Page 39 of A Light in the Dark
THIRTY-NINE
She said I could.
After eight hours of sleep and breakfast, I herded Joel to my car, insisted on driving, and headed to Watercrest to rescue my parents. According to Joel, my parents were in love with his parents, and I might have a fight on my hands to get them to come to Stonecreek with us. Upon arrival, shortly after sunrise, I discovered my mother with a bunch of luna moth larvae on her hands and arms, listening to Joel’s mother teach her everything she might want to know about the insects. Our fathers conferred over the grill, which sizzled and promised good things to come.
I was always game for second breakfast.
I went to my mother, took care to avoid dislodging any of her new friends, and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry for worrying you.”
“You’re not a problem, Valerie. It’s not your fault you’re sick. It’s that asshole’s fault.”
Right. Without the asshole former mayor, I wouldn’t have been dumped in a river and forced to wander around the woods alone. Without the trip into the woods, I wouldn’t have contracted the infection in the first place. “I’m enjoying my work when I get to help add to the charges list to say the least.” I sniffed. “Are we having steak for breakfast?”
“We are. Sarine and Ronald have dealt with that infection more than a few times, and you need extra protein. They’ve seen what you’ll do to a steak put in front of you, so they got steaks from town this morning.”
“Thank you, Mom,” I told Joel’s mother, and I gave her a kiss on the cheek, too.
My mother raised a brow.
I pointed at Joel. “I’ve decided I’m keeping him, so I get to call her Mom. And she said I could.”
“We did introduce ourselves by our name with an offer to call us Mom or Dad,” Joel’s mother explained. “We’re Mom and Dad to half the town, and she’s the first woman he’s brought home to meet us. I like your new car, Valerie. It’s very pretty.”
“Her name is Blaze,” I announced with pride, gesturing to my pretty orange vehicle. “Joel wasn’t lying about me being good to drive despite this stupid infection, right?”
“You can drive and do most everything you want, but you shouldn’t do more than a few hours a day of stressful things, like work. Just listen to Joel; he’s dealt with those blasted infections more times than I care to count. We’re notorious.”
“That’s what he said.”
“We’re?” my mother asked.
“Joel’s had that blasted infection at least sixteen times. He enjoys romping around the woods more than is good for anyone, him especially. He’s into photography, and the bacteria is easiest to pick up from poor hygiene. Romping around the woods involves poor hygiene. We keep trying to tell him to take sanitizer with him, but sanitizer in the volume he’d need is heavy and might damage his camera gear. He tends to get an infection every few years. The medication your daughter is on is a good one.”
“We know,” my mother said in a soft voice, and she smiled. “Did your Joel get it as a child?”
“Several times. That one couldn’t help but shove dirt in his mouth. He had one bad case that resulted in him being hospitalized.”
I eyed my mother, wondering what she was up to. “It’s not your fault Zac died, Mom.”
“I know that. You know that. But I didn’t know other families were suffering from the same blight around here. We were the only ones in town to lose a child from that infection.”
Ah. My memories of my brother’s death were fuzzy, but the town hadn’t been as kind to my mother as I wanted, that much I remembered. “You could move here, Mom. They have good internet and they don’t like gossips.”
“Those are two strong selling points. But where would we move to?”
Joel’s mother frowned, and she got her phone out of her pocket and tapped at the screen for a while. “I suppose it depends on how much you have to buy the land.”
“We have some money. Uh, Mirage paid us a hefty sum after Zac’s body helped them develop the treatments for the bacteria. Compensation that the other medication failed to work.”
My eyes widened. “Mirage paid you? ”
“We’ve never really done anything with the money. We put it in an investment account at their recommendation. At that point, we’d mostly already paid off the house, and when you got older, you were so independent we didn’t want to ruin that, so we hid it. Then you got the scholarship but used it to buy a house.”
Joel laughed. “She has one of the best houses in Stonecreek, truth be told. You’ll get to see it later today. It’s not just a house. It’s a fabulous house. And her work is going to send her to school in the evenings. She’s been accepted at several schools in Mirage, and her work is footing the bill, so she’s going to get the education she wants.”
I eyed the luna moth shifter. “There you go again, telling all my secrets.”
“Being accepted into Mirage universities is not a secret, Valerie.”
It wasn’t? “Also, I haven’t even finished picking which courses I’m going to take or which degrees I’m pursuing!”
“Degrees is plural,” my mother stated, and she considered me through narrowed eyes.
“She’s getting numerous degrees. I suspect she’ll get a business degree and a law degree to start with. Valerie is wickedly smart, and the schools are willing to work around her schedule, especially now that she’s been elected Stonecreek’s mayor. The universities are all in a war to have her, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she ends up with a degree from all of them. She loves learning, and she picked the house because the education might not be enough to let her have a stable place to live.”
I sighed. “It’s true. I get to spend a few hours a week working on my schooling, but it’ll have to wait until after I get done the major mayoral work. It’s a mess. And honestly, after we’re done here, I’m driving us to City Hall, I’m leaving you in Joel’s care, and I’ll be putting in my max allowed working hours before I go home and Joel handles the basics.”
“I’m taking care of everything while she rests, and because she won’t have any chores or cooking to do, I’ll probably let her do five hours of actual work in the day unless her condition worsens.” Joel eyed his mother.
“Yes, that’s fine if she’s not doing any chores, cooking, or other strenuous activities. The idea is to limit stress, and I suspect the faster she gets done her obligations, the less stressed she’ll be.”
Finally, someone who truly understood me. “I’m having a blast driving Blaze. That doesn’t count as work, right?”
“Driving your new car around is fun and not stress,” his mother replied with a smile. “How is your headache doing?”
“A single painkiller reined it in just fine,” I reported.
“Good. If your headache progresses beyond that level, tell Joel, skip work until the headache eases up, and get rest. You’ll be fine. We’re just overly cautious.”
“Would Zac have survived if we’d enforced bedrest, do you think? We tried…”
One day, Zac’s death wouldn’t hurt so much, but I expected that one day would be decades down the road. For my parents? I doubted the pain of it would ever fade.
“We heard of the little boy from Stonecreek who’d died, gone to Mirage, and helped the researchers make a better medicine,” Joel’s mother said, and she heaved the sort of pained sigh that made me wonder who else had died from the infection. “I hadn’t known it was from the town next door or the circumstances. Your son’s life gave back a lot of other lives. Before the new medication, there was a twenty-five percent chance of death of those dealing with the infection for the first time. If you survived the first time, survival was almost a guarantee, but the first infection killed a quarter of the time. And there was just nothing we could do to stop it. Everyone in town here has lost somebody because of the infection. Everyone. Now? Nobody dies from it. And I mean that—nobody. Your little boy died, but he’s saved so many lives from his grave, and there’s no way we can ever repay that debt.”
“Mirage keeps sending us money about the medication,” my mother muttered. “We never wanted money; we just wanted it to never happen again to another parent. We don’t know what to do about the money.”
Joel’s mother blinked. “Berra, did you not read the donation contract when you sent your baby to Mirage?”
“We couldn’t read it,” my mother confessed. “It was filled with all those legal terms Valerie likes. And we tried the dictionary, but that was filled with even more legal terms. We just checked to make certain we’d get his body back eventually for burial.”
Joel bowed his head and sighed. Joel’s mother covered her mouth, but a giggle escaped. “Okay. I’m assuming they used their boilerplate donation form. We’ve sent a few of our family members over to Mirage for research. And yes, the contracts are complicated. Joel, do you want to explain it? You’re better at it than I am.”
“Mirage medical research is a compassion based system. When you send a family member as a donation for research, you’re entering a legally binding agreement that if your family’s body helps unlock something used for commercial purposes, such as a treatment, a vaccination, or so on, the family of the deceased is automatically given a cut of the profits for the expected lifetime of the deceased. So, if you send a child, and the child’s body is responsible for a breakthrough, you’re compensated until when that child should have died of old age. It encourages people to send their loved ones to Mirage, especially when they died of illnesses or things like the bacterial infection. All drug companies that use Mirage’s research are required to pay Mirage for access to that research, and the family of the deceased is then compensated. In the case of life-saving treatments, the payment is increased based on the lethality of the disease.” Joel glanced my way, and he winced. “I’m sorry I’m being so callous about this.”
“You’re fine,” I assured him. “Zac loved helping others.”
All my memories of my older brother involved him getting underfoot and doing everything he could to help and please everybody.
“We just never really understood the money,” my mother confessed.
“Can you show me the account statements? I can take a look and give you a better idea of how the medication is being used.” Joel smiled at my mother. “Understanding might make acceptance a little easier.”
To my astonishment, my mother had a cell phone, a model similar to what I used. After a few moments, she offered the device to Joel. “I bought this thing with some of the money because it can reach emergency services even where we live.”
Joel took the phone, whistled, and spent a few minutes going through everything. “I can understand why you’re confused about the whole thing. Oh, they even have a copy of your contract in your documents. All right, let’s have a look here. There’s a note in the opening that states that you signed contract, likely without reading, due to grief. This note means you have the option for minor renegotiation if needed. That’s an unlimited clause, because Mirage doesn’t play around. It wouldn’t be retroactive, but you have some options for negotiation. The base contract is fine, but you have the option to release their fiscal burden early. I do not recommend doing that, by the way. That money is coming from pharmaceutical profits , and not paying you is not going to lower the cost of the drug. Mirage allows pharmaceutical firms to charge a limited amount for the drug for the lifetime of the contract. So, removing that might cause the drug to cost more. They base the cost of the drug on Mirage’s price for research and a million doses.”
I checked my phone, which had my payment information for my prescription. According to the prescription, I needed to take a dose every twelve hours for two weeks, and before insurance, I would have paid twenty dollars a dose. “This one is actually pretty pricy, Joel. Well, compared to regular antibiotics. Those are like twenty cents a dose. This one’s twenty dollars a dose.”
“The contract breaks it down. Give me a second. Okay, so, according to this, none of the bodies they had received prior were able to help them isolate what is so dangerous about this group of bacterial infections; standard antibiotics just didn’t work on them. They didn’t even help. Something about Zac’s body helped them identify why antibiotics weren’t working.” Joel’s brows furrowed, and he spent a few minutes reading. “Ah, here it is. This says he’d been tried on a combination of different drugs?”
“Yes. We were really careful about monitoring him, and when he worsened, we went back to the doctor, and he would try something new.”
“Well, your doctor didn’t save Zac, but he saved a lot more lives afterwards; the drug cocktail used is what made the difference according to this. And there’s a note that the doctor overseeing Zac’s care was also paid some compensation due to his role in the development of the medication.”
My mother nodded. “We asked if he could be compensated. He’d tried so hard to save Zac.”
“He was compensated, and because it was a parental request, he’s received a small percentage of the funds. That’s in addition to what you were compensated. That’s standard for Mirage medical research.” Joel read through the documents a little longer, smiling every now and then. “It’s not quite boilerplate, but you received a higher than normal percentage. There’s a note that indicates the higher percentage was due to the general importance of the discovery using Zac’s body and was changed per a different clause after you had signed. Mirage retains rights to adjust the contract to benefit the other party, and an increase in your percentage counts. According to an update in this document, which is issued every six months, this drug is actually being used around the entire universe; it’s viable for more than our planet’s specific breed of bacteria. That’s why you have so much money. Pharmaceutical companies around the universe are producing it.”
“Oh.” My mother stared at her phone. “How many lives do you think our baby has saved? ”
“It’s in the millions,” Joel replied in a solemn tone. “You can use this money on whatever you want. You gave your child’s body to science, and the profit share money is how researchers thank grieving parents like yourself, who made a significant sacrifice for the sake of others.”
It came as zero surprise to me that my mother burst into tears. I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation other than hug my mother and marvel at the entirety of the situation.
It also brought forth an important bit of clarity to my situation.
My mother had sacrificed my brother’s body for the good of others. Zac hadn’t meant to sacrifice his life, but he would have loved knowing that his death had done so much good.
The former mayor had tried to kill me, leading to a different sort of sacrifice. I would ultimately give a slice of my life to my people, but I would find making the time and doing the work would be a little easier down the road, even if I ended up with the job permanently.
I could save lives, too—and I would.