in Russian history. The entire Yeltsin article was only two paragraphs. Trent knew the locals generally only cared about local news, and the Herald catered to that. Finding anything of interest outside of crop predictions was rare, and today was no exception. It was the height of corn on July 4th that always occupied the upper echelon of the local news, written or verbal. If the crop was knee high on the fourth, it was going to be a good year. If not, the subject was never discussed. Hoping bad news would just go away, the locals usually accepted the long-standing practice of simply ignoring it.
Trent breezed through the inner page trivia, quickly arriving at the back page. Then, he saw it. Near the bottom of the page was a small fill-in article datelined Atlanta, Georgia. His eyes turned intense, laser-like. He needed no interpretation. It was a short announcement outlining an accelerated vaccination program proposed by the federal government’s Center for Disease Control. It proposed that all children in the United States be vaccinated against what Trent knew to be largely an adult disease, Hepatitis-B. Backed by the medical community, the CDC’s proposal would bring the national childhood vaccination schedule to include nine different inoculations.
Trent squirmed. While Yeltsin’s victory percentage was interesting, he was generating his own calculations, and the results were not encouraging. He reread the article, three times. He pulled a pencil he had tucked over his ear and began reproducing his mental calculations on the blank margins of the newspaper. He had to be sure.
That night, just before midnight, Trent sat at his dining table reviewing the numbers he crunched earlier in the morning. A messy stack of ruffled papers with barely legible equations, charts, and myriad notes rested under a small desk lamp he pirated from his den. He had analyzed and reanalyzed. The results never varied. It was inconceivable to him that he could be the only person addressing the potential problems with the CDC’s vaccine schedule. A sorrow, not present since the passing of his wife four years earlier, slowly began to surface but this time it was different. When Mary passed, he felt incapacitated, enduring many lonely nights. This time, his sense of despair was different. He could do something about it. There was work to do, and the prize was a small chance he could finally ease an ache he had carried for sixty-four years.
For the first time in years, sleep came quickly. Tomorrow was a new day, but fate had a cruel sense of timing. This time, age did make a difference. He had to live long enough to prove his point.
Chapter 15
August 19, 1991
San Francisco, CA
Elena cherished her evening solitude. She needed the break. Next month, she would celebrate the second anniversary doing a job she decided was as strategic and complicated as running a war. She was a mother, and every day was a new battle. On this morning, it had been business as usual. Up early, she dressed Scott for an unseasonably cool day and made a routine trip to the pediatrician. It was hard for her to remember just how many vaccinations her son had endured in his fourteen months of life but, as a conscientious mother, she never questioned the prescribed vaccination schedules. Earlier that morning, Scott received his second round of Influenza and Polio vaccinations plus the first round for Diphtheria, Pertussis and Tetanus or, as she quickly learned, DPT for short. The schedule seemed rigorous but, like most mothers, her sense of trust and faith in her son’s pediatrician was never in question. An ounce of prevention, she thought, there’s no harm in that.
The clock read just past 8 P.M. Having given up trying to predict her husband’s schedule long ago, Elena poured herself a second glass of Merlot and began to count her blessings. Terry’s travels and the late nights during the past two years were beginning to pay dividends. Days earlier, his company obtained financing from a venture capital source that would allow him and his partners to continue developing what Terry referred to as an internet search engine. She had never seen an internet site nor had any of her friends, and Terry warned that she probably wouldn’t see their site for at least another two years. While Terry’s project made no sense to her, insiders were projecting the fledgling industry to grow to enormous economic proportions. Terry’s sale of a portion of his interest in the company to one of his partners had provided the extra cash they needed to allow her to take a two-year leave-of-absence from her law firm to be a full-time mother. While she found that words could not describe her appreciation for his efforts, the addition of a large sixth floor apartment in the financial district sporting a phenomenal view of the San Francisco Bay made it very easy to encourage him rather than complain about his absence. In the fall, they would hire a nanny, allowing her to return to her law firm with a part-time schedule. Their future looked bright but, tonight, Elena had a plan to make it even brighter.
Making love with Terry was once nearly as common as taking a shower, but sexual pleasures had taken a very distant back seat since their son was born. She was about to correct the oversight. After a quick shower, Elena dried herself and stood firmly planted in front of the bedroom mirror. She was thirty-three and the years and motherhood had been kind to her. Her smallish breasts were firm and symmetrical, her skin still unblemished. Aerobic workouts at the Bay Club three nights a week combined with frequent visits to the hair salon made her look years younger than her peers. She broke into a mild smile. She felt the mirror smile back.
Later, Elena lay still beneath Terry’s body. Even though his second orgasm was far less aggressive than the first, she could feel his manhood still pulsating inside her. After he gradually slipped from her most intimate grasp, she watched quietly as he fell to sleep. She was grateful that having a son hadn’t taken away their passions for each other. She rolled over, kissed Terry’s cheek, and pulled up the covers.
It was exactly midnight in La Jolla when Celia Martin finally turned off her television. The network news had spent the better part of her last hour covering the events surrounding the Soviet Union’s vice president Gennadi Yanayev’s attempt to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from power. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest and Yanayev’s coup leaders quickly issued an emergency decree suspending political activity and temporarily banning all newspapers. While international uncertainty was at the forefront of most of the world’s citizen’s minds, Celia couldn’t get on the same page. For now, her thoughts were of her daughter. In two days, Jonna Marie Martin-Lundgren would celebrate her first birthday.
Celia’s single life was already a distant memory. Initially, she found juggling motherhood with her career difficult but, after an exhaustive search, finding a nanny eventually changed her life. Stacey Blick was more than a nanny. Barely nineteen years and straight out of the prairies of Wyoming, she was not only a friend and a companion for Jonna, she had taken full control of their household. Jonna’s father’s financial support had come voluntarily, making it possible for her to purchase a new condominium and use part of her salary at Signal Pharmaceuticals to add Stacey to the equation. There were no guarantees but, in Celia’s eyes, all was well in her world. Like all parents, she felt her daughter was extraordinary, even gifted in her progress. Jonna was special. In time, the world would know how special.
Chapter 16
January 1, 1992
Austin, Minnesota
Just after dawn, Trent donned his parka and knit hat and stepped outside into the face of a biting, wind-blown snowstorm and ran into the barn. He backed out his Jeep, not bothering to close the barn doors behind. He watched through the rear view mirror as the barn’s weathered façade slowly disappeared through a thick snowfall and marveled how little things had changed. When he inherited his boyhood home, the farm meant nothing more to him than a weekend getaway from his responsibilities as Chief of Staff at the Mayo clinic. His time at Mayo had always been at a premium and, even though the farm was only forty miles away, the isolation always provided both him and Mary some much needed personal time together. When he lost Mary to cancer within a month of his retirement, moving back to his boyhood home seemed to be the most natural place for him to spend the remainder
