Elementary, My Dear Watkins

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Alexa had just reached the corner of her street when she spotted her Uncle Rick. He wasn’t really her uncle, just one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends. But of all the guys who’d been in and out of her life that way, Uncle Rick was the only one who ever seemed to care about Alexa. Tall and skinny with spiked-up hair and both arms covered in tattoos, he wasn’t handsome, exactly, but he had a nice smile. Even after he and her mom had broken up, probably two years ago, he tried to stay in touch with Alexa as much as he could. She had heard he’d moved away, across the river, so she couldn’t imagine what he was doing back here, sitting on the stoop in front of a bar by himself, smoking a cigarette.

  “Uncle Rick?”

  He looked up and broke into a wide grin.

  “Alexabear!” he cried, standing up to give her a hug. “What’s happening, kid?”

  She wrapped her arms around him and held on tight, thinking he was the closest thing to a dad she’d ever had.

  “How come you’re not any taller, squirt?” he teased, patting her on the top of the head.

  “How come you’re not any fatter, slim?” she replied, poking him in the stomach.

  Laughing, they sat side by side on the concrete step, and for the first time all night Alexa didn’t even feel cold anymore. They talked for a while, but from the things he said, Alexa realized that something about him had changed.

  It wasn’t until he started to apologize to her for some long-forgotten hurt—okay, he passed out and fell on her seventh-grade science fair project and crushed it the night before it was due, and she’d never really forgiven or forgotten—that she realized what was up.

  “You doing a twelve-step program, Uncle Rick?”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “It works if you work it.”

  “So why you hanging out in front of a bar?”

  “Just waiting here for your mom,” he said, and in his eyes Alexa could see a lot of pain. Her mom did that to people, gave them pain. “She wasn’t ready to leave, but I didn’t think I should wait inside. Too tempting.”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Though he seemed touched by her words, he shook his head, lighting his next cigarette off the one he’d been smoking.

  “Don’t be proud. I’ve done a lot more things wrong than I’ve done right.”

  He flicked the smoldering cigarette butt into the gutter.

  “But isn’t that what the twelve steps are all about? Starting fresh? Getting another chance?”

  He inhaled deeply on the new smoke, peering at her through squinted eyes.

  “How’d you get so wise at fourteen?” he asked as he exhaled.

  She held her breath until the smoke dissipated.

  “I know all about second chances,” she said. “I’m a living example of a second chance.”

  16

  Danny was beginning to feel embarrassed. They were nearly finished with the warehouse photos and Luc still hadn’t shown up. Mr. Bashiri brushed off Danny’s apologies, focusing instead on a discussion about which equipment they would be taking with them on the next leg of the trip, and which pieces they would be shipping back to Paris. It would have been nice to bring everything to the Congo, but that simply wasn’t prudent. Since they were flying down on the GMM jet, the less equipment they brought along, the more medical supplies could be carried in their stead.

  They were making a list of the items that were absolutely necessary when Danny heard a woman calling his name.

  “Danny Watkins?” she asked again, crossing the room to where they were working.

  “Yes?”

  “You are getting shots today, ja? Die shutzimpfungen?”

  “Vaccinations, yes,” he replied, butterflies rising up and flitting around in his stomach.

  “Bitte, the doctor would like to do that now, if you do not mind.”

  Swallowing hard, Danny handed the list over to Mr. Bashiri and excused himself.

  “If you are a good boy,” the photographer teased with a wink, “perhaps they will give you a lollipop.”

  Steeling his nerve, Danny followed the woman from the warehouse into the main building and up the hallway to a small room, the inside of which looked very much like an American doctor’s office, complete with examining table, blood pressure cuff, and a scale.

  Danny introduced himself to the doctor, a transplanted Australian wearing jeans and a faded T-shirt. The man apologized for his attire but said that he’d come today prepared only to load boxes, not to practice medicine.

  “Not that I mind doing it, of course. A couple of last-minute volunteers also need to be inoculated.”

  The doctor told Danny to sit on the table and then he pulled up a stool and sat. He took a brief medical history and then one by one, he named all of the vaccinations and boosters he felt Danny ought to get. The list was long and disturbing.

  “I guess you can do ’em all,” Danny said bravely, “but will we really run into every one of those diseases down there?”

  “Sure, mate, and lots of others too, I bet, including some that’ve got no vaccinations at all—nor even any cure.”

  Before giving the shots, he gave Danny a rudimentary exam, taking his blood pressure and temperature, and then checking his ears and nose and throat. As he worked he talked about what he called “orphan diseases,” which were conditions rare enough that even though they were probably curable, the pharmaceutical companies weren’t willing to fund the research to find those cures.

  “Developing new drugs costs an arm and a leg,” the doctor said as he pressed Danny’s wrist to find a pulse and then consulted his watch. “As a result, lots of needed drugs are never developed. It’s real sad. Take Buruli Ulcers, for example. We’ll see a lot of those down there, and they’re not pretty. They stink too.”

  “Stink? Like bad breath?”

  “No,” the Aussie smiled, releasing Danny’s wrist and reaching for a rubber mallet to check his reflexes. “These ulcers aren’t in the stomach, they’re on the skin—arms, legs, whatever. Like rotting flesh. They’re disgusting.”

  He tapped Danny’s left knee with the mallet, seemed pleased with the reflex, and then checked the right.

  “We treat ’em with skin grafts, tuberculosis drugs, even amputations. There’s no cure. In fact, we’re not even sure how the infection is contracted. Airborne bacteria? Stagnant water? We don’t know. But once someone gets a Buruli Ulcer, not only are they in tremendous physical pain, they are also socially ostracized as well.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  Satisfied with Danny’s exam, the doctor went to the cabinet and the refrigerator, pulling out different bottles of colored liquid. In varying combinations, he pulled the liquids into the syringes, holding them up to the light to flick out the air bubbles.

  “I’ve got to warn you,” Danny said, watching him work, “I don’t do well with shots. If I can get through this without passing out, I’ll be doing good.”

  “Just be thankful these shots exist, mate,” the doctor said with a laugh, placing the final syringe on the tray. “I mean, what’s a little moment of pain compared with the value of protecting yourself from dreaded diseases? Trust me, once you see yellow fever or cholera in action, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars that all you had to do was get a shot.”

  “If you put it that way…”

  The doctor carried the tray of colorful syringes over to the exam table and set it down. He was just wiping Danny’s arm with an alcohol swab when there was a knock at the exam room door. It was flung open, and there stood a bleary-eyed Luc, with the very flustered receptionist right behind him.

  “I am sorry, Doctor. He insisted.”

  “Did you get the shots yet?” Luc demanded, his voice tight.

  “We were just about to—” Danny began, but Luc interrupted him.

  “Stop!” he said. “You don’t need them. I’m sorry, Danny, but you won’t be going to Africa.”

  Uncle Rick wanted to know all about Alexa’s life now, so they sat th
ere on the steps and she told him about the estate and the old lady and her teachers and the Stebbins and everybody else. Alexa wasn’t supposed to mention the Fibrin-X or the ways she had changed, so she just stuck to the story they told her to tell people, that she was living with a guardian until her stroke recovery was complete. When Alexa mentioned the latest guest at the house, Jo Tulip, Uncle Rick seemed really surprised and interested, saying that Jo was a famous newspaper columnist.

  “Get out,” Alexa replied, laughing.

  “No, really. Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Tips from Tulip’?”

  “No, but maybe that explains why she always has big muscle guys around. She must need bodyguards to protect her from the paparazzi.”

  “She does?” he asked, tilting his head and blowing out smoke. “Bodyguards?”

  “All the time. They even sit in the hall outside her bedroom at night.”

  “Imagine that.”

  Suddenly, the door to the bar swung open behind them, and Alexa’s mother stepped out, her arm around the big, burly man who owned the place. The smell of beer and the blare of rock music spilled from the open doorway.

  “You wanna take her home now?” he said to Rick in a voice filled with irritation. “She won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Just one little drink,” she slurred, her eyes a swollen pair of slits in her face. “I don’t know why I can’t have just one more little drink.”

  She pointed at Alexa and gestured toward the door.

  “Why don’t you run in and buy one for me, hon?” she said. “You look like the kind of person to help a girl out.”

  Rick put his arm around Alexa’s mom, shouldering her drunken weight.

  “Gosh, Misty, don’t you even recognize your own daughter?”

  The bartender waved them all off and went back inside as Misty struggled to open her eyes.

  “Alexa? My baby!” she cried, throwing her arms around Alexa and nearly knocking her down—not that she was much more than skin and bones. She began to cry and coo and tell Alexa how much she loved her and missed her. Then she passed out, and Alexa and Rick had to carry her the rest of the way home.

  Moving through old familiar motions, Alexa put her mom to bed in the dinky little room in the crummy little apartment where she was slowly drinking and drugging herself to death.

  “We’ve got to get her into rehab before she kills herself,” Alexa said to Rick as she tucked the woman in.

  “She’s been sober the last few weeks. I was hoping to move back in, thinking we could give it another go. But she got loaded Wednesday night and hasn’t stopped partying since.”

  “What if we just took her to a dry out place right now and dropped her off?”

  He shook his head, wearily taking a seat in the chair beside the bed.

  “Doesn’t work that way, honey. Until she wants to change, she’ll never get any better.”

  Alexa left them both there in the bedroom and went into the front of the apartment. She needed to get out of there, but she was reluctant to leave things like this. She decided to tidy up for ten minutes first, and then she would say her goodbyes and go. Her mom would be coming up to the old lady’s for visitation on Friday anyway—if she was sober by then.

  Alexa walked around with an empty trash bag, filling it with boxes and bottles and cans. She tied it off and set it beside the door, and then she gathered up all the dirty dishes and carried them into the kitchen. The sink was already full of dirty dishes and she wasn’t about to wash them all, so she simply stacked everything as best she could. Reaching under the sink for a rag, Alexa wet it and wiped down the table and the counters and then straightened the chairs. When she was finished, the room looked a little better, but not by much. She couldn’t help but compare it with the sparkly kitchen at the old lady’s house. About the only thing that sparkled here was what looked like a shiny new toaster oven, next to the stove. Otherwise, the place was a dump, and it always had been.

  Alexa returned to the bedroom to tell Rick goodbye, but he had fallen asleep in the chair. It was just as well. Chances are, if he was awake, he might not let her head out into the streets by herself at this hour of the morning anyway.

  At least she could get home from here by train rather than by bus. Slinging her pack over her shoulder, Alexa walked out the front door, pulling it quietly shut behind her, and headed for the train station.

  The doctor moved the full tray of syringes back to the counter and said he would be in the warehouse when Danny was ready for him, if Danny was ready for him.

  “You let me know either way, ’kay mate?” he said, and then he exited the room, pulling the door shut behind him, leaving Danny and Luc free to speak in private.

  “What do you mean, I’m not going to Africa? Is there a problem with my visa?”

  “Yes, there is a problem with your visa. Yesterday afternoon, when you saw me going into the travel service, I was canceling your application and putting in one for myself instead. Here is your passport.”

  Danny took it from him, truly shocked. Was Luc really that ambitious, that he would sabotage Danny’s visa so he could take the trip in his place?

  “I don’t know how to say this to you,” Luc told him, moving to the doctor’s stool and taking a seat. “For the past few days, I have been wrestling with a tremendous dilemma. It started with Chester Parks, who wanted me to convince you to take the job with Haute Couture.”

  “Chester Parks? What on earth does he have to do with this?”

  “First of all, I lied to you about how he and I met. It was at the gallery party, oui, but our encounter did not go exactly as I described. He actually came there that night specifically to meet you. When you did not show, and then he learned that we worked together, he paid me to arrange the dinner instead.”

  “Paid you?” Danny asked, still not understanding what this had to do with Africa.

  “Oui. A hundred dollars, just to make sure you showed up at the restaurant. At the time, I did not think much of it. I knew he was going to offer you a job. I thought I was doing you a favor.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you turned down his ridiculously lucrative offer and left the restaurant, he told me that if I could convince you to take the job in the next twenty-four hours, I would be given a thousand dollars as a finder’s fee.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Then this opportunity to travel with Mr. Bashiri came up, and I knew I would not be able to talk you into it even if he paid me a million dollars. After you and I parted ways the other night at the Métro, I called and told him what had happened, and he simply upped the offer.”

  Luc stood and began pacing, misery clearly on his face.

  “He told me that he would arrange through the magazine for me to take this trip as well, so that I could continue to work on you until you changed your mind. If I convinced you to take the job within the week, I would get a five-thousand-dollar finder’s fee. Of course, I took him up on it.”

  Danny nodded. Five thousand dollars was nothing to sneeze at.

  “We started out on the trip just fine, and I was still trying to figure out how I was going to convince you to take the job when he called me back late the next day and said the agenda had been changed. He said that my primary purpose at this point was simply to get you fired from Scene It.”

  “Fired?”

  “Yes. Sabotage your work, make you look bad, whatever it took to get you kicked out of the trip and off the magazine. If I succeeded, he said that he would pay me twenty thousand dollars.”

  Danny could feel the blood rushing from his face.

  “But why?”

  “I did not know, though he implied that it had something to do with your girlfriend, Jo, or her family.”

  Jo? Her family?

  “I was not sure what he meant or if I could do what he asked of me,” Luc continued, “but for that much money, I still had to think about it. I have to confess, my friend, I almost did some things I would not have been pr
oud of. I considered opening some of the cameras to expose the film, breaking some of the expensive lenses and blaming you, or telling Mr. Bashiri some sort of lies about you…I don’t know, I tossed around a lot of ideas in my head. Chester Parks continued to call, and every time he did I told him that you were my friend and I simply could not bring myself to do it, he offered me more money. Yesterday afternoon, while you were busy taking photographs at the barbecue grill, he called and said that if I could get you fired by the end of today, I would be paid a hundred thousand dollars. That was his final offer.”

  Danny didn’t know what to think. Or say. Or even feel.

  He didn’t understand.

  “With that dollar amount floating around in my head, you must see how it was becoming harder and harder to postpone or turn down. I told him if he wired me a twenty-thousand-dollar down payment, I would begin by canceling your visa application so that your travel plans would have to fall through. He put the money into a Swiss bank account for me, and then I had no choice but to do it.”

  “But why? Why did he want me fired? Why was it worth that kind of money?”

  Luc sat again on the stool, shaking his head.

  “These are the questions I asked him. Last night, when he called yet again, I said I would not do anything else to cause problems for you unless I knew the reason behind it.”

  “And did he tell you?”

  “He said he would think about it and call me back. A half hour later, just as I was about to kiss my beautiful date, I got a call from someone else instead, the person Chester Parks had been working for all along.”

  “Who?”

  “She said her name was Helen Tulip—and that she was Jo’s mother.”

  The train station was just a few blocks away, and though waiting there for the train was scary, at least nobody else ever showed up and nothing bad happened. Alexa got onboard and chose a seat on the nearly empty train car. She had to change trains twice to get all the way to Westchester County. By the time she finally got off at her stop, she was practically dragging her bad leg behind her. She knew for a fact that even if she could walk all the way back to the estate, she would never make it over the gate.