by Ashley Ream
Tilda was feeling good about her work and was just turning to gather up her trash.
“Jesus Christ!”
The man was standing two feet behind her. She jumped back and put a hand to her chest.
He looked chastised. “I’m sorry.”
Tilda put both hands on her hips and turned in a half circle to let herself settle.
“I just saw you under here,” he went on, “and well, curiosity got the better of me.” He held out his hand. “Hooper, UW Biology.”
Tilda dropped her hands from her hips and shook. “I read the article in the paper.”
She had seen him for days, of course, from a distance. He was the one she thought of as Ichabod. Up close, he looked older than she’d imagined.
“This your boat?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m just helping out a friend.”
Almost nothing about that sentence was true, but it was all the truth she felt she owed. He still had some explaining to do.
Hooper nodded. He looked down at the sail by his feet and over to the hull. She could see him looking for something else to say and not finding it. This was a man who knew nothing and cared nothing for boats, which was fine, but it underlined the question hanging between them.
She turned and squared herself to him, crossing her arms over her chest.
He fell to the power of her stare. “I believe you know one of my researchers,” he said.
Now they were getting somewhere, she thought.
“I’m not sure she’s a young woman who many people really get to know,” Tilda said.
“I have to confess I haven’t done the job I should have with her.”
Tilda didn’t comment.
“I was wondering,” Hooper went on, “about her off hours, how she spends her time here.”
“If you’re concerned, you should speak to my ex-husband. He’s the one who has taken her in. I’m just visiting.”
“Of course,” Hooper said. “I don’t mean to involve you. I was just wondering if you could tell me if she’s set up anything inside, anything like a lab.”
Tilda, who had the ability to raise one eyebrow independent of the other, did so. “I take it her lab isn’t sanctioned?”
Hooper gave a quarter of a smile, forced and meant only to avoid a direct answer. His skin was so full of folds and creases, it was as if someone had wadded up a piece of paper several times before trying unsuccessfully to smooth it back out. It was an interesting face if not a handsome one.
“Can I see it?” he asked.
“Her lab?”
“Yes.”
Tilda shook her head. “She’s banned me from the room. Like I said, you’ll have to speak to Harry. He owns the house.”
“I don’t suppose you could describe it to me?”
“Her room?”
“The equipment.”
30.
Harry made Tilda stop at a mailbox on the way to the ferry.
“Why don’t you just put it in our mailbox? The postman will pick it up.”
Tilda realized as she said it that she’d claimed joint ownership of the box. It was a slip of the tongue, but she worried Harry would think she meant something by it. Harry paid no attention to her word choice at all and, therefore, had no thoughts about any of it. He only cared about dropping his thick manila envelope in a big, blue mailbox on the corner.
“No,” he said. “A public box.”
“Why?”
“It’s more secure.”
“What’s in the envelope?”
“Papers.”
Tilda waited for more and didn’t get it.
“Then give it to me. I’ll take it to the post office myself in the morning. That’ll be even more secure.”
“No, the blue box.”
Tilda opened her mouth and closed it. The envelope was on his lap facedown across his knees. He was entitled to his privacy, of course, but people are entitled to all sorts of things that others don’t want to give them.
She sighed to release her frustration. There weren’t many blue boxes on the island, but there was one on the way to the ferry. She couldn’t even claim it was inconvenient, and so when they approached, she pulled up so that Harry’s door was close to it. He still had to undo his seat belt and climb out, but he did that without assistance. His cane was in the backseat, and it stayed there while he walked to the front of the box, pulled down the lever, and dropped his secret envelope into the mouth, which closed with a loud, metal clang.
Then he climbed back in the car, and neither of them said anything else about it for the rest of the night.
* * *
The lower levels of the symphony hall were full. Harry no longer had season tickets, so when he’d bought them the day before, he’d had to settle for one of the upper box levels high above the stage and flat against the hall’s outermost walls.
All the people who filled the hall had started out filling the underground garage, where he and Tilda had wound their way down, one link in a whole chain of cars looking for a spot. Then all the people had gotten out of their cars and had gone to stand at the banks of elevators to wait some more. The men stood with their hands in their pockets rattling their keys and change, and the women fiddled with the iridescent olive, orange, and burgundy shawls they had all purchased from museum gift shops. Then the elevators came, and through the doors of the hall they all went, flashing their tickets to the doormen and going to wait some more at the bars that sold wine in plastic cups before the performance. And after they drank it, they all went for a preemptive pee, where only the women had to wait.
Harry and Tilda skipped the wait at the bar. If he had wanted something, Tilda would nag about his medicines. He knew he needed to put his foot down about that—these were his choices—but right then, he didn’t much feel like it. Maybe he’d used up all his resolve hiding the fact that what he had mailed was a new copy of his will.
There was no reason not to tell Tilda, not really. She was in it after all. He was leaving her the house. That was the big change, but there were some smaller ones. The house had been willed to Juno before, but Harry decided he’d rather see Tilda in it. She needed someplace to land, and his place had been their place before. There was no good reason for it not to be again. She’d earned it. She’d probably earned it before, but coming to stay with him now meant he could no longer deny it. Harry knew that Tilda would pass the house on to Juno when the time came. Juno could wait. All of this was reasonable, but still Harry did not tell her. He told his lawyer, who made the changes and e-mailed the documents to him. Harry printed them, and he signed them, and he kept his mouth shut. Maybe he didn’t tell her because he might change his mind later. She might become unbearable. Lord knew she was difficult. It wasn’t that far a leap between difficult and unbearable. They had decided that about each other before.
Then again, maybe he didn’t tell her because this medicine was new, and it was doing things. Maybe it was just treating his symptoms. They came back after each dose. Harry knew that. But it was the symptoms that would kill him, after all. The motor control he lost in his foot and his leg and his hand and his arm would spread. He would become wheelchair bound. He would lose his ability to speak, and maybe they would get him one of those eye-controlled computer things, so he could tap out a word an hour. But then maybe they wouldn’t because why go to the expense? Along with his speech, he’d lose the ability to swallow and would need a feeding tube. Then other muscles would go, including the ones that made his heart beat and his lungs expand.
He had already spoken to Dr. Woo. He’d done it months ago. Woo had laid out what would happen in what order, and Harry had decided what interventions were acceptable and what were not. There had been paperwork. There were far more interventions in the unacceptable category because what was the point? Except now, maybe there was a point. Maybe this new treatment could keep those symptoms at bay forever. It had been a very good decision to go out to the beach that night. Fal
ling there in the sand on his own dog might have been, Harry thought, the best thing that could have happened, some quirk of fate that made everything different.
That was why he could buy two symphony tickets. Already that was different. He had stopped going six months before—no, it had been longer now that he was thinking about it. It was too hard to go when he knew he would only ever finish this one piece for this one orchestra. There would be no others. Just this very last one. It was so final, so limiting. But maybe not. Maybe there would be more, another chance after this one to get it right, so he bought the tickets.
Tilda went up ahead. She wanted to find their seats. Harry wanted to find the bathroom first. He told her he would catch up.
“It’s going to start soon.”
Already people were abandoning their empty and not-quite-empty plastic wine cups on the cocktail tables in the street-level lobby, on the edges of planters, on benches, anywhere they could find a flat surface. And they were streaming up the open staircases that switchbacked from level to level to level. Harry and Tilda’s seats were almost at the very top.
“I’ll be there.”
Harry had been going to the symphony since he was in his late twenties. The attendees had always been stooped and graying. Some of them were middle-aged or nearing retirement, and some of them would not last the season. That was the way it had always been. It was still that way, but he was taken aback when three of the men leaving the third-level restroom had walkers. Harry had his cane, of course, but that was different, and he was only using it a little bit that night. Harry did his business, washed his hands, and did not look in the mirror where he might accidentally assess the color of his hair and the rounding of his shoulders. By the time he made it back out, he was one of the last people not in their seat.
Harry stood on the third-floor balcony just outside the inner doors to the hall. Inside the musicians would be warming up. Out here he was jutted out over the empty lobby a hundred feet below and across from the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over downtown. From the outside, the symphony’s Benaroya Hall looked like a giant reel of film turned on its side with glass where the celluloid should be.
Harry liked the view. The other buildings that surrounded the hall had just as much glass. In fact, some of them seemed to be made up of nothing but windows—those that were dark and reflected the concert hall’s visage back at him and those that were lit like little vignettes.
Harry wasn’t the only one who wanted to watch the other buildings’ night-cleaning ladies go from office to office turning on and off the lights, or look at the blinking screens left on in otherwise dark and abandoned rooms, or spot the lone worker still at his desk. One other person—a woman—leaned over the third-floor balcony railing, watching the city from a safe distance. They might as well have binoculars, the two of them, the way they peered into strangers’ lives.
But maybe the woman didn’t need them. She was hanging right over the rail while Harry preferred to stand well back near the wall. He had always disliked heights, which was one of the reasons he dallied here rather than go sit in his suspended box. This fear—or as Harry preferred, this aversion—had only gotten worse in the last year. The more balance Harry lost, the less comfortable he became anywhere but on the most solid, most unslippery of ground. He tightened his grip on the four-footed cane whether he needed it right then or not.
The musicians finished warming up. He could hear them. The pleasant, atonal, mishmash of notes from violins, oboes, and percussion all began to settle down. It sounded just like a crowd stopping its vocal chatter for a speaker who was taking the stage. Although in this case, the instruments quieted down for the tuxedoed conductor, who would soon stride across the stage in as grand an entrance as a symphony orchestra allowed. A lone spotlight would be on the conductor’s dais already, an empty pool of white light waiting for a purpose. The musicians would be in tight, concentric semicircles around it, like ripples out from a skipped rock. Subtle tension was building in there. Harry could feel it.
Tilda would be looking at her watch and making a face. She hated to miss the beginning of things, and she didn’t particularly like it when other people missed them either.
The two of them really should go inside.
“Excuse me, miss,” Harry said. “I believe they’re starting.”
The woman’s back moved in acknowledgment. The muscles readjusted themselves in a slight ripple under her bare skin as she pushed back from the rail but didn’t let go of it. She wore her dark hair up in a twisted knot held together with hidden pins or, for all Harry knew, a sort of invisible Jedi force. Her dress, which was green, was so long it touched the floor.
Well, if she wanted to stay out here—
The hall broke into applause. The conductor was walking across the stage toward his dais, taking the two steps up, turning to acknowledge the crowd. Harry didn’t need to see it in order to see it.
Becca turned from the windows and faced Harry. If you asked him now, Harry could not have told you when he knew it was her. It was not when she was facing him. It was before then. It was not when he had first spoken either. It was after then. It was something in the way she started to turn, he supposed, that made the hallucination so real.
Just so everyone was on the same page about it, Harry said aloud, “I’m seeing things again.”
He said it loud enough for her to hear it, but she didn’t respond. She was no longer bleeding, that was his first thought. She scared him, but she did not surprise him. He had conjured her too many times for surprise. People confused the two.
So while he began to sweat inside his suit, he was not startled, and his brain still had enough room to see that she had no mark or blemish of any kind. But she didn’t look the same. She was older. Not old but older. Late twenties maybe early thirties, but then again, it could be the dress and the hair and the makeup. Young women these days did that to themselves, Harry knew. They layered on the accoutrements of age when they didn’t have enough years, and then layered on the accoutrements of youth when they had too many. It was upsetting to the eye.
More upsetting was that she’d been crying. Harry had not dealt well with her tears decades ago, and he did not deal well with them now. It really wasn’t fair what his mind was doing to him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
She looked surprised and not at all happy that he’d spoken.
“It’s not your problem where I am.”
She sounded petulant, like the teenager she never had the chance to become. One of the many things she’d never had the chance to become.
He felt like he should take a step forward. That was what a father would do, but he did not do it. He hesitated too long, and the hesitation became inertia, which settled into the knowledge that he was failing her again. Again he was doing things wrong. He wanted to cling to her, to keep her—this hallucinated version of her—with him, and yet he did not.
It was not good for him. He knew it wasn’t. It did not matter what a father would do for his daughter because she was not his daughter. She was, at best, a side effect. At worst, the stories were true, and she was a sort of netherworld representative sent to drive him mad. Either way, he had to stop this. He would not become this person. He would not die strapped to a bed, screaming at shadows. He simply would not.
Harry steeled himself.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said again. “There’s no place for you.”
He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. She just stared at him. He tried again, tried to shoo her away. “No one wants you here.”
“No one,” he had said, not “I.” He couldn’t bring himself to say that he didn’t want her—real or not. Better to share the blame with others, with everyone, if he could manage it.
But this difference, however much it mattered to him, did not seem to register with her. There was a fresh flow of tears, not fast, not sobbing, but the sort that pooled in her lower lashes before falling in heavy
splashes to her cheekbones. She had her mother’s cheekbones—high, almost sharp.
“Just leave me alone,” she said.
It took all that Harry was to hold his ground. She looked so real. Everything was right from the blotchiness in her cheeks to the chip in her nail polish. This was well beyond the uncanny valley. He took a deep breath.
“Go,” he said. “You have to go.”
“Why do you think I’m out here?”
Her words came out too high, almost hysterical. This was not the calm, wondering girl of all the “whys” he remembered, not the girl that had appeared to him at the house. This Becca was almost as unhinged as he was. In a way it helped. Yes, he decided, it helped. She was not real. She wasn’t even as he remembered her. She was twisting and morphing, just as you would expect from a brain as ill as his. Harry felt braver.
“No one is stopping you,” he said.
Becca looked over her shoulder, out toward the windows and down to the lobby, and then she followed her gaze with the rest of her body, turning back around.
“I want to,” she said. “I’ve wanted to go for a while.”
She was softening. He saw it in her shoulders, heard it in her voice. Softening and weakening. Did that mean it was working? Was this all he had to do to control things? To order the hallucinations away like a child talking to the monster under the bed?
“It’s time.”
And it was. It was time. Harry was afraid someone would come out and find him there, talking, and they wouldn’t be able to see who he was talking to, and he would be asked to explain. He would have to make up something just like with Dr. Woo. And Tilda, he was sure, was on the verge of leaving her seat and coming to look for him, unable to decide whether she should be annoyed or worried.
