DAWN AND REECE HUDDLED TOGETHER OVER REECE’S NEW iMac, purchased by Mia for the Project and installed on Reece’s desk in the Nurtury. Also on the desk was a thick stack of papers, each page cluttered with checkboxes and handwritten signatures.
Vaccination records. Collected from all over the country.
Reece filled out a spreadsheet to log their progress. Dawn scanned each document into the computer, then imported it into Photoshop. She tweaked dates, checked boxes, added pediatricians’ signatures, not finishing until every curl and loop and slash of the signed names was perfect.
She wouldn’t stop her work, the first important work she’d done (take that, ever-important Dr. Craig), until every parent, anywhere in the United States, who wanted to send their child to school without subjecting them to a possibly toxic injection could, through the Project, obtain a foolproof facsimile of a vaccine record, confirming their child had received all vaccines required for school admission.
The interest in the Project was overwhelming. Thousands of parents from across the country, clambering for their records. Reece had devised a beautiful system of parent activists who assembled copies of real vaccination records and repurposed them in the name of the Project. The Nurtury group worked in shifts: Mia was on parent outreach, using carefully worded emails and phone calls scripted by Graham. Summer and Joanie handled all the FedEx mailings. Dawn Photoshopped the documents. Reece handled the payments. The service was free, but donations were encouraged, to cover the costs.
“Consider the ostrich,” Reece told the group. “The bird is virtually unkillable by disease. Naturally resistant to SARS, MERS, Ebola, even HIV. So, if the ostrich, why not us? If intelligent design has created an immune system like the ostrich’s, then why should individuals be denied the choice to say no to the artificial manipulation of our own immune systems? Who might your child be, at this moment, had she not received a mandatory injection?”
Hearing the question aloud, with all it implied, stunned Dawn. She couldn’t help but see Quinn as damaged—by Big Pharma, the lobbyists, the government, the school system. She put herself on that list—wasn’t she to blame, most of all? She had taken Quinn for all her shots, held her still each time the nurse plunged the needle in Quinn’s beautiful rolls of baby fat, comforted her after with a bottle, and later, a lollipop. As much as it sickened her to think of her daughter as hurt, impaired, broken, it strengthened her commitment to the Project.
They made signs, posted them all over the Nurtury, to remember their purpose:
EDUCATION WITHOUT INJECTION!
MY IMMUNITY = MY HUMANITY!
I TRUST MY BODY MORE THAN THE FDA.
MY BODY, MY BLOODSTREAM.
WAKEMAN WAS SILENCED!
NOTHING IN NATURE IS NOT NORMAL.
As they worked, they blasted Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon” and belted out the chorus together:
And we would all go down together
We said we’d all go down together
Yes we would all go . . .
The song became the mantra of their Project.
Dawn had meant the words every time she screamed them along. Together. All for one, one for all. Then again, she’d never considered getting caught. She’d never considered that Craig, who was working a relentless shift schedule at Cedars-Sinai at the time, would ever find out. She never doubted the Project, not for a second. Working on it had been the most meaningful experience of her life. Harmonious and beautiful, teeming with purpose.
Until Reece had gotten sloppy with the donation payments—she’d never cared about money, her purpose always on a higher plane.
Until the feds showed up at the Nurtury and flashed their search warrants.
Then, one morning, Craig read a headline from the Huffington Post aloud to Dawn at breakfast, in a flat, hard voice Dawn had never heard him use.
“LOCAL CHILD PSYCH GURU BUSTED IN ANTI-VAX FORGERY RING.”
He turned to Dawn, eyes blazing. “So help me god,” he said, through clenched teeth. “If you’re publicly affiliated with this fringy bullshit, my career’s over, and so’s your life as you know it. And I can assure you, I’ll get custody, so you can get ready to see Quinn for a maximum of three supervised hours per week, if you’re lucky.”
Later, the feds visited Dawn’s house. Two chiseled guys in navy suits. When they sat down in the living room, she saw the handguns strapped to their ankles.
Blessedly, Quinn had been at school, and Craig at work in the hospital.
Dawn denied everything. She looked the big, blue-suited guys right in the eyes and said she knew nothing about any sort of illicit activities at the Nurtury. As she lied, she knew she wouldn’t get away with it, that she was simply postponing the inevitable, but then Craig’s threat blared in her mind: “three supervised hours per week, if you’re lucky,” and the absurd denials rolled off her tongue.
“I was only there to learn how to help my child, who’s special needs.”
The men nodded. On Dawn’s coffee table, their black recording device pulsed with a little bead of red light.
“Reece Mayall is a wonderful, empathetic therapist. So passionate about her work.”
“How passionate, would you say?”
Dawn paused.
“Let me rephrase. Would you say Ms. Mayall’s passion ever clouded her judgment?”
Very quietly, Dawn said yes.
The others were doomed by outside witnesses. A few of the parents Mia had contacted caved in panic and supplied her name. The staff at FedEx on Wilshire identified Summer and Joanie. Graham fell apart and confessed mere seconds after the navy suits rang his apartment buzzer.
Reece, of course, was ruined, thousands of dollars in donations traced straight to the Nurtury’s bank account.
Dawn’s work on the Project, the countless hours she’d logged on the iMac in the Nurtury, bore only inside witnesses: Graham and Mia. Summer and Joanie. Reece.
They’d kept their mouths shut. Not one of Dawn’s friends breathed a word about her involvement. They corroborated her clumsy denial to the feds, standing behind her every false word.
In the meantime, they went down together.
All except Dawn.
Thanks to her friends—her loyal, selfless, incredible friends—she’d never had to spend a single night away from Quinn.