The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (50 page)

Dr. Gaynor said as kindly as she could that the boy did indeed have the dog sickness and was very sick; unfortunately, there was not a great deal she and her staff could do at this stage. Even if the hospital had vaccines—which at the moment it didn't, no matter how many times she ordered them—the shots could only be given in the early stages, when someone was first bitten or shortly after.

During this exchange, the boy became very agitated, crying, “Dada Dada,” and moving so restlessly that the father had a hard time keeping the boy in his arms. The young boy was smeared with saliva, the father holding fast, crooning in his local language. Dr. Gaynor already had a face shield on, as did the two ward nurses, and Dr. Gaynor asked the taller nurse, Mrs. Kondowe, to give one to Mr. Chimpimere, telling him the virus was very contagious.

But the father just shook his head. So Dr. Gaynor, putting on latex gloves, motioned to the father to move away while the nurse knelt down to hold the boy so she could examine him with her stethoscope.

The boy, however, getting a look at the strange white woman in a mask, threw his head upward, arched his back wildly, and began to keen. The father became agitated, saying he did not want her to touch his son, that his son thought the lady doctor was a ghost and he was frightened. The father did not want his son frightened.

Dr. Gaynor said not to worry, she wouldn't examine the boy for now. She would wait, she said to the father before looking at Mrs. Kondowe, who nodded slightly, confirming Dr. Gaynor's sense that the boy would be dead within the hour. Nothing could have been done; she decided not to give a sedative for fear the boy might choke in taking it.

An hour later the boy did die, his tormented body still at last. Dr. Gaynor supervised the nurses in helping the father to wrap the body in one of the hospital's cotton blankets, then putting the small, shrouded body on the father's back, strapping it with the same piece of cotton
chitenge
skirt material the father had used to bring the boy in. Mr. Chimpimere, now with his son on his back again, seemed stooped—not so much from the slight weight of the dead boy but from the heavy weight of his son's death. He said politely,
“Zikomo,”
the local word for thanks; Dr. Gaynor said she would try to see if their ambulance had returned from taking a body to its village for burial, and if so, it could take the father and son to the border. She was very sorry they couldn't have done more, but the father came too late. He must tell his wife that when children are bitten by a dog or a bat, they must be brought to a hospital immediately. Also, once home, Mr. Chimpimere should tell his wife not to try to wash or hold the body, but leave it wrapped up for burial so as to prevent possible contamination. If his wife or any of his other children got sick, he must bring them here quickly. Dr. Gaynor suddenly heard herself saying all this in her lecturing manner, and so stopped, adding—again in a softer tone—how sorry she and the staff were.

The hospital's ambulance was not back, so Dr. Gaynor, along with Robinson and some of the staff, watched Mr. Chimpimere set off by foot with his dead son on his back, leaving through the hospital gates and turning left to reach the main dirt road.

“It is God's plan,” said Robinson, who was standing behind the silent doctor on the steps. “God's plan!” he repeated in his young, knowing voice that often drove Dr. Gaynor to aggravation. “We must accept God's plans, whatever our fate.”

“Robinson, you are so naive!” said Dr. Gaynor exasperatedly.

However, the little boy's death did upset Dr. Gaynor more than the other deaths she had witnessed since being there. The children were the hardest, but the others had been mostly silent, just watching the doctor from fevered eyes, exhaustedly placid before they stopped breathing. But this boy had been so young, so frightened, and so beautiful! However, her face showed nothing as she led the others back into the hospital.

Her stolen coin purse now forgotten, she suddenly thought she should call her mother in her nursing home in the States, although Dr. Gaynor usually only did this on the last Friday of every month. Her mother, after her stroke, had a special aide who was supposed to stay in the room at all times, but often during the day the aide wheeled the old woman out of her room and down halls into the TV room or social room, more for her benefit than for her patient's. But she always knew to be in the room for Dr. Gaynor's once-a-month call.

Well, Dr. Gaynor would just have to take the risk of not finding her mother in her room. She went to the telephone room, where calls, if reserved, were made by one of the two clerks on one of the three rotary phones. The lines were kept busy, but as boss, she was not refused. While waiting for the connection, Dr. Gaynor debated whether or not to tell her mother about the dead boy. In the old days she told her mother about all her various patients and their problems. But now her brothers insisted she didn't upset her mother any more than she had already done by taking these overseas assignments, especially this one in Africa.

So Dr. Gaynor usually only spoke to her mother in her professionally cheerful voice, spoke in this voice which had gotten more hearty in the last two years, because even before the stroke her mother spoke about Africa as if it were still the heart of darkness, both literally and biblically.

Dr. Gaynor also suspected that her mother, when first widowed and then stroked, thought her daughter would come home and care for her in the family house, for her daughter was a doctor, wasn't she? Isn't this what doctor daughters should do? her mother seemed to signal again as her hand clung like a ferret to her daughter's during Dr. Gaynor's last visit, yes, clung like a ferret, this cruel comparison popping then into Dr. Gaynor's head. Dr. Gaynor had never entertained the idea of staying home with her mother. Now here she was, finding herself calling her mother for solace as if she were a hurtful child.

“Mother?” said Dr. Gaynor as she heard pips, some crackling, the tinny sound of a phone ringing far off across oceans, then a click and someone answering, her mother's aide no doubt.

“Mother?”

“Wait a minute, Dr. Gaynor,” and then there was her mother's voice, soft but querulous, “Who's this? Who's this?” speaking in an unpleasant tone she had developed after her stroke.

“It's Helen, Mom. It's not Friday, but I had some free time so how are you, did you have a good week?”

“Edward Allen?”

“No, Mother, Helen, your daughter.”

“I don't have a daughter, I have two boys, Christopher and Kevin, do you know my sons?”

“Mother, Kevin was our father, you mean Chris and Ted, are they there with you? Put Chris on . . .”

But the phone made a banging noise and went silent. The aide's voice came back on. “I'm sorry, Dr. Gaynor, your mother dropped the phone. She's been very agitated recently. Also very incontinent.” Incontinent? That was new.

Suddenly the line disconnected, and Dr. Gaynor decided not to try to call back. She felt very disturbed by the call, considered for a brief moment flying back to check on her mother, then thought she had best wait for December, when her annual holiday came up.

But scarcely a week later Dr. Gaynor found herself flying back to Pittsburgh to attend her mother's funeral. She was now sitting with her two brothers on folding chairs in the sanctuary room of the funeral home. She was far from Chitipa, far from her missing purse, far from the rabid dead boy, and now, finding herself so quickly here in the States, a small part of Dr. Gaynor worried that her phone call from Africa may have triggered some final insult to her mother's fragile mind that had killed her. But Dr. Gaynor's guilt hardly found root, for she immediately said to herself that her mother hadn't even recognized her voice, so how could this have set off anything?

Dr. Gaynor looked around. Attendance was sparse. Her brothers, Chris and Ted, sat with her in the front row of chairs, while behind were Chris's latest wife and two of his four children. Ted had come with his partner; there were also several aides and colleagues from the nursing home. Their mother had put resuscitation orders on her advance directive, because, she wrote, she was Catholic and not to do so was a sin. Where she picked up this idea, her sons didn't know, for she had only been an Easter-and-Christmas Episcopalian most of her life.

“Catholic?” Dr. Gaynor said in a tone of bemusement to her brother Chris, who had picked her up at the airport in his SUV that he was going to get rid of because of the gas, because of the bad times, because of his wife ruining its gears. As they drove directly from the airport to the funeral home, he went on and on in his explosive, bad-tempered way. Dr. Gaynor just repeated, “Catholic? Whatever put that in her mind?”

“At least she didn't leave everything to the church!” her older brother snapped. “She was really getting loony at the end.”

“They had her on a lot of antidepressants and other medication,” Dr. Gaynor said, intending to explain how these affected the elderly, but Chris had already moved on to fulminate about some oxygen therapy expense the home had ordered for their mother without his consent.

Now, in the sanctuary, as the taped music poured over them, Dr. Gaynor said again to her brothers that she found it odd how her mother had died so quickly. It had been less than a week since Dr. Gaynor had called her; it had been the day that a rabid boy came to her hospital and died and she felt like calling her mother. Her mother hadn't seemed herself then. Was the doctor visiting her on schedule? The nurses checking her vitals and giving her meds?

“Listen, we should be thankful!” said Chris, her older brother, testily. “They were going to have to move her up to the Alzheimer's floor, and that would have cost us all double what we've been paying.”

Dr. Gaynor did not like her older brother's complaining tone, which had begun to sound so much like her now-dead mother's. “Why was that a problem? I was willing to pay. You know I've always been good for that!” she said curtly.

“You're always good for the money. It's the heavy hauling you run out on.” And on that sharp note, still resonating after the funeral and reception and after more sibling bickering, Dr. Gaynor flew back to Lilongwe, the capital.
Yes, God bless everyone, no exceptions, as you would say, Robinson,
she said to herself angrily as she thought about her brothers and thought about her mother and looked at the blank landscape of gray clouds from the plane window.

She had already made an international call to Michael, a fellow expat doctor working in Zomba, that she was stopping over in Lilongwe to pick up some supplies before going back to Chitipa and could he come up to see her. Michael and Dr. Gaynor had met at a medical symposium in Lilongwe a year ago and saw immediately they were kindred spirits; it had taken a while for them to sort out the personal aspects, the carnal side of the relationship lasting less than six months. Now they were just best friends, as they told one another, the best of best friends. And Mike
was
Dr. Gaynor's best friend. She felt she could tell him anything, and had already told him about her stolen purse by someone called Hastings—Hastings! How the locals loved these English names!—and she had told him about the rabid boy and his fear of her, and how that somehow made her call her mother, who then died, not right after the call, but two days later. Michael had just laughed at her concern that these events could in any way be connected. None of her assistant Robinson's God's plan here, he said, just life as usual.

This Dr. Gaynor was thinking about, yes, life as usual, as here she was back in a cat's whisker to the heat and bustle of Lilongwe, when she turned down Chilembwe Road to the newly refurbished Capital Hotel at the northern end of the city. It was a major hotel, with a long tree-lined driveway and portico under which taxis let out their customers, a doorman in white gloves opening the doors.

Lilongwe, even though the biggest city in Malawi, didn't really have a center. Like many African cities, it had grown this way and that, from being no more than a cluster of vendors along the side of the road in precolonial times to an open-air market that added a craft market, then morphed into Asian-owned shops next to bus stations and Spar markets, finally now a jacaranda-lined, spread-out capital city, with glassy high-rises and grand-looking stone-and-brick government buildings, all interconnected by small shopping malls, so one either had to find a bus or grab a
matola
taxi to get from one part of the city to another.

It could become something like Calcutta in time, Dr. Gaynor thought as she walked back to the hotel, her large backpack now filled with boxes of real Band-Aids she had bought at the pharmacy in the small mall she had just visited. Her backpack also contained twelve boxes of rubber gloves, ten boxes of disposable needles, and other ordinary items taken for granted in stateside hospitals, items like the newer type of paper tape instead of the old-fashioned adhesive tape, which was an insult to the skin.

Pleased with her day's shopping, and the small mall being so close to her hotel, she had decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. So when the attack came, she was furious with herself. Everyone knew muggings were frequent near the fancy hotels and restaurants, where the
mzungus
came to spend money. However, since she could see the hotel's driveway right ahead, she had no expectation that anyone would dare to mug her so close.

But they did, three young men, one of them behind and pulling her by the backpack straps so she fell down backward to the ground while another began cutting the straps to take off the backpack. A third, now that she was down, was on top of her and feeling her across her waist, where, from practice, he must have known most tourists still used money belts for their cash, credit cards, and passports.

“I'm a doctor!” she cried out. “I don't have anything but medical supplies in the backpack!” And she aimed a fist at the nose of the young man on top of her, scoring such a hit the nose began to bleed, and Hastings Chiume, yelling in pain, felt to see if the slag had broken it, then took out his knife even while she kept yelling, “Listen, for God's sake, you idiots, I'm a doctor, I'm here to help you people!”