What's Left of Me
Page 25
Kitty stared out the tiny window, her palm pressed against the plastic pane. Lissa slept. Devon—he was Devon now—stared down at his hands until he, too, fell asleep.
Odd, to think this was only our second time up in the air. We felt no excitement. Only weariness.
Before the airport, there had been a tiny motel room where we’d changed out of our Nornand blue and into clothes that barely matched and didn’t fit. We’d combed our hair, washed our face, stared at our reflection, our hollow eyes.
The man, we learned, was Peter. He was even taller than Jackson—sturdier—and we could see Dr. Lyanne in the set of his face, the ash brown of his hair. He’d smiled at us, but we’d been too exhausted to really smile back, though we tried. He was the one who removed the bandage from our forehead as we bit down on our lip and tried not to wince, then replaced it with a smaller, square Band-Aid. The bandages on our legs were easier to cover up with pants, our hands with too-long sleeves. There was a worn baseball cap for Jaime, to hide his incision mark and the staples in his skull. But there wasn’t anything that could be done about the cut on Lissa’s cheek, the bruises and Band-Aid on our forehead. I let our hair fall over our face, curtaining it as best I could.
Peter and Jackson came with us onto the plane but sat a few rows down. There had been another man, but he’d taken a different flight. He’d been the one driving the second black van. The empty one that should have held the rest of the kids. The ones we didn’t save.
We landed in a city by the ocean. Everything was a noisy, overcrowded dream. We had no luggage. There was no one waiting for us at the airport. Everyone piled into a huge van, and the ride was spent in silence, the stars cold and sharp where they poked through the black swaths of clouds.
We reached the apartment a little after dawn. Two women waited at the side of the road, one in her mid-twenties, the other about our mother’s age. They laughed and chattered until our van pulled to a stop.
Peter and Jackson climbed out. Jaime leaned against the window, whispering stories to himself, his hands twisting in his lap. Devon sat beside him, silent. I wished for Ryan, who would have smiled at me, who wouldn’t have closed himself off to the rest of us. But Ryan wasn’t there, and so I looked away, trying to focus on the world outside the window.
The road was empty. A gentle pink-and-yellow haze hung in the streets, illuminating and obscuring them at intervals. I let our eyes wander over the apartment building, tall and cast from red brick with a great metal fire escape winding up the side. Peter, Jackson, and the women spoke quietly in the shadow of a street lamp.
Suddenly, I realized what they were discussing.
“No,” I pushed the car door open. Lissa jerked from her daze. Peter’s last sentence faded on his lips.
“No,” I repeated. “You’re not separating us.”
A bubble of silence grew, round and hard.
The younger woman gave us a hesitant smile. Her cappuccino-colored hair curled like steam around her face. It would be too suspicious to keep all us kids together, she said. We’d all be close, she promised.
We refused.
In the end, they gave in and all five of us kids crammed into Peter’s small apartment. It only had two bedrooms, so all of us girls shared one room while the boys took the other. Kitty hardly woke as Peter carried her up the stairs and into the room, laying her on the bed. Jackson went in search of extra blankets and pillows so Lissa and I could construct makeshift beds on the floor. No one changed. There was nothing to change into but the uniforms, and no one ever wanted to touch those again. We were all too tired anyway, collapsing into tangles of weary limbs.
I just barely kept Addie from screaming aloud when we woke, hours and hours later, from nightmares of Cal on the operating table, scalpels tracing bloody lines across his face. Lissa murmured next to us but didn’t awaken.
Slowly, I lay back down, reaching under our pillow and extracting our chip. We were so used to having it there, now, after all our nights at Nornand. The softly pulsing light was comforting. Our heartbeat slowed until the two rhythms matched, beating in sync.
Then the red flashes began to quicken.
I’d pushed our blankets off and sat up before I realized what I was doing. I was moving so much easier now, a far cry from the painful steps I used to take. Maybe it was a side effect of the Refcon that had made things so difficult before.
Addie was quiet as I stepped carefully over Lissa and darted for the door.
Ryan waited for us in the hallway. For me.
“Eva,” he said, and then my arms were around his neck, my head on his shoulder.
“Are you okay?” I said.
He laughed. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice muffled against him. We sank down together, neither of us letting go, his back against the wall. He was quiet. I finally let go, leaning back so I could see his face.
“What?” he said, at first solemn and then grinning hesitantly when I started to smile. “What’s so funny?”
“I know it’s you,” I said, laughing, and then laughing harder because it was all so absurd. It hurt to laugh, but it hurt more not to. Ryan tried to shush me, but he was laughing, too. Our laughter was tight, breathless, wild. We held our breaths, covering each other’s mouths until we could get back under control. “It’s dark, Ryan. I can hardly see your face. But I know it’s you.”
He smiled. That much I could tell, even in the blackness. His hands were still on our shoulders, his face little more than a foot away from mine.
“And you know it’s me,” I said. He nodded. “How do you know it’s me?” I swallowed, suddenly shy. Suddenly aware of how close we were, how I was practically in his lap, how I’d never been this close to anyone before in my life. A dark, uneasy feeling snuck into me. I stiffened and looked away. But the uneasiness wasn’t mine. It didn’t belong to me, and I tried to shove it aside.
“Eva?” Ryan said. His hand moved down my arm, his fingers curling around my wrist. “Eva?” he said again, softer. He leaned toward me, trying to meet my eyes. I forgot everything else.
There was a moment like a hiccup in time. Inexplicable. And then his mouth was against mine, his lips soft and urgent. It lasted a second. A blink. A beat of the heart. He pulled away and said nothing. I grabbed his arm. This time, I kissed him and was so light-headed I would have fallen if we weren’t already on the ground.
But something twisted inside me. Something flinched, sharp and brittle. Something cried out, and before I knew what I was doing I’d jerked away, gasping for air—“Addie. Addie, Addie—”
She said nothing, but I heard her cry, and I started to shake. I moved away and Ryan didn’t try to stop me, just looked at me, just watched me, and I thought he understood. He didn’t get up, but he touched my hand right before I turned around, and for just one more moment, there was just me and there was just him, and no one else in the world.
But it lasted only a second. Because I was never alone, and neither was he.
I fled to the bathroom. I could already feel my control slipping as Addie’s emotions swirled stronger and stronger. By the time we shut the door, we were crying.
She covered our face with our hands, trying to muffle her tears.
Never thought she’d have to watch, feel, as we kissed someone she didn’t want to. That had been my private fear. My burden.
I didn’t know what to say.
By the time we ventured back out into the hallway, Ryan was gone.
The days dripped by. One. Then two. Then a week. Peter wasn’t often home, though when he was he brought his friends with him—the young woman with the cappuccino hair, the older one with the horn-rimmed glasses, a man with skin
the color of nutmeg, a girl with ballerina poise. Jackson, who never arrived without a smile for Addie and me. They’d gather at the dining room table, conversing in hushed tones for hours. Once, on our way to the kitchen, we heard the other man ask how we were doing.
They’re recovering, Peter replied.
Recovering?
I guess we were.
Ryan and I didn’t avoid each other, exactly. We were just never there. I told Addie I was too tired to take control, and whenever we looked at or spoke to or even passed the boy with the dark curly hair and the darker eyes, I knew it was Devon, not Ryan. He and Addie didn’t say much to each other. If Hally or Lissa noticed, they didn’t comment. They were quieter than they’d ever been, spending a lot of time alone, or with Jaime. But as the days passed, they started smiling again, just a little. Then more and more.
There were always groceries in the fridge: milk, eggs, apples. We found peanut butter and bread in the pantry, and for a while, we all lived off sandwiches. No one complained. Jaime’s tremor never went away, but he smiled and helped us make lunch, laughing when we caught him licking the peanut butter off the butter knives. Sometimes we found him murmuring to himself, shuffling his fragmented sentences around as if he hoped to piece together the twin soul he’d lost. But other times he was bright and happy, and I could see how he’d captured Dr. Lyanne’s heart like no other Nornand patient had.
Then came the day when the doorbell rang and it wasn’t the young woman with the cappuccino curls or the man with the dark skin. It was a tired woman with ash-brown hair in a loose ponytail, carrying a single suitcase and wearing uncomfortable-looking shoes.
She and Peter looked at each other for a moment, their faces so similar and so different, all at once. Then she looked at us and Hally sitting at the table, eating breakfast. The others hadn’t woken up yet.
Dr. Lyanne gripped her suitcase and stepped inside, pausing just beyond the threshold. There was a tremor in her mouth that she quickly quashed. She said nothing, as if daring someone to judge, someone to say she couldn’t go any farther, that she had to leave. But Peter just moved out of her way, a smile brushing his lips.
We sat on the fire escape. Over the last dozen days, we’d started spending more and more time there. It was the only way to get real, direct sunlight without leaving the apartment, which we weren’t allowed to do yet. Of course, it was almost sunset now, so we wouldn’t be getting a tan, but the air was still warm.
We used to spend a lot of time on the fire escape when we still lived in the city. The air had been chillier there, the streets busier, but the fire escape had allowed the same sense of peace and freedom it did now. We’d forbidden Lyle from following us, had claimed it as our own spot, and whenever he’d thrown a fit about it, Dad had nearly always taken our side. Maybe he’d understood our need for space, or maybe he’d wanted to keep Lyle away from us, or maybe he’d just thought the fire escape was too dangerous for a little boy—I’d never know. But right now, I’d have given anything to have our little brother here, flinging himself about the small space with his usual lack of abandon, calling us to look at this or that.
I’d have given anything to know Mom was just beyond the window, checking from time to time to make sure we hadn’t managed to hurt ourself somehow. I’d have given anything to know I’d be seeing Dad tonight, that our family would take us back and we’d all somehow run away and be safe somewhere. Except, even then, there would be Ryan. There would be Ryan and his family, and there would be all the other hybrid kids in all the other hospitals, all the other institutions, to think about.
The window slid open behind us, screeching a bit as it always did, the hinges whining for oil.
“The others are calling you for dinner,” Dr. Lyanne said, and I nodded.
She lingered at the window, looking out at the red sky like we were. Before I realized what I was doing I said, “Haven’t you come out here yet?”
She hesitated, then edged her way onto the fire escape. Her heels made her wobble, and I hid a smile.
“It’s pretty,” I said, turning back to the busy streets far below, the cars zooming by in clouds of exhaust, the people crossing this way and that. Addie preferred portraits to landscapes, but maybe one day she’d humor me and paint the scene beneath us. There wasn’t any point in hiding that part of her anymore.
“It is pretty,” said Dr. Lyanne.
A moment of silence stretched and stretched. Finally, I said, “What happened at the hospital?”
Dr. Lyanne leaned against the railing next to us, her hair loose around her shoulders. It hid some of her face’s sharper lines. “Nothing really,” she said. “The children are gone.”
“Gone?” I stared at her. “Gone where?”
“To institutions.”
I looked away. “And Mr. Conivent? Dr. Wendle? What about them?”
Sometimes, when Addie and I didn’t have nightmares about scalpels and crinkly white butcher paper stained with blood, we dreamed about Mr. Conivent lying motionless on the floor.
Dr. Lyanne’s lips thinned. “I don’t know. The surgeries were technically legal. They never acted without parental consent. But—” she said as our mouth fell open. “But everyone knows that if news gets out about this, there’s going to be backlash, legal or not. As far as the review board—the government—is concerned, Nornand clinic was a complete failure.” She laughed bitterly.
If he were dead. Because that was the fear that dragged down our limbs. That somehow, in our panic, we’d hit him too hard or in the wrong place. That we’d killed him.
“They’re all scrambling to save their own skins,” Dr. Lyanne said. “But everything will get buried. Everything will be erased. A few years down the road and it’s going to be like it never happened.”
I laughed so sharply Dr. Lyanne flinched. “Except Jaime. And Sallie, and all the other kids who died. That’s going to stay. That’s never going to be erased. And all those kids who didn’t get out. They’re still stuck. They’re still in danger.” I closed our eyes for a moment, gripping the iron railing. “Might have been different,” I said.
“You saw me at Mr. Conivent’s desk.” Dr. Lyanne was still looking out at the bleeding sky. “That was your screwdriver he found, wasn’t it?”
I said nothing.
“Thank you,” she said. “For distracting him.”
“It was Cal,” I said. “Not me.” Down below, a couple of teenagers strolled by in a big group, far enough away to be faceless. But I could read the levity in the way they moved. I turned to Dr. Lyanne. “Was it important, at least?”
She was quiet. “It showed me Peter wasn’t lying.” Finally, she looked at us. “That paper, Addie—”
“Eva,” I said.
It took her a second, but she said it. “Eva. That paper had codes on it, each for a different country. Medication from different places is coded based on region. Of course, you’ve got to have special access to know which number codes for what, but—”
“But what?” I said.
“The medication in that box came from overseas, Eva,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s just medication. I think we’re getting parts from them, too. The plans for our machines. The technology for our equipment. All from overseas.”
I had to hold on to the railing because our knees had gone soft.
The vaccines. Were they shipped here from some foreign country, too? Some hybrid country?
If they were hybrid, why were they helping the government exterminate us?
“How can anything the government’s told us about the rest of the world be true if they’re the ones sending us supplies?” Dr. Lyanne said. “Eva, they’re better off than we are. They’ve got to be. At least some of them.”
Some of our earliest memories were of the film clips of the wars, the bombs falling, the cities in flames. Even in first or second grade, they hadn’t shied a
way from telling us about the destruction and the death overseas. The hybrid countries, engulfed by chaos and never-ending wars, always ready to launch into a new battle at the slightest provocation. Supposedly, the Americas had ceased trade—had cut off any sort of communication, really—since the years right after the invasions. We’d been taught there wasn’t anything worth trading for over there, nothing worth seeing.
Europe. Asia. Africa. Oceania. All hybrid, all devastated, all burning.
“All lies,” Dr. Lyanne said so quietly I didn’t know if she meant to speak to us or to herself. “Everything. Anything they tell us could be . . .” She quieted. Pushed herself away from the railing. Took off her shoes so she didn’t wobble on her way back to the window. Left us by the edge of the fire escape sinking in our shock, wishing we were standing on more solid ground.
And suddenly, I thought of the man in Bessimir. The hybrid at the center of the storm of angry people, the one who’d been accused of flooding the history museum. The one who, from some angles, looked like our uncle.
Those pipes. How many times have we said to get those pipes fixed?
He hadn’t done it. Maybe. Probably. Perhaps.
What mattered was that it didn’t matter. He might never have stepped foot in that museum in his life, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because our government lied. Because our president lied. Because our teachers lied. Or didn’t even know the truth of what they doled out in class, of what marched across their blackboards, lay bound in their textbooks.
“Michelle,” Dr. Lyanne said.
I didn’t need to ask. Apparently, the question was obvious enough on our face.
“You asked me if I remembered her name,” Dr. Lyanne said.
What was she like? we’d whispered. Your other soul. The one you lost. Do you even remember her name?
“It was Michelle,” she said, and the words dissipated in the warm, salty air.