Michael Palmer: The fifth vial

"It's like a vicious cycle."

"Precisely. Are you sure you're ten?"

"Almost eleven."

Hermina, wearing a print housedress, had dozed off on the bed. A cigarette, burnt down to the filter, was still smoldering in a saucer on the bedside table. The kitchen was still her favorite spot, but more and more over recent months, this was the scene that greeted Natalie — either here in the bedroom or on the sofa in the living room. The cigarettes were taking their toll on her mother's oxygen levels and stamina. Before too much longer a green oxygen tank on a roller would be accompanying her wherever she was.

"Hey you," Natalie said, gently shaking the woman awake.

Hermina rubbed at her eyes and then propped herself on one elbow.

"I expected you later," she said somewhat dreamily.

Natalie was bothered by the unnatural depth of her sleep when she had been awake enough to light up a cigarette that was still burning. At fifty-four, this once vibrant and entrancingly beautiful woman was aging rapidly, and growing more leathery-skinned with every butt. Her cocoa complexion was much darker than Natalie's — understandable, given that Natalie's father, whoever he really was, was white — but unlike her deteriorating skin, Hermina's wide, hazel eyes were playful, intelligent, alluring, and virtually identical to Natalie's.

"Ma, you've got to stop smoking in here," Natalie said, helping her up and into the kitchen.

"I almost never do it anymore."

"I can tell."

"You're not attractive when you're cynical."

Hermina was Cape Verdean. She was brought to the States by her parents when she was Jenny's age, and still retained more than the hint of a Portuguese accent. By the time she was nineteen, she had graduated from high school and was a certified nurse's aide with plans to go to nursing school. That was when she became a single parent for the first time.

"Jenny seems okay."

"She's doing fine."

"That's good."

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. To Hermina, Jenny was Elena, and no matter how many rehabs had given daughter number two the gate, no matter how fast the police said she was driving when she slammed through the guardrail, Hermina always considered her to have been the victim of external circumstances.

Daughter number one, who had run away from home at fifteen, was another story. If Hermina Reyes knew nothing else, she knew how to harbor a grudge, and in this household, Elena was still and always would be the child of choice. The grocery shopping, the monthly checks, the trophies, the Harvard degree, and soon the one from medical school, still didn't balance off the hurt Natalie had brought on her mother.

"So, help me out here," Hermina said, picking up her pencil and pointedly turning her attention to the crossword puzzle in front of her. "Eight-letter word for nervous?"

"No idea. I'm never nervous. Ma, it's wonderful that you're taking care of Jenny the way you are, but you've got to try not to smoke when she's in the house. Secondhand smoke is no different than firsthand when it comes to — "

"So what about you? You seem tense."

There were many, including Natalie and her late sister, who equated Hermina's remarkable intuitiveness with sorcery.

"I'm okay," she replied, putting the groceries away. "Just tired is all." "That doctor you were seeing hasn't worked out?" "Rick and I are still on good terms."

"Let me guess. He wanted a serious relationship, but you just didn't love him."

Sorcery.

"The demands of the surgical residency I'm about to start make it hard to be available to someone else."

"What about that Terry who you brought over for dinner? He's so nice and so very handsome."

"He's also so very gay. That's why I like him so much. He doesn't want anything from me except my friendship and my company. There's never any talk about commitment and moving our relationship to the next level. Ma, believe me, almost every one of my friends who is married or living with someone is miserable over it a good deal of the time. Just trying to make their relationship work absorbs ninety percent of their energy. In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural — the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers."

"Daughter, I know you're long past listening to me, but you've got to break through that hard shell of yours and let love in or you're going to be a very unhappy woman."

Let love in. Natalie kept herself from speaking too soon or, worse, laughing out loud. With two children born of different swains, both long gone, Hermina Reyes wasn't exactly the poster child for true love. In her case, at least from Natalie's viewpoint, physical beauty had proven to be a mortal enemy. Still, her enduring sense of romance, trust in men, and unflagging enthusiasm for life were as unfathomable as her inability to put away the Winstons.

"Right now I don't have time to be unhappy."

"You sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine. Why do you keep asking that?"

"No reason. Sometimes, when I came to watch you run, you would hold yourself before the race in a funny way — an awkward, uncomfortable way. Almost always, when you did that, you didn't run well and you lost. You're sort of doing that here."

"Well, nothing's the matter, Ma, trust me."

At that moment, Natalie's cell phone announced a call. The caller ID displayed a number she didn't recognize.

"Hello?"

"Natalie Reyes?

"Yes?"

"This is Dean Goldenberg."

Natalie stiffened, then walked into the front hallway, out of earshot from her mother.

"Yes?"

"Natalie, I wonder if you're free to come over to my office to discuss the incident this morning at Metropolitan Hospital."

"I can be there in twenty or twenty-five minutes."

"That will be fine. Please call my secretary when you are ten minutes away."

"O-okay."

Goldenberg waited until Natalie had a pencil, then gave her the phone number of the medical school and his extension. Throughout their brief conversation, she had tried unsuccessfully to get a read on his voice, and now was stifling the urge to ask for the details of why she was being called in. Over the years, Dr. Sam Goldenberg had expressed any number of times what a fan he had been of her running, and also of her performance as a medical student. Whatever was up now, they could work out. She felt certain of it.

"Trouble?" Hermina asked as she returned to the kitchen.

"Nothing that drastic. Just some problems with my schedule at school. But I do have to rush off. Sorry."

"That's okay."

"I'll be back to see you both before long."

"That would be wonderful. Take care of yourself."

"You, too, Ma. Jenny, I'll see you again soon."

"I love you, Aunty Nat."

"I love you, too, babe."

"Panicked," Hermina said.

"What?"

"That eight-letter word for nervous. It's 'panicked.'"

Natalie's teenage years had been written up in a number of publications. Her tumultuous struggles on the streets of Boston ended after almost a year when workers at an agency called Bridge Over Troubled Waters managed to convince her and the Edith Newhouse School for Girls in Cambridge that the two of them were potentially a good match. It then took many months in the school before an uneasy truce with the teachers and administration enabled her to discover her talent for track — and for academic success. Three and a half years later, she started at Harvard.

After her graduation from college, in addition to training and racing, Natalie worked in the laboratory of Dr. Doug Berenger, then and now a huge booster of hers and of Harvard track. By the time of her injury at the Olympic trials, she had her name as coauthor on half a dozen papers for research work performed with the cardiac surgeon and his team. She had also taken all of the required courses for medical school admission. Sooner or later, she probably would have applied anyhow, but the accidental step onto her Achilles tendon by the woman running in second place definitely sped up the timetable.