by Ashley Ream
Darren had picked up the pot and tossed the boiling water down her back. Rachel remembered the first moments. She remembered feeling the pain and not knowing what had happened. Then she’d seen the water at her feet, and she had known, and the knowing lasted for only one moment before the reel broke. Rachel had nothing else, nothing until weeks later in the hospital where she’d been forced to lie on her stomach for what seemed to be forever and certainly was. She hadn’t known how she’d gotten there and had not thought to ask. The nurses had said that, in a small way, she was lucky. It could have been her face. She would still be beautiful from the front. And she would, after all, live.
Her mother would not. The guilt of it ate at her from the inside out. It took fourteen years, but it got her in the end. When she died, the doctors said it was cancer, but Rachel knew better.
In the present, Rachel wiped her cheeks and forced her mind down to the task in her hands. Wash, wipe, flame, acid rinse. Again and again until all the tanks and all the flasks and all the tubing were clean.
She set everything back up in her room. She prepared half the flasks with purified water, using a pipette to add the necessary nutrients and then a sufficient amount of green algae to feed them. In the other half, she filled the flasks with raw seawater, hypothesizing that some unknown element, some symbiotic relationship, might be necessary for the Artemia lucis to survive. Then she added in the new samples. It was only enough to fill a few flasks. She would need to make more trips. Rachel looked at her watch. Half an hour had passed since she’d taken the second dose. After a deep breath, she put her fingers to the bruising on her face and pushed.
It did not hurt at all.
She pressed so hard her fingers turned white, and still she felt nothing but mild pressure. Then she bent forward and touched her toes—careful this time. Results were promising. She could do it. She could reach them.
Rachel sagged onto the bed and took a shuddering breath. She gave herself a moment, just one, to be grateful. It would be okay. She was okay. She opened her eyes and pushed up. There was so much work to do. She picked up her plankton nets and sample jars. The two other tanks still needed to be filled and their settings adjusted and recorded and monitored. It was clear the analgesic in the Artemia lucis decayed very quickly upon death. She would need to keep them alive to isolate the compound. She would need to keep them alive and breeding. She had three days left.
* * *
Tilda climbed the deck stairs, tried the sliding glass door, and found it unlocked. Inside, she kicked off her shoes, setting off Shooby, who galloped out of the library to survey the situation, and then went back to alert Harry of her triumphal return.
In stocking feet, she headed for the kitchen. “Aww. Dammit.”
She lifted up her foot and looked at the bottom.
“What did you do?” Harry called.
Tilda could hear him shuffling down the hall toward her. “I stepped in something wet. In my socks.”
Tilda pulled off the offending item and then the other. And now that she was looking, the puddle, which was small, wasn’t really a puddle at all. It dribbled all the way down the hallway.
“What did you spill?” Tilda asked.
“I didn’t spill anything.”
“Well, someone did.”
Tilda knew exactly what the spill was and who had done it. She wanted to see if Harry would admit what had happened or cover for their new houseguest, but he, having said all he was going to on the subject, did neither. Barefoot, Tilda went to the kitchen for a towel. Harry followed her.
“You didn’t come home last night,” he said.
“Of course I did.”
“I was awake.”
“Well, if you were awake, then you should know I came home.”
“You came home this morning. That is not the same thing.”
“It wasn’t morning.”
“Three a.m. is morning.”
Tilda took the towel from the drawer and went out to the hallway to mop. Harry and Shooby both followed her, and neither offered to help.
“This woman you’ve taken in,” Tilda said, “that’s a bit sudden.”
“How could it be anything but sudden? She’s only here for six days, and I just met her.”
“Are you sure inviting a complete stranger into the house is a good idea?”
“What do you think she’s going to do? Steal the silver?”
“I don’t know what she’s going to do,” Tilda said. “I don’t know her and neither do you. That’s the point.”
“She gave me a hand. We talked. I liked her. It seemed like she needed some help. I helped. End of story.”
Tilda had made it all the way to the back of the house, scooting the towel along with her foot, using it to mop up each dribble as she came to it. Done, she bent over and picked up the damp towel. It was sage green with white checks. She remembered it from many years before. It was one of the few things Maggie hadn’t replaced.
“It’s not really the end of the story. It’s the start of a new one, and I just want to be sure it’s a good one. That woman seemed a little pushy this morning.”
“Her name is Rachel,” Harry said. “And she’s not half as pushy as you.”
“You need to be resting and taking care of yourself. You need a regular schedule. Dr. Woo has been very clear about that. If you have a parade of researchers coming in and out of the house, it’s disruptive.”
“It’s my house. If I want a parade, I’ll damn well have a parade. Not to mention that one person hardly counts as a parade.”
“Harry—”
“This isn’t a democracy, and you don’t get a goddamn vote, Tilda. The only person traipsing in and out of here at odd hours, creating a disturbance, is you.”
The hand Harry was using to grip the head of his cane was like a claw, and his knuckles had gone white. His neck was flushed red coming out of the collar of his white button-down shirt. He had missed a button, and Tilda couldn’t help but notice the shirt needed a good bleaching and pressing. She wondered if it had been laundered at all before he put it on and if he needed help with getting it fastened or if the button was an isolated incident.
“My presence here is a disturbance?” Tilda demanded. “I seem to recall you asking me to come.”
“Maybe that was a mistake.”
Tilda drew herself up to her full height. She was just above average while Harry was just below, and when she did stand right up, putting as much distance as possible between every vertebrae, she could put her eye to his.
“Are you asking me to leave?” she demanded.
“Don’t be hysterical.”
It was clear that this conversation had gone further than Harry had intended, but he was unwilling to back down. A noncommittal insult did the trick. Harry turned away from her and maneuvered himself with two twisting clomps of his cane into a ninety-degree turn. Able-bodied, he would have stomped off in a huff. This was the slow-motion absurdist version, which might have been funny if Tilda weren’t so angry. It was all she could do not to throw the towel at his head. She did the next best thing.
“She—Rachel—told me you fell last night while I was gone.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“She said you were down on the beach by yourself and that you fell. You hurt the dog.”
Harry didn’t answer. He was heading back toward the library, his safe harbor, to hide. Not that he needed a space to hide, Tilda knew. He had always been capable of hiding in his own head and locking up all the doors and windows once he was there.
“Did you call the vet?”
No reply.
Tilda was following him, and they’d made it to his doorway. Harry shuffled into the library, and she was on his heels. “You don’t have anything to say about that?” she asked.
Harry was clomping toward his piano as fast and as forcefully as he could. “Carrying on with that damn kid next door makes you look like a bloody fool,” he said and dropped down onto
the bench in front of the keys.
A flush spread across Tilda’s chest. She opened her mouth to throw something back at him, something equally hurtful. And then she didn’t. Her mouth was open, but sound did not come out. She froze there, just for a moment, long enough for Harry to swing his head around to see what in the Sam-damn-hill was the problem now. Tilda closed her lips, and Harry followed her eyes.
Becca looked at them both from inside the photo frame. Her hair blew in her face, and the dog ran and the waves broke, just as they always had. Her coat was just as red and the scene just as gray, but just as it was exactly the same, it was completely different because Tilda had not seen the photo before. At least not in decades. All the other photos of their daughter had been boxed away, hidden in the attic or sent off to other family for safekeeping. Harry had thought the purge would be temporary, just until Tilda could breathe again, and he had not objected. He did not feel, given that he had done the most horrible thing that it was possible for anyone to do, that he could object to anything at all. But he had saved this one photo and hidden it here in his space where no one went but him.
Except now Tilda was here, and the three of them were together.
Tilda stood in place, staring at the photo. She said nothing. Harry said nothing, and then she turned and walked away with the wet towel in her hand, and nothing was said at all.
18.
Rachel had slept for three hours and was up and dressed in jeans and the same hooded sweatshirt she had worn on and off for days, scribbling into the notebook perched in her lap. She had completed another experiment, grinding a sample and running it through a small centrifuge that separated the animal body solids from the liquids. It had yielded important results. The liquids had no painkilling qualities at all—she had tested that on herself—leaving the solids as the only possibility.
Rachel couldn’t write fast enough. She was trying to hold twelve different thoughts in her head at the same time. It would take a lot to distract her, something like a bear falling down the stairs outside her bedroom door. At least, it sounded like a bear. It was enough to convince Rachel to put down the notebook and stick her head out.
Harry was halfway down the steps, having begun his fall from who knew how high. He no longer had his cane. It had clattered all the way down to the foyer below. Rachel shut the door tight behind her and took the stairs two at a time to reach him.
“I was going to take a nap,” Harry said.
His hair, which was unkempt all the time, was even wilder. The bald spot on the crown of his head, which Rachel now had a clear view of from above, was the size of a small egg and vulnerable looking, like it might be as soft and unfused as an infant’s. Half of his collar stood up, and his heavy fisherman’s sweater was pushed up on one side.
“Did you black out?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Harry laid his head back against the wall. He wasn’t even trying to get himself up, and his right leg was turned below him at an awkward angle that made her think of an ostrich with its knees bent the wrong way.
“Are you hurt?” Rachel asked.
His eyes were closed. “I fell down the stairs.”
“I inferred.”
The corners of Harry’s mouth turned up a little at the corners. The woman was frank. You had to give her that.
“I fall all the time now,” he said.
“Your disease is progressing.”
“It would seem so.”
They sat a moment in the quiet before Harry went on. “You know, I have to grab the towel rack now to lower myself onto the toilet. One of these days I’m not going to get back up.”
“Yes,” she said, “but the toilet is no more probable than any other surface.”
Harry looked at her.
She clarified. “A toilet is a chair like any other, functionally speaking. You might get stuck on a dining room chair or the sofa or in a car.”
“That really wasn’t my point.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what it’s like to be terrified of a shower?” Harry asked.
Rachel did know. Unfamiliar showers sometimes had abrupt changes in temperature, which hurt her back terribly, but she did not say this to Harry, who had continued talking without her.
“And I can’t grip a pencil. I hold it in my fist like a toddler to try to put the notes I can hear in my head on the page because, Lord knows, I can’t play them.” He was quiet a moment. “That might be the worst part.”
“The worst part changes from day to day,” Rachel said.
He had closed his eyes, and now he opened them and looked at her. “That’s true.”
Most people, Rachel knew, didn’t want you to talk about your pain, not unless it was temporary like a twisted ankle or hitting your thumb with a hammer. If you did not hold up your end of the bargain and get better, things fell apart quickly. People would avoid you. It was easier to keep hidden, and she felt sorry for Harry because he could not hide. There were not a sufficient number of high-necked jackets and fishbowls full of pills to get him through his day unseen.
“Where’s Tilda?” Rachel asked.
“She went to the store. Well, she said she went to the store. She’s probably just driving around, or maybe she went to go visit her boyfriend.”
This information didn’t fit well with the image Rachel had of the woman who had greeted her at the door that morning. She didn’t seem like the sort of woman who would have something that sounded as girlish as a “boyfriend.”
Harry glanced up at her and then looked back down either because it was embarrassing or the angle hurt his neck. “She and I had a fight. It was probably my fault.”
“Okay.”
“It was my fault.”
“Okay.”
“The good news is I don’t think I messed myself, so if you could give me a hand, I’d appreciate it.”
Rachel wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be funny or not, so she didn’t laugh. She just got hold of him under his armpits as best she could on the treacherous and uneven surface and lifted. His right leg did nothing but hang. He tried to get some leverage with his left, but it wasn’t much, and it didn’t help.
In the end, she half dragged him up the stairs, one agonizing six-inch rise at a time, with Harry pushing off from the wall and the handrail as best he could. At the top, she left him and went down to fetch his cane. When she returned, he had all his weight on his left leg and was holding up the right like an injured dog.
“Do you think it’s broken?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s just the knee. Torqued is all.”
“You might have torn some ligaments,” she offered, despite not being that sort of doctor. “Do you have Tilda’s cell phone number?”
He shook his head again. “No need. Just gonna rest it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m like an old dog with cancer,” Harry said. “There’s no point in going to a lot of trouble fixing things.” He had to stop and take another couple of sips of air. “Just need one second here.”
Rachel had done the same thing how many times? A thousand. More than a thousand. Her mind began to whirl, slowly at first like an engine warming up, but soon she was making calculations so quickly she thought for sure the zipping of her neurons would be audible. She could help him. She could alleviate some, maybe even all, of his pain, and she could—this was the important part—collect more data. A sample size of one wasn’t really a sample size at all, but still, the risk was enormous. She would need to mitigate it. She would need to get information from him without giving any out.
“Stay here,” she told him.
“Afraid you won’t be able to catch me?” he asked, but she didn’t respond. She was already down the hall and on the other side of her bedroom door, shutting it behind her.
When she came back, she had a white plastic spoon, the kind with sharp edges that can be found in every fa
st-food restaurant in the world. On it was a small lump of reddish-brown paste, not unlike the filling in the middle of a Fig Newton but a little lighter in color.
“I have this,” she said.
He looked at the spoon and the lump.
“It’s a new painkiller, one I developed. Am developing. Stronger than morphine.”
Harry wrinkled his nose. “Did you find it on the bottom of your shoe?”
She didn’t answer that. “It’s experimental, and there are side effects. Some I know and some I probably don’t.”
Rachel had the feeling that she was stepping off a ledge into pure black, and Harry wasn’t saying anything. She didn’t know what that meant. She rarely knew what anyone meant by anything, and she was starting to feel very self-conscious standing there holding a plastic spoon with a disgusting lump in the bowl. Harry didn’t know her from anyone, and it did look like something off the bottom of her shoe.
“Anyway,” she said, lowering it. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t discuss it with anyone.”
She wanted to turn away and go. She could feel herself begin to blush, and the humiliation of blushing only increased the embarrassment and hurried the process. Harry would have to fend for himself. She backed a step away and went to spin on her heel.
“Have you tried it?” Harry asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Better than morphine?” he asked.
“Better is subjective. It’s stronger.”
He held his hand out. “When I was a teenager, I used to take things somebody cooked up in their bathroom. No reason to get cautious now,” he said.
She handed him the spoon, and he took one long look at it before raising it to his lips.
“It has a rather strong taste,” she warned him just as he was sliding it in.
“Gah—Jesus. Son of a—”
He made all the faces and exclamations she’d been through before. It was a little funny, she had to admit, when it was happening to someone else.
When he got control of himself again, he said, “You have got to make that smokable or something. God. It tastes like a fish’s ass.”
He handed her the spoon back.
