehow make things work out with Kyle—eventually she’d have to confess her true age and hope he’d stick with her—the time would be much more enjoyable.

She liked to think that in addition to being brainy, she was also strong on organization and determination. When she came up to a roadblock, she didn’t turn back; she found a way around it. Ever since she was a toddler, this had been true about her. One of the stories her Grandma Shelly liked to tell all her rich friends was of how Savannah once escaped from her parlor, which was gated off to adjoining rooms, while she, Shelly, was gone to the bathroom. “I came back—not two minutes later, you understand—and Savannah was
gone
. Just disappeared from the room! I looked under the furniture, behind it, all around the house, thinking she could’ve climbed over one of the gates. But no! The child had pushed out a screen and gone out through the window! I finally saw her on the patio, where she had a chair pulled up to the fountain so she could reach the water—she was soaking wet and giggling, pleased as punch!” Her grandma used this story to show how much Savannah was like her dad, and maybe in some ways she was: results-oriented, single-minded—but she would use her powers for good, not evil, that was how she thought of it.

She packed up her world history textbook and her binder, wondering what her grandma, and the rest of the family, would think if they knew how she was making the Miami trip work; her mom should do a better job of hiding her credit cards. By the time the bill came, she’d have a good excuse to give if she got caught—but more importantly, even if she was caught, she’d have already been to Miami with Kyle.

A
FTER CLASS, SHE AND
R
ACHEL WALKED TOGETHER TO THE LOCKER ROOM
to change for softball practice. Rachel was back to her chatty self before they were dressed, talking about a guy named Hunter, whose brother went out with Rachel’s sister a few times, and one of Hunter’s friends.

“He’s hot—they both are. I think Hunter likes me, and you could maybe go out with R.J. He graduated last year, but he goes to State. Do you think a college freshman’s too old?”

“Not even,” Savannah said. “However,” she added, thinking, as she laced up her cleats, that she could tell Rachel a
little
about Kyle, “I met somebody—he’s around that age, and I want to see how it goes with him before I check out other guys.”

“
You
met somebody? Who? Where? God, you think you’d tell your best friend!”

“I
am
telling you.”

They left the locker room and headed for the practice field, their cleats thrumming over the hallway’s tile floor. As they walked, Savannah told her about Kyle in the most general, and not completely honest, terms. But telling Rachel even in this abbreviated way felt good, as if in sharing Kyle with her best friend he became more real. There were times this past week when, if she hadn’t heard his voice, hadn’t stayed up until three
AM
Sunday talking about ways they might be together in the future, she wouldn’t believe in him at all.

She thought again of his voice, how it had seemed to permeate her as she’d lain in the dark, phone to ear.

What d’you plan to do, you know, after getting your bachelor’s?

I’m thinking something in conservancy. My dad, he wants to push me into business, but that’s just not happening.

Hey, how ’bout this: You and me, we buy some land, get our own nature preserve started. Right? Get your dad to front the money—he would, don’t you think? I mean, since that’s a business. I’d ask mine but, you know, we aren’t exactly talking.

Yeah, what’s that all about?

I don’t really, you know, want to get into it. That’s history. Me and you, though—we’re the future. I mean, we
could
be. It’d be killer, you and me and the great outdoors….

She loved that he would do this, dream with her, put himself in her future.

“He sounds fab, and I bet he’s even cuter in person,” Rachel was saying. “And nineteen isn’t that old.”

“That’s what I thought,” Savannah agreed, mentally excusing her lie about his age. She reminded herself she’d tell Rachel the whole truth soon, and even if she had to tell a hundred lies before her weekend with Kyle was over, the experience, the adventure would be worth all the guilt, and then some.

They went outside and down the wide concrete steps, then onto the clover-covered field that stretched between the main school building and the softball diamonds. A few bees buzzed around their ankles, angry to have their important work disturbed.

Savannah repeatedly tossed and caught a ball as they went. “Kyle and me, we made plans to get together on May Day,” she said, not revealing, of course, that this first date would be in Miami.

“Seriously? How are you going to get your mom to let you go out on a Monday?”

“Monday?” Savannah stopped, letting the ball fall into the clover.

“Uh,
yeah
,” Rachel laughed. “Smart girl, May Day is like next
Monday.
When did you think it was?”

“Next
Friday
—May fifth. Cinco de Mayo—oh, Jesus,” she said as realization dawned. “That’s
not
the same as May Day, is it?”

Rachel laughed even louder. “Oh my God, that is so funny! You thought—?
Everybody
knows—”

Savannah punched her arm. “Shut up! I just got it mixed up.”

“Yeah you did,” Rachel said. “But oh well, so you can see him that Friday.”

“Maybe,” Savannah muttered.

“Oh, c’mon, don’t be like that. Everybody does stupid shit sometimes. He won’t hold it against you—he’s probably, like, panting over getting to meet you in the first place. I mean, what guy wouldn’t?”

She prayed Rachel was right. Maybe it was crazy, but she’d gotten really attached to Kyle. He offered a kind of attention and reassurance no one else did. In a way, he was taking her grandma’s place.

“Thanks,” she told Rachel.

“Sure. And hey, maybe you can hook me up with one of his friends.”

Sixteen

M
EG WAS JUST FINISHING UP WITH HER THIRD PHARMACEUTICAL REP OF
the day, a severe-looking, ambitious young blonde dressed in all black, when Manisha knocked on her office door.

“Oh good,” Meg said, “I was hoping you’d finish before Ms. Trumbull left; I want you to take a look at this IUD she’s pitching. The data look all right, but I don’t want to decide until you’ve seen it.”

Manisha, as petite and dark as Meg was tall and fair, came into the office and said, “Sure. And I’m reminding you to call the orthopedist.”

“Right. Jesus,” Meg said, jumping up. All week she’d been meaning to call him and had put it off, forgotten, remembered, put it off again. “I’ll use your phone and be right back.”

The orthopedist, Cameron Lowenstein, was another golfing acquaintance of Brian’s—though not a friend, owing to what Brian called the man’s “bizarre” attitudes. “He does this Zen golf thing—not my kind of guy,” Brian said once. “But he’s good. I know a bunch of guys who go to him. He gets the kink out of my shoulder every time.” A golf-related kink, resolved weekly so that he could keep playing golf.

Lowenstein took her call directly, which surprised her, and was willing to see her at the end of his schedule, in about an hour. “I’m sure it’s something simple,” she said, after describing her symptoms. “I hope it won’t take much of your time.”

“Glad to help,” Dr. Lowenstein assured her. “Your husband is one of my favorite patients.”

After Meg hung up and returned to her office, she found Manisha sitting on the edge of the desk, swinging one leg and talking about her new shar-pei puppy. “You have never seen so many wrinkles, worse than my great-grandmother—though their faces, they are about the same with fur. The puppy is much prettier, but neither has to worry about dating, yes? So it’s all good.”

Meg smiled. “And the IUDs? Are they ‘all good’ too?”

“In fact,” Manisha told her, “Laurie here, she is not fully convinced of their efficacy because her sister became pregnant while using one. But that is to me just fate. I think we can try them.”

That Manisha had managed to turn what for Meg had been an aggressive sales call into a girlfriends’ candid chat surprised her not at all. Manisha was the warmest, most outgoing person she knew. And Meg admired how firmly convinced in the concept of fate her friend was. Manisha’s motto for all of life was, in effect,
Acknowledge, Accept, Appreciate
. If Meg could learn to follow that motto, then maybe she, like Manisha, would be able to look at the loose affiliation that defined her family life as a matter of course. Maybe she would sleep more soundly, act more decisively, let life’s troubles wash over her like a gentle stream over a pebble.

“So,” Manisha said, when Laurie Trumbull had gone, “you are to see the doctor?”

“In about an hour.”

“Ah, good. And how is the arm today?”

“Today it’s fine, just a little tired,” Meg said. “It’s been fine all week, pretty much. I’m probably wasting my time.” She had none to waste. Just fitting the exam into this afternoon meant she needed to persuade Brian to get Savannah from softball and meet her at Horizon for dinner with her father, neither of which he would be happy to do. The two men had not, in all these years, found a common ground on which they could stand comfortably, so Brian avoided seeing her father whenever he could get away with it. And having to leave work early for any reason other than his own agenda always irritated him.

Manisha folded her arms and gave Meg what Meg called her “mom” look. “Maybe it wastes your time, but go anyway. Okay? You will not want another time like Sunday.”

“I know,” Meg said, the image of the lost baby vivid in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t her fault, but still…“That’s why I’m going; that’s why I called him.”

“After I am reminding you,” Manisha scolded.

“Guilty as charged.”

“And me, I am thinking you are due for vacation—a week on a quiet island, no pager, no cell phone, no laboring women. You still like to swim, yes?”

Meg nodded. “But I hardly ever do. I think our pool is mostly for looks. Did I ever tell you I set the one-hundred-meter freestyle record at my high school?”

“I recall, yes. So I prescribe a swimsuit and sunscreen, taken with one charter sailboat, daily, for seven days.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Meg smiled. “I’m cured!”

Manisha moved to the doorway. “In six years together, I see you work hard, try to please everyone, and this I admire. But remember, you must care also for yourself—one empty pot cannot refill another.”

M
EG SAT IN
D
R
. C
AMERON
L
OWENSTEIN’S OFFICE, LISTENING TO HIS ASSESSMENT
: her X-rays were clear, no signs of compression in her spine or joints, nothing out of place. “I can’t see anything that needs work,” he conceded with a shrug.

“Nothing,” Meg said.

“Nope. You’re structurally sound. Which means the culprit is invisible, at least to X-ray technology. My primary recommendation at this point is, wait and see if you have any further problems, and if you do, give this a try…” he handed her a business card printed with an unpronounceable name and the declaration “acupuncturist and psychic.”

She looked up at him, trying to ignore his violet-and-brown-patterned tie, which looked to her like a baby had puked the pattern onto it. What odd taste he had, in clothes and in referrals. She could understand his suggesting acupuncture,
maybe
. But
psychic
therapy?

“You don’t think a neurologist’s my next stop?” she asked, looking above the tie at dark eyes set deep beneath bushy black eyebrows.

“You would be astonished at what acupuncture can accomplish. I’m surprised you don’t already support it,” he said, eyebrows raised in disapproval. He reminded her of Groucho Marx. “However,” he added, “loathe though I am to bring it up—”

“Yes?” she said, not imagining what his next words would be, though later she would reflect on them at far more length than she wished.

“The symptoms you’ve experienced: repeated periods of weakness in arm and hand, possibly in the leg, the stumbling—”

“That was just the one time. Maybe twice.” Maybe a third time, she realized, recalling how she’d caught her toes on the edge of a step just yesterday evening.

“The symptoms, when seen with an absence of pain or malaise, no sign of spinal compression, and no mental process malfunction, are
suggestive
of ALS.”

The import of the three initials slid past her at first, a silvery fish through a cupped hand in the surf.
Al’s
, she thought, and then,
A-L-S
? And then, when she finally understood which disease it was that he was referring to—no,
suggesting
, she sat very still and blinked several times, quickly.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said.

“A
very
remote possibility.”

“Sure.”

“There are a hundred more plausible scenarios,” he added and she thought,
Then why did you bring it up?

He went on, “If your symptoms persist, you
will
want to talk to a neurologist, but try the acupuncture too. It can’t hurt. That’s a joke—get it? It can’t hurt? Acupuncture
can’t hurt
?”

She smiled wanly and leaned down to collect her purse. “Maybe I will.” She stood. “Thanks so much for seeing me on short notice.”

He waved away her gratitude. “Not at all. Glad to help a fellow doctor.”

“If ever you’re pregnant…” she said, pushing herself past the nightmarish image of his suggested diagnosis and into the much more comfortable space of humor. “Or just need a last-minute Pap smear—”

“I’ll call,” he agreed, extending his hand. “Take care.”

Outside his office building, the air was thick, steamy from a just-ended shower. Meg crossed the hot asphalt parking lot, her sense of humor evaporating like the rainwater in the returning sun’s heat. Under scrutiny, every fumble, every misstep, every dropped item or awkward movement she’d experienced recently became suspect. She might well have had symptoms for months and not paid them any attention. As if to prove Lowenstein wrong, she took measured, steady steps, keys held easily in one hand, her purse in the other.

She knew enough about ALS to know her chances of having it were very slim; she also knew that her symptoms did, in fact, correspond with those of the rare disease. Reaching her car, she paused, trying to recall what the other possibilities might be…and couldn’t come up with them, her mind distracted by her knowledge of what ALS patients suffered: the steady loss of ability to move arms and legs and head and lips and lungs. A progression from cane to walker to wheelchair to bed. To being fed by some overworked health aide or dutiful family member, and then by a tube. Extending life through use of a ventilator, if the victim was willing to bother—because there was no reversal, no cure, not even, she was pretty sure, much in the way of medication to slow the onset of each symptom.

She stood at her car and looked up at the palm trees bordering the road—a sight as normal and familiar to her as her own face—then past the tree trunks, at the passing motorists, all looking ordinary and content with their place on the planet. Certainly
she
was just as ordinary, just as content; certainly she was
just like them
, not afflicted with ALS—or anything else so grim and unfortunate. Certainly all the sacrifices she’d made for her parents and sisters, for Savannah’s happiness and Brian’s, for her patients throughout the years, had earned her better karma than Cameron Lowenstein’s stab-in-the-dark diagnosis.

Hadn’t they?

The frightened woman in her wanted to believe she’d earned good fortune, but she couldn’t silence the informed doctor in her, that part of her with extensive knowledge—and experience—with life’s unavoidable truth: bad things happened to good people every minute of every day, just as surely as the sun was always rising, and setting, somewhere.