by Nancy Kress
He’d raised his head to smile at me, and alarm bells clanged in my head. What did he know? Was his question a signal . . . but of what? From whom? Or did he want me to know that he’d discovered my identity? Clams . . .
“No,” I said, “I don’t like them.”
“Oh.” He went back to the menu, and I did the same, wondering what expression had been on my face, whether I had given anything away.
And wishing, stupidly, because there was nothing to be done about it, that he didn’t remind me so much of Ian. I was not this kid’s mother. I would never be anyone’s mother again.
2010: PORTLAND, OREGON
CHILDHOOD DOESN’T REALLY END until both your parents die. Before that, even if you are fifty or sixty or seventy, you are still someone’s daughter. The older generation, no matter whether you visit them or not, like them or not, take care of them or not, is nonetheless a wall between you and the abyss.
I liked my parents and they’d never needed caretaking. They were only in their fifties, healthy and active, with a lot of friends. At least once a month we had dinner together, me driving down to Portland from Seattle. I’d moved there after the break-up with Jake, unable to bear the memories in Manhattan.
Seattle is a city defined by both the tech industry and crunchy-granola activism. I found a job with a law firm that did a lot of pro bono work, especially on sexual assault cases. I demonstrated for sea lion habitats and against hate speech. I made few friends, by choice. I stayed celibate. The city, gray in January rain, suited me. My parents worried about me, as I never worried about them.
I hoped they hadn’t had time to see the twelve-wheeler that lost control on the expressway and hit their Toyota.
The memorial service I’d organized at a funeral home in Portland was thronged. People stood in the back, against the walls, in the hallways. Seven people spoke movingly about “Bea and Jim.” Both my parents, like me, had been only children, and the only family present was my ancient Great-Aunt Cecilia, who hung on my neck and wept. I peeled her off, stony-faced. Stone was the only way I could get through this.
“Where is the gathering afterward?” Great-Aunt Cecilia asked.
“There isn’t one. I don’t live in this city.”
She looked shocked. “But, Renata, there’s always a gathering afterward! You should have—”
“I didn’t,” I said shortly, and turned away. My parents had never liked Cecilia, and I didn’t see why I should. Nor did I believe in her grief. I didn’t know, then, that you don’t have to be close to a dead family member to feel mortality hissing at your back.
Afterward, I had to stand in the doorway, shake hands, and thank everyone. It was torture. My hand grew cramped, my fake smile felt like a death rictus, I tried to evade the hugs I emphatically did not want. When everyone was gone, I closed my eyes to shut out all of it, including the overly helpful funeral director who’d wanted me to sign up for grief counseling.
When I opened my eyes, a cop stood facing me in the doorway.
I stiffened. I’d been arrested twice in the past for protests that got out of hand, and cops are not my favorite people. But . . . this cop looked familiar. Still, I couldn’t place him until he spoke. I was always better at voices than faces.
“Renata,” he said awkwardly, “I’m sorry about your folks.”
“Dylan? Sanderson?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Jake’s little brother, whom I’d last seen almost four years ago at my Yale graduation, had grown up. He looked a little like Jake, Jake without the confident swagger or intense eyes, Jake in dim photocopy. Dylan shifted uneasily from one foot to another, a childish gesture at odds with his uniform. Which, I saw now, looked very new.
“Dylan, what are you doing here?”
“The police report came in about your parents’ accident. I recognized your name, of course, as next of kin.”
Why “of course”? We’d only met that once. I didn’t ask him.
“I wasn’t very nice to you at Yale,” he said. “It was . . . I was . . . anyway, I apologize.”
I didn’t think a spate of teenage rudeness four years ago required showing up at a funeral in order to apologize, but maybe he thought it did. Tired as I was of considering everybody else today, I still managed another horrible smile. “Don’t worry about it.”
He didn’t look any more comfortable. “Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, because I did something else.”
Fuck—now what? Before I could say anything more, Jake strode in from the hallway.
People say, “My stomach jumped,” and I always thought it was a metaphor. People say, “I almost fainted,” and I dismissed it as hyperbole. Both things can be facts. As I struggled to recover, to turn cold toward both brothers’ presumptuousness, Jake had his arms around me in a hug.
“Renata, I’m so so sorry . . . I know you loved them . . . it’s so fucking unfair!”
For the first time since the accident, I leaned into someone.
The only thing I remember between that moment and a double Scotch in a dim bar was Dylan’s triumphant, smug smile. “I did it,” he said, and then he was gone, and Jake and I faced each other across a booth, some terrible country-western music droning in the background and the NFL playoffs on the TV over the bar. Green Bay Packers versus Philadelphia Eagles. The Packers were winning.
“Why did you come?” I demanded.
“Same old Renata.” Jake reached over to squeeze my fingers. “I came because we were both idiots and I missed you so much I thought my heart would split down its seam.”
“What play is that from? And if I remember correctly, you missed me so much you were dating Marilu What’s-Her-Name.”
“How do you know that?”
“I read it in some supermarket tabloid.”
“You never read a tabloid in your life, and neither Marilu nor I am important enough to be in one. You followed me on Facebook. No, don’t glare at me, Renata—I followed your Facebook page, too. Every single day—not that you ever said much.”
“You did? Then why the fuck didn’t you call me?”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
We were glaring at each other now, bristly as fighting cats. Nobody said anything. The Packers scored a touchdown.
“Okay,” I said finally, “it’s over now.”
“What’s over? Our separation or this fight?”
“Which do you want to be over?” In that moment, I think I hated him.
He shook his head, suddenly amused. “You can’t back down, can you? Even when you want to.” His voice softened. “Even when we both want to. We’re together again, Renata. This time, for good.”
“Don’t you think you should ask me first?”
“You ask me instead.”
“No,” I said, nodding my head so that it was both no and yes at the same time. And then, before I knew I was going to say anything, “I miss them so much, Jake.”
He made an understanding noise, but I knew he didn’t really understand. Jake didn’t much like his puritanical, self-righteous mother. He hadn’t much liked Dylan, either, although perhaps that had changed. There was an in-the-moment quality to Jake that had, I realized, been the source of so many of our fights. Jake gave himself completely to the present, with an underlying disdain for those who wasted the moment. I gave myself to the future, considered his attitude puerile, and resented his disdain. But he sat across from me in that moment, with his whole loving heart in his beautiful, rich actor’s voice, and for the first time in a year, my body felt alive again.
“Together,” I said. “For good.”
It wasn’t that easy, of course. I didn’t want to leave my job in Seattle. Jake was still getting small parts in Hollywood. We commuted, using up the money my parents had left me. We didn’t have too many fights; time together was too precious. We did have a lot of sex, which was just as good as ever. I met a few of his friends, including Marilu, who turned out to be friendly but so ambitious that, even t
hrough my jealousy, I could see that no man mattered much to her unless he could help her career. I still didn’t have, or want, friends in Seattle, although sometimes Dylan called and said he was driving up anyway and asked whether we could have coffee. I always said yes. Dylan was, from what I could tell, plodding through his job as a rookie cop in Portland, but he said little about it. Unlike Jake, he was a fidgety person, tapping his foot and jiggling his knee and tugging at his ear as we chatted aimlessly about movies or politics. I didn’t really enjoy those coffee dates, but he was Jake’s brother, and he seemed lonely.
We had been flying back and forth between Seattle and L.A. for four months when everything happened.
Jake got the second lead in a major picture from Paramount, Year of the Goat. It was an incredible part: the alcoholic best friend who knows how pathetic he is, comes through at the end, and sacrifices his own happiness for the woman he loves from afar, the sister of the hero (who is not all that heroic). The role had a wide emotional range that could attract a lot of attention. “I can’t believe they gave it to me,” Jake kept saying as we celebrated. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“You’ll be great,” I said over and over. He would be. The part was made for him.
“But do you know who I beat out for the role? Do you know who else wanted it—how big they are?”
“You told me. They chose you. God, Jake, this will be your big break! Kiss me.”
He did. Then again, and again, and we were having drunken sex, and I didn’t put in my diaphragm. A month later, I Skyped Jake in Hollywood to tell him I was pregnant. He turned pale.
“Renata . . . how do . . . it isn’t . . . what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” I was confused, sick every morning, assisting with a tricky case at work, peeing urgently at inconvenient times. My body had always been strong and reliable; sickness was alien to me.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Jake said, and I knew that he was afraid of losing his big chance. That made me angry.
“Do you think I’d ever interfere with your movie? Knowing how much you want it? That’s really insulting, Jake!”
“Don’t get mad. It’s just . . .”
“Just what?” I wanted to throw something at him. I wanted to go again to the bathroom. I wanted to cry. I never cry.
He said, “Just that I want to marry you and have this baby, and I’m afraid you’ll say no.”
Did he mean it? I’ll never really know. Pregnancy hurried along the marriage that might have happened naturally—or not. Hurry sometimes isn’t a good thing. But I did know he loved me, and two days later we flew to Las Vegas and got married. I threw up immediately before and immediately after the ceremony.
“How will marriage be?” I asked, wiping my mouth outside the ladies’ room at the Office of Civil Marriages.
Jake, ashen, managed a grin. “Let’s find out.”
The next day, I flew back to Seattle, and Jake went to Hollywood.
I had a difficult pregnancy. Morning sickness persisted all day. “It will stop after the first trimester,” my doctor said. It didn’t. Unable to keep food down, I developed an iron deficiency. Jake came from Hollywood when he could, which wasn’t often. I refused to go down there and puke on the set or in a hotel room, away from my doctor. Part of Year of the Goat was shot on location in North Carolina, and all we could do was Skype. I was bewildered—this person with a little parasite growing in her, this vomity, weak person, was not me. I didn’t know myself. Other women had easy, even glowing pregnancies. I felt cheated.
The weather in North Carolina did not cooperate. The movie went over schedule, over budget. After Jake’s movie wrapped, he was in Seattle more, but not a lot more. The shoot had generated a lot of buzz, but MGM was keeping postproduction under tight control. Jake had to be in Hollywood to record looping, to go to auditions and screen tests, to have conferences with producers and his agent, Morgan Tarryn. Jake wasn’t yet major tabloid fodder, so nobody investigated his personal life.
Did I resent that he was with me so little? Yes. Did I know he couldn’t help it? Yes. Did I resent having to take a leave of absence from my job while Jake was glorying in his? Yes. That, too, wasn’t his fault. But it drove us a little apart.
I developed preeclampsia and had to stay in bed. Outside my small, dark apartment, rain fell incessantly. Terrified of losing the baby, I got out of bed only to go to the bathroom, shower once a day, and stack the day’s food by my bedside. I took about half of Jake’s calls and let the rest go to voicemail.
Ian was born six weeks premature, in late-November rain gloomy even for Seattle. I went alone to the hospital, in a taxi. I don’t think the driver even knew I was pregnant; I’d vomited so much during the pregnancy that the baby bump under my coat wasn’t obvious, and the pains weren’t yet bad.
I expected a hard labor to match my hard pregnancy, but Ian slid easily into the world. He was small but healthy; he was perfect. I held him next to me and felt the world shake beneath my bed, beneath the hospital, beneath the universe. Everything shifted. From that moment, Ian became the most important thing in the entirety of creation.
Jake arrived the next day with apologies and roses and exclamations of love, and I showed off the baby, and laughed with Jake, and knew that he had gone into second place in my heart.
November 2010. The Catastrophe that would change the United States was already beginning, on a farm in Indiana. But we didn’t know that then. It would be a dozen more years before we, or anyone, knew that. By then, it would be way too late.
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN TOM AND I showed up at the cell meeting, the others were already there.
Before we drove to the meeting, I switched identities at a Keep It Safe! The chain of facilities rented lockboxes to people who didn’t want to show the identification required for bank safe-deposit boxes. That’s lot of people in the age when anything digital can be hacked. Keep It Safe! buildings were ubiquitous, large, and secure, as long as you paid your fee every six months. They asked no questions, accepted cash, and had armed security bots.
Every time I stopped being Renata Black and became Caroline Denton, minion of the Org, I left my government-issued ID and usual cell phone in a lockbox. I traded them for an Org-forged ID, a cheap cell phone without net access, and a tiny box with Context Eyes. These—expensive, illegal, handmade—fitted into my eyes and gave me a different retinal scan than Renata’s. Law enforcement, of course, knew about Contexts, which was why retinal scans were going out of style. Still, as long as there was a chance I might be casually scanned, I wore them. If I were actually arrested, the Contexts would be discovered, and I’d be made to remove them. I did not plan on being actually arrested.
Tom said, “I switched already,” and I nodded. Where, and from what actual identity, was not my business.
The meeting place for our cell was a “suite” in a dilapidated old building in Seattle’s industrial district. The building consisted of five floors of studios for artists who never sold a painting, offices of barely-hanging-on businesses, storage areas, and empty rooms. Our suite consisted of a tiny outer room and a larger room behind it. The bathroom was down the hall. We were on the fifth floor. A sign on the door said PARKSIDE CHESS CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY. There was no park, of course, no sign at street level, and no elevator, all of which meant we didn’t get drop-ins eager to play chess.
Nonetheless, we had plausible deniability: three small tables with cheap chess sets, three chess clocks, and a large wall poster with photos or drawings of every world champion since 1886 (Wilhelm Steinitz, a singularly ugly man). A splintery wooden counter held a rule book and three other paperbacks detailing famous games. These sat next to the coffee machine and the top one was stained with someone’s spilled coffee, making the title impossible to read.
“You’re late,” said Kyle, who was never late for anything.
“Traffic accident on I-90.”
“Drivies or real cars?” ask
ed Jonas, who still distrusted drivies.
“A real car,” I said. “Meet Tom Fairwood, our new recruit. Tom, this is Jonas Li and April Shaunessy.”
“April May Shaunessy,” she said.
April was goofy. In some ways, she reminded me of my long-ago college roommate, Dena. April May chose her Org alias herself, and I didn’t know why she was allowed to do that, except that the computer people had special privileges because the rest of us didn’t understand what they did. She ran our cell’s section of the internet information-and-disinformation campaign. She did it on a computer system in some undisclosed location, using remote servers, remailers somewhere in Eastern Europe, a virtual private network, and tactics that let her posts be read without leading authorities to her. Some of her posts were designed to be hacked, which they were. She planted favorable information about genetic engineering and unfavorable information about those groups opposed to it, including DAS. Some of the disinformation was true, some not. One of her untrue tactics was to say that agribusinesses had been used by foreign powers to destroy the American economy during the Catastrophe. April was good at conspiracy theories, or at least it sounded that way to me. I found the Org’s online activities distasteful, even though I knew that our enemies did the same thing. In my apartment I never used the internet except to access the most reliable news channels. Such as they were.
April was Tom’s age, pretty in a gamine sort of way, and always slightly off—there was something weird about the way she perceived the world. I didn’t know why she’d joined the Org, and so I didn’t actually trust her, but Kyle did, and so here she was.
Jonas was different. Quiet, heavyset, balding, he was a biology professor at the University of Washington—I wasn’t supposed to know that—with a wife and grown kids. He was risking a lot for the Org because he believed in its goals completely. I didn’t understand why he’d been passed over for cell leader in favor of Kyle, but it wasn’t my place to question that.
