I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision, and saw we were in Celeste Akintola’s office. Jill Franklyn surprised me by sitting down behind her desk and motioned for us to take the chairs on the other side. Gloria and I traded looks as we sat down; she gave me a you-first nod.
Jill Franklyn sat straight up in the high-backed chair, listening to me with a troubled expression, nodding from time to time but saying nothing. I finished and turned to Gloria, who hesitated, waiting for some kind of response, but the nurse remained silent, not even looking at my sister.
Gloria spoke in a small, uncertain voice, occasionally pausing to look at me. Each time I made a small, keep-going gesture. She did, but any confidence she’d had had deserted her, and I had no idea why. Maybe she was having trouble with the whole snitching thing, I thought. Except this wasn’t just tattling to teacher—Lily Romano was carrying around more pills than she needed. A lot more.
When Gloria was done, I sat forward in my chair and said, “What would happen if someone gave that stuff to a patient here?”
Jill Franklyn finally lifted her gaze to meet mine. “It would depend on the patient,” she said, sounding calm and logical, like we were discussing the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee. “And the dosage. And, of course, what other medications they might be on at the time. Someone taking vasopressin, for example, might be less drowsy. Depending on the dosage. It would probably have to be twenty or thirty milligrams, I think.
“Dementia patients respond best, though. Early dementia, I mean. Dexedrine’s a lot better than methylphenidate but you have to work with what you’ve got.” She sighed. “I don’t suppose either of you have access to Dexedrine? It’s practically impossible to get nowadays.”
Gloria and I looked at each other. “Did you hear anything we just told you?” I asked.
Jill Franklyn wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, Lily Romano’s screwed. And so am I, right?” She sat forward, putting her arms on the desk. “Or instead of being Girl Scouts, you could be part of advancing medicine and making life better for dementia patients everywhere.”
“How?” I asked, wondering why her eyes weren’t crazy.
“By going home and catching up on your sleep, and when you get up tomorrow, we’ll all just have business as usual. You”—she pointed at Gloria with one hand—“can volunteer as much as you want, whenever you want; I’ll get Akintola to sign off on it. I don’t see why she wouldn’t, considering you’re four for five. That was pretty nice, wasn’t it—getting to be a hero? Heroine, whatever. It was too bad about Mrs. Boudreau, but that’ll happen—every so often, one of them won’t come back for you, no matter how healthy they look. And you”—she pointed at me and frowned—“I can’t remember what you do, but I remember your mother’s always talking about how you never take a vacation. So take one. She won’t lose much ground while you’re away. Maybe none.”
“How many people are in on this?” I asked incredulously.
Jill Franklyn looked up for a moment. “Hard to say. Here, it’s just me and Lily.”
“Are you saying this is a—a conspiracy?” My sister practically squeaked on the last word.
“What conspiracy?” Jill Franklyn looked at us like we were crazy. “You’re on the Internet, does that mean you’re in a conspiracy?” She looked from me to Gloria and back again, then stood up abruptly. “I should have known you wouldn’t go for it.” She began edging toward the door. “You two Girl Scouts’re probably like most middle-aged women—not too physical. I know I don’t look like much, but I’ve got nurse muscles—I can lift almost any resident here unassisted. Or subdue them if they get violent. So I’ll just fold my tent now and you can call the—”
I never even saw Gloria move. One moment Jill Franklyn was opening the door; I felt something brush past me. A framed picture of Celeste Akintola’s children skidded off the top of the desk into my lap. I barely had time to register that Gloria was crouched on the desk before she sprang forward, landing on top of Jill Franklyn as they fell through the open door into the hallway.
The next minute or so was chaos. Jill Franklyn was on her belly, screaming in outrage and calling for help while Gloria sat on her back, holding her arm so that she couldn’t move without breaking it. I stood in the doorway, blinking down at them.
“I’m calling the police!” yelled a woman, presumably Deirdre, from the nurses’ station.
“Tell them to hurry,” Gloria yelled back. “No security guard?”
“Cost-cutting,” Jill Franklyn grunted. “See how safe your mother is? No on-site security guard—”
“Shut up,” Gloria said and twisted her arm slightly. “I’ll show you who’s middle-aged, bitch.”
Now, I would like to say that Gloria kept Jill Franklyn subdued until the police arrived, and after hearing what we had to tell them, they immediately sent a car to pick up Lily Romano and they were prosecuted and got long prison sentences and so on and so forth. But Deirdre—yes, it was Deirdre—only saw my sister assaulting another nurse and, after summoning more staff via the PA, did something about it. Deirdre was closer to my age but her nurse muscles were more well developed and more experienced. She knocked me flat on my ass when I tried to get in her way. I still might have had a chance, except, of course, we woke everyone up and they all came out to see what was going on.
Except that it wasn’t just a lot of half-asleep people opening their doors to see what all the noise was about—it was a lot of very disoriented elderly people who couldn’t see or hear properly, all bumping into each other, stepping on me, falling over Gloria and Jill Franklyn, and crying out in pain or panic or both. In all the confusion, Jill Franklyn managed to get away several minutes before the police arrived.
They arrested me and Gloria, of course.
We didn’t end up going to jail, but it was a very near thing. Fortunately, Celeste Akintola believed us.
There was little evidence—methylphenidate leaves the body relatively quickly. Metabolizes efficiently was how Celeste Akintola put it, I think. By the time she got a doctor to order blood tests, it was too late. I turned Lily Romano’s pill over to the police but I couldn’t prove it was hers; when I told the cop taking my statement how I had come by it, she just shook her head. Needless to say, both Lily and Jill were long gone. Celeste Akintola resigned.
I had to take a second mortgage on the house to cover our legal expenses, and yet I still felt funny about telling Gloria that she had to get a job. She started looking, which, in her case, meant uploading her somewhat padded résumé to a few job-hunters’ websites and checking her e-mail before she went to see Mom. There was no more volunteering, but she still went to see our mother every day.
Interestingly enough, the firm that owned the nursing home saw fit to give me a nice break on the bill—apparently, their legal department advised that, despite the lack of hard evidence, the disappearance of both alleged wrongdoers might be enough for civil proceedings. I signed all the papers happily, including the confidentiality agreement and the waiver of responsibility (theirs, of course). With a second mortgage to feed, I was short on resources.
The change in Mom was undeniable, though not as dramatic as I’d feared it would be. She complained about not having any energy, of feeling slow. A number of other residents seemed to feel something similar, including some whom I knew weren’t dementia patients.
I asked Gloria one night if there were any new heroes or heroines at the home, now that she was a civilian again. She said she hadn’t heard anything. “But then, I probably wouldn’t,” she added. “They replaced most of the staff and all the volunteers. I’m out of the loop.”
Gloria found a health club that needed an aqua-aerobics teacher, but still found a way to squeeze in a visit to Mom almost daily. Apparently aerobics in water was less exhausting than the dry-land variety. Or maybe exercise really was energizing—I didn’t remember being able to maintain such a high level of activity in my late thirties.
And even then, it was six months after th
e fact before I really began to wonder. Mom’s decline had come to another of its periodic plateaus, but she was still having slightly more good days than bad, or so I thought. Or so I wanted to think. And then I finally started thinking about Gloria and her energetic lifestyle.
It was a stupid idea, I decided, which was why it hadn’t occurred to me before. But still, a small voice in my mind insisted that it actually had occurred to me and I’d deliberately refused to consider it. So it had simmered on the back-most of back burners in the back-most area of my mind until I was ready to jump at shadows.
Which made me think of how Gloria had leaped up onto Celeste Akintola’s desk and from there across half the room to land on Jill Franklyn. With my own eyes, I’d seen her sitting on Jill Franklyn’s back with her arm in a bone-breaker hold. We had both suffered through everything that followed. How could I think that Gloria would go through all of that with me only to turn around and do the same thing?
Not the same, nagged that mental voice. Gloria’s messiah complex is strictly limited—just her and Mom, no one else, not even you. Not yet anyway.
The only way to kill shadows was to turn on all the lights. I got as far as opening the door to her room, but I couldn’t go any farther. I’m not sure what I was more afraid of—that I would find Ritalin or Adderall or even Dexedrine, or that I wouldn’t. If I did, I’d know what to do—I just didn’t know if I could.
But if I didn’t, no one would ever have to know … except me, of course. Because that’s what I would find instead. I decided I would rather wonder about my sister than know for sure about myself, and closed the door.
It’s been the same every night since for the past year and a half. Intellectually, I know I might as well stop, because I’m not going to do anything different. But on a gut level, I don’t dare. I’m afraid of what could happen if I don’t stand there and deliberately choose not to be a bad, sneaky, dangerous woman.
Caroline Spector
Caroline Spector has been an editor and writer in the science fiction, fantasy, and gaming fields for the last twenty-five years. She is the author of three novels, Scars, Little Treasures, and Worlds Without End, and her short fiction has appeared in the Wild Cards collections Inside Straight and Busted Flush. In the gaming world, she has written and edited several adventure modules and sourcebooks for several TSR game lines, notably Top Secret/S.I. and the Marvel Superheroes advanced role-playing game, both on her own and coauthored with her husband, gaming legend Warren Spector.
Here she gives us a deadly cat-and-mouse game between a woman with superhuman abilities and a faceless, enigmatic adversary who may be able to use her own powers against her, a game that she can’t afford to lose, where the highest stakes of all are on the table, waiting for the next turn of a card.
LIES MY MOTHER TOLD ME
Zombie brains flew through the air, leaving a trail of blood and ichor on the throne riser of Michelle’s parade float. She smiled as another bubble formed in her hand. This one was larger and heavier—the size of a baseball. She let it fly, and it caught the zombie full in the chest and exploded. The zombie fell backwards off the float and was trampled by the panicking crowd.
Michelle saw more zombies moving toward her. They clambered over the floats in front of hers, pushing people aside as they flowed up the street. Another zombie crawled up onto her float, using the papier-mâché arbor for purchase. The arbor came loose, and Michelle watched in dismay as the sign reading “The Amazing Bubbles, Savior of New Orleans” broke off and fell into the street. Her daughter, Adesina, who’d been hiding under Michelle’s throne, let out a frightened shriek. Michelle released the bubble, knowing it would fly unerringly where she wished. When it hit, it would explode and leave a big, gooey zombie smear all over the decorations. Her beautiful float was getting ruined, and it really pissed her off.
There were three things Michelle hated about Mardi Gras: the smell, the noise, and the people. Add in a zombie attack, and it was going to put her off appearing in parades altogether.
To make sure she could bubble as much as needed during the parade, she spent the morning throwing herself off the balcony of her hotel room … until the hotel manager came up and made her stop.
“But I’m doing the Bacchus parade,” she explained. “I won’t be able to bubble through the whole parade if I don’t get fat on me. And the only way to do that is to take damage. A lot of damage. A fall from a fourth story is good, but not great.”
At this point, the manager turned an interesting shade of green.
“Look, Miss Pond,” he said. “We’re all grateful that you saved us from that nuclear explosion three years ago, but you’re starting to scare the other guests. It just isn’t normal.”
Michelle stared at him, nonplussed. Of course it isn’t normal, she thought. If I were normal, New Orleans would be a radioactive hole in the ground and you’d be a black shadow against some wall. I didn’t ask for this. None of us wild carders did.
“Well,” she said, thinking if she just explained it to him, he’d be less freaked out. “It isn’t as if when I get hit, or slam into the ground, or even when I absorbed that explosion that it hurts me. I just turn that energy into fat. Actually, it feels pretty good.” Too good sometimes, she thought. “So you don’t have to worry that I’m in pain or anything like that.”
But his expression said he really didn’t want to hear about her wild card power. He just wanted her knock it off. So she stopped trying to explain and said, “I’m sorry I frightened the other guests. It won’t happen again.” It meant she didn’t have as much fat on her as she wanted, but she’d make it work.
Adesina was still watching TV when Michelle closed the door after talking to the manager. She was perched on the foot of the bed, her iridescent wings folded against her back and her chin propped on her front feet. Just seeing Adesina made Michelle smile. Michelle had loved the child from the moment she’d pulled her from a charnel pit in the People’s Paradise of Africa a year and a half ago.
Michelle still couldn’t believe that Adesina had survived being injected with the wild card virus, much less being thrown into a pit of dead and dying children when her wild card had turned her into a joker instead of an ace. She shook her head to clear it. The memory of rescuing the children who were being experimented on in that camp in the African jungle was too fresh and raw. And her own failure to save all of them haunted her.
And Michelle wasn’t certain how Adesina might develop. Right now she was small—medium-dog size. Her beautiful little girl’s face was perched atop an insect body. But there was no telling if she would stay in this shape forever. She’d gone into chrysalis form after her card had turned and come out of that in her current state. It was possible she might change again—it all depended on how the virus had affected her.
“What on earth are you watching?” Michelle asked.
“Sexiest and Ugliest Wild Cards,” Adesina replied. “You’re on both lists. One for when you’re fat and one for when you’re thin.”
Christ, Michelle thought. I saved an entire city, and they’re really judging me on how “hot” I am? Seriously?
“You know, these lists are really stupid,” Michelle began. “Everybody likes something different.”
Adesina shrugged. “I guess,” she replied. “But you are prettier when you’re thin. They always want you to do pictures when you’re thin.”
Shit, Michelle thought. That didn’t take long. We’ve been in the States a year, and already she’s thinking about who’s prettier. And who’s fat and thin.
“Do you think a boy will ever like me?” Adesina asked. She turned her head and looked at Michelle. Her expression was serious. Oh God, Michelle thought. It’s too soon for this conversation. I’m not ready for this conversation.
“Well,” she began as she sat down next to Adesina. The bedsprings gave an unhappy groan under her weight. “I … I … I don’t know.” Oh, great. This was going well. “I don’t see why not. You’re beautiful.”
“You have to say that,” Adesina said. “You’re my mother.” She rubbed her back pair of legs together and made a chirping noise.
“Well, no one falls in love with you just because of how you look,” Michelle said.
Adesina turned back to the TV. “Don’t be dumb, Momma,” she said. “Everyone loves the pretty girls.”
A lump formed in Michelle’s throat. She swallowed hard, refusing to cry. There was no way to ignore it. Every TV show, magazine, billboard, and website had some pretty, young, skinny, half-naked girl selling something. And up until a couple of years ago, a lot of the time that girl had been Michelle—but that was before her card had turned. And now Adesina was worrying about this crap. Michelle was at a loss.
She stared at the TV. The bumper coming in from the commercial break flashed a rapid succession of images. There was footage from the various seasons of American Hero. There were some still black-and-white photos from the forties when the Wild Card virus had first hit. And then there were pictures of Golden Boy testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Shots of Peregrine at the height of her modeling days, looking like the ultimate disco chick—with wings. Of course they have pictures of her, Michelle thought. She’s gorgeous.
“Since 1946, when the alien bomb carrying the wild card virus exploded over Manhattan, they’ve walked among us,” the voice-over began. “The lucky few Aces and the hideously maimed Jokers. But who cares about that? We’re here to determine the hottest of the hot and grossest of the gross—Wild Card style!”
Michelle grabbed the remote. “Okay, that’s it,” she said, snapping off the TV. “Look, honey, America is a stupid place sometimes. We get all caught up in unimportant junk like that show, and we forget the stuff that really means something. And I am really sucking at this mom thing right now. The truth is that the world is going to be unkind sometimes because you’re different. But that doesn’t have anything to do with you, honey. It’s just that the world is full of idiots.”
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