The Body Human Read Free

this bad.
    So after Sean was born at Emerton Memorial and Randy got engaged the day I moved my baby “home” to my dying aunt’s, I bought a Smith & Wesson revolver in the city and shot out the windows of Randy’s supposedly empty house across the river. I hit the gardener, who was helping himself to the Satler liquor cabinet in the living room. The judge gave me seven-and-a-half to ten, and I served five, and that only because my lawyer pleaded post-partum depression. The gardener recovered and retired to Miami, and Dr. Satler went on to become Chief of Medicine at Emerton Memorial and a lot of other important things in the city, and Sylvia never visited me once in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Nobody did, except Jack. Who, when Sy l via-and-Elizabeth were strutting their stuff at Emerton High, had already dropped out and was bagging groceries at the Food Mart. After I got out of Bedford, the only re a son the foster-care people would give me Sean back was because Jack married me.
    We live in Emerton , but not of it.
    Sylvia puts her kuchen on the kitchen table and sits down without being asked. I can see she’s done with apologizing. She’s still smart enough to know there are things you can’t apologize for.
    “Eliz…Betty, I’m not here about the past. I’m here about Dr. Bennett’s murder.”
    “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
    “It has to do with all of us. Dan Moore lives next door to you.”
    I don’t say anything.
    “He and Ceci and Jim Dyer and Tom Brunelli are the ringleaders in a secret organization to close Emerton M e morial Hospital. They think the hospital is a breeding ground for the infections resistant to every antibiotic except endozine . Well, they’re right about that—all hospitals are. But Dan and his group are determined to punish any doctor who prescribes endozine , so that no organisms develop a resistance to it, too, and it’s kept effective in case one of them needs it.”
    “Sylvia,”—the name tastes funny in my mouth, after all this time—“I’m telling you this doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
    “And I’m telling you it does. We need you, Eliz…Betty. You live next door to Dan and Ceci . You can tell us when they leave the house, who comes to it, anything suspicious you see. We’re not a vigilante group, Betty, like they are. We aren’t doing anything illegal. We don’t kill people, and we don’t blow up bridges, and we don’t threaten people like the Nordstrums who get endozine for their sick kids but are basically uneducated blue collar—”
    She stops. Jack and I are basically uneducated blue collar. I say coldly, “I can’t help you, Sylvia.”
    “I’m sorry, Betty. That wasn’t what I meant. Look, this is more important than anything that happened a decade and a half ago! Don’t you understand ?” She leans toward me across the table. “The whole country’s caught in this thing. It’s already a public health crisis as big as the Spa n ish influenza epidemic of 1918, and it’s only just started! Drug-resistant bacteria can produce a new generation every twenty minutes, they can swap resistant genes not only within a species but across different species. The bacteria are winning . And people like the Moores are taking a d vantage of that to contribute further to the breakdown of even basic social decency.”
    In high school Sylvia had been on the debating team. But so, in that other life, had I. “If the Moores ’ group is trying to keep endozine from being used, then aren’t they also fighting against the development of more drug-resistant bacteria? And if that’s so, aren’t they the ones, not you, who are ultimately aiding the country’s public health?”
    “Through dynamiting. And intimidation. And murder. Betty, I know you don’t approve of those things. I wouldn’t be here telling you about our countergroup if I thought you did. Before I came here, we looked very carefully at you. At the kind of person