“I shouldn’t have asked. I really did come just to see you.” He didn’t turn from the night and she could barely see his face in the failing light. “Let’s just eat.” She uncovered a dish of satay shrimp and replaced it quickly to avoid being sick. Food was the last thing she was interested in, no matter how nice it looked.
She’d had so many nice images in her mind as she’d been flying to find him. They’d play cribbage and make up outrageous stories about Bryce Sr.’s visitors and laugh. She missed laughing with him.
“You’ve changed so much, Mom, that I barely even recognize you. This is a better person, stronger, prettier.”
His smile brought an echo that flirted with her own face.
“But I don’t know her. There are parts of me that don’t know whether or not to trust you. You’ve changed.”
“What? I’m not allowed to grow up?”
“No!” His smile broadened with a light that had never been a part of her father’s repertoire. “Mothers are supposed to be forever-the-same, an unchanging shrine to my childhood.”
She leapt to her feet and came round the table to face him. A sharp jab of her finger in the center of his broad chest and he played at falling back wounded, slumping down into the chair, his head lolling to one side. She lowered her voice into a tone of rolling command.
“Look here, y’ung ‘un. Your momma, she done growed up and y’all better get used to it, right quick. Hear?”
He raised his hands in surrender, “I hear ya, Momma-lady. I hear ya. And what was the name of the stranger in the night who changed you out for my Momma-lady?”
Suz rocked back on her heels. “Why it was a young man who whispered into my ear in a room that had once held his childhood. He said, ‘I set you free.’ And you did, Brycie. More that you can know. And I like being described as lavender and honey. I hold that close in the dark night.”
Brycie blinked back at her and then suddenly burst into laughter. “Guess I’ll have to be more careful about what I say. ‘Cause you look great, Mom. I left behind a brow-beaten, robe-shrouded mother, and now look at you. Amazing. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I’m suddenly very hungry.”
Suz practically danced around the table as Brycie uncovered dishes and stabbed out with his fork. They both ate from the serving dishes, using their light-green dinner plates as a field to merely catch the drips of sauces as they sampled, offered, and warred like children over choice pieces.
When she couldn’t cram down one more piece of peanut-butter chicken or another bite of gado-gado, she dropped back into her chair with an exaggerated sigh.
Brycie waved the final stick of satay shrimp in her direction, but she could only shake her head. He took one off the bamboo stick, and munched with more thought than enthusiasm.
“So what is it that you need?”
She shook her head. This dinner had done more to restore her than anything she’d done for herself in years. She wasn’t about to wreck it.
“C’mon. It’s sitting there making you twitch. What is it?”
She looked down at her plate to avoid his gaze. Peanut sauce, bakso soup dribbles, some dark sauce, tamari perhaps, had all left their trails angling from the various dishes straight toward her heart like a speckled arrow.
“You need a new team leader.” He crunched another shrimp. “One who will be loyal to you.”
She swallowed and wondered how to dodge the arrow she had built.
“Ah. That’s why you need me. You need someone who is not loyal to our parent. And my memories might know.”
It struck home. She was using him. She was using Brycie for the part of him they both hated.
“I can do better than that.”
Under the inspection of her raised eyebrow, all he did was smile.
“I, Brycie the Younger, know someone who despises our parent. And he would know who to get for you.”
“You do?” Then it would come from her son and not their father. That would be clean. The speckled arrow turned back into a bunch of splatters. She turned the plate so that the arrow was aimed at the empty dish of nasi campur, eaten down to the last fried rice grains.
“I do. We just give him a call. No, no security here. Maybe we should go see him. Though our parent might get suspicious. He has,” Brycie’s face soured for a moment, “odd connections there.”
“I can build a secure call. One even the dragon lady at the front desk won’t be able to follow.”
He trailed along behind her as she moved into the dark interior of the hotel suite. She found a light by the terminal and flicked it on.
“Where are we calling?”
“I need to talk to a man named Perry. He lives over Perry’s Restaurant on Bikini Atoll.”
She started in through a general public query on restaurant names. Once she had the call code located, she backed out and opened a general search engine. While it was loading she hacked into the terminal’s interface and ran a carrier out to a low-orbit comm satellite.
“The moon? What the hell are you doing routing to the moon? He’s in the South Seas.”
She ignored him and sent a half dozen false comm trails out to Mars colony, before ducking back to the satellite and doing a seven-step bounce to wind up only a few thousand kilometers from where they were sitting. The viser popped to life.
“Sergeant Major Wolve—”
The bleary-eyed face glared at her. The broad features were masked by short gray hair and a heavy shadow on his jaw line.
“Who the hell are you, lady? And why are you calling so late?”
He glanced down at where his readout would be.
“And who the hell is Lucille Ball?”
A gentle nudge on her shoulder and she traded places with her son. “Lucille Ball?” he mouthed at her.
“False lead,” she whispered back as Bryce settled into the chair.
“Hey, Bryce. How’s it hanging?”
Men. They were definitely strange.
“Obviously pretty well. That one was cute. Get your ugly mug out of the way, put that cutie-pie back on.”
“Ease back, man. Remember I told you about my family. She’s my mother. Sorry about waking you, wasn’t thinking.”
“Yea, you don’t do that a lot. Wish I had a mom who looked like that. Why did your name just change to James Tiberius Kirk?”
When Bryce glanced at her, she tapped her wrist and held up two fingers. The automatic security systems didn’t like the few dozen rules she’d broken and were slowly chipping away at them to resolve the issues.
“Time’s running short, man. Lucille needs a Captain of the guard. Someone who has no love for the man we both met.”
“On the level?” The man’s brow knitted.
“As true as a lemon-yellow bikini.”
Suz looked down at Bryce, but whatever that code could possibly mean, Perry nodded his head. Perhaps she didn’t want to know. It was still hard picturing her little boy interested in bikinis, or removing them.
Perry looked down and scrabbled around out of view for a moment. Then he held up a piece of paper with a call code. She memorized it.
“You got it?”
Brycie glanced at her and she nodded as she flipped the code backwards and memorized it that way as a back check.
“Your name just changed three times. I’d guess seconds are running short. Have that cute mom of yours tell the man she reaches that The Wolf sent her. And ‘the First Tuesday in April.’ Got that?”
“Got it, buddy.”
“Come on by and we’ll split a beer or twelve.”
“Thanks, man. Owe you.”
Flames licked around the note as Perry burned it. Bryce cut the connection.
Suz checked her watch. “Twelve seconds to spare. Cute, hunh? Maybe I should go visit this
friend of yours.”
“Not your type, mom. What the hell do I know? Maybe he is. I’m not even sure who you—”
She grabbed her son in a hug and held his head to her shoulder. His hair smelled of shampoo and the odd, rusty quality of water that had bubbled through volcanic ash as it sought the surface.
“Suzie loves Brycie.” She kissed the top of his head.
“Brycie loves Suzie.” Their nighttime ritual complete, he held her so tight that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
“Are you going to place the call from here?”
“No. The watchdog programs are already alerted to something odd on this island, maybe even this town. I don’t dare try again. I have plenty of secure circuits at home.”
“My mother the all-powerful. I didn’t even understand half the stuff you did.” His voice rumbled gently against her where they embraced. “You used two satellites Bryce Sr. doesn’t even know about.”
“My mum launched one. The other belongs to a ham radio group. I’m just fighting back. Doing what I can.”
“You be careful. You are wrestling with the horns of the beast.” And then she knew. She knew what had changed her life. She also knew what was trapping her son. He was running from the man they had both once cowered in the dark to avoid.
“Hey, Brycie.” She stepped back to see his eyes as he looked up at her.
“Yea?”
She leaned down until her lips were against his ear, and her hair created a shroud of safety for them both.
“I set you free.”
# # #
“Where do you go at night, Jaron?”
He mumbled something about the jungle.
“I knew that. Show me.” Robbie debated making it a request, but didn’t dare risk giving him an out. Her grant was up and she had to walk out in the morning, nearly a week to tramp to the nearest port. Jaron had decided to leave at the same time, to once again cross the Sierra de Curupiras into the Upper Amazon.
And she was damned if they were going to sleep apart on their last night of three months together. He still flinched away if she even brushed against him by accident and, though she could easily find some sexual partner once she was back in school, she didn’t want to wait. There were some hidden depths here that drew her. And, dammit, she liked the man.
There was a look of panic as his eyes repeatedly darted in her direction and away. He arranged his empty journals and pencils for the twentieth time on the desk. He rearranged the hardcopies of the journal articles they’d cowritten. Under her name alone at his insistence, although she’d argued long and fruitlessly against taking the credit for his research. He truly cared only about the truth and was terrified of having his name released anywhere.
He didn’t answer, but rather edged to the door. She slung a machete and water bottle over one shoulder and followed him out into the evening light as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Harold swooped down out of the sky and landed on Jaron’s shoulder.
“Harro, Brobrie.”
“Hey there, Harold.”
The macaw bobbed his head at her and rode backwards on Jaron’s shoulder for a while. Sometimes inspecting her, sometimes the sky above. Once they were clear of the camp Jaron turned to the east.
“But you always leave camp to the southwest.”
Harold rode up and down on Jaron’s apologetic shrug. “I start southwest and then circle around each night.”
The heat of anger rose up within her. Why was she wasting time with this man? He was so closed off. So bloody gun shy that she wanted to slap him sharply just to shake him out of his own world a little bit. But then there were the moments when they were working together.
Jaron would forget she was a woman or even a person distinct from himself. When they worked together there was a synergy that echoed from one mind to the other until they were finishing each other’s sentences, working out problems level by level. Neither able to climb the height on their own, but together reaching easily right out of the superstory and up into the stratosphere.
Somewhere inside him, that passion must exist for something other than his work. She kept telling herself. It must. Harold’s love of the man supported that intuition. Great. Now she was envious of a parrot.
She almost turned back to sleep her last night on the bunk she’d rigged in the back of the lab, but then he turned to make sure she was still following. Robbie couldn’t be sure, perhaps it was the set of his shoulders, or the way he moved, but he must have crossed some threshold himself. He hadn’t looked back in hope that she wasn’t following, but rather to make sure she was.
Harold turned to face forward as they penetrated deeper and deeper beneath the canopy. The failing light of the day barely reached down to the forest floor.
She wished she’d thought of a flashlight as Jaron moved nimbly ahead and she stumbled over hidden roots and nearly twisted an ankle in a rodent’s burrow. At least a kilometer from the station he halted at the base of one of the largest Diplotropis trees she’d ever seen. The great arching roots rose high enough to make separate rooms in the spaces around the base.
Jaron indicated a tangle of vines which she quickly realized was a harness.
“But there’s only one.”
“I don’t need one.” True to his words, he dug his hands into the leaves of the vine-wrapped trunk and began ascending rapidly upward. It took her a while to adjust the harness for her much larger frame. Someone as slender as Jaron must have been the last to use this.
“Hurry,” his whisper shadowed down through the jungle. He was already halfway up by the time she had the harness sorted out.
Once in, she ascended rapidly. When she arrived high in the tree, she clambered out onto a wide crotch where half-a-dozen branches reached out to form their portion of the canopy. But Jaron was nowhere to be seen.
“Where are you?” For some reason she whispered. There was a waiting hush this close to the sky. The sunset speckled the leaves above her. And then she picked out the unnatural shape of a small square platform above her. A narrow ladder, barely enough for her to place two feet on the same rung, continued up the main trunk to the platform. When she reached the wooden structure, the ladder continued yet again upward. There, lit in a dazzle of orange light, Jaron was perched and looking out across the jungle.
Robbie edged up below him until her face was even with his feet and she turned to look. They were over a hundred meters in the air, a few feet above the top of the tree. The world bobbed and swayed with the gentlest breeze, and Harold was nowhere to be seen.
The rolling hills of the jungle rose and fell in shining yellows and greens along their crowns, and pitch-dark shadows of night in the valleys. Above her, swirling against the pink sky were a hundred gnats. But that wasn’t the right perspective.
Parrots. A hundred, a thousand, filled the sky, climbing ever higher until they were the last things lit by the sun, now set beyond the horizon of trees. Groups, small at first, then larger and larger, broke and descended toward the trees. Harold, identifiable by his size and aim soared down like a bullet to land on his friend’s shoulder.
The empty sky shaded from blue to purple-black as the first stars peeked out into the firmament. A lone bat swung up into the night sky. A fury of wingbeats after the long, gliding swoops of the parrots. Then another and another joined in the diving flight to begin their nightly meal of bugs.
She descended reluctantly back to the platform. And Jaron followed close behind. With the two of them, the narrow platform was dangerous enough simply standing, no railings against the hazard of rolling over in one’s sleep even if there’d been enough room to stretch out.
“Where do we sleep?”
He pointed downward.
“I don’t know about doing that whole descent in the dark. I’d never find my way back out of the jungle.”
Without a word the man continued down the ladder past the platform and she was left with no option but to follow his lead. At the crotch in the tree, which she found more by touch than sight, he waited for her.
“Here,” was all the guidance he offered. There was no way for two of them to sleep there without touching, which was fine by her, but for Jaron it was clearly a major concern.
They performed a silent dance of body parts and branches until they were both sitting in relative comfort. Robbie sat with her back against the main trunk, a wide branch sweeping beneath her right arm holding her in place. Her feet rested easily on a slightly lower branch shooting off into the darkness. She kept the harness on, loosening it more than she knew she would if she could see how distant the forest floor lay.
Jaron’s left thigh was pressed hard against her right one as they faced each other. He had supports for his back and legs as well. The open drop to his right didn’t seem to bother him or the parrot on his shoulder, so she decided she’d better not make an issue of it. She kept her left hand ready to grab him if it should prove necessary.
It was the first time they’d touched, other than by accident, since she’d helped him back into his chair on that first day. They sat for a long time in the darkness before she could bring herself to break the night’s stillness.
“Thank you, Jaron.”
“For what?” She could no longer see his face in the darkness. She knew the moon would be up later. But here, beneath the platform and the tops of the skylit trees, any stray starlight only showed the vaguest outlines.
“For the parrots. It was… It was breathtaking.”
“I know.”
“You know, but you’ve never written about it. After three months, I know your data as well as you do. There is nothing on the nocturnal habits of parrots, not even under your sister’s name. Why do you do that anyway?”
He didn’t answer and his breathing became ragged in the night air. She wished again she’d thought to bring a handlight. This time so that she could see his face.
A shudder passed down his leg where it pressed against hers. She rested a hand against his leg as the shudders grew worse.
Nara Page 11
