No one’s rushing forward to meet me, obviously, so none of them can be my imaginary girlfriend, the one I told my guide I was here for. I murmur, “I think I missed her. She must’ve already went in.”
The woman smirks at me, not entirely not on my side, and releases my hand as we slip toward the reception window. “I guess you got trouble now.”
“I guess.” I hang back a discreet distance while the woman signs in. She gives me a final nod and takes a seat to wait—a seat, I notice, without an empty neighbor on either side. That ends that. I shouldn’t press anyway. The nurse behind reception doesn’t look up as I push my belly into the edge of the counter separating us. “Ma’am, my name is Carter Quinn. I’m here to see Natalie.”
“Who?”
“Natalie,” I say quietly. “She works here.”
That warrants me a glance. Then she returns to whatever she’s been keying in. “You think she’s expecting you?”
“I do, ma’am. She is.”
“Sit down, then.”
“Can you tell her I’m here? I only need her for a minute.”
“She’ll call you,” the nurse says distinctly, without looking away from her screen, “when she’s ready for you.”
I slink to a seat. I don’t try to talk to anyone else, and most of the women seem to want to avoid looking at me anyway. I’m the only guy in the room, and no others come in. There’s nothing to look at or check or do. I don’t read any of the literature on child and infant care, since I don’t expect Fred’s Care Circle or Ken Walker’s fancy family will want me anywhere near my nephew or niece, after he or she is born. Fred will let me know if it’s okay for me to hold the baby. I never expected to get to hold a baby. Every woman in this room will. But no one I know has ever expected to hold one. I cannot imagine for the life of me why anyone would hand me an infant to hold. Not with these hands. They’re trained for something else entirely.
The door to the back offices opens and my heart leaps up in my chest. Down, fella. It’s not Natalie B. It’s a young woman with a cane and a slight limp. She waves toward the reception window. “Bye, hon.”
“No next time,” the nurse there calls to her, with a slight smile.
“No next time,” she calls back, and hobbles to the exit and is gone.
For the next hour, every time someone leaves, it’s the same little call and response. No next time. No next time. No one in the waiting room seems especially happy to be there, but everyone coming out from the back offices looks more or less relaxed. I see a couple more women go out, one holding a cold pack against her cheek. She just nods at the reception window instead of saying No next time. A few more women arrive, take seats to wait. Finally my friend goes in without so much as a glance back at me.
I wait. I maintain a neutral expression and keep my body language unthreatening. I’m just a guy waiting for his girlfriend. A largish guy, with largish hands and feet, with boots that look like they were in a war, with a face like his eldest sister’s, like his father’s, a face like a dark knife, a face that needs careful moderation to prevent making other people uncomfortable. I’m there long enough, waiting, that the women whispering to each other in the corner might be speculating about me. When one of them catches my eye, staring at me very much as if she doesn’t think I should be here, I look down at my hands in my lap. My unsafe hands. Last night is still banging in my temples and roiling in my empty stomach. I keep my gaze down.
Finally I let my head drop, might actually doze a little.
Then I hear my name.
Carter Quinn. I’m a little sleepy-eyed and slow-witted when I look up, and what I see is confusing enough that the bottom of my mind seems to drop out, and what’s left of my comprehension seems to pinwheel and teeter on the edge of a long drop.
The door to the back offices has opened, and my friend from earlier today (is it afternoon now? evening? I seem to have lost a few hours somewhere) is standing framed in the doorway, and her arm is in a cast. She’s seen me. She’s looking at me suspiciously. Why is her arm in a cast? She held doors open for me. She opened the door with one hand and took my hand with the other. Her arm wasn’t broken then. But now it is. Carter Quinn.
I can’t remember telling her my name. I can’t remember breaking her arm. But no, I didn’t break her arm. I would never harm a woman, not me, not myself. Yes, I’ve harmed women. I’ve damaged their brains, their hearing, their eyes, their skin. I’ve killed women; I’m sure I have. But that was different. I’ve never broken a woman’s arm. I have two sisters. I would do anything for them, but I would never break a woman’s arm.
The woman moves through the doorway, advances into the waiting room, her eyes still on me. Natalie B. steps out from behind her, scanning the room, wearing scrubs, a handheld portal in one arm, like a shield up against her chest. She’s saying my name again.
“Here. I’m here.” I make my way to my feet and my head swims dangerously. Flowers and stars and stars and flowers and that smell, holy goddamn.
And now that woman is coming toward me. Her expression is hard to look at. I’ve never seen a woman so angry, not even Fred. Everyone is watching. A woman sitting near the exit stands up and slips out the door. Another one hesitates and then follows.
My guide gets close enough to hiss at me. Her eyes are bright and black and furious.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
I know, I want to tell her. I know that now.
“Everything all right?” Natalie calls from the doorway. “Mr. Quinn? We’re ready for you.”
“No next time,” the nurse calls from the reception window. There’s a firm, no-nonsense edge to her voice. It says, No trouble here. It says, Move along.
The woman glances back over her shoulder. “No next time,” she repeats. Then she passes me without another word, without another glance, and the exit door clicks shut behind her.
Natalie B. is across the waiting room, her lovely face composed into blankness. But she’s breathing fast, like she’s afraid of something. I’m sorry I came. There’s no welcome here for me. “Ready, Mr. Quinn?”
• • •
The room Natalie shows me into has a reclining chair and a little tray of silver tools. There’s a high white smell like an alcohol swab that manages to pierce the cloud of flowers surrounding my head like a gauze. I’m not sure what I thought I’d find back here, but it’s more like a dentist’s office than what I would expect from a women’s health clinic. Not that I’ve been inside one before today.
Meanwhile, my head feels half disattached from my body. The ringing in my ears has already started. I can tell I don’t have much time before I stop making sense, before the white and the flowers take over and I have to make it back to Pop’s place and stay horizontal for about twelve hours. Sometimes I have bad days. This is clearly shaping up to be one of them. I don’t know why. Some combination of a hangover and PTSD and chronic pulmonary distress and whatever is actually wrong with me.
“So you found us,” Natalie says. “Sit.”
Obedient, I sit in the patient examination chair. There’s nowhere else. Natalie stands near the door, facing me, arms crossed. It’s impossible not to notice that she is even pretty down here, in the unpleasant light of this place.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I begin, and then I feel a soft warm drop on my right hand. I don’t need to look down. I know what it is. “Can I have a tissue, please?”
Without a word, Natalie reaches over, yanks a tissue out of an unbranded box, hands it to me. It’s about as comforting and plush as a sand dune. I blot my nosebleed and do my best to continue, all business.
“I know my sister Gardner worked nights here for about a year, because she told me as much in her messages to me. My sister’s last message was sent from here. It said—”
“From here? How do you know it was sent from here?” Natalie interrupts. “We don’t have receptivity—”
“—down here, I know that now. I noticed. It’
s strange. And in her message she hid the address, or tried to, so—”
Natalie interrupts again, talking fast. “We don’t have anything to hide. This clinic is private but perfectly legal. It’s a safe place for hundreds of women who don’t have many other appealing options. You saw that much, I think, while you were waiting.”
This isn’t exactly what I had been getting at, or what I expected her to say. “Sure.” My nosebleed seems to have stopped. “Of course. If you don’t mind my asking, though—”
“I do. You know I do.”
Maybe because she’s taken me off guard, the question that comes out isn’t exactly the one I mean to ask: “That woman who spoke to me on my way in, her arm was broken? I swear her arms were both fine. Earlier. Before.”
Natalie glares. “I don’t intend to discuss our clients’ medical histories with you, but you must have noticed she’s wearing a cast. She has a fractured wrist.”
“She didn’t,” I insist helplessly. “She didn’t have a cast on. I talked to her earlier. She brought me down here. She took my hand, pulled me through the door. She wasn’t wearing a cast when she did that.”
Natalie rolls her eyes to the subterranean ceiling.
Something’s not quite connecting here. And I’m still feeling wheezy and woozy. I need to get back to what brought me into this office to begin with: Gard.
“Gard’s last message to me, which she sent from here, was her saying goodbye. She said she would be in touch when she could, and that we shouldn’t worry about her. And nobody in our family has heard from her since. Do you have any idea why, or how, she would have sent me that message from here? It was October fifteenth, that would have been a Tuesday. Six thirty a.m. She would have just been getting off her night shift.”
“The night shift ends at five a.m.,” Natalie corrects. I wait. She says nothing more.
“Natalie. I’m begging you. Help me understand.”
“As you know, I have a waiting room full of clients to see, Mr. Quinn. I don’t know how I can help you, but I do know how I can help them. Have you tried opening an investigation with Security?”
My patience, as I have said, is not infinite, and it’s quite a bit less than infinite when I can barely see straight for the gray clouds crowding in on all sides and the sparks going off in my ears. “All I’m asking for is a few minutes—or, Jesus, a few answers, if you don’t have a few minutes! Of course we haven’t brought Security deep into this—don’t you even want to know how I knew where this place was?”
I see her glance down toward my arm, where my wearable is, just like everybody else’s: embedded in the skin of the inner arm, a third of the distance between wrist and elbow.
In my wearable’s virtual display, which lines up across the upper corner of my retina, my med status is visible, the digits the same blue as my veins, which thread over and around the embedded wearable panel in my arm, just like everybody else’s. But because we’re underground, in a dead reception zone, the icons for most of the wearable’s functions are white, not blue—inactive. When they’re blue, then with a blink or a stroke or a verbal command I can call up a virtual portal, also projected onto the interior wall of my retina, along with a virtual keyboard that’s visible only to me, and key or dictate a message, or read messages and advertisements customized for me, or call up a map for directions or my father’s and oldest sister’s whereabouts, or see my last few financial transactions (all of them biweekly automatic deposits from the Department of Veterans Affairs). When the icons are blue, my wearable is transmitting as well as receiving, so if they ever need to look for me, my family members can call up my precise coordinates, my activities, my med status. Every time I pass one of the millions of sensors in this city, or one of the dozens on a city bus, or one of the few in my pop’s apartment, my status is updated and upstreamed, while fresh data flows in. In and out, all day long. Like breathing. Like blood circulating.
There is one way in which my wearable isn’t quite the same as everybody else’s now. Wash’s work left a small raised edge on the lower-right corner of the panel. When I bend my arm these days I can feel it, a slight irregularity. “There’s a data port accessible from each corner of the panel, but you have to be willing to get to it, and you have to know someone with the technology to connect to it,” I tell Natalie.
“I know how the wearable works, Mr. Quinn.” Her voice is acid.
“Then you know how I found this place.”
“It would appear that we both do.” She makes a sort of funny half step toward the tray of tools, then seems to force herself to step back, fold her arms over her chest. She is nervous. I make her nervous, maybe. Or there’s something else.
“Why would she try to hide her location from me? She never did that before. She never tried to send me a message from here before, either. How could she? How could she have sent me a message at all, from down here? Easier to go back up to street level, send it from the bus or the train or the getaway van as she left town.”
Natalie raises an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”
“I’m telling you that I don’t.”
She smiles, but there’s no humor in it. “Ask whoever helped you pluck the location data out.”
“He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He was over there with me. He was in communications. He knew how to do it. He helped me. He was a friend. His name was Wash. Washington. Specialist Paul Washington.” I don’t get to say his name very often anymore. It feels good to say it.
Natalie is quiet for a moment, then says, “Well, Wash should have told you that when you have a port connection in, you can send and upstream data and messages directly, as well as downstreaming what’s in the wearable.”
Something’s not making sense, still. “You mean Gard would have had to connect a data port to her wearable to send a message to me from down here.”
The barest pause. “Yes.”
“I don’t mind saying, it hurt like hell.” I smile at Natalie. I see her recoil, then cover it up by turning to the tray of silver tools suspended from the wall near the chair. In this small examination room, I am less than half a foot from her. I’m bigger than she is, yes. I scare people without meaning to. My smile has a touch of fang to it. Even at rest my face is unhappily sharp. But I am harmless. I am harmless. I swear it. “I hate to think of Gard doing that just to send me a message. Why didn’t she just go up to the street and send it from there? No need for any of the pain, or trouble. But it was her last message, Natalie. This is her last-known geo.” I have to ask it. “Did she even leave this place?”
Natalie freezes. “I’m not sure what you’re implying.”
“Nothing. Not a thing.” I raise my hands.
“We help women here,” Natalie says. She keeps her shoulder turned to me, her attention on the tray of tools, which she touches lightly with one hand. I see her face in profile, her curved cheek, her lowered lashes, but she’s a fast-breathing wall, and not a piece of her tells me anything. “Sometimes, at our clients’ express request, we help them in ways that can be hard . . . for people to understand, but only if they haven’t faced the kinds of choices these women routinely face. We would never have harmed your sister. She was on our staff, as you know. I worked with her. She was my . . . my friend. And my colleague.” Natalie keeps her eyes on her silver tools. They are lightweight, delicate things. I recognize none of them. “You might want to ask yourself what the other possibilities are, Mr. Quinn.”
“What possibilities? Natalie, for a minute see it from my point of view. I saw a woman come in here this morning and go out with a fractured wrist. My sister came in here and might never have come out.”
Now Natalie turns to me, and I don’t like her expression one bit. “Are you threatening us?”
“I’m not threatening anybody!” I exclaim, my hands high in surrender again. “What could I even do to you? But what happened to my sister in here, exactly?”
Her expression has not cha
nged, and something in it tells me that if I were smart, I’d be getting the hell out of her office. “The question you should be asking, Mr. Quinn, is what did your sister do here, exactly.”
I can’t tell, but I might be gaping uncomprehendingly at her like a dead man. She moves, hands me a tissue.
“Your nose is bleeding again.”
The volume of the ringing in my right ear mobilizes abruptly and the sound turns to static, scratchy static, unbelievable. Unbearable. In the reclining chair, I put my head between my knees, which sometimes helps. No relief. My hands are shaking, so I clasp them tightly, bring them to my mouth, and try to slow my breathing. I don’t feel as if any oxygen is getting to my lungs, to my brain. Everything’s crowded out by the static in my ears and the scent of flowers in my throat. My hands are sticky. I open my eyes and see that there’s blood between my fingers, from my nosebleed. I hope it’s a nosebleed. Once, at my worst, I couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere—my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears, even the top of my head somehow. Then I blacked out.
“Mr. Quinn? What’s happening?”
Blacking out here, in Natalie’s office, is an awkward prospect, but even with my eyes and hands and consciousness clenched tight against the pain in my head, I can’t get it under control. I allow that it might be in process. It might be happening.
“Do you need help?” Natalie asks. Gently she pushes me back in the reclining chair. I keep my eyes shut tight and my hands clasped together in front of my nose and mouth, where I should be able to catch most of the blood. Still I hear her breath come in sharp. Her small strong fingers are on mine, trying to pry my hands apart to see what’s under there, where the blood is coming from. For some reason I feel like I can’t let her see, I don’t want to let her see. Or I don’t want to see her seeing it.
A squeal of fiery pain in my head, like static obliterating a freq, is all I can focus on for a second.
She’s got one of my bloody hands in hers now. I open my eyes briefly and see that I have somehow left a bright red smear across the front of her scrubs, from her chest down to her belly. I hope to God I didn’t hit her, didn’t flail or lose it or lash out, but I don’t know. I might have. I can feel her shaking. She’s scared. She’s scared of me.
The Completionist Page 7
