The Things That Keep Us Here (2 page)

TWO

T
HE BIRD TUMBLED IN FREE FALL, ITS WINGS OUTSTRETCHED
, its yellow beak gaping wide. A cat waited below, a wide grin splitting its whiskered face.

Ann tilted the painting toward her. “Wow, Hannah. This is some story.”

“Her kitten caught a bird yesterday,” Maddie said. She and Hannah sat close together, their chairs practically touching. “And
killed
it.” She shuddered.

Hannah nodded, a little ruefully, Ann thought. “My mom says Furball is a real hunter.”

Across the table, Jodi sniggered. Her sheet of paper lay before her, untouched. “With a name like that, he’d better be.”

“You’re just jealous,” Maddie said. “You just wish
you
had a new kitten.”

So did Maddie. But that would never happen.

“It looks like you’re having trouble getting started, Jodi,” Ann said. “Why don’t you go through the book on my desk for ideas?”

“I
know
what I want to do.” Jodi narrowed her eyes and stuck out her lip. “I
want
to make a story about an airplane, but
you
said the Aborigines don’t have planes.”

So Jodi had been paying attention. Good for her. Sometimes Ann wondered if Jodi had some sort of attention disorder. Next time she saw Jodi’s mom at the mailbox, she’d find a polite way to ask. Ann barely knew Sue Guarnieri, so no telling how she’d react, even if Ann was the child’s teacher. “Well, this is your story, Jodi, not an Aborigine’s. You can paint an airplane if you like. Maybe you could paint a story about a trip you’re planning on taking with your parents.”

The corners of Jodi’s mouth turned down. “My mom and dad don’t take me on their trips. They say I’m too young. They make me stay home with Nana and Poppa. And Nana makes me wear stupid dresses and Poppa won’t let me drink pop at dinner.”

Until she started teaching, Ann had no idea how much personal stuff children revealed in the classroom. She could just imagine what Kate and Maddie had been saying this past year. “Well, you can make a picture about the trips you’d like to take when you’re old enough.”

A heavy sigh, then Jodi dragged the paper toward herself. “I guess.”

Beside Jodi, Heyjin worked on, seemingly oblivious to the chatter around her. Maybe she couldn’t follow it. The principal had assured her that Heyjin spoke English, but the girl had hardly spoken a word since appearing in Ann’s class two weeks ago. Instead, she usually just sat and nibbled on her fingernails, watching everyone out of the corners of her eyes.

But today she was really digging in. Perhaps Heyjin had finally caught on. Or maybe there was something about this particular art style that spoke to her.

“Heyjin?” Ann said. “How’s your painting coming?”

At the sound of her name, the little girl glanced up, her dark eyes sober behind the round lenses of her glasses, her black hair parted precisely down the middle and tied into tight pigtails. She lowered her head and went back to work.

So maybe she didn’t understand English.

Ann observed the child for a moment. Heyjin certainly seemed to have grasped the process. She dipped the cotton swab into the paint and coated the tip with just the right amount of paint, exactly as Ann had demonstrated, before carefully carrying it to the paper and pressing firmly to form a tidy dot. But when Ann looked to the paper itself, she realized that the concept might have eluded Heyjin: the entire sheet was peppered with uniform brown dots, every one of them barely perceptible against the black surface. No story there at all.

Ann could suggest that Heyjin try a different color. But the girl seemed so content. Ann decided to let her be. Art was all about self-expression. Heyjin certainly seemed to be expressing something. Ann just didn’t know what it was.

She glanced up and found Maddie watching her. “What’s your story about, honey?”

Maddie curled her arm protectively around her work. “Don’t look until I’m done.”

But Ann had already glimpsed enough to guess: happy family. The symbols for father, mother, and two children marched down the middle of the page. A big arc soared over their heads. Was that what Maddie imagined would happen to them, that after the storms of this past year, a rainbow would climb into the sky? But not every story had a happy ending.

“Mrs. Brooks?” Jimmy had his hand up. “I forgot what you do for a campfire.”

Ann forced down the knot of sadness lodged in her throat and turned to her class. “Does anyone else remember?”

Hannah waved her arm. “It’s a circle with a dot in the middle.”

“Very good, Hannah.” Walking to the board, Ann picked up a stick of chalk and drew the dashes for rain, the wavy lines for river, the oblong man and semicircular woman. “Don’t forget how important color is. The Aborigines use color to express mood.” Now she made the honey ant and the kangaroo. “Red for happy—”

A siren shrieked, shattering the calm. Puzzled, Ann turned from the board. A fire drill wasn’t on the schedule, not so far as she knew.

A few children were standing and scraping their chairs back. Others groaned and pretended not to hear, still bent over their drawings.

“Come on, everybody.” Ann clapped her hands. “Who’s my line leader?”

Steven waved. “Me!”

“You come right here and stand by the door. Everyone line up behind Steven.”

“But I’m not done,” Jodi said. “Just leave it, honey. Come on.”

“I only have to do this one part.”

“It’s okay. Come on. Let’s go.”

Jodi pushed back her chair and dragged herself over to where the other children lined up by the door. But Heyjin was still in her seat, looking around with wide eyes. Had she any idea what was going on?

“It’s all right, Heyjin. It’s the fire alarm.” Ann held out her hand. Even if the child didn’t understand the language, she could follow gestures. “We have to go.”

Heyjin allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.

“Follow Maddie, okay?” Ann guided her into line. She strode to the front of the room. “All right, Steven. Let’s go.”

They burst through the heavy door onto the playground. Groups of children stood clustered here and there, chattering excitedly as more children streamed from the building. A little girl stumbled, and Ann helped her up, leading her class to a spot by the swings.

“It’s freezing,” Jodi said. “I need my coat.”

Which was back in her homeroom, hanging from its hook. “Stamp your feet,” Ann said. “Think warm thoughts.” She went down the straggly line of shivering children, counting.

Another teacher was going down her line. “It’s the real thing,” she said in a low voice.

Ann glanced at her. “What happened?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “One of the parents was showing the fourth-graders how a volcano works and blew up the science lab.”

“Omigod,” Jodi wailed. “We’re going to be out here
forever.”

“Oh, it won’t be that long.” Ann absently patted Jodi’s shoulder. She’d counted nineteen children. That wasn’t right. There were twenty in Maddie’s class. She began counting again.

“I want to go back inside.”

“Can I play on the playground while we wait?”

Maddie, Hannah, Jodi
…

“Is that smoke?”

“No way.”

“Yeah, right there. See? Coming out of that window.”

Kristen, Michael, Foster, Stephanie
… Wait a minute. Where was Heyjin? Ann spun in a circle, scanning the playground for a petite child in a bright red sweatshirt. “Does anybody see Heyjin?”

Maddie shook her head as Jodi said, “She’s inside.”

That couldn’t be. Ann herself had placed her in line.

Jodi shrugged. “She doesn’t
ever
go outside.”

“It’s true, Mom,” Maddie said. “Heyjin doesn’t like the playground.”

Ann stared at Maddie, then wheeled around to the other teacher. “Would you keep an eye on my class?”

No way back into the building but through the main entrance, the black double doors standing wide open. The unrelenting alarm wailed as red warning lights pulsed along the ceiling. No one stood in the hall. The front-office staff was gone, and classroom after classroom stood empty.

A gray haze drifted down the far corridor. Ann wheeled in the opposite direction, almost running toward the art room, and yanked open the door. Everything was as they’d left it, papers strewn across the tables, chairs akimbo. No sign of Heyjin anywhere. Could Jodi have been mistaken? No. Maddie had nodded in agreement.

The supply closet. There Heyjin crouched, her arms around her bent knees, a pigtail undone and hanging in glossy tendrils.

Relief rushed through Ann, cold and filling. “Oh, thank God, Heyjin!” She held out her hand. “Come on. We have to go.”

Heyjin shook her head hard enough to dislodge another plait of her hair.

A fire truck wailed in the distance. “I’ll carry you.”

The girl pressed herself deeper into the corner. “I not going.”

So she did speak English. The siren grew louder. Colored lights sliced across the ceiling. She bent and gripped the child beneath her armpits, pulled her out of her hiding place.

Heyjin wriggled and twisted, trying to get free. “No, no.”

“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.” Ann pressed her to her shoulder and ran down the smoky hall, Heyjin’s small hands flat against her and pushing.

Maddie would be panicked, seeing the emergency vehicles and knowing her mother was still inside.

The doors were just ahead. The siren shrieked overhead in great pulsing bursts, and Heyjin writhed in Ann’s arms. The bulky shapes of the firefighters appeared in the doorway, dragging the long fire hose. Their masked faces turned toward her as she pushed past them.

Outside, she sank, sweating and breathless, onto a bench. Heyjin scrambled out of her arms and onto the bench beside her. Ann wanted to shake the child. What on earth had prompted her to behave in such a way? “Heyjin, what
is
the matter?”

Heyjin looked around at the people massing on the grassy slope, and the fire trucks lining the curb. She shrank back, turning her head and burying her face against Ann’s shoulder. She grew almost limp. Ann slid an arm around her and drew her close. She felt the hard beating of the child’s racing heart, the dampness of the little girl’s tears seeping through her blouse. “Heyjin?”

“My daddy die. My daddy did.” The words came out muffled.

Ann held her breath. She’d had no idea. Why wasn’t this in the child’s file? Why on earth hadn’t anyone told her about Heyjin’s problems? “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”

Heyjin lifted her chin and looked at Ann. Her cheeks were pink and the lenses of her glasses smeared with tears. She held her gaze for a long moment. It was as though she was searching for something. Then she spoke. “First the chickens get sick. Then Daddy did.”

There were no poultry farms in this school district. Then Ann understood. “In Korea?”

Heyjin nodded.

Korea was dangerous. There had been several barely contained flu outbreaks there. Millions of chickens had been slaughtered. A hundred people had died. One of them must have been this child’s father. Ann pulled the child into her embrace. “You’re safe now, honey. I promise. You’re safe.”

After a moment, she felt the girl’s arms come up and circle her neck. Ann held her close, the child’s hair soft against her cheek, and rocked her. She couldn’t imagine what Heyjin had witnessed back in Korea. It was a miracle she’d escaped unharmed.

It was a miracle they’d let her into the country.

Heyjin cuddled closer and spoke softly into Ann’s ear. Ann had to bend to hear the child’s whispered words. “It coming here.”

THREE

P
ETER LIFTED A HAND TO LEWIS AS HE HURRIED DOWN
the corridor. He owed the guy a draft of the grant they were working on, but it’d have to wait.

He sliced his keycard through the reader. The lock sprang open and he stepped into the carpeted veterinary science suite of labs and offices. Pushing open the door to his lab, he saw Shazia working at the bench along one side of the room. Another student worked the microcentrifuge beside her.

Peter frowned at him. “You chewing gum?”

“Sorry.” The boy shot upright and looked around. Peter pointed to the trash can. The kid had probably been chewing it when he’d entered the room. A common mistake but one that needed correcting. With all the pathogens in here, they could never relax their guard.

Shazia scraped back her stool. “Peter?”

“Hold on.” Peter reached for the phone on the counter. “Dan,” he said when the fellow answered. “I’m going to put you on speaker.”

“What’s up?” echoed Dan’s voice.

Peter set down his cooler. “We’ve got a die-off.”

A rustle of paper over the phone. “Where?”

“Sparrow Lake. Northwest tip.”

“How bad?”

“Two, three hundred. All of them teal.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Looks viral to me.”

“Shit.” A pause. “You think we’ve got Qinghai Lake on our hands?”

“I don’t know.” Peter had pored over the photographs from that massive die-off in China a number of years before, when avian influenza had killed more than five thousand migratory birds. It was too early to know what was going on here, but Dan had given voice to Peter’s greatest fear. What if H5N1 had landed here, right in Peter’s backyard?

“When will you get back to me?”

Dan knew as well as anyone that running the initial tests was a full-day process. It was impossible to make it go any faster. “First thing in the morning. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”

Shazia had come up to stand beside Peter. She was shaking her head at him. He held up a finger.
Hold on
.

“Call me on my cell when you know something,” Dan told him.

Peter disconnected. “What?”

“Professor Alfonso’s secretary stopped by to ask if you could fill in for him today. He’s stuck at the airport in Madrid.”

The undergraduate epidemiology class Peter had agreed to guest lecture the following week. He didn’t have anything prepared. Lord knew where his old slides were. Probably stuffed into one of the filing cabinets that lined the hall outside his office. Maybe still at the house.

“I could do it, if you want.” Shazia stood close, looking up at him.

It was a generous offer. It’d be good for her to gain the teaching experience, but was it fair to the undergraduates who really needed to master this material? Shazia verged on the shy side, and when she was anxious, her voice dipped to a whisper. Peter looked down at the test tubes nestled among the ice packs in his cooler. He glanced at the wall clock. One-ten. Classes started at one-thirty. By the time he got out of the lecture hall, it’d be going on three. But Alfonso had helped him out of a bind once before.

Oh, hell. “That’s all right. Why don’t you get started on these?” She nodded, clearly relieved.

It was a routine procedure, and she was a smart girl. She wouldn’t make any mistakes.

PETER LOOKED AROUND AT THE STUDENTS THAT FILLED THE HALL
. A number of them looked back. “Good afternoon. My name is Peter Brooks. I’m a professor over in the School of Veterinary Medicine. Professor Alfonso couldn’t be here this afternoon. He asked me to come and talk to you about zoonotic disease.”

A few yawns. Some low-level chatter along the back rows.

He set his briefcase by the podium and loosened his tie. “Let me ask you guys something. How many of you have gotten your flu shot?”

Some kids straightened in their seats. A couple of hands went up.

“Let me guess. Your parents made you.” Laughter. More students were sitting up. “Not my mom,” one called out. “She says the flu shot doesn’t work.”

A common misperception. “Well, in a sense, she’s right. It only protects against the strains that scientists predict will be circulating in a given year. We’ll get to that in more detail shortly. Anyone want to take a stab at how many Americans die each year from influenza?”

Another straggle of waving hands. Peter pointed to a girl in the second row with blunt black hair and a gold hoop hooked through her eyebrow.

“Ten thousand?” she said.

“Try thirty to forty thousand.”

There was a murmur and a general shifting of position.

“That’s slightly more than one percent of the U.S. population. Not terribly significant … unless you happen to be one of those thirty to forty thousand.”

A few students scrawled notes. Good. That sort of statistic would definitely be on the final exam.

“So, you might say that influenza is nothing to sneeze at.” A few smiles.

“Anyone know how many influenza variants there are?”

“Two?”

“Close. There are three. Influenza C is a mild respiratory ailment, usually referred to as the common cold. Influenza B is the human variant and can lead to epidemics. That’s generally the one that the flu vaccine addresses. And then there’s A, the avian variant, also known as bird flu. It also happens to be the only one that can result in pandemics.”

Peter looked to a T-shirted boy with long sideburns sprawled in his chair. “You might want to jot that down.”

Hastily, the boy righted himself and flipped open his binder.

Peter slid a fresh sheet of acetate onto the projector and lifted his pen. After so many years of using PowerPoint, it was nice to return to the old-fashioned, hands-on way of teaching. “Pandemic.” He underlined the first syllable.
“Pan
, a prefix that means all. In 1918, a pandemic swept across the entire globe and killed fifty to one hundred million people.”

The smiles faded.

“Let’s look at how influenza A can develop into pandemic flu.” He drew a line parallel to the bottom of the screen. “Imagine that H3N1 is the current influenza A virus. It’s going along infecting people.” The line sloped up. “Those people who survive develop immunity. At the same time, we develop a vaccine, which we use to inoculate key players, such as day-care providers, emergency room doctors.” He turned and wiggled his eyebrows at the class. “University professors.”

Laughter.

He turned back to the board. “And so on.” The line flattened out.

“Now we’ve got two populations that can’t pass the virus on. We call this ‘community immunity.’ As a result, the virus now produces fewer and fewer human infections and may eventually have to move to wildlife. That specific virus is out of the picture, at least temporarily.”

The line dwindled to a series of dots.

“But wait. All of a sudden, it alters the form of its protein receptors so that our vaccines are no longer effective.”

Now the line rose up in a second gentle slope.

“Once again we have to build up a new sort of immunity. Which we eventually do.”

A second flattening out. The line resembled a series of rounded steps climbing across the board.

“This is antigenic drift.” He wrote the term in capital letters and underscored it. “This is what the World Health Organization is working hard to monitor and control. Anyone have any idea how?”

A flurry of raised hands. He pointed to a fair-haired boy in the back.

“By tracking the virus in poultry. And killing it when they find it.”

“Exactly. Now, antigenic
drift
is no small thing. But antigenic
shift
is Freddy Krueger, Dracula, and Hannibal Lecter rolled into one.”

Now every head was up. They should be. He wasn’t exaggerating.

“Antigenic shift occurs when two viruses, one avian and one human, mix together within a single host.” He sketched two blobs with antennae. “The pig is ideally suited for this role, because it’s susceptible to both avian and human influenza viruses. So let’s say these two viruses meet and mingle within a pig. Out pops a new virus, one that carries avian code but has human protein receptors. Now we have humans getting infected with an avian virus.” An alien-looking thing with protruding nodules. “What’s the significance of this?” He scanned the class and nodded to a boy in a front seat.

“Um, we don’t have any immunity against it?”

“Worse than that. We don’t have any community immunity against it, and we have no quick way of attaining it. By the time science catches up, this little guy will have ripped through the entire human population”—another series of circles—“and utterly devastated it.” Peter slashed his pen through every circle.

A hushed silence, then someone said, “That’s what’s happening with H5N1.”

“That’s what we’re
worried
can happen with H5,” Peter corrected. “That’s why WHO has issued alerts, why our health departments are stockpiling latex gloves, and why I’m freezing my butt off beside Sparrow Lake at five in the morning.”

A ripple of laughter.

Someone called out, “Do you think we’re going to have a pandemic?”

Peter regarded the young faces turned toward him. He thought of all those mute bobbing birds, felled by the same sharp blow. “What does the science tell us?”

Silence. They were thinking about this.

“Put yourself in the virus’s place. If you had a good thing going, hooking up with everybody in town, would you move on?” Nervous laughter.

“Of course you wouldn’t. You’d hang around as long as possible.”

“So that means yes?”

“That means …” Peter reached over and shut off the projector. He faced the room. Every head was lifted, every pen stilled. “It’s inevitable. Maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in yours or even your children’s lifetimes. But sometime.”

He didn’t say the last part. That the world’s population was greater than ever. That when the pandemic did arrive, it was going to result in the most devastating loss of life mankind had ever seen, many times worse than what had happened almost a century before. That science was helpless to stop it.

These were kids, after all. No need to terrify them.