Alan caught Kate's hesitation and sudden attention. “What?” he said, some concern in his voice.
Kate made sure that her voice was calm and level. “Nothing. I was just hoping that this doesn't screw up his nap schedule.”
Swinging him around slightly, bringing out the first smile of the afternoon, Kate brought her son's forehead closer to the overhead light. She leaned closer and kissed him, her eyes only inches away from the sweetsmelling skin of his scalp.
The nasty bruise and abrasion he'd received less than two hours before were gone. No pooled blood under the skin, no sign of swelling or lingering hematoma, not the slightest sign of the raspberry rash that should have taken a week or two to fade.
The wound was gone. As if it never existed.
“This should be fascinating stuff,” said Alan, returning to his console. “I can hardly wait.” “Me too,” said Kate, looking into the baby's eyes and realizing that her heart was pounding wildly against her rib cage. “Me too.”
Chapter Fifteen
ON Saturday morning Tom drove his Land Rover to Kate's house, she loaded picnic things in her backpack, Tom stowed Joshua in the backpack carrier, and they hiked the easy mile to Bald Mountain. Technically, Bald Mountain was part of the Boulder city park system, but it was far enough away from the town not to get too many hikers and picnickers. Kate had always loved it for its view; it was just that much higher than her home to open up a wider vista of high peaks and plains.
The July sun was hot and they paused several times while climbing the hill to let the breeze cool them. At one of these times Kate had the outofbody view of the three of them, Joshua well and happy on Tom's broad back, her exhusband grinning and not the least out of breath, the breeze ruffling her own hair and the sunlight hot on her bare legs. She could not help but feel a pang of loss at this snapshot of their family that could have been.
The summit of Bald Mountain was almost devoid of trees, which made the view that much more impressive. Kate spread the blanket she had packed up, they set Joshua down to play, and Tom began setting out picnic things. The sky was a faultless arch of blue. Heat shimmered on the plains to the east and Kate could see sunlight glimmering off windshields on the narrow ribbon of the Boulder Turnpike to Denver.
Only the smallest pockets of snow remained on the Indian Peaks to the west.
“Deviled eggs,” said Tom. “You sweet thing.”
Kate hated deviled eggs, but she had remembered Tom's fondness for them. She cut a slice from the roll of French bread and folded it around some turkey. Joshua ignored the food and crawled over Tom's knee to get off the blanket and onto the grass.
Kate started an old game that she and Tom used to play on their outings. “What's that tree over there?” she asked.
Tom did not even glance behind him.. “Ponderosa pine.”
“I knew that,” said Kate.
“Then give me a hard one.”
She scooped up some of the sandy, pebbly soil they were sitting on. “What do you call this stuff?”
“Dirt,” said Tom. He was building a gargantuan sandwich.
“Come on now, Balboa,” she said, “be pacific.” It was an old, dumb joke of theirs.
Tom used his free hand to lift a bit of the soil. “This is called gruss,” he said. “It's just a worndown version of the granite that makes up these hills.”
“What wears it down?” Kate rarely grew tired of this game. Most of what she knew about nature came from talking to Tom.
“The granite?” he said and took a big bite of his sandwich. “Ice expanding and contracting. The plant roots. The acid from fungi hyphae in those lichens. Given time, living things will chew the crap out of any mountain. Then the. organic stuff decomposes, we get critters burrowing in it and enriching it further when they decompose, and viola! . . . dirt.” He took another bite.
Kate ran her hand across the sparse grass and low weeds where Joshua was crawling. “And what's this?”
“Blanketflower,” said Tom around his sandwich. “That jagged thing you don't want Josh to tumble into is prickly gilia. Those sharp little jobbies are mistletoe stems and the involucral bracts of gumweed. That scabby stuff on the rock is crustose lichen. That other stuff we have a sort of technical name for“
“Which is?”
“Grass,” said Tom and took another big bite.
Kate sighed and leaned back on the blanket, feeling the fierce sun on her skin. The breeze stirred the high grass, cooled her, and then died, allowing the sun to fill her senses again. Kate knew that she should not feel so totally content with her exhusband and a sick child, but at the moment everything was perfect.
She opened one eye and looked at Tom. His blond hair, always thin on top, had thinned a bit more, allowing his eternal sunburn to creep higher on his forehead, but other than that detail he looked just like the overgrown boy she had met and fallen in love with fifteen years ago. He was still fit and almost obscenely healthy looking, his forearms sculpted in the muscled symmetry only rockclimbers could develop. His face, pinkskinned and unlined, fell into the pleasant, unselfconscious smile lines of someone pleased with not only where he was, but who he was. Tom greeted every day as if he had just arrived on planet earth, fresh and rested, and had too much to do and see that day to cram into twenty-four hours. On the other hand, Kate admitted, he never seemed rushed or in a hurry. Living with him had been like hiking up a mountain with himsteady, unforced, taking time to see and know the names of all the flowers, but never turning back short of the goal.
It was just, Kate realized now, that they had never agreed on a goal.
Joshua's arms slipped and he went facedown into the grass. Tom lifted him and set him down on a softer surface. The baby sat for a minute, balancing, and then teetered sideways. He began moving again, pausing only to check the taste of the soil he was creeping across. He did not like it.
Tom watched him. “Shouldn't this guy be walking pretty soon?”
Kate pulled a strand of grass and chewed on it. “He could be already if his development had been normal. As it is, he's still several months behind. We'll be lucky if he walks by the time he's fourteen months old.”
Tom poured them each coffee from the Thermos. “OK, why don't you tell me what the tests showed. I've been waiting all week.”
Kate held the plastic cup under her chin so she could inhale the rich scent of the coffee. “The results were crazy,” she said.
Tom arched an eyebrow. “You mean screwed up?” .
“No, the data is accurate. It's just that the results are crazy. “
“Explain.” He leaned back on one elbow. His blue eyes were clear and attentive.
Kate concentrated on keeping it in layman's terms. For all of Tom's interest in the natural world, medicineat least above the firstaid levelhad never been something he spent time trying to understand.
“You remember,” said Kate, “that I told you about the cyclical nature of Josh's immune deficiency problem and how it seemed to relate to the transfusion he was receiving?”
“Yeah. But you said that that shouldn't be the case. Wasn't it bone marrow, not blood, that would help the kid's immune system?”
“Right. Well, I've seen the results of our last test, and there's no doubt that the blood transfusion has brought about an amazing recovery in his immune system. Within an hour of the injection of whole blood, Joshua's WBCs were back to normal“
“What's WBC?” asked Tom. He was watching the child crawl while he listened.
“White blood cells.” Kate took another sip of coffee. “More than that, his Tcell and Bcell count shot back up to normal. Above normal, actually. His gammaglobulin levels peaked. And the weirdest part is, the enzyme I told you aboutthe one that's totally lacking in his system?”