The Fever (18 page)

“No, Mom. No!” Her voice rising, that shrill tone only her mom could bring out of her, all those months and months after the separation, slowly understanding what her mother had done.

“Deenie, it's not safe for you there,” she said. “They don't know what it is.”

“Dad takes care of me.”

“I can take care of you. Deenie, I always—”

“You were never good for anything,” Deenie said. “Except ruining everything.”

Eli's eyes scanned the team showcase.

Glancing at the clock on the wall, he noticed it was almost seven. It had been hours since that smoke with Skye, hours spent on the thawing practice rink that seemed to pass in an instant.

There was a lot of noise echoing from the gym. They were setting up for something. It seemed a bad time to hold a game, a college fair.

He stopped at last year's trophy, a gold-dipped puck presented by the mayor, dusty ribbons, the team photo, sticks slanted in perfect symmetry.

And the big photo from last year's interscholastic banquet.

There were other players from Dryden, and from Brother Rice, Star-of-the-Sea.

He was thinking of what Brooke had said, about the boy with Lise.

In the picture, everyone wore the same dark blue blazers, the same button-down shirts and shiny loafers, the same ironic grins.

They all looked like him.

Her head hot and her room smaller than ever, and Deenie couldn't believe she'd called her mom, hated herself for it.

Her phone kept ringing, but she didn't want to turn it off because it might be Gabby.

She was remembering, again, the hundred muffled conversations in her parents' bedroom and doors slamming and her mother crying in the basement, echoing up the laundry chute. She couldn't figure any of it out at first and then finally one night she'd heard it, her dad's voice high and strange through the walls.
Couldn't keep your legs together couldn't stop yourself look what you've done look what happened.

The next morning, they sat Deenie and Eli down at the dining-room table and she told them she was leaving, a roller bag upright between her knees.

The entire time, Deenie's eyes were trained on her dad sitting there next to her mother, not saying a word, head down, thumbnail gouging a notch in the table.

Tom wasn't sure at first where the sound was coming from, or what it was.

But then he moved toward the kitchen and heard the distinctive chugging of the washing machine.

He walked down the rickety steps, thick with layers of old paint.

Deenie didn't seem to hear him at first, the washer grinding to a halt. Quickly, almost furtively, she jerked the lid open, lifting her Pizza House shirt from the depths of the old Maytag.

He watched as she held up the shirt to the lightbulb hanging above.

As she pressed her face against it.

“Deenie,” he called out, standing at the foot of the basement stairs.

“Yeah, Dad,” her voice came, a hitch in it. She didn't turn around but pulled the shirt from her face, slapped it onto the lid.

It was dark down there, he couldn't quite see, but it felt private. Not illicit, just private.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you didn't want to work tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, still not turning her head. “It just doesn't seem right to go to work. With everything happening.”

Her hands were tight on the shirt, red and wet.

From the rain-whisked
parking lot, Tom could see the gym burning bright as a game night.

Streaking past him, a Channel 7 News van, its antenna corded like a peppermint twist.

In the distance, he could see Dave Hurwich having a heated discussion with a woman in a yellow raincoat and matching hat, a container of some kind in her arms.

Walking faster, Tom passed a trench-coated reporter standing at the foot of the building's front steps, a camera light illuminating his face as he spoke:

“Though school officials claim the purpose of this hastily scheduled meeting is to address all parental concerns, it is hard not to see a connection to tonight's revelation.”

Another reporter ten feet away, fingers to earpiece:

“If Miss Court never received the much-discussed vaccination, many parents are saying that calls into question the most pervasive theory for the outbreak.”

The reporter held the microphone out to a woman in a purple slicker beside him. Tom vaguely recalled her from Parents' Night.

“The vaccine was a red herring,” the woman said sternly, leaning over the microphone. “So where does that leave us now? Now it could be anything. That's just not acceptable!”

Tom kept walking.

A small group was gathered at the school's front door. At the center, a man with headphones and a Channel 4 baseball cap was talking to Assistant Principal Hawk.

“This is a public meeting, isn't it?”

“This isn't a school-board meeting,” Hawk said, his face bone-white and wet, his Dryden Stallions baseball cap soaked through. “This meeting was called by the parent-teacher association. We need to respect their privacy.”

“But you're a public school, aren't you? What makes you think—”

Tom hurried past, ducking his head, nearly tripping over the long licorice cords snaking from the van.

“Is that the Nash girl's father?” he heard someone say.

He didn't stop. He just kept going.

Her mom left two long messages that Deenie let play as the phone rested on the counter and she ate her cereal.

She turned the radio louder so she could hear even less.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that her mom wouldn't come. It wasn't a surprise.

In the past two years, she hadn't spent more than ten minutes in the house, more than an hour in Dryden. When she picked them up, she waited in the car as if there were police tape draped across the entryway.

Sometimes, peeking under the sun visor, her mom would look up at it like it was haunted.

Deenie threw the rest of her cereal into the sink and opened the refrigerator, considered a bottle of beer nestled in the back corner. She had only had maybe ten beers in her life, but it seemed like what you did, what one did in a situation like this. As if there had ever been a situation like this.

The news report came on with that plunky news music.

Deenie sat back down, thinking of the hospital again, of being in the parking lot the night before, the closest she'd been to the thing that was happening. It was happening there. With Lise.

And then hearing Kim Court's voice again, her eyes muddy ringed.

Deenie Nash is here now too…I knew she had to be here. Deenie's the one.

She picked up her phone, trying Gabby again.

“Deenie, I don't want to talk.” Gabby's voice sounded soft and sludgy, like when she had strep, her tongue furred white.

“But what happened today? Weren't you going to the hospital for more tests?”

“Yeah. I'm home now.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I don't know, Deenie. More blood, gross stuff. More head-shrinking. I don't want to talk about it.”

Deenie paused. She pictured Gabby like a ball rolled tight and there was nothing she could do to unpeel her arms from her legs, unfurl her head from her chest.

“Is Skye with you?” Deenie asked, then felt embarrassed.

“What? No.”

“Did you see the videos?” Deenie tried again. “Kim Court?”

“No,” she said. “No, I'm not watching anything. My mom said I couldn't watch anything. Deenie, I don't want to talk about it. Okay? Please.”

But Deenie couldn't stop herself, her voice pushing forward.

“Gabby, we have to do something. What if we went to the hospital? Maybe, with everything going on, we could try to see Lise now—”

“No” came Gabby's voice, loud and urgent. “I'm never, ever going back there. What is wrong with you, Deenie? What do you think is going to happen if you go? That Lise is dying to see you so much she'll come out of the coma?”

Deenie didn't say anything for a second.

“Coma?” she said at last. “What do you mean, ‘coma'? I thought she was just unconscious.”

There was no sound on the other end.

Then a vague clicking, like a tongue across the roof of the mouth.

“Deenie,” Gabby said finally, “people aren't just unconscious for four days.”

“But we don't know…she may be conscious now. We don't know.”

There was a muffled sound, but Deenie couldn't hear what it was, her forehead wet and tingling. She felt so far away from Gabby. Like with everything lately, even before this, all Gabby's adventures with Skye. The only other time she remembered feeling that way was a few years ago. That time Gabby stayed with them for almost two weeks. Every night, Deenie tried to get her to talk and she wouldn't. A few times, though, she heard Eli talking to her downstairs and Gabby laughing, and it had to be Gabby but didn't sound like her laugh, or like Gabby.

Which was funny to think of now, because those weeks Gabby stayed with them seemed to be the thing that had made them best friends. After that, they were closer than ever.

“Deenie.” Gabby's voice returned, a whisper. “What is it you're trying to do?”

Click, click,
and Deenie felt her own lips, tongue. Was the sound coming from her own mouth?

“Deenie,” Gabby said, “we're all sick here.”

Ten minutes later, her coat on, she was ready to go.

If I text him,
she thought,
he'll say no.

Tearing a page from her spiral notebook, she wrote a note.

The minute Tom walked inside the school, he felt it.

It was loud, louder than any school event he could remember.

The pitchy clamor of nervous parents finding other nervous parents to be even more nervous together.

A flurry of shouts at the door as the sole security guard tried to keep another reporter or producer from entering through the loading dock.

The screeching of gym risers pushed down the hallway, veering hard into the rattling lockers, sending a rolling garbage can careering into the wall.

Two sets of parents shouting at each other, something about a fender bender in the parking lot, and one of the fathers inexplicably crying, humiliating tears of frustration he tried to hide behind his shirtsleeve.

At the gym's double doors, the fleecy-haired student-council president stood as sentry, a name tag slapped across his navy blazer:
PATRICK
.

“I don't have any information. But don't worry,” the boy said, his voice cracking, to the mother speaking fervently to him, her glasses crooked and fogged. “They're gonna explain everything.”

He couldn't remember ever seeing the gym so full.

Principal Crowder himself, shirtsleeves rolled up like a junior senator, was directing a letter-jacketed student-council type in how to push open the high windows with the extension pole.

If it hadn't been so hot already, the air outside so preternaturally mild and the school holding all the furnaced breath of months of winter, then maybe the two hundred or more parents packed so tightly would not have radiated so much heat.

The air thick with it, the high windows wisped with condensation, Tom walked through, pushing past the straining masses, the gym starting to feel like some kind of torpid hothouse or sweatshop, the creaking hold of an ancient ship.

And they were all there.

A
This Is Your Life
of parents, current, recent, long past (what was Constance Keith doing there, both her rambunctious, teeth-flashing, hell's-yeah daughters and her Adderall-dealing son long gone to state schools, possibly state prison?).

There were the earnest parents, notepads and pens out, clasping copies of news articles printed from the Internet in their shaking hands.

And there were the ones wearing vaguely stunned expressions, the same ones who could never quite believe their children were failing chemistry, had scorched their lab partners' hair while swinging burners like flamethrowers, had referred to other classmates as “pass-around pussies.”

And there were the ones, fewer than usual, with their eyes fixed on their phones, just like during Back to School Night, concerts, graduations, their faces veiled now so you couldn't be sure if they were merely biding their time, reviewing the news reports, poised to pounce on the school officials, or if their thoughts were elsewhere (on work, on Scrabble, the Tetris slink).

Standing room only, like a rock concert, and Tom tried to avoid them all, finding a corner by the boys' locker-room doors, against the vaguely damp wall mats smelling strongly of mildew, spit, boys.

Through the aluminum crossbars, fifteen feet away, he could see Lara Bishop in her own hideout, chewing gum with the vigor of a former smoker.

He worked a long time to catch her eye, but finally she nodded back, a half smile filled with knowingness. Sometimes she reminded him of one of those world-weary actresses in old movies, the ones who looked knocked around but instead of making them harder, it seemed to make them more generous-spirited.

“You're hiding too,” a voice beside him said.

It was the French teacher, Kit, walking toward him, sliding off a tiny leather jacket, tomato red, like her Vespa.

Where did this woman come from? he wondered. And where had she been when he was single? Then he remembered he was single.

A sudden screech from the mike system made her wince, smiling, her shoulders pushing together in a way that reminded him, unnervingly, of Gabby, Lise, Deenie.

“If I can have your attention…”

Principal Crowder began, papers rolled in his hand, pen behind his ear. A cartoonist's drawing of an important person. First, he introduced the murderers' row of officials standing at his side. Sue Brennan, next to the superintendent in his usual taupe suit, then a silver-haired woman introduced as the hospital's “chief information officer,” flanked by an unidentified man in a three-piece suit, fingers tight around his cell phone.

And poor Mark Tierney, the PTA chair and a pediatrician, his face crimped and flushed, like a man caught in the middle of a rope pull.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” the superintendent began. “Concerned parents are involved parents, and involved parents make our district strong. The safety and well-being of our students is our utmost priority. We are working closely with the affected students, their parents, and health officials to gather all the facts. We ask the community to respect the privacy of the families involved as we progress and that any questions you may have be addressed to Principal Crowder directly.”

It was a marvelous string of sentences containing no information at all.

All eyes turned over to Crowder, who momentarily flashed his toothy grin, as if forgetting the occasion.

“Thank you all for coming. While privacy laws prevent us from getting into specifics, we want to be clear that all girls have received or are receiving appropriate medical attention. The headline here is that there's no evidence—and Mrs. Tomlinson from the hospital can back me up here—suggesting we are dealing with a contagious threat of any kind.”

The silver-haired hospital woman stiffened visibly, locking eyes with Crowder. It was like watching a couple of battery men at a ball game, still working out their signals. Crowder caught her signal, only a little late.

“But the investigation is ongoing,” Crowder said, eyes dropping down to a folded sheet of paper in his hands. “Essentially, what we're trying to do here is walk the cat backward. The district and health officials are working together, trying to determine any commonalities the girls share that might explain their conditions.”

“Here's a commonality,” someone shouted from the throng. “They all attend
this
school.”

There it was. It hadn't taken long, but it almost felt like a relief to get it over with, to have someone start.

Tom could feel the pressure in the gym release momentarily around him and, in seconds, build up again, random parents straining to move forward, others waving for the student with the microphone. The buzz of two dozen or more conversations vibrating louder.

Crowder cleared this throat. “I was getting to that. The department of health is preparing to conduct a full review of the premises, and the deputy commissioner can tell you about that now. I know she's happy to answer any questions.”

Sue Brennan stepped forward to the mike stand, teetering ever so slightly on her heels.

Tom focused closely on her, this woman who had spoken so inscrutably, so evasively, it seemed to him now, about his daughter.

“After Ms. Bishop's incident, our staff reached out to officials at the state department of health, including the environmental health and communicable diseases divisions. They're helping us review all available medical tests and sharing epidemiologic, clinical, and environmental data. Several of you have asked about autoimmune conditions, like PANDAS, but none of the girls have recently had strep. We've ruled out many standard infections—
E. coli,
staph. Also neurological infections—encephalitis, meningitis, late-stage syphilis.”