Wake Up Missing (10 page)

I'd been working on my birds, too. I'd started sculpting a heron, even though its long neck was going to be tricky. The snail kite was finished except for firing and painting, and that would have to wait until I got home.

I couldn't wait to get home. Every time I felt like slowing down on the treadmill, I thought about Mom and Dad, about our houseboat and the bay, and I pushed myself to keep going. I was up to a mile now, and my head only hurt a little at the end.

“Absolutely fantastic!” Dr. Ames high-fived me as I stepped off the treadmill. “You're scheduled for an MRI now, and then you can head outside. But I can already tell you've had a great first week of Phase Two. Really good work, kiddo. We'll be moving on to Phase Three in no time.”

“Thanks,” I said, but when he mentioned Phase Three, I remembered Trent, and questions tugged at my insides. After spending most of the day with Dr. Ames, it felt safe to ask now. “Do you known where Trent's been lately? We haven't seen him around. Dr. Gunther mentioned some workshop?”

“Oh!” Dr. Ames's eyes looked startled, but only for a second. Then his face relaxed into its usual smile. “Trent was discharged on Wednesday. He's gone home.”

“He has?”

“Yep, his foster parents came to pick him up. You must have missed him.” Dr. Ames headed for the hallway.

I followed him. “So . . . Trent's all better?”

“Good as new.” Dr. Ames held open the lab door. Relief seeped through me like hot chocolate on a cold, rainy day. Quentin was right. Sarah and I had misunderstood all that computer stuff somehow. Trent was fine. He'd gone home, and now that I was getting better, I'd get to go home soon, too. But something still flickered inside me.

I paused. “Can you tell me once more how Phase Three of this treatment works?”

“Sure.” Dr. Ames put a hand on my back and gave me a little push to keep me moving through the door, down the hall. “You already know Phase One was simply about getting you settled, getting your meds at the right levels.” He stopped at the door to the MRI room and held it open for me. “Phase Two is what you're doing now—the light and oxygen therapies, combined with exercise to help your brain cells repair themselves as much as possible.” He clicked a wall switch, and the laboratory lights flickered on. “And Phase Three is the gene therapy. Remember how I explained it when your mom was here?”

“I think so.”

“We use retroviruses . . . which get inside cells and use them to replicate their own DNA.” He patted the MRI table, and I stretched out on it. “When a retrovirus has healthy human DNA, it can—”

“Healthy human DNA from
where
?” I blurted.

“Remember when your doctor at home took blood for testing?”

I nodded.

“As soon as he referred you to us, he sent that blood sample here. We've been growing
your
DNA, and that's what we use. It works beautifully.” He grinned and flipped a switch on the wall, and my table started moving toward the scanner. “Hold still now, okay?”

I held still, but the whole time I was being moved toward that electrical donut that would scan my brain, I couldn't help wondering what had happened to Trent's brain. Did he really used to be that goofy kid Sarah told me all about? If he was, what changed him into the quiet boy-genius we'd seen that one morning at breakfast?

Could that happen if the doctors were using Trent's
own
DNA to repair his damaged brain tissue?

When the MRI table finally slid back out of the donut, Dr. Ames said, “All set, Cat. You can head out for some fresh air unless you have more questions for me.”

I did have more questions. But I wasn't ready to ask them yet, so I smiled and went outside. There was a great blue heron flying over. I recognized it right away and wondered if I'd be able to do that once my Phase Three was complete. Would I still know a heron from its pointed toes in flight? Would I be able to shape its long neck out of clay and etch the feathers on its wings? Would I still care?

What was going to happen to me when those new brain cells started to grow?

“See that strangler fig?” Quentin reached into a box for a handful of cereal and then pointed to a tree opposite the dock. Another thinner tree was wrapped around it, over and over, like a python. “It's the smaller one—wrapped around the cypress.”

“Yeah.” Sarah tossed a Cheerio to the gulls that had gathered around us. “It looks like it's hugging that other tree to death.”

I had to laugh. “That's how I felt when Dad hugged me at the airport before I came here.” For the first time since I got to I-CAN, I was feeling well enough to enjoy a memory from home with a smile instead of watery eyes. It was amazing what sleeping all night and waking up without a headache could do.

“The tree
is
being hugged to death, literally.” Quentin threw a shower of cereal up in the air, and the birds all rose up from the water to squawk over who got what. “The strangler fig is a parasite; it's stealing nutrients from the cypress, and eventually it'll kill its host plant. A virus kind of works that way, too, except it gets
inside
the cells of its host and hijacks them to make copies of
itself. It uses your cells to make copies of its own DNA. We studied this in advanced bio. It's what happens when you catch a cold or the flu or something.”

Quentin was trying to explain retroviruses to the rest of us, and he was doing a better job than Dr. Ames had. I was finally starting to get it. “So if you somehow change the DNA in that virus . . .” I thought for a second. “Then the virus won't be making copies of itself anymore. It'll be making . . .”

“Whatever you choose.” Quentin reached for more cereal. “All you have to do is genetically engineer the virus, so the DNA that it's copying is the kind of DNA you actually
want.
They've been using this kind of gene therapy for a while, to treat some diseases.”

“Sounds pretty awesome,” Ben said. “Why question it when Trent's better and has already gone home?”

“That's what they
say
happened.” Sarah leaned over and held out a piece of cereal to a wary seagull; it came close but wouldn't take it from her. “But the last time we saw Trent, he was a totally different person. And they had all that other DNA data in their files. What if the genetic material they introduced wasn't Trent's? What if they gave him DNA from somebody else?”

“Like . . . oh . . . I don't know . . . a dead scientist?” Ben threw a Cheerio so hard he pegged a duck in the head with it. “Whoops! Thought it was Trent's DNA but maybe it's Albert Einstein's . . . oh well.”

“I'm
serious
! I know what we saw.” Sarah whipped around to face me. “And so do you. I think you're
trying
to forget.”

“I am not.” I felt as if she'd slapped me. I wasn't trying to
forget. I wasn't . . . but sometimes, when I remembered, it was overwhelming. I was feeling so much better, and the idea that our miracle clinic might not completely fix me after all this was too much to think about. “I just . . . I don't know anymore. But I do know that I'm not dizzy today, and my head doesn't hurt, and that's all I wanted in the first place.”

“You know what I want? I want to leave.
Now.
You guys, they're starting Phase Three with Quentin and Ben and me
this
week!”

“Perfect.” Ben pretended to check his watch. “Maybe I'll be home for Sunday dinner.”

Sarah knocked Ben's plastic cup out of his hand and a shower of little round O's rained into the water. The birds went crazy scarfing them up. “Something is
wrong
, and I don't know what, and yeah, maybe it sounds dumb, but I'm scared.”

Ben shrugged.

The only sound was duck bills, opening and closing in the water.

And as soon as I forced myself to think about it again, my head got all fuzzy. But I made myself remember. There
were
too many questions.

What if Sarah was right? The idea of Dr. Ames and Dr. Gunther injecting somebody
else
's DNA into me was . . . My stomach clenched, and I closed my eyes. “I'm scared, too,” I whispered. My eyes burned with hot tears, and the shadow of a headache hung over me. I hated that it was back when I was supposed to be getting better. I couldn't think about it anymore right now. Not until we knew for sure. “We have to find out more.”

I thought Quentin and Ben would laugh like they'd been laughing at Sarah all along, but they didn't. Ben only shook his head.

“Can we get back into that office, you think?” Quentin asked. He looked up at the clinic. “Or maybe . . . I think Gunther and Ames are both inside. Scans are done for today. We could try to talk to one of them.”

Sarah and I spoke at the same time. “No.”

“If we talk about any of this, they'll know we were in the office,” Sarah said.

“And I don't trust them.” I hadn't realized that until I said it. But I didn't.

“Do you trust anybody?” Quentin asked.

The Cheerios were all gone, and the ducks had paddled away except for one, waiting to see if we'd drop more. There was a single tiny O left on the dock; I brushed it into the water and thought about Lucy. A few months ago, I would have answered his question with her name in a second, but things had changed so much.

A duck came close to snarf up that last piece of cereal, and the fine lines of feathers on its head reminded me of the bird I made for Lucy's birthday. It was a chickadee, and I brought it to her party, all wrapped up in tissue paper in a purple gift bag. When Lucy opened it, she said, “Oh wow! Did you make this?” I nodded and she smiled and set it down on the table next to a stack of iTunes gift cards and a huge jar of pastel M&M'S. I told her it was kind of fragile, but I don't know if she heard, because she was already opening something else, and somehow, my bird got buried in all the bows and torn-open envelopes, and when I was getting cake, I found it on the edge of the table with its beak broken
off. I don't know if somebody dropped it or what, but I found the beak under the table. I slipped it into my jacket pocket with the bird when I left to go home. I was planning to fix it and give it back to Lucy at school, but I couldn't make it look right glued back together, so I never did. Lucy never asked about it.

I couldn't say I trusted Lucy anymore. And I didn't have many other friends. I thought about Amberlee from my art class. She'd asked about my birds and invited me to come to art club and might have been a friend if I'd let her. But Lucy and Corinne were in charge of our cafeteria table, and they'd said no, and I hadn't said anything at all.

“Cat?” Sarah's voice brought me back. I kind of trusted Sarah, but I hardly knew her. Who was left?

I took a deep breath. “I trust my parents and Aunt Beth and Kathleen.” I folded my arms over my chest. It was weird, but then I thought about Sawgrass Molly, her dark eyes and her weathered hands and all she knew about this place. “And Molly. Maybe we should talk to Molly.”

“Her boat's here.” Sarah nodded toward the airboat, tied up to the dock. “I haven't seen her, though. She wasn't up at the clinic.”

Quentin looked around. “She's not out on the grounds. But what's in there?” He pointed toward the older building we'd seen on the property the day we arrived.

“Old storage building, I think Dr. Ames said. It's probably from when this was a military property.” I stood up, brushed the cereal crumbs from my lap, and took a deep breath. “Maybe it's a garage or something. Molly could be up there. Let's go see.”

“Fine.” Ben rolled his eyes, but I didn't care. We needed to
find Molly. We needed someone who could tell us we were going to be okay.

“Looks pretty abandoned,” Sarah said as we got closer. The building was a rust-covered shell that must have been important once but didn't look like it mattered to anyone besides barn swallows anymore. “I bet it's locked.”

Faded green paint peeled off the door, but when Quentin reached for the handle, it turned, and we stepped into an echoey cave of a room. It was gigantic, mostly empty except for an old silver-and-red plane in the far corner. There was a number on the tail and U.S. AIR FORCE painted on the side.

“That plane's gotta be from the fifties or sixties!” Quentin jogged over to it and ran his hand along the wing. “Somebody's taken it apart. The engine's gone.” He hoisted himself up to peer into the cockpit. “All the navigation stuff's torn up, too.”

He jumped down, and his sneakers thudded on the cement floor. “I don't think Molly's—”

Something clanged—metal on metal—from another part of the hangar, and we all turned. Tucked behind the plane was the entrance to a hallway that ran along one wall of the building. Quentin started down it, but I grabbed his sleeve. “What if it's not Molly? What if it's Dr. Ames? Or Dr. Gunther?”

“So what?” Quentin said. “Nobody said we couldn't come in here.”

“True.” But it still felt dangerous. “Let's go. Just be careful.”

The clanging got louder as we crept down the hall. Sarah walked so close behind me she kept stepping on the backs of my sneakers.

At the end of the hallway was a single door with a tiny rectangular window. The clanging was coming from right inside, over and over. Quentin took a deep breath and stepped up to the window.

His mouth fell open.

“What?” I whispered. “Is it Dr. Ames? Dr. Gunther?”

He shook his head. “It's Trent.”

“Look at him,” Quentin whispered, and stepped aside so I could see through the dirty glass.

Trent sat on a high stool, leaning over a long, narrow table filled with engine parts and wires, batteries and radio transmitters, what looked like the old plane's navigational instruments, all strung together, and other electronics I couldn't recognize. It had to be the workshop Dr. Gunther mentioned in the cafeteria. The room was about the size of the swimming pool, with two more tables lined up behind the first one, all overflowing with scientific equipment—beakers and test tubes on one table, nests of tangled wires and gadgets on the others. The walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with more electronics, supplies, and books . . . rows and rows of books. Trent sat in the center of it all, focused with the intensity of the sun.