“He’s the first person I thought of when I reviewed Jubilee’s medical file,” he says, his voice a deep and serious baritone.
In fact, everything about Dr. Benefield is serious—from his crisp bow tie and thick-rimmed bifocals to his dark eyes that only lit up when I first mentioned Jubilee’s name.
“Ah, yes.” He smiled. “My little walking medical mystery.”
Though Dr. Benefield had never come across a case of a person being so severely allergic to other humans before (and in fact, there are only three other documented cases of it—none in the United States), he had a hunch about what the cause must be.
“I recalled Dr. Simon’s work from my graduate studies,” he says. “And every doctor before me—and there had been many—had ruled out nearly every other possibility. I just thought, “What if?” I ran a few simple tests—experiments really. We kept her in an isolation ward for a week, and her symptoms cleared up. Then I touched her arm to see what would happen. Sure enough, an hour later, a rash. It appeared to be the cause of her condition.”
Her condition that, after a few more tests, finally had a diagnosis—an allergy to humans.
“It’s the most fascinating thing, genetically speaking,” says Dr. Benefield. “When you’re allergic to something, like a food protein for instance, your body mistakes it for an invader and attacks it with a release of antibodies and histamines. It’s an understandable mistake to an extent—it’s a foreign protein, just not a dangerous one. But for a human body to attack other human proteins would mean that the affected person doesn’t have at least one of those proteins—those very building blocks that make us human. Technically speaking, does that make her not human?”
A mind-boggling proposition for sure, and not one that Dr. Benefield means literally, he assures me. “There is obviously some genetic mutation in her DNA—a variation causing her to be absent one or more human proteins.” It’s estimated the human body is made up of more than two million proteins. “She would be a fascinating candidate for genetic sequencing.”
He’s not the only one who thinks so. Since Jubilee’s unique condition has been publicized, Ms. Jenkins has received numerous phone calls and requests from researchers all over the country—and in some instances, internationally—to study the young girl’s condition.
But could further testing, or genetic sequencing, lead to a cure?
“Perhaps in the future,” says Dr. Benefield. “There is still much we don’t know about allergies, particularly how to heal someone of their condition. Studies are ongoing, but our best practices at the moment are symptom management—in Jubilee’s case, keeping her away from any skin-to-skin human contact—and the hope that children will outgrow their allergies with age.”
Does that happen often? I ask.
“It happens,” he says. “Though typically not with very severe allergies.”
Like Jubilee’s?
“Like Jubilee’s.” (continued on page 26E)
* * *
* * *
nine
ERIC
“AJA! THE DOG needs breakfast,” I yell as I grab the coffeepot and start to pour my first cup of the morning. I gave up on quitting—especially since we brought this mutt home from the animal shelter two weeks ago. Aja couldn’t think of a name, so we’ve been calling it The Dog, though The Puppy would be more accurate, as it’s been waking me multiple times every night, needing to go out, wanting to play, or whining for no discernible reason at all, bringing back memories of Ellie’s sleepless first year of life.
I walk down the hall, The Dog at my heels. “Aja!” I say, giving his door a firm knock with my knuckle as I pass by. In my bedroom, I set my coffee mug on my nightstand and pick up The Virgin Suicides from where I left it last night. I flip through it, skimming a couple of paragraphs here and there, hoping something might jump out at me that I missed the first two times I read it this week.
Those vampire books? I breezed right through and sent Ellie a text:
Read Twilight. Team Jacob all the way. Dad
I was glad she was, too—according to her journal, she found him to be “soooo much hawter than Edward”—because that vampire seemed to have some serious control issues.
But this book? I can’t understand why Ellie wrote: “This Eugenides guy gets it. He just really gets it.” I think of her words and look back at the book: what exactly does he get?
I’m tempted to have Aja read it because I’m fairly certain he’s smarter than me, but I don’t think the material (boys spying on girls with binoculars, sex under bleachers, virgins impaling themselves on fence posts) was appropriate for Ellie to be reading, much less a ten-year-old boy.
“No!” I shout. The Dog has squatted on the carpet in front of me and is releasing a stream of urine onto it, while his dewy black eyes stare up at me, as if to say, I told you I needed to go out. I sigh, and realize Aja still hasn’t responded to me. I’m reaching down to scoop The Dog up when a loud crash jerks my head up in the direction of the living room.
“Aja?”
Silence. I run down the hall toward the noise, panicked that I’ve forgotten some Art of Safe Parenting rule—something Stephanie would have innately known, like maybe I should have secured the flat-screen to the TV stand with bolts. I have visions of Aja sprawled beneath it, crushed by forty-eight inches of LCD technology.
But when I get there, Aja is standing upright, looking not at the TV, but at the glass coffee table, which no longer resembles a coffee table. It’s shattered, likely by the hammer that—for inexplicable reasons—is sticking up from the center of it.
“Aja!” I yell, brought up short by the sight, my heart still hammering from my sprint down the hallway. “What happened?”
My eyes scan the large plates of sharp-edged glass at his bare feet, surrounded by thousands of tiny glittering shards lighting up the carpet. The Dog, who followed me from the bedroom, is dancing around the mess and barking. I grab his collar to still him and then look to Aja for an explanation of what I’m seeing.
His head hangs on his shoulders, eyes trained to the ground, and he’s standing so still, I have the fleeting horrific thought that a shard has somehow struck him directly in the heart and killed him where he stands.
“Aja!” I say again, but then realize that I don’t want him to move, seeing as how any step he’d take in any direction would certainly embed glass in the soles of his feet.
“Don’t move.” I feel a little ridiculous when the words come out—it’s like giving an imperative to a marble statue. I walk The Dog to his crate in the corner of the living room, secure him inside, and then go back over to Aja, trying but unable to avoid the glass crunching beneath my tennis shoes.