Do No Harm

"Me and my old man, we never talked much. All growing up, we never talked about anything, like… you know. He was a man's man. When I got divorced, I was hurting, you know, something awful. Peggy's a great gal-she just finally figured out what she deserved, I guess. But when she left me, I decided I wasn't gonna fuck around no more. I was gonna tell people how I… you know, how I felt. So I took a whole weekend and wrote a letter to my father. Told him how much I.. . how much I loved him, what he meant to me, all that stuff. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. Spent the whole goddamn weekend at the kitchen table. And finally I finished it-eight pages-and I went over there and gave it to him. He read it, right there with me standing there watching him, then he handed it back to me and you know what he said?"

David shook his head.

" 'Nice letter.' " Henderson laughed, a genuine laugh. " 'Nice letter.' " Grief washed through his eyes again. "I hope I told my boy enough," he said.

Chapter 52

THE humble room that served as the chapel barely fit ten chairs. A stained-glass window lit the front, and bad paintings of clouds decorated the walls. English and Spanish copies of the New Testament leaned from a small box adhered to the wall.

David sat on a chair in the middle row, one foot perched on the genuflecting pad before him, the occasional sound of a rolling gurney audible in the hall outside. The manila envelope he'd picked up moments before from Sandy's assistant sat in his lap, unopened. Sandy had written on it: David-the enclosed is all public record. Covering her ass, as always.

Henderson's open weeping had unsettled him, and he stared at the tacky chapel walls, thinking of the ways he'd weathered his own losses. An image came, whitewashed and ethereal. Elisabeth blow-drying her hair, naked so she wouldn't overheat, her dress draped across the bathroom counter. She'd caught him looking, smiled around the comb she held between her teeth, and closed the door with a foot. The aching reached a place inside him it had not in months, and he wondered which intimacies had allowed it its inroads. He thought about lying beside his wife, feeling her warmth along the full length of his body. They used to sleep forehead to forehead sometimes, curled beneath the sheets. Through a brief chink in his scientist's armor, David caught himself wondering if we go anywhere when we pass, and if so, what things we miss the most.

He wondered if he would ever allow himself to know someone so intimately again. He wondered why it took a smattering of alkali to eat through the monotony of his life and reveal it for what it was.

He opened the manila envelope and pulled out the two pieces of paper it contained. The first was a photocopy of a newspaper article.

Psych Study Terminated After Resultant Aggression in Children

A psychology study at UCLA's prestigious Neuropsychiatric Institute was terminated after several alarming incidents involving its subjects. Chief Investigator J. P. Connolly was not available for comment, but NPI Chief of Staff Dr. Janet Spier described the study's focus as "examining children's responses to stimuli, that parents and educators can better create healthy, supportive environments, and avoid unhealthy ones."

David felt a growing sickness. Mrs. Connolly's comment-We always appreciated what your mother did for us-had snagged on a raised suspicion in his mind. He scanned farther down the article, looking for information betraying the extent of his mother's involvement in what was quickly betraying itself as a cover-up.

The problems arose when the first set of subjects were released from the study and returned to their homes. Several of the boys were observed by foster parents to be more aggressive, disrupting the home environments with persistent fighting and temper tantrums. After one boy broke a foster sibling's nose, his "mother" phoned the Chief Investigator and lodged a formal complaint. "We shut the study down immediately," Spier said. "While we stand behind its meritorious and conscientious nature, we also recognize that certain minor problems have resulted in assimilating the subjects back into their social environments, so we decided to halt and recalibrate."

The study, which was to run for three months, was shut down after nine weeks.

The other piece of paper was a photocopy of a check for $40,000, signed by the UCLA Medical Center's treasurer. Dated two days previous to the article, it was made out to Happy Horizons Foster Home. Clearly, some aspect of the study had gone terribly awry-something worse than a broken nose-if the foster home owners were being paid off so grandly.