Gray Matter

But some things remained buried, like his parents. They had died when he was eight, yet he could only recall them in their last years—and nothing from his early childhood—as if there were a blockage. Also, there were things he wished he could selectively summon to the light—like that big smiling Happy Face that sat deep in his memory bank like the proverbial princess’s pea sending little ripples of discomfort up the layers … blue.

Big blue cartoon head and big bright round eyes and a big floppy nose. Bigger than life.

Brendan slapped himself in the face.

Don’t be afraid …

Dance … Mister …

Almost. Big eyes. Funny nose. He felt it move closer.

He slapped himself again.

Mr. {SOMETHING} makes you happy.

And again.

He almost had it. Almost.

His face stung, but he slapped himself once more … and like some night predator, it nosed its way up out of a dense wormhole toward the light … inching upward ever so cautiously, so close … so close he could almost grasp it … Then suddenly without mercy it pulled back down into the gloom and was gone.

Brendan let out the breath that had bulbed in his chest and felt his body collapse on itself. He rested his head against the trunk and closed his eyes, feeling spent and chilled from perspiration.

So close, he could almost see it take form out of the gloom … and hear vague wordless voices … and almost make out a room and faces … hands and lights.

He banged the back of his head against the tree.

A bloody membrane away.

Brendan lit a cigarette and let his mind wander. He thought about how the tars in the smoke were filling the micropores of his lungs with dark goo that might someday spawn cells of carcinoma and how he didn’t really give a damn. How nothing in his life mattered, including his life. How different he was from others. A freak who could recite the most exquisite love poetry ever written, yet who passed through life like a thing made of wood.

It was crazy, which was how he felt most of the time. Crazy.

Just before he climbed down, he let his eyes wander across the stars, connecting the dots until he had traced most of the constellations he knew, then reconnected the stars until they formed constellations of his own. The arrow of Sagittarius he stretched into a billion-mile hypodermic needle.

And Taurus he rounded out into a smiling blue face.

“Mista Nisha won’t hurt you”.

The words rose up in his head with such clarity Brendan gasped. Instantly he clamped down on them before they shot away.

He had them. HE HAD THEM.

“Mr. Nisha wants to be happy …”

“ … Don’t be afraid …”

“Dance with Mr. Nisha,” he said aloud. And he groaned with delight.

Thirty feet away, Michael Kaminsky also groaned with delight as he shed himself deep inside Nicole.

She felt the warm ooze fill the condom and kissed him. “Was that good?” she whispered.

“Ohhhhh, yeah.”

“Would you give it an A?”

“A-plus,” he panted. “Did you … you know, enjoy it, too?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Why? Well, because I’m never sure with you. You don’t react much.”

She didn’t answer, but tapped him on the shoulder to get up. The clock said 12:43. “You’ve got to go, and I’ve got to get up in four hours.”

“But it’s Saturday.”

“I know, but my mean old history teacher wants my term paper by noon Monday.”

“What a prick.”

She slid her hand down his body and touched him. “I’ll say.” Then she got up and slipped on her nightgown.

Michael peeled himself off her bed and began to get dressed. “If they ever found out, I’d be hanged at dawn.” He pulled up his shorts then sat at her desk and put on his socks.

“Well, that won’t happen if you’re real nice,” she said, and put her arms around him. “Michael … ?” she said, glaring up into his eyes in her best pleading look.

His body slumped. “Come on, Nik, I can’t do that.”

“You have to, Michael. Just two-hundredths of a point.”

He sighed. “You’ve got your A, but I can’t do that to Amy, or any other student. I can’t give her a grade lower than she deserves.”

She squeezed his arms. “I want you to do this for me. Please.” She kept her voice low so her parents wouldn’t hear them.

“You know these Vietnamese kids. She killed herself on her paper. I’d have to make up stuff to justify a B. It was excellent. So was yours—”

“Then you’re going to have to make up stuff, because this American kid won’t settle for second place.”

Michael got up and pulled on his pants. In the scant light from the fish tank, Michael looked around her room. Covering the walls were photos of Nicole as well as her various awards, plaques, citations, blue ribbons. Hanging over a chair was her Mensa T-shirt.

“It means that much to you.”

“Yes.”

She watched Michael move closer to inspect the photographs. There were a dozen of them. One caught his eye: the group shot of the Bloomfield Biology Club on a field trip to Genzyme Corporation. Seven kids were posing in a lab with company biologists in white smocks. At one end was Nicole; at the other end was Amy Tran.

“Aren’t you taking this a little hard? I mean, you’ve got a wall of awards. You’ll probably get early admission to Harvard and be in med school in four years. What else do you want?”

Nobody remembers seconds.

Nicole moved up to him. “Maybe I am,” she whispered. “But you have to do this for me. It means everything.” She pressed herself against his groin.

“I don’t think Mr. Laurent had this in mind,” he said.

“Fuck Mr. Laurent.” Her voice was void of inflection.

The Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was a prize that went to a member of the incoming senior class whose sheer determination and effort had “most demonstrated the greatest desire to succeed,” as the write-up said. It was the most prestigious award at Bloomfield Prep, not because of the thousand-dollar prize, but because the benefactors stipulated that it went to the student with the mathematically highest grade-point average going into the senior year. It was the only award based purely on grades. And although the school did not publish class rank, everybody knew that the recipient was the eleventh-grade valedictorian. Number one.

“Numero uno,” as her father said.

“Numero uno.”

“Never settle for second best,” Kingman DaFoe once told her years ago. And he had reminded her ever since: “Who remembers vice presidents? Who remembers silver-medal Olympians? Who remembers Oscar nominees? You’ve got number-one stuff, Nicole, so go for it!”

Daddy’s words were like mantras. And ever since she had entered Bloomfield ten years ago, they were scored on her soul right down to the DNA level.

Nicole DaFoe had a grade point of 3.92, and Amy Tran had a 3.93. She knew this because she got Michael to check the transcripts. If Michael gave Amy a grade of B in his U.S. History course, she would drop to 3.91, leaving Nicole in first place. Which meant the Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was hers. And everybody would know.

“Michael, I’m asking you to do this for me.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and headed for the window.

She pulled him back. “Michael, promise me.”

“Nicole, I think your obsession with grades is a problem.”

“Say you’ll do it.”

“This is bad enough, but now you’re asking me to compromise professional ethics and downgrade another kid so you can get an award.”

“It’s not just the award.”

“That’s what bothers me. See you Monday and get that paper in.” He pulled his arm free and slipped out the window.

In a moment, he was climbing down the drainpipe as he had done before.

“Fuck your professional ethics,” she whispered. “And fuck you, Mr. Kaminsky.”

When he was out of sight, she looked back in the room—at the bookcase on the far wall. She walked to it and reached up to the second shelf and moved aside some books to reveal the small wireless video camera. She rewound it, pressed Play, and watched the whole scene from the moment Michael climbed through her window.

Then she looked at the photos on the wall. The shot of the Biology Club on a field trip. There was Amy Tran with the flat grinning face, the greasy black hair and chipped tooth, the stupid slitted eyes, the breathy simpering voice and ugly ching-chong accent that charmed the teachers who thought it wonderful how she took extra English courses and worked around the clock because she was a poor and underprivileged foreigner.

Nicole hissed to herself and gouged out Amy’s eyes with a razor knife.

Nobody remembers seconds.

15

“Hey, look at the tiger,” Dylan hooted. On the far side of a small water hole was a long-legged cat pacing back and forth, his eyes fixed someplace in the far distance.

“That’s not a tiger, it’s a cheetah,” declared Lucinda, pointing to the sign in front of Dylan.

A couple of the kids giggled at Dylan’s mistake.

“C-H-E-E-T-A-H,” Lucinda said. “Can’t you read?”

“I can read,” Dylan said weakly.

“No you can’t,” Lucinda said. “You can’t read anything.”

“Besides, tigers have stripes,” said Lucinda’s friend Courtney.

Lucinda shook her head at him in disgust. “You must be taking stupid pills.”

Sheila and Rachel were maybe ten feet behind them, but Rachel heard the comment and instantly saw red. From the look on Dylan’s face, he was clearly wounded. Rachel’s body lurched, but she caught herself, exerting every fiber of self-control not to fly at Lucinda and smash her fat little self satisfied face.

“Lucinda!” Sheila cried and grabbed her daughter by the arm. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you ever!” she growled, wagging her finger in her face. “Do you understand me, young lady? Do you? DO YOU?”

Lucinda’s face froze in shock at her mother’s reaction.

“You do not talk to other people that way,” Sheila continued. “I want you to apologize to Dylan right now.” Sheila steered her toward him.

Rachel half-expected Lucinda to begin crying at the humiliation, but instead she turned her face to Dylan. “Sor-reee,” she sang out.

Dylan shrugged. “That’s okay.”

But Sheila wouldn’t let go. She had taken Lucinda’s arm and pulled her aside. “Say it like you mean it,” she snapped.

“That’s fine,” Rachel said, wanting to stop her from dragging out the incident.

But Sheila persisted. “Say it properly.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said in a flat voice.

Sheila started to insist her daughter affect a tone of remorse, when Rachel cut her off. “We accept your apology, right?” she asked Dylan.

“Sure,” he muttered. He was beginning to squirm from the attention. He also wanted to get back to the others enjoying the cheetah. Then in all innocence he added: “I am stupid.”

“No you’re not,” Rachel said. “You’re not … Don’t even use that word.”

He and Lucinda moved to the group of kids.

“I’m really sorry about that,” Sheila said. “Really. That was uncalled for.”

Rachel nodded and looked away, wishing that Sheila would drop the subject. Her overreaction was making it worse—as if Lucinda had called a paraplegic a “crip.” Because he was young, Dylan would repair. But on a subconscious level he must have absorbed something of the message. How many times must you be told you’re a dummy before you internalize it?

The rest of the morning passed without other incidents.

Later, on the bus, Rachel could hear Lucinda challenge the other kids to an impromptu spelling bee, then an arithmetic contest—mostly who could add or subtract numbers in their heads. She was clearly the Dells power kid, always pontificating, always needing to show how clever she was, how much more she knew than the others. And even though most kids were too young to rank each other, Lucinda had already established the mind-set that Dylan was at the bottom of the hierarchy: the one to pick on—the class dope.

Throughout the ride, Rachel tried to keep up conversation with Sheila, but her mind was aswirl with emotion. By the time the bus arrived back at the Dells, she had put away the anger, resentment, and envy, leaving her with an overwhelming sense of sadness not unlike grief.

When she got home, Rachel found a voice message from Martin saying he would be getting home late that night and would have dinner in town. So she dropped Dylan off with her sitter who was free and headed to an afternoon exercise class at Kingsbury Club just outside of Hawthorne. It would feel good to throw herself into some mindless technomusic aerobics just to work off the stress.

The place, a large structure tastefully designed and nestled between an open field and conservation area, was a full-service fitness center with tennis courts, full-length pool, a workout gym with all the latest in exercise equipment. Shortly after she had joined, she convinced Sheila to do the same.

The parking lot was more than half-full at that time of day. When she did not spot Sheila’s green Jaguar, she felt relieved. She didn’t want to see her. She didn’t want to talk to her.

Her aerobics class had about twenty women, some of whom she was friendly with. But she did not feel friendly this afternoon, so she skipped the two o’clock class and headed for the treadmills.

About fifteen minutes into her workout, Rachel spotted Sheila through the windows to the lobby. Before Rachel could duck out of view, Sheila waved at her. In a few minutes Sheila showed up wearing a black warm-up suit with white stripes.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked, getting on the adjacent machine.

“I’m only on for another ten minutes,” Rachel said.

“That’s fine. I’m here for a quick hit. I’ve got a place to show at three.”

Rachel clicked up her speed a couple of tenths until she was at a full power walk. Meanwhile, Sheila got herself into a stiff gait. They kept that up silently for several minutes until Rachel dropped her speed to cool off and coast to a finish. Sheila did the same.

“Sorry about this morning,” Sheila said, after catching her breath.

“No problem.” Rachel got off the machine and mopped her face. She guzzled down some water from her bottle and started to head for the free weights, hoping Sheila would stay on her machine. But she got off, not having even worked up the slightest sweat. A quick hit that was hardly worth the effort.

They were in the main fitness room, a large chamber with nobody within earshot of them. So, on an impulse, Rachel announced, “I’m thinking of taking Dylan out of DellKids.”

“God, I hope not because of what happened.”

“No. It’s not Lucinda’s fault. We’re going to look for a more appropriate place for him. There’s a group in Bolton, and I hear the woman’s got an opening.”

Sheila nodded. “Have you spoken to Miss Jean?”

“No, but I will. And it’s not her fault, either. She’s been great with him. All of the DellKids staffers have.” Rachel expected Sheila to go on to deny the obvious, to be a good friend and conjure up all sorts of rationalizations and consolations.

But instead she nodded. “Lots of kids have learning disabilities.”

“I’m also thinking of finding a private school for him. I’m not sure Marsden Elementary has the best resources, especially with the budget cut. He’s going to need a more nurturing place with better special ed teachers.”

Sheila’s mood shifted slightly. Her cheery interest had faded into more serious speculation. “There are many good special schools,” Sheila said. “Chapman in Spring River is supposed to be excellent. There’s also the Taylor-Blessington in Wilton. Of course, there are several boarding schools out of state, if you want to go that route,” Sheila continued.

Suddenly Rachel wanted to end the conversation, and not just because the topic pained her. Something in Sheila’s interest struck her as suspicious. Maybe it was just raw envy, but Rachel resented Sheila’s solicitousness. She resented how Sheila could stand there smug in the certitude that her little brat had a lifetime ticket to ride while recommending for Dylan schools for intellectually handicapped kids. Besides, how the hell did she know so many special schools? “Can we change the topic, please?”

Sheila put her hand on Rachel’s. For a long moment she locked eyes with Rachel until she began to feel uncomfortable. “It really bothers you,” Sheila said, her face glowing with sincerity.

“What does?”

“His … disability.”

Rachel was nonplussed by Sheila’s obtuseness. Of course it bothers me. How in hell could it not bother me? “Sheila, why are you asking me this?”

“Because we’re friends, because you’re like me—the kind of mother who would do anything for your kid, right? Anything to make life better for them.”

Rachel did not know how to respond. She could not tell if Sheila was eliciting a genuine answer or just talking. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Now you’re getting edgy.”

“Yes, I’m getting edgy. I appreciate your concern, but I just don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s a private matter. You can understand that.”

Sheila nodded. “What if I told you there may be something you could do for him?”

The intensity on Sheila’s face held Rachel’s attention. “Like what?”

“Something I heard about that you might want to look into, that’s all.”

“I’m listening.”

“You once told me that Dylan was born pigeon-toed.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, you took corrective measures, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well … ?”

“Well what?”

“Well, you had the problem fixed, right?”

“So?”

Sheila leaned forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Well, I heard about a special procedure that’s … corrective.”

The word hovered between them like a dark bird. For a second Rachel felt as if the room had shifted. “But that was medical.”

“I’m talking about one that, well … that does work.”

“Works how?”

Sheila tapped the side of her head. “Improves a child’s cognitive functions—you know, memory, language, logic … intelligence.”

Intelligence. Rachel couldn’t tell if Sheila was being vague on purpose or if she didn’t know what she was talking about. “I’m listening.”

“Well, they’ve got special procedures for children with learning disabilities and brain dysfunctions.”

“Nobody said my son has a brain dysfunction.”

“Of course not, but … Look, I’m no specialist. They can explain it better.”

“Who’s they?”

“The people in charge. Doctors.”

Sheila was being irritatingly coy.

“Look, if we can get our kids’ teeth and noses and boobs fixed, why not their IQs?”

Rachel looked at her in disbelief. “Sheila, how can they do that? And what’s the name of the group? Who are they?”

Suddenly Sheila’s face flushed as if she had gone too far. “Look, let me get you some names and numbers then you can go from there.”

“But how come I haven’t heard about them?”

“You’re the new kid on the block. What can I say?”

For fifteen years Sheila had been working at New Century Realtors, the hottest franchise in the area. As office manager she was the undeclared mayor of Hawthorne. She knew everybody and their business. She was probably referring to one of those specialized instructional approaches that promised to raise your kid’s test results by a couple points, like those SAT prep courses.

Sheila glanced at her watch. “Oops. Gotta run.”

Before Rachel knew it, Sheila grabbed her water bottle and towel and gave Rachel an air kiss. “I’ll check for you and get back. See you at the game Saturday. Thorndyke Field at ten.” She meant the weekly soccer games for the town kids.

Rachel watched Sheila hustle across the room. She had a place to show across town in half an hour, surely not enough time to shower and change. In fact, she wasn’t even sweaty. So why did she even bother to work out?

It was another fitful night for Rachel. She woke up several times in a cold sweat, her heart racing and mind tormented by the thought that she had traded her son’s brain for good sex.

At one point she almost shook Martin awake and told him everything. But that would only have made things worse. No, this was her doing, and the punishment was hers to suffer alone. Besides, Martin would never forgive her. Never. And she could not blame him.

Sometime in the middle of the night, she decided she would call Dr. Stanley Chu in the morning. According to the Newsweek piece, he was the man who had headed up the research on TNT mutagenics. Maybe he could help. Maybe if he knew the nature of the damage he could figure out a treatment—some corrective measure, to use Sheila’s word.

By the time she got out of bed the next morning, the man had become an obsession. She waited until Martin took Dylan to day care. Then about nine-thirty she called information and got the main number of Yale School of Medicine, which gave her the extension of Dr. Stanley Chu. Trembling as if there were a shaft of ice at the core of her body, she dialed. A woman answered. “Neurology.”

“Yes, Dr. Stanley Chu, please.”

“Who may I ask is calling?”

For some reason Rachel could not get herself to announce her name. “I—I’m calling about his study on birth defects.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d like to talk to him about it, please … to make an appointment if that’s possible.”

“I’m sorry but Dr. Chu is out of town today and won’t be back until the end of the week. Is there something I can help you with?”

“No, I’d like to speak directly with him. I can come to his office when he’s free.”

“What is your name, please?”

Now she couldn’t go back or she might be dismissed. “Rachel Whitman.”

“Ms. Whitman, Dr. Chu is very busy. So if you could please give me some idea what your interest is—if you’re a student, or a researcher, or a pharmaceutical rep …”

Before Rachel could think, she said, “I took LSD laced with TNT some years ago, and I’m concerned my child has been … affected.”

“I see.” There was a long pause. “He’s free next Wednesday at one,” she said, then gave directions to the office in New Haven.

When she hung up, Rachel’s eye fell on the baby picture of Dylan on the fireplace mantel. He was sitting in the bathtub covered with big puffs of bubblebath and laughing happily. He looked gorgeous.

According to the report on Chu’s study, two-thirds of the TNT women studied had given birth to children with birth defects, and half of those suf fered damage to the brains.

Not my baby.

Please, dear God …

When Rachel got off the phone, there was a message from Sheila to meet her at the Dells. She had some “important information” for her. So she drove to the club and went in the side entrance, which took her through the lounge.

Because it was a little after ten, the room was empty. But as she passed through, she spotted Brendan LaMotte behind the large mahogany bar with a buffing cloth. But instead of polishing glasses, he appeared to be slouched low with his back to her. As she walked by, she caught him unawares, sniffing from an open bottle of liquor. Startled, he capped the bottle and pretended to be wiping it clean and lining it on the shelves.

Rachel did not want to make a scene, so she continued through the lounge with no more than a chirpy “hello” which was her cue that being underage, he would be fired if caught.

Sheila was waiting for her at a table. A waitress came over and took their orders and left.

“Here you go,” Sheila said and pulled out one of her business cards. On the back she had written: “Nova Children’s Center.”

Also, a telephone number and address: “452 Franklin Avenue, Myrtle.” That was a town between Hawthorne and Gloucester.

“So, what is the place?”

“A complete child-care center with therapists, child psychologists, pediatricians, development experts, neurologists, whatever. The whole shebang for kids.”

“You mean a clinic?”

“Well, kind of. But it’s very unique.”

“I’ve never heard of them.” But then again she had only lived in the area for six months. “So, what makes them so unique?”

Rachel lowered her voice. “Well, what I know is that they can help children with learning disorders and, you know, neurological problems, brain dysfunctions. Stuff like that. Some kind of enhancement procedures.”

“Enhancement procedures?”

“Yeah, for kids with memory and information-processing problems. Whatever.”

Sheila was being vague again, probably not to offend Rachel with the suggestion that Dylan had a neurological disorder. “You said something about corrective procedures.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve heard they can, you know … raise a kid’s IQ—maybe even double it.”

“Double it! That’s not possible.”

Sheila rolled her eyes in frustration. “Look, sweetie, I don’t know the ins and outs, so I don’t want to mislead and all. But they’ve got all kinds of programs, procedures, and stuff—I’m not sure of the details—but what I do know is that they’re very exclusive, if you know what I mean. Like they don’t take just anybody, and they’re très expensive. But you got their number, so why don’t you just call them and make an appointment and bring in all your questions, okay?”

“How do you know so much about them?”

“Because this is a small town and I’ve lived here for twenty years is how come. Look, give them a call, they’re supposed to be the best, and they’re in your own backyard. If Dylan’s got a problem, he can be fixed.”

“Whom do I ask for?”

Sheila lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Lucius Malenko.”

“Who?”

Sheila wrote the name on the card. “He’s one of the directors. You’re going to want to talk to him eventually, but first you’ll have to bring Dylan in to be tested so they can see what his problems are. So, call and make an appointment. You can’t lose.”

Rachel thanked her and stared at the name. Lucius Malenko.

“If Dylan’s got a problem, he can be fixed.”

16

It was a little before noon when Greg showed up at the Essex Medical Center. He would have put it off until the evening, but Nurse Cynthia Porter and the others were working the ER day shift. Instead of reporting to Lieutenant Gelford where he was heading, Greg slipped out of the barracks and headed north.

He met Nurse Porter in a small conference room in the ER complex. With her was a radiologist, introduced as Dr. Adrian Budd, and a resident physician, Dr. Paul Doria. They were there at Nurse Porter’s request.

Greg sat down opposite them and removed from his briefcase the photographs of the skulls, including the computer schematics with the holes marked. “There’s a pattern of evidence that may shed light on what happened to these kids,” he said, and he described the circumstances surrounding each of the remains.

While Greg spoke, Dr. Budd and Nurse Porter listened with interest. But Dr. Doria, a mutt-faced man with a goatee, nodded impatiently in time with his “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” That annoyed Greg. When he finished, Doria glanced at his watch. “I wish we could help, but we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Patient confidentiality,” Doria said curtly. “We can’t release the patient’s name or discuss his condition.” He made a move to get up.

Greg looked at Cindy. “On the telephone, you said you would be able to show me the X rays so we could make comparisons.”

“I know, but then I checked with my supervisor, and we can’t do that.” She made a woeful expression. “I’m really sorry, Officer. I just found out, or I would have saved you the trip.”

Greg looked at them, thinking of his two-hour drive and what Gelford would say if he found out that Greg had come up here and returned emptyhanded.

Doria took a step from the table toward the door. “The only way we could release them is through a court order or a subpoena. Sorry.”

Budd began to inch his chair back from the table also.

“Well, then, what can you tell me?”

“Just that the patient had scars on his head that looked similar to those in the newspaper,” Nurse Porter said.

“Any idea where they came from?”

“No.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes, but he didn’t know.”

“How could he not know?”

Her face clouded over since Greg wasn’t going to let go. “Well, I don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “Unless it was some kind of procedure he had at a young age.”

“Have you ever seen scars like those before?”

Porter glanced at the others. “Well, not really.”

“They were very unusual,” Budd added, and Doria shot him a hard look.

“Can you at least tell me how old he was?” Greg asked.

Cindy looked at Doria who made a half-nod to end the discussion. “Eighteen.”

Greg conspicuously wrote down on his pad: “Male—eighteen.”

“White?”

“Mmm.”

“And what did he come into the ER for?”

“Excuse me, Officer,” Doria cut in. “But we can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Try to get around protocol by playing twenty questions. I mean, if you had a crime and a court order, that would be different. But you don’t, and we’re not at liberty to discuss the case. Patients have their rights.”

The others nodded.

“Then can you tell me what kind of medical procedure these holes might have come from?” He spread out the skull photos and moved them closer to them.

“I don’t think we can continue,” Doria announced, backing away.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re indirectly asking us to disclose a patient’s condition by having us diagnose these remains. And we can’t do that.”

“But you may help solve a crime.”

“What’s to say those holes had anything to do with a crime?” Doria asked.

“Because nobody knows what they were for. So I’m suspicious.”

“Well, if you think there’s a connection,” Doria said, “then get a subpoena.”

That was a legitimate option, but it could take days, even weeks. And that would alert Lieutenant Gelford, who would go ballistic to know Greg was still pursuing this. There was another option.

Greg stood up so he was eye to eye with Doria. “You worked on this patient, correct?”

“You know that.”

“And you were aware that this eighteen-year-old had scars on his head that he himself was not aware of, correct?”

“So?”

Greg picked up the photocopy of the newspaper article on the mystery skull and held it to Doria’s face. “This is child abuse as far as it can go—kidnapping and murder.”

“What’s your point, Officer?” Doria asked.

“My point is that in the state of Massachusetts, as doctors and nurses you are mandated reporters of child abuse. By penalty of law, it is incumbent upon you to report directly to the DSS any suspicions you have that a minor has been wrongfully injured. Failing to do so can result in your arrest and incarceration.”

“But we had no such suspicions,” Doria protested. “The kid had old scars.”

“But you said the kid didn’t know he had them.”

Doria’s face turned red. “Many adults walking the streets have scars from appendectomies, but they didn’t get them from abuse as children.”

“You’ve treated a patient with very unusual scars in his head similar to those of a murdered child. Did you notify the DSS?”

Doria looked at Dr. Budd who both looked at Nurse Porter. Sheepishly, Porter said, “Well, I called you.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” Greg said. “Did you file a report with the DSS as mandated by law?”

“No.”

“Wait a minute,” Doria said. “Are you threatening us, Officer?”

“No, I’m offering you an option to jail.”

“I don’t believe this,” Doria said.

“Believe it.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Nurse Porter asked. She looked scared.

“Show me the X rays.”

“And if we don’t?” Doria asked defiantly.

“Then I will file a complaint with the attorney general’s office, and you’ll be arrested.”

Doria gave Greg a scathing look. “Give me a break.”

“I am.”

There was a moment of prickly silence. Then Dr. Budd said, “I have no problems with your seeing the films.”

“Me, neither,” Nurse Porter said.

Doria glowered at Greg like an angry schnauzer. “This is coercion, Officer, and you know it,” he said. “You can see them, but I’m drawing the line on revealing the patient’s name.”

“Fair enough.”

Doria left, and returned a few minutes later with a large envelope containing duplicates he had made without the patient’s name or ID number on them. He handed them to the radiologist.

Budd pulled out the X rays and slid them onto the light board. He studied them for a moment, then with a pen he pointed to faint impressions on the top and side images. “These are the holes. There’s a cluster of eight here above the left ear each about a millimeter and a half in diameter—and ten more above the eyebrow, just behind the hairline—here.”

The holes appeared on the images as white dots on the left profile, and tiny transect lines in the top views. “Can you tell how they were made?”

“Since they’re so sharply incised, my guess is a cranial drill,” Budd said.

“As the result of some medical operation or procedure?”

“Yes.”

The holes appeared to be clustered almost identically to those on the Sagamore and Dixon boys’ skulls.

“The ones in front I noticed while working on him,” said Cindy Porter. “But I didn’t know about the others until I saw the films.”

Budd continued. “What’s even odder are the three holes just behind the temple about where the left ear begins.” He tapped them out with the pen.

Not wanting to influence their interpretations, Greg held back on Joe Steiner’s speculations. “What do you make of them?”

“Well, I’m not really sure,” said Budd.

“Have you ever seen clusters of holes like these before?”

“No,” Budd said. “It’s possible he’d been treated for multiple tumors.”

“Except that the surgeon wouldn’t have to make so many holes,” Doria added.

Greg could see that he was warming up again. The threat of jail does that. “Why not?” Greg asked.

“Well, if you’re going to drill so many holes—whatever the reason—it’s a lot easier to pull back the skin first, then drill.” He put his fingers to his forehead and rotated the flesh. “The scalp moves around easily. It makes more sense to do a line incision and push the skin back, then close the incision after boring.”

“So you’re saying that this is an unusual technique.”

“Very,” Doria said. “Why go to this length to make all these little incisions when it’s easier to make a clean slice?”

“Unless he wanted to hide them,” Cindy suggested.

“Why hide them?” Greg asked.

“Maybe the surgeon was trying to avoid leaving a long Frankenstein scar,” said Budd.

“Couldn’t he have made it behind the hairline?”

“Sure, but then the kid grows up and starts losing his hair, and there it is.”

Greg turned to Nurse Porter. “You said he didn’t know he had them.”

“Yeah, he looked genuinely surprised when I pointed them out. In fact, he looked in the mirror like he was seeing them for the first time.”

“Which makes sense, since they were flush to the scalp,” Doria added. “Through the hair, he wouldn’t be able to feel them with his fingers. And he’d never notice them unless he shaved his head.”

“Why was he brought into the ER?”

“He slipped and banged his head against a glass door.”

“And you took the X rays to see if he had a concussion.”

“Yes,” Nurse Porter said.

Greg jotted down what they were saying. “Does his medical file have any record of his having a brain operation?”

“No. In fact, the only entry for him is for a sprained ankle four years ago. He apparently slipped on ice. But that’s it.”

“You still haven’t said what kind of brain operation this could be.”

Doria took the question. “Because I’m not sure. Holes are made through the skull either to take something out of the brain or to put something in. If it was to remove something, then we’re talking needle biopsies or the removal of tumors, lesions, or blood clots. But I have never heard of needing twenty-one holes for any of those procedures. Even if the patient had multiple tumors, I would think that the surgeon would have removed segments of the skull instead of making multiple holes over so large an area. And frankly, tumor masses that large would probably be fatal.”

He was right about the size, since the holes covered an area constituting most of the side of the head.

“The other possibility is putting something into the brain. He could have had interstitial radiation therapy—the insertion of radioactive pellets into tumor tissue. What bothers me is that radiation therapy is local. It’s not commonly used for widely spread or multiple tumors. Another thing, if he doesn’t remember, he must have been very young. And multiple radiation implants in a child are almost never heard of, because a child’s brain is very susceptible to radiation.”

“So, what are you saying?” Greg asked them.

All three of them shook their heads. “I don’t know what they did to him,” Doria said.

17

From the inside of her closet, Brendan watched Nicole DaFoe undress.

It was Friday night, and she was home for the weekend again. As usual, her father had picked her up at school. Brendan knew the patterns of her movements. He had watched her ever since that day at the club swimming pool. She had been wearing a rather revealing white bikini of which her mother did not approve because when she arrived and found Nicole sunning herself in a lounge chair, she spoke sharply to Nicole who snapped back then grabbed her towel and huffed away. Nicole was something of an exhibitionist. And her mother was very proper.

But to Brendan’s mind Mother DaFoe had no need to worry that her daughter was wanton, since she lacked the arousing fantasies and sexual urges of a true flasher. She had been genetically blessed with physical beauty and the instinct on how best to employ her baby-doll appeal for maximum gain. But she was like a polar cap—all light and no heat. Yet when she needed something, she could affect the turn-on, and the boys swarmed around her like heat-seeking missiles. And as long as the flesh was warm, they’d put up with anything, even a frozen core.

Ironically, it was the ice that drew Brendan.

When her parents drove off and Nicole went to the basement to do laundry, he slipped in through the back door and headed up to her bedroom, where he had waited for two hours until she had finished watching some medical video downstairs and came up.

But while crouched in her closet, he discovered a lockbox stashed behind some storage bins of clothes. The box was not an expensive thing, so it was easy to jimmy open with a penknife. With a pocket flash he inspected the contents.

At first glance it looked like a hodgepodge of things. But he went through them closely: two inexpensive men’s watches; a curled-up leather belt; a Swiss Army knife; two smaller pocketknives; a leather Pierre Cardin wallet which still had some cash, two ID bracelets with different male names on them; a fancy pen; a Bloomfield football high school ring; and a man’s gold wedding ring. They were all male effects. But, oddly, no photos or love notes or things that looked like gifts. On the contrary, they looked like collectibles. Probably from all the boys she had bedded. Things she had probably taken to commemorate her little conquests. Trophies.

When Nicole returned, she didn’t go straight to bed. Instead, she stripped down to her panties and bra, then got down on the floor to do stretching exercises—probably one of her ballet routines. For nearly twenty minutes he watched her do sit-ups, push-ups, then an elaborate set of revealing stretches, at one point lying on her back and moving her hips up and down as if having sex with an invisible lover. Watching her like this, any other normal boy would have exploded on the spot. But Brendan just watched—feeling nothing. No, he was not gay. He was not anything.

Just dead.

When she finished, she pulled off her top and headed into the adjoining bathroom. He could not see her from his angle, but he heard the rush of water as she took a shower. He thought about taking a peek, but the glass door steamed up. Besides, she might catch him, which would be disastrous. So he remained in the closet peering through the black crack.

When she came out, she had one towel wrapped around her head, another around her body, so he could see nothing. She sat on her bed and removed the towel. Her breasts were like pink-tipped pears. He had never touched a girl and wondered what it would be like. Until Nicole, he had never seen one naked in the flesh.

She stood up and toweled her behind, then turned toward him and for a moment he saw her point-blank naked. But then she slipped into panties and a camisole top. A moment later she flicked off the light and got into bed.

He waited until he was certain she was asleep, then crept across the floor, guided by the glow light of her aquarium. The creak of the floorboards caused her to stir, but she did not wake up.

When he reached her bed he froze. Fortunately, she was sleeping on her right side. Fortunately, also, it was a warm night, so only a single blanket covered her.

He had to be swift. He reached into his pocket, and in a clean move he pulled back the covers and clicked on a penlight.

Nicole’s eyes snapped open.

The next moment she yelped and jerked away. Before he knew it, she leapt off the bed and pulled a field hockey stick from wall mounts. Without a sound, she took a huge swipe at him.

He jumped back just in time. “No, please, d-d-don’t,” he cried. “I’m not going to h-h-hurt you. Really.”

But she came at him and swung again. He reflexed again, but this time he stumbled backward over a stuffed animal and came down on his backside, his head slamming on the edge of the closet door. As he lay there, she came at him with the stick raised high.

“P-p-please, don’t. My head.”

“I know you. You’re Brendan LaMotte,” she gasped.

“Please don’t h-h-hit me, okay? Just don’t h-hit me.”

Nicole backed up to her portable phone and picked it up. “You’ve been following me, you creep. At the club and the diner. You’re stalking me.”

“No. Please don’t call the police. I b-beg you.” He dabbed his sleeve on his forehead.

“Then tell me what the hell you are doing here or I’ll call them.”

“I will, I will, but please don’t.” He checked his hand. He was bleeding from the scalp. “Can I have a t-tissue?”

“No.” She tossed the phone down and raised the stick like an executioner’s sword. “Talk or I’ll bash your brains in.”

“You have a t-t-tattoo on your hip.”

Instantly her face shifted, and her hands flinched. But she said nothing.

“I saw it once real fast when you were at the pool. You were wearing a t-two-piece white bikini, and you were on the lounge chair reading a copy of vogue, with a picture of M-Meg Ryan on the cover—she was wearing red—so it must have been the May issue because June had Charlize Theron in white chiffon.” He caught himself because his mind was beginning to flood with useless details that he could recite endlessly. He knew all the magazine covers because people left them at the pool all the time.

“How did you see it?”

“I c-c-can’t swim, so I don’t go up to the p-p-pool. Binoculars. I s-saw you through binoculars.”

“You mean you broke into my bedroom to see my tattoo?”

He nodded. “Ummm.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“It’s important. Very important. Can I p-please get up? My head’s bleeding.” The second time in a week, he thought.

He started to pull himself up, when she whacked him in the leg. “What do you mean, it’s important?”

Blood now trickled down the side of his head. He blotted it with his sleeve then reached into his pants pocket.

“Don’t you dare,” she said and raised the stick.

“No, don’t.” When she didn’t strike, he said, “I just want to show you something. Please.”

“How do I know you haven’t got a weapon?”

“Because I d-don’t.” He slipped his hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper and unfolded it, revealing the blue cartoon. “It’s Mr. Nisha,” he said.

Nicole glanced at it, and for a second her face seemed to have turned into a plaster mask. As the image began to sink in, little expressions flickered across it like eddies of electricity. “Where did you get that?”

“You remember,” he whispered.

She lowered the stick.

“Please, can I get up?”

She did not respond but took the drawing to the table beside her bed and turned on the lamp. While she studied the image, Brendan’s eye fell on a photograph tacked to the wall—Nicole and a bunch of other kids on a field trip. The eyes of the Asian girl at the end had been poked out.

While Nicole continued to study the drawing, Brendan noticed a video camera sitting on the desk. Beside it was a cassette. Without thought, he picked it up, but she snatched it out of his hands and threw it into the desk drawer.

Then Nicole turned the light toward herself and pulled down one corner of her panties. On her left flank was the same serene blue elephant with the big floppy ears, fat snaky trunk, and fingered human hands. And on its head some kind of crown. It was nearly identical.

“W-w-where … ?”

“Hampton Beach,” she said.

“B-but how did … ?”

“I wanted a tattoo, and when I saw an elephant sample, I knew that’s what I wanted. But all he had was stupid pink elephants or that freaky demon-beast shit for bikers. I made him draw it on paper until he had it right.”

“But why did you have it done?”

“Because I wanted a tattoo is why.”

“But where did you get the image from?”

“Why’s it so important to you?”

“Because I’ve been seeing this image for years in my brain. It’s like a ghost of something, but I couldn’t put it together. Until now. I th-think we’re connected somehow through that image.”

She did not respond.

“Does’M-M-Mr. Nisha’ mean anything to you?”

“Mr. who?”

“Nisha. M-Mr. Nisha. Or ‘dance with Mr. Nisha’?”

Before she could respond, the sound of a car pulling into the driveway cut the air. “Shit! My parents! You gotta get out of here.” He started for her closet, but she stopped him. “They saw my light on, so they’ll be in. The window.”

“We have to t-talk more.”

“What for? I’m going back to school, then camp.”

“But we have to.”

“Go!”

Brendan was overweight and unathletic, so the prospect of climbing down was not appealing.

She pushed him toward the window and opened the screen just enough for him to climb out onto the porch roof. She pointed to the corner. “The drainpipe,” she said, and shoved him through. “GO!”

He climbed out and steadied himself on the roof. He could hear the garage door close in the front of the house, leaving the night dark and still for his escape. From the roof, it was maybe a ten-foot drop to the ground, and little footholds attached to the corner column along the drainpipe made the descent easy. It was the path most taken.

As he eased his way down, he wondered about Nicole’s other midnight visitors and wished that for one moment he could feel what they had come for. Just one little burst of spring fires. He would die for that.

18

The ride to Connecticut took about three and a half hours. After breakfast, Rachel bundled Dylan in the car and drove him to day care, leaving Miss Jean her cell-phone number. Then she headed south on Route 95 to New Haven and the Yale University School of Medicine where she had a one o’clock appointment with Stanley Chu.

She listened to the radio to distract her mind. But she snapped it off after the news story about a controversial case of a mentally deficient man on death row in Texas. He could barely read and write and had flunked the seventh grade twice. He did menial work such as cutting grass. And last night, at thirty-three, after spending twelve years on death row for the rape and murder of a twenty-four-year-old woman, he had been executed.

She arrived at the medical school on time. A directory inside the main entrance led her to the Department of Neurology.

Dr. Stanley Chu, a slight man of about sixty with thinning hair and glasses, spoke with a faint accent. Rachel took a seat across from his desk. A folder containing Dylan’s medical records sat open before him. She had overnighted the package last week.

Dr. Chu seemed a little put off by her visit and got right to business. “I looked at your son’s medical history, the test results, and the scans. As you know, there’s some dysfunction of the left temporal lobe.” From a folder he pulled out some of the films and slipped them onto the display board. “Dylan’s brain is on the left, the one on the right is a child about the same age but with normal brain anatomy.” He used a ballpoint pen to point out the shadowy shapes. “As you can see, the gyri of Dylan’s brain—that is, the folds—are smaller and the sulci—the spaces in between—are larger. Usually, they are packed closer together as you can see in this normal scan.

“What this means,” he continued, “is that the gyri of Dylan’s brain are not developed normally, that he has experienced some cell loss here—maybe as much as twenty-five percent in this area.”

“Oh, God,” she whimpered.

“But I’m afraid the real problem is in the thalamus down here,” he continued. “You can’t see that as well from the scan because the structures are subtle. But there are some malformations of the thalamus, and we know this because one of the telltale marks of such malformation is the abnormal formation of the gyri up here.”

“What’s the thalamus do?”

“Well, the thalamus is a complicated area very deep in the brain,” he explained. “It controls all parts of the brain affecting speech and motor functions, emotions, and sensory functions—so many aspects of our makeup. These kinds of structural deficiencies are commonly seen in individuals with language-processing problems such as Dylan’s.”

Rachel felt her soul slump. A silence filled the room as the doctor waited for her to respond.

Finally Rachel asked, “Is this consistent with the damage of the people you studied?”

“Do you mean did your use of TNT bring this on?”

“Yes.”

The doctor took off his glasses and stared at her. “Mrs. Whitman, why do you need to know this?” It was the same question that Dr. Rose had asked.

She shook her head, but said nothing for fear of breaking down.

“There’s no way to know that. Some of the women who had taken TNT gave birth to perfectly normal children. All I can say is that it’s statistically more probable that you suffered some reproductive cell damage which was passed on to your son.”

“Is there anything that can be done?”

“Done?” He seemed unclear about the question. “Well, as I said there are medications that can help him focus better …”

“How about surgically?”

“To what end?”

“To reduce his problems,” she said. “To increase his learning capabilities.”

The doctor’s eyebrows twitched slightly. “Not that I know of.”

Rachel nodded. “I guess it was a dumb question, but I’m feeling very guilty and desperate.”

“I understand, but I’m afraid, for all practical purposes, Dylan’s brain has already wired itself as much as it is going to. As I said, there’s a structural deformity that cannot be corrected because circuitry is missing. And it can’t be manufactured. It’s like wanting to regenerate an amputated finger. It can’t be done.”

Rachel looked at him and her eyes puddled. “So there’s nothing that can be done? No new experimental procedures to help stimulate growth and regeneration of whatever … neurons?”

Dr. Chu shook his head. “Not that I know of.” He then glanced at the wall clock.

“So he’s going to be impaired for the rest of his life?”

He paused for a second, as if carefully measuring his words. “Without taking a functional MRI, all I can say is that the visible malformations are consistent with those found in individuals with language problems. This does not mean that special learning programs won’t help his development—”

Her voice straining, Rachel cut him off: “I did this to him.”

“Pardon me?”

“Because of me, he’s going to go through the rest of his life mentally handicapped.” The tears were flowing freely now, and she pressed a wad of tissues to her face.

“You don’t know that.”

“But I took the stuff. I did that to him.”

“But nothing’s conclusive. It’s entirely possible that it’s an hereditary expression or some other cause.”

Rachel just shook her head.

“Mrs. Whitman, my suggestion is that you accept what has happened and go on from here. And, if I may, avoid the pitfall of so many of today’s parents—namely the fixation on academic performance. Yes, it’s understandable in our competitive culture, yet so much more goes into one’s destiny in life, especially a child’s emotional makeup and character. Unfortunately, too many people are stuck on a single notion of intelligence. In reality, intelligence is a multiplicity of human talents that go beyond basic verbal and mathematical performance. As someone once said, ‘If the Aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would flunk it.’”

She nodded quietly, letting his words sink in.

He tapped the pile of papers that represented Dylan’s test results. “IQ isn’t the measure of a person. Believe me. I know many so-called geniuses who are failures as human beings.”

“I realize that but, frankly, smarter people do better in life. You have to admit that.”

Chu looked at her with a puzzled expression, perhaps wondering why they were having this conversation. “Mrs. Whitman, I admit that in some walks of life higher intellectual abilities may mean more opportunities. But a high IQ is no guarantee of success, prestige, or especially, happiness in life.”

She glanced around his office, at the photo of him and his wife and children posed in ski gear smiling gleefully with snow-capped peaks in the background. The Yale School of Medicine diploma on the wall. “You’ve done well.” She wished she could retract the words the moment they hit the air.

“On paper, yes,” Chu shot back. “But you don’t know anything about my personal life or my psychological or emotional state. I could be miserable with my lot and contemplating suicide, though I’m neither.”

“I’m sorry, please forgive me.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. What you should do is spend less effort ranking your child and more trying to identify his natural gifts and competency. For all you know, Dylan may grow up to be an artist or musical genius, or someone gifted in social and interpersonal skills.”

She nodded. “So you’re saying that nothing can be done, I mean medically.”

Dr. Chu looked at her quizzically, as if surprised that she had not processed his words. He took a breath and let it out slowly. “Your son’s brain development is fixed. It cannot be structurally modified toward higher functionality. I’m sorry.”

It was time to leave. She thanked the doctor and packed all of Dylan’s medical records into her briefcase and left.

Outside the sky was overcast and it smelled like rain. Rachel walked to her car, feeling scooped out. In the distance lightning soundlessly flickered.

And her mind turned to Sheila MacPhearson as if she were some ministering angel.

19

It had been days since Travis Valentine had seen his mom, and he missed her. All he remembered was being down by the canal looking for butterflies, and then he woke up in this room with the TV cartoons going all the time and the animal paintings on the walls.

There was a tap at the door, then the turn of the lock, and a woman came in with a plate of cookies. She had said that her name was Vera. She also said she was a nurse and a friend of his mother’s.

“Here you are,” she said, putting the tray on the beanbag chair. “How you doin’?”

“When am I going home?” It was the same question he asked every time she delivered something.

“Soon,” she said. “How do you like the books?”

On the floor there was a pile of picture books of butterflies. (Somebody must have told them about his hobby.) He already had three of them at home.

The woman picked one up and thumbed through it. “Very pretty. What’s this one called?”

“A barred yellow swallowtail,” he said, knowing she wasn’t really interested.

“You’re a smart little guy.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you’re special, that’s why.” Then she said, “I hear you have your own butterfly collection at home.” She fanned through the book.

He said nothing. He did not like her face. It was pinchy and mean looking.

“Where’s my mom?”

“She’s home.” Vera’s mouth was small with thin lips that were very red. “And if you cooperate you can go home real soon.”

Cooperate. That meant eat their food, swallow their medication, and take their tests. He didn’t know what the tests were. But Vera had said that was the reason he was here: to take the tests. Then he could go home.

He looked at the cookies, but did not take one.

Vera got up. “Enjoy the cookies,” she said and left using a key.

That was the only way out of the room—a key. And they didn’t give him one.

He hated the room. There were no windows, the door had no handle and was always locked from the outside. The floor was padded with some plastic-covered foam. The furniture was also soft—beanbag chairs, air mattress on the floor, a plastic table, and a hanging plastic clothes organizer. There were five of everything—shirts, pants, pairs of socks. Five days’ worth.

It was clearly a place for kids because of the stupid paintings on the wall and all the stuffed animals, the boxes of “nontoxic” Crayolas on the floor, and coloring books and paper. And there was nothing hard or sharp. No pencils or pens or metal or even wooden toys. Just soft puzzle pieces and rubber building blocks. And stuffed animals. Even the food was safe—sandwiches served on easily crumbled Styrofoam plates; and there were no forks or knives, not even the plastic kind. The only hard surface in the place besides the TV cover was the black plastic hemisphere on the ceiling.

Travis couldn’t see the camera, but he knew there was one inside because he had once asked his mom what those black bubbles were on the ceiling of the Target in Fenton on Florida Highway 75. Mom had said it’s how the people in the back room make sure folks don’t shoplift stuff.

There certainly was nothing worth stealing in here. But the folks in the back room were watching him—even when he went to the bathroom—which made him feel creepy. He hoped they went to sleep at night. That was another thing: The lights never went off, they just dimmed automatically at bedtime, which was when the TV went off.

In the corner was a toilet with a plastic blue curtain, but you could see through it. The TV was built into the wall and was covered with a hard Plexiglas front. It wasn’t a real TV since all it showed were cartoons which he had seen dozens of times. And it was on whenever he was awake, so that the sound constantly filled the room. He couldn’t hear the outside—no cars or planes. No sounds of other people.

He missed the canal. He missed the woods. He missed the sounds of birds. He missed his friends. But most of all, he missed Bo and his mom.

He didn’t know where in the world he was, but he had a sense that he was far away. Really far.

He looked at the cookies which made him think of his mom and her cookies. And he began to cry. He didn’t want to cry. He had done a lot of that for the last two days. Sleep, stare at the TV, and cry. But he couldn’t help it.

So he lay on the mattress and cried a deep cry, hoping he would fall asleep and wake up at home.

20

The first thing Greg did on the morning after his visit to the Essex Medical Center was to multifax a memo to the medical examiner’s offices throughout the state asking if anybody had seen any human remains with such a pattern of holes in the skulls as in the accompanying photos—holes that appeared to have been made by medical drills: “Any information may help in the investigation of two missing children, one of whom is a kidnap and possible murder victim.” He left his name and number.

Nobody seemed to know what the holes were for, but every instinct in his being told him that there was some sort of plan—some sort of connection between the Essex case and the remains of the two kids.

When he was finished, his telephone rang. It was his supervisor, T.J. Gelford. He wanted him to come to his office. Something in the tone of Gelford’s voice told him it was not a routine conference.

Greg went upstairs to the detective sergeant’s office. Greg stiffened as he entered. Gelford was not alone. With him were Chief Norm Adler and the internal affairs officer, Rick Bolduk. They nodded when he came in, but nobody was smiling.

“Have a seat, Greg,” Gelford said.

Greg felt his heart rate kick up.

“I’d like to know where you were yesterday afternoon.”

Greg gauged their expressions as they waited for his answer. Their faces could have been hewn from Mount Rushmore. “I was on a case.”

“Which case?”

Before he went off on a job for any length of time, he was supposed to report to his supervisor or at least leave word with the dispatcher, especially if the investigation took him out of town. But failure to report did not call for a tribunal. “I was on the North Shore.”

“The North Shore? That’s a hundred miles out of our jurisdiction. You were supposed to be working the high school break-in.”

Some kids had broken through a rear window and trashed a room, maybe doing eight hundred dollars’ worth of damage. It was not a Priority One crime. “That’s not what this is all about.”

“That’s right,” Gelford said and glanced at a piece of paper in front of him. “We got a call from a Dr. Paul Doria, an internist from the Essex Medical Center that you’d been up there mucking around about this skull case.”

“I was investigating some leads.”

“He said that you threatened him and two other ER staffers with arrest unless they showed you somebody’s X rays. We contacted the other two, and they confirmed.”

“Because they failed to report suspicions of child abuse.”

“What suspicions of child abuse? The kid had some old scars in his head.”

“That’s right, and in the same places as the holes in the two skulls. I wanted to see if there’s a connection.”

“Did you?”

“I’m still working on it.”

“No you’re not, because you coerced three members of a medical staff to compromise a patient’s right to privacy, and that’s a violation of policy.” He handed Greg a piece of paper.

Greg didn’t have to read it to know it was a formal letter of reprimand.

“I sorry to say this, Greg, but you’re being put on notice,” Rick Bolduk said. “If you do anything else on this skull case, we will proceed with disciplinary action.”

Greg stiffened. He knew what that meant. At best, they would take away his gold shield and bust him back to a foot officer chasing speeders. At worst, he could be suspended, maybe even terminated.

“Nobody wants to do this, Greg,” Rick Bolduk added, “but you’ve stepped over the line and shown insubordination to your supervisor. Those are grounds for dismissal, but we’re giving you a second chance. From this point on, you’re off this case. Period.”

Greg nodded.

“It’s in the letter, but I’m putting you on night shift, seven to three,” Norm Adler said.

Greg made a flat grin. “Great.” Nothing happened on night shift in Sagamore except car accidents or drunks beating up their spouses. So what they’d give him to fill his time would be a bunch of petty larcenies and bum-check cases. His punishment was to further marginalize him. “Starting when?”

“Tomorrow.”

Greg knew that it was useless to protest, only because they were right to do this. He had operated on hunches, none of which had panned out. And he wasn’t doing his job in the town he was hired to protect.

“I apologize,” he said, and got up to leave, taking the letter with him.

“Greg, I don’t know how to say this without saying it, but maybe you should see a professional about this obsession you have for this skull case. I don’t think it’s healthy for you. I can give you some names.”

He was saying that Greg was weird: that his pursuit of this case was pathological. That he could end up like Remington Bristow, the investigator in the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office who spent thirty-six years doggedly investigating the 1957 “Boy in the Box” case, only to go to his grave without ever determining the identity of the murdered child found naked in a cardboard carton by the side of a country road—or his killer. That Greg should see a shrink.

Maybe they were right.

But it crossed Greg’s mind that working nights freed up his days. He nodded his appreciation. “I’ll be okay.”

21

By eight-thirty on Saturday morning Thorndyke Field was a mob scene. The four adjacent soccer fields had been sectioned off with orange cones as eight teams all in different-colored uniforms practiced kicking maneuvers. Along the sidelines, parents and other spectators had gathered with orange wedges and coolers full of drinks.

The parking lot was nearly filled as Rachel and Martin arrived with Dylan. The boy looked positively adorable in his crisp white uniform and new blue soccer shoes and bright red sports bag over his shoulder, the contents of which consisted of three boxes of granola bars—enough for everybody on the team (his idea)—and his Curious George doll. At this age level the teams were designated only by their colors. This morning the Whites were playing the Reds.

As they approached their corner of the field, Rachel spotted Sheila. Lucinda was on the Reds. In Hawthorne, boys and girls competed on the same teams.

Dylan looked forward to these games, and he always arrived full of enthusiasm. This morning was no different. Dylan did not start, which was fine since there were so many kids on the team.

A few minutes into the game, somebody kicked the ball point-blank into Lucinda’s midsection, sending her to the sidelines whimpering. While Rachel took some shamed-faced satisfaction in that, Dylan went over to her and handed her his Curious George. It was clear from Lucinda’s perfunctory dismissal of him that she did not comprehend the comforting gesture, or was just too grown-up to accept it. But Dylan’s untainted compassion brought tears to Rachel’s eyes. After a few seconds, Lucinda got up and joined her teammates, while Dylan returned to the sidelines.

After fifteen minutes or so, when the score was 3 to 2 in favor of the Reds, Dylan was sent onto the field.

Dylan was playing forward end. The kickoff went deep into the Reds’ line. After some back and forth, the ball came to Dylan. He quickly positioned himself but kicked it the wrong way. A fast response from one of his teammates on defense sent it back toward the Reds. Dylan rushed into the fray and got the ball. Martin yelled and pointed toward the Reds’ goalie, but again Dylan kicked it the opposite way.

Some of his teammates yelled at him, but Dylan ran after the ball and continued to run with it toward the Whites’ goalie who tried to wave him back. But he was too lost in his footwork. And before anybody could stop him, Dylan toed the ball into the net.

The Reds jumped up and down and the Whites shouted protests.

The coach came out and put his hand on Dylan’s shoulders and tried to explain to him that although he played the ball well, he had scored for the Reds. That he should run for the net with the Red goalie not the White goalie.

Dylan didn’t seem to understand at first, but when he was taken out of the game, he began to cry. Out on the field, Lucinda was consulting with her coaches, looking like a World Cup champ discussing strategies. Meanwhile Dylan squatted behind the chalk line, crying in his hands. Rachel and Martin went over to console him. “There’s nothing to cry about,” Rachel said.

“I’m a dummy. Everybody says.”

“No you’re not. And don’t say that.”

Rachel looked at Martin. She could read his expression. Several times in the last few weeks Martin had practiced passing maneuvers with Dylan, trying to get him to understand which goal was theirs, but nothing seemed to have stuck. He simply didn’t get the fundamentals of the game even though he had been playing for nearly two months. He was much better at T-ball, which started up next week. But Rachel still feared that he was developing an inferiority complex.

“Hey, Dylan,” Lucinda sang out as she pranced by after the ball. “Thanks for the free goal.”

Goddamn little bitch.

But Rachel said nothing. Across the field she spotted Sheila in a clutch of other parents rooting on the Reds. She had no idea that Rachel was fantasizing about Lucinda falling on her face. She knew it was awful of her, but at the moment she hated that little girl.

When the game was over, Sheila caught up to Rachel on the way to the parking lot and pulled her aside as Martin and Dylan went to their car.

“Did you give them a call?” Sheila asked, meaning the Nova Children’s Center.

Rachel was still upset over the incident with Lucinda, but she did not let on. “Yes, and we have an appointment in two days.”

She had spoken to a Dr. Denise Samson and explained the nature of Dylan’s problems. The woman said to bring him in for an assessment. In addition to past test results, they needed a complete profile of his language skills, long-term/short-term memory, sequencing, abstractions/concrete tests, et cetera. They also wanted to schedule a functional MRI, which meant viewing his brain during cognitive testing.

Sheila seemed to beam at the news. “Great. You’re not going to regret it. They’re miracle workers over there.” Then she checked her watch. “Oops, gotta go. Showing a place on Magnolia Drive. Big buckaroos.” She blew Rachel a kiss, still grinning.

Rachel watched her hustle after Lucinda toward her car, wondering why she was so elated over her appointment at the Nova Children’s Center. Much more than Rachel was.

As always when Dylan went to bed, Rachel or Martin would read a book with him.

Tonight he had picked Elmo, the Cat from Venus. Of course, Dylan technically could not read, but they called it reading. He had simply memorized the story line with the pictures and knew when to turn the pages. But it made him happy.

Halfway through the book, Rachel felt her heart slump as she thought of Dylan trying to entertain the Dell kids with funny faces while they composed poetry on the computers.

She kissed his silky hair as he recited the pages, feeling the warmth of his head beneath her lips. No matter how hard he tried, he would forever feel stuck, humiliated, surpassed by other kids who would go on to bigger things. And he would never grow to appreciate the higher aspects of science, math, literature, or art. He would never know the higher pleasures of discovery or creativity.

As she listened to him recite, all she could think was that he would grow up feeling inferior—that his wonderful enthusiasm would turn in on itself as he learned what a limited space he occupied in the world.

After they finished reading, Rachel sat on the rocking chair in his room and watched her son sleep, his Curious George on the pillow beside him.

Sometime later, Rachel awoke.

She was in a hospital ward. For a moment, she was totally confused and frightened because she couldn’t recall how she got here. Maybe she had had a stroke, that while putting Dylan to bed she’d been struck by an aneurysm, sending her into a blackout.

She was in a bed and hooked up to an IV and a vital-functions monitor that chirped as neon lines made spikes across the screens. They appeared normal. In fact, she felt normal. So what was she doing in a hospital?

As she stared around the room, odd features began to assume a pattern of familiarity: A small crib sat at the foot of the bed; flowers sprouted from vases on the tables; stuffed animals filled a visitor’s chair. Hanging across the mirror was a CONGRATULATIONS streamer. And cards. Lots of cards on the food table to her right. Some with cartoons of naked bouncing babies. IT’S A BOY!!!

My God. She was in a maternity ward.

That couldn’t be. She didn’t recall being pregnant. Besides, that was medically impossible. She had had a hysterectomy two years ago. It made no sense.

Of course it made no sense, she told herself. This was all a dream. A flashback dream. And the sounds of someone approaching the room cut through the thick mist of sleep. And fear and confusion gave way to a sudden rush of joy.

“Here he is,” announced the nurse.

Through the door came a nurse who looked vaguely familiar. But Rachel was too confused to rummage for an identity because the woman was holding a newborn baby. “Here he is,” she sang out. And she gently placed the little bundle in Rachel’s arms.

Rachel couldn’t believe her eyes. It was Dylan, and a replay of the day he was born.

Tears of joy flooded her eyes. She was reliving the most beautiful moments of her life. The birth of her only child. Her beautiful little boy. What a wonderful dream.

In that hazy margin between wakefulness and dream-sleep, she wished it wouldn’t end. She wished the moment would telescope indefinitely. Because deep down in the lightless regions of her conscious mind she recalled a stalking fear born out of a report she had read somewhere. In the article a phrase had cut through all the technobabble like a seismic shock—the single solitary phrase: chromosomal damage.

Not my baby.

The moment passed as somebody put a hand on her shoulder. Through her tears she recognized Martin beside her in a chair. She hadn’t noticed him before, but that was part of the Lewis Carroll absurdity of dreams.

“He’s got your head.”

“Yes,” she said, not wanting to break the spell by questioning his odd wording. So she nodded as if Martin had said, He’s got your eyes.

Dylan was wearing one of the little knitted caps they put on newborns. With the little point at the top he looked like a baby elf. But he was beginning to fuss. And though his face was still red and a little wrinkled, Rachel decided that the cap looked tight across his brow.

“It’s okay, little man, it’s okay. Mommy will remove this thing.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said the nurse. “It’s a little cool in here.”

“Oh, just for a moment. Besides, he’s half-hidden.”

The nurse rocked. “Well, I suppose.”

Ever so delicately Rachel peeled back the little cap with her fingers. For a moment, Rachel froze.

Then from deep inside, a scream rose out of her as her mind tried to process what her eyes were taking in: The top of Dylan’s skull was missing. And in its place was a gaping dark hole, edged with red raw tissue and a white layer of bone.

Rachel was still screaming as she stared into the gaping brain pan of her infant’s head, wondering in a crazy side thought why no blood had stained the tiny white cap, and why Dylan was still alive, in fact, behaving like a perfectly healthy infant, staring at her wide-eyed, his little pink berry mouth sucking for her nipple, his hands making little pudgy fists—all in spite of the fact that the top of his head was missing.

Rachel’s scream caught in her throat like a shard of glass. In the overhead light she spotted something inside his skull. It was his brain, but it was a tiny shrunken thing lying at the bottom.

“Boy, oh boy! He’s sure got an appetite, haven’t you, little guy?” the nurse chortled.

“Well, that’s Something he inherited from his old man,” Martin said with a big happy grin.

Was it possible that they didn’t notice? Rachel wondered. But how could that be under these harsh lights? Or maybe she was hallucinating?

While Dylan nursed happily at her breast, Rachel closed her eyes tightly, counted to three, then opened them again, hoping against hope that that hideous vision would go away. But it persisted. “Wh-what happened to his brain?” she cried.

“Oh, that.” The nurse glanced over her glasses at Dylan. “Just your basic DBS.”

“DBS?”

“Dope brain syndrome.”

“WHAT?”

“Dope brain syndrome. Dysgenic occi-parietal encephalation. We see that from time to time. It’s from mothers who did a lot of TNT when they were younger. Take enough of that stuff, and it discombobulates the chromosomes,” she added while straightening out Rachel’s sheet. “But, you know, except for the minibrain, you almost never see any funny physical stuff—flippers or webbed fingers or extra toes. Really, just the ole dope brain.”

“Dope brain,” Martin said simply, his voice without inflection. “He takes after you.”

Then they both looked at Rachel and in unison said, “DOPE BRAIN DOPE BRAIN DOPE BRAIN—”

“Stop!” Rachel screamed. “Please stop.”

“Nothing to get upset about,” the nurse said, and poked her fingers into Dylan’s skull and pulled out his brain as he continued to suckle. “Pardon my French, but you musta done a lot of shit, if you ask me, ma’am.”

Paralyzed with horror, Rachel stared at the poor pathetic little thing in the palm of the nurse’s hand. Like all the pictures of brains she had seen, it was yellow and split down the middle and wrinkled with convolutions. But so small. Like a peeled chestnut.

“See? It doesn’t even bother him,” the nurse said, and she dropped the thing back into Dylan’s skull. “There you go, little guy.”

Dylan burped and went back to the nipple.

“He’s awfully cute, though,” the nurse said, grinning expansively. “Aren’t you, you little monkey.”

“Don’t call him that,” Rachel protested.

Suddenly the nurse’s face shifted as if the flesh were re-forming across her skull. Her eyes narrowed shrewdly and suddenly she was Sheila MacPhearson. She pressed her face to Rachel’s until it filled her vision. Her lips were big and rubbery and they muttered something.

“What did you say?” Rachel asked and woke herself up.

For a long spell, she looked around the room. The maternity ward had turned back into Dylan’s room, still lit by the little night-light. The book they had been reading had slipped to the floor with a thud. Dylan stirred but did not wake.

A dream, she told herself as she sat in the dim light. No, nightmare. A wretched, brutal nightmare that has left my mind tender and begging for forgetfulness.

She closed her eyes for a minute, Sheila’s voice still humming in her head. She had said something that had gotten cut off.

Rachel got up to adjust Dylan’s blanket when in the dim light all she saw staring up at her from the pillow was a dark little monkey head. She nearly fainted in the moment before she recognized Curious George. Suddenly she hated that thing with its insipid grin and stupid blank eyes.

She folded back the sheet to expose Dylan’s face, and covered George with the blanket.

As she leaned over to kiss Dylan on his head, Sheila’s voice cut through the haze.

“He can be fixed.”

22

There were two things that Lilly Bellingham’s mom told her that day: Don’t go in the water just after eating; and when you do, don’t go in above your waist.

Lilly wasn’t that good a swimmer, so she understood the second Don’t. But she had trouble with the first. “Why do I have to wait an hour after eating?”

“Because you’ll get cramps.”

“How can I get cramps?”

Lilly was only six, but she was very persistent. And smart. That’s what all her teachers said. But there were times when Peggy was caught off guard. “Because,” Peggy said, and took a swig of her diet Mountain Dew.

“But why because? I want to go in. I’m hot as hell.”

Peggy shot her a hard look. “I don’t like you using swear words, little missy, ya hear?”

“You use it all the time.”

“That’s different. Children aren’t supposed to swear. Period.”

“But hell’s not a swear word. Not like taking the Lord’s name in vain, or the f and s words which Daddy uses all the time with Uncle Art.”

“Well, he shouldn’t. He knows better,” Peggy said, knowing how feeble her response sounded, even to her daughter. “I don’t want no daughter of mine using any of those words, including the h word. Period.”

“So how come I can’t go in the water?”

“Because you’ll get cramps. You just ate and your tummy is full, that’s why.”

“Then how come I don’t get cramps on land but will get them in the water? And how come I don’t get cramps in the bathtub after eating?”

Damnation! Peggy thought. She was right. How come you didn’t get cramps on land but were supposed to get them in the water? Lilly was looking at her for an answer, something that was supposed to make the sweetest sense and sit her little girl’s fanny on her towel. But the best Peggy could come up with was, “Because that’s what the doctor said.” An even more feeble explanation and instantly Peggy knew Lilly wouldn’t fall for it.

“What doctor? Not Dr. Miller. I never heard him say that. Not ever ever.” And she stamped her foot in the sand. “And you know why? Because it doesn’t make any sense. Standing in water can’t give you cramps just like standing in air can’t give you cramps after you eat. Besides, all those other kids just ate and they’re in the water, and I don’t hear any of them hollering about cramps.”

Peggy sighed and glanced at all the kids goofing around in the shallows. Lilly was right: They had all just had lunch at a nearby picnic table and not a one of them was doubled over.

“So how come I can’t?”

“All right, all right! Go in the damn water.”

Lilly’s face lit up.

“But if you get the slightest cramp, don’t come whining to me, ya hear?”

“Mom, you said the d word.” And she dashed down the sand and into the water.

“And not too far,” Peggy shouted. “You hear?”

Lilly waved.

Peggy watched Lilly run in up to her waist then plop down to wet her upper body. For a second she submerged herself then shot up because the water was cold. In her yellow bathing suit she looked like a canary. She had picked it out herself last week in Kmart. They were having a sale on kids’ swimsuits, and it was marked down to $7.99. Lilly loved yellow. Half the T-shirts and other tops in her closet were yellow.

After a few minutes, Lilly wandered toward a group of kids about her age or a couple years older. They were tossing a Frisbee a few yards away. One kid overthrew and Lilly retrieved it. Although she didn’t know the kids, it didn’t take her long to make friends. In a matter of moments, she was tossing it with them, leaping in the air and splashing down to catch it. That was just like her—outgoing and sociable. Miss Chatty-Charm as Uncle Art had dubbed her. “She could sweet-talk the quills off a porcupine,” he’d say. That was just the problem, Peggy thought. She was too friendly.

When she was satisfied that Lilly wasn’t going to go in above her waist, Peggy stretched out on the blanket with her magazine. Every so often she’d look up to see how Lilly was doing and that she was keeping in the shallows.

But the warm sun made her drowsy, and after a while Peggy dozed off.

Several minutes later, she woke with a start. It was nearly three-thirty, and she had to get Lilly to her four-thirty interview with Smart Kids, a summer-school program for gifted children at the local high school. She was one of five selected from her elementary school. The announcement was in the newspaper and even on the Internet.

Peggy sat up. Lilly was standing in the water looking out over the lake. “Lilly,” Peggy called.

But she didn’t turn, too preoccupied with some ducks floating nearby.

“Lilly!”

Still no response. Now she was playing deaf just to drag out the day. But they had to get back.

Peggy got up and headed down to the water. “Hey, young lady!”

But she still did not turn around.

Now Peggy was getting angry. The initial chill of the water shocked her in place. She would never understand how kids could just bound down the sand and plunge into such freezing water. It must have something to do with their metabolism.

She was five feet from her daughter. “Hey, you!” As she said those words, a chill passed through Peggy.

The girl turned. It was not Lilly.

Similar yellow one-piece suit. Same sandy brown hair. Same length. Same body size, though she did seem a little taller, her legs a little longer—but Peggy had dismissed that for not having seen her daughter in a swimsuit since last summer.

“Oh, sorry.”

The girl just shrugged, then waded to shore.

Peggy looked down the beach. No sign of Lilly. No other yellow suit.

She left the water, looking up and down the beach. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the girl in the yellow suit head toward the parking lot. As Peggy spun around trying to spot Lilly, it passed through her mind that the resemblance of the girl to her daughter from the rear was amazing. Before she bolted down the beach, Peggy caught the girl looking over her shoulder at her. For one instant, Peggy felt something pass between them. Something dark and jagged.

The next instant Peggy was jogging down the beach the other way, scanning the people on the blankets and in the water, and shouting out her daughter’s name.

Oh, God!

In a matter of seconds she was running, her head snapping from side to side.

“Lilly. LILLY.”

When Peggy ran out of beach, she shot to the lifeguard stand.

She could barely get the words out: “M-my daughter’s missing.”

23

“Enhancement?” Martin said. “Sounds like some kind of religious experience.”

As Rachel had expected, he was completely dismissive of the idea.

It was the next evening, and they were in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher. They had just finished eating, and Dylan was upstairs taking a bath.

Still Rachel kept her voice low. She had related Sheila’s claim about the Nova Children’s Center. “She says they can improve a child’s IQ by fifty percent or more.”

His eyebrows shot up like a polygraph needle. “What? That’s impossible!”

“I’m just telling you what she said.”

Martin had an intelligent angular face—one that was capable of authority. He was not always right, but never uncertain. At the moment, his eyes narrowed cleverly, his mouth spread into a smirk, and his eyebrows arched the way they did when he was about to make a pronouncement. It was a look that annoyed her for its condescension. “Look, Rachel, you’re born with two numbers: your Social Security number and your IQ. And neither can be changed.”

“They also once declared the earth was flat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t be so damn pigheaded.” Frustration was tightening her chest.

“Unless these enhancement people have come up with some brand-new science, I don’t buy it. You’re born as smart as you’ll ever be. Yeah, maybe you could add a couple points on a test, but intelligence is basically fixed.”

“Keep your voice down,” she said in a scraping whisper. She closed the French doors so their voices wouldn’t carry upstairs. “I want to look into it.”

“Fine, but keep in mind that Sheila loves to impress. She’s always dropping names and telling secrets. She rents a place on Martha’s Vineyard and leads you to believe she’s drinking buddies with Diane Sawyer and Alan Dershowitz. Not to mention how much so-and-so paid for their house.”

“So, what’s your point?”

“My point is that Sheila MacPhearson embellishes the truth. She exaggerates. Remember what she said when she showed us this house? That it was the childhood home of a ‘famous movie director.’ Her exact words. For days I had thought Steven Spielberg grew up here. Then we find out it’s some guy who did a music video for MTV.”

“So you’re saying that Sheila is lying?”

“I’m saying I don’t believe they’ve got some procedure that can turn your average Jack and Jill into a Stephen Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant.”

“Well, I’m going to look into it.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t get your hopes up.”

She hated his absolutist manner. It was something he used on his workers to bring them to their knees, but she resented when he brought it home. It was obnoxious and failed to intimidate her. She also hated the possibility that he was right. That out of desperation she was chasing white rabbits on some offhanded remark by good-hearted Sheila MacPhearson.

Martin must have read the turn of her mind because he instantly softened. “Honey, more than anybody else you should know how these things don’t work. We tried every gimmick in the books and then some. It’s all a myth: It can’t be done—not in the first three years or the next or the next. That’s all a pipe dream of die-hard liberals who want to believe they can make poor inner city kids intellectually equal to children of white affluent suburbanites: How to flatten the bell curve. But it doesn’t work. The human brain is a Pentium chip made of meat: It’s got all the circuit potential it’s ever going to have.”

There’s a hole in our son’s brain, a voice in her head whispered. A gap. Missing circuitry. A deficiency in his left hemisphere. And I put it there for better sex.

Every other minute of the day she had thought about telling him, of finally spewing the vomit from her soul; but she really didn’t know if she could live with the consequence. She really didn’t believe that Martin could ever forgive her. He was like that—he held grudges. And what greater grudge than that against the woman who had ruined his only child? Even if in time, she could work up the nerve to confess—fortified by the fact that at the time she was young, foolish, and unaware of the risks—the proper punishment would be to watch Dylan grow up impaired, her secret festering within her the rest of her life.

“I see no harm in looking into it.”

Martin nodded. “By the way, did she say what the enhancement procedure actually is?”

“She didn’t know.”

“But she said it works wonders,” he muttered sarcastically. “I’m just wondering: If they’ve got some kind of procedure to make you smarter, how come the world doesn’t know about it? How come Peter Jennings and The Boston Globe haven’t gotten the scoop on it? And how come there aren’t IQ jack-up centers in every hospital and clinic in the country?”

Martin was no fool. If she protested too much, he would wonder at her desperation. “Martin, I really don’t know,” she said, trying to sound neutral. But she was struggling between anger at his patronizing manner and her own transparency. He was right: She knew nothing about the procedure or those behind it. She wasn’t even sure where the place was located. “Forget it. Forget I ever brought it up,” she said.

“But you did. And what bothers me is how come you’re so wide-eyed about some foolish claim about boosting our son’s intelligence?”

For a long moment she just stared blankly at him, not being able to summon an answer. She felt the press of tears but pushed them down. “Because I’m feeling desperate. Because it makes me sick to think what he’s going to go through. Because … oh, nothing. Nothing!”

“Nothing,” he repeated. “Well, the only enhancement we need around here is our love life.”

Rachel slammed the dishwasher closed. She was not going to respond. He knew that she just didn’t feel like having sex, that she was going through a down spell.

Suddenly the French doors flew open and Dylan walked in. He had his pajamas on, but the shirt was on backward and inside out, the label under his chin. In his hand was a big zoo picture book.

“Daddy, can you read me ‘bout the aminals … I mean anminals … I mean anlimals?”

Rachel burst into tears and left the room.

24

“If you keep this up, you’re going to starve.”

Vera glared at him. Travis didn’t like Vera. She wasn’t warm or kind like his mom, and she had hard flat eyes like a catfish.

Yesterday when he had stopped eating and talking, she called in Phillip to help. (Travis vaguely remembered him as the man who carried him out of the seaplane that first night.) They had wanted him to eat so he could be healthy for “the tests”—whatever those were. He wondered if they were like the ones he took in January for the SchoolSmart scholarship.

Phillip’s was the only other face that Travis had laid eyes on here. And it was a scary face—a pale, tight, unsmiling stone with gray eyes that poked you when they stared. Vera had called him in to make Travis take his pills. He could still feel Phillip grip the lower half of his face in that big meaty hand and squeeze until Travis’s mouth opened. Then Phillip tossed in the pills and squirted water down his throat with a plastic squeeze bottle and clamped his mouth shut so he had to swallow or choke.

While Vera circled him, Travis sat still in the beanbag chair looking blankly across the room at the TV His eyes did not follow her, nor did he answer her.

He had stopped asking for his mother. He had stopped asking when he was going home. Most of the day, all he would do was stare at the television, losing himself in the mindless flickering of colors and squealy voices.

Beside him was a cardboard tray with a sandwich, a cup of carrots, pudding, and a carton of milk, now warm. There had been a Snickers bar, which he had pocketed. The rest he hadn’t touched, and it had been sitting there for several hours.

Vera brought the tray over and handed him the sandwich wedge. It was peanut butter and grape jelly. She wagged it under his nose, but he turned his head away. She pressed it closer until it pressed onto his lips. He turned his head even farther away.

“I just talked to your mother on the telephone.”

Travis’s head twitched, and he glanced tentatively at the woman.

“She asked about you and said to tell you that you had to eat your food or she would be sad.”

Slowly he looked at the woman.

She raised the sandwich to his mouth again. “She said that she missed you, so does Beauregard. But if you eat and get your strength back you can go home.”

“You’re lying.”

Vera looked at him, shocked at the first words he had spoken in two days. “I’m not lying. I just got off the phone with her, I’m telling you. She called to see how you were doing on the tests. But if you don’t eat, you can’t take them which means you can’t go home.”

“His name isn’t Beauregard.”

She stared at him with those small dead catfish eyes. “Look, I made a mistake,” she said. “So what’s his name?”

“Bo Jangle.”

“That’s what I meant. I knew it was Bo something.” She pressed the sandwich closer. “You going to take a little bite for Mom and Bo Jangle?”

That wasn’t his name either, and he turned his face away without answering.

Yesterday he had cried. Vera had wanted him to take his pills again, but when he refused, she said that his mother would be upset. It was the first time they had mentioned his mother. He didn’t want to cry, but he could not help it. And while he did so, the woman stood and watched him. She had lied to him then, too, he was certain. She didn’t know his mother. Just like she hadn’t just talked to her on the phone.

Vera got up and tossed the sandwich. “Well, you’re going to have your test on an empty stomach, I guess.” She went out and returned a few minutes later with Phillip who carried a tray with a cloth over it.

“Hey, Travis,” he said, as if they were friends. “We just want to run a little test on you, okay? You’re going to do this lying down, okay?”

Phillip led him to the bed and told him to sit at the edge. He handed him a piece of paper on a clipboard and a pencil. “I’d like you to write your name for me—first and last name.”

Travis sat on his bed. He thought about not responding, but he recalled Phillip’s hand on his jaw yesterday and wrote his name, thinking this was a dumb test.

“Good, now I want you to take the pencil with your left hand and do the same.”

It was much harder with his left hand, but he struggled, making a real mess of it. When he was finished, he handed the clipboard back to Phillip, who looked pleased.

Then they made him lie on the bed. Vera then said, “I want you to count backward from twenty for me.”

Travis did not respond.

“If you do, Phillip will take you outside. Promise.”

He didn’t believe them, but they would keep it up until he did. So he counted backward from twenty in a soft voice.

Vera then rubbed his neck with alcohol, a smell he knew from when his mother cleaned out a cut knee. She then rubbed some other stuff on the same spot. “This is to numb the skin so you won’t feel anything. But you have to lie perfectly still, you got that?”

He nodded, but suddenly he felt scared by the way they were hanging over him, with Phillip tightly holding down his hands. “Close your eyes, kid,” he said.

Travis hesitated for a few moments, then closed his eyes, but not all the way. Out of the crack he saw Vera stick a hypodermic needle in the right side of his neck and press it all the way. Instantly he jumped, but Phillip held him down.

His neck suddenly felt hot inside all the way up his head. But after a little while, he felt nothing.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Vera said. “Okay, keep your eyes open and count backward from twenty again.”

He didn’t know what they gave him, but he counted backward as she asked. Then they asked him to recite his address, his mother’s and dog’s name, and where he went to school. He did all of that. Then Vera held up a picture book with butterflies and asked him to identify the pictures. Then to read a few first lines of writing. He did that also. And when it wasn’t loud enough, they made him do it again.

Phillip smiled. “You’re doing good, kid.”

“You have big yellow teeth,” Travis heard himself say.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Vera snickered.

“More like out of a vial of truth serum,” he said.

“Like my dog’s,” Travis continued.

“Fuck off, kid.”

“And you’ve got a big mole on your face.”

“Okay, Travis, you did good,” Vera said. “Close your eyes for a few minutes and rest.”

He closed his eyes and thought about his mother and home and Bo. Phillip did have teeth like his. And the mole looked like a bug had crawled out of his mouth.

Travis began to feel sleepy when he felt another needle jab on the left side of his neck. He let out a startled yelp, and the same hot pressure flowed up his neck and across his face, this time on the left side.

“Travis, again, I want you to count for me, backward from twenty.”

Travis heard the woman’s words but did not understand.

“Travis, count backward from twenty.”

Still he did not understand.

“Travis, tell me your name,” the man said.

Travis could not answer. He knew they were talking to him, he heard the words, but he did not know what the sounds meant. But he remembered that he once understood them. But not now. How strange.

The woman held up a book. “Travis, read me the title on the cover.”

Travis did not understand.

Phillip picked up the small glass jar on the tray. “Amazing stuff, sodium amythal,” he said. Then he looked at Travis, “You haven’t got a clue, kid, but you just passed the Wada test. We first put the right half of your brain asleep to see what the other half would do. Then we put the other side of your brain to sleep to see what you’d do, which is nothing.” He tapped the other side of his head. “You passed the first test, kid: You’re a left-brainer.” He looked at his watch. “And in about three more minutes, you’ll be back to normal.”

And they left.

25

The Nova Children’s Center building was a handsome redbrick neo-Gothic structure with turrets and large windows that had been reencased. A converted old schoolhouse, it was set back from the road and surrounded by a sweeping lawn, in the middle of which sat a hundred-year-old beech tree ablaze with purple leaves. The place looked solid, established, and full of promise. Their eleven o’clock appointment was with a Dr. Denise Samson.

Rachel and Dylan drove around to the parking lot in the rear beside a playground and picnic area. The visitors’ section was full of shiny upscale cars. This was not your typical learning clinic. And she had known several.

As they rounded the front, they heard children laughing and teachers talking. Through the windows, she could see young kids in chairs and adults working with them. In another room, children were at computer terminals.

“Is this my new school, Mom?”

How do you answer that? she thought. “It might be, if we like it.”

She wasn’t sure he understood, and he didn’t pursue it, captivated by the playground apparatus.

In spite of its early twentieth-century vintage, the building’s interior had been redone in bright modern, tasteful decor. A directory hung in the foyer. The only names she recognized were Denise Samson and Lucius Malenko. The receptionist said that Dr. Samson was expecting her and would be out in a moment. Meanwhile, Dylan headed for a small computer terminal with a video game, while Rachel sat and filled out a medical questionnaire asking the basics, including how she heard about the Nova Children’s Center. She entered Sheila MacPhearson’s name.

When she was finished, she picked up one of the glossy Nova brochures on the table. There were photos of the administration and staff, of students being instructed by specialists.

Inside was a note to parents:

If your child exhibits some of the following,

NOVA CHILDREN’S CENTER is a solution:Poor reading comprehension Slow reading Spelling problems Poor math skills Low self-confidence and self-esteem Poor handwriting, printing Delayed language skills Memory problems …

This list was a relentless description of Dylan. She read on:

What Can Be Done?

The NOVA CHILDREN’S CENTER provides help for dyslexia and other learning challenges. We offer a variety of diagnostic testing to identify the problems …

The brochure went on to describe how the center offered individualized learning programs for each child, all instruction given one-on-one. In bold was the statement: “Ninety percent of NCC students average one year or more improvement for every NCC semester.” This was probably the enhancement that Sheila meant.

Rachel flipped through the pages. They recommended from two to five sessions a week lasting from twenty-four to thirty-six weeks per year. There was a multistep assessment procedure that was essential to define the problem areas. Another few pages were dedicated to testimonials of success by parents, teachers, and former students:

When Diana first arrived at Nova Children’s Center, she could read words at her second-grade level, but she couldn’t comprehend the content. She had difficulty connecting to language she read or language she heard. Words seemed to go in one ear and out the other. People thought she was not trying, and she had been labeled a “motivation” or “attention” problem.

The report went on to explain the cause of Diana’s problem with language comprehension. Then there was an explanation of how the Nova Children’s Center approach improved language comprehension, reasoning, critical thinking, and language expression skills. At the end of that discussion, again in bold, was the claim that “most of the children at NCC gained one to three years in language comprehension in just four weeks on intensive treatment.”

Rachel let that sink in. He can be fixed. Maybe that was what Sheila had meant.

A photo gallery of the staff was included at the end of the brochure. Nearly every one had a Ph.D. after their name.

The chief neurologist and one of the directors of the center was an avuncular-looking gray-haired man named Lucius Malenko. He had both a M.D. and Ph.D. after his name.

In the photo, Dr. Denise Samson was a handsome-looking woman about thirty-five to forty with pulled-back dark hair and heavy dark-framed glasses.

“Mrs. Whitman?”

Rachel looked up.

It was Dr. Samson herself. She was a tall, statuesque woman with auburn hair tied into a thick bun behind her head. She was even more attractive in person. “And this must be Dylan.”

“Hi,” Dylan said, glancing up from the computer. On the screen were funny little creature heads that you could eliminate by shooting blips of light from a spaceship. Dr. Samson showed Dylan how to do it then walked Rachel to a small conference room beyond a glass partition so that they could talk while viewing Dylan.

“As I said on the phone, this is a multidimensional assessment to help determine Dylan’s various cognitive abilities—his information-processing strengths, problem-solving style, and problem areas. Since his problem areas seem to be language-based, we’ll assess his oral language—phonics, word associations, sentence formulation, and the like. Then we’ll do some visual/auditory diagnoses.” She sounded as if she were reading.

Because the assessments were long and tiring for a child, they would be spread over two days. Tomorrow would also include functional MRI scans.

“After the assessments are in, we’ll put together an individualized instructional program for him with one of our specialists.”

Rachel listened as the woman continued. When she was finished, Rachel said, “I’m wondering if I might also speak to Dr. Malenko.”

“Dr. Malenko?” Dr. Samson seemed surprised.

“I have some questions of a neurological nature that I’d like to ask him.”

There was a pregnant pause. “I’m sure I can answer most of your questions, Mrs. Whitman.”

“I have no doubt, but a friend recommended that I speak with him before we decide on a program. So I’d like to set up an appointment.”

“I see. Then you can check with Marie out front.”

Rachel could sense the woman’s irritation, but at the moment she didn’t care.

Rachel made the appointment for Thursday, and gave Dylan a kiss, telling him she was going to be right here in the waiting room. Dr. Samson then led him down the hall to the test rooms. He went willingly, looking back once to check that Rachel was still there.

Mommy’s so sorry for what she did to you, my darling.

26

That night Brendan woke himself up with a scream.

He looked around his bedroom. Everything was still. The green digital readout on his clock radio said 3:17.

He had had that dream again. The one with the blue elephants. They were circling him. Taunting him. Insane-looking creatures with wide grins and big floppy trunks and all the grabbing arms. Like the demon pachyderms in Disney’s Fantasia, dancing maniacally around him, screaming at him to be a good boy, grabbing at him, poking him, pulling his hair while he cowered under bright white lights.

One of them came over to him and bent down. How many marbles does Mr. Nisha have if I take away seven? Tell me. TELL ME! When Brendan didn’t answer, the creature pulled out a large sword and cut off his own head.

That’s when Brendan woke up.

His shirt was damp with perspiration. His bed was a mess from kicking around.

Time to dance. Time to dance.

He went to the toilet and peed in the bowl.

Time to eat your soup.

He flushed the toilet. In the dim light from the street he looked in the mirror.

Count backward from twenty.

“I can’t,” he whispered.

Time to fix you up.

Which glass has more water?The tall one.Nope!Time to fix you up. Time to fix you up.

Brendan lit a cigarette and went to the window. He looked across the front yard, the dark street, the field of scrub and landfill on the other side. A fat white moon had risen above the horizon and whitewashed the scene.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!

The Matthew Arnold lines jetted up from nowhere, as usual.

for the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So carious, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light

He thought about Richard in wheezy sleep in the next room. He wondered how many nights the old man had. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t wake up the next morning—if Brendan went in there and found him cold and blue. He wondered if he went in there and did something about it.

Would he be horrified? Would he cry?

He thought about Nicole. He wondered what nightmares she dreamed. He wondered if she cried.

Mr. Nisha wants you to be happy.

He raised his eyes and let the white light flood his mind.

A huge crystalline moon sat in the sky over Rachel and Martin like a piece of jewelry.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

“I hope it’s how madly in love you are with me, and that you’re finally over your PMS, which I thought was surely terminal.”

He was making light of the moment, but she really couldn’t blame him. They were sitting on the balcony of the Blue Heron overlooking Magnolia Harbor. The reflection of the moon made a rippling carpet all the way out to the horizon. Above was a cloudless black velvet vault dappled with stars. They had just eaten a sumptuous meal—Martin, the frutti di mare, and she, the Chilean sea bass—which they washed down with a bottle of Hermitage La Chappelle 1988.

“Martin, I think we should talk.”

“Uh-oh. Is this the big thorn you’ve been sitting on for the last month?”

“It’s a problem I have … we have.”

Martin’s face hardened. “Rachel, if you’re going to tell me that you’ve found somebody else, I’m not sure I can take it.”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“And you’re not sick.”

“No.”

Martin nodded, as if to say that the high horribles had been eliminated. “Okay, hit me.”

“It’s Dylan.”

“What about him?”

“He has brain damage, and it’s because in college I took some dope, something called TNT, which some guy I know made in a chemistry lab. In any case, I read a report saying the stuff damaged female reproductive cells, resulting in chromosomal defects of their children. I had him tested, and the left hemisphere of Dylan’s brain is underdeveloped, and it probably was caused by the TNT.” Rachel was amazed at her glibness. That was totally unexpected.

She couldn’t tell if it was the flickering light from the small glass kerosene lantern that sat between them, but Martin’s face seemed to shift several times as he struggled to process her words.

“You’re telling me that my son has brain damage because you took a lot of bad dope?” His voice was a strange hissy whisper.

“Yes. His IQ is eighty-three, which is the low side of average.” Again, she could not believe the smoothness of her confession—but, of course, she had rehearsed it so many times over the last several days that she had managed to strip the words down to their phonetic bones.

“Eighty-three. EIGHTY-THREE. My son is going to grow up dumb because you took some sex drug?”

“Martin, you’re shouting.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I read about that TNT shit. It was for sex thrills. SEX THRILLS.”

The people at other tables were glaring at them in astonishment.

“You goddamn idiot! You ruined my son. You ruined my only child.”

“Martin, keep your voice down.”

“No, I won’t keep my voice down. That means he’ll be handicapped forever, just because you wanted good orgasms.”

The other diners were now muttering to each other and scowling at Rachel. Suddenly she recognized neighbors, acquaintances, and other members of the Dells. Even the minister from the Hawthorne Unitarian Church and her husband, the choirmaster. “How could you?” someone said. “Shame!” cried another. “Pigs like her shouldn’t be allowed to have children.”

“I didn’t know,” she said to Martin. Then to the others. “Really, I didn’t know. I was young.”

The entire balcony was glowering at her, their large rubbery mouths jabbering condemnations.

“You didn’t know because you’re stupid,” Martin growled. “He was going to grow up to take over the business.” Then he made that bitter mocking face she had come to hate. “Maybe he can head up the cleaning crew. President and CEO of latrines. The world’s leading expert on SageSearch’s urinal camphor. Can plunge a toilet and change the paper lickety-split.” His eyes were huge and red and his teeth flashed as his mouth spit out the venom.

“I’m sorry. I’M SORRY. I’m SORRY …”

“Sorry? SORRY? You bet you’re sorry,” he said and picked up the kerosene lantern with the burning wick and smashed it on her head.

Even before the cutting pain registered, her head was engulfed in flames, burning hair dripping onto her dress and sizzling her eyes.

“SORREEEEEE!”

It was her own scream that woke her, and she bolted upright gasping to catch her breath.

It was Lindsay. Greg could not recollect the details of the dream, but he woke filled with the sense of her.

But as much as he tried, he could not recapture the scenario—just the afterglow of her presence, like the fast-fading image of a TV. He sat at the edge of the bed, wishing he could put the moment on rewind. He had had dreams of her in the past, lots of them—odd, disjointed scraps, floating images—sometimes of her alive and vibrant, sometimes of her on Joe Steiner’s table. Once he had dreamt of her and their son—but not as a baby, but a little boy.

As he sat there thinking about the day, he felt the old sadness spread its way through his soul like root hairs. He knew if he let himself loosen a bit he’d dissolve into deep wracking sobs—the kind that had left him reamed out and barely functional. He had had enough of those and fought back the urge, telling himself that he didn’t want to be one of those widowers who went through the rest of his life embracing his grief like a mistress.

A photo of Lindsay smiled at him from his bureau. It was taken in Jamaica on their honeymoon six years ago. She was dressed in white with a large red hibiscus behind her ear and smiling brightly at the camera in a tangerine setting sun. With her shiny black hair and large brown eyes and honey skin, she looked like a vision in amber. They had been crazy in love.

Greg got up.

It was nearly eleven, and the sun was pouring through the window. Although he had slept for nearly six hours, he felt fatigued. It had been four days since they put him on night shift, and he still could not get used to sleeping in the daytime. Most of the time he felt low and out of focus, as if he were suffering permanent jet lag. But it was worse when he was drinking. He had stopped fifteen months ago. He had been disciplined then, too, because he had showed up late for work and was nearly useless on the job. After a second verbal warning, he quit the booze cold turkey—a victory of which he was proud, telling himself that he had done it for Lindsay. The only strategy that worked. But there were nights when the craving made his body hum.

He pushed himself off the bed and headed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice. He put on a pot of coffee, thinking how the caffeine would pick him up, maybe even shock the fur off his brain.

He wasn’t sure how he’d spend the rest of the day. He knew he should check out some leads on the high school break-in, but he had done very little on the Sagamore Boy case over the last week beyond scanning the latest missing-children reports. No leads, as usual. The boy had been missing for over three years, and all that came in were bulletins of recent disappearances. The Dixon case had iced over also. He had nothing but faint hunches and colleagues who thought he was nuts.

The red light on his answering machine flashed.

It was probably Steve Powers calling to see if the kids he interviewed the other night had given him anything on the school break-in. Unfortunately, the security cameras in the damaged area weren’t functioning. All he had was names, some with prior records. He hit the button.

“Detective Zakarian, this is Adrian Budd, radiologist from Essex Medical. I’m not sure if this is significant, but after we talked the other day, it dawned on me why those holes kept bothering me. They just didn’t seem random, nor did they look like all the needle-bore nuclear seedings of tumors I’d seen. Also, the number threw me. So I checked with some neurospecialists here at the center, and they confirmed my suspicions.

“Those skull holes—like the perforation scars of the patient you came about—form a neurotopographical pattern. They seem to trace out the surface area of the sulci folds of the cortex. And there are so many because the cortex folds in on itself, with deeper pockets of surface tissue—which is why cortex folds exist in the first place: to have a broad surface area. Otherwise we’d all be Coneheads.

“The long and the short of it is that the holes appear to trace the sulci of the cortical surface known as the Wernicke’s Brain.

“I don’t know what it means, but that’s the area associated with memory and intelligence.

“I can’t tell you the patient’s name, and I’m not even supposed to divulge this, but the individual whose X ray you saw apparently has a remarkable memory. Nurse Porter thinks he may be a savant. Hope that helps.”

And he clicked off.

27

Ashiny red Porsche Carrera with New Hampshire plates sat in the slot reserved for L. Malenko. A sticker on the rear window read CASCO BAY YACHT CLUB. The man is doing well, thought Rachel as she headed inside the Nova Children’s Center.

It was the following Thursday, and she was here for her eleven o’clock appointment. She had to wait only a few minutes before the receptionist led her down the hall to a corner office.

Lucius Malenko was not wearing a physician’s smock as Rachel had expected, but casual whites—shoes, pants, and cotton pullover—all but for a lavender polo shirt whose collar stuck up around the back of his neck like a flower. He looked as if he’d dressed for a day of yachting or golf. Maybe the “casual Friday” trend was full-time here, a way of being less intimidating.

“Please, come in,” he said pleasantly. He had a surprisingly small sharp hand, probably an asset in neurosurgery. The office was a bright open room with windows on two sides overlooking the greenery of the building’s rear. “Where is Mr. Whitman?” he asked, peering down the hall.

“I’m sorry, but he couldn’t make it.”

“No?” Malenko closed the door. “I’m sure Dr. Samson explained to you that we like to involve both parents where possible—right from the beginning.” He spoke in an accent that sounded eastern European—perhaps Slavic or Russian.

Dr. Samson had explained that. “I’m sorry, but there was a last-minute conflict.” That was the best she could do, hoping that the subject would be dropped. Rachel looked away, pretending to take in the office decor.

Malenko took his chair behind his desk, fixing her with his stare. “May I be so bold as to ask if Mr. Whitman knows you’re here?”

“Well,” she began, thinking how she didn’t want to begin with a lie. She chuckled nervously. “Is it really that important?”

“Only because we’ll be discussing matters that concern his son, too, no?” His manner was pleasant, although she was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“Actually, he doesn’t know. This is a kind of a reconnaissance mission. Maybe if things work out, I’ll bring him next time.”

He looked puzzled, but said nothing and affixed a pair of half-glasses to his nose and thumbed through a folder of Dylan’s test results.

Adding to his immaculate appearance was his nearly pure white hair, which was combed back, emphasizing a broad aggressive forehead. In spite of the hair, he had dark, thick eyebrows and a smooth, boyish face that belied his age. He was a big man who might have been an athlete at one time. His eyes were heavy lidded and intensely watchful. But there was something disconcerting about his gaze—something she had vaguely registered the moment they had met. And only now did Rachel realize what it was: His eyes didn’t match. One was reef-water blue, but the other looked black. On closer inspection Rachel noticed that one iris was all pupil, giving him a disorienting appearance—one eye icy cool, the other darkly alluring.

On the walls hung a few framed plaques—from the American College of Neurological Medicine, the International Society of Skull Base Surgeons, the American Board of Neurosurgery. Also, a Kiwanis Club award for outstanding contribution. Clustered on the opposite walls were photos of him with groups of students from Bloomfield Prep and with people at black-tie functions. The only other form of decoration was a bronze sculpture of the Indian elephant-head god on the windowsill. It had four arms, and each hand held something different. Only one she could make out. It was an axe.

“His name is Ganesha,” Malenko said, his face still in the folder. “He’s the elephant-faced deity, sacred to Hindus the world over.”

“It’s rather charming,” she said. The figure had a large potbelly spilling over his lower garment, and his eyes were large and his smile broad under his trunk.

“Yes. Indians revere him as a god of intellectual strength. Was your son named after Bob Dylan?”

“No, the poet Dylan Thomas.”

“Ah, yes, the great Irish bard. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Wonderful stuff. Are you a literature person?”

“I like to read.”

“A former textbook editor, of course.”

Rachel wondered how he knew that, because she hadn’t put that in the questionnaire. Perhaps it was in Dylan’s medical records.

“Reading is the highest intellectual activity of the human experience,” Malenko continued. “More sectors of the brain are active than in any other endeavor including mathematics or flying an airplane. It’s the most totally interactive processing of information, even with children reading Mother Goose.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do.” He smiled and displayed a row of small but perfect white teeth in a sugar-pink mouth. “So, what can I do for you?”

The baldness of the question threw her. Dylan’s records and test results sat under his nose. “Well, you can see from his folder that he has serious learning disabilities.”

Malenko removed his half-glasses. “Yes, he’s functionally dyslexic, which means that the Wernicke’s area and the angular gyri—those areas of the brain involved in deciphering words—are underactive. As Dr. Samson clearly explained, we have here some of the best LD people in the country who could construct a personalized curriculum for your son.” He tapped his fingers impatiently as he spoke, as if to say, Why are you wasting my time?

“It’s just that I wanted to explore other approaches.”

“Other approaches?”

Clearly Sheila had not told him about her. She probably did not even know the man, just his reputation. “Well, you’re a neurophysician, correct?”

“I also can be found baking cookies.”

She smiled in relief that his manner had softened. “I’m just wondering if there was anything you could do medically to help him.”

“Medically?”

“You know … some special procedures …”

“Everything we do is a special procedure. We tailor our programs to each child, according to his and her individual needs. I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

“It’s just that I heard you had some kind of enhancement procedures.”

Malenko’s eyebrows arched up. “Enhancement procedures?” He pronounced the word as if for the first time.

“To repair the damaged areas. Maybe something experimental—some electrical stimulation thing.”

He looked at her for a long moment that reprimanded her in its silence. Then he glanced inside the folder again. “I see that you were recommended by Sheila MacPhearson, the real estate lady.”

“Yes.”

“And what exactly did she say, Mrs. Whitman?”

“Well, that you had some special procedures that can enhance children’s cognitive abilities.”

“Like cripples at Lourdes.”

“Beg pardon?”

“We get some child to improve significantly on a math test or the SATs, and the word gets out that we’re miracle workers.” He chuckled to himself. “Mrs. Whitman, let me explain that we do perform miracles here, in a sense. We even improve a child’s ability to take tests so that scores go up a few points. But that’s incidental to our objective, which is to maximize a child’s potential. I’m not sure what you are looking for, but this is not Prodigies R Us.”

Rachel felt a little foolish. She had been caught in Sheila’s exaggerated promise. Martin was right. “You’ve seen the MRI scans, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they’re not normal. There’s some kind of anomaly. I was just wondering if—you know—if anything could be done about that? I mean, with all the breakthroughs in medical science, aren’t there any corrective measures that could be taken—some kind of neurostimulation procedure or something … ?” She trailed off, hearing Dr. Stanley Chu’s response: “It’s like wanting to regenerate an amputated finger. It can’t be done.”

Malenko stared at her intently as he considered her appeal, then he opened the folder and removed the MRI scans. “It seems to me, Mrs. Whitman, that you are confusing some magical medical fix with behavioral programs. I’ve looked these over, and I see no signs of hemorrhaging or lesions or tumors that might be impinging on your son’s intellectual development or performance. If there were, then something possibly could be corrected by surgery or radiation.”

“But the left hemisphere is smaller than the right.”

“Mrs. Whitman, let me ask you why you had the MRI scan done.”

Suddenly she felt as if she were entering a minefield. “Because I was worried that he had a tumor or some other problem.”

“But what made you suspect a tumor or some other problem?”

“It was simply … I don’t know … precautionary. His memory retention isn’t normal.”

“Had you consulted your pediatrician for possible psychiatric counseling or medications? Sometimes a child’s memory problems are the results of environment issues or chemical imbalances.”

“Yes, we went through all of that.”

“And was it your pediatrician who referred you for the MRI?”

“Yes.”

“And what was his evaluation?”

“That the ventricles in the left hemisphere of his brain were larger than normal, indicating some kind of underdevelopment in the thalamus.”

“And what did the doctor recommend in terms of medical treatment?”

“He said nothing could be done.”

“And you didn’t believe him.”

“I’m seeking a second opinion.”

“Surely your pediatrician consulted neurologists for an evaluation.”

“I wasn’t satisfied.”

Malenko listened intently, his bright eye training on her as if it were some kind of laser mind-scan. “Does your husband know about this?”

“No, he doesn’t know, but why is that so important?”

Malenko leaned forward. “Mrs. Whitman, if we are going to work with Dylan, then we cannot have misunderstandings regarding the medical condition of a prospective student. If we are going to set for ourselves expectations and objectives, candidness is essential.”

Rachel nodded.

“Good. Then am I correct in assuming that your husband does not know about the MRI scan or the dysmorphic abnormalities in your son’s brain?”

She felt as if he had stripped her naked. “Yes.”

“I see. Then may I ask what you are hiding?”

“Hiding?”

“Mrs. Whitman, you have an MRI done on your son’s brain, you discover an anomalous formation, then two weeks later you come in here for consultation—and your husband knows nothing. I find that unusual, unless you are in the throes of separation or divorce. Are you?”

There was no equivocating with this man, Rachel thought. She struggled with the urge to tell him that it was none of his damn business, but she stopped herself. If she showed offense at his persistence, he might dismiss her. “No, we’re not.”

Malenko looked at her with a bemused expression. Then he picked up the film scans and clipped them to the display board on the wall. “This disparity between the hemispheres of Dylan’s brain could be the result of many different causes, including infant trauma.” He glanced down at her.

Christ! Now he’s wondering if I had battered my own baby.

“It could also be chemical, genetic, oxygen starvation in utero … a number of possibilities. Sometimes these structural deformities can occur as the result of chromosomal damage, usually from the mother’s side.”

For a prickly moment his eyes gauged Rachel’s face.

chromosomal damage

from the mother’s side

He suspects, she told herself. He is a neurologist so he surely knows about the Chu study and recognizes the TNT signature damage.

“Did you smoke or take any unusual medications while carrying your son?’

“No.”

“Any medical emergencies during pregnancy—emergency room visits? Hospitalization? Any intravenal medications?”

All this was on the questionnaire. He was testing her. “No.”

“Another possibility is alcohol. Did you drink while carrying your son?”

“No.”

Malenko handed her a box of Kleenex without comment.

Rachel wiped her eyes, feeling that any moment she would break down.

“MRI scans can only give us gross anatomical pictures, not minor neurocomponents. But the left temporal horn is dilated. Given your son’s test results, my guess is that the cortical regions have been short-circuited to the hippocampus, which is involved with recurrent memories and might explain his linguistic deficiencies.”

There was no reason to dissemble with this man. “I took some bad drugs in college. Something called TNT. The chemical name is trimethoxy-4-methyl-triphetamine.”

Malenko’s eyes flared. “‘TNT for dynamite sex. Get off with a bang.’”

The old catch phrases for the stuff.

“And I suppose your husband doesn’t know that either—which is why you’re here.”

Rachel knew that under ordinary circumstances she would have dismissed Malenko’s unctuously manipulative manner and got up and left. But she suddenly felt a preternatural numbness from all the grief and guilt that had wracked her soul for the last weeks and just didn’t care about his obtuseness. Perhaps it was just the relief of getting it all out—like lancing a boil. “I’ve mentally crippled my son,” she said softly. “I just don’t want him to suffer. I don’t want him to go through life feeling inadequate and inferior.”

“And that is why you’ve not told him.”

She nodded.

“Probably a good reason.” Malenko moved back to his desk chair and sat down. “I’d like to meet your husband.”

“I don’t want him to know.”

“Telling him is your business, not mine, Mrs. Whitman. But I think we all should meet again to weigh the options.”

Weigh the options?

She looked up. “Are you saying there’s something that can be done?”

“I’m saying simply that we should meet again.” He glanced at his watch then closed Dylan’s folder and dropped it on a pile of others with a conclusive snap. “What kind of work is your husband in?” The discussion was over.

If he had some experimental procedure in mind, he wasn’t talking. Yet Rachel felt a flicker of promise. “Recruitment. Martin’s in the recruitment business.”

“Ah, you mean a head hunter.”

“Yes, for the high-tech industry.”

Malenko nodded in approval. “So he matches up eggheads with egghead companies.”

“Something like that.”

“Very good. Is it his own business?”

“Yes.”

“And business is good, no doubt?”

She nodded. She felt emotionally drained. “Mmmm.”

Malenko smiled, probably because it suggested that they could afford their pricey services. Then he picked up Dylan’s folder. “I will look these over more closely,” he said. “Let me suggest we meet next week, and with your husband. About the MRI, I will explain that you came in here on referral from a local friend, and we had a scan done as a matter of protocol.”

He was saying that she could lie, and he’d swear to it. “Thank you.”

“You can make an appointment with Marie. Good day.”

Rachel left the building, torn between renewed hope and the overpowering desire to drive home and fall into a long dreamless sleep.

Through the window, Lucius Malenko watched Mrs. Rachel Whitman cross the parking lot to her car, a gold Nissan Maxima. Not a Jaguar or BMW, but also not a Ford Escort. He watched her pull out to the road that would lead back to her perfect little seaview home on the perfect little hill surrounded by perfectly nurtured horticulture.

He had seen her likes by the dozens over the years: yuppies, suburbies, and middle-aged country-club parents of different ethnicities and races—all driven by guilt and vanity and all devotees of the new American religion of self-improvement. From birth and even before, they were obsessed with rearing the supertot. They put toy computers in their children’s cribs. They sent them to bed with Mozart and bilingual CDs. They muscled their way into the best preschools. Infertile couples advertised for egg donors in the Yale Daily News. Others doled out thousand of dollars for the sperm of Nobel laureates. Some had even consulted geneticists, hoping that they could locate a “smart” gene to be stimulated. There is none, of course, nor any known cluster or combination, but that didn’t prevent people from spending small fortunes. It was all so amazing and amusing.

“Nobody wants to be normal anymore,” he said aloud.

As Mrs. Rachel Whitman drove away, a new silver BMW 530 two-door pulled into the slot just vacated by her. It was Mrs. Vanessa Watts, coming in to consult about her Julian’s behavior problems. Years ago, she had come in just like this Rachel Whitman, gnarled with despair that her youngster was distracted all the time, unfocused, a slow learner, and that he had scored in the fortieth percentile on his math aptitude and fifty-five on the verbal. She was likewise desperate to know what could be done to boost his ranks, otherwise he would never get into Cornell where his father had gone or even into Littleton State where, after some unpleasantness regarding a paper on Jonathan Swift, she eventually earned a doctorate in English literature. And that just could not be—not her Julian. No way. It was unacceptable, and they would do anything, pay anything to make him a brighter bulb.

He watched Vanessa Watts cross the lot to the front entrance as she had on several occasions to come up and complain that they had succeeded too well—that her Julian was too absorbed in his studies, in his projects, that he had become antisocial: that his filament was all too brilliant.

Never satisfied, these bastards. Especially this one—Professor Loose Cannon. And now she was here with her ultimatum. Fortunately, he had one of his own.

He picked up the phone and dialed Sheila MacPhearson.

28

Brendan found Nicole in her ballet class in a building off Bloomfield Prep’s central quad. She was with seven other girls and an instructor in a dance room with mirrors and bars.

Through the glass door, Nicole was dressed in white tights. Her shoulders were bare, giving her long-neck Modigliani proportions. She looked like a swan. They were going through motions called out by a woman instructor dressed in a jogging outfit.

Because it was the last day of classes, the place was empty, so Brendan watched without being discovered. Nicole was perched with one leg up on the bar in line with the other girls. In the reflecting mirror, they looked like twin rows of exotic roosting birds, their faces in a numbed tensity. Suddenly the instructor said something, and they went into leg-flashing exercises. Nicole was second in line at the mirror, her long legs kicking out with elegant precision as if spring-loaded. From a CD player flowed the sweet violin strains of Swan Lake. The instructor shouted something, and on cue Nicole broke into her solo, going through complex leaps and pirouettes across the room. Brendan was amazed to see how totally involved she was in the movement, and so precise and athletic. Her teeth were clenched, muscles bunched up for each vault, her shoulders and face aspic’d with sweat, those muscular semaphore legs moving with effortless grace as she flashed around the room. She was a diva in the making.

When the instructor turned off the music and announced class was over, Brendan left the building and waited for her behind some trees in the quadrangle.

Several minutes later, he saw her with two boys coming down the walk toward him. She had changed and was heading for the cafeteria.

“What are you doing here?” Nicole said when he stepped out from behind a tree.

“I have to t-talk to you.”

“How did you find me?”

“That’s n-n-not important.” He pretended the two boys weren’t there. “Look, we h-have to talk.” According to her schedule she had a forty-minute lunch break before her next class.

“I have a conference with one of my teachers. I can’t.” She made no effort to introduce Brendan to the others, and he was grateful.

“It’s very important,” Brendan insisted. He had not foreseen a conference lunch. Or maybe she was just making that up.

She looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. Call me later.”

He had promised Richard to take him for his doctor’s appointment in two hours. “I can’t. We have t-t-to talk now. Just two minutes.”

“Hey, man, she said she’s got a conference,” the taller boy said, trying to puff up. He was a smooth-faced kid who looked like the poster boy for Junior Brooks Brothers. He was dressed in beige chinos and a stiff blue oxford shirt. The other Nicole drone, a black kid with wireless glasses, had on the same chinos but a white golf shirt. “What part of no don’t you understand?”

“Now there’s an original expression,” Brendan said. “D-d-did you read that in A Hundred Best Comebacks?”

The kid looked baffled, but before he could respond, Nicole said, “Forget it, I know him.”

“You sure?” asked the taller boy, eyeing Brendan as if he were toxic waste.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“Good luck,” the black kid said to her, probably referring to her conference. Then he glanced at Brendan’s baggy jeans and black T-shirt with the multicolored tie-dyed starburst on the front. “Nice threads,” he sneered.

“Up your J. Crew b-bunghole.” As soon as the words were out he felt a surprising flicker of pleasure.

“Cut the shit, both of you,” Nicole said.

As the boys moved away, one of them said, “Speaking of the devil.”

Coming down the path was an older man in a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.

Nicole’s face went to autolight: “Hi, Mr. Kaminsky.” She beamed at him as he approached. “I’ll be right there.”

The man scowled at Nicole. “You know where I’ll be.” He did not look pleased. As he walked away, he glanced at Brendan, and recognition seemed to flit across his face, but he continued down the path toward the next building.

It was the bushy-haired guy in the diner. And the one she had shacked up with that same night.

“I’ll catch you later,” she said to the other boys, dismissing them. As they walked away, she looked at Brendan blankly.

“Your teacher,” he said, barely able to hide his dismay.

“So?”

“Nothing.” But he could tell that she remembered Brendan seeing them holding hands at Angie’s. She had no idea, of course, what he had seen through her window.

“Okay, make it fast.”

“I had a dream the other night. It was c-c-crazy, but I was in a hospital bed.”

She looked at him incredulously. “So?”

“I had never been in a hospital before, at least I d-don’t remember.”

Nicole checked her watch. “You’ve got twenty seconds.”

“M-Mr. Nisha was there. He said I had to be a good boy and take my medicine. It was crazy, and I don’t know what or who he was—just that image floating and ‘Mr. Nisha wants you to be happy’ stuff. I don’t understand. Also, there were other kids there, too.”

Nicole continued to stare at him blankly. “I’ve got an A hanging on this conference, and if I’m late, he gets pissed and takes off, and I’m screwed out of a four-oh. I’m not going to lose that because you had some stupid dream.” She started away.

“Okay, but just one question,” he pleaded, chasing after her.

“Later,” she snapped. “At the club party.”

Dells was sponsoring a Scholar’s Night Saturday for caddy scholarship winners and the publication of Vanessa Watts’s book. Brendan was scheduled to serve hors d’œuvres.

Brendan moved in front of her. “Please, j-just one question.”

“What?” Her otherwise remote, expressionless face suddenly tightened like a fist.

“Did you ever go to a hospital?”

“No.”

“Nicole, think!” he said, running after her.

“I said no.”

“Never?”

“NO.”

“You sure?”

Suddenly she stopped. “Get out of my way.” Her voice hit a nail.

He caught her arm. “Can I look at the top of your head, please?” He moved his hands to part the hair on her crown.

“Get out of here.” And she whacked his hand.

“Do you have any scars on your head?”

She did not answer him and ran down the path to the cafeteria. Before entering, she stopped in her tracks. With an almost robotic movement, she turned and looked back at him for a long moment. Then she ran into the building.

Brendan followed her. The cafeteria entrance was toward the rear. He stuck his head in. Because most upperclassmen had left for the summer, the place was only partly filled with students.

In the rear of the room he spotted Nicole and Mr. Kaminsky at a table by themselves. They were not eating, but talking heatedly. After a few minutes, Nicole slipped him a package. He looked in and slipped out the contents, inspected it then put it back in the envelope, dumped it into his briefcase, and left.

She followed him with her eyes until they landed on Brendan just a moment before he slipped out of view.

Instantly, he disappeared out a side door, leaving her wondering if he had noticed that she had given Kaminsky a videocassette.

29

Travis could tell time, of course. But he had no idea what hour of day it was or what day of the week—or how many days he had been in this room. Everything was a big bright blur. But he figured it was two days since the needle test, because his neck didn’t hurt anymore—yesterday it was like bee stings.

Today was another test day, but no needle this time, Vera said. He also knew that if he didn’t cooperate, they’d send him back to his room and turn off the lights for hours. That was the one punishment he couldn’t take. Total blackness in that locked room. The first time they did that he screamed and cried until he thought he would die. In fact, he knew he would rather die than go through that again.

Vera came in with Phillip. Although Travis could walk, they put him in a wheelchair and snapped a harness on him like a seat belt so he couldn’t get up.

For the first time they brought him outside the room.

He was in a long dimly lit corridor with pipes overhead. On either side of the corridor were windows with shades drawn down from the outside. The only sounds were from television sets. There must have been a set in each room all playing the same stuff because the sound followed him as they pushed him down the hall.

At the end of the corridor, they turned left into a room full of shiny metal equipment and computer terminals. They wheeled him to a table near a computer with some electronic equipment attached to it.

“Don’t be afraid, this isn’t going to hurt,” Vera said. “We’re just going to look at pictures of your brain.”

Travis’s heart pounded. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the looks of those machines and another man sitting in the dark rear of the room at another computer terminal.

Phillip pulled up a chair in front of him. “Listen, kid, this is going to be a piece of cake. You’re not going to feel anything, it’s not going to hurt. just answer a few questions and do a few puzzles. That’s it. It’ll be fun, okay?”

Travis nodded.

“It’s just a simple test. Vera’s going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give the answers. Got that? So, be a good boy.” Phillip stared at him hard, and Travis heard: Or else I’m going to take you back to your room and turn off the lights.

Vera came over and put gobs of jelly stuff on his head and rubbed it into his scalp through his hair. It didn’t smell bad, but it felt yucky. She told him it would wash right out. Phillip then fitted onto his head a tight black rubbery cap. It had lots of red wires attached like snakes. Those Phillip connected to the machine and the computer. He pulled the cap tightly over Travis’s eyebrows and fastened it across his chin so that only his face was exposed. Then he taped some wires on Travis’s cheeks and the space above his eyebrows.

Travis sat still at the table, listening to the faint hum of the machine.

When they were set, Phillip joined the other man at the computer in the back, and Vera sat at the machine. “Just relax and answer the questions,” she began. “Some of the questions will be easy, some will be hard. But the important thing is that you try the best you can. Okay? Because the better you do, the sooner you go home.”

Travis looked at her blankly.

As if reading his mind, she said, “Yeah, for real. You do real good on these and you can go back to your mom.”

He didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance. “Okay.”

She set the small clock down beside her and opened the booklet she had. “How many states in the United States?”

“Fifty.”

“Good.”

“How many days in two weeks?”

“Fourteen.”

“Name me six types of trees.”

“Um … Pine, oak, birch, beech, magnolia, orange.”

Vera nodded and scratched in her book.

She asked several easy questions like that, then said they were going to switch to different kinds of questions. “While training for a marathon, Jack ran fifty-two miles in four days, how many miles per day did he average in this period?”

“Thirteen.”

“Excellent.”

After a few more like that, the questions got harder. “Now I’m going to say some letters, and you repeat them after me. T-R-S-M.”

“T-R-S-M.”

“Good.”

“Do the same with these: P-G-1-C-R-W.”

“P-G-I-C-R-W.”

“M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”

“M-F-Y-U-W-R-S-D-A.”

Vera nodded. “Good,” she said. “Now give me the letters in the backwards: Y-L-X-F-R-W.”

“W-R-F-X-L-Y.”

“Do the same with these: X-D-E-W-Q-A-F.”

“F-A-Q-W-E-D-X.”

Vera whispered, “Jesus!”

Then she did the same, adding one more letter each time, until he repeated a ten-letter series backward. He could tell he got them right because Vera’s face lit up as she marked down the score and checked the computer monitor.

“Okay, now I’m going to read you a sentence, and I want you to repeat it exactly as I read it. Okay? Good: ‘Janet, who lives on Brown Street, got for her birthday a dollhouse with green shutters and a red roof.’”

“‘Janet, who lives on Brown Street, got for her birthday a dollhouse with green shutters and a red roof.’”

This went on for almost an hour until he was tired and wanted to rest.

When the testing was over, Vera said, “You’re a very bright little guy.”

“Can I go home now?”

“Soon,” Vera said. She disconnected all the wires on his cap, removed it, and wiped his head with a towel. His scalp was sweaty from the cap and sticky with the jelly. “For the time being, we’re going to take you outside.”

“But you said I could go home.”

She didn’t answer, just nodded Phillip over.

They pushed him out of the test room and down the corridor to a staircase at the end where Phillip and the other man lifted the wheelchair and carried him up to the top. Vera then pushed him through a series of rooms to an outside deck.

The shock of the bright sky made him wince. It felt good to be in the warm open air. There were tall pine trees all around. In the distance he could see a lake sparkling in the sunlight. It must have been late morning.

But what caught his attention was the sound of children. To the far right he spotted a small playground with climbing structures and a slide with kids on it. Nearby a woman watched them.

Two of the children had white bandages on their heads.

One of them was on the grass dancing with someone.

At first he thought it was another kid dressed up in some kind of costume. But when the girl spun around, Travis realized that she was attached to a life-sized doll—that the thing’s feet and hands were strapped to the girl’s shoes and hands, and that she was laughing and chanting something, although the words weren’t right.

It took Travis a moment to make out the doll, but when the kid turned into a shaft of sunlight he could see that it was a big blue stuffed elephant with a wide grin and human hands. The same stupid creature they had painted on the walls of his room. And in the puppet-show video they played.

And in a singsongy voice, the woman chanted: “Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha. Dance with Mr. Nisha.”

30

Greg met Joe Steiner at the Quarterdeck, a popular bar and restaurant in Falmouth center. Sitting with Joe was another man introduced as Lou Fournier, a neurologist from Cape Cod Medical Center.

“I think Lou might be able to give you a little more insight about your skull cases,” Joe had said. Greg didn’t have to be at work until seven, so they met at five-thirty. Joe knew Greg had been put on night shifts. He also was beginning to suspect that Greg might be on to something odd, although he didn’t know what. And that suspicion was why they were meeting.

Fournier was a man in his sixties with a round broad expressive face that made you think of Jonathan Winters. According to Joe, he had been chief neurologist in a hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, but had gone into semiretirement on the Cape. Joe had shown Fournier the photos of both sets of remains and the diagrams of the anonymous Essex Medical Center patient.

They ordered some beers. “I don’t know what I have,” Greg said. “It might all be a grand coincidence.”

“What does your instinct tell you?” Fournier asked.

“That the odds are against coincidence, that there’s some pattern, some connection.”

“I’m not sure, either,” Fournier said. “But I’d say your instinct is right on.” He laid the two skull photos side by side with the drawing of the Essex patient. “On the Sagamore Boy, you’ve got twenty-two holes all on the left side of the skull. On the Dixon boy, you’ve got nineteen holes on the left side of the skull. On this kid from the Essex Medical Center, his X rays show eighteen holes on the left side. I think Dr. Budd is correct: The areas seem to map out interconnected circuits of the cerebral cortex that’s associated with intelligence and memory.”

Using his finger to illustrate, he continued. “This area here is the frontal lobe, or prefrontal cortex, and is important for planning behavior, attention, and memory. This other cluster is over the parietal lobe and is part of the ‘association cortex,’ known as Wernicke’s area.”

“Wernicke’s area?”

“Yes, the area of the brain associated with language and the complex functions of understanding. People with damage to this area suffer aphasia—they lose their ability to comprehend the meaning of words and can’t produce meaningful sentences.”

“What about these other holes?” Greg asked, pointing to seven around the ear area.

“That’s even more interesting,” Fournier said. “These cover what’s called Broca’s area, which is associated with the analysis of syntax and speech production. If someone experiences damage in the Broca’s area, they lose their ability to speak.”

“So you’re saying the holes cover the entire language center of the brain.”

“Yes, but it’s important to note that these same areas make important connections with many other areas of the brain involved with thinking abilities, conceptual skills, and memory.”

Greg nodded and sipped his beer.

“What do you know about this Essex patient?” Fournier asked Greg.

“Almost nothing—a male teenager from someplace on the North Shore, but that’s it.”

“Then you don’t know his handedness—whether he’s a righty or lefty.”

“No.”

“How about the Dixon boy?” He picked up the Dixon photo.

Greg thought for a moment. Grady’s first baseball glove. “Right-handed.”

Fournier nodded. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. But why is that important?”

“I’m not sure, but more than ninety-five percent of right-handed males have language localization in the left hemisphere. Left-handers are bilateral, that is, they have language centers on both the right and left sides of the brain.”

“But the kid never had any kind of brain operation, his parents said. And I saw his medical records, and his pediatrician confirms.”

“I understand, but these holes are not random, so somebody did something to him. And these others.”

“Like what?”

Fournier took a sip of his beer. “These holes I’d say were made by stereotaxic drilling. It’s an alternative to removing large sections of the skull to reach target areas of the brain—a pinpoint-drilling procedure to remove lesions, abscesses, or tumorous tissue. Or to implant electrodes or radioactive seeds for killing tumors.

“The sheer number suggests mass intercranial lesions or multiple tumors—except the likelihood of survival for young kids is nil. Even with the most precise 3-D imaging, a surgeon can get lost trying to determine where a tumor ends and normal brain tissue begins. And in these areas, that means damage to important neurocircuitry, which could result in serious physical and emotional problems. So I’d rule out any orthodox neurological operation.

“The other possibility is radioactive seeding. But that’s not likely, either.” Fournier picked up the schematic of the Essex patient again. “This is what throws me the most. If this kid underwent extensive stereotaxic surgery, he’s either a walking miracle or he’s walking brain-dead.”

“The nurse said that he looked perfectly healthy and that he has a remarkable memory,” Greg said.

“Then something else is going on.”

“Like what?”

Fournier shook his head. “Some kind of exotic experiment, but nothing I’ve seen before,” Fournier said. Then he added, “But if these two kids are dead, and this one is walking around, you might want to look him up, because he’s making medical history.”

31

Fine gray drizzle was falling the morning that Martin and Rachel met with Dr. Malenko. The air was unseasonably cool, making the day feel more like a morning in October than late June.

The appointment was set for noon. However, they did not meet at Nova Children’s Center. Instead they were directed to Malenko’s private office in Cobbsville, a small town just over the New Hampshire border, about a half hour drive from Hawthorne.

Martin was quiet on the drive over, commenting perfunctorily on the rain and scenery. If he was nervous, it did not show. If he was incredulous, he didn’t let on. He had lapsed into a mode of slightly irritated neutrality—irritated because he had to cancel a meeting in Boston with an important client.

Rachel disregarded Martin’s mood, too lost in her own vacillations between hopefulness and nagging anxiety. She had told Martin that she had consulted with Malenko last week, but didn’t go into details. All she said was that the doctor had agreed to meet with them both. About what she didn’t know.

Number 724 Cabot Street turned out to be a small nondescript ranchlike house with pale green aluminum siding and black shutters behind a hedge of mulberry. Except for the cherry-red Porsche with the gold Bernardi dealer’s decal in the driveway, Rachel would have thought they had the wrong place. No M.D.’s shingle hung outside, no name above the bell.

Malenko heard them pull up, because he opened the front door to greet them. He shook Martin’s hand. “Please come in.”

A small reception area had been carved out of a front parlor on the left, but no receptionist. In fact, from what Rachel could tell, no one else was in the house.

Malenko led them into a rear office furnished in leather and dark muted reds, greens, and gold. Bookcases lined two walls, full of medical tomes and technical journals. On a table beside some plants sat another elephant-god statue in tarnished brass.

“You are your son’s father,” Malenko said. “The resemblance is striking.” A school photograph of Dylan was included in the folder.

“Poor kid,” Martin joked.

“On the contrary,” Malenko said, and took his seat behind the desk.

The resemblance was uncanny, something everybody picked up on. It was as if Dylan were a miniclone of Martin, Rachel thought, his own Mini-Meas if she had passed nothing on to her son but a damaged brain.

“Well, now,” Malenko began, glancing into the folder before him. “When you came in here last week, Mrs. Whitman, you expressed interest in the center finding a program that would best be suited for Dylan.”

Rachel nodded, not knowing where this was going, but feeling her anxiety mount.

“As you know, we had him assessed with an expectation of designing a program tailored to his talents and needs. Because of his language-processing problems and memory lapses, we conducted a body of tests, both neurological and behavioral, including an EKG and MRI scan.”

Rachel felt her heart gulp as he pulled out a large envelope with MRI scans. She didn’t know if she could sit through another gruesome profile of her son’s disabilities.

“The results show that there are region-specific language problems that are associated with the regional-specific deficits in Dylan’s brain, not unlike those we see in patients with dyslexia. As you well know, Dylan has a tendency to overregularize verbs—saying I singed, I goed, I knowed. He also has problems with the use of other morphemes such as possessives and verb agreements. Instead of the cat’s paw, he’ll say the cat paw. Or she talk instead of she talks.

Rachel took a deep breath and swallowed it before it came out a groan.

“He also has problems with certain reasoning aspects associated with language—the use of the passive voice, subjunctives, and if clauses. He was asked the classic test in the field: Who did the biting when he heard the statement ‘The lion was bitten by the tiger.’ His answer was the lion. He was not able to understand the causality. He heard ‘The lion bit the tiger.”’

Rachel put her hand to her brow as Malenko went to the light board and pointed out the anatomical disparities in Dylan’s brain for Martin. Her heart raced, and she bit down, trying to keep herself from spinning out of control.

“Jesus!” Martin said, as he listened. “The left looks smaller by a quarter.”

“Yes, at least,” said Malenko.

“But why?” Martin asked.

Rachel stiffened. If Malenko even faintly intimated that she had brought this on with drugs, she knew that she would explode.

“There are several possibilities,” Malenko began, “though none we can exactly determine. My best guess is that it’s a genetic aberration. Who knows? But that’s not the important thing. It’s what we can do for Dylan.”

Rachel caught Malenko’s eye as he sat down again. He must have detected the insane heat in her eyes because he addressed Martin. “Your son will have to have a comprehensive individualized instruction program geared to improving his word recognition and comprehension, grammar, reading, and critical-thinking skills.”

“How long a program are you talking about?”

“Typically, from seventy-five to a hundred hours of instruction, and up to four hours of instruction per week. But given Dylan’s assessment, I’d say he would need instruction on a daily basis for a hundred to two hundred hours. Maybe more.”

“God! It’s that bad?”

Malenko leaned back in his chair and for a brief moment studied Martin’s reaction. “Mr. Whitman, I’m sure you’re aware that no test can exactly measure a person’s intellectual ability, including standard IQ tests. I mean, how can a test assign a number to creativity or artistic skills or leadership, curiosity, musical talent or physical prowess or social skills, emotional wellbeing, and so on? It’s impossible. However, the composite IQ score measures verbal and logical thinking, which is the best overall predictor we have of educational achievement and success.

“Your son’s intelligence quotient falls in a range of seventy-nine to eighty-four which is the low side of the national average. He needs special attention.”

“So it’s not just some attention-deficit thing that can be treated with medication?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Jesus,” Martin said. “Maybe it was some lead paint he was exposed to. Or mercury or some other crap. I don’t get it. We’ve got lawyers and engineers on both sides of the family. How the hell …” And he tapered off.

“How it happened isn’t the issue, Mr. Whitman. There are people with less intellectual talent than Dylan who are happy and productive members of our society.”

“Yeah? Name me one.”

Rachel shot a look at Martin.

Martin turned to her. “What?”

“Stop it!”

“Stop what? He’s handicapped and I can’t accept that. Okay?”

Rachel knew it was totally irrational, but all the outrage, despair, and vexation that was racking her soul converged like rays in a magnifying glass on Martin’s face. And at the moment she hated him. He was condemning their son to a life on the margins.

Malenko cut in. “I can’t name names just like that. But you know what I mean—sports people, entertainers, actors, musicians, singers—people in the various trades, business people who surely would qualify.”

Martin made a cynical grunt.

“Mr. Whitman, your son is a charming and handsome little boy with a lovely voice, I understand. Who knows, he may grow up to be the next Luciano Pavarotti or Frank Sinatra.”

“Hmm,” Martin said, feeling Rachel’s eyes burning him.

To break the tension, Malenko said to Martin, “Let me ask you a question. You know something about the different programs we have, and you know your son’s potentials and limitations. Given all that, what exactly are your expectations for Dylan?”

“My expectations? I don’t follow you.”

“What would you like for Dylan?”

“I would like him to have more of a head start on life.”

“And you, Mrs. Whitman? Do you feel the same way?”

Rachel took another deep breath to steady herself. “I’m not sure I understand the question.” She could hear the deadness in her voice.

“That you would like for Dylan to have more of a head start on life?”

Still not certain she understood him, she said, “I suppose.” Tears began to fill her eyes. She felt as if she were dying inside. All she wanted to do was to go home.

“Good, because that’s what we intend to give him—the chance to live up to his abilities.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Martin said.

“Then what do you mean, sir?”

“Even if we sign him up for the best tutoring—”

“Instruction,” Malenko insisted, cutting him off. “Not tutorial. There’s a big difference.”

“Okay, instruction. Even with the best people you have, he’s got an eighty IQ. That wouldn’t be an issue if this were the eighteenth or nineteenth century. You didn’t have to be very bright to make it. But it’s the twenty-first century, and the brightest people occupy the highest-powered professions. Simple as that. The best instruction you can come up with won’t raise his capabilities.”

“No, but we may get him to work at his best. What more can you ask for? Your son is not retarded or autistic.”

“No, but he’s the low side of average. Just how far can that take him? It’s like asking him to run a race with a club foot.”

There was a humming pause for a few seconds. Rachel began to cry.

“Well, what exactly do you want of him?” she heard Malenko ask.

“I want him to be smarter.”

“But, surely, being smart isn’t the only measure of people.”

“No, but it will get you places.”

Rachel cried into her handkerchief while Martin’s and Malenko’s voices blurred like white noise. They seemed not to notice.

“Like his mom and dad.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just wondering whom you are here for, Mr. Whitman: Dylan or yourself. I seem to be hearing less about what we can do for Dylan and more about reducing your dissatisfaction with your child.”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor, but I love my child very much.” Martin’s face was flushed.

“Your love is not in question, Mr. Whitman. But what I’m hearing is that you don’t have the child you wish you had—a child who would grow to share your intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests. A child who will be your equal someday, not an inferior.”

Martin’s eye twitched, and Rachel half-expected him to flash back at Malenko. But something in Malenko’s manner extinguished whatever impulse Martin felt. “I’m here for Dylan,” he said flatly. “I just wish he could have the opportunities other kids have.”

“What other kids?”

“Other kids in his school and play groups,” Martin said. “You know what I mean. Kids who aren’t intellectually handicapped. You’re saying that our son has a serious brain deficiency that’s crippled his verbal skills. We live in a heavily writing-dependent society, which means that he’ll be targeted as somebody who’s dumb.”

Rachel got up.

“What’s the matter?” Martin asked.

“I’m leaving. You can stay, but I’m going.” She started toward the door.

Malenko rose to his feet. “Please, please. Let’s all calm down.”

“I am calm,” she said, barely able to disguise her emotions. She began to open the door when Malenko came over to her and took her arm.

“Please, sit down. I’ll call Marie to bring in some coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee,” Rachel said. “I want to go.”

Something in Malenko’s expression gave her pause. “I think there’s more to discuss. Please.” And he beckoned for her to return to her seat.

Martin was on his feet looking at them both wide-eyed.

Rachel felt herself consent. But with tears rolling down her cheeks, and her voice trembling, she said, “I don’t want to hear any more about how my son is intellectually handicapped. Okay? Or how he’s not going to make it in life.” She glared at Martin.

“Yeah, sure,” Martin said feebly.

She took a deep breath, and in as steady a voice as she could muster, she announced, “I want to discuss an instructional program for him. Period.”

Malenko nodded, and led her back to her seat.

An uncanny silence fell on the room, as he seemed to turn something over in his head. He then picked up the phone and called the secretary to bring in three coffees.

They sat in an uneasy silence as the coffee was delivered.

Rachel sipped from her cup and stared blankly at the floor. All the swirling eddies of emotions had receded to the rear of her mind leaving her at the moment feeling dead. She could register Martin’s presence beside her and Malenko’s behind his desk. But it was as if she were occupying that quasiconscious state in dreams.

But the spell suddenly broke when Malenko clinked down his cup. “Mrs. Whitman, when you first came in here last week, you asked about special medical procedures to enhance your son’s IQ. At that time, I had said that there were no accepted strategies to accomplish that.”

Rachel looked up.

“I had assumed you were interested in standard medical practices, which to my knowledge do not exist. I had not assumed that you were interested in alternate procedures, thus, I mentioned none.”

Rachel felt her heart jog. The room seemed to shift its coordinates. “Alternative procedures?”

“Yes. There’s an experimental treatment that’s been known to have significant effects in lab animals. It appears to work by stimulating areas in the cortex and hypothalamus that affect memory and cognitive performance.”

“Lab animals?”

“Yes, maze tests with mice and more sophisticated problem-solving tasks for higher animals including monkeys. And the results are rather remarkable.”

“Has it been tried on people?” Rachel asked.

“Yes, and with remarkable results, but I must caution you that this is a purely experimental procedure akin to what’s used in the treatment of certain cerebral dysfunctions, including Parkinson’s disease. I’m talking about measures that are drastic and unconventional. Is this something you’d be interested in?”

“You mean a brain operation?”

“Yes, an invasive procedure.”

Rachel wanted him to continue, but Martin cut him off. “And what are the results?”

“They’re not always predictable, but the neuronal pathways in those areas associated with intelligence show marked blood flow and heightened electrical activity, including abnormally developed areas.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning enhanced performance in language and analytical skills.”

Sheila’s face flashed across Rachel’s mind—that look of burning import. Suddenly the line between hope and the emotional muck of grief, anger, and guilt had shifted.

“That’s incredible,” Martin said.

“But, once again, this is not orthodox methodology,” Malenko cautioned. “It’s an experimental alternative.”

“And it’s been done on people? Children?” Rachel asked.

“Yes.”

Rachel’s mind was spinning in disbelief. “Is it safe?”

“Like any operation, it has its risks, but it’s categorically safe.”

Malenko’s manner was purposely guarded. Rachel was about to ask him to elaborate when Martin cut her off again. “What exactly is the science—some kind of genetic therapy?”

“Before I continue, I must tell you that what we are discussing is strictly confidential. What we say in this room will not go beyond these walls. Do I make myself clear?” He looked from Martin to Rachel.

“Yeah, sure,” Martin said.

Rachel nodded, feeling a bit dazed at the new possibilities. It suddenly occurred to her that their previous discussion had been a test—and that they had passed.

“Good,” Malenko said. “The procedure involves the introduction of certain agents that stimulate neuronic connections and open new pathways.”

“You mean like stem cells?” Martin asked.

“Something like that. The target areas of the brain are infused with a cocktail of various substances including growth factors. Intelligence is a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of different potentials—mathematics, linguistic, logic, spatial, and so on—and each specialty has a field locus in the brain. Dylan’s musical talent has an associative field of activity in his cortex. However, there are underdeveloped areas where the field potential is low and where lateral support cannot be assumed by other specialized areas.”

He opened a desk drawer and removed a diagram of a human brain.

“I’m not saying it will work, but it might be possible to stimulate cell development in those language-deficient areas so that they’ll connect up to those specialty areas to make for more integrated brain dynamics.” He used a pen to demonstrate on the scans. “Essentially, it might be possible to compensate for the developmental deficiencies in utero.”

“That’s incredible,” Martin said.

“You said invasive. You mean an operation?” Rachel asked. “Cutting open our son’s head?”

“Actually, it’s done by stereotaxic surgery—drilling tiny holes then implanting stimulants by use of needles.”

Rachel let out an involuntary groan, and Malenko picked up on it. “Sorry to say that this can’t be done intravenally. But stereotaxic procedures are performed all the time, and it is very precise, of course, and monitored in three-dimension by CAT scans.”

“And where do the stem cells come from?” Rachel asked.

“There are donor banks.”

“Who would be doing the procedure?” Rachel asked.

“We have a surgical team.”

“And your role is what?”

He smiled thinly. “I’ll be in charge.”

“So you’ve done these procedures before?” Martin asked.

“Yes.”

The guardedness in his manner was almost palpable. Rachel could sense that they were treading on territory that had vaguely been charted—some forbidden zone behind the chrome and green Italian marble veneer. “What about the risks?”

“Risks are inherent in any operation, but with this procedure they are very small. At worst, there would be only a minimal regeneration of neuronal networks, with modest improvement in performance. But that possibility is far exceeded by the benefits.”

“Such as?” Martin asked, his eyes wide with supplication. He was suddenly enthralled by the possibilities.

“Your son’s IQ will be higher.”

“It will?” Martin’s voice skipped an octave. He could not disguise his excitement. “How much higher?”

Malenko smiled. “How much would you like?”

“You mean we have a choice?”

Malenko chuckled. “Enhancement can’t be fine-tuned to an exact number, of course.” He then unlocked a drawer from a file cabinet behind him and removed a folder from which he removed some charts. The first was a lopsided bell curve showing the IQ distribution of high school seniors and the colleges they attended. On the fat right end of the curve where the scores went from eighty-five to one hundred and five, the schools listed were community colleges and Southern state schools. But at the long thin tapered end were the A-list institutions—Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, WPI, and the top Ivy Leagues.

“Dylan’s IQ is currently about eighty-two. Let’s say, for instance, that it was enhanced by fifteen points, he would just get by in the typical high school. Another fifteen points would mean he’d perform well in high school and just passably at a mid-level college. Another fifteen points would mean he’d do well at the better colleges. Another fifteen points—an IQ about one hundred forty—would mean he’d do a sterling job at the better colleges. Another fifteen points and he would have an incandescent mind capable of doing superior work at the very best institutions.”

“Incandescent mind.” The phrase hummed in Rachel’s consciousness.

“Wow,” whispered Martin.

Malenko seemed bemused at their sudden display of interest. Or maybe it was the kind of sneaky pleasure one gets from sharing secrets.

The second chart showed a correlation of IQ scores with various occupations—physicians, mathematicians, scientists, accountants, lawyers, business executives, teachers, bus drivers, and so on.

“As you said, there was a time when people of high intelligence were scattered across a range of employment. But over the last two decades, that population has squeezed into a handful of high-powered professions. No longer do you find the brilliant shoemaker or ditchdigger. Instead, they’re running laboratories, law firms, the world’s most important corporations, and”—he gave a little smile—“egghead—recruitment companies. So the benefits can promise years of success for Dylan.

“But they go beyond professional. The statistical correlation of high intelligence with financial and intellectual achievements is an obvious gain. Not so obvious are the intangible benefits of high intelligence, such as maturity, superior adjustments to life, general health, and happiness—all of which I assume you desire for your Dylan.”

He raised another chart—an actuarial graph of life expectancy measured against IQ. “One of the ancillary benefits of high intelligence is lifestyle, including diet, personal health care, and basic survival. In other words, as you can see, smarter people are happier, healthier, and live longer lives.” He ran his finger up the curve showing the higher survival rates for those at the upper end of the IQ scale.

While Rachel listened half in awe, it became clear that this was not just a glib explanation of some experimental neurophysiological procedure, but a sales pitch. That Malenko had had these charts prepared, and that he had been through this spiel with other parents who had sat in these same chairs, twisting with anxiety and hope that they could make life better for their children.

Malenko is selling IQs.

“I should add that individuals at the lower end of the spectrum are, statistically speaking, people with more serious psychological problems and emotional disorders. Nor should it surprise you that the majority of people on welfare and in prisons in the United States have an average IQ of eighty-seven.”

That comment jabbed Rachel like an ice pick. “Those are blind statistics,” she said. “And I resent the implication.”

“Of course, of course, they’re blind statistics,” Malenko said. “And in no way am I suggesting that Dylan would otherwise grow up to be a criminal or on welfare. I’m just telling you what studies have found.”

He slipped the charts back into the drawer and locked the cabinet. “So?” he said, waiting for a response.

“So, you’re saying that you can do this—that you can increase Dylan’s intelligence?” Martin asked.

Malenko smiled. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“That’s incredible.” Martin’s face looked like a polished Macintosh.

“What about the side effects?” Rachel asked again.

“Side effects might be the wrong term, madam,” Malenko began. “Intelligence is holistic. It’s intricately bound up with a person’s ego, his self projection, his personality, and character—and all his or her assorted talents. So, the person that Dylan will become would most likely not be the same person he would be were he not enhanced. Depending on the emotional complexity of a person, much of the difference would have to do with confidence and self-esteem.

“Studies have shown that intelligent people are more centered, more self-assured, more self-confident, and less timid than those who are intellectually challenged.” He turned to Martin. “You see it all the time in your profession—that special poise, presence, and strength not found in people possessed of lower intellectual skills.”

“But you’re talking about changing who Dylan will be,” Rachel said. “I don’t want him to be intellectually enhanced if his personality changes …”

he kissed my boo-boo

“ … or he loses his love for singing or baseball.” Although he could not read music, he had a voice like wind chimes. It was a talent that distinguished him and brought him pleasure.

“Mrs. Whitman, forgive the analogy, but he would be like the child who had been stricken with polio. Without the vaccine, he’d grow up wearing leg braces or confined to a wheelchair. Now consider that same child who at age seven was given his legs back and all that went with that. Which child do you suppose would have the happier, longer, better life?”

He did not expect an answer, nor did they offer one. But Rachel was vexed by the man’s pronouncements.

“Before we go any further,” he said. “I must know if this is something you would consider for Dylan. Mrs. Whitman?”

Rachel felt confused and overwhelmed. “I don’t know where to begin.” It was as if Malenko were no longer a physician but some kind of self-proclaimed Fairy Godfather. “You’re talking about surgically manipulating my son’s native intelligence. That’s not something I can make a snap decision about. There are too many questions and unknowns.”

“Of course, nor am I asking for a snap decision. I’m simply asking if you are interested in pursuing the matter. If not, then we can go back to our original plan for an instructional program.”

“Well, I’m interested,” Martin announced. He looked at Rachel beckoningly. “I mean, isn’t this what we wanted?” He was almost giddy.

Rachel was not sure what they had wanted. “I think I need time for all of this to sink in.”

“Of course, but I should caution you that the time for best results for the procedure is when the child is between three and six years of age. Any older and enhancement diminishes in effectiveness. And Dylan is six years and two months.”

“You mean there’s a deadline?”

“The earlier the better. As a child approaches puberty, everything changes. Yes, nerve cells are still generated—even in adults. But the massive wiring of the brain takes place early. More importantly,” he added, moving his finger across his head, “the long axonal connections from one section of the brain to another are most important in terms of cognitive functions, and they’re laid down and fine-tuned well before puberty. At six, your son’s brain is still experiencing large-scale cognitive development. But it’s already begun to diminish.”

“I understand,” Martin said. He was beaming.

Malenko’s face seemed to harden. “There’s something else that you’ll need to factor into your decision: I ask that you maintain total confidentiality even if you decide against this. And I’ll be honest with you: Enhancement is not standard clinical procedure for the treatment of LD children. It’s an alternative, but it’s not FDA-approved.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Because, although the procedure is medically safe and sound, it would be something of a social taboo. It’s not politically correct. And unless they wanted full-scale riots on their hands, no government administrators would support the procedure. And until they do, we play hide-and-seek.”

The unexpected element of secrecy made Rachel even more uneasy and confused. On top of all the disquieting medical unknowns, she now had to be concerned with social and ethical issues. Malenko was right: If word got out about a medical procedure that enhanced the intelligence of children, the social implications would be astounding. Every parent who could afford it would have his or her LD kid fixed. In the long run, that would throw off the balance of society, the intellectual diversity. Not to mention the class problems—the haves versus the have-nots. Enhanced versus the enhanced-nots. Not to mention how every liberal left of Joseph Goebbels would raise a stink about eugenics and social engineering. And rightfully so. But at the moment, social questions weren’t most pressing. “But you say the procedure is medically safe?”

“Absolutely, and one hundred percent effective.”

“Meaning what?”