Joan’s examining room was not the spare, antiseptic cell most physicians maintain in deference to their patients’ germ phobias. Kids, Joan reasoned, are more afraid of doctors than they are of germs, and so her room, though no less clean, was painted in bright colors and had laminated (that is, washable) pictures of Disney characters on the wall. The examining table was bright purple, and the sanitary paper she pulled across it had cartoon balloons and Snoopys. The floor was literally dotted with appliques, the purple-polka-dot kind.
“What are you doing here?” Joan said to Davis when she walked in, a leather portfolio held flat against her stomach. Davis was lying on the Snoopy paper, reading a journal article, which he suspended above his face with his left hand. He hopped to his feet and pulled a new sheet of paper off its roll, tearing off the length he had just wrinkled and stuffing it in the garbage.
“Was wondering if I could sit in,” Davis said.
“On Justin’s physical?” Joan’s frown declared it a bad idea. “Why?”
“Just to observe. I read the report from his shrink. I guess the divorce has been tough on him.”
“Tough on any kid,” Joan said.
“Yeah, but especially tough on a kid like that.”
“Like what?” Joan baited.
“You know. Smart. Genetically predisposed to… whatever.”
“Wow,” Joan said with a dry lilt. “Is Davis Moore actually expressing concern for this child, instead of pawning that responsibility off on me?”
“Come on, Joan. You know I care about Justin.”
“Maybe,” she said, closing a drawer she noticed was ajar. “But that’s the first time I’ve heard you admit that Justin might have a genetic disposition to anything. Are you finally admitting to some second thoughts about this?”
“No,” he said. “We’re all predisposed to some vice, some evil. I didn’t create the genetic matter that made him. Nature had already mixed it in that combination.”
“You didn’t create it, Davis, you just doubled the recipe. Instead of one monster, you have one monster on the loose and maybe another in the making.”
“We don’t know that. I just think we need to watch him more closely.”
“Whatever, Dave.”
Davis examined an anatomical drawing on the wall. It was a poor attempt at looking indifferent. “I called you last night to talk about this,” he said. “Where were you?”
“A date. Jazz at the Green Mill.”
“Great,” he said, too quickly.
“I’m not getting younger, Davis. It’s tough to meet single men my age.”
“Why limit it to men your age?” he said. Joan didn’t have to wonder if the question had a flirtatious subtext.
“ Single men any age. In Northwood, anyway,” she said.
Davis nodded. “So it’s okay if I observe? Ask him some questions?”
“You should ask him about Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Dr. Morrow says the little braniac’s interested in astronomy now. You better hope he doesn’t take up genetics next. If Justin starts reading Mendel, you’ll be busted for sure.” She paused but Davis didn’t laugh. “All right. I’ll tell Mrs. Finn it’s routine. She won’t mind.”
Davis put his hand on the door. “This room is fun. I like the colors. I might do all my reading in here.”
“Get out. I’ll have Ellen buzz you when I’m ready.”
Davis feigned a pout and skulked out of the room with heavy slapstick feet. Back in his office, he had files to review ahead of a four o’clock appointment with a couple scheduled for a conventional in vitro procedure next month. Their history remained on his desk in an unopened folder.
He pulled a drawer past his left knee and lifted out a file, which he spread across his lap. One by one, he removed seven tattered and water-damaged pieces of paper and spread them in two rows across his desk.
He had collected them two nights before, one of the many evenings he drove home past Justin’s house. This particular night, something he had never noticed seemed at first unusual, then startling. He drove to the next block, up and down and across the avenue (which was broad and grand but with little traffic), and through an adjacent neighborhood. Finally, he parked his car and retraced his route, circling Justin’s house as the streets of the subdivision wound and crossed in nongeometric patterns. As he walked, Davis breathed in the lake air, sweetened by magnolia and linden trees and professionally groomed grass. He examined every streetlamp and utility pole, collecting specimens along the way until he at last came back upon his car with these seven pieces of paper in hand: LOST DOG MISSING KITTEN BELOVED FAMILY PET HELP US FIND MIKO WE MISS OUR PUPPY HAVE YOU SEEN COTTON? PLEASE HELP FIND OUR BANDIT!
One was written in a child’s hand; the rest seemed penned by an adult under a child’s direction, or at least with the grief of a child in mind. All of them included a photo of the dog or cat and a phone number to call, should the animal appear. Davis palmed the keyboard of his computer, waking up the monitor, and typed each number into a reverse-lookup engine on the Internet. He wrote down the addresses and opened a map printed by the Northwood Chamber of Commerce for last year’s Garden Walk and placed it on top of the street flyers. With a Magic Marker, he plotted the approximate location of each house, and they appeared in a symmetrical, half-moon pattern around Justin’s home.
“Goddamn,” he said under an exhale. The presence of the flyers themselves in such numbers was enough for him to draw a horrible conclusion. But he was struck by the discipline, by the mathematical, purposeful way in which the boy must have abducted these animals. Davis wondered why precision was so much more frightening than chaos.
“Dr. Moore?” Ellen crackled through the intercom. “Justin is in with Dr. Burton now.”
Justin sat on the examining table in white briefs, his thin upper torso arched grotesquely forward so his face could stare down at his dangling bare feet. He was tall and pale, and his wavy blond hair was long for an eight-year-old, a look that, in Davis’s experience, betrayed hippie parents, the premature onset of adolescent independence, or possibly in this case, a single parent with more than she could handle.
“Hello, Justin,” Davis said as he and the boy shook hands. “You don’t mind if I sit here while Dr. Burton gives you your checkup, do you?”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said cheerfully. He straightened when Joan approached him with a stethoscope and Davis noted he possessed the sort of awareness around doctors that older sick people have. When Joan reached for an otoscope, he turned his left ear toward her. When she wheeled herself back to grab the black cuff of the blood-pressure monitor, Justin crooked his elbow and readied his biceps. He welcomed the tongue depressor without gagging and appeared unembarrassed when Joan hooked a finger inside his waistband and made a quick survey of his privates.
“How have you been feeling?” Joan asked, settling in to a wheeled stool at a tiny white desk.
“Fine,” Justin said.
“No sniffles, no headaches?”
“Nope, nope.”
“Are you seeing everything okay at school? Can you read the blackboard when your teacher writes on it?”
“Yes.”
Joan shook the pen she was writing with. “Dr. Moore, do you have a pen I could borrow?”
Davis’s hand went instinctively to his breast. “Actually, no.”
“Really?” Joan smirked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without that silver Waterman in your pocket.”
“I set it down somewhere on Monday,” he said. “I haven’t the nerve to replace it. Thing never leaked. I’m skittish about putting some old Bic in my shirt, you know?”
Justin stretched his neck to look up at the ceiling. Davis followed his line of sight to the ugly, cheap tiles that disguised the even uglier ductwork and conduit and other guts of the clinic. Justin’s mouth opened, became almost unhinged, it seemed, as he stretched farther back and back and back. To Davis, the boy looked like a duckling, newborn and featherless, his pale skin untouched by age and stress and bad diet and hormones, his bones growing even as they sat there, his mind expanding, soaking, remembering, learning without effort. A growing boy is a mutating thing, and Davis thought if he could stare at him long enough and in just the right place he could see a change occur right here in the exam room.
“I lose things, sometimes,” Justin said, head back.
“Really?” Joan said. “What things?”
“Just things,” he said. Davis watched as the heels of the boy’s bare feet began to kick against the examining table. “Sometimes I’ll have a thing in my hands and I’ll – I’ll just lose it. It’s there and then it’s lost.”
“Sometimes, do you find your things later? The things that you’ve lost?” Joan was making conversation in an absent dialect, still scribbling across Justin’s file with a new pen.
“Nope,” he said. “Lost forever.”
Davis felt his arms go cold and his face became hot. Joan’s head was still buried in her notes. To Davis, it seemed like he was watching the conversation from behind two-way glass, picking up subtleties in tone and expression, attaching a subtext to every phrase. This boy is not AK’s killer, he reminded himself, but he couldn’t help imagining Justin alone somewhere, in the narrow woods that partition his neighborhood, cradling a neighbor’s cat in his arms, his fingers lightly around its neck, and then an older, crueler version of him behind the counter at the Gap, straddling Davis’s daughter, watching her struggle, thrilled by her fear.