Life Sentences (30 page)

Driving along Woodpecker Road, Jack
took in the sight of the soft spring colors blanketing the fields and woods.
The house was white with red trim, perched on top of a hill like something
out of a fairy tale. He stepped out of his car and stood on stiff legs, feeling
the warmth of the sun on his face. Then he winced when Daisy ran headlong
into his arms, his taped ribs still tender. "Ouch."

"I missed you," she said,
kissing him.

"I missed you, too."

The very air changed. It became
charged.

"Come on inside and meet
Lily. I hope you like meat loaf."

"I love meat loaf."

"Good answer." She took
his hand. "You won't believe how much the baby has grown."

They went inside. Noah was a
pink, squirming bundle of needs. Lily Hubbard was wound tighter than a
bee's bum, but Jack could appreciate the pain she was in. He was gracious
and charming, and twenty minutes into the visit, he figured he'd pretty
much won her over.

During dinner, he told them of his
plans for their safety. He was going to change the locks on all the doors
and install an alarm system along with automated yard lights; he'd already
spoken to the local authorities and had faxed the town sheriff pictures
of Roy
Hildreth
; he told them they should alter
their schedules and always carry pepper spray around with them wherever
they went. He could see that he was making Daisy and her mother uncomfortable,
so he changed the subject and told a few stories about
Freddie the Fuzz
.

"They hired a real cop to show up on the set and tell
my father how real cops did things. Dad wanted Freddie to slide across
the hood of a car, but this cop-his name was Carl-said no… not only would
his gun belt scratch up the paint job, but a person could get seriously
injured that way."

Lily laughed. "I've always
wondered why the police on TV stick their finger into the white powder
and then taste it."

"Yeah, well… real police
aren't that stupid. It could be cyanide," Jack said. "Also, real
police never give up their guns for the hostages. If they did, nobody
would ever get rescued. Anyway, Dad wasn't too thrilled with his advice."

"So what did he do?"

"He fired the professional
police officer and went back to make-believe."

Lily laughed, and Jack could see
where Daisy had gotten her pretty blue eyes.

They had coffee and dessert in the
living room, then Lily excused herself and went to bed. Daisy took
Jack's hand and led him into the den and closed the door. He kissed her on
the neck. "God," he said, "you smell like fresh-baked bread."

They made love on the plaid sofa
in the downstairs den, and he felt like a teenager again. She kissed
him, and he kissed her back. The couch had rusty springs that squeaked, and
Daisy kept shushing him while he fumbled with the buttons of her blouse.

Afterward she clung to him. "I
feel safe with you," she whispered.

He wanted her to feel safe with
him. They lay together on the sofa, staring into one another's eyes, while
outside the snow melted and the wind did its drifting routine. "I
brought you something," he told her. He got up and rummaged
dirough
his overnight bag, then pulled out the gun he
had purchased for her in Rutland.

She just looked at it and wouldn't
touch it.

"You'll need protection,"
he insisted. "Just in case."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Here. Take it."

"Absolutely not."

"A heavier gun soaks up a
lot of recoil, but I figured, since you don't shoot that often, you'd do
better with a medium-barrel thirty-eight. A revolver suits an occasional
shooter."

"I don't want a gun in me house,"
she said.

He could see the veins pulsating
in her temples.

"You can keep it under lock
and key," he said. "This is just in case."

"Just in case what?"

"He gets inside the house."

With great reluctance, she took
the gun and hefted it in her hand.

"It's a revolver. Easy to load,
easy to store. You don't have to maintain it the way you would an automatic.
You can just throw it in a drawer until you need it. Then you aim and shoot,
using your dominant eye."

"Which one's my dominant
eye?"

"I don't know. They're both so
lovely."

Her smile was sweet.

"Want me to show you? I'll show
you."

He took her outside, where they
practiced aiming and firing pretend bullets in the backyard. She was right-handed,
but her dominant eye turned out to be the left one. Jack showed her how to
take the safety off, how to load and empty the cylinder. 'The official
policy of most police departments is… don't encourage civilians to
fight back," he said. "Give the carjacker your car, don't fight
off the rapist. But that's a politically driven policy. You
wanna
know what I'd recommend? Fight, scream, scratch,
claw, kick, shoot… do anything you have to
to
thwart the bad guy."

"Now you're really scaring
me, Jack."

"I'm paranoid," he admitted.
"I'm suspicious. Try being a cop for fourteen years, see where
you grow your calluses."

Goose bumps rose on her arms.
"Do you honestly think he's going to come after us?"

"Yes."

"Why? Because of Anna? Does
he want to kill the baby?"

He took the picture of little
Suzy Pearl
Hildreth
out of his wallet and handed
it to her. "I found this in Arizona."

Daisy studied it. "She's got
Stier-Zellar's
," she said after a moment.

Jack nodded. "He got a girl
pregnant when he was eighteen. She was seventeen. She raised the baby
with her parents' help. I don't know how involved he was in the child's upbringing,
but I think it messed with his head."

"So he's killing off the carriers?"
Daisy said, the truth finally registering. "C-A-G. Biology is destiny.
He doesn't believe in gene therapy. He doesn't believe we'll ever find
a cure. Not in his lifetime, at any rate."

"So he's 'curing' the disease
himself… by killing off the carriers."

"Which means that he's &
carrier," Daisy said. "It takes two parents with the mutated
gene to produce an afflicted child." She looked at the picture
again. "She probably died a lingering death. He must've started killing
people shortly afterwards."

"Shortly after she died, he
tried to slash his wrists. He did a stint in a mental institution."
Jack nodded. "They're reopening missing-persons cases all over the
country, trying to see if any of the victims were carriers. See if there's
a connection."

She handed him the picture. The
steel revolver looked burdensome in her hands. "I have to call Truett.
We need to warn our patients."

"Right now all he's thinking
about is that little girl. He doesn't want history repeating itself."

"So he's coming after Noah?"

"And you. And your mother."

She nodded. "We're all carriers."

"You want to be safe?" he
said. "Put new locks on the doors, get an alarm system, learn self-defense,
get the neighbors involved and keep this gun handy. You'll need a firearm
for protection, Daisy. That's not an opinion, it's a fact."

She looked at the gun in her hand
in a detached manner, as if it didn't belong there. "I read somewhere
that the human heart is like a machine gun," she said. "After
each contraction, the heart rests as it fills with blood like a new round
filling the chamber of an automatic."

He smiled. "Be careful where
you aim that thing."

She lowered the gun, but he'd meant
her heart.

The day was overcast by the time
they arrived at the church. Daisy settled the baby into his stroller and
wheeled him across the parking lot, her hands gripping the handle as if
she were afraid that the stroller might rear up and bolt away. People were
milling around the church doors, and Daisy recognized a few families
she hadn't seen in a while. She and the baby and lily and Jack walked down
the aisle and sat in the front pew. Lily took the baby and held him; Jack took
Daisy's hand and held it She remembered the last time she and Anna had been
inside a church together, for
Maranda's
wedding,
and how Anna had joked, "You are bound together in holy acrimony. I
mean holy monotony… I mean…"

Despite the minister's thoughtful
eulogy, Daisy couldn't feel Anna's presence inside the church with
them. All she felt was five kinds of numb. Anna was gone. Anna was someplace
far away, just as she'd been in real life. Anna Hubbard was never where
you expected her to be-emotionally, physically, psychologically.

Outside, it was raining, and they
raced back to the car. Jack helped Daisy collapse the stroller and put it
in the trunk, then they drove to the cemetery, where everybody stood around
in a big circle with their umbrellas open and took turns tossing flowers
onto the casket. Daisy started to cry, a mourner's cry, heavy and heartsick.
She sopped up the tears with a fistful of tissues, hunching her shoulders
and weeping quietly into her hands. Sorrow shook her and wouldn't let
go. She wanted to know-what had interrupted Anna's path from the happy
child she'd been twenty years ago to the troubled adult she became? The
two sisters had reacted to the twin traumas of their childhood in very
different ways-Daisy had become an overachieving scientist, hell-bent
on finding a cure for the rare disease that'd taken her brother's life,
whereas Anna had spun out of control while fighting for her right to an
independent life. The sense of responsibility and the urge to escape
had played differently on each sister's psyche.

Loss was written on Lily's face in
heavy lines. It made Daisy sad. Her mother reminded her of a hawk that
had lost the ability to fly. An image popped into her head-Anna in labor,
the doctors and nurses working frantically to save her life. Had she understood
what was happening to her? Had she been in any pain? Had she at least realized
that her baby would survive? Daisy's entire body worked to push away the
image as if it weren't any part of her, as if it hadn't seeped into every
fiber, muscle and bone of her being. Snip off any portion of her, and
there, like a hologram, would be Anna.

Her voice trembled when it came
her turn to say something, and she recited one of her sister's favorite
poems, "Remember" by Christina Rossetti:
Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent
land; when you can no more hold me by the hand, nor I half turn to go yet turning
stay… For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts
that once I had, better by far you should forget and smile than that you
should remember and be sad.

Back home,
Daisy helped her mother prepare the food while Jack checked out the house
and grounds.

"Does he honestly think that
man is going to try to hurt us?" Lily asked with a condescending
frown.

"Stop criticizing him,
Mom."

"I'm not criticizing."

"Yes, you are. I know that look."

"I'm just saying… what do you
really know about him, Daisy?"

She wheeled around. "You
don't understand what Jack's been through, Mom. What he's given up. We
should be grateful."

"I'm just saying…"

"He's protecting us. We need
protection, okay?"

Lily fell silent, and Daisy was
glad that she hadn't told her mother about the gun. Outside, the wind was
blowing the sopping-wet trees around, and soon people started to arrive
from the cemetery, old friends and distant relatives Daisy hadn't seen
in years. Lily hugged everybody who came through the door, then sat in a
thronelike
armchair in the living room, basking
in all the unexpected attention. She laughed and chatted happily as if
nothing terrible had happened, until Daisy entered the room. Then she
grew silent and offered solicitous glances, or else urged her daughter
to have a glass of wine or a piece of cake.

"You should eat," Lily said,
and so Daisy took a few bites of something without really tasting it.
She ate because that was what was expected of her. She hadn't eaten, and so
she should eat. Her hands shook at the thought of Roy
Hildreth
and the Angeles National Forest. It seemed so far away now, like a childhood
nightmare. She wiped her lips on a paper napkin, sipped her wine and
greeted the thought of her sister's death with a deepening sense of guilt.
She tried to finger-massage away a newly blooming migraine, then recalled
her old paralysis in the face of Mr.
Barsum's
many sins, how she would freeze and stay frozen.

Dr.
Slinglander
arrived, looking very comfortable in his red cardigan sweater, his khaki
trousers and worn brown Hush Puppies. He took Daisy's hand in his gigantic
paws and studied her face. "So," he said, looking at her with
the world's kindest brown eyes. "How's the baby?"

"Fine. We got fantastic news
yesterday." He showed great concern. "You had him tested?"
"He's a carrier, but he doesn't have the disease." He shook
with relieved laughter. "That's the best news I've heard all week."

She watched him for a curious
moment. His teeth were far too perfect in a slant of light, and there was
something oddly familiar about the creased corners of his mouth and
the soft triangular shape of his nose. He took out a handkerchief
and mopped his shiny face. "So, then, Daisy, you haven't made a decision
yet?"

She frowned. "Decision about
what?"

"Whether or not you'll be bringing
the baby to Boston with you?"

"Who said I was thinking of
doing that?"

"Lily mentioned it."

She chewed on a thumbnail and
studied his face. Dr.
Slinglander
was around
the same age as Lily. He had snow-white hair and crinkly brown eyes, but his
hair used to be brown, she recalled. Dark brown hair and brown eyes, just
like Louis.

A chill enveloped her as she recalled
her mother's pain and suffering after Gregory Hubbard had died. During
the days and weeks that followed his funeral, Lily had become almost catatonic
with grief, her sadness seeping into everything she said or did. Eventually,
she went to see Dr.
Slinglander
for counseling.
She was still seeing him three years later when she came home from the maternity
ward with Louis.

"How long had you been treating
Anna?" Daisy suddenly asked.

"Oh," he said with a thoughtful
frown. "Years. Let me think."

She couldn't help staring. Could
it be that, after all this time, Louis's father was standing right in
front of her? But why hadn't he told Anna? Anna, of all people. The person
he'd treated for years. It was either the world's biggest betrayal, or it
couldn't in fact be true.

"Daisy," he said,
"it might be a very positive thing for you to keep this baby."

She shook her head. "I'm not
sure I could handle it, knowing who the father is."

"Don't invest Noah with the
baggage of his parents. You can both move on, you know. Think about
it," he said, and walked away.

She stared after him. The house
was full of people she didn't recognize. She finished her wine, then
had another glassful, and another, and soon she was drunk. She stumbled
around in a state of liquid suspension like a million-year-old swamp
mummy, like a barnacled shipwreck, drunk the whole time, her heart in
her throat. All those faceless neighbors milling around inside their
house-Anna's friends and coworkers, and two strange little girls, two
little sisters whose eyes shone with mischief, whose faces were soft
and round as pieces of fruit; two Utile girls she wouldn't let near her,
for fear they'd be swept into the whirling vortex of her grief.

At some point, Jack took her hand
and said, "Follow me."

"Where are we going?"

"You need some fresh
air."

The back porch faced a sloping backyard.
Beyond the old stone wall, the woods came right up to the property line.
These poplars were the first to green up in the spring. Daisy and Jack sat
drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups and listening to the rush of the wind
through the trees. Goose bumps rose on her arms as the wind gave shape to
the rain. Back inside the house, it
soundfed
like a party going on. "I hate this," she said. "They're having
too much fun."

"I know." He played with
her fingers.

She looked at him. She was glad he
was there. There were three little scars like flatworms on his throat,
and his suit was slightly rumpled. He looked good to her anyway.
"People think I'm helpless, don't they?" she said.

"Nobody knows what to think, Daisy."

"Well, I'm not."

"Okay."

She held his eye. She wanted to be
honest with him. "My boss is coming today," she said.
"You'll probably meet him. I just wanted you to know that he and I had
this thing… this…" She stopped short.

Truett appeared in the doorway
just then, holding a tall glass and looking frazzled. His timing couldn't
have been worse. "Just got here," he said. "Sorry I missed
it. Feels like I've been driving for centuries."

"Truett!" Daisy stood up
and kissed him on the cheek. She could smell the lab on him, that wonderful
chemical odor.

"I'm not interrupting anything,
am I?" He joined them on the porch, scraping a chair forward. His tennis
shoes, baggy shorts and Celtics T-shirt made him look as if he'd wandered
into the wrong house by accident. "Remind me never to ask you for directions
again," he told Daisy, flashing that charmingly off-center smile of
his.

"My directions were very
clear," she said.

"I don't wish to quarrel with
a respected scientist. Hey, I know you," he said, shaking Jack's
hand. "You're that detective she keeps talking about."

Jack narrowed his eyes. "Jack
Makowski."

"Marlon Truett."

"My boss," Daisy explained.
The two men seemed to have an instant chemical aversion to one another.

"Got a minute?" Truett
asked her.

Jack stood up. "I'll go get some
coffee."

She squeezed his hand before he
left.

Once they were alone, Truett leaned
forward in his chair and planted a wet kiss on her cheek. "Daisy, I'm
sorry I missed the funeral. Careless of me to head out so late. How'd it
go?"

"It was sad, Truett. Really
sad."

"I imagine all the
cliches
have been used up?"

"Every single one."

He smiled. "So. When are you coming
back to us?"

"Soon."

"How soon? Soon when?"

"I'm not sure," she hedged.
"I've got to see about the baby."

"Baby? Don't tell me you want
to raise a baby, Daisy."

"Why not?"

He made a face. "You can't be
serious."

"What, a scientist can't raise
a baby?"

"Not if you hope to win the Nobel
someday."

"I think the Nobel Prize is
overrated," she said, only half joking.

"Ha." He gave a disapproving
smirk. "You don't want my advice, then. Anything that doesn't contribute
to my career is expendable."

"I didn't say I was going to
keep him. I said I haven't decided yet."

"Good. Because there's a distinct
lack of wattage in the lab at the moment," he said. "I need some
of your candlepower, Daisy."

The overcast sky was no color really,
just a widening brightness the rain kept falling from. She could hear
the sound of the
meltwater
all around them, a
welcome sign of spring.

"You know Evelyn Prentice?"
Truett said, and Daisy nodded. Professor Prentice taught biology and
had twins, but she'd gotten pregnant only after she was tenured.
"She's a master juggler, a brilliant scientist,'' he said, "but
even she can't handle it. She spends all her mornings at home. That's a significant
amount of time to be away from the lab."

"Give me a few weeks,"
she said.

He rubbed his eyes, then peered at
her through his elegant fingers. "I want you, Daisy. I can't lie about
it anymore. I want you in more ways than one, but I promise to be a gentleman
about it. I can only complicate your life, I'm afraid. Clinical trials
start next week," he said, standing up. "One way or the other, your
future is with me. Think about it."