Marella comes to wait with her when school gets out, bringing gossip and a bag of Julia’s empanadas from Adams Morgan, still steaming.
“Ms. Vern says the UC schools are going to reopen in the fall. Stanford hasn’t announced yet, but they probably will too. So reapply and, voilà, escape.”
Bird chews slowly, making herself focus on the flavor of the chorizo and semisweet crust. “What are you going to do?” she asks.
Marella laughs. “Go wherever I get the best scholarship.”
“Do you think I could just follow you there?”
“What if I get a full ride from Georgetown?”
“Then I’d be sure God hates me.”
Marella bites her lip and puts her hands on Bird’s shoulders. “I know you’re not okay,” she says, “but you’ll tell me if it gets too bad, right? If there’s something I can do?”
Bird feels sticky with days of unwanted sympathy, but she loves Marella for this. She nods and listens to Marella tell her about school and city protests and her latest argument with Sarah — a reminder that everything doesn’t end with sound of the boy she loves struggling to breathe. But eventually Marella leaves. Alone again, Bird rests her head on her raised knees. She waits for Coffee’s mother to give her a grudging update, but instead her phone rings for a different reason entirely.
“Em, it’s me,” her dad says. “I’m outside. Alonso’s mother called me. It’s time I took you home.”
* * *
Bird presses her forehead against the window and watches the holiday lights blur past. Her father turns down the already low volume of the public radio station and clears his throat.
“Not a good time, Dad,” she says, before he can speak. She knew Coffee’s mother didn’t like her, but she’d never expected the contempt of an end-run to her parents. Doesn’t it matter to her how her son felt?
“Emily,” her father says, awkward as a ninth grader asking his crush to dance, “I know this is hard for you….”
“Then why are you talking?”
He flinches, but he doesn’t reply, just turns up the volume like he always does. It’s a story about the go-go riots and martial law protests now that the quarantine has ended. Bird stares straight ahead when the reporter talks about a student being “critically injured” by a soldier in the chaos. Her dad doesn’t seem to hear; when he glances at her, she can tell that even her best Carol Bird impression won’t stop him from saying his piece. She feels pathetic enough to crawl under the wheels of the car, but of course she doesn’t. You’ll survive, Nicky told her, a comfort and a prophecy.
“That night,” her father says, so softly she leans toward him, “the night of the party, your mother was out of town, but I had come back. She was worried about the quarantine. She wanted to get some … things from the house, in case we couldn’t get back to the District.”
Bird jerks back. “You were here? When I came back to the house, after what happened, did I talk to you?”
“I never saw you,” he says even more softly than before. Does he whisper because he’s afraid of someone hearing, or because he’s afraid of her? “I packed while you were at school. And after I went to visit … a friend.”
“A friend,” she repeats, understanding precisely what he means and wishing she could feel surprised. Lord knows she can’t blame him for seeking comfort in arms less constricting than Carol Bird’s, but she also hates the cowardice of the backdoor escape, the silent betrayal of vows that must have once meant something.
“Emily, your mother and I …” Even he can’t finish the sentence.
“You’ve never heard of divorce?”
He glares at her, which is a surprise. “We have a partnership.” He hits the steering wheel for emphasis. “Professionally, we’re famous for it. But personally too, with you. I can’t just rip that up for better sex.”
“My God, I don’t want to hear about it. You’re never even home, so don’t use me as an excuse.”
“I know that we haven’t been able to spend as much time with you as other parents, but you’ve grown into an intelligent, capable, independent woman, haven’t you? Independent enough to ignore my warning.” He sighs. “And it’s probably better that you did. That man needed to get put down.”
Bird’s heart fills with a volatile mix of disgust and pleasure, wondering if he means that someone killed Roosevelt. She doesn’t ask; if Coffee dies, at least she can dream of what happened to the man who left him in the snow.
“If you’d been home that night,” she whispers, “none of this would have happened, would it? You would have been able to stop it.”
“No, Emmie.” He whispers too. “No, and I’m so sorry, but it probably saved us both that I wasn’t. The whole reason that man came to the party, the reason that he wanted to meet you was because I had … said something I shouldn’t. Given them reason to doubt. They wanted to know what you knew because of me. If I had any idea they would go after you, I never would have opened my mouth. I thought we had protected you enough, been careful enough, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Bird nods, pretending any of this makes sense. She feels her face to make sure that it’s there. Two months of hell because of her father’s work disagreement? “What did you do?”
He ignores her question. “When I got to the house that morning, I could see you’d been there. Mud all over the floor, I guess because you walked through the park. Carol called and told me you were in the hospital. Safe. So I left.”
She thinks again of Coffee’s mother-turned-lioness, and laughs. “Dad of the year,” she says.
“I had no choice! You were in trouble no matter what I did, but we could help you more doing our jobs —”
“Saving the world?”
This stops him. He turns onto their street and stops the car before he speaks again. “From itself. I’ve had to reconsider a lot lately. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but it hasn’t been easy for me either. I want you to know that I’m proud of you. I picked this up when I went back to the house, because I hoped that you might be ready to take it.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a black leather case. Inside, the gold pen. He looks at her, steady and, for once, not at all distant. She understands. That morning, when he came back to the house, he saw that she had moved the case. So he took it before Lukas Group ever knew it was there.
Her lost clue is the Trojan horse for her father’s absolution. That’s what this pen always meant to them, even before she knew the scope of her father’s betrayal.
She hesitates, and then holds out her hand.
* * *
His mother calls the next afternoon: “He’s asking for you.”
Bird digs her fingers into her thigh. “Is he …”
“Better enough to yell at me. Come, I won’t stop you. Make him happy.”
Bird spares ten minutes for a quick shower and a fresh set of clothes. She’s in the car when she realizes that the sweater she pulled from her drawer is an old one of Mo’s, a pink hoodie with the word “fresh” blazoned in a glitter cursive across her chest. It looked better on Mo.
Bird hears his mother in the hall before she turns the corner. It’s the undercurrent of alarm, not so much the words, that stops her: “Two years?”
A man answers, “He could get twenty if he’s convicted on all counts.”
His mother says something in soft Portuguese. “I thought you said the case should be dismissed?”
“It should. Prosecution’s case is riddled with inconsistencies. But the judge is buying their arguments, so we’ll have to try again on appeal.”
“You don’t think he should take the plea?”
A long pause. “There’s something off about this case, Maria. The prosecutor is pushing it hard, more than he should, frankly, given the mess the cops left for him. Alonso thinks …”
“He thinks it’s about that girl.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it myself, except I met the man he’s talkin
g about. Some CIA contractor type. The situation is strange, I’ll give him that. He might regret refusing the plea.”
Bird makes herself turn the corner before they can say anything else. His mother’s mouth drops in comic surprise before she collects herself. The lawyer smiles slightly and shrugs.
“Roosevelt,” she says, “that man, he’s … fired or something. Shouldn’t that make a difference? If he’s not after Coffee anymore, then there shouldn’t be a case.”
The lawyer — Bao, she remembers — frowns and steps toward her. “You’re sure?”
Bird swallows, remembering her father’s confession last night. “Yeah.”
“You heard what I said about the plea bargain? I got that call this morning. Maybe this CIA pressure goes higher than that one operative.”
She shivers. Roosevelt did warn her.
“The district prosecutor isn’t going to just drop it without a reason — probably the same sort of pressure that made him pick it up in the first place.”
“So we need leverage,” Bird says.
He looks over his shoulder at Coffee’s mother, who rolls her eyes. “What Alonso needs is some common sense!”
Bird glares at her, then realizes she might change her mind about visiting Coffee and stares intently at the paper booties covering her tennis shoes.
Bao clears his throat. “If you find any of that leverage, Bird, let me know.”
Bird has leverage burning a hole in her pocket, if only she could understand it. She meets his kind, intent eyes and nods.
“Go on, Emily,” Coffee’s mother says loudly. “Bao and I have some further business to discuss.” The indignant subtext is hard to miss, even as she runs past them.
He smiles to see her when she freezes in the doorway of his isolation room. He is awake and alive, two adjectives she has regularly demanded of any passing deities, but she is greedy, and she immediately wants more.
His hair is plastered wet against his ears and forehead, and sticks up everywhere else like damp hay. His breathing wheezes, though not so badly as before. He looks as sick as her grandma did, when they took her to the hospital for pneumonia. Her grandmother never did come back home.
“Is it a cliché to say you look like shit?”
He tries too. “Nice shirt. Did you wear that to the go-go?”
Bird jerks like he hit her. She pulls up a chair, tries to pass it off, but she should have known better.
He takes a deep breath; she wishes he wouldn’t. “I’m sorry,” he says, hoarse. “I —”
“Don’t.” She makes herself look at him. “I’m sure it was way worse for you than for me.”
“I wasn’t awake for most of it, remember?”
“I remember.”
They stare at each other for a minute, then two. He reaches for her gloved hand. Easier to speak this way, palm to palm, reading the volumes in his eyes, than with words he doesn’t even have the breath to say.
But then he says them. “What’s happened, Bird?”
“Too much.”
“Highlights?”
“Your mother hates me?”
His abrupt laugh gives way to a coughing fit. When it ends, he says, “She doesn’t like me much at the moment either.”
She squeezes onto the edge of the bed, desperate to touch him, as if he can’t really be sick as long as she can feel the weight of his shoulders pressing against her arm. “She loves you.” She can’t say any more. One day she’ll tell him about the time Greg Bird saw his daughter’s nightmare tracked in mud and leaves over the marble floor of his perfect house — saw it and left anyway, with a bomb in his briefcase.
Besides, Coffee knows the shape of it — no one understands her parental psychodrama better. He isn’t stupid enough to say anything. They just lean against each other and breathe, happy to be alive and together, especially in this place, where nothing has seemed less sure.
“You still have something to tell me,” he says, touching her neck.
“How do you know?”
“You breathe differently when you want to say something.”
“Oh.” She reaches into her pocket. The things they know about each other aren’t things you know after a few weeks of dating; the way she feels about him overwhelms her with the vastness of its uncharted territory.
She takes out the pen. “My dad had it all along,” she says, whispering out of habit. She unscrews the base from the nib. A piece of paper is wrapped carefully around the ink cartridge. She hands it to him. Coffee glances at the door, slightly ajar, before unrolling the paper.
On one side, in her own handwriting, are the words:
california boy asked doctor about mom & dad — didn’t understand — but doctor said that it was the fault of the screwups at the FBI, what was their plant thinking giving the FARC guys the real virus? And c boy said you could only do so much with used-car salesmen — didn’t understand — and anyway the chances of mutation had been one in a million. the new flu?
She’s tried all night, but she can’t remember a shadow of this conversation that she risked so much to record and keep safe. All she has are these cryptic sentences, hinting at a truth so damning that she understands, finally, all of Roosevelt’s rage and paranoia.
Coffee lifts his head slowly. “This means … Bird, what you overheard …”
“I think so too,” she says. “Turn it over.”
The long string of molecular notation is so complex that she couldn’t even figure out a way to plug it into a search engine. She knows she didn’t write it. His eyes widen at the sight and for the first time since she entered the room, his hands start to twitch. Chemistry, his first love, holds him in her embrace and Bird smiles in relief to see it. “You overheard this too?” he asks.
“Not my handwriting,” she says. “Besides, no way I could remember all that just from hearing it, especially not pumped full of that drug.”
“Then who —”
He starts to cough again.
“I should go.” She’s shaking. His mother and Bao talked as if he was out of danger, as if they didn’t know that teenagers are in the worst risk group for v-flu mortality. How could she drag him into this again?
“No.” He takes her wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. “Stay, we don’t have to talk. Please, Bird.”
It’s his eyes, not his hand, that stop her. Eyes as panicked as she feels, as deep and as adrift.
She takes off her shoes and curls up beside him.
“It’s okay,” he says, “you can sleep.”
“No talking,” she mutters.
His laugh rattles against the phlegm beneath his ribs, but it still carries her, dreamless and content, to sleep.
* * *
Hours later, they both wake up.
“I need a computer,” he says.
“Because you want your mother to actually kill me?”
“Don’t you want to know what that molecule is?”
She did, before. She’d been plotting out her leverage and exactly how to apply it. “I want you to be healthy.”
“So do I, but this is something I actually have control over.”
She asks the ward nurse for a computer. He works until he shakes with exhaustion and a nurse turns out the lights. She wants to stay, but his mother makes her go home again. Carol Bird gives her a long look, full of judgment, when she stumbles into the kitchen near midnight.
“Out of curiosity, are you planning to attend classes anytime before the New Year?”
Bird raises aching and salty eyes and says, simply, “No.”
What Carol Bird sees there, she does not know, but her mother goes back upstairs without another word.
The next day and the next she visits him, though there are times when she has to sit in the hallway while he sleeps or the doctors talk with his mother. Bao visits once more and she wonders if he’s representing a dying boy, or just one in a great deal of trouble. If they get out of this, she suspects that Coffee will spend his life finding troubl
e, one way or another. She dreams of a future where they can find it together — where her Bird pragmatism can temper his Coffee radicalism. Which is to say, she dreams of a future where he survives.
She gets a call from the dean, sympathetic about the situation as explained by her mother, and letting her know she can make everything up next semester. First Roosevelt, now school — she’s had more help from her mother in the last two weeks than she’s had for the last five years. She wishes that it made her feel safe and protected and loved; but even now, a part of her is afraid of the blow.
* * *
His skin glows translucent under the hospital lights; the tracery of veins on his lowered eyelids are a lost language on ancient parchment. He had a bad night, and now he sleeps with her pen clasped tight in his right hand. When he wakes up, he smiles to see her.
“I figured it out.” His voice is so shredded she has to lean in to hear.
She closes her eyes, but the tears have crept up too quickly to stop. She hunches in the chair and hates herself, sobbing and choking when she’s supposed to be the strong one, the one who will get them through this.
His hands in her hair. His breathless voice, coaxing her to sit beside him, to lie down, to wipe the embarrassing strings of snot off on his hospital gown. This makes her laugh, at last.
“I am a lousy date,” she says.
“Then I guess we’re even.”
She has a sense that she will remember this forever: the antiseptic and detergent scent of his isolation room, his labored breaths, the muscles of his back, tense beneath her shaking hands. The present glows and blurs with the afterimage of its memory.
Love is the Drug Page 32
