DAY 12
Marcus woke up with a start. Samantha was drawing on his leg and it tickled. She was kneeling next to the couch with Seth’s green pen, going all the way around his shin again. He groaned. Everything else hurt.
Seth was standing behind her in his socks, holding the headlamp on Marcus’s leg. Cooper was standing behind Seth, panting. A lot.
“What time is it,” Samantha said.
“Two oh six,” Vlad said from the hall.
She wrote 206 on his leg next to the line.
Marcus lifted his head and looked. There were three lines now, and the new one was halfway to his knee. Everything below it was red and shiny and looked like it belonged to someone fatter. He was cold. He was also sweating through his shirt. He was perplexed about how both could be true at the same time.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Samantha snorted. “Tell me about your doctors,” she said to Seth.
Seth sat down on the arm of the couch, by Marcus’s head.
“Ann Galvin. She’s been my doctor for twenty years. She has a family practice in north Boulder. She’s also been in my funds from the beginning.”
Ann Galvin had made a lot of money with Seth. Marcus figured that was worth one house call.
Vlad came in from the hall.
“A doctor writes everything down.”
“Not Ann.”
“Everyone writes everything down,” Vlad said. “It is the law. There is a form.”
“Then she won’t fill out the form.”
Sam looked at Marcus instead of at either of them.
“Marcus.”
It took him a second to understand that she was talking to him.
He lay back and looked up at the ceiling of Doug’s cabin. There was a canoe paddle hanging on the wall above the woodstove with signatures all over it.
Marcus took a deep breath.
“I want to go,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to lose the foot, and I really don’t want to lose it on Doug’s couch.”
Samantha nodded once and stood up.
“How long to her house?”
“Ninety minutes,” Seth said. “If I knock on her door at three in the morning, her husband Jim will call the police. So, we’ll leave at four thirty.”
Vlad stood in the doorway.
“Then the batteries come,” he said. “Doug’s are dead. Not empty. Dead.” He went back out.
“I can take him down by myself,” Seth said. “You three stay here with the truck—”
“We don’t split up,” Samantha said.
Marcus slept until Seth and Vlad came to carry him out to the Rover. They all piled in. The red truck stayed in Doug’s garage next to the snowmobile.
Seth drove. Marcus had the front seat again, all the way back, with his left foot up on the dashboard, wrapped in a towel from Doug’s bathroom. Samantha and Vlad were in the back with Cooper between them, who snuggled up to Samantha.
Rollinsville was dark. So was Nederland. They went around the roundabout past a dark building with a sign that said CAROUSEL OF HAPPINESS, and Marcus decided he was hallucinating.
Then they were in the canyon. Marcus shivered. Seth reached over without looking and turned on the seat heater.
“Brett Sasaki texted me,” Seth said. “Last Sunday. Then he left me a voicemail on Monday.”
“Brett?”
“Your mom’s been calling him.”
Marcus hadn’t known his mom had Brett’s number.
“Why is she calling Brett? Is everything ok with my mom?”
“I don’t know, Marcus. He said she was worried. That’s all I know.” Seth glanced at him. “I didn’t call him back.”
“He has also written about you on LinkedIn,” Vlad said.
Marcus turned around in the seat, which hurt.
“He what?”
“It is a post. It begins, ‘Not a normal post for me.’”
Marcus put his hand over his eyes.
“Hashtag friendship,” Vlad said. “Hashtag mental health. Hashtag leadership.”
“Stop.”
“Hashtag founder life.”
Samantha laughed. Cooper snuggled closer.
“You read Brett’s LinkedIn and you didn’t tell me,” Marcus said.
“You would have wanted to answer it.”
Marcus started to say that he wouldn’t have, and then stopped. He desperately wanted to call his mom.
Ann Galvin lived on a dark street in north Boulder with big old cottonwoods over it. Seth parked around the corner, got out, and walked up to a porch with the light off, although the lights in a room upstairs were on.
Marcus watched through the windshield. Seth knocked. He waited, and knocked again. More lights came on inside the house followed by the porch light. Then a tall man in boxer shorts and a Rockies T-shirt opened the door. He and Seth talked for a moment. He shouted something up the stairs.
A woman came down in a fleece and running tights. She had short gray hair sticking up on one side. She pulled the door closed behind her and folded her arms. Seth talked with his hands, which Marcus had never seen him do. She said something short back, and then something much longer, and pointed at the Rover.
She looked over Seth’s shoulder, right at Marcus. Then she put her hand on Seth’s arm.
“She said yes,” Marcus said.
“You cannot know that,” Vlad said.
Seth came back, got in, and started the car.
“She’ll meet us at the office. She’s getting dressed.” He pulled out. “Her husband’s name is Jim. He wants to know if we’ve had breakfast.”
Galvin Family Medicine was a one-story brick building on a side street off Broadway near the old hospital site. Seth drove around to the lot in back so you couldn’t see the Rover from Broadway. Ann’s Subaru pulled in behind the building a minute after they did. She unlocked the back door and turned on the lights, and they all stood blinking in a hallway that smelled like hand sanitizer.
Samantha and Seth walked Marcus in between them. Vlad had the batteries under his arms.
“Where are your outlets,” Vlad said.
Ann looked at him.
“He needs to charge some things,” Seth said.
“By the fish tank,” Ann said. “Don’t unplug the fish.”
Vlad went off down the hall with the batteries.
The exam room had a paper-covered table, a rolling stool, and a poster of the bones of the foot. Seth and Samantha got Marcus up onto the table. The paper crackled under him. Ann washed her hands for a long time, put on gloves, and unwound the towel.
She looked at the lines, and the times written next to them.
“Who drew these?”
“Me,” Samantha said.
“Good.” Ann pressed two fingers into the red above the top line and watched it go white and then come back. “This should be a hospital. You needed IV antibiotics two days ago.”
“We were busy,” Samantha said.
Ann looked at her, and then at Marcus, for a little too long.
“You’re the Bitcoin guy.”
“That was mostly her,” Marcus said, and pointed at Samantha.
“It was all me,” Samantha said.
Ann didn’t laugh. “What have you been taking?”
Marcus dug the bottle out of his pocket and handed it to her. She held it up to the light.
“This says Cooper.”
“My dog had a hot spot,” Seth said. “In July.”
Ann closed her eyes for a second.
“Cephalexin doesn’t touch MRSA,” she said to Samantha. “Your friend has gotten no benefit from taking the dog’s pills, except maybe he’s now constipated.” She put the bottle in the pocket of her fleece.
Marcus was scared.
“There’s pus under that heel,” Ann said. “I’m going to open it.”
Samantha nodded. Then she looked at the window. The blinds were down.
“I’ll be in the car,” she said. “With Cooper.”
She went out. Marcus guessed she wanted to watch the street. He heard the back door open and close.
Ann rolled the stool over to the end of the table.
“Little pinch,” she said.
It hurt like hell and brought tears to his eyes. Marcus stared intently at the poster of the bones of the foot and tried to find the heel. Seth put his hand on Marcus’s shoulder and rubbed softly.
After the numbing it was mostly pressure and a gruesome smell. Marcus didn’t look down. Seth did, and Marcus could tell from the look on his face he wished he hadn’t.
“Shit,” Marcus said.
“That’s the good news,” Ann said.
She packed it and wrapped it. Then she opened a drawer and took out a syringe.
“Roll over.”
“Why?”
“Because it goes in your butt.”
“Does it have to go there?”
“Yes.”
Marcus rolled onto his right side and pushed his shorts down. The paper tore under his hip. Seth stared at the poster. The shot burned all the way down his leg and kept burning after she took the needle out.
Ann pulled off her gloves, sat back on the stool, and wrote on a pad.
“I’m not writing a prescription for a guy whose face is on every television news station,” she said. “I’m writing it for Seth.”
“What do I have?” Seth asked.
“A staph infection in your left heel. It’s very painful. You’ve been very brave.” She tore the page off. “Bactrim, twice a day for ten days. I’ll call it in. It’ll be ready when the pharmacy opens.”
“Thank you,” Seth said.
“Don’t thank me. Come out to the hall.” She stood up and pointed at Marcus. “You stay right there for fifteen minutes. Some people react to the shot. If your throat gets tight, yell.”
They went out and left the door open a crack. Marcus could hear them in the hall, low, and then farther away in some other room. Ann was saying Seth’s name a lot. Once he heard her say “my license,” very clearly.
He lay on his side on the torn paper and pulled his shorts back up. His heel throbbed. The burn in his hip had turned into an ache. He was so tired.
Ann came back in. She had her phone in her hand and she was typing on it with her thumb.
“Jim wants to know if he should make pancakes for everyone,” she said. “I told him to go back to bed.” She looked at Marcus’s face and put the back of her hand against his forehead. “How’s your throat?”
“Fine.”
Marcus looked at the phone.
“Can I borrow that for one text?” he asked. “My mom doesn’t know if I’m alive.”
It was true. He also knew it would work.
Ann looked at the door, and then at the phone, and then at him. She unlocked it and put it in his hand.
“One,” she said. “I’ll be right outside.”
She went out.
Marcus opened a new message and looked at the empty box at the top where the number went.
He didn’t know it. It was in his phone under MOM. His phone was in Vlad’s bag in the next room. He knew the last two digits were a seven and a six.
He knew Brett’s. Brett had had the same number since they were nineteen years old.
Vlad’s rule was about their phones. This was a doctor’s phone in Boulder. Brett wasn’t the FBI.
He typed Brett’s number from memory and wrote the text with both thumbs.
brett its marcus. this isnt my phone. im ok. please tell my mom im ok and that i love her and im sorry. dont post this. dont tell anybody else. dont text back to this number
He read it once and sent it. Then he went back and deleted the conversation.
The phone buzzed in his hand four seconds later.
MARCUS
omg
ok ok ok
calling your mom right now
harper is going to be so happy
where are you
Marcus didn’t know anybody named Harper. Brett knew a lot of people.
Then the screen changed and a number with a 650 area code was calling. Marcus wanted to answer it badly. He pressed the red button instead and deleted the new conversation too.
His mom would know by breakfast. Marcus felt better than he had since Basalt.
Ann came back in and held out her hand, and he put the phone in it.
“Did you get her?”
“Close enough,” Marcus said. “Thank you.”
She put the phone in the pocket of her fleece with Cooper’s pills and went back out to Seth. On her way through the door it buzzed once in her pocket. She didn’t look at it. Marcus hoped it was Jim.
Vlad was in the doorway. Marcus hadn’t heard him come down the hall.
“The large battery is at nine percent,” Vlad said. “I need forty minutes.”
Marcus decided Vlad didn’t need to know about the text.
“Take your time,” Marcus said.