by Mike Chen
She took a step forward, one foot seemingly caught in the next, and while her mind zipped like lightning, her body reacted the opposite, becoming a clumsy collection of marionette movements. Somehow, she got through the open door, and somehow she closed it behind her.
“Yes?” Uncle Dean said, glancing up from his desk, no mask on his face. “I’m sorry, did you need something? Oh.” His eyes widened and he tore his glasses off, rubbing the remaining bits of hair on his head. “The transcripts for the French team. I forgot, didn’t I? Give me one—”
“Look at me.” Krista tore her mask off and her voice rang out, not loud but with a force strong enough to shatter glass. She took a step closer, then another, until she stood right in front of his desk, her knees touching its metal side. “What’s my name?”
His mouth hung open, frozen in confusion while he put his glasses back on and blinked. “Krista?” He stood up, the chair beneath him rolling back and hitting the bookshelf against the wall. “Krista? You’re—”
“I’m standing right here.”
“You’re dead. I was at your funeral. I mean, I paid for your funeral myself.”
“You wasted your money.”
“But we got a note, Kristen and me, we got a note that said you were dead. An official document—”
“From Nassau County,” they said at the same time. Krista kept going, though. “Jesus Christ, you’re as gullible as Mom. I swear, I must have inherited my survival genes from somewhere else. I paid to have a forged document sent to you. By some guy on Long Island who ran a printing business.” His open mouth showed he was reeling, and she wanted to say more, to go for a knockout punch. Yet only silence lingered between them.
“Krista. My God.” Uncle Dean’s fingers bored into his forehead as his thumb balanced on his cheek. “Why...why would you do that?”
“Oh, don’t give me that. Now you care. You know when you didn’t care? All those times I waited for you while Mom got hammered. You think it’s easy to play, to study, to be a goddamn child when a drunk is screaming at the wall? A mom that fights you off when you try to take a bottle away? A mom that needs you to clean up her puke for her, to wake her up for work? You think that’s normal for a kid? I still remember the last time we talked. The intervention that you didn’t come to. ‘I don’t think it’s our place to get involved.’ That’s what you said.” The words began to roll out of her mouth, each laced with poison and fire, propelled at an uncontainable momentum. “I learned one hell of a lesson that day. I guess I should thank you. You taught me to rely on myself.”
Uncle Dean sank farther into his chair with each word. She hesitated, just for a second, long enough for him to start to say something before she launched into it again. “So I’m sorry if you thought I was dead, but I didn’t think one more death notice would make a hell of a lot of difference to you. Or Mom, for that matter. Neither of you ever cared.”
“Krista,” he said, his voice barely audible, “your mom—”
“Save it. There’s a little girl named Sunny in this hospital, and I want you to bring her to me right now.”
“The girl.” He blinked behind his glasses several times before inching forward, hands placed on his desk. “You know the girl?”
“I’m taking her back with me to San Francisco before anyone fails to protect her.” She stood, shoulders up and chest tall, and for the first time in her life, she felt like she truly towered over someone. “I care about her too much for that to happen.”
Without speaking, Uncle Dean picked up his phone and punched a series of numbers on the pad. “Security? This is Dean Francis. The girl we found, the one who said she knew me. She does know me after all. Or a relative of mine. Can you bring her to my office? Okay. And please let the Seattle FSB know they won’t be necessary. Okay. Thank you.” He set the receiver back in its cradle but continued to stare at it. “She’s sleeping. They’ll wake her and bring her up.”
“Look at big Uncle Dean,” her words were gravelly from her dry mouth, “protecting the little girl he found. Nice to see you add something to your repertoire. What’s next, you actually going to cure this new virus?”
Uncle Dean’s sigh filled the room. His face changed, the color dropping from a pale blotch under fluorescent hospital lighting to a more ashen tone. “Yes and no,” he finally said.
“See, even with this you can’t stick with an answer. What the hell does ‘yes and no’ mean?”
“I’m...” His voice trailed off, leaving only the murmur of the outside hallway to eat up the empty seconds. “There’s nothing official yet. But we’ve been preparing for this situation for close to a year. Medically speaking. I believe governments have had outbreak contingencies in place ever since society restarted. Things happened far before any rumors did. France, Kenya, and Australia have been invaluable. Russia’s shutting us out, even though we keep offering to share information. The isolated flu symptoms. It was scary to see, but it gave us a head start. The government’s blood donation protocol, we’ve been able to isolate immunity elements.” Uncle Dean’s demeanor changed. This was a different type of defeat. “This new mutation, I think we’ve got a handle on it. But it’s going to keep—”
“Oh, should we throw a parade? I’ll call Mom and we’ll go buy a piñata and—”
“Krista, your mom is dead.”
Uncle Dean’s words dammed up all of her momentum, causing her to lurch between her anger and her shock. Dead. Her stupid, horrible mother was dead. The very idea of it wore her down to the core, exposing something buried long ago: the little girl inside that just wanted her mommy to do the right thing. But in her place stood a woman who had to accept forever being an orphan.
“Figures. It totally figures,” she finally forced out, her voice matching his soft tone despite her best intentions. “I knew she wouldn’t make it. She was too stupid.”
“Kristen died shortly after we had our funeral for you. The last thing we argued about was the music I chose for it. The Clash, of course. ‘Lost in the Supermarket.’ ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ was too obvious.”
She could feel his eyes searching, looking for some sort of connection but her gaze remained strictly on the floor. “I would have also accepted ‘Somebody Got Murdered.’”
“I thought you would have appreciated it,” he said, letting out a heavy sigh. “She thought it was disrespectful.”
“Disrespectful. Like Mom knew anything about that. She died. I knew she would,” she said, her voice getting weaker. “I knew it. Of course I knew it.” She squeezed her eyes shut so he wouldn’t see, but the tears just leaked out the side. “I knew it. I knew it.” She turned away from him, away from Uncle Dean’s world of evil and horrible sentimentality. “I knew it.”
“Krista,” he said. She heard his footsteps on the tile, but his movements didn’t register with her, not until they stood side by side. “Your mom—”
“I hate you.” This time, the words came at full volume without control. In her peripheral vision, she could see the words attacking him, cutting away at his posture until he seemed only inches tall. “You never got involved. You knew, you knew what she was like and you chose to stay out of it. You let it happen.” She turned again, her knees shaking despite having already collapsed into a chair. Warm palms pressed against her face, tears sliding under them. “You let it happen. You let it happen.”
On a certain level, Krista knew how undignified her meltdown was, how unlike the person she prided herself on being. But the facts were the facts: she didn’t need to mourn her mother, the Kristen Francis she knew. She needed to mourn the idea that Kristen Francis departed the world without ever becoming the mother that Krista Deal needed, as a child or an adult.
That, in itself, was an acceptable reason to break her down for a minute or two.
“Krista? Krista.” Uncle Dean must have turned on his doctor voice; it came across as gentle
and soothing, the type of thing he was probably trained to say just before revealing to a patient that she had six minutes to live. “You’re right. And I have to live with that.” His voice shook, each syllable chained to the next through the most fragile of connections. “I’m so sorry.”
Despite her proclamation, drumming up the necessary vitriol to truly hate Uncle Dean seemed impossible. His apology broke her stride, stealing her emotional thunder and making it harder and harder to stay on course.
She tried. This was what she clawed for all those years ago, when she left the quarantine and started life afresh. This was why she had a giant stack of cash in a safe. This was why she ordered a falsified death certificate after a bit too much wine. Life without family, without a past, without anything to tie her back to them or other unnecessary things, a principle she’d clutched on to for dear life. And yet, with three small words, Uncle Dean somehow opened a new possibility: What if she just let all that go?
Somehow, it worked. Somehow, she found herself sitting, body shaking from the tears of release, and when he put a hand on her shoulder, she didn’t recoil or fight. Part of her demanded that she be tougher right now, but in that moment she realized that that part was as sad and scared as the rest of her. And while she wasn’t ready to hug it out and have Uncle Dean over for burritos, the longest first step was taken.
“Why didn’t you help?” she said, finally able to speak.
“Because I didn’t know what to do. She always said she just needed one more chance. One more chance. And I believed my big sister. Every time.”
“Well, she was an idiot. She’ll always be an idiot. And you’re a bigger idiot for listening to an idiot.”
“I’m not arguing with you there.” His grip loosened, and he stepped back.
“Did she even make it to rehab?” In just about every circumstance, Krista would have been mortified to let anyone see her with tear stains and nose sniffles. Somehow, the need to protect against that didn’t surface this time.
“What do you think?”
“Of course not.”
“You always had a good intuition. No, she went into quarantine with the rest of them. I was taken away to the UN research facility, so I couldn’t track her until after things settled down. From what she said, her quarantine got good at smuggling in booze.”
“What did she die from?”
“Liver failure.” Her palm swept across her mouth in a vain attempt to erase the emotions that burst out. Krista’s stare fell straight down, burrowing into her shoes, then the carpet underneath. “Don’t waste your energy wondering if you should have forgiven her. She never earned it. She never changed. I still think about that. Did she ever hit rock bottom? Her daughter stopped talking to her, she went into a quarantine, so many people died. But through it all, someone enabled her.” Uncle Dean rubbed his brow, his palm brushing against his glasses as he did so. “Most of the time, that was me.” Each passing word seemed to break his posture a little more, chipping away until the defenses were gone. “You did the right thing by staying away,” he said with a sigh.
The sentiment sat in Krista, stewing over a lifetime of rage and neglect. “She wasn’t family. She was a relation. Family would do better,” she said finally.
Which was Uncle Dean? The question lingered for a moment and the answer wasn’t definitive, but at least it was a direction.
He’d have to earn it back.
“You are as stubborn as your mom.” He laughed, the first laugh of their entire reunion. “You know that?”
“Smarter, though.”
“Yes.” Uncle Dean let out a heavy sigh, and for the first time she noticed the weary posture of his slumped shoulders. “Absolutely.”
A knock arrived from the door, along with a muffled voice. “Security.” Uncle Dean looked her way, and she nodded. The door swung open.
“Krista!” Sunny’s blissful cry matched the volume of Krista’s earlier tirade. She ran toward her, knitted scarf trailing, and Krista scooped her up, squeezing her with enough force to protect her against killer viruses, lying adults, and protesting hippies.
“That’s a nice scarf you got there.”
“I know.”
“I thought you didn’t like the colors I used?”
“I don’t like green. But I like it because you made it and this way you can come with me.” Sunny looked up, head tilted inquisitively. “Are you still mad at me?”
“No, Sun,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Of course not. We’re friends, remember? Friends forgive each other.”
“You didn’t bring Daddy, did you?”
“I did,” she said as Sunny’s feet landed back on the ground. “And Moira too.”
“MoJo!”
“Well, I think she’d prefer to be called Moira.”
“But you can’t spoil my surprise for Daddy. I’m going to talk to Mommy so she’ll come home.”
“Right. Well, I suppose it’s up to him now. Sunny,” she said, turning her to Uncle Dean, “there’s someone here I want you to meet.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Rob
Rob wasn’t sure how much time had passed since security took them away from Pediatrics. They sat in a small room behind a locked door, a couple of metal chairs and a side table offering little comfort, everything in their pockets confiscated. Only a box of disposable breathing masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer remained, and that probably was for the hospital staff’s own protection.
Good thing security didn’t know about the bag of things from Narc stashed under the Dumpster. He wondered when they should bring up the guy Moira and Krista had tied up.
“You think they’re gonna question us?” Moira asked.
Despite being on their own, they’d sat in silence most of the time. Which, Rob figured, made sense. He wanted to spend more time with Moira, to get to know more of the true person who finally seemed to be emerging. But being held in a makeshift detention didn’t exactly make for the best arena for that.
Not when they still didn’t have confirmation about Sunny.
The door suddenly flew open, and a man in a blue uniform stepped in. “Is your name Rob Donelly?”
That seemed like a strange question considering they took his wallet. But given that they had used fake IDs to get here, perhaps not that strange. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Sir, I think we found something of yours.”
“What’s—” A high shriek pounced over Rob’s question. The man stepped aside, two small hands pushing him at waist level to shove into the doorway.
“Daddy!”
Words poured out of Rob in a garbled mess while he held his daughter, and the troubles of everything outside the hospital melted away. Another outbreak may have been on the verge of eating the planet alive, but for that moment the world was complete. “Sunny,” he said after regaining his composure. “We were all worried sick about you. Why didn’t you pick up when I called?”
“Because I wanted it to be a surprise. And my phone ran out of battery.”
“Well, you surprised me all right,” he said. Moira knelt down next to them, a hand on Rob’s arched back, her free arm halfway around Sunny.
“One happy family.” Krista popped into the doorway, then walked over and put her hands on Sunny’s shoulders. “You’ve raised a little troublemaker, haven’t you?”
“I’m not a little troublemaker.”
“That’s right, Sunny. You’re a big troublemaker.” In the few weeks since Krista had invaded their lives, Rob had never seen her smile quite like now. And when he stood up to meet her on an adult level, her demeanor clearly illustrated that something was different. An aura of something—weary? humble?—penetrated Krista’s space, something in her expression that lacked the intensity of every other encounter they’d had.
“Mr. Donelly, I’ve got good news for yo
u.” A stocky man stepped forward, and Rob recognized him as Krista’s uncle Dean. He reminded himself not to use one of Krista’s nicknames for him.
“Dr. Dean Francis? Or Uncle Dean?” He held out his hand to shake and couldn’t remember in the moment if Krista had ever explained why she detested him so. She held everything so close to the vest.
Though now that he thought about it, they all did. Everyone in this new world.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Rob said.
“Well, I hope I can make a better impression in person,” he said, taking his hand. “Your daughter’s asked me about your wife, and unfortunately I’m not treating her personally. In fact, I’m not sure why the doctors wouldn’t let Sunny talk to her, but we’ll get that straightened out. I can help.”
Even in his peripheral vision, Rob could see Krista shake her head.
Uncle Dean glanced back at the security guard. “This is my niece—” he gestured at Krista “—and her friends. Can we get a few minutes alone?”
“Of course, Doctor.” He stepped outside and the door clicked shut behind him.
“Look, I...this is not public knowledge yet. But it will be. Might be a week. Maybe two weeks. Hopefully a few days. That means it’s getting out there faster. But this new illness, we have a new antiviral protocol and a vaccine for it.”
For someone announcing such positive news, Uncle Dean’s expression remained grim. Lines sunk in across his forehead, his eyes squinted, and his shoulders tensed.
“When that’s ready for public distribution, then President Hersh will make an announcement. Something we’ve known for a while. You’re gonna hear it soon. It might as well be from me.” Behind him, Rob heard Moira straighten up, and her fingers dug into his shoulders tightly. Krista looked at Uncle Dean, a confused expression on her face.
This must have been new to her too.
