The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  “Well, that’s a relief, at least.…”

  “Maybe not. I, uh, borrowed some data from Big Dattie.”

  “Janie! What the hell—” He leaned forward over the table and lowered his voice. “I’m not sure I want to hear this!”

  “You told me to tell you everything I did—”

  “Everything that related to your application for reinstatement.”

  “Well, this is related to that, at least indirectly.”

  “You can’t include information gained illegally on an application for reinstatement. My expectation was that it would all be legal.”

  She was quiet for a moment, smarting from his castigation. “If everything I did was legal, why would I need you?”

  Tom took a long and lawyerly breath. Janie could almost hear him counting to ten. He sat up again and composed himself, and when he finally spoke, his words came out measured and controlled.

  “You don’t, unless you care about how the rest of your life goes. If you’re happy with your current professional situation, you don’t need me. If you’re satisfied with phone sex to London, then you don’t need me either, although as I’ve told you, you could probably get better immigration results with someone else. If you are absolutely certain that there will never be repercussions from what happened in London …”

  He paused for a moment and stewed, while Janie sat in chastised silence. “You know what the number one item on the lawyer list of questions not to ask the client is?” he said finally.

  “Not really.”

  “Sorry. I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s ‘Did you do it?’ And I’ll tell you why. We don’t really want to know. That way, if someone asks ‘Mr. Lawyer, is your client guilty?’ we can say something other than ‘No comment,’ something like ‘I have no personal knowledge.…’ ”

  “Tom.”

  “That way if someone from Biopol wants to know all about your little unauthorized excursion into their database, which as I’m sure you know carries a rather stiff penalty, I can truthfully say I have no personal knowledge of it.” He paused, fuming, and gathered his thoughts. “I can’t believe Caroline went along with this.”

  “She didn’t seem to think it was particularly risky.”

  “Of course it’s risky. Everything with those assholes is a risk.”

  She waited a minute for the unexpectedly emotional dust to settle and said, “I’m sorry. It just never occurred to me that I should be keeping something from you. We’ve never had secrets before.”

  “Did you and Harry have secrets when you were married?”

  “Well, of course, a few.”

  “There you go,” he said, as if it were the last word. For a moment Janie was sorely tempted to remind Tom that some of the secrets she’d kept from Harry before he died were things that she’d shared with Tom himself, bittersweet youthful indiscretions, some of which she’d sooner forget, events Tom knew about because he’d been there too. A hastily extinguished joint, a beer bottle tossed away just in the nick of time. A begging session with a cop who’d caught Janie and Tom parking on a deserted farm road, rounding third base and headed in a heat for home plate, back when there were still farms in the community where they’d grown up together and people who would be offended if they came across the two of them in that condition. The humiliation of being made to get out of the car, only partly clothed, while the cop ran his flashlight up and down their young bodies, shaming them completely. A blanket on a beach in Wellfleet, with the mist coming in, and the only other person for miles around a lone and rather preoccupied surfer, where they’d touched each other’s secret places with youthful delight and awe.

  But it didn’t seem like a good idea at the moment to dredge up the past. “Well, anyway, now you know.”

  “I do,” he said unhappily. “And I don’t like it. Be careful when you’re poking around in there. Please. You never know who’s going to be watching.”

  She wasn’t sure precisely what he meant. But she agreed to do what he asked. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

  As soon as she’d gotten her more pressing work obligations out of the way, Janie opened a data program on her foundation computer. She said all the necessary magic words, and a map festooned with red dots appeared on the screen, each mark showing the hometown of one of her “subjects.”

  She blinked when she first looked at it. The map showed the entire United States but the dots were all clustered in the Northeast, with a small number of exceptions. One or two were on the West Coast in greater Los Angeles, and a handful were from the Chicago area. There was only one Midwestern dot, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  But they were all urban families, and mostly Easterners. The vast majority were bunched up between New York City and her own area of western Massachusetts.

  Their surnames were all Jewish-sounding. None of the parents had the problem that their sons seemed to be evidencing—it appeared to have sprung up within the younger generation.

  It was time to start talking to some of them.

  The phone buzzed on her belt, surprising her out of her concentration. She answered it quickly, listened for a few moments, then put her program on hibernation. She was wanted for an audience with the Monkey Man.

  “I’m still looking for that report on Catholic popes,” he said.

  “I’ve been a little busy, Chet.”

  “With what?”

  “With the work I’m supposed to be doing, what do you think?”

  “Just checking,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to do something stupid.”

  She scowled at him. “Chet, everything I do in this job is stupid.”

  Malin seemed shocked that she would stand up to him, and for a moment he was flustered into speechlessness. “Well,” he finally said, “just watch out. Unauthorized stupid activities can get you in a lot of trouble.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  Not having the sanction of her employer was incredibly frustrating. The work she’d discovered was something Janie knew she could sink her teeth into, something that was looking more intriguing all the time. She decided to start contacting the families herself, thinking that just maybe a conversation would spark the necessary moment of recognition and lead her down the road to an idea. Like all good physicians, practicing or not, she knew that the best place to start treating any patient was with a complete history. And there were lots of questions she could ask that couldn’t be answered in a data evaluation.

  It would certainly justify a trip to visit Abraham Prives, perhaps not in Chet Malin’s beady little eyes … but she wasn’t going to let him hold her under his thumb.

  When she got to Jameson Memorial she entered by her usual route, the emergency entrance, because there were tissue tests there waiting to be retrieved and it was the shortest route to the Prives boy’s room. It was, as always, the scene of much scurrying and bustling. There were cubicles off to both sides of a long hallway that led to the hospital’s main building, each with its own sealable door and opaque drape. Janie glanced from side to side as she proceeded apace down the corridor, and saw kids with air casts, old people with IV lines, a man who looked to be some sort of construction worker with his hand wrapped in a bloody bandage, the usual assortment of maladies.

  And then there were the green-suited cops holding down—

  She stopped. It was not the usual fare, she realized as she stared into the cubicle. Certainly there were reasons for people to be convulsing on the floor of an ER cubicle. But the biocops put a whole different light on it.

  One of the green men saw her, reached up, and with a good yank closed the opaque drape.

  She ran down the remainder of the corridor, and it wasn’t until she was in the elevator with the door closing that she allowed herself to breathe.

  If that was DR SAM, that room will be closed off until they can tear it down to the studs, she thought as she rode upward. Oh, please, she prayed silently, let it not be that.

  When she got off the ele
vator at Abraham’s floor, she sat down in a chair in the waiting area and panted until she’d regained herself. Then soberly, quietly, she went to the boy’s room.

  Mrs. Prives was precisely where Janie had seen her the first time, sitting in a chair by the edge of the bed, talking to her unresponsive son.

  “I wish I had more to tell you” was all she could say to the woman’s instant flurry of questions. “I haven’t found any funding yet, but I haven’t given up the search. It takes time.”

  “Everything seems to take time.”

  “I know. It’s got to be difficult for you.” She paused for a moment. “What are Abraham’s doctors telling you?”

  “That there isn’t much that can be done for him right now, at least not until the swelling goes down.”

  “Well, they’re probably right about that. No one will be able to do much of anything until then. That’s the real culprit in all of this—the spine just gets too big for the space it’s supposed to be in. And in Abraham’s case, the space has been compromised. So wait-and-see is the best course of action.”

  “So why are you here, then,” the woman said bitterly, “if there’s nothing more to be done?”

  “I didn’t say there was nothing more to be done, just that right now doing nothing is appropriate. And the reason I’m here is that I’d like to ask you some questions. Of course this is all voluntary. You can tell me to go away if you want to.”

  “No,” the mother said wearily, “I don’t want you to go away. Forgive me if I was snippy with you. I’m snippy with just about everyone these days.”

  “I can understand why.” Janie took in a preparatory breath, then related the gist of her findings without revealing how surprisingly large the number of other victims had turned out to be. Then she began with the questions. “I saw from the database that you’ve lived here in town for five years.”

  The mother nodded. “I have family in the area. And the school system is good. With my husband gone I didn’t really want to stay where we were.”

  “Which was where?”

  “High Falls, New York. It’s this little podunk town in the Hudson River Valley. My husband was teaching at Vassar and it was a pretty easy commute, just over the river. It was gorgeous there.”

  Janie said, “I know the area. There are some beautiful spots out that way. Was Abraham born while you lived there?”

  “Actually, he was born in Manhattan. We moved up to High Falls when he was about two years old.” She glanced over at her son. “It was a bit tough at first, I remember; I was used to everything being so close and handy. But after I learned my way around, I grew to love it. I got used to the slower pace, found other kids for Abraham to play with. It got to feel like paradise after a while.”

  Janie pulled a notepad out of her pocket and wrote High Falls, New York on the top sheet. “Were there any unusual environmental incidents or issues you remember from the time that you lived there?”

  Mrs. Prives’s brow tightened slightly as she concentrated. “Not that I recall. My husband might have remembered something—he used to read the papers a lot more than I did, and he paid attention to that sort of thing. I was too busy raising my kids to keep track of everything that was going on around us.”

  “But nothing major sticks out in your mind, nothing about the water or a pollution site?”

  “Oh, we drank bottled water, of course, but we didn’t have to. They tested the water all the time there. It was very hard—I remember I had to add this stuff to our laundry to keep it from being stained—but it wasn’t polluted.”

  Hard water, Janie scribbled. But she didn’t think it would mean much of anything. Water with high mineral content could be found in just about every state in the country. And it didn’t cause broken bones—in fact, it was often instrumental in preventing them.

  “Now, I saw in Abraham’s record that he’s been fully immunized. Has he had any unusual diseases, anything that might not have shown up on his database file?”

  “Not that I remember. He’s always been so healthy, that’s why this is so hard to take.” She glanced at her son. “He was incredibly active. Loved to hike and swim and—”

  She paused for a moment, her forehead creased with the search for a memory. “I do recall one thing,” she finally said. “Once when Abraham was at camp, he went swimming in a pond that had some sort of beaver bacteria in it, they found out later. So all the boys at camp got an injection of some antibiotic to prevent them from getting a stomach infection. I remember because they had to call me for permission. He hates injections. I was tempted to drive out there—it’s just on this side of the state border.”

  A small fire was lit inside Janie’s imagination. It might be nothing, she told herself. “How old was he at the time?”

  “Six, I think. Yes, six. It was his first time at camp. Thank God he got to go, because the camp had to close for a couple of years after the Outbreaks—the owners died and none of their other family members wanted to run the place. They found someone after a couple of summers, though.”

  “Did Abraham go back then?”

  “Oh, yes. He went every year that he could. It’s a religious camp for boys who are studying Hebrew. Not that we’re all that religious, really, it’s just that he was going to be bar mitzvahed this fall.” She looked at him again and sighed sadly. “But I think it’s going to be delayed a bit.”

  Janie asked her some inconsequential questions, just to be polite. She jotted down a few more things before asking the question that really mattered to her.

  “Oh, by the way, I might want to contact the people at the camp to see if they can tell me which antibiotic was used. Would you mind if I used your name as a reference?”

  “No, not at all, not if it might help,” Mrs. Prives said. “It was Camp Meir. After Golda. It’s in this little town just on the border, called Burning Road.”

  She sat with the ancient book on her lap and rocked back and forth in the cool night air. Burning Road, she thought to herself, almost incredulously.

  … and often the bodies did not find repose in the ground, for there was not adequate room nor adequate gravediggers, and those that were set out on the sides of the roads for collection had to be burned where they lay … indeed, it seemed some days as if the roads themselves were burning.

  “I know how you feel,” she said to her long-dead colleague, the plague physician who had penned those words in his elegant hand. There were burning roads back then, even. Everywhere I turn, I seem to find another one.

  Beside her on the swing was a newspaper. A small story on page two told of three small outbreaks of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mexicalis. Dr. Janie shuddered as she read of these new cases of DR SAM.

  Sometime in the middle of the night Janie was awakened from a nightmare, one in which she’d been weaving her way between funeral pyres, and her first thought was a sense of gladness that she’d been snapped out of it. But that notion changed when she realized that what had brought her out of one hell was the door opening to another—a closer, much more real hell. It was the cold sound of tinkling shards of glass falling in a crystalline shower on her kitchen floor. As icy fingers of terror walked down her spine, she reached instinctively for the light switch. But the door to the hallway was open, which was why the noise had been loud enough to awaken her.

  They’ll see the light, she realized. She sat up in bed, pulled the covers up to her neck, and stared into the darkness for a scared moment, wishing with every cell in her body that she could reach over and wake someone up.

  More sounds, ill-defined but nevertheless frightening, drifted through the house from the kitchen area, which faced away from the street and into the woods. Shaking, she picked up the handset of the bedside phone and dialed 911, only to realize when nothing happened that there was no dial tone.

  Where is my cellular phone? In the kitchen, charging from the wall socket because she’d forgotten to leave it out in the light and the battery had gone completely dry
. It was in the corner of the counter, out of sight, because Janie thought the charging unit was ugly. She wanted it out of sight, and now it was very out of reach.

  So Janie got out of the bed with excruciating care and tiptoed as noiselessly as possible over the rug-covered floor. She went into her bathroom and closed the door, whispering a silent prayer of thanks to the hinge god that it didn’t squeak when she pushed it. The thin nightdress she wore seemed woefully inadequate in the night air so she wrapped a bath towel around her shivering shoulders.

  She waited, trembling, with only a locked wood door between herself and the unknown intruder. She pressed one ear up against the wall that connected the bathroom to the hallway and listened, hearing the unmistakable sounds of rummaging. It was only when she had heard nothing for a full fifteen minutes that she dared to open the door again.

  When she got her hands on the cell phone, she tried to speak Caroline’s name but her voice was so shaky that the unit wouldn’t recognize it, so she had to look up the number in her paper address book and dial it with her finger. Then she dialed Tom.

  Only then did she turn on the kitchen light and survey the mess. Drawers were emptied, chairs tipped, her desk rummaged through—and there, where she’d left her notebook computer before retiring, was a blank expanse of desk. They’d taken it.

  But what on earth for? They’re so cheap now.…

  And then she realized—there was information inside it, information she’d acquired in marginally legal ways. For a moment she panicked, but then she remembered that she couldn’t be connected to that acquisition except through a permit, which made part of what she had legal. And she’d copied all the data on a removable disk to take it to her office. That disk was in her purse, hung by habit from a hook on the inside of the coat closet door, which the thief had, for some unfathomable reason, overlooked.

  She rushed into the living room—more mayhem—and let her eyes go directly to the bookshelf.

  There, in its proper place, was Alejandro’s journal. She ran to it, pulled it off the shelf, and hugged it to her chest.