The 100 Year Miracle (31 page)

The first of them walked right past her, heading toward the water, looking left and right and only turned back when she called. Behind him, in a small clump, came the rest of the men, some in better shape than others, but all boat men, boat men who were looking for a boat, which she had to turn and point to there under the deck. They squinted at it with varying looks of surprise on their faces.

When it had just been her, it felt as though the boat were a big, solid thing keeping her company, but now with a whole team of strangers around her, it felt more like it was hiding, like a wounded cat that had run under the house to heal its wounds.

The men moved toward her, forming a semicircle with her at the center. She explained again what she had on the phone. They all wore windbreakers and whiffs of their bodies found their way into her nose, pushing out the ocean brine. One of them had worn aftershave, and they had the smell of sweat and work on them. They nodded while she talked, accepted her direction and the credit card she produced for the one with the clipboard. They asked few questions, and then, without making any deal of it at all, they did what they had come to do.

With caution tape and scientists blocking the most direct path to the bay, they instead lowered the mast, lifted the small craft off the jacks, and carried it with any number of heart-stopping jerks and starts up to the road. They loaded it onto a trailer they had brought, tied everything down, and navigated the twisting half mile of road to the housing development’s communal dock.

The truck, trailer, and boat had to take the road so slowly that Tilda, who would not fit in the vehicle with them, kept them in sight the entire way as she jogged along the gravel-covered shoulder. She stopped, her hands on her hips, and walked slowly from the road down to the ramp, catching her breath and steadying her words before she got to them.

The boat’s design would’ve allowed them to push it into the water, launching and landing from the beach like a canoe. But the ramp here was concrete, and so they backed the trailer into the water just like her father had when she was a child. Tilda climbed up onto the trailer and then stepped into the boat, one leg swinging over the side at a time. She knelt there, holding her breath as the boat met water for the first time.

She was suddenly nervous. She had been nervous the whole way, of course, nervous they would drop the boat, nervous it would come off the trailer, nervous that the mast, once down, would not come back up. But now she remembered to be nervous about this, the biggest thing. Would the boat even float?

She crossed her fingers inside her jacket pockets as the bay began to take
Serendipity
’s weight, and the men pushed her off the trailer and into the water.

“How’s she look?” the most senior of the men asked her. He was her age or very near it with deep gouges radiating out from his eyes and in smiling commas around his mouth that, despite the lack of a tan, spoke of a life lived almost entirely outside. He wore a frayed ball cap pulled down low over his eyes, which were green and kind, something Tilda might have taken more notice of if her stomach hadn’t been attempting to turn itself inside out.

“Good,” Tilda said before enough time had passed to really tell.

The men pulled
Serendipity
over to the long, slender dock that stretched out into the bay, just left of the ramp. Two other boats were moored there, and her boat—Tilda thought of it as hers even though she knew well enough that it wasn’t—took its own place. Together, they raised the mast, checked the rigging, and attached the sail, raising it foot by foot as they secured the slides. It was a simple boat. She had only the one sail, and with many hands, it was a fast job.

The boat had been in the water for a while by then, and the inside of the cockpit was the driest thing for twenty miles. Even with the taped sail and patched wood, Tilda was proud of herself.

“She’ll do all right,” the man said, running his hand over the side.

Tilda nodded. She had something in her throat that resembled a rubber band ball that she could neither explain nor swallow.

“You want to bring her down now?”

He was asking if she wanted to lower the sail, cover it, and tie it down, maybe ride back with them to the house, which was the very last thing Tilda could imagine wanting.

She shook her head. “Gonna take her out.”

The man smiled and nodded, and with her in the cockpit, he threw off the moorings.

*   *   *

Rachel had been up for an hour, and she had still not left her room, not even to go to the bathroom. The blinds were closed tight. Even at just past noon, the room was so dark she’d had to switch on the lamps. But the lamps weren’t the only source of light. When she unplugged the UV bulbs over her tanks, the
Artemia lucis,
thinking it was night, glowed their brilliant green. The individual flasks shimmered in the darkened room. Up close it was a bright lime both beautiful and alien.

Nearly being run down by a car had been worth it. It had been worth it because here those same samples were. They were here, and they were alive. They had lived through the night and half the day, and they were glowing and shimmering and moving and mating. She was sure they were mating.

It had worked. She had done it.

She had done it all by herself, and now the possibilities were unimaginable. She would load these and all the other samples she could carry into the truck and onto the ferry. She would have to take the truck. There was no way around it. The covered bed would be big enough to hold everything, including her small generator, powering the tanks. She would set it all up in there, a mobile lab, and she would take it straight to her apartment. She would need to get started isolating the possible proteins and synthesizing them right away. Then the
Artemia lucis
wouldn’t be needed anymore. She could make as much of the active agent as she needed, test it and tweak it. She was only the first patient. Thousands and thousands after her would get better. Millions even.

Rachel had to take a breath. There was work to be done before she could pack everything. Every detail of the final conditions mattered. She had to be able to replicate this exactly to keep the samples alive until the work could commence. Rachel had written down everything she could think of in her notes, coded of course. She wanted to type the coded messages into her laptop, but she was terrified to e-mail them to anyone or upload them anywhere. That’s what John wanted, of course. He had been the one to chase her into traffic. He had been the one spying on her from the very beginning. She knew it. She couldn’t put the secret anywhere that could be hacked. And, of course, her laptop could be stolen just like her notebook could be stolen. There needed to be contingencies.

She was making three, no four, no five—five would be better—copies of the secret notes and folding each piece of paper as small as she could make it. She shoved one into the already sliced lining of her puffy winter coat. She slid others into the lining of her bags. She pulled the footbed out of her boot. She tried to think of everything. If only she had a condom, she could have put a set of notes into that and swallowed it.

35.

Tilda sat with her hand on the tiller heading northeast across the bay toward Carpenter’s Island. It was smaller and greener than Olloo’et with fewer full-time residents and far fewer ferry stops, especially in winter. Harder to get onto and off of this time of year, almost no one bothered, which was entirely the point.

With no other boats to look out for, Tilda turned her face to the clouds. The bank hung low but was moving fast. It would cross the sound before ripping open and then pile up against the Cascades, dumping out its payload before floating up and over the mountains, turning innocuous as the clouds drifted over the dry half of the state. Olloo’et would be spared this one, she thought, but it would be big enough that visitors at the top of Craven’s Lighthouse would be able to see the rain come down in the distance like a blue-gray sheet on the horizon.

That same wind that pushed the clouds was pushing her. The sail was full, stretched really, and the hull clipped along the top of the water like a skipping stone. Multihull boats were known for speed, but this was more than she had expected. She would make landfall in less than an hour, making her early for her date with Tip.

She would use the time, she thought, to walk out the kinks. Even small waves batted
Serendipity
. Tilda held tight to the tiller to keep from losing her seat, the boat coming down hard with each skip and bruising her tailbone.

There was no question that it hurt. It hurt, and she was wet from the spray. She’d been squinting to keep the wind from her eyes, something that she had largely failed at, and so tears streamed from the corners. Her hands ached from holding the tiller and the side so tightly—or at least they would ache when they warmed and feeling returned. There was every reason to be miserable. Anyone else would’ve been miserable. But adrenaline was flooding Tilda’s bloodstream. She was excited. She was proud. She was in control of something, and Tilda could not remember a time, not in months, that she had been this happy, this purely and unquestionably happy.

*   *   *

It was hours before her shift was to start, but Rachel had no intention of working another shift. She needed more containers from the research site. She would take them, just go in and grab them like they were hers. Then she would go back down the road to the collection site from the night before and fill every one of them with samples. She had on her boots, which she’d reassembled, and her coat, and she unlocked and opened the door.

Harry’s fist was at face level. Rachel blinked, struck dumb for a moment, and then she ducked. Harry lowered his hand.

“I’m sorry. I was just about to knock.”

“I’m leaving,” Rachel said. “No time to talk.”

Harry looked over his shoulder like he’d heard something. Rachel looked, too, and saw nothing. He turned back to her, distracted. “You know why I’m here.”

Rachel stepped into the hall, forcing him to shuffle backward with his cane and make room. She closed the door behind her and pulled out her key to lock it. When she turned back around to face him, her mouth already open and ready to refuse, he was holding up a roll of money.

“This is for one month’s supply,” he said. “I can get you more as we go.” He was wearing a gray T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants that had become too big for him and drooped around his hips. It was cold in the house. It was always cold in the house just like it was always cold outside. And still, there were rings of sweat under Harry’s arms.

The money made her feel like a low-level drug dealer, which wasn’t to say that she didn’t want it. She was a post-doc after all, which meant she lived largely on six-for-three-dollar packages of ramen, and her equipment was not free. Still, she had to stay focused.

“I don’t—” she started, but Harry held up his hand to silence her.

It would have been rude except that he looked back over his shoulder again, longer this time. “Do you hear something?” Harry spoke without turning back to her. “We’re not alone right now.”

Rachel knew they weren’t alone. She was never alone in the house. It was bustling with people.

“I’m also making notes for you,” Harry said, giving her more if not all of his attention. “I made some—I made some yesterday, but I laid them down, and now I can’t—I can’t find them. There are some side effects.”

Harry held the roll out to her. It was everything she had not to take it.

“I don’t have time to prepare another dose right now. I have to leave. I’m packing.”

“Leave? Leave where?”

“I have what I need here,” Rachel said. “I can continue my work back in Seattle.”

Harry was becoming more and more agitated. “No, you don’t understand,” he said.

She went on like he hadn’t spoken. “I have just a few more things to take care of. I’ll work through the night and be gone in the morning.” Rachel slid past him and started down the stairs before stopping. “Thank you for letting me stay. I do appreciate it.”

Harry felt obscene holding the money, ridiculous and immoral all at the same time, like he’d just tried to pay her for something more than medicine. And she’d walked away from him. She was leaving.

He tried to go after her. He took a step toward the stairs even though the thought of trying to go down them scared him. He’d lost so much in the past few days—so much feeling, so much movement. His hands and his legs were weak unless he had the medicine. When he had the medicine he was all right, better than all right. He was almost as good as new. When he didn’t have it, he was worse than he had ever been, and if he’d known that going in, maybe he wouldn’t have started taking it. But he had started, and there was nothing for it. She had to tell him who else had access to the medicine. Someone would want to sell it to him.

He was going after Dr. Bell. Becca didn’t need to get involved, but he hadn’t found any logic that worked with her. He didn’t need the medicine to see her now. She came to him even when it had been hours—almost a day—since he had taken anything. After he had gone to bed, she came back to him. She was wearing different clothes, and she didn’t look like someone who had fallen from a balcony. And of course, she hadn’t. That other woman had. That poor woman, and who knew if she had been in control? He had been so sure it was Becca. So sure. Even now it was hard to believe … and those things he’d said … he never would have if Becca hadn’t made him think it was her. She had, hadn’t she? Everything was so jumbled.

Becca scared him. She stayed in his room with him all night, pacing and humming and talking about things she had done as a child. And Harry knew it wasn’t real. He told himself it wasn’t. And he looked away and squeezed his eyes closed, and he tried to sleep, but every time he opened them again, she was there.

And here she was again. She had stood behind him the entire time, and now as he was going after Rachel, she got impatient and pushed past. He felt it. He felt her hand on his arm and the weight of her shoving him off balance. Harry fell into the small decorative table Maggie had put in the corner. It jabbed into his hip, and his hand slipped off his cane. He went down on one knee, his elbow hitting hard on the table.