Bones of Betrayal

She shook her head. “I went early this morning,” she said. “Dr. Davies met me there, and he talked to Dr. Sorensen on the phone. If the pain gets bad and the tissue gets necrotic, they’ll give me painkillers and ointments and antibiotics. But for now, there’s nothing to be done except ‘watchful waiting.’ Watching and waiting to see if my fingertips die or heal. Watching and waiting to see if Eddie heals or dies.” She studied her fingertips. “The necrosis has started in his hands.” She said it calmly, but then the shaking got worse. The tremor traveled up her arms to her shoulders, which began to quake. She said “dammit” again, very softly, and I knew she was not cursing the complexities of origami now. “Why,” she said, “God in heaven, why?”

 

 

“I don’t know, Miranda. I can’t think of anybody who deserves this less than you and Eddie.”

 

“Oh, Dr. B.,” she cried, “I’m not asking ‘why’ about Eddie and me. I’m asking ‘why’ about everything else. Everybody else. All the horror we’ve inflicted on one another.”

 

I’d known Miranda for years now; she could be as tough as cheap steak about her own hurts, but her heart bled freely for others. By “everybody else,” I figured she meant the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and maybe even more than those: maybe also Dresden and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Rwanda and Darfur and Baghdad. I laid one hand on her shoulder; with the other, I reached behind me and retrieved a Kleenex box from the desk. The paper bird fell from her hand, fluttered to the floor, and lay still. “Fucking war,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “God damn it to hell.”

 

“Yes,” I said. “God damn it to hell.”

 

I set the Kleenex box on the table, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and eased out of the bone lab. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob, locked the door behind me, and retreated to my office at the far end of the stadium. There, I locked my own door and unplugged the phone. I did a quick search of the Internet and clicked on a link that filled my computer screen with purple squares and triangles, crisscrossed with dotted lines. “Best Origami Crane Folding Instructions,” the caption read. I took a sheet of paper from the printer tray and folded it diagonally. I creased it between my fingertips until the edges were sharp as a blade.

 

 

 

THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. In my dream, Garcia and Miranda reached out to me for help, but their outstretched hands crumbled before my eyes, leaving bloody stumps at the ends of their wrists. Then the dream shifted, and I was speaking to a large crowd in an auditorium in Oak Ridge. I realized I was talking to them about the atomic genie their city had helped loose from the bottle, and I realized I was distraught. I heard myself say to them, “Was anyone ever helped by it?” There was a stunned silence when I said it; even I, who dreamed the words, was shocked by them. Then, near the back of the room, I glimpsed movement. A woman rose slowly to her feet and stood. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf, in the manner favored by women who have lost their hair to radiation or chemotherapy. The woman didn’t speak; she didn’t move; she simply stood, holding that space, a calm answer to the bitter question I had posed.

 

Heads had swiveled in her direction when she stood, and the atmosphere in the dream-room suddenly felt alive and electric, the way the Tennessee air prickles just before a summer thunderstorm. Then a second person stood, and soon a dozen other people were on their feet, all bearing silent witness to cures effected, diseases diagnosed, homes heated, pipelines and airliners made safe.

 

The last person to stand was directly in front of me. He rose slowly, as if it cost him some pain to stand, and his head was bowed. He raised his head slowly, and I found myself staring into eyes that were both haunted and hopeful. I found myself staring into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer.

 

When I awoke—or dreamed I awoke—I seemed to see the world through such eyes myself.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 25

 

 

 

 

THORNTON HAD SENT A PEACE OFFERING TO MIRANDA—a dozen stems of iris, not yet unfurled, looking like green artists’ brushes dipped in indigo paint. Seven small sunflowers were tucked amid the blue tips, blazing like a week of summer days. Miranda wasn’t in the lab when I saw them; I knew they were from Thornton by the business card lying beside the vase, bearing his name, the FBI logo, and the word “Peace?” The man had flair, and he seemed smart and spunky, so maybe he was still in the game.

 

But he wasn’t ready to risk a personal appearance just yet, so I agreed to pick him up at the Federal Building, in downtown Knoxville, for our trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I’d come up with an idea about how we might search for the dead man shown on Novak’s film, and Thornton wanted to talk with someone in the Lab’s radioisotopes program, so we decided to ride-share.