24 Hours

“I’ll be back Sunday night,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. “You take care of Mom. And don’t give her any trouble about your shots.”

“But it doesn’t hurt as much when you do it.”

“That’s a fib. Mom’s given a lot more shots than I have.”

He set her down with a muffled groan and gently pushed her toward her mother. Abby walked backward, her eyes locked on Will until Karen scooped her up.

“Oh!” Karen said. “I forgot to tell you. Microsoft is going to split again. It was up twelve points when I left the house.”

He smiled. “Forget Microsoft. Tonight starts the ball rolling on Restorase.” Restorase was the trade name of a new drug Will had helped develop, and the subject of his presentation tonight. “In thirty days, Abby will be set for Harvard, and you can start wearing haute couture.”

“I’m thinking Brown,” Karen said with a grudging laugh.

It was an old joke between them, started in the days when they had so little money that a trip to Wendy’s Hamburgers was a treat. Now they could actually afford those schools, but the joke took them back to what in some ways had been a happier time.

“I’ll see you both Sunday,” Will said. He climbed into the Baron, started the twin engines, and checked the wind conditions with ATIS on the radio. After contacting ground control, he waved through the plexiglass, and began his taxi toward the runway.

Outside, Karen backed toward the Expedition with Abby in her arms. “Come on, honey. It’s hot. We can watch him take off inside the truck.”

“But I want him to see me!”

Karen sighed. “All right.”

Inside the Baron, Will acknowledged final clearance from the tower, then released his brakes and roared up the sunny runway. The Baron lifted into the sky like a tethered hawk granted freedom. Instead of simply banking to his left to head south, he executed a teardrop turn, which brought him right over the black Expedition on the ground. He could see Karen and Abby standing beside it. As he passed over at six hundred feet, he waggled his wings like a fighter pilot signaling to friendly ground troops.

On the concrete below, Abby whooped with glee. “He did it, Mom! He did it!”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t go this time, honey,” Karen said, squeezing her shoulders.

“That’s okay,” Abby reached up and took her mother’s hands. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I like arranging flowers, too.”

Karen smiled and lifted Abby into her seat, then hugged her neck. “I think we can win the three-color ribbon if we give it half a try.”

“I know we can!” Abby agreed.

Karen climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Expedition, and drove along the line of airplanes toward the gate.

Fifteen miles north of the airport, a battered green pickup truck with a lawn tractor and two weed-eaters in back rattled along a curving lane known for over a hundred years as Crooked Mile Road. The truck slowed, then stopped beside a wrought-iron mailbox at the foot of a high wooded hill. An ornamental World War One biplane perched atop the mailbox, and below the biplane, gold letters read: Jennings, #100. The pickup turned left and chugged slowly up the steep driveway.

At the top, set far back on the hill, stood a breathtaking Victorian house. Wedgwood blue with white gingerbread trim and stained-glass windows on the second floor, it seemed to watch over the expansive lawns around it with proprietary interest.

When the pickup truck reached the crest of the drive, it did not stop but continued fifty yards across the St. Augustine grass until it reached an ornate playhouse. An exact replica of the main house, the playhouse stood in the shadow of the pine and oak trees that bordered the lawn. The pickup stopped beside it. When the engine died, there was silence but for birdcalls and the ticking of the motor.

The driver’s door banged open, and Huey Cotton climbed out. Clad in his customary brown coveralls and heavy black eyeglasses, he stared at the playhouse with wonder in his eyes. Its roof peaked just above the crown of his head.

“See anybody?” called a voice from the passenger window of the truck.

Huey didn’t take his eyes from the enchanting playhouse. “It’s like Disneyland, Joey.”

“Christ, look at the real house, would you?”

Huey walked around the playhouse and looked across a glittering blue swimming pool to the rear elevation of the main house. Peeking from two of the four garage bays were a silver Toyota Avalon and the white nose of a powerboat.

“There’s a pretty boat in the garage,” he said distractedly. He turned back to the playhouse, bent, and examined it more closely. “I wonder if there’s a boat in this garage?”

As Huey studied the little house, Joe Hickey climbed out of the truck. He wore a new Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and Tommy Hilfiger khakis, but he didn’t look natural or even comfortable in the costume. The lower half of a crude eagle tattoo showed on his biceps below the band of the Polo’s left sleeve.

“Look at the real house, Buckethead. See the third downstairs window from the end? That’s it.”

Huey straightened and glanced over at the main house. “I see it.” He laid one of his huge hands on the playhouse’s porch roof. “I sure wish I could fit in this house. I bet the whole world looks different from in there.”

“You’ll never know how different.” Hickey reached into the truck bed and took out a rusted toolbox. “Let’s take care of the alarm system.”

He led Huey toward the open garage.

Twenty minutes later they emerged from the back door of the house and stood on the fieldstone patio.

“Put the toolbox back in the truck,” Hickey said. “Then wait behind the playhouse. As soon as they go inside, you run up to the window. Got it?”

“Just like last time.”

“There wasn’t any freakin’ Disneyland playhouse last time. And that was a year ago. I don’t want you fooling around back there. The second you hear the garage door close, get your big ass up to that window. If some nosy neighbor drives up in the meantime and asks you a question, you’re with the lawn service. Act like a retard. It shouldn’t be much of a stretch for you.”

Huey stiffened. “Don’t say that, Joey.”

“If you’re waiting at the window when you’re supposed to be, I’ll apologize.”

Huey smiled crookedly, exposing yellowed teeth. “I hope this one’s nice. I hope she don’t get scared easy. That makes me nervous.”

“You’re a regular John Dillinger, aren’t you? Christ. Get behind the playhouse.”

Huey shrugged and shambled across the patio toward the tree line. When he reached the playhouse, he looked around blankly at Hickey, then folded his giant frame into a squat.

Hickey shook his head, turned, and walked into the house through the back door.

Karen and Abby sang at the top of their voices as they rolled north on Interstate 55, the tune one from The Sound of Music, Abby’s favorite musical. The Jenningses lived just west of Annandale in Madison County, Mississippi. Annandale was the state’s premier golf course, but it wasn’t golf that had drawn them to the area. Fear of crime and the race problems of the capital city had driven many young professionals to the gated enclaves of Madison County, but Karen and Will had moved for a different reason. If you wanted land, you had to move north. The Jennings house sat on twenty acres of pine and hardwood, twelve miles north of Jackson proper, and in evening traffic it took twenty-five minutes to get there.

“That will bring us back to doe, oh, oh, oh …”

Abby clapped her hands and burst into laughter. Breathing hard from the singing, Karen reached down and punched a number into her cell phone. She felt guilty about the way she’d spoken to Will at the airport.

“Anesthesiology Associates,” said a woman, her voice tinny in the cell phone speaker.

“Is this the answering service?” asked Karen.

“Yes ma’am. A-l Answer-all. The clinic’s closed.”

“I’d like to leave a message for Dr. Jennings. This is his wife.”

“Go ahead.”

“We already miss you. Break a leg tonight. Love, Karen and Abby.”

“With sugar and kisses on top!” Abby shouted from the backseat.

“Did you get that last part?” asked Karen.

“With sugar and kisses on top,” repeated the bored voice.

“Thank you.”

Karen hit END and looked at her rearview mirror, which was adjusted so that she could see Abby’s face.

“Daddy loves getting messages from us,” Abby said, smiling.

“He sure does, honey.”

Fifty miles south of Jackson, Will settled the Baron in at eight thousand feet. Below him lay a puffy white carpet of cumulus clouds, before him a sky as blue as an Arctic lake. Visibility was unlimited. As he bent his wrist to check his primary GPS unit, a burning current of pain shot up the radial nerve in his right arm. It was worse than he’d admitted to Karen, and she’d known it. She didn’t miss anything. The truth was, she didn’t want him flying anymore. A month ago, she’d threatened to tell the FAA that he was “cheating” to pass his flight physicals. He didn’t think she would, but he couldn’t be sure. If she thought Will’s arthritis put him—and thus the family—at risk while flying, she wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever she had to do to stop him.

If she did, Will wasn’t sure he could handle it. Even the thought of being grounded put him in a black mood. Flying was more than recreation for him. It was a physical expression of how far he had come in life, a symbol of all he had attained, and of the lifestyle he had created for his family. His father could never have dreamed of owning a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane. Tom Jennings had never even ridden in an airplane. His son had paid cash for one.

But for Will the money was not the important thing. It was what the money could buy. Security. He had learned that lesson a thousand times growing up: money was an insulator, like armor. It protected people who had it from the everyday problems that besieged and even destroyed others. And yet, it did not make you invulnerable. His arthritis had taught him that. Other lessons followed.

In 1986, he graduated from LSU medical school and began an obstetrics residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It was there that he met a surgical nurse with stunning green eyes, strawberry-blonde hair, and a reputation for refusing dates with physicians or medical students. After three months of patience and charm, Will persuaded Karen to meet him for lunch, far from the hospital. There he discovered that the cause of her dating policy was simple: she’d seen too many nurses put medical students through school only to be cast aside later, and others caught in messy triangles with married doctors and their wives. In spite of her policy, she dated Will for the next two years—first secretly, then openly—and after a year-long engagement, they married. Will entered private practice with a Jackson OB/GYN group the day after his honeymoon, and their adult life together began like a storybook.

But during the second year of his practice, he began experiencing pain in his hands, feet, and lower back. He tried to ignore it, but soon the pain was interfering with his work, and he went to see a friend in the rheumatology department. A week later he was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a severe, often crippling disease. Continuing as an obstetrician was impossible, so he began to investigate less physically rigorous fields like dermatology and radiology. His old college roommate suggested anesthesiology—his own specialty—a three-year program if the university would credit Will’s OB experience and let him skip the internship year. It did, and in 1993, he began his anesthesiology residency at UMC in Jackson.

The same month, Karen quit her nursing job and enrolled at nearby Millsaps College for twenty-two hours of basic sciences in the premed program. Karen had always felt she aimed too low with nursing—and Will agreed—but her decision stunned him. It meant they would have to put off having children for several more years, and it would also force them to take on more debt than Will felt comfortable with. But he wanted Karen to be happy. While he trained for his new specialty and learned to deal with the pain of his disease, she racked up four semesters of perfect grades and scored in the ninety-sixth percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test. Will was as proud as he was surprised, and Karen was luminous with happiness. It almost seemed as though Will’s disease had been a gift.

Then, during Karen’s freshman year of medical school—the third year of Will’s residency—she got pregnant. She had never been able to take the pill, and the less certain methods of birth control had finally failed. Will was surprised but happy; Karen was devastated. She believed that keeping the baby would mean the death of her dream of being a doctor. Will was forced to concede that she was probably right. For three agonizing weeks, she considered an abortion. The fact that she was thirty-three finally convinced her to keep the baby. She managed to complete her freshman year of med school, but after Abby was born, there was no question of continuing. She withdrew from the university the day Will completed his residency, and while Will joined the private anesthesiology group led by his old roommate, Karen went home to prepare for motherhood.

They made a commitment to go forward without regrets, but it didn’t work out that way. Will was phenomenally successful in his work, and Abby brightened their lives in ways he could never have imagined. But Karen’s premature exit from medical school haunted her. Over the next couple of years, her resentment began to permeate their marriage, from dinner conversations to their sex life. Or more accurately, their lack of one. Will tried to discuss it with her, but his attempts only seemed to aggravate the situation. He responded by focusing on his work and on Abby, and whatever energy he had left he used to fight his slowly progressing arthritis.

He treated himself, which conventional wisdom declared folly, but he had studied his condition until he knew more about it than most rheumatologists. He had done the same with Abby’s juvenile diabetes. Being his own doctor allowed him to do things he otherwise might not have been allowed to, like flying. On good days the pain didn’t interfere with his control of the aircraft, and Will only flew on good days. Using this rationale, he had medicated himself to get through the flight physical, and the limited documentary records of his disease made it unlikely that his deception would ever be discovered. He only wished the problems in his marriage were as easy to solve.

A high-pitched beeping suddenly filled the Baron’s cockpit. Will cursed himself for letting his attention wander. Scanning the instrument panel for the source of the alarm, he felt a hot tingle of anxiety along his arms. He saw nothing out of order, which made him twice as anxious, certain that he was missing something right in front of his eyes. Then relief washed through him. He reached down to his waist, pulled the new SkyTel off his belt, and hit the retrieve button. The alphanumeric pager displayed a message in green back-lit letters:

WE ALREADY MISS YOU. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT. LOVE KAREN AND ABBY. WITH SUGAR AND KISSES ON TOP.

Will smiled and waggled the Baron’s wings against the cerulean sky.

Karen stopped the Expedition beside her mailbox and shook her head at the bronze biplane mounted atop it. She had always thought the decoration juvenile. Reaching into the box, she withdrew a thick handful of envelopes and magazines and skimmed through them. There were brokerage statements, party invitations, copies of Architectural Digest, Mississippi Magazine, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Did I get any letters?” Abby asked from the back seat.

“You sure did.” Karen passed a powder blue envelope over the front seat. “I think that’s for Seth’s birthday party.”

Abby opened the invitation as Karen climbed the long incline of the drive. “How long till my birthday?”

“Three more months. Sorry, Charlie.”

“I don’t like being five and a half. I want to be six.”

“Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You’ll be thirty-six before you know it.”

When the house came into sight, Karen felt the ambivalence that always suffused her at the sight of it. Her first emotion was pride. She and Will had designed the house, and she had handled all the contracting work herself. Despite the dire warnings of friends, she had enjoyed this, but when the family finally moved in, she had felt more anticlimax than accomplishment. She could not escape the feeling that she’d constructed her own prison, a gilded cage like all the others on Crooked Mile Road, each inhabited by its own Mississippi version of Martha Stewart, the new millennium’s Stepford wives.

Karen pulled into the garage bay nearest the laundry room entrance. Abby unhooked her own safety straps but waited for her mother to open the door.

“Let’s get some iced tea,” Karen said, setting Abby on the concrete. “How do you feel?”

“Good.”

“Did you tee-tee a lot this afternoon?”

“No. I need to go now, though.”

“All right. We’ll check your sugar after. Then we’ll get the tea. We’re going to have some fun today, kid. Just us girls.”

Abby grinned, her green eyes sparkling. “Just us girls!”

Karen opened the door that led from the laundry room to the walk-through pantry and kitchen. Abby squeezed around her and went inside. Karen followed but stopped at the digital alarm panel on the laundry room wall and punched in the security code.

“All set,” she called, walking through the pantry to the sparkling white kitchen. “You want crackers with your tea?”

“I want Oreos!”

Karen squeezed Abby’s shoulder. “You know better than that.”

“It’s only a little while till my shot, Mom. Or you could give me that new kind of shot right now. Couldn’t you?”

Abby was too smart for her own good. Conventional forms of insulin had to be injected thirty minutes to an hour before meals, which made controlling juvenile diabetes difficult. If a child lost its appetite after the shot and refused to eat, as children often did, blood sugar could plummet to a dangerous level. To solve this problem, a new form of insulin called Humalog had been developed, which was absorbed by human cells almost instantly. It could be injected right before a meal, during the meal, or even just after. Physicians like Will were some of the first to get access to the drug, and its convenience had revolutionized the daily lives of families with diabetic children. However, Humalog also tempted children to break their dietary rules, since they knew that an “antidote” was near to hand.

“No Oreos, kiddo,” Karen said firmly.

“Okay,” Abby griped. “Iced tea with a lemon. I’m going to tee-tee.”

“I’ll have it waiting when you get back.”

Abby paused at the hall door. “Will you come with me?”

“You’re a big girl now. You know where the light is. I’m going to fix the tea while you’re gone.”

“Okay.”

As Abby trudged up the hallway, Karen looked down at The New England Journal of Medicine and felt the twinge of anger and regret she always did when confronted by tangible symbols of the profession she’d been forced to abandon. She was secretly glad that the flower show had given her an excuse to miss the medical convention, where she would be relegated to “wife” status by men who couldn’t have stayed within fifteen points of her in a chemistry class. Next month, Will’s drug research would be published in this very magazine, while she would be entangled in the next Junior League service project. She shoved the magazine across the counter with the rest of the mail and opened the stainless-steel refrigerator.

Every appliance in the kitchen was a Viking. The upscale appliances were built in Greenville, Mississippi, and since Will had done the epidurals on two pregnant wives from the “corporate family,” the Jennings house boasted a kitchen that could have been featured in the AD that had come in today’s mail—at a discounted price, of course. Karen had grown up with a noisy old Coldspot from Sears, and a clothesline to dry the wash. She could appreciate luxury, but she knew there was more to life than a showpiece home and flower shows. She took the tea pitcher from the Viking, set it on the counter, and began slicing a lemon.

Abby slowed her pace as she moved up the dark hallway. Passing her bedroom, she glanced through the half-open door. Her dolls were arranged against the headboard of her tester bed, just as she’d left them in the morning. Barbies, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and Beanie-Babies, all mixed together like a big family. The way she liked them.

Five more steps carried her to the hall bathroom, where she stretched on tiptoe to reach the light switch. She pulled up her jumper and used the commode, glad that she didn’t tee-tee very much. That meant her sugar was okay. After fixing her clothes, she climbed up on a stool before the basin and carefully washed and dried her hands. Then she started for the kitchen, leaving the bathroom light on in case she needed to come back.

As she passed her bedroom, she noticed a funny smell. Her dolls all looked happy, but something didn’t seem right. She started to walk in and check, but her mother’s voice echoed up the hall, saying the tea was ready.

When Abby turned away from the bedroom, something gray fluttered in front of her eyes. She instinctively swatted the air, as she would at a spider-web, but her hand hit something solid behind the gray. The gray thing was a towel, and there was a hand inside it. The hand clamped the towel over her nose, mouth, and one eye, and the strange smell she’d noticed earlier swept into her lungs with each gasp.

Terror closed her throat too tightly to scream. She tried to fight, but another arm went around her stomach and lifted her into the air, so that her kicking legs flailed uselessly between the wide-spaced walls of the hallway. The towel was cold against her face. For an instant Abby wondered if her daddy had come home early to play a joke on her. But he couldn’t have. He was in his plane. And he would never scare her on purpose. Not really. And she was scared. As scared as the time she’d gone into ketoacidosis, her thoughts flying out of her ears as soon as she could think of them, her voice speaking words no one had ever heard before. She tried to fight the monster holding her, but the harder she fought, the weaker she became. Suddenly everything began to go dark, even the eye that was uncovered. She concentrated as hard as she could on saying one word, the only word that could help her now. With a great feeling of triumph, she said, “Mama,” but the word died instantly on the wet towel.

Huey Cotton stood outside the Jennings house, nervously rubbing his palms against the legs of his coveralls and peering through Abby’s bedroom window. Abby. Unlike most names, he could remember that one without trouble. His mother had once read letters to a woman named Abby out loud to him. Dear Abby, she would drawl in her cigarette-parched voice, sitting at the kitchen table in her hair-rollers and housecoat. The people who wrote to that Abby never signed their real names. They were embarrassed, his mother said. They signed big words instead of names, and sometimes they signed places, too, like Bewildered in Omaha. He always remembered that one.

Huey heard the scuff of a heel on wood. He looked up to see his cousin walking through the pink bedroom with the little Abby in his arms. She was fighting, kicking her skinny legs to beat the band. Joey held her at the center of the room so that her feet wouldn’t hit the furniture or the tall bedposts. The kicks got weaker and weaker until finally they were just little jerks, like a hound’s legs when it dreamed of hunting.

The little girl looked like another of the hundred or so dolls that lay around the room like the sleeping occupants of some fairyland, only bigger. Joey walked to the open window and passed her through it. Huey accepted Abby as gingerly as he would a wounded bird, his mouth open in wonder.