Tim said, “Wow. Cute place. Small but sort of… you know, elegant. And Stubbins is paying for this and for Ryan’s hospital, too? What is it you do for him, again?”
Not nearly enough to justify all this.
But there was no use questioning Jonah Stubbins; the sphinx was less secretive. Marianne began to unpack the boys’ clothing.
Marianne and Colin took a taxi to the office building on West Fifty-Ninth, a little south of the zone patrolled by private guards hired by the West Side Protective Association. But Colin’s appointment was at noon, not a popular hour for violent crime, and Tim was with them, alert as always. The building guard wanded them and had a tense exchange with Tim about his Beretta, then sent a keypad signal to Dr. Hudspeth. They waited.
The lobby held sagging chairs and a vending machine. Two large ficus plants shed yellow leaves onto the dingy tile floor. Colin said to the guard, “Those trees are thirsty.”
“Yeah?” He wasn’t interested.
“You should give them some water.”
“The plant service went out of business.”
“You should give them some water now. They’re crying!”
The guard looked at him oddly. A voice said from the computer, “Thompson, please send them up.” The elevator door opened.
In the elevator Colin said to Tim, “I don’t like that man.”
“Yeah, he’s a prick.”
Marianne frowned at Tim, who grinned back.
It was Dr. Hudspeth that Marianne didn’t like. Marianne had chosen her because of her location, right across the park, and anyway how hard could it be to test a child’s hearing? But Dr. Hudspeth seemed to not test many children. There were no toys in the tiny waiting room. The doctor, who smiled constantly over what seemed like too many teeth, had the excessively bright, cloying manner of adults not used to children and possibly not very fond of them.
In the examining room she said, “Now, pumpkin, just sit there—good! Great! We’re going to play a little game. You like games, don’t you?”
Colin gazed at her from steady gray eyes and said nothing.
“Good! Great! Here’s the game: You’re going to wear these earphones. I’m going to press a button on this thing here. Sometimes it will make a noise and sometimes it will not. When you hear it make a noise in your earphones, raise your finger like this. Can you do that for me, pumpkin?”
Colin nodded, impassive.
“All right, here we go!”
Marianne heard nothing. Colin raised fingers, didn’t raise fingers, never changed expression. The test went on for about fifteen minutes. Dr. Hudspeth removed Colin’s earphones.
“You did great! Now, you go out to the waiting room with your daddy for a few minutes while I talk to Grammy.”
Colin said, “He’s not my daddy. My daddy’s sick and in the hospital until he gets better.”
“Good! Great! You go out and sit with… your friend.”
“He’s Grandma’s—”
“Colin, stay here,” Marianne said hastily. Grandma’s what?
Dr. Hudspeth said, “Well, all right, since there’s no problem here. Colin’s hearing is normal, in fact, quite acute. He heard right up to the limits of human hearing, at both high and low frequencies.” She beamed at Marianne and glanced at her watch.
Marianne said, “What was the lowest frequency you tested? Twelve Hertz?”
The doctor looked surprised, and not entirely pleased. “Are you an engineer, Mrs…. ah…” She glanced at her tablet. “Carpenter?”
“No. Was it twelve Hertz?”
“Yes. That’s the lowest frequency even children, whose hearing is more acute than ours, can hear, and then only under ideal laboratory conditions.”
“Test him lower, please.”
Dr. Hudspeth stared.
“Does the machine go lower than twelve Hertz?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do it.”
Marianne, former teacher and lecturer, knew how to sound authoritative. Dr. Hudspeth put the earphones back on Colin.
He raised and did not raise fingers.
“Mrs. Carpenter, I don’t think he understands. He’s raising fingers at eight Hertz, when he might be feeling physical vibrations in the body but can’t possibly—”
“Go lower.”
“This audiometer doesn’t go any lower!”
“Then we’re done here. Thank you, Dr. Hudspeth. I’d like a printout of the results, please.”
As they left the office, Dr. Hudspeth peered at the settings on her machine. Colin said, “That lady is upset.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t. And I’m not a pumpkin.”
“No,” Marianne said. “You’re not.”
In the lobby, Colin insisted that Marianne buy a bottle of water from the vending machine. Carefully he dumped it over the ficus plants.
Marianne sat with Colin in the tiny bedroom he shared with Jason, who had protested at having to go to school when Colin got to stay home. In the kitchen Tim rattled pans, singing off-key as he made dinner. He was a surprisingly good cook, although Marianne was getting past being surprised by hidden talents in anybody. She sat cross-legged on Colin’s low bed, since his small sprawled body covered the rest of the floor. He was drawing elephants on a sheet of white paper.
Marianne had the opening she wanted. “Did you know that elephants can talk to each other across long distances by making noises that people can’t hear?”
Colin looked up. “My favorite book is Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement! I brought it in my suitcase. Do real elephants talk about how Brandon rescued the elephant from the basement?”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t speak elephant.”
Colin laughed and went back to his careful drawing of floppy gray ears. Marianne said, “People can’t hear elephants because their noises are too low—too deep—for people’s ears.”
Colin said nothing.
“But I’ll bet you could hear an elephant, couldn’t you?”
He said, not raising his head but with a certain stiffness in his thin shoulders, “I’m not ’spozed to talk about that, Grandma.”
“Says who?”
“Jason. He says everybody at school will think I’m weird.”
So Jason knew about this, whatever it was, and tried to shield his little brother. “Yes. But I’m not at your school. You can talk about it with me.”
She had Colin’s attention. He stood up, worn gray crayon in hand, and looked searchingly at her face. “Is that true?”
It was his father’s phrase: Ryan the scientist, always weighing evidence to find the singular truth he so fervently believed existed. Ryan had never accepted that truth could be many sided. Marianne kept her voice steady. “Yes, it is. You can tell me what you hear.”
Relief brightened Colin’s eyes. “I hear everything, Grandma.”
“What everything?”
He held up his fingers, smeared with gray and green crayon, to count off. “I hear people talk. Well—duh! I hear plants. They don’t talk words, but they make noises. Some are low like that ear doctor’s machine near the end, some are like Captain’s dog whistle, some are like people talking, only they go through the ground. I hear the ground when it’s mad. Low rumbles, like before the earthquake. I hear baby mouses in the ground, sometimes, when they want their mother. Those are like dog whistles, too. If you take me to a zoo, maybe I can hear an elephant!”
Infrasonics and ultrasonics both, Marianne thought dazedly. How was that possible? Was that possible? How much was the imagination of a five-year-old who believed an elephant could be rescued from a basement? She would have to do some research, including on biosonics. But before that—