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DAVID HAD OFTEN SEEN the woman and child around the museum. They came maybe once a month, the boy eager, the mother patient, the two of them a perfect example of why he did this work.
And now he’d scared them off. She’d asked the question, hadn’t she? How was he supposed to know she didn’t want an answer? When he’d started to explain her smile had frozen as fast as that mammoth and she’d looked at him as if he’d committed a hit-and-run or something.
He didn’t have any reason to feel guilty. “Ma’am?” That sounded all wrong. Ma’am didn’t suit her.
Their rush out the door slowed, then stopped. She directed the boy to a cutaway view of hibernating insects and rodents before rejoining him.
“If you were going to apologize, it isn’t necessary. You were trying to do your job. My son will be fine.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize.”
That ticked her off. “What did you want, then?”
Her phone number, for one thing. The thought came out of nowhere. He had no business wanting her phone number. “The gift shop has a very good book about the mammoth, if you’re interested. Pictures. Maps. Discussion.”
“Does it? Thank you.”
A dismissive smile and she was on her way. She had no intention of going anywhere near the book. Why did she bring the boy to the museum so often if she didn’t want him to understand how the world worked?
They trailed out of the room, the boy speaking in an anxious tone that made it impossible for David to continue feeling guiltless. He’d drawn some conclusions from his brief look at the hibernation display.
“Mom, if we got buried in snow I guess we’d be all right. Because bees and mice and gophers are all right deep down in the snow.”
“There won’t be an ice age, Chris. That’s what the man said. We won’t be buried in snow. Not ever.”
She was good at conveying a mother’s certainty. What she didn’t seem to realize was that her son had grown beyond being helped by it.
THE BOOK David Whoever had recommended was displayed near the front of the gift shop, all one hundred glossy pages of it, with unnecessarily detailed and colorful photos of the frozen animal and its stomach contents. Hard cover. Forty-eight bucks. Gwyn flipped through it, trying to decide if it would be forty-eight dollars well spent, or just an invitation to sleepless nights for Chris.
“Can we go home, Mom?”
Gwyn looked at him with concern. He liked the gift shop almost as much as the museum itself. Since the store’s glow-in-the-dark star charts had first held his attention when he was two she’d found most of his birthday and Christmas presents here. “Sure we can. Don’t you want to get lunch in the cafeteria first?”
He shrugged.
“Just home?”
His shoulders came up again. He looked miserable. Gwyn led him out of the gift shop, wishing that David person could see what he’d done. Chris had nothing to say on the ride home, only showing a spark of interest when she whispered in his ear, “How about Johansson’s?”
They rode a couple of blocks past their usual stop, and got off near a small brick building on the river side of the street. Johansson’s Fine Foods carried gourmet treats, locally grown produce and homemade take-out meals for when people had no time to cook. It had its own small bakery, too, where it made the richest desserts Gwyn had ever tasted. It was a place for special occasions or emergency spirit lifting.
As she’d hoped, the display case of chocolates got Chris’s attention. He considered a dark chocolate car, a milk chocolate hammer and a hazelnut hedgehog, then settled on the one she’d suspected he would, a six-inch-high hollow tyrannosaurus that cost as much as a restaurant lunch.
“Do we want anything else? Oysters?” His head shaking and face screwing increased as she went on, “Snails? Squid?” She looked around the store, hoping to keep going until he laughed. “Parsnips? Fennel bulbs? Oh—”
Strawberries. Tiers of strawberries in pint containers. Picked that morning, the sign said. No pesticides. They were small, lusciously red and smelled sweeter than any berries Gwyn had seen in her entire life. They hardly cost less than the dinosaur chocolate, but she put a pint on the counter anyway, along with two bottles of a fizzy orange drink from Italy that she’d tried before and loved.
“We’d better stop there. My purse is empty.”
Chris looked up from his chocolate, his gaze sharp. Gwyn wished she hadn’t said anything about money.
“Don’t worry. There’s more in the bank. And even more waiting for me at work.”
Outside, pansies grew in window boxes and there were a few round tables by the sidewalk. Gwyn picked a spot partly shaded by a boulevard tree and put the berries in the middle of the table. With all those seeds and hollows she usually scrubbed berries until they were almost jam, but she put her faith in the no pesticides claim. She picked the one on the very top and popped the whole thing in her mouth. Biting into it was a revelation. It was like taking a drink. She couldn’t believe how fresh, how sweet, how juicy the berry was. She looked at Chris, his feet swinging slowly, a faraway expression on his face.
“You’ve got to have a strawberry, Chris.”
Still holding his dinosaur in his right hand, he took a berry with his left. “Mmm.” He took another.
“That’s the taste of sunshine,” she told him.
He frowned. Space was one of his favorite things, and he took it seriously. “The sun is made of gas.” He watched her for a moment, looking ready to argue if she had anything else silly to say. She confined herself to eating berries, and his attention drifted.
Hers did, too. Back to the damp-legged man at the museum. He must be new. She didn’t remember seeing him before, and she couldn’t have seen him and forgotten. It was years since she’d noticed a man, noticed in a way that made looking at his chest to read his name tag uncomfortable. That kind of feeling—the sudden awareness, the catch in the throat—she had thought belonged only to Duncan.
Of course Duncan had noticed her at the same time. He’d given her a slow smile that started small and got bigger until his eyes sparkled. That was it for her, she was a goner. David Whoever, on the other hand, had chosen to talk about mammoth steaks.
Chris was still playing with his dinosaur. He walked it along the table, leaving tiny chocolate footprints on the plastic. It sniffed the berries, and growled, then picked a fight with a paper napkin. Maybe he hadn’t found the museum visit as upsetting as it had seemed. He looked like her pre–Day After Tomorrow Chris, all about animals and space. Thanks to the strawberries and the filtered sunlight she felt more cheerful herself.
“That dinosaur’s headed for extinction,” she said when she noticed the footprints getting bigger and stickier. “You’d better eat it while you can.”
Chris bit off its head. He chewed and swallowed, then licked his fingers.
“Well,” he said slowly, after finishing another mouthful, and from his preoccupied tone she knew he hadn’t been thinking about dinosaurs after all, “people live way up north where it’s always winter.”
She had to remind herself not to mention elves or toy shops. “The Inuit.”
“In igloos.”
“I don’t think they live in igloos anymore.”
“But they did. So we could keep warm and get food even if our house was ice.”
She’d never seen so much uncertainty in his eyes. “We can do anything we have to do, sweetheart. But our house will never be ice.” She put the remaining strawberries and drinks back in the shopping bag and handed Chris a napkin to rub the melted chocolate from his hands.
On the way home he went back to telling her the plot of The Day After Tomorrow. She listened more to his voice than to the story. It was higher pitched than usual and every sentence finished with an uncertain upswing, an unasked question. Maybe it would help if they spent the afternoon reading fairy tales. “The Little Mermaid,” “Hansel and Gretel.” He’d heard those often enough without believing they were true. Or maybe a complete change of pace would be better. They could go to the park and try to skip stones on the river.
“That man was a scientist, right?”
She saw the pitfall immediately. “The one who talked to us at the museum? I don’t know what he does there.”
“The actor wasn’t a scientist and the screenwriter wasn’t a scientist but the man we talked to today, he was a scientist.”
“We don’t know,” she repeated. “All kinds of people work there. Even artists, to make the displays. And accountants to work on the budget.”
Chris gave her another of those looks. She didn’t blame him. David Whoever hadn’t sounded like an artist or an accountant. She tried to think of something more convincing. “And tour guides.”
“And scientists, I bet.”
She had to agree. Scientists definitely worked at the museum. Distracting Chris with stories and outings wasn’t going to work.
CHAPTER THREE
TWELVE-THIRTY, and Chris wasn’t ready for school. Wearing only Spider-Man briefs, he stood on top of a brand-new shirt in the middle of his bedroom. A narrow line of red trickled down his heel.
He looked at Gwyn guiltily. “I’m bleeding.”
It was almost a week since their visit to the museum and Gwyn was still wishing they hadn’t gone. She’d tried to keep Chris’s days low-key. They’d walked along the river, curled up on the sofa reading and played games like Snakes and Ladders, but nothing had kept his attention from the idea of an impending ice age.
The point he’d fixated on was that the frozen mammoth from the movie was real. If it was real then maybe other parts of the story were, too. Like the field of ice that collapsed under one of the “scientists,” like glaciers melting and filling the oceans with too much fresh water. If he wasn’t miserable enough trying to get his five-year-old head around those questions, Mrs. Henderson—following Gwyn’s instructions—had encouraged him to play outside a couple of evenings ago, but she had ignored the bottle of mosquito repellent kept by the door. Chris was covered with bites.
He had been cantankerous all morning, scratching fiercely and challenging Gwyn at every opportunity. After falling asleep in the rocker on the porch she wasn’t in the best of shape herself. At five-thirty she’d woken to crickets so loud she couldn’t believe there wasn’t a bylaw against them and a monster kink in her neck that no amount of massaging had fixed.
Holding his foot away from her clothes she carried Chris to the bathroom. “You said you weren’t going to scratch those bites.”
“They got itchy.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I could have got the calamine lotion for you.”
“I hate that stuff!”
“You sound mad at me. I didn’t bite you.”
He was in no mood to smile. Gwyn sat him on the narrow vanity with his foot in the sink. Cool running water diluted the trail of blood, then washed it away. She dabbed peroxide on the spots of broken skin and stuck on a web of Band-Aids.
“We’re going to be late.”
Chris was silent. If he missed the second bell he’d have to take a note from the teacher to the principal’s office. After a moment he said, “I didn’t get blood on the carpet.”
It would have been nice if he’d kept it off his new shirt, too. “You did your best, right?” They nodded at each other. “Off you go. Get dressed as fast as you can.”
While she waited she kept checking her watch, as if that would help her get to the bus on time. Sooner than she expected Chris came to the door, dragging his backpack behind him. He wore a long-sleeved button-up shirt that looked silly with his shorts.
She hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding her keys. “Go back and change into a T-shirt, Chris.” He didn’t move so she added, “You know, short sleeves, over the head?”
“I like this shirt.”
“That one goes with long pants. You might get teased at recess.”
“I don’t care.”
Gwyn put her head to one side and stared at him. He stared back, unblinking. He was younger and smaller than most of the boys in his class, more verbal, and not the least bit interested in sports, unless chess counted. Not that he could play it, yet. He just trotted the knights across the squares and had the bishops confer with the king and queen. The other kindergarteners weren’t exactly tough guys, either, but what would happen next year, or a few years from now?
“Chris, do as I say.”
He sighed, and trailed back to his room. She heard drawers scraping back and forth, then he returned wearing a T-shirt that looked as if it belonged in the laundry hamper. The mood he was in, maybe he had got it from the hamper.
“Let’s go. Quick as you can.”
That turned out not to be very quick. Every few steps Chris slowed down to scrape his sandaled foot against his ankle, or rub his hand over a swollen bite on his arm. He began to scratch it, absentmindedly at first, then angrily.
“Don’t, hon.”
“I have to.” Still scratching, he stopped walking so he could look up at the sky, turning in circles to see all around. “Shouldn’t there be some clouds? There’s usually clouds.”
“We don’t have time to talk about the weather, Chris.”
“But shouldn’t—”
“Chris!”
Minutes after the last bell, they arrived at the school’s front entrance. She watched him go through, looking grumpy even from the back. The sight made her ache. Wasn’t five supposed to be a happy age?
“IT’S FUNGUS,” said the woman in the first bed. “That’s what I heard. You slap ’em and you drive this fungus they carry right into your bloodstream. Like a poison dart. And that’s it. There’s nothing anybody can do for you.”
Gwyn stood holding a lunch tray and wishing she hadn’t mentioned Chris’s discomfort. She’d arrived at the hospital half an hour late, overheated and flustered from hurrying, and found herself explaining why to everyone she saw.
“You don’t even need fungus,” the woman’s roommate added. “Any old infection will do the job. My cousin had a mosquito bite that he would not leave alone. Next thing we know a red line goes snaking up his arm from the bite. And it just keeps going. Up to his elbow. Up to his shoulder. It gets to his heart and—” she slapped her hands together sharply “—that was it. He keeled over right in front of me.” She nodded at Gwyn. “But don’t you worry about your boy. Things are different now.”
“You want to put oatmeal in his bath,” the first woman advised. “That’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Maybe an antibiotic cream would be a good idea, too.
She slid the tray into place on the meal cart and went into the next room. A smiling, fully dressed man sat in the armchair beside an empty bed.
“There you are!” he said. “All the nurses were worried about you.”
“You’re exaggerating, Mr. Scott.”
“Having trouble with your son?”
Gwyn wished she could tell him about Chris’s ice age fears. It wasn’t that Mr. Scott knew about science. He’d worked in the Grill Room bakery at Eaton’s from his high school graduation until the store closed. It wasn’t even that he knew about children. He and his wife didn’t have a family. Maybe she just wanted to complain to someone about David Whoever. She couldn’t use a senior citizen with a heart condition for that.
“We live near the river so we have lots of mosquitoes,” she said. “Poor kid’s one big bite.”
“I remember what that was like.” Mr. Scott sounded nostalgic. “You get out with your chums and you don’t even notice the darn things until you’re home and want to go to sleep. My mother used to soak cloths in baking soda and water and spread them on my skin. Cool water, that’s the ticket.”
“I’ll try it. Thanks.” Gwyn picked up her lunch tray. “All ready to go?”
“Yup, they’re cutting me loose. I’ll miss you.”
“I bet you won’t.” A bowl of pudding sat untouched beside his plate. “Want to keep that for later? You never know how long you’ll wait to get signed out.”
“They won’t let me.”
It was true the kitchen liked having all the dishes returned at the same time. Mr. Scott’s diet didn’t allow many treats, though. Gwyn left the bowl and spoon on his over-bed table, put a finger to her lips and carried his tray out of the room.
In the corridor she almost barreled into the head nurse. Mrs. Byrd always looked stern, whether or not she was feeling that way, so it alarmed anyone with a guilty conscience to find her on their heels. It was just once, Gwyn thought, just half an hour.
“Trouble at home today?”
“I’m sorry. We took too long getting ourselves organized.”
“Could you have called?”
It had seemed like one more thing to do, a few more minutes between herself and the bus. “I guess I hoped to get here on time.”
Mrs. Byrd still looked stern, but not necessarily disapproving. Gwyn felt a familiar anxiety, an eagerness to please that made her feel eight years old. For years, with the School of Nursing’s traditional pleated cap on her head, its gold pin over her breast and the hospital’s crest on her sleeve Mrs. Byrd had been the closest thing to her mother Gwyn could see. It gave her feelings of fondness for the woman that made no sense otherwise.
“I’ll need you to make up the half hour you missed. There’s plenty for you to do after your regular work. You can read to Mrs. Wilton and the shelves in the supply room should be straightened up.” Mrs. Byrd walked away without waiting for an answer.
Gwyn rolled her head back and forth and dug her fingertips into the knotted muscle in her neck. She wouldn’t be home before Chris and this was Mrs. Henderson’s afternoon for aquacize. During her coffee break she’d need to make some calls.
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE rules that everything happened all at once in hospitals. Just as Gwyn was about to leave the ward Mr. Scott was discharged, three patients were admitted and another went into respiratory arrest. In between helping people into gowns and rushing samples to the lab she called the kindergarten mom who had agreed to pick up Chris, found out she was about to leave for a soccer game and, now that Iris was back from work, arranged for him to go there instead.
Almost two hours late she finally got home. There was no fence between her yard and Iris’s so as soon as Gwyn walked up her sidewalk she saw Chris and Molly playing. They lay on the grass reaching for each other, right arms outstretched, fingertips barely touching. Chris clutched long cardboard rolls under his left arm. When she got closer she heard them half gasping, half shouting.
“I’ve got you!” Molly said desperately.
“Take the samples!”
“Throw them here!”
“Ahhh!” Chris rolled away, his voice fading, the cardboard tubes flying into the air.
Iris appeared at the door. “Long day? Come have a cold drink.”
“I’m so sorry about this. Thanks for looking out for Chris.” Gwyn followed Iris inside. When she looked out the kitchen window the children were on their stomachs again, but their roles were reversed.
Iris handed her a glass of lemonade. “They’re playing The Day After Tomorrow.”
“Shoot.” The mild word didn’t feel like enough to say. She repeated it, with feeling.
Iris took a cigarette from a nearly full box. “The ground is cracking apart, they tell me, and they take turns being the guy with the ice core samples who’s about to fall to his death.”
Maybe acting it out was a good thing. Chris could make it a game. He seemed happier now than he had trudging into school.
“Don’t look so worried. Didn’t you ever play Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”
Gwyn smiled, feeling a little sheepish and nostalgic. “National Velvet. I trotted everywhere and jumped over things.”
“Now that’s a picture I’m going to hang on to.”
“But our kids are playing The End of the World.”
“No, no,” Iris said lightly. “Just the end of the world as we know it.” She lit her cigarette, smelled the smoke appreciatively, then put it out.
“Think I should quit my job?”
“No, I don’t. What brought that on?”
She only worked part-time. Maybe subtracting her small paycheck wouldn’t make all that much difference. Then she would be there when Chris needed her, bug spray at the ready. “There’s Duncan’s pension and life insurance. We’d get by.”
“Getting by is all right for a while. You wouldn’t like it in the long run. I can tell you for sure from now until he’s grown up and settled into his own job you’ll always need more cash.”
Iris would know. She had longer experience than Gwyn at raising a child alone. There wasn’t an ex-husband in the wings, no child support check, no pension. An aunt who lived on a farm not far from the city helped out with fresh produce and a place for free holidays, but that was all.
“How do you do it, Iris?”
“Do what?”
“Work full-time, take care of the house, raise Molly.”
Iris shrugged. “Badly?”
Gwyn gave a snort. “You’d better not do it badly. You’re my role model.”
“Uh-oh.” They both smiled, then Iris added, “You can’t fix everything for him. It wouldn’t be good for him even if you tried.”
Gwyn nodded. The urge to make everything better was there, though, along with the terrible feeling of falling short when she saw him struggle. Next year he’d be in school morning and afternoon. That would help, but it brought its own worries. School could be an uncaring place to leave a child for so many hours of the day.
She watched Chris pull Molly back from the imagined precipice again. “He was calming down until he saw the hurricane coverage yesterday. The weather channel should come with an R rating.” After churning over the tip of Florida Elton had gathered strength before hitting the coast of Mexico. Their TV screen had been full of shattered houses and drowned livestock.
An idea struck her and she turned back to Iris. “How old is Molly?”
“Twelve, why?”
“I thought she was about ten.” Ten forever.
“Ten would be fine. That was a good year. The next one I’m looking forward to is, I don’t know, twenty-five?”
It was a spur-of-the-moment idea. She should probably wait and think it through, but it seemed like a perfect solution. A pretty good solution, at least. “Would you mind if I offered her a summer job?”
Iris looked at Gwyn blankly for a second, then started shaking her head. “Oh, no.”
“No?”
“You need someone reliable. A grandmother. Remember?”
“This is the happiest Chris has been for days.”
“I don’t know.” Iris’s head was still going back and forth. “It’s up to you, I guess.”
That seemed to be as close as she was going to get to permission. Gwyn hurried outside, Iris right behind her. The kids stopped playing when they saw their parents. Chris lay on his back, cardboard rolls held to his stomach.
“We saved the ice core samples, Mom.”
“I noticed, well done. How’s the bite?” She meant the one on his forearm. It had been giving him the most trouble.
“Good.”
“Let’s see.” A scab had started to form over the top, so at least she knew he’d stopped scratching. A large area around the bite was pink, swollen and warm to touch. “I bought some ointment that’s going to help it feel better.”
Chris pulled his arm away. “I hate ointment.”
She turned to his fellow scientist. “Your mom told me you’re twelve.”
Molly dropped her cardboard roll, discarding all appearance of childhood as she rose from the ground. “Nearly thirteen.”
“Twelve,” Iris said firmly.
“Not for long.”
“You’re twelve, and you’ll be twelve for another four months.”
Gwyn sidestepped the brewing squabble. “Are you interested in having a summer job? I need a babysitter who’s willing to play with Chris, someone who’ll remember bug spray and sunscreen. It would be about twenty hours a week, for July and August. Usually five hours at a time, sometimes more like nine. And if that worked for all of us, in the fall we could talk about evenings.”