But Joe doesn’t let me finish. “If the Kaycee Mitchell case was legit, if she got sick, it only confirms what we think. We can’t prove it because we can’t ask her, and we can’t ask her because we don’t know where she is, and we can’t find her because that’s not why we’re here. Abby, we need to focus on what Optimal is doing now—not what they did ten years ago.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” I snap. Joe doesn’t understand that in Barrens, you can’t just peel away the present from the past. It’s like trying to get gum out of your hair: the more you try to separate it, the more strands get caught up.
“This isn’t about Kaycee Mitchell,” he tells me in a low voice. “This isn’t about what happened back then.” Then: “We might be able to save some people, Abby. But not her. You understand that, right?”
Despite the absurdity of storming out of my own rental, I’m out in the sunshine before I realize I have nowhere to go.
The same thing that makes Joe a good lawyer makes him a crappy friend: he’s right almost all of the time.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I’ve got four voicemails from my dad’s home line and half a dozen texts from TJ, a thirty-three-year-old war vet who lives down the road and spends all his time going house to house, checking the trees for signs of insect rot. TJ is the closest thing my dad has to a friend.
His texts are borderline incoherent, all abbreviations and shattered punctuation, but I get the message clear enough: I’m late to pick up my dad for his doctor’s appointment.
TJ is still humping around in the yard when I arrive. He lifts a hand to wave, and then turns back to his inspection, sifting the leaves of one of our crabapple trees. His left arm swings useless when he moves.
There’s nothing wrong with TJ’s arm except, thanks to a case of PTSD, he doesn’t know it’s there.
“Waste of time, waste of money, these so-called doctors,” my father grumbles, as he eases into the passenger seat. “All they do is take your money and fumble with a lot of doodads and in the end, what? They send you home with a prayer, a bill for five hundred dollars, and a prescription to see another doctor.”
He stops my hand when I try to belt him in. “I can do it, dammit. I throw my back out and you act like I’m a cripple.”
But I notice it takes him several times to work the seatbelt home. His hand is shaking.
When I was a kid we didn’t go to the doctor. My dad said all we needed was God’s love, and when I had my first visit—nine years old, my mom whittled by sickness—I thought the doctor’s office was the cleanest, brightest place I’d ever been. By then I knew not going to the doctor was one of the things that made me a freak, so the waiting room felt like the heaven my dad always talked about, a place where nothing existed but quiet and a blinding whiteness that struck down every shadow. I got a lollipop from the receptionist, and when my mom and dad were with the doctor, I paged through magazines, rubbing perfume samples on my wrists and my shirt.
Then it was the oncology wing of a hospital in Indianapolis, although to me it was a doctor’s office only bigger, even more miraculous. More magazines. More cold air faintly tinged with the smell of Winterfresh gum. More people in clean white coats, like angels with their wings folded around them.
Dr. Aster spends a long time examining my dad. I make it through every magazine in the waiting room: two months-old copies of People, a Home & Garden full of smiling housewives, copies of Outdoor and Fishing. I wonder how many people are sitting here, in this waiting room, reading about smallmouth bass just before they get news that changes them forever.
“Are you from Barrens, too?”
I look up to see the only other woman in the waiting room watching me, rocking a quiet baby in her arms.
“Chicago,” I say forcefully.
“Oh. My bad. I thought I recognized you is all.” If she notices that the question has annoyed me, she doesn’t let it bother her for long. She shrugs.
“I went to Barrens High,” I say, without elaborating or explaining that I also went to Barrens elementary and middle schools.
“I thought so! You were two years above me! My name’s Shariah Dobbs,” she says. Then, indicating the baby in her arms, “I would stand up, but…”
“That’s all right. Abby.” I’m suddenly ashamed of my bag sitting on the seat next to me—four hundred dollars, bought at Neiman Marcus with my first paycheck and way more than I could afford, but still—and of my boots and jeans. All of it is chosen to armor me precisely against the question she first asked. Are you from Barrens, too?
But seeing her moon-shaped face, her cheap skirt and knockoff sneakers, and the unselfconscious way she looks me over—both cheerful and sympathetic, as if she knows exactly what I think of her and doesn’t hold it against me—makes me curdle with guilt.
I stand up and come closer to coo over her baby, so swaddled that from a distance it might be a folded T-shirt. “Boy or girl? How old?”
“Boy. His name is Grayson. Twelve months.” She starts to peel the blanket back from his face and then, unexpectedly, her face clouds. “The doctors at the clinic have been so helpful. At first everyone told me he would just grow into it…”
I’m about to ask her what she means when she flips back the blanket and I suck in a breath. The baby is small, way too small, and his skull looks soft and malformed. His forehead is barely there at all. It’s as if his eyebrows run straight into his scalp.
“No one knows if he’ll be able to talk, even,” she says, in a quiet voice. “Bad luck, I guess. But he’s a good baby,” she adds quickly. “He’s my baby boy, and I don’t care what anyone says. I did everything like they told me to, I quit smoking and even took those vitamins they gave me…” She covers his face again and looks at me sideways, as if she expects me to accuse her of something.
“You still live in Barrens?” I ask, and she nods.
“Over in Creekside.” Her face flushes. Creekside is a trailer park—directly on the lip of the reservoir, within sight of the plant. “I’m still with my mom. My sister and her husband just moved back, right next door, so they help a lot.” Her face clears and she smiles. “My sister’s pregnant, too. So Grayson’ll have a little cousin soon enough.”
Before I can respond, the door opens and Dr. Aster appears with one hand hooked around my father’s elbow. My dad stumps forward, digging his cane into the carpet, looking more like his old self than at any time since I’ve been home.
“Sorry for the delay,” Dr. Aster says. “It’s been a while. I thought we should do the whole detail.”
“Tests, tests, and more tests,” my father says. “Is that all you people know how to do?” The best measure of my dad’s health is how rude he is.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, turning away from Shariah.
Dr. Aster’s eyes flicker.
“We’ll know in a few days, when all the test results come back,” he says. “Meantime, he should take it easy. Rest. Using a heating pad and ibuprofen should be fine.”
My father shakes his head, rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Five hundred dollars,” he mumbles, “and a prayer.”