The Fever

13

From her bedroom window, Deenie could see her dad standing in the backyard, smoking, which she hadn’t seen him do ever, except in the browning snapshots in the photo albums in the hall closet, the ones with the pages tacky to touch, the binding peeled and cracked like everything from the 1980s.

He was leaning against the house, so hidden he was nearly under a corner gutter downspout.

His head turned and she jumped back. She couldn’t bear the thought that he’d see her seeing him.

She was afraid to look at her phone. There was something on it. A text Julie Drew had sent, with a new YouTube link.

What if it was Skye? Then she’d be the only one left from the lake.

But she knew it wasn’t going to be Skye. Skye would never record a video of herself for the world. Not Skye, who hardly ever let anyone inside her house because her aunt had tinnitus. Not Skye, who told everyone she didn’t even have a Social Security number because that was like being in prison, or a concentration camp. You have to be in charge of your own numbers, she said. You can’t let them put a number on you.

But more so this:

Something in her said nothing could ever happen to Skye. She didn’t have that thing Lise had, Gabby had, even Kim and Jaymie had. That softness, that tenderness. Easy to bruise.

But then again, Deenie thought, I guess I don’t have it either.

Eli held back Brooke’s long hair, coiled it in his hand, as she leaned over, bent at the waist.

The noise she made, low and guttural, didn’t even sound like a girl’s, sounded like the noises players made at the rink, stick in the gut, a wrister off the groin.

“Do you want me to get the nurse?” Eli asked, one hand on her shoulder, twig-brown but cold and goose-bumped in his hand.

“I don’t think so,” she whispered, looking down at her feet. “I thought I was going to throw up. But I didn’t.”

It was a funny thing to say, as if he hadn’t just seen her do it, his hands still in her hair as she righted herself.

She leaned against the wall, her face slick with saliva, her tank top riding up like a crumpled daffodil.

She was staring out the breezeway’s glass panels, fogged from the humidity.

Pointing at the tall hedges, her face whitened, her hands covering her mouth.

“That’s where. Right there,” Brooke said. “Last week. I saw Lise walking out from behind the bushes with some guy. I’ve seen him before, but I don’t know his name. She was sliding her skirt around so it faced front.”

Eli couldn’t imagine Lise doing what Brooke was suggesting. Anywhere. Much less in the bushes by school. He was sure it couldn’t be true.

“I guess I wasn’t the only one to see,” she said, eyes on the glass as if she were still seeing it.

“Wait,” he said. “Why would anyone think it was me?”

“I don’t know. He looked like you a little. And he was wearing one of those red interscholastic jackets like you sometimes wear.”

Eli didn’t say anything, but she shrugged as if he had.

“Lise Daniels,” she said, eyes narrowing. “All the sudden she was so goddamned pretty. Some of us have been pretty forever.”

It was like she was talking to no one, or to the whole world.

“No one cares if you’ve always been pretty,” she said, palm stretched flat against the glass. “It’s the same old news. But if all the sudden you’re beautiful, you can do anything. That’s what she must’ve thought, anyway.”

Eli looked at her.

When he saw her expression, he thought she was going to get sick again, but then he realized she’d just heard herself. Heard aloud, for the first time, what had been in her head, maybe for a long time.

“Listen!” Kim Court shouted on the video. “Whatever’s happening to us, it’s bigger than any shot. It’s bigger than everything.”

The clip, which Deenie found on both CNN and Fox News, was only twenty seconds long, edited for the single revelation.

As the headline read, “Afflicted Girl Warns: It’s Bigger than Any Vaccine!”

Deenie searched around for Kim’s own YouTube channel and found a longer version.

Seven minutes long, with a staggering twenty thousand viewings, including thumbs-up (654) and thumbs-down (245) ratings.

It began with Kim muttering, like the words were sticky in her mouth.

“I told them not to put the glue in my hair,” she was saying.

The light was so dim that everything looked brown, murky, and her eyes, amid the haze, looked like black holes.

“Because that’s what they did to Gabby and I touched it.”

Her fingers were on her throat, and the voice like a gurgle, like she was underwater.

“If I sound weird,” Kim said, “it’s only because my tongue is so big and my mouth is so small. They’re giving me drugs. But if they want to help me, why did they put glue in my hair?”

For a painful moment, Kim seemed to have to gasp for breath. Then she breathed deep, a scraping noise lifting from her.

“I know I was dreaming,” she continued. “They said I was. But it was so real. The man with tornado legs. I always dreamed about him, since I was little. And Gabby too! She was pulling seaweed from her throat. The stones that were her eyes. She found Lise down there.”

Her eyes suddenly darted to one side, like before, the whites glowing.

Then a light went on somewhere and Kim’s hands dropped from her throat, skin bright and raw. Clawed.

She faced the camera again.

“And I heard Deenie Nash is here now too.

“I heard her talking last night. I knew she had to be here.”

Kim’s eyes burning, the knowing look there as she said:

“Deenie’s the one.”

Her finger pressing until it turned white, Deenie shut off the phone.

“The parents of Kimberly Court confirmed through their family doctor that, due to an allergy to a component of the vaccine, their daughter never received the HPV shot,” the newscaster announced.

Tom had never thought it was the vaccine, never believed it.

But he had the sudden sense, as his phone filled with voice mails from parents, and texts, and e-mails, that everything had become much, much worse.

Now that the definable horror, the specific one, had been eliminated, a pit had opened up beneath them. Beneath all these parents. All parents.

If not that, what?

He picked up his phone.

“Hi, you’ve reached Diane in Billing. Please leave a message.”

Her voice cool, professional, friendly.

He left a message with no confidence she would ever call back.

Then remembering what Deenie had said.

Dad, who was that woman, anyway?

The woman in the parka, who could she have been? CDC? He didn’t think so. Sometimes on TV, CDC officials wore uniforms. She didn’t even have an ID badge.

And there was something else about her. Her stance. The way one leg was behind her, her hips angled, knees slightly bent.

Like a cop.

Straight-backed, Deenie sat on her bed, thinking about Kim Court, guessing who had watched the video, knowing it was everyone, everyone in the world maybe. All wondering what Kim meant when she said, “Deenie’s the one.”

And the even crazier part: Deenie Nash is here now too. I heard her talking last night. I knew she had to be here.

Like there might be another version of herself out there, in the hospital, with Lise.

Once, Skye told them about a cousin who could astrally project himself. He used to visit her at night and she thought she was dreaming until he asked her once, When did you get the new pajamas, the blue ones with the rainbows?

Part of her wished she could do that. She tried to imagine what Lise looked like now, if she looked different, better, something. But then the picture came to her, that mottled buckling in the middle of her forehead.

She turned to face her bedside table. Behind the empty Kleenex box, the gumball desk lamp, there was a picture frame draped in electric-blue Mardi Gras beads. Middle-school graduation, she and Lise, cheek to cheek, cap tassels pressed into open mouths. The old Lise. Lise with a forehead scraped with acne, Lise with snuggle of flesh around her beaming face.

But it was hard to picture the Lise of now, or of last week at least. The Lise who poked her head around Deenie’s locker every morning to say hello, except on the morning it happened, when Deenie never went to her locker. Because of what she’d done with Sean Lurie.

The only Lise she could picture anymore was the one convulsing on the classroom floor. The surprise in her eyes.

It was like the surprise in Sean’s eyes. That instant he’d realized the truth about Deenie, knew her secret, or thought he did.

Lise and Sean, their matching stuttered-open expressions.

They weren’t the same thing, except maybe they were: You didn’t tell me. You should have told me. You didn’t tell me it was going to be like this. You should’ve told me. Deenie, why didn’t you tell me.

Or maybe it was like the look in her own eyes, Sean pressed tight against her. A look she herself never got to see: I didn’t know it was this. If someone had told me it was this. If.

She didn’t remember turning the phone back on.

“Mom,” she said, the phone shaking in her shaking hand. Had she really pressed her mother’s name? “Mom, can you come here?”

The phone was ringing.

Not Tom’s phone, not anyone’s phone. The landline, which almost never rang except right before Election Day, which sat on a table in the hallway like a blistered antique.

“Is this Deenie Nash’s dad?”

“Yes,” Tom answered.

“Um, can you let Deenie know she doesn’t have to come in tomorrow?”

“What?” Tom said, then realized it must be someone at the Pizza House. “Oh, okay. I’ll have her call you if she doesn’t plan on coming.”

There was a brief pause. “No, I mean, Deenie should just take the night off. And Sunday too, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

Another pause.

“We’re just being careful, sir.”

“So you’re closed for business?” Tom said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Who’s going to be working?”

“We just don’t need Deenie,” the man said. “That’s all.”

“Listen, none of this has anything to do with Deenie,” he said. “Though your concern for my daughter’s health, since I’m sure that’s what this really is, is admirable.”

Phones rang in the background, pots clattered, for several seconds before the man spoke again.

“Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Nash, but none of us really know what this has to do with.”

“Where did you get this idea? What made you think my daughter—”

“Sir, I don’t think anything. I just know I got a call about when she’d last worked a shift. And I hear things. I live here too, you know.”

Tom hung up.

Laptop open, he watched the Kim Court video again. The whole video. Filled with gaping eyes and throat clutching and then the worst part. The crazy talk about Deenie being in the hospital too. About Deenie being “the one.”

It was the ramblings of a confused, overwrought girl.

The vaccine theory hadn’t made sense. Nor had the elaborate theories about bats and toxins. But most of all, the notion that his daughter might be some kind of Typhoid Mary scything her way through Dryden.

He remembered watching a documentary about her on public television.

Her peach ice cream was highly regarded and often requested—that’s what they said about Mary, a cook for the wealthy, a carrier who infected dozens of families.

He pictured Deenie at the Pizza House, hands blotted with flour, grinning at him from the back, the steel dough roller rattling before her dainty frame.

The PTA meeting was in a half hour, and he wanted to get there early.

“I’m so glad to hear your voice, baby,” Deenie’s mom kept saying, had said three, four times.

“I didn’t feel like talking. A lot’s been going on.”

“Deenie,” she said, “I’m so sorry you’re going through all this alone.”

“I’m not alone,” Deenie said, all the urgency she’d felt when she’d first called draining away and something else, older and warier, taking its place.

“No, I know,” her mom said quickly. “I’m just sorry you’re going through it without me.”

Deenie grabbed for the Mardi Gras beads, rolling them between her fingers, trying to listen, or not listen.

“I keep hearing all these conflicting things,” her mom said, her voice filling the silence. “The vaccine. All those antivaccine people. I remember when you all had your measles shots in fifth grade. Your dad trying to explain to everyone how vaccines work. I bet that’s what he’s doing now.”

Deenie didn’t say anything.

“And the congressman keeps talking about the lake.”

“What about the lake?” Deenie said, her spine stiffening.

“I always wondered about that lake. That smell.”

Deenie felt her hand cover her mouth.

“It used to be so beautiful,” her mom was saying, “and then it changed.”

“Mom.”

“Is it still thick like that, like a bright green carpet on top? Does it still smell like animal fur?”

“Are you coming, Mom?” Deenie blurted, her jaw shaking.

“No” came the reply just as quickly.

The pause that followed felt endless, Deenie’s hand aching from squeezing the phone so hard.

“Come stay here, baby,” her mom said, voice speeding up. “I’ll get in the car right now. I’ll pick you up by midnight. You can stay here until—”

“No, Mom. No!” Her voice rising, that shrill tone only her mom could bring out of her, all those months and months after the separation, slowly understanding what her mother had done.

“Deenie, it’s not safe for you there,” she said. “They don’t know what it is.”

“Dad takes care of me.”

“I can take care of you. Deenie, I always—”

“You were never good for anything,” Deenie said. “Except ruining everything.”

Eli’s eyes scanned the team showcase.

Glancing at the clock on the wall, he noticed it was almost seven. It had been hours since that smoke with Skye, hours spent on the thawing practice rink that seemed to pass in an instant.

There was a lot of noise echoing from the gym. They were setting up for something. It seemed a bad time to hold a game, a college fair.

He stopped at last year’s trophy, a gold-dipped puck presented by the mayor, dusty ribbons, the team photo, sticks slanted in perfect symmetry.

And the big photo from last year’s interscholastic banquet.

There were other players from Dryden, and from Brother Rice, Star-of-the-Sea.

He was thinking of what Brooke had said, about the boy with Lise.

In the picture, everyone wore the same dark blue blazers, the same button-down shirts and shiny loafers, the same ironic grins.

They all looked like him.

Her head hot and her room smaller than ever, and Deenie couldn’t believe she’d called her mom, hated herself for it.

Her phone kept ringing, but she didn’t want to turn it off because it might be Gabby.

She was remembering, again, the hundred muffled conversations in her parents’ bedroom and doors slamming and her mother crying in the basement, echoing up the laundry chute. She couldn’t figure any of it out at first and then finally one night she’d heard it, her dad’s voice high and strange through the walls. Couldn’t keep your legs together couldn’t stop yourself look what you’ve done look what happened.

The next morning, they sat Deenie and Eli down at the dining-room table and she told them she was leaving, a roller bag upright between her knees.

The entire time, Deenie’s eyes were trained on her dad sitting there next to her mother, not saying a word, head down, thumbnail gouging a notch in the table.

Tom wasn’t sure at first where the sound was coming from, or what it was.

But then he moved toward the kitchen and heard the distinctive chugging of the washing machine.

He walked down the rickety steps, thick with layers of old paint.

Deenie didn’t seem to hear him at first, the washer grinding to a halt. Quickly, almost furtively, she jerked the lid open, lifting her Pizza House shirt from the depths of the old Maytag.

He watched as she held up the shirt to the lightbulb hanging above.

As she pressed her face against it.

“Deenie,” he called out, standing at the foot of the basement stairs.

“Yeah, Dad,” her voice came, a hitch in it. She didn’t turn around but pulled the shirt from her face, slapped it onto the lid.

It was dark down there, he couldn’t quite see, but it felt private. Not illicit, just private.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You said you didn’t want to work tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, still not turning her head. “It just doesn’t seem right to go to work. With everything happening.”

Her hands were tight on the shirt, red and wet.