After that, she started for Matt’s clinic, still not breaking, still pushing on, still searching for an answer. All she found was another mystery in Matt’s car missing from the parking lot, and then she was picked up by the convoy and brought to the settlement.
In the chaos of those early days she still did not break. She didn’t know what had happened to any of her family and maybe, just maybe, her children were in another settlement with Matt since he’d been closer to the home daycare and their schools than Ryla . . .
There was hope, though slim. But she still had hope, and that was everything.
And then she sneaked to the fence one day and saw them on the outer edge of the woods, Kelsey and Cadence about fifty feet apart, their eyes blank sweeps of freshly fallen snow.
That broke her at last. Knowing.
She pulled back from the railing as a large group of harvesters pushing and pulling farm equipment headed her way. Was she going to see Malachi tomorrow?
She could not plan that far ahead. As she walked away, she could only think of being called in to the hospital to find Kelsey or Cadence in a bed, white eyes, fish-silver skin, lips parting to cry Mom!
All of the tears she hadn’t shed in ages would spring forth like a fountain. She would spring forth, to rub more ointment into Kelsey’s skin, to search Cadence’s blank eyes for a hint of blue, to smooth their hair and check to see how much they’d eaten, what they’d eaten, if they wanted more . . .
Had one of them already been used for the Phoenix Project? Both? Had their deaths finally spurred Malachi’s success?
If it had happened that way, it was better. God almighty, it was better that they had died in treatment than to live forever wandering out there. That realization cut through her like a knife.
Hospital or not?
She didn’t know. She didn’t have to know. Not yet. The fog came back and swallowed her whole, and she reported to the Center to resume her appointments.
*****
She went. For no other reason than it was penciled in on her schedule, and to get out of it would make her have to think too much.
The hospital was much calmer than it had been the day before. The waiting area was almost empty, and nurses spoke in quiet tones at a cabinet. A doctor rattled aside a curtain to enter a private space and rattled it shut behind him. Even passing right by it on her way to the staircase, Ryla could not make out the words spoken in his muted voice.
The tranquility of the hospital’s first floor was matched in its top. There was only a nurse at the station, quietly flipping through paperwork. Ryla let herself into Malachi’s room and found him in the chair by the window. He was alone, his back to her, and he had received the haircut he wanted in a wild cap of loose, vivid brown curls. The untamed cheerfulness of it brightened the room.
His feet were propped up on a second chair, and he was reading a book while absent-mindedly patting the head of a large yellow dog. She sank onto the floor and he took his eyes off the book to bend and rub her belly. Then he noticed Ryla.
She startled at his brilliantly gray eyes. Colored contacts had been dug up from somewhere in the settlement. The shade was so intense that it was unnatural, but not nearly as unnatural as those milk-and-cream orbs. “Hi, Malachi. May I come in?”
He swung his feet off the second chair in welcome. “Not as a therapist, no. But you can as a regular person. This is Bongo, by the way.”
There was no heat in his voice. She entered the room and took the seat, giving Bongo a pat. Her fur was long and silky. “I can be a therapist and a regular person at the same time.”
“I’m sure you can,” Malachi said. “But I don’t want a therapist.”
“Are you reading anything good?”
“See? That’s what a regular person says.” He showed her the chewed-up cover of a scary book for children, a terrified kid’s face peeking out the window of a haunted house. “It’s not that good, and the pages are pretty marked up. This is something Elliot would read. He’s my little brother.”
Opening the book, Malachi tore out a page and said, “Well, he would have been reading it back then. He’s thirteen now. It’s hard for me to picture him as thirteen. I asked my mother if he stopped picking his nose while I was gone, but she didn’t think that was funny.” He balled up the paper and threw it at a trashcan. Making the basket, he ripped out a second page that was decorated in blue marker.
She had seen so many adolescent boys content to give one to two-word answers, or do nothing more than sulk and grunt as communication. Getting them to speak took creativity on her part, and sometimes she still got nowhere. Malachi Harris was a veritable chatterbox in comparison. “How old are your sisters?”
“Nineteen and seventeen,” Malachi said, adding, “Now, not then. They’re old enough to visit me in the hospital, but no, it’s all part of the Big Reveal.” He rolled his gray eyes. “Stupid, huh?”
“I see you got your haircut.”
“For fuck’s sake, I’m twenty-two.” He said the number with a little uncertainty as he ripped out more pages. “We’ve always fought about my hair.”
It was such an innocuous style to her, nothing remotely worth a fight. This was a good look for him, a little rakish and quite appealing. “Why?”
“Mom thinks it’s sloppy. She calls it my princess hair when she’s really pissed. Or she looks at me and says in fake-surprise that she didn’t realize she had a third daughter. Dad thinks anything longer than a crew cut means a guy is gay. I have no idea why he believes that. He’s actually got a bigger problem with women who have short hair, but Mom eggs him on with me. There’s a huge family blowout about it every few months at home. My sister Laurie calls it the Harris Hair Wars.”
His verb tense was the present. “That sounds very frustrating,” Ryla said as he crumpled the pages one by one.
“Yeah. Around and around we go on the same old carousel. Laurie and Mandy don’t like having their hair down to their elbows, but that’s how Dad likes it. He gets bitchy whenever they cut it too high, like mid-back.” Malachi offered her a bunched-up page. She threw it at the trashcan, where it bounced off the rim and landed on the floor.
“It’s some weird obsession with him,” Malachi said. “When my aunt was being treated for cancer, she shaved off her hair rather than watch it fall out in clumps. Dad kept hammering at my mom to ask her sister why she wouldn’t wear a wig. On and on and on. Her bald head totally offended him and she was sick. Then he was even more offended when it finally grew back and she didn’t let it get below her shoulders.”
Snappishly, Malachi said, “But who cares? Who walks around thinking about other people’s hair all the time? How empty do you have to be to do that? I don’t ever want to be so vacant. But it’s just one of their things, both Mom and Dad. Hair, hair, hair.”
“Do they have a lot of things?” Ryla asked as they threw more pages to the trash. The dog watched in quiet enjoyment, stretching out a paw to flatten a missed basket.
“That sounded too much like a prying therapist,” Malachi said. “Talk to me like you’re real. Talk to me about something that’s happened in your life, something kind of sexist like my dad with my aunt.”
These were not things she wanted to dredge up and talk about under normal circumstances, but this room felt oddly a world apart. “It reminds me of the day when I took JoJo out to the store dressed in one of his big sisters’ old baby T-shirts. He was three, four months old. The shirt was light green, with pink flowers on the sleeves. The bagboy almost had a fit when I was at the register. He was very concerned about how I was dressing my son.”
“Did you tell him to blow off?”
“More politely than that, but yes. JoJo was too young to mind what he had on, and he was just going to spit up on it anyway. It was bizarre to me that the bagboy cared so much about what I put my son in.”
“My parents wouldn’t have said anything to your face, they’re too polite to walk up to a total stranger and do that, but they�
�d be whispering about it behind your back. They’re as mentally pliable as a two-by-four. Are you feeling better?”
It took her a moment to follow the jump. “Yes, I’m better.”
“I didn’t mean to gross you out. I don’t know why I did that. It kind of grossed me out, too.”
“Yesterday you were expressing a lot of anger.”
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” He looked over to her with a broad smile at how she’d slipped back into therapist mode. “Yes, I was expressing a lot of anger. I didn’t sign on to be the mascot of Settlement 3. You know what a mascot is?”
“It’s a symbol of luck and togetherness. Fighting spirit.” They lobbed their paper balls, which struck each other in mid-air before falling into the can.
“Rah-rah-rah!” Malachi exclaimed. “But what it really is, that’s what I mean.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s a costume. A puppet. There’s nothing real inside a puppet. It’s inflated with other people’s bullshit. And I know what you want to ask. You want to ask if I feel like a puppet.”
“You said it. I didn’t.”
“I am a puppet. I’m only supposed to give the answers they feed me. You’re going home soon, kid! How does that feel? Bubble in one. A: Great! B: Great! C: Great! D: Great! E: All of the above.”
“How does it really feel?”
“Great!” he said with cheery insincerity. Bongo wagged her tail. “And now they’re going to trot me out as their zombie mascot, the mascot of greatness, pull the cord in my back and make me spew their bullshit onto the audience. Great! I’m great! So that’s great! And you’re great! Isn’t it great? Should I do a little dance, too? Rah-rah-rah!” He jerked spasmodically in his chair.
“What would you rather say to them?” Ryla asked.
The question took him aback. Settling down, he said, “I don’t know.”
They lobbed paper balls, Ryla making it and Malachi missing.
“Would you give it if you were in my position?” Malachi asked. “The speech?”
“I can’t say.”
He crunched a page in each hand and passed her one. “Because you’re a therapist and this is all about me?”
“No. I genuinely don’t know what I would do in your shoes. When I was your age, I was thinking about college. Guys. Homework. Earning money for a car. I couldn’t possibly have imagined . . .” She gestured all around them with her paper basketball. “This.”
He juggled a ball between his hands rather than throw it. “Would you give it now? Let yourself get propelled up there to talk about how great everything is?”
“I would have to think about it.”
“What is there to think about?”
“Why exactly they want me to give the speech.”
He scoffed. “They want to show me off. Here are the marvels of science and perseverance and believing in your dreams! They can pat themselves on the back and have everyone pat them on the back, too.”
“There could be a degree of truth to that. They’re proud of what they’ve accomplished in you.”
He threw his ball and made it. “They should have invented a robot instead.”
“Some of the medical staff and those in government might look at you as an experiment, the experiment that finally worked. But who will you be to the audience?”
“Just some dope they’ve never seen before.”
She looked at him. He shifted his attention to the dog, scratching between her floppy ears. Letting go of the urge to press him further, Ryla picked up a missed basket by her foot and tossed it into the can.
“It’s a lie,” Malachi said quietly. “They want me to stand up there and lie to make them look good. I’m not anyone to the people who will be gawking up at me.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Then tell me who I am, because I sure as hell don’t know.”
“You’re their son,” Ryla said softly. “You’re their brother; you’re their grandson; you’re their nephew; you’re their friend. No, not those actual people, but a representation of them. You are hope, the one thing they haven’t had any of for a long time. If you came back from the dead, then there’s a chance that someone they love will come back, too.”
He rubbed at his eyes and winced like the contacts were bothering him. “I thought you didn’t care if I gave the speech.”
“I don’t. I’m not going to talk you into or out of it. But you should know exactly who you are up there, and it’s far from just a science experiment.”
“It’s still a lie. And I wasn’t dead. But you can’t know.”
“They look dead to me, the times I’ve seen them. They may be upright, but they’re dead.”
“No.” With excruciating slowness, he tore a page from the book, which was now half-disemboweled. “My best friends were Kelton and Lorenzo. Kelton was in the top five of our class without even trying. Lorenzo was a doofus, but he was funny. Always in his happy place no matter what was going on around him.”
This was striking too close to home for him, and he was backing away. She followed him, marking his usage of past tense. “Were you all in the same grade?”
“Yeah, seniors. We met in kindergarten. Other friends came and went but the three of us were always tight. I loved going over to their homes. Lorenzo’s parents, Kelton’s parents, they weren’t like mine.”
“How were they different?”
He took her measure, and chose to answer. “In every way. I could just be myself there. Like one time we were doing skateboard tricks at Kelton’s house when we were eight or nine and I biffed it on a crack in the sidewalk, got all banged up on the concrete and I was trying so hard not to cry. And Kelton’s dad came running over to see if I was okay and patch me up. He told me it was okay to cry, instead of shake it off, man up, stop being such a wimp, cry and I’ll give you something to cry about, I’m not raising a fag, like my dad would say.”
He recited his father’s responses in a weary rapid-fire, like these were things he had heard on a regular basis throughout his childhood. “What do you think about that?” he asked Ryla.
“I think everyone cries.”
“But I didn’t know that until then. It blew my mind, having this big soldier dad telling me that it was okay, that soldiers cry, too. I can’t even tell you how much it blew my mind. I was over there for dinner all the time and it was so different. My mom and dad talk at you over dinner. Kelton’s dad talked with you. He always wanted to know who I was, not who I was pretending to be. So I could let loose over there. I didn’t have to hide parts of me. If I had questions about something, a problem, I went to him. I hated having to stuff it all back in when I went home.”
He crumpled the paper just as slowly as he had ripped it out of the book. “I was jealous of Kelton for having a dad like that. He was a soldier but their house wasn’t a war. Mine was a war.”
“That must have made your friends and their families even more important to you.”
“Yeah. If you don’t let it out somewhere, you go crazy. So I stuck to Lorenzo and Kelton like glue so I wouldn’t go crazy. If I ever needed anything, they’d be there in a shot and I’d do the same for them. We didn’t have to bullshit with each other. We could play video games and just talk like real people. Not guys trying to out-tough each other.”
Abruptly, Malachi laughed. “We got in trouble for gluing our hands together in first grade art, and in the third grade play, we were cast as trees in a forest. We couldn’t act for shit. So we just stood there during rehearsals on a corner of the stage trying to hit each other with our branches and cracking ourselves up. Lorenzo fell over during the actual performance and couldn’t get up. He was just howling and rolling around down there and the audience was howling too, because we were trying to help him but our branches just kept getting in the way. The teacher had to step out from behind the curtain to pick him up. And then in junior high, we had P.E. all together once. Lorenzo was so proud of his eleven-minute miles and we didn’t have t
he heart to tell him how much that sucked. His happy place, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I wanted to buy a one-way ticket to that happy place of his. Kelton and I would smack him on the back and say the Olympics better watch out while the coach stared at us like we were insane. In high school, we hung out in the same group of friends for lunch and after school we were always on our phones shooting texts and pictures back and forth. And then we were out there.”
“Beyond the fence?” Ryla asked in confusion.
“Yeah.”
“All three of you were together?”
“Yeah. We didn’t think. We couldn’t have said each other’s names, or our names or anything else. But we weren’t dead. You can’t call us that.”
“How did you find each other after being changed? Were you changed together?”
“No. It wasn’t finding each other like looking. Purposely searching. Nothing like that. We came together somewhere along the way. Gravitated to one another. It was like I could smell them and they could smell me, and we followed the scent until we were in the same place.”
“Did you understand anything at all about who you were to each other?”
“No. I just felt that they were the ones I was supposed to be with, and that we were supposed to be here in this place. We weren’t holding hands or anything out there, but we stayed close by. We hunted together.”
His chest folded in as if he had absorbed a sharp blow. “I can stop so you don’t hurl again. I’m not trying to gross you out now.”
“It’s all right. I want to understand.”
“You aren’t thinking when you’re like that. You aren’t feeling happy or sad or angry; you don’t have bad memories or good ones or anything. You’ve got no concept about college or your GPA, or that the trash needs to go out on Thursday night. You’re blank.”
“How is that not death to you? Our lives are made up of our thoughts and emotions, our hopes and fears, dreams and memories.”
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