The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  Sam said, “There is light at the end of this tunnel. There’s been three before you—”

  “And how did they work out?”

  The first two had died.

  “Shelby Sheffield, he’s out of here.”

  The pulsating pain seemed to subside. Roy said, “What do you mean, out of here?”

  “That’s why I came in today. Penny and I were supposed to tell you together. Shelby’s gone home. Walked out of Six-Oh-One Lexington this morning. All over the news today.”

  “Shelby walked out of here? By himself?”

  “Kinda herky-jerky, but yeah, the man walked straight out of the lobby and across the sidewalk to the car waiting for him. Totally by himself, arms swinging—even waved to the crowd.”

  Shelby Sheffield was Danesti’s third attempt at a full-body transplant, performed eighteen months before Roy’s. A sixty-four-year-old British banker, former head of the IMF. His room was on the opposite side of the floor, but he had come in a few times on his robotic-walker legs, shuttled over by Nurse Juan to say encouraging things.

  He remembered the man’s black eyebrows, incongruous under the shock of white hair. Flaccid tanned skin hanging beneath tired eyes, jowls forming at the sides of his mouth, but the man had a kind voice. Said nice things. Terrible breath, but nice words.

  Sam said, “Two years after his surgery, and Shelby is home. Walking around by himself. Check out the video clips on the web. I bet he felt like you a year ago. We’ll have you home for the next holidays, buddy. We’ll celebrate your forty-fourth birthday in style. That’s your inheritance day, old buddy.”

  4

  Officer Delta Devlin tried to control her rapid breathing. She checked and rechecked the straps on her ballistic vest. The apartment hallway smelled of mildew and urine. The concrete floor was littered with chips of paint and plaster from the walls. Bare incandescent bulbs, one above each doorway, threw stark shadows. Sixteen units on the second floor. She looked at the door again: 14B. This was the one.

  She unholstered her Glock 22.

  Most of her peers went for a Smith & Wesson or SIG, but she didn’t find them as comfortable for the weak-hand-thumb-past-the-straight-strong-thumb grip that trainees were taught to adopt. Also, the grip and barrel were shorter and easier for her to handle. Fifteen rounds in the magazine.

  “It’s your bust,” said the Nassau County police officer, pointing at the 14B doorplate as an invitation to take charge. He backed away from the door. So did his partner.

  Were they being polite, or cautious? Or just tired old men? This was her big collar. Maybe. Second year on the job, but still a rookie. She was the one who got these two cops here in such a hurry. The warrant still stuck out of her pocket.

  If she stepped back, asked them to initiate, she would look weak. Control the fear. This was what she had always wanted, right? To be like Dad? Her gun hand shook. That was the adrenaline and cortisol. Natural. It was normal to be scared. The unknown was behind that door. Should she wait for more backup? But she knew he had already been tipped off.

  No time to wait.

  She stepped forward and rapped hard on the door with her left hand, her right holding the weapon down and away. “Open up! This is the police. We have a warrant to search the premises.”

  Anyway, Pegnini, the guy she was looking for, was just a small-time bookie for the Matruzzi mob family out of Queens. Wasn’t as if she were hunting the cartel. Maybe she was being a little dramatic.

  One second. Two.

  Nothing.

  No sound except the faint crying of a baby two or three doors down. She glanced at the two Nassau County officers behind her.

  “Open up,” she repeated, louder, hammering the door hard with the fleshy part of the fist this time. “Open up, it’s the—”

  The hallway went pitch black.

  Del waited a beat, but the emergency lights didn’t come on. She checked down the hallway to the only exterior window, but even the streetlight outside had gone out. “Damn it!” she muttered under her breath.

  She gritted her teeth, stood up, and piston-kicked the door with her heel. It budged a half inch. She backed up and lunged. This time, her blow splintered the door frame. Jet black inside as well. She took a tentative step forward, fumbled for her flashlight, felt the other officers coming in behind her. A ghostly image in smudged red stepped into her field of view and swung something up. She knew she was the only one who could see it in this darkness.

  She screamed, “Get down!”

  The shotgun’s muzzle blast lit up the room for a split second before the boom. Del dropped to the floor, felt the whoosh of projectile sucking the air back. The oily blackness returned, but overhead she saw the hot scattershot glow red. Whoever it was had aimed high, into the ceiling. Hadn’t tried to hit them—just scare them away. There was a noise in front of her. Someone opening a door.

  A light flicked on. One of the officers managed to find his flashlight. “How the hell did you see that?” he asked. He crouched and waved the beam of light around the small apartment.

  “He’s going out the back,” Del said, ignoring the question. “One of you go out the front; one of you stay here.” She had already pushed past them and was sprinting down the hallway.

  She had her flashlight out now and hit the stairwell at a run. She made the first landing in three careful leaping steps, and in three more she thudded into the emergency exit door. Outside, it was almost as impenetrably dark—just the haze of industrial lights a few hundred feet away through the trees. Somehow, the perp had switched off the streetlights, too. Damn it. The area behind the complex was the Bethpage Solid Waste Disposal building. No telling what bolt-holes someone connected with the Matruzzis would have back there.

  In the distance, the whine of police sirens. A flicker of red.

  The apartment complex was bordered by a high wrought iron fence, more to keep people away from the waste-disposal property than out of the apartments. Playing her flashlight beam along the old, twisted barrier, she found a gap and squeezed through. Her light flickered. Maybe the battery? With no time to change it, she felt her way through the mud and low brush. She circled around and stopped. Listened.

  Beneath the wailing sirens, a soft gurgling.

  Step by careful step, she angled her way to the rear of the building, hoping to triangulate 14B’s location. Her breath came in quick pants. The flashlight beam shimmered. In the blackness, her uncommon visual acuity picked up a shape glowing faint red. The figure seemed suspended in the air, a hundred feet away. She quickened her pace and almost tripped over a branch.

  “Back here!” she yelled.

  The strobing lights of the arriving police cars lit up the trees to her right, but the back of the apartment complex was still black as a mine shaft.

  She took four more steps and shined her light upward. It flickered on and off again, then back on. She recognized the face. It was Pegnini, on the second-floor balcony. “Hold it right there!” she yelled, raising her gun and the light. “Put your arms up and don’t move.”

  The light flickered, but the man kept his arms by his sides, seemed to wriggle.

  “Don’t you goddamn move,” Del repeated, “and put your arms up or I will shoot you.”

  This asshole had just blown off a shotgun at three officers. What game was he playing? She still couldn’t see him clearly, but he was too far from the back of the apartment to be up that high. More flashlight beams scissored across the back of the building. One shone straight into Del’s face, and she squinted, holding up one hand to block the glare while she looked up.

  “Mother of God,” someone said.

  Two more flashlight beams fixed on Pegnini. He wasn’t on a balcony.

  The man had jumped from the second floor, but clever as he’d been to rig shutting off all the lights, he hadn’t quite calculated his escape properly.
Part of the fifteen-foot iron fence had pulled away, and one of the ornamental spearheaded rods was angled toward the back of the apartment.

  The rod had entered through Pegnini’s right groin, protruding through the top of his left shoulder blade. Both arms were caught in the fence, his feet twisted together. He looked as if he’d struggled to begin with, but his desperate flailing had just driven the post deeper and deeper through his body. His legs and arms still quivered, but the blank stare and silent-screaming slack-open mouth said he was already gone.

  “Jesus Christ,” said another officer.

  More beams of light fixed on the hapless bookie.

  Del pulled her gaze away.

  A split-open briefcase was on the ground. Papers lay scattered all across the grass and into the scrub forest of the waste-disposal site. She holstered her gun and bent down to start gathering them as quickly as she could, leaving the other officers to figure out how to get Pegnini down. She could barely pick up the papers, her hands shook so badly.

  5

  FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER

  “Welcome home!”

  Roy’s mother, Virginia, stood in the entyway of his house, arms spread wide.

  “Did you walk the whole way? Showing off?”

  She wore sheer yoga pants and a sparkling black tank top under a frayed jean jacket. Waves of platinum hair cascaded over her shoulders. Not your average seventy-seven-year-old, but not that unusual for the Hamptons.

  Roy said, “Just wanted to get a look around.” He walked up the driveway, past the manicured twelve-foot cedar hedge that secluded the grounds from the road. His soft exoskeleton hissed quietly with each step.

  One of the last days of summer. Sweat dripped down his back after the two-block excursion. Gravel crunched underfoot, and cicadas buzz-sawed loudly from the triad of stately elms that provided some relief from the midday swelter. A salt breeze, just enough to hold back the stifling humidity, rolled in from the Atlantic, the sea air perfumed by the red roses lining the house.

  Roy had had the driver drop him off a few hundred feet down the road, at East Hampton Beach, amid the crush of holidaymakers’ cars lined up to drop off and pick up; mothers holding boogie boards, kids in wide-brimmed hats balancing cones of disintegrating ice cream in their sticky hands while dads yelled for everyone to hurry up.

  On days like this, he would roll up with his big-wheeled cooler brimming with bottles of chardonnay, on the usual circuit from the house to erect a circle of beach chairs near the pounding surf. And by this time in the afternoon, he would be most of the way to stumbling drunk, wandering to the boardwalk to stand in line for a lobster roll, wondering whether he’d remembered to put on sunscreen.

  Was it that easy? Could he just fall back into his old life? The cooler was probably still in the garage. Could he load it up with a few bottles, call Sam, put on some board shorts, and head out to the beach? Pretend the last two years were just a bad dream?

  Something about the idea felt as if it were someone else’s life he was remembering. The trip in from Manhattan a re-creation on the true-crime channel, a step-by-step replay of the night of the accident. The drive down the Long Island Expressway, turning off onto the Montauk Highway—he experienced it like a film he’d seen before, one he hated but couldn’t stop watching, toothpicks propped under his eyelids to keep them open. This was supposed to be his happy day, his return to freedom. So why, the farther he ventured onto Long Island, did it feel like a descent ever deeper into some dark pit?

  “Nothing has changed.” His mother held her arms wider, her teeth perfect and white in the afternoon sun.

  While nothing here had changed, she seemed younger than he remembered.

  “Come here,” his mother said. Virginia jogged down the front steps, leaving the glass entryway doors open. “Come on, give me a hug.”

  Roy quickened his pace and closed the last ten feet with his arms open to embrace her. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  “So good to have you home.”

  Both sounded insincere, though both tried not to.

  The black Escalade ground to a halt behind Roy. He had asked his wife and the driver to follow him in the car, to give him a moment, but they were home now. He heard the car doors open and shut and the crunch of footsteps behind him.

  “Bring all the bags into the house,” Penny told the driver.

  Roy and his mother released each other from their awkward embrace to follow his wife into the house, into an oasis of air-conditioned coolness. Dark-stained wide-planked oak floors, cheery whitewashed walls—everything looked just as he had left it two years before. Through the glass wall of sliding patio doors, the pool glistened in scrubbed-clean pale blue.

  He had rebuilt this house almost from scratch after buying it as a broken-down eyesore twenty years ago. His friend Sam had helped in what became a sort of bonding session between them right after Roy’s father died. Before, Roy had thought of Sam as an uncle; afterward, as a friend.

  “You were supposed to be here an hour ago,” his mother exclaimed, clapping her hands together. She glanced over the granite kitchen countertops to the digital display on the gas stove. “It’s already two.”

  “You didn’t need to come, Mother.”

  “I did, but can I go?” She crinkled her nose. “Is that all right? I have tennis with Maurizio.”

  “Go. I’m going to take a nap anyway.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Penny said.

  “You certainly have.” As always, Virginia delivered her sarcasm with a smile.

  Silence, broken only by the driver asking, “Is that all, ma’am?”

  “Yes, yes, here.” Penny tried to hand him a fistful of twenty-dollar bills.

  The driver refused. “All paid for by Eden, but thank you.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Virginia said to Roy, stopping to peck her son’s cheek on her way out. “And don’t forget tomorrow night. Seven sharp. And wear a decent jacket, for God’s sake.”

  She followed the driver out.

  “I don’t trust your mother,” Penny said after waiting for her mother-in-law to get out of earshot.

  It had taken less than a full minute of being back in the house for the circus to start up. “Tell me something new.”

  “I heard some things when you were in the hospital. She wants to take your money, Roy.”

  “Like I said.” To change topics, he added, “Who’s Maurizio? She’s not seeing Thomas anymore?”

  “That was three boy-toys ago—not that I’m judging.”

  “Is that jealousy?” He let the comment linger an instant. “Can we not do this?”

  If he had to pick one thing that had attracted him to his wife when they first met, it was her innocence. That free-to-be-you-and-me attitude and lack of pretentiousness, but then, men always loved women for what they were—right up until they changed.

  She was easily bruised, and his mother’s circle of friends wasn’t gentle. Penny had transformed—transmuted—in the six years since they’d married, and he had been in the hospital for two of those years. Roy knew she was only trying to protect herself. Even before the accident there had been a distance between them. Since then, the rift had widened into a gulf. Some relationships grew stronger through adversity; others couldn’t bear the strain.

  This wasn’t easy for her, either.

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said. “I’m tired. Really tired.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Penny said. “You’re right. And this was all my fault.”

  She had been the one driving when they had the accident. It was something she had apologized for a thousand times, try as he might to get her to stop. He noticed again the pink scar on her forehead. Her only injury.

  “It was an accident.”

  “Still my fault.”

  Roy paused a beat and said, “Hey, I was thinking,
maybe after a nap, of dropping by the animal shelter.”

  It had been the closest thing he’d had to a full-time job, helping with their paperwork. Technically, he had a job—on the board of directors of his father’s company. But twenty years ago, when he showed up there after his father died, they had made it clear they preferred that he not come. He still got a salary, and after a few years, he had given them what they wanted: he’d not bothered to show up anymore.

  “Everyone you know at the shelter is gone,” Penny said. “I don’t think anybody would know you there.”

  “Really?” Two years swallowed in a time warp.

  His house keys in his pocket, he reached in to pull them out and drop them on the side table, just between the picture of his mother next to Diana Ross in Studio 54 and the frame of his father arm in arm with Steve Robinson at the release of the HighSoft Corporation’s first cell phone. HighSoft had become one of the world’s most valuable companies, but the picture was from its uncertain early days.

  Roy tossed the keys unconsciously, automatically, then noticed that he’d used his left hand. Things like that gave him fleeting bouts of vertigo. He was right-handed—at least, he always had been. Now it was a little of this and that, an ambidextrous struggle between his mind and body.

  Shaking it off, he took two steps to the couch and slumped into it. “I gotta get out of this thing.”

  He began unstrapping the Velcro ties that held the soft exoskeleton to his legs. Wearing it outside his jeans had been mostly a publicity thing for the reporters when he left Eden this morning. He could walk on his own now, at least around the house. The exoskeleton wasn’t metal struts, but hair-fine shape-memory alloy wires sewn into a fabric to allow free movement in certain directions while restricting it in others. The nickel-titanium filaments contracted to encourage his muscles to work in concert with the implants. He carried the batteries in a small backpack.