“I understand,” Tim said. “So what happened?”
“We took twenty-four hours to talk it over and make a decision. We couldn’t see the risk. It sounded so simple, and it was like she’d be . . . well, she’d be helping to save the world. My God, it sounds so fucking stupid now, but it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal for her to agree to it.” He laughed now, a humorless bark. “We might have thought about it more clearly if it hadn’t been for some nutcases blowing up a day-care center and a hospital and killing a bunch of kids up in our area. It was all over the news. She was already anticipating the end of the world, and these lunatics with two carloads of manure just so happened to solidify all her fears. She asked me what the point of living was if it was in a world as mad as this one had become. We had a daughter; we needed to make sure she grew up happy and healthy. So, yeah, in the end, it seemed like a no-brainer.”
A peal of laughter drifted across the field, followed by Ellie crying out, “Oh no!” The rabbit had kicked its way loose and Ellie had dropped it to the ground; she scurried after it now, darting about in the long grass, while Gany laughed and tried to help her catch it. “Oh no! Oh, you rabbit!”
“She felt like she was doing some good,” David went on. “She felt like she was helping to find a cure. We both did. But she was giving too much of herself, and she was growing weaker and weaker. Because of all the tests, she had to stop taking her meds. Depression medication, stuff prescribed by her shrink. I can’t remember now. Goddamn it. It made her anxious, paranoid. After some time, she fell back into some deep depression, too.
“A few days a week they would keep her overnight, just to keep an eye on her vitals. I’d stopped going to work—my students had all pretty much dropped out, and the college was pretty much a ghost town by this point—so I spent my days with Kathy at the facility. It wasn’t even a hospital, but some retrofitted office building in Greenbelt.”
“Where was Eleanor during all this?”
“In the beginning I would bring her with me. Things were okay back then, and I didn’t see the harm in it. It was good for her and Kathy to be together. But as things . . . worsened. . . as Kathy’s temperament continued to sour . . . I guess I thought it best that she didn’t come. There’s this older woman a few blocks up from our house, used to teach Ellie piano when she was younger. Mrs. Blanche. She agreed to keep Ellie during the day. They got on fine, so I was very thankful. Particularly toward the . . . well, toward the end of things.”
Tim nodded.
“They asked Ellie and me to give blood samples, too. They tested our blood the same way they’d tested Kathy’s. Mine was just normal.” He grimaced tiredly at Tim.
“But Ellie,” Tim interjected.
“Yes,” David said. “Ellie has the same genetic mutation as her mother. She’s immune.”
“And so they wanted to study Ellie, too?”
“Dr. Kapoor suggested it. I told him I’d give it some thought. But by that time, things with Kathy had started to look grim.” He lowered his head. “She was staying at the hospital around the clock by then. I decided to take her home and stop the testing—it was wasting her away, Tim—but Kathy refused. Something . . . something inside her had changed. They said they never actually injected her with the virus, but I don’t believe that. I saw her, Tim. I saw what they did to her.
“I told her about Ellie’s immunity. She cried, she was so happy. But then that didn’t last long. She began to wonder what it would be like once everyone on the whole goddamn planet died except our daughter.”
“I guess that didn’t help her state of mind any,” Tim said.
David shook his head. “And all along, they kept promising nothing would happen to her.” His voice cracked, and he felt his throat tighten. In his mind, he heard Kathy’s last words to him, echoing like the report of a pistol in the center of his brain: Bring the heater closer, would you, honey? It’s so cold in here. “But it was all too much for her in the end. Her body just gave out. Those doctors had used her up, weakened her body and her mind, and she just . . . she just died, Tim.”
“Were you there when it happened?”
“I had stepped out to have a cigarette and put some stuff in the car. She was dead when I went back up to the room.”
“Okay. Okay. How much of this does Eleanor know?”
At the mention of her name, David looked back out through the screen at the sloping brown field and rabbit hutches. Gany and Ellie were gone. Trees sighed in the breeze.
“She knows everything,” he said. “I tried lying to her at first, but Ellie, she’s too goddamn perceptive for that. I mean, I didn’t go into the details of Kathy’s death, but she knows.”
“She’s a smart kid,” Tim said. “She sees through the bullshit.”