“I don’t have it with me,” she said. “I’m not sure where it is.”
“I’ll call it.”
“It’s off.”
The sand timer ran down. She reset it and faced me with crossed arms.
“Why are you so concerned about him all of a sudden?”
The premise of her question — that I’d failed to show concern for Luke until now — grated on me, not least because of the truth it contained.
How could I answer her?
Guess where I was earlier today.
Guess what I found.
Andrea stared at me defiantly.
She knew who my brother was.
She’d married him anyway.
Whatever’s happened, I wanted to say, you can tell me. I can help.
But I didn’t know if I could. And she’d never believe me. Why should she? I’d never gone out of my way to hurt Luke. But neither had I gone out of my way to help him.
Wind whistled through the wallboards in hot blades.
“Please,” I said. “I just want to talk to him.”
She made a put-upon face. “The phone’s in my car.”
“Do you want to give me your keys?”
“It’s unlocked.”
“Thank you.”
She lifted out the infuser, watched it drip.
The Leaf’s glove box contained a heavy nylon pouch whose label read RF BLOQ. I unzipped it and found a cracked Samsung Galaxy. It refused to turn on, and I only had an iPhone cable with me.
In the longhouse Andrea was sitting cross-legged on a pillow, eyes closed, cradling her mug.
I held up the Galaxy. “You have a charger for this somewhere?”
She looked over at me. Recoiled. “Get that out of here.”
She straggled to her feet. Tea sloshed from the mug and ran down her arms. “Out.”
Mystified, I retreated outside. I could see her through the open doorway, moving around in a frenzy, as though she were on fire. “Andrea?”
“... one second.”
“Are you okay?”
“One second... Move back. Farther.”
I stood among the trees.
A twisted black cable sailed out and pipped in the dirt.
I took the cable to my car, plugged in the Galaxy, and left the motor running.
I walked back to the longhouse, pausing on the threshold. Andrea huddled against the opposite wall with her knees drawn up protectively against her body.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“Where’s the phone?”
“In my car.”
“Yours, too. Leave it outside. I don’t want it in here. I should have told you before. Do you have anything else?”
“Like what?”
“A radio. A walkie-talkie. Anything that puts out a signal. A garage door opener.”
“Not on me.”
“Okay.”
I set my phone atop a stack of firewood and stepped inside. “Are you all right?”
“No, actually. My head is throbbing.”
“Is there something I can get you?”
She seemed unwilling to abandon the comfort of the wall. She pointed to her mug on the floor. I brought it to her. Pink blotched her wrists where the tea had run.
“I’m sorry I upset you,” I said.
“Not your fault. You didn’t know any better.” She took a sip. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know like what. I use it during the day, I have to. But I try to limit my twenty-four-hour total exposure, especially close to... ” She trailed off. “You should, too, by the way, if you care about your health, or Charlotte’s. Do you have any idea what those levels of radiation do to rats? Look up cellphone tumors. We’re conducting this giant uncontrolled experiment on ourselves and we’ll pay for it.”
She turned vigilant, as if she’d heard a siren. “What time is it?”
“I... uh.” I reached for my absent phone. “About eight thirty, I think.”
“Shit.”
She hurried to the makeshift kitchen, set the mug down with a thump, and knelt to open the mini-fridge. Light spilled out.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. They had solar, and she’d plugged in the Leaf, so there had to be a power storage unit somewhere. But the candles and the woodstove — not to mention her patent terror of electronic devices — seemed to relegate functioning outlets to the realm of science fiction.
From the fridge she took four small glass vials and lined them up on the folding table.
From among the jars and canisters she picked out several vitamin bottles, a red plastic sharps container, a tattered piece of paper, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a zip-top bag of gauze, a second of syringes. She removed four syringes and laid them in readiness next to the vials. Consulting the paper, she rearranged the vials to ensure they were in the right order.
I came closer. The paper was a calendar. Each day listed dosages for various medications.
She shook out capsules of vitamin C, vitamin E, folic acid, omega-3s, coenzyme Q10, bolting them down with gulps of tea.
I was also close enough to get a good look at the revolver. Roundish, 22 or .38 Special. A purse gun, meant to deter a mugger.
I wondered if it could inflict the kind of damage done to Rory Vandervelde’s body.
I wondered if ballistics had recovered shells or slugs, and if so, what size.
Andrea stabbed a needle into the first vial and drew up a third of the chamber.
She held the syringe out to me.
I accepted it, reflexively.
She rolled up the hem of her T-shirt and pinned it in place with her elbow. The flesh near her waistband was mottled yellow and green and stippled with puncture marks.
She gathered a fold of skin, swabbed it with alcohol, and averted her eyes. “Don’t tell me when it’s going in.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Put the needle in. Push down the plunger. Slow.”
“You can’t do it yourself?”
“No. I can’t.”
“What do you normally do?”
“Luke does it for me.”
“What did you do last night, if he wasn’t here?”
“I did it myself.”
“So—”
“And I threw up. Can you please stop talking.”
I slid the needle into my sister-in-law’s abdomen and injected her with Follistim. While the chamber drained she breathed out through her teeth.
I removed the needle. There was no blood.
“Put it in the sharps bin.” Andrea laid her finger on day thirteen of the calendar, lips moving as she reviewed the next dosage.
Day twenty read possible trigger. Day twenty-two, circled in red, was possible retrieval. The top of the calendar read Contra Costa Center for Reproductive Health. Their logo was a stylized pair of hands holding a stylized baby whose face was also a daisy or maybe a shining sun.
She drew up the second syringe.
“Do I... Should I aim for a different spot, or—”
“Just do it.”
I injected my sister-in-law with Menopur, with dexamethasone, and with Lupron.
I withdrew the last needle and she appeared to deflate, as if leaking from the holes in her body. She mumbled thanks, trudged toward the mattress, and flopped down.
“Do you need anything?”
She shook her head.
“Do you want the blanket on?”
“It’s too hot.” She squirmed, scratching at the dry skin on her calves, flexing and rotating her swollen ankles.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything? Water?”
“It’ll just make me need to pee.” Unable to get comfortable, she sat up and grabbed her left foot and ground at it with her knuckles. “They’re like rocks,” she muttered.