by Nancy Kress
“Don’t you want details?”
He drained the second beer—third? Fourth? Tim’s capacity was astonishing. He said quietly, “Sure. Here’s a detail I want. Did you get all these research updates from Harrison Rice?”
“Yes.”
“By e-mail?”
“Some of them. Some in person.”
“You went to see Rice. You two still have a thing for each other?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But that’s where you went when you were attacked outside this building that other time?” Tim said. “You told me you’d been to a museum library.”
She said nothing, gazing at him steadily. If he got angry, this might be over. Her heart beat harder.
“You lied to me.”
“Yes. I should not have. But you keep me on such a tight leash, you hem in my movements every minute, you check up on me … I’m not a child, and I resent being monitored constantly.”
“It’s my job to keep you safe. I’m doing my fucking job.”
He was right. Before she could think what she wanted next, he said, “Ah, Marianne, let’s not claw at each other. We’re both just tired. Come to bed.”
His solution to everything. But she went, from remorse at having lied to him or from obligation or from sheer confusion in her own mind. Not from desire. For the first time, the sex between them didn’t work, and they ended up lying in the bed with a foot of sheet between them, neither saying anything, both alone with their thoughts.
* * *
The tree was really old.
Colin leaned against its trunk, listening, although what he really wanted to do was put his ear to the ground and listen to everything down there. But that would look weird to the other kids on the playground. It was a pretty small playground, because the Healy School was squished between big New York buildings. The playground had this tree by itself near the fence, a bunch of littler trees where the third-grade girls sat with their teacher, a basketball concrete where the third-grade boys were jumping and shouting, and some slides and stuff. The rest of the first-graders were on those. Only two classes got recess at a time because there just wasn’t room. People had to wait their turn.
Maybe if Colin snuck behind the tree and lay down, nobody would notice him. There were bushes near there, too. The ground was muddy and cold and he would get his clothes dirty, but he really really wanted to listen to the tree and bushes. He slipped behind the bushes and lowered himself to the ground. It hurt because ever since Paul kicked him yesterday, Colin’s belly had pain in it. Nonetheless, he pressed his ear hard against the muddy soil.
So much was going on down there! Clicks and rumbles and high-pitched sounds and low-pitched sounds. Some of them he’d heard before, but he didn’t know what any of them meant. They weren’t real sentences, of course, but they must mean something, like when thirsty plants made noises to want water. But these plants weren’t thirsty; it’d rained really hard last night. Also, the tree branches above him were making noises. So many interesting sounds …
And then another one. Colin, flat on his stomach, raised his head. That hurt his belly, too. He saw black boots.
“Hey, Jenner. No school guard here now.” Paul spoke very fast, like the words were bursting out of him. “That guard called my father, you know? You got me in trouble for sassing back and it’s your fault, you piece of shit.”
The tree branch above them made another sound.
Paul raised his boot to kick Colin.
Colin rolled to one side—it hurt his middle to do that!—and Paul followed him. Colin lay still and squeezed his eyes shut. Now now NOW …
The dead branch on the old tree cracked with a noise anyone could hear, and it hurled down on Paul. He screamed.
People rushed toward them, kids and teachers and a security guard. Then there were sirens and an ambulance and police—not a school guard but a real New York cop, with a gun—asking Colin questions. He kept his hands over his belly while he answered the questions. He said he and Paul were playing, and did not say that Paul had kicked him once before and was going to kick him again. What if they found out that he made Paul move to stand under the tree branch just before it was going to fall? They might put him in jail! Nobody must know what really happened, not any of it, not ever … Paul was not moving. “Concussion,” somebody said, and Paul was taken away in the ambulance.
Colin clutched at his teacher’s hand. She looked down at him, surprised and concerned, but he did it mostly because his legs felt so wobbly. Still, the pain in his middle was less now.
Don’t let Paul die, Colin thought. If that happened, Colin would be a murderer, just like on TV. Don’t let Paul die!
But.… don’t let him come back to school soon, either.
* * *
“Colin, what’s wrong?” Grandma said.
They were eating dinner, Grandma and Tim and Colin and Jason, and Jason was talking about some clay maps that his class was making in school. Or maybe not clay but something else. Colin couldn’t listen very well and he couldn’t eat either.
“Hey, buddy,” Tim said, “do you feel all right?”
“I’m … good.”
Jason said, “You don’t look good.”
“I’m…” Colin threw up all over his dinner plate. “It hurts!”
“What hurts?” Grandma said, jumping up. “Tim, he’s sweating like a pig!”
Did pigs sweat? Colin didn’t know. He started to cry, and everything got fuzzy except the picture in his head of a pig, sweating tears.
* * *
Icy needles pierced Marianne’s gut as the ER doctor ran her hands over Colin. “What is it?” Marianne said. No no no, I can’t lose Colin too—
“Spleen. It’s been bleeding for a while. Did he injure it in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No! Not that I know of!”
“Grandma! A boy—” Colin fainted.
The next half hour was a blur. Then, as if it had all happened in a moment, Marianne found herself standing outside an operating room while a different doctor, dressed in blue scrubs, spoke to her in rapid sentences.
“The spleen appears to have been damaged sometime in the last few days and was slowly bleeding into itself until it stabilized. Did he complain of pain yesterday or this morning?”
“No, but he was pale and sort of weak-seeming, and then he seemed to get better. Is—”
“It takes a fairly hard blow to cause spleen injury.”
He was looking at her with suspicion. All Marianne could do was shake her head.
“The initial blow caused the spleen to rupture. The peritoneal cavity is filling with blood. The operating team is going in to take out the spleen, and he is receiving a blood transfusion. He should survive this, and the effects on his life will be minimal, but you should know that we are obligated to report this to the child-protection people.”
It barely registered. “But he’ll be all right? He’ll be all right?”
“We’ll certainly do everything we can.” He disappeared into the operating room. Marianne staggered to a chair in a waiting area and dropped into it, her eyes fastened to the door through which the doctor had disappeared. Tim took her hand.
It was the worst hour of her life. Ryan was damaged, Noah was gone, Elizabeth was furious at her—but they were all still alive. Marianne sat unmoving, scarcely breathing, as if her own motionlessness could keep Colin from leaving her. Jason sat pressed so close to Tim that he seemed to want to blend into him. If either of them spoke to her, she didn’t hear. Her eyes remained trained, unblinking, on the door through which the surgeon would come.
He did, eventually. “Mrs. Carpenter? Colin will be fine.”
Marianne could move again.
“We removed the spleen. He can function normally without it, although he may be more than usually susceptible to certain types of infection for the rest of his life. He can go home in a day or two. You’ll get discharge directions.”
“Let me see him.”
>
“Not yet.” The doctor disappeared, without explanation. Marianne started angrily after him, but Tim grabbed her shoulder.
“He has to wake up, Marianne. And then they want a cop or social worker to talk to him first. Because of what that first doctor said.”
Child protective services. They thought Marianne, or Tim, had abused Colin. Marianne wanted to tear the hospital apart with her fists. To think that she could ever … And they would want to check records that didn’t exist for “Colin Carpenter.” This was going to be complicated.
She said wearily, “Take Jason home, Tim. I can deal with this.”
“All right,” Tim said, “if you promise not to leave the hospital until I get back.”
“Promise.” She wasn’t leaving the hospital until she could take Colin with her.
When they finally let her see Colin, hours later, he lay in a recovery room, tubes stuck into his little body, an oxygen line in his nose. The woman who’d been talking to him, either a cop or a social worker, nodded and left. Colin peered out from under his white hospital blanket and said, “Did Paul die?”
“What, honey?”
“Did Paul die?”
“Who’s Paul?”
“I told that lady. The nice one who gave me this.” He held up a small toy airplane.
“Paul will be fine. How do you feel, honey? Does anything hurt?”
“I had to tell the lady. That I could hear the tree was going to fall. The police said I had to tell everything. My real name, too. I’m sorry, Grandma.”
“It’s all right. As long as you’re okay, everything is all right.”
His eyes were closing. Marianne said, “I’ll be right back,” but he might have already been asleep.
The social worker, joined by a cop, waited for her in the corridor. They found an empty waiting room. Marianne explained about the aliases, and the social worker told her what Colin had said.
A third-grade bully, with metal-capped boots. Kicking Colin in the bathroom, threatening to do it again under the tree, until by sheer chance a dead branch cracked and fell on him. Paul Tyson had taunted Colin, using his real last name.
“You are cleared of suspicion, Dr. Jenner,” the social worker said. As if that was what mattered. “And we’ll follow through with Paul’s parents.” Then the woman, who went around dispensing toy airplanes in return for children’s truths, closed her tablet and left. The cop followed her, but only after a hard look that told Marianne exactly what were his sentiments about alien-loving Embassy scientists who wanted a spaceship built.
She checked on Colin once again. He was still asleep. Her cell would not work on the hospital ward. She took it outside, defying Tim’s orders, and called Jonah Stubbins.
* * *
Tim and Marianne stood in the apartment’s tiny kitchenette as he made coffee. It was after midnight, but Tim could drink coffee at any time of the day or night and still sleep. Marianne, nearly twenty years older, could not. Her body ached for sleep but she had to do this, now, tonight. Jason lay asleep in the boys’ room, curled up in Colin’s bed. She had found him holding Colin’s old stuffed elephant and she’d almost burst into tears. Stress.
Tim poured hot water on cheap instant-coffee crystals; he would drink anything with caffeine. “And so Colin thinks he made the tree branch fall on the little shit.”
“No. But he lured Paul to stand under it because he knew it would fall.”
“The social worker didn’t believe that.”
“No, but—”
“I’m not sure I believe it, either,” Tim said. “I’m more interested in how this Paul Tyson knew who Colin was. I want to talk to that kid.”
“It doesn’t matter how he knew,” Marianne said wearily. “It only matters that our identity is out yet again. I can’t keep moving like this. It’s not good for the boys.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be good to stay here now, either. You gotta see that, Marianne.”
“I do see it. Tim, I’m taking Stubbins’s offer to move us all to the Venture building site and get a tutor for the boys. They’ll be safe, and I can work just as well there.”
Tim paused, coffee cup halfway to his mouth. He put the cup, undrunk, on the tiny counter. “Yeah? I thought you wanted to be close enough to see Ryan.”
“I can’t do both. Jason and Colin must come first.”
“I get that.” He picked up the coffee and drained it in one gulp, hot though it must still be. Marianne waited, knowing what was coming.
He said, “And while the boys are being tutored and you’re working on your computer, what am I supposed to be doing? You won’t need a bodyguard there, or the kids to be taken to school, or anything like that.”
“I don’t know what you could do.” Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure what he did all day now. “I’m going out,” he would say, but where? And why hadn’t she thought to ask before now? Self-focused, that’s what she’d been.
“Tim—”
“You don’t want me to go with you, do you?”
She said gently, “I think we both know that this relationship isn’t really working. And that it never had a future.”
He didn’t answer, and despite her relief that he wasn’t going to make a scene, her pride was bruised. Dumb, dumb! She should be glad that Tim wasn’t hurt—as it was clear from his face that he was not—and that they didn’t love each other. He had never felt about her the way he’d felt about Sissy, and for her the attraction had mostly been sexual. That had drained away. Stress, or acceptance of how different they were, or maybe just the passing of time.
She suddenly felt very old.
Tim said, “I’ll miss those kids. Can I come see them sometimes? And what will you tell them?”
She hadn’t thought that far. “Yes, of course you can come see them. We’re leaving as soon as Colin can travel. Stubbins will send a car.”
He moved toward her, and she tensed. But his kiss lacked all passion. “Go to bed, Marianne. You’re exhausted.”
She did. When she woke, in midmorning, Jason had been taken to school. Tim’s things were still in his room. He wouldn’t leave until Colin was discharged and Marianne and the boys safely transferred to Stubbins’s protection. The innate decency of this moved Marianne. But she couldn’t afford any more emotion. Hastily she dressed to go to the hospital.
* * *
One more trip before they could leave for Pennsylvania. Marianne drove alone to see Ryan. It was a lovely day, amazingly warm for November, and Ryan sat outside in an Adirondack chair. He wore his own clothes, his hair neatly combed. He gave his mother a tired smile. “Hi, Mom.”
Encouraged, she said, “Hello, Ryan. How are you?”
“Fine.” But a minute later his face sagged again and tears filled his eyes. “I want to go home.”
Marianne took her son’s hand. He said that often, always when he seemed most stressed, the words seeming to rise unbidden to his lips. They were unbidden, she knew now: unwilled, pushed up from some place deeper than rationality. The words were not literal. There was no specific geographical place Ryan wished to return to. He wanted to go back to the past, to the “home” where he was the child that his depression had regressed him into being, the child who was happy and cared for, the child who’d assumed happiness and order were the way the universe worked. Who had not yet been broken by an entirely different universe.
She had always thought it was Noah who was the weakest child, the drifter who belonged nowhere. She had been wrong. Noah had gone, happily, to the stars. But there was no way for Ryan to go where he wanted. Connie was dead and his beloved job with the wildlife agency gone, and the past could not come back again.
“I want to go home,” he said again.
“I know, sweetheart,” she said. “I know.”
He said nothing for the rest of her visit. Marianne sat for an hour just holding her son’s hand in the soft autumn sunlight.
CHAPTER 20
S plus 6.2 years<
br />
Jonah Stubbins was building his starship, the Venture, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The site made sense.
Part of the Allegheny Plateau, the area was free of hurricanes and tornadoes. Its geography shielded it from superstorms. Earthquakes were rare and mild. Before global warming had reached its present state, deep snow and ice storms had been frequent here, but no more. Creeping desertification, not yet far advanced, nonetheless had proven drying enough to cause many farmers to sell their gentle hills. Once coal had been mined here, but never in the quantities found farther east, and most lodes were played out. Stubbins had gotten huge swaths of land reasonably cheap.
Glaciers had left the entire area dotted with caves. However, unlike the clear, large caves to the east and south—once tourist attractions, now mostly closed due to lack of state funds—the majority of caves in this part of Pennsylvania had been formed by stream water forced underground during wetter times. The caves were small, twisty, and filled with mud. Clearing them out would involve large and conspicuous equipment. Stubbins was not worried about stealth attacks from underground.
Marianne’s first sight of the vast compound was a strip of dirt, backed by an electrified fence topped with barbed wire reinforced by periodic guard towers. Beyond the fence lay another, wider strip of bare ground, followed by another fence, and then low cinder-block buildings. The whole thing looked like a gigantic maximum-security prison.
“Wow,” Jason said from the backseat. Colin said nothing. He had, since Tim’s departure, taken to sucking his thumb. Marianne, riding beside the driver of the car that Stubbins had sent for them, turned around to see how the boys were taking this.
“This is so cool!” Jason bounced in his seatbelt. “Look, Col, it’s great!”
Colin took his thumb out of his mouth.
Thank heavens for Jason’s upbeat nature.
They passed through the gate and drove for longer than she’d expected, past bulldozers and trucks, cinder-block outbuildings and groves of trees, trailers and barracks of raw weathered lumber. The closer they drove to the ship itself, the messier the site became. Thick cables, transformer stations, a thirty-five-ton crane. Equipment shrieked; people milled about, shouting to be heard. Marianne remembered the smooth, noiseless descent of the Embassy into New York Harbor and wondered if anything that clean and sleek could really emerge from this chaos.
