by Pike, JJ
Betsy hung her head. Evelyn wasn’t wrong.
Fourth step:
Dear God,
It is I who has made my life a mess.
I have done it, but I cannot undo it.
My mistakes are mine and
I will begin a searching and fearless moral inventory.
I will write down my wrongs
But I will also include that which is good.
I pray for the strength to complete the task.
There was more blood in Paul’s bag. She needed to pick up the pace. She stuck two fingers into one of the latex gloves on the counter and used it as a makeshift barrier between her and the nail brush. No cross contamination. She poured Betadine onto her fingertips and the nail brush, dropped the glove into the sink, and set to scrubbing.
Then she remembered her magnifying headset. Nothing to be done about it. She was going to get Betadine on everything. She clamped the glasses to her forehead and returned to her sterilization protocol.
Mimi came back. She’d pulled herself together since the news of Petra’s condition. While she wasn’t strictly speaking sober, neither was she paralytic. Could Betsy trust her to sterilize the equipment while she prepped herself? “Have you done this before?”
Mimi shook her head. “I’m not great around blood. I’m afraid I’d be pretty useless once you cut him open.”
“No. I don’t want you to assist. I only need you to help me with the tools.”
Mimi brightened considerably. “I can do that.”
“See the box of gloves at the end of the counter?”
“The blue ones?”
“Pull out a single glove without touching anything else. Don’t touch the box or the gloves below.”
Mimi delicately pried a glove from the box as instructed.
“Dang,” said Betsy. “You didn’t wash your hands. Here…” She held her hands aloft so she wouldn’t be tempted to touch anything. “Wash them as thoroughly as you can and start again.”
Mimi reached for Betsy’s nail brush.
“No!”
Too late, Mimi had already picked it up.
“Never mind,” said Betsy. “I’ll do it.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“It’s so hard to learn,” said Betsy. “It takes hours and hours and hours of practice. When we’re not under the gun, I’ll teach you, I promise.”
“It’s that bad, then?” Mimi glanced at Paul and looked away several times. The last time she stopped. “Oh dear.” She’d seen the urine bag.
“We don’t know what it means,” said Betsy. “It’s light pink rather than red…” She shouldn’t speculate. She’d heard Mimi go off the rails earlier. If Betsy fed her the wrong detail, she could go all apocalypse-y on them and scare the pants off Petra, who needed quiet, now more than ever.
“We’re going to…” She ran through all the things that could result in hematuria. Most of them were off the cards. The most likely reason for Paul to be peeing blood was the most obvious: they’d missed a bleeder. Mimi didn’t need to hear that.
“What are you going to do?”
Betsy turned her attention back to her nailbrush. “Fix him.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. That was the goal. But she couldn’t say for certain that they’d succeed. She should have said, “We’re going to do our best,” or “We’re going to try,” but everyone in the house was so jumpy and prone to hysteria she’d opted for the easy route.
Her beloved AA sponsor was in the forefront of her mind instantly, reminding her of her moral obligations: “Call it what it is, Betsy. A lie. There are no gradations; no such thing as a white lie. You might not want to hurt her feelings or cause more anxiety, but you lied. Like I always say, you must at least be honest with yourself. That’s always our goal, to be honest with ourselves.”
She needed to think of a way to send Mimi on her way but in a calmer state than she was now. Her head was filled with bags of leaking blood and that was not an image Betsy wanted Mimi to relay to Petra.
“We need to leave the house as soon as we can.” Betsy kept her tone light and even. She’d had years of practice doing just that: sounding calm when her insides were on fire or the world around her was ablaze or death was pounding on the door. Mimi would never know how scared she was: for Jim, for Paul, for all of them. “Could you take stock of what’s going on with the others and report back to me?”
“I can and I will.” Mimi left, filled with purpose.
“He’s doing fine, by the way. Jim’s stable. I’m sure it’s just a case of dehydration. Once we get some fluids in him he’s going to be right as rain.” Nigel took the Betadine from her and doused his hands. “I’m going to scrub in.”
“You can’t leave Jim. He needs you. You have to monitor him.” Betsy had imagined her working on Paul alone and Nigel seeing to Jim, even though she knew in her heart that that was nuts.
“Jim’s right here, in the room, with us. We can see him and hear him. If there’s any change in his condition, we’ll be on it. Don’t fret. You’ve got this and I’ve got you. Have I ever let you down?”
They’d only worked together for two-and-a-half days, but Betsy trusted Nigel. He wouldn’t let her down. She needed to trust him. Ugh. Trust. So hard. She took a deep breath and handed it over. Nigel would never know he was part of her process, but that was okay. God knew. If she handed it over, Jim would live. That was the deal. Okay, so not a deal, but…
“Betsy…” Evelyn’s hand was light on her shoulder, but she let her know she was there. “The point is that you completely let go. This is where you’ll find freedom. Come on. Give it a go. Baby steps when you must, but eventually there’ll come a time when you have to leap.”
“I get it,” Betsy muttered. “Leap and the net will appear.” This was the time. She had to leap. On the inside she was sobbing and wailing and wishing she could stand by the drinks trolley and drain it dry, but on the outside she continued to prep for surgery. She took one last look at Jim and made her way to her kitchen-table-turned-operating-suite.
“Where shall we start?” Nigel was only half-joking. With no equipment this was going to be exploratory surgery circa 1970. Or earlier. Surgeons had been going in and looking for leaks for centuries. Most of their patients died, either on the table or of post-surgical complications, but Betsy had already decided that wasn’t going to happen.
“The belly’s turgid. I say we open at the original incision and start there.”
“Righto,” said Nigel.
“Betsy?” Mimi stood in the doorway, her hand over her eyes. “I don’t want to pass out, so I’m not going to look, but I have a report.”
“Yep?” Betsy nodded at Nigel. They had to start. Making sure Paul was sedated enough, when they’d only just finished surgery, was a tricky business.
“Aggie has loaded up Floofy, but she’s not happy about it.”
“Floofy?” said Nigel.
“Don’t worry about it.” Betsy waved him back towards the meds on the counter. “You concentrate on the anesthesia.”
“What does it mean, Floofy’s not happy?” Betsy retrieved a clean drape from the surgical tray, careful not to touch the table Paul lay on, and lowered the drape over the incision site.
“Floofy’s not going to be able to carry anything.” Mimi giggled, more hysteria than comedy. “It’s not like she’d had any training. She’s always been more of a pet than anything else. I’m not sure why they brought her up here.”
“Tell Aggie to cut her loose. We don’t need animals who aren’t useful to us.”
“One alpaca, roaming free, coming up.” Mimi gulped back more laughter. At least she was trying. It couldn’t be easy for her: she had no training, no aptitude for the sick room, no taste for blood or gore. She was doing her best.
“Anything else to report?” said Betsy. “I don’t want you to hang around in that doorway any longer than necessary. Fewer people equals fewer contaminants.” Who was she kidding? They were up to their collective
eyeballs in germs. It was Germ City. No, Germ Metropolis. Germ Central. The Grand Central of Germville. The lack of sleep was catching up to her.
Mimi cut Betsy’s worries short. “The sled is out here in the hallway, ready for Paul when you’re ready to move him.”
“Good.” Betsy selected a scalpel, her mind focused back on the task. We can only control that which we can control; the rest we consign to His power.
“Sean’s almost ready with the stretcher.”
“Damn,” said Nigel. “If I’m in here with you, I can’t help Fred carry Midge on the stretcher.”
“Mimi? Tell Sean he’s to help Dr. Fred carrying Midge’s stretcher.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of right this second. There will be, though, so check in with me in another fifteen minutes or so.”
“Fred wanted to know when you’d be distributing the potassium iodide. If we’re going to set off across country, he said we have to have some protection.”
Betsy looked over at Nigel. Did he know Fred any better than she did? He had to. They were colleagues. “Can I trust him?”
“He’s an outstanding pediatrician,” said Nigel. “The best in the area.”
“Yeah, not that. If I give him potassium iodide, will he stick around? I’m scared the moment he gets a dose he’ll be off. Don’t get me wrong. I know he has a family and he’d rather be with them, but I have to look after my own. If potassium iodide is his price, I have to use that to our advantage.”
“No clue,” said Nigel. “I don’t have kids, so I can’t say what he might do. But they’re in Buffalo. It’s going to take him days to get there on foot, even if he manages to hitch a ride or, more likely, a series of rides. If you dole out doses on a daily basis, he has to stick around for the protection, right?”
Betsy grimaced. She didn’t like being the bad guy. This was a form of emotional blackmail. Could she do it? Could she not? These lives were in her hands. She had to be ruthless. Keeping Fred was to their advantage. He’d handed her a short leash and told her she could use it and use it she must.
“Mimi?” she said, “listen carefully. Tell Aggie to give each person a single dose of potassium iodide. Single, do you hear me? Emphasize that. Just one dose per person. No more.”
“Got it,” said Mimi. “Then what?”
“Then I want the first caravan to set off. Sean and Fred will carry Midge. Aggie will escort them.” Petra wouldn’t leave Paul, she was sure of that.
Mimi left the surgical duo to their impossible task muttering her instructions under her breath.
Betsy lifted the first suture with her tweezers and cut below the knot. She moved swiftly, but not too swiftly. There was some version of “a stitch in time saves nine” that would be totally appropriate in the circumstances, but she didn’t know what it was. She was down to the last stitch when Aggie brought their potassium iodide pills to them.
“You’re not traveling in the first convoy, I gather,” she said. “I’m not sure when I’ll make it back so I’ve left you a fully stocked box of meds in the cubby by the door. There’s more potassium iodide in there. The box is under a pile of coats, so it’s not totally obvious, but I didn’t want you to have to look too far. The minute we make it to the salt mines I’ll turn around and come back again.”
“Good girl,” said Betsy. She stopped work for a second and looked at Aggie. She wanted to do this right. “I hope everyone has been saying ‘thank you’ to you a million times a day, because you’re an absolute wonder Agatha Everlee. We’d be a lot worse off without you. Thank you for being so calm and thoughtful and sensible. I barely knew you before this week. You hang back when you’re with your family, you know. But I’m here to tell you that you’re a lifesaver.”
Aggie blushed.
“Put the pills on the counter over there. Nigel will make sure we take them as soon as we’ve found out what’s going on with Paul.”
Aggie trotted to the counter, deposited the pills, checked on Jim, then trotted out the back door.
“Right,” said Betsy. “Finally. We’re going in.”
Bryony’s scream broke the tension.
Betsy didn’t flinch or jump, but her heart was in the next room with the little girl. “Mimi?” she screamed. “Get in there. See what’s going on.”
Bryony didn’t stop screaming.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bill and Alice were safely in the van, dogs in the back, and headed down the road as fast as Bill’s gimpy one arm gait would allow.
“Where do you think the kids are?” he said.
“They have three choices,” said Alice. “They bugged out, they bugged in, or they did a little of both.”
“Both?”
“Our food is in our root cellar. If they know about the fire at Indian Point they’ll have done the calculations and know they need to get out as fast as they can.”
“Aggie will have her finger on the pulse. She’ll know about Indian Point.”
“Then they won’t be at home, even though it’s a safe distance from the reactor. Agatha knows about wind currents and fallout and decay rates. She’ll have found them someplace safe.”
“So they’ve bugged out, but found a place to make camp? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“That’s what I would do,” said Alice. “And I trained them…”
“We trained them.”
She patted his knee. “You taught them to do what they needed to do—hunt, fish, trap—I trained them to think outside the box. They’re going to need to think tactically to outstrip this disaster. I’m sure they’ll be fine. And, anyway…” She turned from one side road onto another. “…They’ll leave us a trail so we can find them. I’ve been trying to reach them…”
“You have?”
“Of course. As soon as we got to Charles’ house, I called.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Who did you talk to? What did they say? How are they doing? Is Paul home yet?”
“No one answered.”
Bill’s guts dropped to his feet. “No one answered?”
“No, it’s a good thing.” Alice was upbeat. She meant it. How could it possibly be a good thing if she hadn’t been able to reach any of the children? “It means they got rid of their phones, like I told them to. They’ve been listening all along. They’re going to be fine.”
Bill flushed. He hadn’t gotten rid of his phone when she’d told him to. He’d held onto it until Manhattan had eaten him whole. He hadn’t asked the kids what they’d done with theirs. They’d barely started on their “remove all plastics” project when he’d gone tearing off, looking for Alice. “Oh. Shoot.”
“What?” The car swerved under Alice’s panic, but she righted the car and looked straight ahead. “What’s ‘shoot’ about?”
“My mom.”
“Ah.”
“I told her we’d be back on Monday to pick her up. She refused to leave her apartment. She said she’d rather die on her own terms.”
“Sounds like Mimi.”
“I hope she got out. She deserves better than being holed up in Morningside Heights with no electricity or water or grocery stores…”
“She’s a tough old chicken, your mother. She’ll be fine.”
They drove in silence. Bill wasn’t sure what Alice was thinking about but he had hundreds of questions with no answers. Were they really immune to the effects of MELT? Were the kids? They’d been exposed to way more plastic than he and Alice had. He closed his eyes. If MELT had harmed their kids it would be unbearable.
“Shall we go to Lake Placid Lodge first?”
Bill nodded. It was their check-in location. If the kids had followed the plan they’d have left a message there.
Alice was still calm and in control. Disaster did that to her. All her freak-out worries—the ones that had invaded her dreams for so many years—took a back seat when the heat was on.
“My hope is they’ve move
d far enough to be outside of the fallout zone but stayed close enough to have access to our food.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Bill. “If they bugged out in a hurry, they wouldn’t have been able to take that much with them.”
“They’ll be fine,” said Alice. “They’re better prepared than most kids.”
“I’m so glad you insisted we eat healthy.”
Alice nodded.
“If Christine is right, if foods that contain fewer plastics can make any difference to how MELT reacts to the human body, you might have saved their lives. Literally.”
