Property Of, the Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter, and At Risk

by Alice Hoffman

  Charlie opens his can of soda and drinks deeply. He doesn’t bother to tell Sevrin that tyrannosaurus and brontosaurus lived eighty million years apart, and that no fossils of either have been found anywhere near Morrow. Charlie’s been told he’s a know-it-all enough times for him to have learned when to keep his mouth shut.

  Sevrin sits up and takes a candy bar. He puts his feet in the water, and small startled frogs jump into the pond. Sevrin looks back at Charlie apologetically.

  “You think our mothers are going to get rich from this book they’re doing?” Sevrin asks. Felix sits facing him, panting, waiting for some chocolate to fall. Sevrin finishes his candy bar and puts the crumpled wrapper in his pocket. “Maybe it will be a best-seller. Maybe we’ll all be millionaires. Boy, my father will go nuts. He always tells my mom she should go out and get a real job.”

  “My mom didn’t say anything about being a millionaire,” Charlie says.

  “You know what I’d buy?” Sevrin says. “First a motorcycle, and then a yacht.”

  Charlie likes being with Sevrin because he doesn’t have to talk. Even when Sevrin asks a question, he doesn’t necessarily expect an answer. It’s been this way since they were three years old. Sevrin dragged his cot next to Charlie’s at nursery school and that was it, they were best friends. As far as Charlie is concerned, he never needs another friend as long as he has Sevrin.

  “Gonna eat that Almond Joy?” Sevrin asks.

  Charlie has taken one bite, but he hands the rest of the candy bar to Sevrin. It’s too hot for chocolate; it melts in your hands.

  “If I could live on a yacht,” Sevrin goes on, between bites of Charlie’s candy bar, “I’d never go to school. I’d dive for starfish. I’d never hang up my clothes in the closet because there wouldn’t be any closets.” He holds out his hands so Felix can lick off the chocolate.

  “There wouldn’t be any food except Spaghetti-Os,” Charlie says.

  “Right. Orange soda and Yoo-Hoo to drink.”

  A kingfisher flies over the pond, and Charlie nudges Sevrin with his foot. Sevrin nods and puts down the sighting in the log he’s been keeping for them.

  “There’d be a pool on the yacht,” Sevrin whispers.

  “With one of those curlicue slides,” Charlie whispers back.

  There is a plunk in the water, as if the kingfisher had dropped a stone into the pond. When Charlie narrows his eyes he sees that the stone is moving. He nudges Sevrin again, and Sevrin automatically looks up, toward the kingfisher.

  “I’ve already got him,” Sevrin says.

  From this distance it looks like a plank of mossy wood, or an empty barrel. Except that Charlie can see its eyes now. Charlie has not dared to tell Sevrin what he hopes. It’s so irrational, so unscientific, but he hopes they have stumbled upon a cryptodire, a turtle that developed in the Triassic period, alongside the dinosaurs, two hundred thirty million years ago. And when he thinks about it, it doesn’t really seem so impossible for one to exist when all modern-day turtles are relatives, virtually unchanged from the ones that survived what the dinosaurs could not.

  Water sloshes against the thing that looks like a barrel. Charlie kicks Sevrin, hard, and Sevrin turns to him.

  “Hey!” Sevrin says.

  Charlie nods toward the pond and Sevrin follows his gaze. The turtle is getting closer.

  “Holy shit,” Sevrin says.

  “That’s him,” Charlie whispers.

  Sevrin begins writing furiously in his log. Charlie watches as the turtle gets even closer, before it veers away and dives.

  “No one would believe us,” Sevrin whispers.

  “Who cares,” Charlie whispers. “We know what we saw.”

  They stay for another two hours, forsaking lunch, but the turtle doesn’t resurface, or, if it does, it’s hidden by weeds. Late in the day they get on their bikes reluctantly and head over to Sevrin’s. Unlike many of the houses in Morrow, which are mostly painted white with black or green shutters, Sevrin’s house is blue, with yellow trim. There are hanging plants attached to hooks all along the porch, pots of fuchsias and trailing pink geraniums. They leave the dog outside and go into the kitchen. Sevrin and Charlie can hear the furious beat of Betsy’s typewriter. The boys move quickly, grabbing a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, four Devil Dogs, and a sack of sugar, and they’re down the basement stairs before Betsy can hear them. Betsy often wants to talk to them about something meaningful, when all they want is to be left alone to feed Sevrin’s white rat or watch Star Trek.

  Down in the basement, Sevrin makes the sandwiches while Charlie mixes up more sugar-water for the newts. The turtle is such a spectacular find, they still can’t talk about it. Not yet. That’s the thing none of their parents understands. You don’t have to talk all the time. You can sit right next to each other on old wooden stools and wolf down two peanut butter sandwiches and two Devil Dogs apiece and not have to say a single word. The newts that are being fed sugar-water are looking good, much more energetic than the control group. Charlie makes notes in their log, while Sevrin slaps some peanut butter on the cover of the peanut-butter jar and feeds Cyrus, the rat.

  They don’t go upstairs until Sevrin’s father is home and Betsy calls them up for dinner. Actually, she calls Sevrin, but when she sees Charlie she sets another plate.

  “Does your mother know you’re here?” Betsy asks Charlie while Sevrin recaps the peanut butter and puts it back in the cabinet.

  “Yeah,” Charlie says. “She must.”

  Betsy points to the phone and Charlie calls home. He hates talking on the phone; he doesn’t understand what Amanda and Jessie Eagan can possibly find to say for all those hours they talk to each other.

  “Tell her you’re sleeping over,” Sevrin coaches Charlie.

  “Ask her,” Betsy says pointedly.

  Charlie compromises and says, “It’s okay if I sleep over,” to Polly. It’s not really a question, and Charlie knows his mother won’t give him any trouble; whenever Charlie or Amanda is sick Polly’s so distracted she gives in easily to the one who is well.

  “Roger,” Charlie says when he hangs up the phone.

  “Over and out,” Sevrin says as they sit down at the table, waiting to be fed.

  “How about you guys helping out,” Sevrin’s father, Frank, says when he comes into the kitchen.

  Sevrin’s father is big on asking them to help out, although Charlie has noticed that Frank never seems to do much of that himself.

  “We’ve had an exhausting day,” Sevrin tells his father.

  “Oh, really?” Frank says.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sevrin tells him. “A mammoth day.”

  “A cryptodire of a day,” Charlie says, and he and Sevrin both laugh hysterically.

  Betsy dishes out reheated lasagna, and when Frank looks displeased she says, “Sorry. I’ve been working.”

  Betsy and Frank are going to fight tonight, the boys can tell. They fight over just about anything, Charlie thinks it’s sort of like watching TV for them. But that’s all right, it will be easier for Sevrin to talk them into letting him and Charlie sleep out in the tent set up in the backyard if they want some privacy. By nine, Frank and Betsy are upstairs in their bedroom, shouting, and Sevrin and Charlie have already set themselves up in the tent with a sleeping bag, two blankets, the five remaining Devil Dogs, a flashlight, and a canteen of cranberry juice.

  They’ve been doing this all summer, sometimes twice a week, with Charlie pointing out all the constellations Ivan has taught him: Orion with his white belt, Aquarius with his luminous pitcher of water. But tonight the sky is so beautiful, so starry and so black, that the boys silently edge closer to one another. It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten all they know, that stars are made of gases and are bigger than the earth. They are beneath a huge, black bowl, transfixed by a million points of light. They’re only kids, maybe they shouldn’t be out here all alone. Maybe a meteor will plummet to earth and crush their tent, maybe Sirius will fall out of the
sky. When they crawl into the tent they agree to keep the flashlight on all night, they let the dog come into the tent with them, despite his snoring, and they sleep close together, their backs pressed up against each other.

  It’s hot, even at midnight, and Charlie and Sevrin both sleep fitfully, but when they wake up neither admits to ever having been scared. They go into the house and, ignoring the breakfast Betsy left out for them before she went up to her study, eat two uncooked Pop-Tarts apiece.

  “Let’s not mention the turtle to anyone until we can document the sighting,” Charlie says.

  “Absolutely,” Sevrin agrees.

  Charlie knows the best way to prove that the turtle exists is a photograph, but he doesn’t know how to get hold of a camera. His mother would never let him touch her Minolta; she treats that camera as if it were gold, and he hasn’t seen the old Polaroid for ages.

  Charlie has to be home by noon so he can stay with Amanda—be her servant and bring her Tylenol and juice, while his mother finally takes the Blazer in for new shocks. Sevrin rides Charlie halfway home, and they stop where they always do, on the corner of Ash and Chestnut, exactly halfway between their houses.

  “I’d better head home,” Sevrin says. “If I clean my room my dad may get me a new soccer ball.”

  Charlie nods his approval, then rolls his bike over the curb.

  “See you tomorrow,” Sevrin says. He turns his bike around and starts pedaling. “Hey, idiot,” he shouts when Charlie doesn’t say good-bye. “Adiós.”

  “Adiós,” Charlie calls back.

  Charlie pedals hard the rest of the way home. The wind is hot, but it feels good anyway. As he speeds past the Crowleys’ house and the Wagoners’, Sevrin is going just as fast in the other direction.

  That afternoon the heat doesn’t let up, and at Pearson’s Animal Farm, where Ed Reardon and his wife, Mary, have taken the kids, thick dust rises up and gets into their hair and their clothes. Mary was the one who collected all the stale bread in the breadbox for the ducks and geese, but when they come to the petting zoo she says to Ed, “You go in with them,” and then she heads in the other direction so she can collapse on a bench in the shade.

  Ed’s daughters beg for quarters so they can feed the baby llama with bottles. His son, Will, clings to his legs, frightened of the pygmy goats that run up and surround them, nuzzling and pushing, searching for bread.

  “They can’t hurt you,” Ed tells his son.

  Just to show Will how gentle the goats are, Ed reaches to pat one on the head and gets butted for his troubles. He picks Will up so he can toss bread down for the goats without fear of being trampled. In the shade, Mary undoes several buttons on her blouse and fans herself with her hand. Ed watches her, puzzled, then he realizes what he’s seeing. From this distance she looks displeased. Happiness has come easily to them, they haven’t had to struggle for it, but lately they’ve had silences, and these lapses make Ed suspicious of their happiness. He can tell Mary things that upset him terribly—as he did last night, when he mentioned Amanda Farrell’s disturbingly low white blood count and his decision to run a series of tests, tests whose positive results would be disastrous—and get no response whatsoever from Mary. Does she not listen to him? Has she heard so many stories about his patients that she simply tunes him out?

  “Are you all right?” Ed asks Mary when the children have had enough of the petting zoo and are ready for the small carousel and the bumper cars.

  “Of course I am,” Mary says. She pulls Will onto her lap and feels in his diaper to see if he needs a change. He was potty-trained for a week and has had a temporary setback.

  Ed’s beeper goes off and he quickly reaches to turn it off.

  “We’ll meet you at the carousel,” Mary says.

  “Sorry,” Ed says. He says this every time he’s called away by his service.

  “If I’m not used to it by now, I never will be,” Mary says, but still, Ed wonders. Sometimes he thinks that Mary blames him for his patients’ illnesses, that she half believes he uses his work as an excuse to get away from his own family.

  Ed plans to make it fast and get back before the kids are off the carousel, but he has to search for a pay phone. Finally he spies one behind the refreshment stand. It’s three o’clock, nap time, and children all over Pearson’s Animal Farm are cranky, refusing to walk, demanding ice cream, being scolded by their parents. When he phones his service he’s told that the lab wants to speak with him directly. He has to search his pockets for change and he’s sorry now that he gave his daughters all his quarters. The phone feels too cold in his hand; the buttons stick as he punches in the number for the lab. He knows something is wrong, he can feel it by the way the air crackles with heat. Ed makes them repeat it twice: An organism called cryptosporidium has been found in Amanda’s stool sample. That’s what’s been causing her diarrhea, but Ed knows this is just an opportunistic disease. He feels dizzy even before he’s told that Amanda Farrell, whom he has seen through chicken pox, ear infections, and inoculations, as well as a broken arm and a worrisome appendectomy, has tested positive for AIDS. Ed Reardon, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, who completed both his internship and residency at Children’s Hospital in Boston and who has been in private practice for twelve years, sits down on the ground behind the refreshment stand that serves lemonade and popcorn.

  He doesn’t plan to move for a long time.

  That night is quiet, there is no longer the chorus of katydids that rang through the air all summer. The heat breaks suddenly, at midnight; a thread of thin, milky clouds makes a ring around the moon. It’s amazing that nightmares don’t travel through a town the way chicken pox does, swept through open windows, slipping around the corners of doors left ajar.

  Ivan loves cool weather, so he gets a particularly good night’s sleep and the next morning he’s at the institute before nine. The institute is in a small house directly across from the town green, a circle of grass bordered by hostas and late-blooming lilies, which was once used as a communal grazing area. Out by the marsh, near Red Slipper Beach, is the domelike building that houses the telescope. Charlie now takes the huge telescope for granted, but Ivan can remember the amazed look on Charlie’s face when he first saw the ceiling open to reveal the sky. Usually, Ivan drives down to Red Slipper Beach once a night, although lately the graduate students have been doing most of the viewing as the astronomers prepare their papers. Ivan has a lot of preparing to do before the Orlando conference. His particular interest is the supernova, and one has just occurred. Actually, it occurred one hundred seventy thousand years ago, but it has just now been sighted over South America. Ivan can’t help wondering whether, if he were affiliated with MIT or Stanford instead of the poorly funded institute, he might be in Chile right now, instead of getting information secondhand at the conference. Ivan is not used to feeling dissatisfied and it eats at him. There are four astronomers at the institute, five graduate students, and two secretaries. He has always liked the intensity of the place, the smallness. Now he wonders if perhaps he hasn’t settled for second best.

  When he was young, Ivan seemed like an affable, even-tempered boy, but he wasn’t. From the time he was ten he had two plans of action: to become a scientist and to get out of New Jersey and away from his family. He still considers his acceptance to MIT his salvation. Both of his parents are dead, but his two sisters, Ilene and Natalie, still live in Fair-lawn. They see each other every weekend, and Nat and her family live in the big brick house where they grew up. Ivan knows they talk about him—he overheard a remark in the kitchen of the old house after his father’s funeral. Actually, it was Polly they were blasting, because she wore no makeup and no jewelry other than her wedding ring, but it might as well have been a direct attack upon Ivan. What it comes down to, Ivan knows, is that he and his sisters grew up in the same house but have always inhabited different worlds.

  They still cannot understand what Ivan does for a living, or why he does it. How they can be made from the
same genetic material and be so completely different is more of a mystery to Ivan than any riddle in this galaxy or any other. And maybe that’s why Charlie brings him such pleasure. Not that Ivan loves one of his children more than the other, but Charlie is like him. He cares about clouds and constellations; he may not listen when he’s told to clean his room, but he always listens to the sound of crickets in the tall grass, he never fails to keep watch for changes in the sky.

  Ivan is at his desk before any of his colleagues, with a hot cup of coffee and a buttered roll he picked up on the way. He is looking at the data from their computer, tied into NASA, when the phone rings. He doesn’t bother to answer until one of the secretaries, Monica, buzzes him, and then he knows it’s for him. He guesses that it’s Polly, calling to remind him of something he’s forgotten—he’s been doing a lot of forgetting these days—but it’s a man’s voice, one he doesn’t recognize.

  “It’s Ed,” the voice tells him.

  “Ed,” Ivan repeats, and it takes him a moment before he can place this Ed as the kids’ doctor.

  “I’d like you to come in this morning,” Ed says.

  Ivan wonders if they owe Dr. Reardon for the kids’ last checkup. He knows he paid the mortgage this month, and the electric company, but more than that he cannot remember.

  “How about ten?” Ed says.

  “The hell of it is,” Ivan says, “I’ve got a paper to finish before Friday. Have you tried Polly? She’s got the checkbook anyway.”

  All morning, Ed has been telling himself it would be easier to tell Ivan alone, without Polly; a scientist could better accept the random path of a virus. Now he knows he’s been kidding himself. No one can accept the indiscriminate order of cruelty. No one can even begin to explain it, and yet this is exactly what he has to try to do.

  “How about ten-thirty?” Ed Reardon presses.

  “Come on, Ed,” Ivan kids him. “Don’t you think I’m a little old for your practice?”

  There is silence on the other end of the wire. Ivan can hear his own heartbeat.