The Fever

4

Standing in front of his students, even with his butane lighters on, Tom couldn’t get anyone’s attention, not even Nat Dubow’s, who loved to demonstrate every day how much he knew, who shot videos of himself doing chemistry experiments in a laboratory in his parents’ garage and then posted the videos on the web under the name Nat Du-Wow. Despite Nat’s constant urging—he’d planted his open laptop on Tom’s desk one day, tail wagging—Tom always claimed he was too busy at the moment to watch, sorry. One night at home, though, he looked up an episode and was surprised to see four hundred comments posted and more than twelve hundred thumbs-up. All of it made him feel unbearably old.

But even Nat was distracted today, talking about epilepsy and electrical currents and auras.

“Mr. Nash, what if it was a tonic-clonic?” he burst out, voice breaking. “It can damage your brain forever.”

“Nat,” he said, “let’s focus, okay?”

But he was having trouble focusing too. He’d even walked down the aisles summoning all his best jokes, teasing Bailey Lu about the doodles on her hand, which usually made her blush and giggle.

Nothing worked, and Bailey could only stare at her hands in distress, her inky palms sweat-smeared.

Clearly, and he felt it himself, it wasn’t the kind of day one of Mr. Nash’s awesome gummy-bear-and-potassium-chlorate or Mentos-and-Diet-Coke demonstrations would become the talk of the school.

So he surrendered, gave them a pop quiz, and gazed out the window while they moaned and protested, their hysteria giving way to cries of injustice and the cruelty of teachers.

Meanwhile, he thought about Lise, and what it must be like for her mother, worrying. Sheila Daniels worried constantly anyway: about school trips to the falls, vaccines, the sound of hydraulic drills by the water wells.

And he reminded himself it was likely nothing. Girls fainted, kids fainted, fevers could do things to them, stress too. Some of these girls never seemed to eat, floating through the hallways like wraiths, crumpling under the bleachers during gym. There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen in twenty years of high-school teaching.

After fourth period, Tom walked outside to the wind-slapping corner by the practice rink.

The new French teacher with the tattoo on her nape was leaning against a heating duct, smoking.

The first time he’d met her, he tried to imagine how he would have felt as a high-school kid if he’d had a slinky thirty-year-old French teacher with leather boots and a tattoo of a peacock feather snaking around her neck.

He wondered why Eli didn’t take French.

“Bad habits,” she said, grinning, and he started a little.

She gestured to her cigarette. He smiled.

“There are worse,” he said.

“Like what?” she said, still grinning.

“Crack?” he ventured. “High-fructose corn syrup?”

“Come on,” she said, offering him the gold pack in her ringed hand. “Don’t make me the provocateur.”

Just then, his cell phone tingled to life.

DEENIE, the screen flashed, the picture of her in the sock-monkey hat she used to wear.

“Hey, Deen,” he answered.

“Dad,” she said, her voice sounding very far away.

“What’s wrong, honey? Where are you?”

“Dad, can you come get me? Can you take me to the hospital?”

He spotted her standing in front of the Danielses’ duplex, headphones on, jumping a little in the cold.

Her parka, those skinny legs—she looked for all the world like she had at eleven years old.

Noticing her bluing ankles, he could imagine what Georgia would say. He only hoped she’d taken the bus to Lise’s and not gotten a ride with an older student, some boy. Sometimes he found it hard to believe he was in charge.

He wanted to ask what made her think it was okay to leave school like that, but he didn’t. The truth was, he was always glad when she asked for a favor because she almost never did.

“Hey,” he said, “get in.”

Just like her brother, she didn’t seem to get in the car so much as tumble into it, like it was a disappearing space she had to hurry in and out of.

Headphones on, not quite looking him in the eye.

“So,” he said, turning the steering wheel as he backed up, “to St. Ann’s?”

She nodded, leaning her head against the glass.

He was used to teen sullenness, even though Deenie’s sullenness was only occasional and never sour. But this felt like something else.

He wondered how bad it had been for her, seeing Lise. What had she seen?

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

“Did they say anything at school?” she asked. Tom could hear a screeching from her headphones. “About Lise?”

“I didn’t wait,” he said. “I just left. Carl took my fifth period.”

Pushing her headphones from her ears, she looked at him.

Her face seeming to wilt, flower-like, before his eyes.

“Dad,” she said softly. “I think something really bad’s happening.”

He looked at her, nodded, pressed the gas harder.

“Okay,” he said, hand on her forearm. “One step at a time.”

“My daughter is her best friend. She was there when Lise fainted. You can’t tell me anything?”

The admitting nurse, glasses smeary, hair slipping from its clip, sighed and shook her head.

“You’re not family, sir.”

He looked at her, saw the weariness set on her, the feeling around her of fluorescence and confusion, a surly man with a mustache shouting at her from his chair about the president and single-payer health care.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He gave the slightest of smiles, the one Georgia used to call the Charmer and eventually called the Croc, and set his palms lightly on the counter. “I’m being a pain in the ass. It’s just, my little girl over there…”

He let the nurse’s eyes wander over. He imagined how Deenie looked to her, her parka sleeves too long, her brother’s old trapper hat slipping from her brown hair.

“…she got spooked seeing her friend faint,” he said. “Now she’s just scared out of her mind. I promised I’d find out something.”

The nurse wouldn’t give him a smile in return, but she did let her gaze float down to the computer screen.

“What’s her last name again? Daniels?”

He nodded.

She typed a moment, then her face tightened.

Standing by the dusty halogen lamp in the corner of the waiting room, Deenie was watching her father talk to the nurse when the corridor doors swung open wildly.

A middle-aged woman bucked past them, a frizz of blond hair, her bright down coat flapping.

“Oh God,” she said, spotting Deenie. “Oh, honey.”

It was Lise’s mom.

Rushing toward Deenie, she seemed to envelop her in the coat’s puffy squares.

“My baby,” she said, pushing herself against Deenie, a gust of perfume and sweat. “You should see what they’ve done to my baby.”

At first, it was like on television.

On TV, this is when you find out your friend is dead. Her face punched through a windshield in a drunk-driving accident. Strangled by her jealous boyfriend. Locked in a cage by a man she met on the Internet.

Even though it didn’t seem real, Deenie found herself wanting to do what they did on TV, maybe sink to her knees, the camera overhead swirling away from her, the music cueing up.

But then a doctor arrived to talk to Mrs. Daniels.

And hearing him, it became real.

“Deenie,” her dad was saying, “it’s okay.”

He was holding on to her shoulder, which was shaking. She felt her whole body shaking and wondered: Is this how it felt for Lise?

“We’re very lucky she was here when it happened,” the doctor was saying to Mrs. Daniels. “You did the right thing calling 911. Every second counted. A cardiac event of this kind at home…”

“Her heart stopped,” Mrs. Daniels said, her face damp, mascara ashed across her left cheekbone. “I could feel it in my hands.”

Seconds later, Mrs. Daniels and the doctor disappeared behind the swinging doors, and her dad kept trying to explain things to her.

“Lise had a seizure at home,” he said, “a bad one. And her mom called an ambulance. Something happened to her heart, but they were able to stabilize her. They’re taking good care of her.”

Deenie nodded and nodded, but all she could think was she wished he weren’t there with her. All the smiling-at-nurses in the world wouldn’t get her behind those doors to see Lise. She believed if her dad were gone she could find a way to get back there. She and Gabby always found ways to get places: behind the tall fences at the shuttered train depot, into that room in the school’s basement where they kept old VCRs so they could watch a mildewed cassette of Romeo + Juliet during Back to School Night.

“We can wait,” he said, “if you want.”

“Okay.”

“Let me just drive over to the school and set it up with my classes. And tell Eli.”

Deenie nodded.

“Are you going to be okay here, by yourself?” He looked worried.

“I am, Dad,” she said, keeping her voice even, steady. “I have to stay.”

Sitting in one of the metal chairs, as far from the angry man with the droopy mustache as possible, she tried to text Gabby but couldn’t think what to say.

Then she saw a couple, the woman with a crying toddler in green overalls sobbing at her hip. They were talking to a doctor and nurse in front of the same double doors Lise’s mom had exited.

Behind them, somewhere inside the belly of St. Ann’s, was Lise.

She couldn’t believe no one saw her walk in, but then many times she felt invisible. At school, the mall, she could feel people walk right through her. Sometimes, with boys, she realized they could see straight behind her head, to blond-lashed Lise, to long-legged Gabby, to anyone else but her.

His leg shook a little on the gas. He was thinking about Deenie in that waiting room with the growling man with the coffee-damp mustache and who knew what new arrivals. Downriver bikers with meth mouths, suburban predators prowling for teenage girls.

Lately, when he read the crime-beat section of the paper, he’d begun to feel his once-gentle town, their little Brigadoon, was teeming with endless threats imperiling his children.

He could hear Georgia’s voice buzzing in his head.

So you left her there? You couldn’t just call the school? Call our son?

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

At least his version of it.

It was just before lunch and the corridors were swollen with students, dozens of hunch-hooded sweatshirts, the boys shoving one another into lockers while the girls glided by in low-tops, skirts, and three layers of tights, their smiles nervous and intricate. He spent half his day feeling sorry for girls.

His phone vibrating, he thought it might be Deenie, but the minute he moved past the front entryway, the screen went black, his signal lost.

When he stepped out again, he couldn’t get it back.

He waited at Eli’s locker, and waited, and then the second bell rang, and everyone scattered, backpacks like cockroach shells.

There was a slight ripple in his chest. Where is Eli, anyway? As if Eli were as reliable as an elevator and not his shaggy, perennially late son.

He’ll be here any second, he told himself, but a nagging fear came from nowhere: What if, what if?

Rounding the corner, he spotted was his son’s blaring-blue hockey jersey.

There he was, standing in front of his calculus class, shoving folded papers into a textbook.

Tall and carefree and more handsome than any son of his had a right to be. And late as ever, for everything. It was hard to explain the relief he felt.

“Dad?” Eli said, looking up, surprised. “Dad, why are you smiling?”