The Chain(64)

She opens the message.

You have a lot to be thankful for this year, Rachel. We have given you back your daughter. We have given you back your life. Be thankful for our mercy and remember that once you are on The Chain, you are on it forever. You are not the first and you will not be the last. We are watching, we are listening; we can come for you at any time.

Rachel drops the phone and stifles a scream.

She bursts into tears. It will never be over. Never.

She sinks to the floor and after a few seconds remembers to breathe.

She weeps and washes her face and flushes the toilet and takes a deep breath and rejoins her family.

Everyone looks at her. Everyone knows that she has been crying. Two of them guess the reason why.





45



Fifty-Five Fruit Street, Boston, Mass.

She tells them not to come. She wants them to come, but she always tells them not to. Pete has to drive her, of course, but there’s no reason Kylie and Marty have to be there.

As ex-husbands go, Marty is pretty high up there.

They wait outside in the family room.

The family room is fine. There’s a TV tuned to CNN and a stack of National Geographics going back to the 1960s. There’s a view of Boston Harbor. You can just see the USS Constitution.

She’s glad they aren’t in here to watch her gasp in pain when the nurse accesses the port or to see her when the poisons flow and the shivering begins and the nausea makes the room spin.

Chemo is a little death that you invite in in order to keep the big death waiting outside on the porch.

When the humiliation and the agony are done, they wheel her into the recovery room and they smile at her. Hugs from Kylie and Pete. Marty talking a mile a minute.

That’s what you need. Family. Friends. Support.

Dr. Reed is happy with her treatment. And her prognosis is good. And the trajectory is pointing to the upper right of the chart.

But the terrible secret truth is that she isn’t doing well.

Her body is failing.

She’s getting weaker.

And she knows it isn’t the cancer that’s consuming her. That isn’t the big C.

Not the cancer.

It.

The Chain.





46



A family has just finished moving into a house in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s been a long day but now the delivery guys are gone and all the boxes are inside.

The family are posing for a photo outside their new home. A happy family in sunlit suburbs. Imagine an early-1990s version of Robert Bechtle’s painting ’61 Pontiac, except the kids are the same age. Twins. The husband, Tom Fitzpatrick, is a small, trim, dark-haired man in a white shirt and thin black tie. He looks rather like the first Darrin on Bewitched. He seems harmless enough. His new wife, Cheryl, is pregnant. She has long, straight golden hair and bangs that hover a couple of inches above her pretty brown eyes. Without straining the analogy, you could say that she has a bit of a Samantha Stephens vibe.

The little boy, Moonbeam, is now called Oliver. A chubby, harmless-looking kid with maybe a slightly eerie unblinking intensity about him. The girl, Mushroom, is called Margaret. She too does the eerie unblinking thing, but you don’t notice as much with her curly red hair and perpetual-motion antics. If Tom were one for taking his kids to head doctors, Margaret would probably be on Ritalin, but Tom is not one for doctors. He’s old-fashioned like that. “You don’t need a pill for every ill,” his father says.

Two days after they move in, they hold a housewarming party and invite all the neighbors. There are congressional aides living on this street, employees of the State Department, the Treasury Department.

There are three parties taking place in the house at the same time that night. There is the party where the men are getting to know one another. Tom comes off OK. He seems like a square, boring kind of a guy with his GI Joe hair and pocket protector and fridge full of Coors Light.

There’s the women’s party. Cheryl seems pretty and dull and maybe a bit simple. Cheryl is a typical suburban mom who had her own dreams but who has given them up to be a supportive wife. Cheryl wanted to be a baker like her grandfather.

And then there’s the kids’ party taking place in the TV room. The kids’ party is the most interesting. The boys are dissecting the record collection and declaring it lame: John Denver, Linda Ronstadt, Juice Newton, the Carpenters. The girls are spilling the family secrets. Ted’s dad is a drunk who is having an affair with his secretary. Mary’s mom crashed her car two years ago and killed a woman on a bicycle. Janine’s mom thinks the neighborhood has gone straight to hell now that an Indian family has moved in.

As the party continues well past the kids’ bedtimes, Oliver is informed that the Jets and the Giants both suck but the Giants suck more because they’re in the same division as the Redskins.

Oliver says that he doesn’t even really like football. A ten-year-old boy named Zachary tells Oliver that he is a little queer who smells. Zachary also informs him that his mom looks like a whore.

Oliver calmly tells the boy that his mom is dead. His mom was murdered and her body was mutilated and then burned in a fire.

Zach looks pale. He looks even paler a minute after Margaret dares him to drink half a can of beer she found. Zachary chugs the can and says he has drunk beer before. That might be the case, but not beer laced with a teaspoon of ipecac syrup.