The Cure for Modern Life

by Lisa Tucker

  Except in this case, it was really the opposite. The security guard didn’t want to find them; he didn’t even want to be in the man’s apartment. He kept saying, “I’m not supposed to do this,” but their mom kept hysterically insisting that this man had “stolen” her children.

  Danny was stunned that his mom had managed to talk this security guard into letting her in. She didn’t seem sick, but he couldn’t really tell since he couldn’t see her. He kept his ear to the door. He heard the guard say, “You can look around, but don’t touch anything.” He felt his heart pounding as he wondered if he’d left any signs. The computer was still talking, but the security guard told his mom that happened with computers; it didn’t mean anybody was home. (Actually, Danny was responsible for that. Every hour or so, the computer stopped speaking and the changing screen with the equation came back, but Danny discovered all he had to do was shake the desk a little and it started again.) The trash was all thrown away. They still hadn’t found any food other than crackers and bread, which he knew hadn’t smelled up the place. He’d flushed both toilets. He’d put the man’s toothbrush back where it belonged, after he’d used it to brush his teeth and his sister’s.

  He could hear people moving around, and then the sound of his mom crying. “I’m telling you, they were here! It was Monday night. I left for just a minute and this man took them from me.”

  Danny felt sorry for her, but the “just a minute” part reminded him that he couldn’t trust her. She’d left them for a whole day. Anything could have happened while she was gone. If the man hadn’t been in a hurry, Isabelle might be in some horrible foster home right now.

  “Look,” the guard said, “I only let you in here because my brother has a habit, and I felt sorry for you.” He sounded both annoyed and bored. “I’m telling you, the guy who lives here, Doctor Connelly, is never home. He’s probably in Germany, somewhere like that. He travels all the time, works for a big drug company. He may not be back here for a month.”

  “But where did they go, then?” Danny could hear her coming closer. Now she was standing in the man’s bedroom, maybe looking right at the closet. “What did he do with them before he left?”

  “I told you, I didn’t see any kids here. Not Monday night, not that I remember. And I was here then, too. Me and the maintenance guy, we live on-site.”

  Danny thought about this. He’d seen the security guard when the rich man brought them into the building. The guard had been on the phone, but he’d looked in their direction. The rich guy had waved hello. Was it possible the guard really hadn’t seen them? Most people didn’t; Danny knew that. This was why he’d yelled and screamed so the man would notice them on the bridge.

  His mom cried harder. “Does this mean you won’t help me?”

  “Hey, I risked my job to let you in here, lady. We’re never supposed to use the master key unless there’s a plumbing problem or a fire or the police have a warrant.” He paused. “Maybe you should call the police. Tell them your story.”

  The guard obviously didn’t believe his mom, which wasn’t surprising. Nobody seemed to believe her, even when she was telling the truth. Of course his mom wouldn’t really call the police, but it took Danny a few minutes to realize the best part of all. Now, when the rich guy finally did call the security guard to throw them out, the guard would already know it wasn’t necessary. He’d either tell the guy he’d checked the place recently or, more likely, considering he wasn’t supposed to be up here, wait a few minutes, pretend he was checking, and then tell the man that nobody was there, that everything was fine.

  It was an amazing stroke of luck, and all thanks to his mom.

  He heard her ask the guard if she could stay here and wait, in case her children came back. When the guard said that would never happen—they couldn’t get in without a building pass—she broke down completely. Danny looked at Isabelle, who was sucking on the strings of the puppy shoe. It was hard to hear their mom sobbing, but they were used to it. She did it all the time with real cops, to get them to let her go.

  He heard more movement and the voices got farther away. His mom asked the guard to call the man’s work so she could ask about her kids, but the guard said no way. “I’m not gonna bother Doctor Connelly with this. I’ll end up fired.” A few minutes later, Danny heard them leaving. “You’re gonna have to figure out where your kids are. I did you a favor, but that’s it.”

  The front door closed, but Danny still waited several minutes before he took Isabelle and her toys back into the living room. She was back to crawling around, putting the Barbie in the shoe, playing with the edge of the man’s rug. Danny was looking out the big window, watching his mom grow smaller and smaller as she walked back to the bridge.

  His plan had been to hide from whoever the man sent to throw them out, not from his own mom. But his mom wanted them thrown out, too, even if her reasons were different. She wanted them back in the ugly, freezing house where Isabelle couldn’t crawl without getting splinters in her hands. Where there wasn’t a computer to teach his sister to talk. Where it was so loud that Isabelle never slept all the way through the night the way she had last night in the guest room bed. And, worst of all, where his sister had thrown up so much he’d been afraid she was dying and his mom hadn’t done a thing to help. She’d even refused to give Danny any of the stolen cash for a hotel, though he’d begged and pleaded with her to put Isabelle first for once in her life.

  He had to learn to harden his heart. He had to tell himself that it wasn’t his mom walking away, so pitifully alone and scared—it was the dragon. And now that the dragon was gone, the town was safe. He could rest in this castle until the man came back, which, from what the guard said, could be a very long time.

  It was time to relax, and the first thing he did was take a long hot bath while Isabelle sat on the bathroom rug, unwrapping bars of soap. When the water got cool, he just turned on the tap; somehow, amazingly, there was always more hot. He washed his hair and stayed in until his skin was all shriveled and pink; then he let out the dirty water, got dressed, and gave Isabelle her bath. She loved the way the soap smelled; she kept sticking it on her nose and saying her newest word, “Good!” Later in the week, she also said, “Three,” the number of washcloths she wanted in the tub with her: two she liked to wrap around her feet and one she put flat on her tummy. It didn’t matter because the man had tons of thick washcloths; Danny found a huge stack of them next to the towels on some shelves by the shower, the same shelves where Isabelle had found all the great-smelling soap.

  Now that they were clean, he had to tackle the serious problem of food. He rummaged through every cabinet and every drawer in the refrigerator: all empty. By nightfall, they’d finished the loaf of bread and the crackers and the cookies, but Isabelle was still hungry. He was just wondering if they would have to leave this wonderful place when he got lucky again. He saw one place he hadn’t tried, a silver box in the corner, across from the cabinets. That silver box turned out to be the jackpot. Inside were dozens and dozens of frozen meals, a weird brand he’d never seen in any grocery store, probably made especially for the rich man. The food had weird names, too, like “herbed cod” and “bison chili,” but the instructions were right on the package, just like any frozen dinner, though you didn’t cook them in the microwave, but in a pan of water on the stove. It took Danny a minute to figure out the fancy stove, but then he dropped the packages in the water, and fifteen minutes later they were ready. Isabelle’s favorite was cranberry-stuffed chicken. Her least favorite was veal stew, which Danny made later in the week, for himself, but he was glad he gave her a taste because she said her first two-word phrase: “Don’t wike!”

  Danny liked everything but the vegetables, and even they were decent, except the asparagus, which he flushed down the toilet so it wouldn’t smell up the trash. And he loved the man’s plates, his heavy forks and spoons, the dark wood table where he and Isabelle ate their meals. His sister loved sitting on her phone books, holding a
spoon, and feeding herself with her fingers, no matter how messy the dish. Danny put a garbage bag under the phone books and another one under her chair, but inevitably some food would miss the bags and end up on the floor or, once or twice, on the walls. Luckily, everything washed up easily, even the walls. He didn’t want to harm this place.

  By the fourth day they were so well fed that Danny almost forgot what it was like to be hungry. They were clean all the time, too. Even their clothes didn’t smell now that Danny had discovered the coolest black washer and dryer in a room right off the kitchen. And they were celebrating, just like the knights did when they returned from their battles.

  Celebrating in the man’s castle was obviously different from the olden days. Then it was probably all parties and singing and merriment. Now it was the huge television hanging on the man’s bedroom wall, flat as a painting, with hundreds of channels, including a whole channel just to tell him what was on the other ones.

  It hadn’t taken Danny long to discover how to work the remote control. Now Isabelle was learning word after word, in English, since he’d let the computer stop talking so she could watch cartoons and Sesame Street . On the fifth day he came into the bedroom and saw his sister perform another miracle. She was in the middle of the room, standing up, and then he saw her taking steps, walking over to the dresser, where her elephant was. Until then, she’d been able to walk only if he stood her up and held on tightly to her hands. The furniture had made the difference, and Danny felt stupid that he’d never thought of it before. How could she learn to walk by herself without something to pull herself up on? Their house had no furniture other than mattresses lying on the floor. Here she had regular beds and end tables and couches. She had thick rugs beneath her, so she wouldn’t be hurt if she stumbled and fell. She had a real house, and she could become a real kid.

  Even if the guy came back tomorrow, Danny would never regret breaking his promise to leave this castle. Of course he’d have to run like hell with Isabelle before the man called the guard, but he could do that. He’d pick up his sister and take off, even though he knew she’d protest all the way. After their first day here, she’d decided she hated being carried, and now she told him so, repeatedly, even if he picked her up for a good reason. “I do!” she said, and he said okay, unless it was the tub, which was too big and too dangerous to let her get into by herself.

  As she struggled to climb into the guest bed that night, he didn’t try to rush her, even though he was looking forward to her bedtime, as always, so he could do whatever he wanted. He watched a lot of TV himself: a show about penguins he really liked, a movie about kids with superpowers, the History Channel, where he learned that the bad things that had happened to his family were really nothing compared to World War II and the Holocaust. The one show he wouldn’t watch, no matter how many channels it was on, was Law & Order . He watched it once, that was all, but it was enough to make him understand the way people saw his mother. The cops on the show talked about drug addicts like they were garbage. It was hard enough thinking of his mother as a dragon; he hated that anyone would think of her as trash. And it just wasn’t true, not about his mom, not even about the other addicts who lived in his house. They annoyed him all the time, and they scared him, too, but they were still real people who made popcorn and laughed and talked about whether it would snow. Most of them wanted to change; Danny heard them telling one another this constantly. Most of them were afraid that if they didn’t change soon, they wouldn’t “make it.” Danny had never known what that meant until he saw Law & Order , but now he did. They were afraid they were going to die.

  When he wasn’t watching TV, he wandered around the loft area or cooked himself another frozen meal or sat on the big leather couch, looking at the city lights, wondering what it would be like if he really lived here, if he were the man the security guard was afraid to bother at work: Dr. Connelly. He wasn’t surprised the guy was a doctor; no wonder he had the equation. He knew what Astor-Denning was, too; he’d seen it on a TV commercial. It was the drug company where the doctor worked, and the commercial helped Danny figure out that what they mainly did was research, which meant finding cures for sick people. He liked thinking that Dr. Connelly might have found a lot of cures himself.

  On Monday morning, the sixth day, Isabelle insisted on walking to the potty, too. She’d been trained to use it last summer, not by him but by his mom, who’d said she couldn’t wait any longer because it was too expensive to keep buying diapers. His mom had taught Isabelle to make this squeaky noise and point whenever she had to go; then someone, usually Danny, carried her into the bathroom and held her on the toilet. At home, that is. When they were out begging for train fare, Danny kept her in toddler Pampers so he wouldn’t have to deal with stopping every hour to find a bathroom. He had only one large pack of Pampers left in the garbage bag, but he still made Isabelle wear a diaper during every nap and at night because he didn’t want to risk her wetting the guest bed. He didn’t want her crawling up on the hard ceramic potty, either, but he couldn’t talk her out of it. She held on to his arm so she wouldn’t fall in, and she let him wipe her, but otherwise she did it all by herself.

  She wanted to do everything by herself. It was hard for Danny to get used to. He’d been carrying her around for three years, talking to her, but she’d never talked back. Now she not only talked, she got mad if she didn’t get what she wanted. If he tried to put her toys away in the garbage bag, she yelled at him, and sometimes threw herself on the floor. Danny tried to ignore her, but that afternoon, when it was time for her nap, she screamed no, and when he picked her up to carry her there anyway, she hit him in the nose.

  It hurt—a lot—but he was still surprised when he discovered that the wetness on his face was blood. He had to let Isabelle down so he could get some toilet paper and keep his nose from bleeding onto the floor. While he was in the bathroom he looked at himself, like he always did. There wasn’t a mirror in their house, and he kept being surprised at his own reflection. His brown hair was a mess; it wouldn’t stay down no matter how often he combed it, probably because his mom had cut it off too quickly when she was sick. He was so short he didn’t come even halfway up the glass. He was still a lot skinnier than the regular kids who went to school. But what bothered him most was how young he seemed in that mirror. He didn’t look like a grown-up or a knight. He looked like a little kid.

  A little kid with a bloody nose, no less, which made him start to cry. It was the stupidest thing to cry about, that a three-year-old had hit him. He wished someone were there to tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself, but nobody was. He felt really alone for the first time since they’d been in this place. He wanted his mom.

  He sat down on the floor, still holding the toilet paper against his nose, still crying. He called himself dumb over and over, but now that the tears had come, he couldn’t seem to make them go away. He didn’t notice that Isabelle had walked into the bathroom, too, but he felt her hand on his head. He shook her off, not because she’d hit him but because he was embarrassed. He didn’t want her to see him bawling like a baby.

  She walked around in front of him; he saw her pink and yellow striped shirt that didn’t quite cover her tummy, and the stretchy blue pants that he’d safety-pinned on her that morning because they were way too big. He wanted to look up at her and say it was all right, but he just couldn’t do it. Nothing was all right; that was the problem. It was like the punch to the nose made him realize that he didn’t belong here, but he didn’t belong anywhere else, either. His mom would never stop using drugs. His mom might die.

  He felt Isabelle put her arms around him. Then he heard her voice. “Danny.”

  He sniffed hard and looked at her. She’d never said his name before, and he didn’t think she knew it—half the time, his mom called him by his real name, forgetting that he hated it, and everyone else called him whatever name he gave them. And since his sister had started using words, no one had called him anything, of course, beca
use no one was around. He was just wondering if he’d imagined it when Isabelle said “Danny” again and broke out in a big smile. He smiled, too, when she pointed at herself and giggled.

  After a moment he stood up, threw away the toilet paper, and washed off his eyes. He watched Isabelle moving bars of soap around the bathroom for several minutes before he reminded her that it was naptime. “Will you go sleepy-bye now?”

  She held out her arms. “Up.”

  Maybe she was just tired, but he felt like she was still trying to make him feel better. He waved his hand in the direction of the guest bedroom. “Go ahead. You can do it yourself.”

  She started off in that direction, but halfway down the hall, she turned around to look for him.

  “I’m here,” he said, walking toward her. “It’s all right.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ben and Amelia in Paris, or Strangling the Kitten

  The year before, in November, when Matthew had called Amelia to ask her to lunch, she was about to tell him no, absolutely not, but then he said he was going to divulge an important secret that was decades old. Big Pharma was having a terrible year: there were so many lawsuits and scandals and government fines that her staff was having trouble keeping up with it all. Astor-Denning, in particular, was facing a public relations nightmare after downplaying a serious side effect of their newest bipolar drug and giving psychiatrists frequent flyer miles as an “incentive” to prescribe it. But still, the thought that Matthew was about to blow the whistle on that creepy company was irresistible, and she agreed to the lunch. She also brought along her tape recorder. They met in a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, her choice, a funky little place that served New Orleans cuisine. A poignant reminder of the flood—at least that’s what she hoped it would be to Matthew. She’d just written an article about the shocking lack of prescription access for the Katrina refugees: some who’d lost their insurance cards, many who’d never had insurance in the first place.