Matt parked his medical bag on the bedside table and told her hello. He made it a point to talk to her, though the neurologist had assured him she couldn’t understand. She might still take some solace from the tone of his voice. “I came by to see how you’re doing today.”
Cindy blinked. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ellen said when he emerged from the girl’s bedroom. “Come on. Sit down.”
He sat at the kitchen table and allowed Ellen to pour him a glass of 7-Up.
“She really is better,” Ellen said. “I told you so.” Matt struggled to form his thoughts.
“She spoke,” he said. “She was lucid. She understood what I said to her. She’s weak and a little feverish, but I believe she may even have gained some weight.” He looked at Ellen. “None of that should be possible.”
“It’s a miracle,” Ellen said firmly. “At least that’s what I believe.” She laughed. “I’m a little feverish myself.”
“Ellen, listen. I’m pleased about this. I couldn’t be happier. But I don’t understand it.”
And truly, he did not. Yes, there was such a thing as a remission. He had once seen a lung tumor remit in a way that could be called “miraculous.” But Cindy was a vastly different case. Brain tissue had been destroyed. Even if the tumors had somehow vanished, she should not have been able to speak. That part of her brain was simply missing. Even without the tumors, she would have been in the position of someone who had suffered a severe stroke. Some recovery of faculties might be possible; certainly not a complete cure… certainly not what he had witnessed in the bedroom.
He did not say any of this to Ellen. Instead, he offered: “I want to be sure. I want the hospital to look at her.”
Ellen frowned for the first time this morning. “Maybe when she’s stronger, Matt. I don’t know, though. I hate to put her through all that again.”
“I don’t want us to have false hopes.”
“You think she might get worse?” Ellen shook her head. “She won’t. I can’t tell you how I know that. But I do. The sickness is gone, Dr. Wheeler.”
He couldn’t bring himself to argue. “I hope you’re right. Cindy said something similar.”
“Did she?”
The girl had spoken with deliberation, as if the framing of the words still required enormous effort, but succinctly and clearly.
“Poor Dr. Wheeler,” this emaciated child had said to him. “We’re putting you out of business.”
Strange as the incident was, here was something even stranger: He did not dwell on it or even think about it much after he left the Rhees’ house.
He drove downtown along Promenade Street where the road followed the curve of the bay. There wasn’t much traffic. It was an easy drive, the ocean still and blue under a feathery wash of sky. Hot August noon and nothing stirring.
He felt as strangely placid as Buchanan looked. Matt had blamed it on the fever—this empty calm, his own, the town’s—but then it occurred to him to wonder.
Maybe Jim is right, he thought. We’re all infected. Machines in the blood. A sort of plague. The Taiwan Flu… hadn’t he dreamed about it? But these thoughts, too, slipped away beneath the glassy surface of the day.
It turned out that Jill, the receptionist, hadn’t shown up for work—phoned in sick—but Annie was at the office, sitting in Reception fielding calls, mainly cancelled appointments. She put down the receiver and transferred queries to the service for an hour so she could break for lunch; Matt brought up food from the first-floor coffee shop—which was understaffed. Plastic-wrapped salads and ham sandwiches on white. Annie Gates picked at hers, eyes distantly focused. “Strange day,” she mused.
Matt told her about Cindy Rhee, but the story felt distant, curiously immaterial, even as he told it.
Annie frowned. Wrinkle of brow and purse of lips. Trying to fathom all this but meeting some internal resistance. “Maybe that’s why nobody’s keeping their appointments. They’re all—well, better.”
Poor Dr. Wheeler. We’re putting you out of business.
Maybe not better, Matt thought. Maybe sicker.
He told Annie what Jim Bix had said about foreign bodies in the blood of his hospital samples, in his own blood. He hadn’t intended to tell her this, at least not yet—hadn’t wanted to worry her needlessly. But she nodded. “I heard something about it at the hospital. Had lunch with a staff nurse from the path lab. She was scared spitless. So was I, by the time she finished. So I called the hematology resident at the Dallas hospital where I interned. He didn’t want to talk about it, but when I told him what I’d heard he pretty much confirmed it.”
So we were keeping this from each other, Matt thought. It was like an O. Henry story. How many other people were in on this secret?
He said, “That means it’s not local.”
“No. Are you surprised?”
“No.”
“The CDC must have known about it at least as long as Jim Bix.” She sipped her Pepsi. “I guess the clamps came down hard. There hasn’t been a hint of it in the papers. I suppose the thinking is, why worry people? A disease with no symptoms, a disease with no epidemiology because everybody already has it—so why start a panic?”
“Surely they can’t keep it a secret much longer.”
“Maybe they won’t have to.”
He felt enclosed in a dome of feverish tranquility. Part of him was conducting this conversation quite reasonably; another part was encapsulated, silent, but frightened by what Annie had said. These were thoughts he had not yet allowed himself.
A distant, dreamy note crept into her voice. “If this infection has a purpose—and I think it does—we’ll all know pretty soon what it is.”
He gave her a sharp look. “What makes you think it has a purpose?”
“Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “Don’t you think that?”
Not a question he wanted to answer.
“Annie, can I ask you something? You said when you heard about this from your friend you were scared. At the time.”
“Yes.”
“But not now?”
Her frown deepened. “No… not now. I’m not scared now.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, Matt.” She regarded him solemnly across the remains of lunch. “I don’t honestly know.”
He spent the afternoon cleaning up paperwork and attending a single patient: a thirty-year-old housewife keeping an appointment to monitor her blood pressure. Yes, she was sticking to her diet. Yes, she was taking her medication.
Her pressure was a textbook-normal 120 over 80 despite a degree and a half of fever. She seemed absentminded but she smiled as she left. Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.
Matt pulled his chair to the window and watched shade and light mark time in the street beyond.
We’re being sedated.
The town was quiescent. Every motion seemed isolated, a unique event. A car crawled along the hot blacktop in slow motion. An elderly man, his collar open and his suitcoat over his shoulder, stepped out of the Bargain Cuts Uni-Sex Barber Shop and paused to run a bony hand across his stubbled head. Sunlight winked on windshields, softened road tar, and lifted haze from the blank and distant ocean.