“How’s Clara doing?” her friend demanded now, before Madeleine could even issue a greeting. Taken aback at her tone—it wasn’t like Lucy to be so short—she looked again at her daughter, who seemed to be dozing off.
“She’s fine, thank goodness—you know yourself, you’ve been through it with Steph. Poor thing will be itchy and miserable for the next few days but—”
Lucy cut her off. “Have you talked to anyone from the school since?”
Madeleine furrowed her brow. What did that have to do with anything? Everyone knew the thing was going around, hadn’t they gotten that note on Monday...
“Well, I obviously phoned to tell them that Clara wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week, that the poor little thing had caught the blasted pox and—”
“Oh, God, you really don’t know, do you?”
What the hell? Madeleine thought, irritated. Why all the drama, for crying out loud? Was there a reason why Lucy wouldn’t let her finish a sentence? It was actually starting to sound like she was phoning for a gossip and Madeleine didn’t have any time or inclination for gossip. Just then, Clara was her only concern. “Well, I kind of have my hands full here. I don’t know what else is going on at the school and, to tell you the truth, I don’t particularly care—”
“Maddie,” interjected Lucy harshly, “I don’t think Clara has chicken pox.”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. “What are you talking about?Ofcourseshe has chicken pox. Ellie got it first, and now Clara has it. Her temperature’s subsided and granted there’s not many sores showing up yet, but all we can do now is let it take its—”
Again, her friend cut her off. “Madeleine, let me finish. I just got off the phone with Kate O’Hara. Rosie is sick, too.”
“Ah, poor thing.” Madeleine felt sorry for Kate, who was a single mother and would be seriously put out by having to miss work to look after little Rosie. And as she expressed as much to Lucy, she could almost sense her friend shaking her head on the other end of the line.
“No, you see, Rosie already had chicken pox a couple of years ago. And before you say it, no, she isn’t one of those kids who gets it twice, either. Please, Madeleine, quick, just tell me what Clara’s chest looks like—is there a rash?”
Madeleine felt confused, but did as she was told. With the phone pressed to her ear, she looked at her sleeping child—thankfully, Clara had found some peace in slumber—and pulled down the bedclothes a little.
Then she whispered quietly into the phone, “I don’t know. Like I said, there isn’t much of a pox outbreak yet, but now that you say it, just under her neck there is a kind of rash, I suppose, little bumps clustered together. Pretty much what you would expect with—”
“Madeleine, you have to get Clara to a doctor, fast. And get Jake out of school, too. I’m serious.” Lucy sounded almost frantic on the phone and her normally mild-mannered friend’s panic made Madeleine’s mind race. But her heart almost dropped into her stomach with her friend’s next words. “I don’t think that Clara has chicken pox, sweetheart, but she could have measles. Rosie definitely has—Kate recognized the difference right away. You know she’s a nurse. But, anyway, it’s not common knowledge yet, at least I don’t think it is, the way that people know...well...the way people know about Jake and Clara. But it seems Rosie isn’t vaccinated, either. She has some allergy that prevents it and—”
Feeling like her head was spinning, Madeleine looked down at her daughter and tried her hardest to recall what Jake had been like when he’d had measles, but it was a good six years ago and she really didn’t remember. It had been a mild case, so hadn’t really stuck in her mind, other than the fact that the doctor had berated her for not vaccinating her eighteen-month-old against it in the first place...
And now it seemed Clara had picked it up. But where?
Suddenly, Madeleine’s mind drifted back to their holiday in Clearwater over the Easter break. There’d been something in the news at the time—she’d hardly paid attention to it amid all the activities—about some kind of outbreak in one of the Orlando theme parks?
And little over a week ago, the Coopers had shared an eight-hour flight home from that very location, with countless other Irish families who’d spent Easter in the theme parks...
“Oh, my goodness,” Madeleine gasped as the full realization of what might be happening hit her.
The countless hours and days she and Tom had spent researching measles when Jake was a baby, trying to decide whether or not they could realistically avoid the MMR vaccination.
First and foremost, they’d been hugely uncomfortable about the vaccine’s link to autism, and while the original research paper suggesting the connection had long been discredited, it was very difficult to ignore the multitude of real-life anecdotal experiences that were so prevalent. The very idea of their happy, thriving, babbling Jake regressing to a withdrawn, unresponsive state within days—perhaps hours—of receiving the vaccination was enough to break Madeleine’s heart, and it certainly gave her pause.
While Tom had been raised a freethinker and found it easy to rail against the establishment, she hailed from a more traditional Catholic background, used to trusting and going along with generally accepted advice and thinking.
Initially, Madeleine couldn’t credit that the government and health boards would realistically offer something that could harm, rather than protect, children. That was before she started to read through the reams of research on the vaccine and its potentially harmful ingredients, as well as the troubling suggestion of collusion and lobbying from the pharmaceutical companies.
But it was the worrying realization that worldwide governments’ and health officials’ ultimate priority was not the health of an individual child but “herd immunity” that truly concerned her. She’d spent hours upon hours reading up on both sides of what was a very heated and controversial argument, but, ultimately, the whole decision came down to her baby son’s safety.
“Suppose we don’t give him the vaccination,” she’d said to Tom, when Jake’s first MMR shot was imminent and they were by then seriously wavering about going along with protocol, “and he catches something terrible? I don’t think I could ever forgive myself—”
“Could you forgive yourself if wedovaccinate and it triggers something potentially worse?” he’d argued, and Madeleine’s heart constricted. “It’s a huge leap of faith, Maddie,” he went on, but by then she no longer needed persuading. The health board’s concerns might be for the safety of the population at large; but, as parents, theirshadto be for their son.
And once you’d understood something like that, once you’d come to a realization that rocked the very foundations of your beliefs, you couldn’t go back. Their family knew that all too well.
“Look, it’s not as if measles is the end of the world, either,” her husband concluded. “I had it when I was a kid and, yes, it was nasty, but I recovered fine.”
Madeleine’s brother Paul had also seen off mumps as a child, and she herself had gone through a mild bout of measles when she was ten.
