Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  This was my first time in Miami Beach. Gina had moved here only nine months earlier. She ran a small company in partnership with her husband of fifteen years, a New Yorker called Dan Bazalget. They had met in New York during an electronics product-launch event; they had both been working in PR, for the same company on different sides of the Atlantic. They had already been in their forties, with the complicated pasts you acquire by that age; Gina had a childless divorce behind her, and Dan actually had a twenty-year-old daughter, whom I'd never met. But once they had glommed onto each other they had soon gone into business together, and then sailed into parenthood, producing two fine boys as easily as shelling peas, despite Gina's age. Now, based on Gina's Florida inheritance, they sold something called "conference visioning and management" — coordinating probably unnecessary conferences for senior business types.

  My father the accountant had always mocked Gina's job title. "I mean, can you take a degree in 'conference visioning'?" he would ask. Well, actually, yes, you could. I didn't begrudge Gina her thoroughly modern choice of career or her commercial success — not much, anyhow, given the usual sibling-rivalry envy for a sister who in every aspect of her life had always seemed to do better than I ever had.

  When I had passed most of the big hotels I cut inland, passing through an alleyway. I crossed Ocean Drive

  , where even the police officers wore skintight shorts, to reach a main street called Collins Avenue

  . I bought a small tourist map for a few dollars from a drugstore and briskly toured Miami Beach's highlights. There was an art deco area, a small district peppered with ornately decorated buildings — hotels, private homes, banks, bars, some set behind heavy security gates. The most beautiful building of all seemed to be the town's main post office, a pointlessly grand edifice across whose magnificent floor queues snaked desolately.

  I couldn't quite get the city into focus. There was a faint sense of sleaze about the place, of a past of dirty money and menace — and yet somebody had made a determined effort to clean it up, as witness the alarm buttons on the boardwalk. And I knew my sister well enough to know she wouldn't bring her kids to a place she couldn't make them safe. Still, I was relieved to get back to the boardwalk, and the huge physical presence of the sea.

  I never watch American TV. Those constant ad breaks make me feel hyperactive, as if I've been taking too much sugar. I ordered up a movie, a comedy, and a room service "snack," bigger than most Sunday lunches back home, with a half bottle of Californian Chardonnay. I was asleep before the movie was over.

  • • •

  "George. Lovely to see you, et cetera." She took my shoulders and actually gave me an air-kiss, her left cheek brushing mine, her lips missing me by a good couple of inches. Automatically I shaped up for a second kiss on the right, but I'd forgotten that's the European way — in America you get just the one.

  Well, that was about as much affection as I generally got from Gina.

  She said, "As you can see I took time off work to see you, though Dan couldn't get away. The boys are on their way home from school. I secured them a half day off." Her accent was vaguely mid-Atlantic.

  "I appreciate that..."

  Her house was modern, the walls wooden, perhaps a little sun-bleached around the front door. The rooms were filled with light, lined with bookcases and TVs — it seemed there was a set in every room, and in most a computer — and there was a bright but slightly irritating smell, perhaps of pine-scented air freshener. This was a big, sprawling homestead set in an extensive acreage of finely cut lawn, over which sprinklers hissed, even at this hour, eleven in the morning. There is always so much space in America, so much room.

  But the first thing I saw when I walked into her hallway was Dad's grandfather clock.

  It was a big, moth-eaten, unmistakable relic, whose heavy, tarnished pendulum and time-stained clock face had made it a kind of focal point of our childhood. I hadn't noticed it missing in my clear-out visits to the house in Manchester. But now here it was — it looked as if it might even have been renovated — and I realized that Gina must have taken it from Dad, presumably with his consent, before he died.

  She saw me looking at the damn clock. We both knew what it signified. It wasn't that I wanted the clock, or would have stopped her taking it, but I would have appreciated some discussion over this bit of our shared heritage. It wasn't a good start to the visit.

  She took me to a breakfast room, sat me at a polished pine table, and loaded a coffee percolator. We sat and talked, inconsequentially, about the continuing fallout from our father's death: the sale of the house, his business affairs. She didn't ask me about my own life, but then she never did.

  She looked her age, midfifties, but good with it. She looked physically relaxed, the way you do if you work out just enough. She'd let her thick blond hair fill with gray, and it was swept back from her temples and forehead, a little severely. I always thought of her face as a far more beautiful version of mine, her features more delicate, her chin smaller, her nose not quite so fleshy. Now wrinkles spread around her eyes and mouth, and her skin was a little weather-beaten, polished by the Florida sun. But she still had the family eyes, limpid and clear gray, what one of her boyfriends used to call smoke-filled.

  We ran out of facts to swap, and the silence was briefly awkward.

  She said, "It's good of you to come. It's important to be with family at a time like this. Et cetera."

  "So it is," I said. It was true. For all the unending tension between us, as I looked into that face that was so like my own, I felt a certain peace I had lost since Dad's death.

  But she broke the spell by saying sharply, "I know you think I should have stayed longer after the funeral."

  "You've got your life to live here. It was easier for me to handle it."

  "I suppose it was," she said. It was a coded put-down, of course. You had the time because, by contrast with me, you don't have a life. That's sibling rivalry for you.

  I pulled her scrapbook about Regina out of my jacket pocket and put it on the table. "I found this at home. I don't remember you making it."

  "Before your time, I suppose."

  "I thought you might want it."

  She pulled the dog-eared little book toward her. She didn't pick it up, but turned the pages with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. It was as if I had presented her with her afterbirth pickled in a jar. She said coldly, "Thanks."

  I was irritated, with her and myself. "Shit, Gina. Why do we find it so hard to get on? Even at a time like this. I'm not here to fight—"

  "Then why?" she said coldly.

  "For Rosa," I said without hesitation. I was satisfied to see how her smoke-filled eyes, so similar to mine, widened.

  That was when the boys burst in, to our mutual relief.

  • • •

  "George!" "Hey, Uncle George..."

  Michael was ten, John twelve. They were wearing summer gear, T-shirts, shorts, and huge, expensive-looking trainers. Michael had some kind of complicated Frisbee under his arm. I actually got a hug from Michael, and a punch on the shoulder from his older brother, hard enough to hurt. From those two I took whatever I could get.

  I could see their gazes wandering around the kitchen. "Go to my hire car and take a look in the boot."

  "The trunk," they chorused.

  "Whatever. Go, go."

  I always enjoyed playing the indulgent uncle, if only because I had a knack of spotting presents that suited my nephews' tastes. John always seemed a little duller than his brother, and would be content with computer games and the like, passive entertainments. But little Michael was always a tinkerer. Once I found an old Meccano set — an antique from the sixties, from my own childhood, but in mint condition. Michael had loved it.

  My gifts didn't work quite so well this time. I'd bought them both robot-making kits. You'd put together a motor and wheelbase with a processor you could command via a PC interface, so producing a little beetlelike creature that could scuttl
e around the room, avoiding chair legs. The beetles could even learn simple tasks, like how to push a table-tennis ball up a ramp. But in the better American schools they build critters like this for homework. The boys dutifully played with the kits for a while, though.

  We ate lunch, a simple but typically delicious fish salad — my sister was annoyingly good at everything — and Gina sent us all outside the house.

  Over the immense back lawn we chased Michael's Frisbee back and forth. He had modified it: it had a series of round holes carved neatly around its perimeter. It shot through the air like a spinning bullet. More engineering: later Michael showed me a whole collection of modified Frisbees, kept in a box under his bed.

  He was actually working through a series of experiments in a systematic way, using a bunch of stuff from junk shops and friends' lofts, trying to design a better Frisbee. At first he had done what you'd expect a kid to do, cutting out smiley faces, building on cabins for model soldiers, installing gigantic fins. But he'd quickly progressed to experiments focused on improving the Frisbees' actual aerodynamic performance. He had cut out patterned holes, or notched their edges, or scratched spirals and loops into their surfaces. He was even keeping a little log on his computer, with a scanned-in photograph of each change, and results given as objectively as he could, such as records of greatest distance achieved. I was impressed, but I felt kind of wistful, for I would have loved to have been around to share this with him.

  I found flying that damn Frisbee hard work, however. When the boys had been smaller it had been easy for me to keep ahead of them. But now John was nearly as tall as me, and both of them were a hell of a lot more athletic. I was soon puffing hard, and embarrassed at my lack of competence with the Frisbee. And tensions between the two of them soon emerged. They made up a catching game with rules that quickly elaborated far beyond my comprehension, and when John infringed a rule — or anyhow Michael thought he did — the bickering started.

  Anyhow, so it went. Running around that sandy lawn, with the Atlantic breakers rumbling in the background, I worked as hard as I could while the boys barely broke a sweat, and it was with relief that I welcomed the next milestone in the day, which was Dan's arrival home from work.

  "Hey, boys." He left his briefcase at the back door of the house and came bounding out onto the lawn to join in the Frisbee game. "George! How's the mother ship?"

  "England swings, Dan."

  He asked about my flight and my hotel, and I was gratified that Michael started telling him about my robot kit. We played for a while. Then we took a walk along the beach — sandy and empty, a private stretch reserved for the estate of which this house was a part.

  As the boys ran ahead, still impossibly full of energy, Dan and I walked together. Dan Bazalget was a big man, built like a rugby player. I knew he had played football at college, thirty years before, and his bulk seemed too large for his short-sleeved white shirt. His face was broad, his eyes small. He was bald, and had shaved the remnant fringe of his hair, so that his head gleamed like a cannonball.

  Dan was good at conversation. He asked me about the aftermath of Dad's death, and unlike my sister drew me out a little about the state of my life, my work. But there was always an odd reserve about him, his deep brown eyes unreadable. He would look at me and smile, ostensibly generous, neither judging nor caring. To him I was surely just an appendage of his wife's past, neither welcome nor unwelcome in his life, just there.

  As the sun began its journey down the western sky, we returned home for dinner, the boys running ahead, still whooping, hollering, and fighting.

  • • •

  The meal was strained. The kids picked up on the tension and were subdued. Gina was polite enough during the meal, and her gentle chiding of her children for lapses in manners and so forth was as calm and efficient as ever. But her smiles were steel and fooled nobody.

  Before the dessert she went to the kitchen, and I joined her, ostensibly to stack dishes and help make coffee.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "For what?"

  "For springing that on you about Rosa. It wasn't fair."

  "No, it wasn't." She loaded her dishwasher with as much aggression as her expensive crockery would allow her.

  "But I know she exists, Gina. Or at least existed." I told her about the photograph.

  She sighed and faced me. "And now you're asking me."

  "You must know. You must have been — what, twelve, thirteen? You saw her born, growing up—"

  "I don't want to think about this."

  "I need you to tell me the truth," I said, my voice harder. "I think you have a duty, Gina. You're my sister, for Christ's sake. You're all I've got left. Et cetera. I even know where they sent her — to some kind of school, run by a religious order in Rome. The Puissant Order of—"

  "Holy Mary Queen of Virgins." I knew she must have known, but it was still a shock to me to hear those words from her lips. "Yes, they sent her there. She was about four, I think."

  "Why send her away — why to Italy, for God's sake?"

  "Remember I was only a kid myself, George... Take a guess. The simplest reason of all."

  "Money?"

  "Damn right. Remember, I was about ten when you were born. It had been a long gap. Mum and Dad had taken a long time trying to decide if they could raise another kid. You know how cautious Dad was. Well, along you came, but they hadn't banked on twins — you and Rosa."

  "We were twins?" Shit, I hadn't known that. Another kick in the head.

  "And then, just after you two were born, they ran into trouble; Dad lost his job, I think. The timing of it all was one of God's little jokes. They didn't tell me much, but it was going to be a struggle: I remember they talked about selling the house. They wrote to relatives, asking for help and advice. And then this offer came in, from the Order. They'd take in Rosa, school her, care for her. Suddenly, with just you, they were back to the position they'd bargained for when they decided to have a second kid."

  I felt a complex melange of emotions — relief, envy. "Why her, not me?"

  "The Order only takes girls."

  "Why didn't she come back?"

  She said, "Maybe the Order has rules. I don't know. I wasn't privy to the discussions."

  I wondered briefly why, if my parents had always been as hard up as they claimed, my dad had continued to send money to the Order, long after Rosa must have completed her education.

  "They never told me about Rosa," I said. "Not a word."

  "What good would it have done?... I swore it would never happen to me," Gina said suddenly.

  "What?"

  "Being so poor you have to send your kid away. Et cetera." She was staring at the wall.

  For once I thought I could read her. I'd only been seeing this from my point of view. But Gina had been old enough to understand what was happening, though of course she'd only been a helpless kid herself. When Rosa was sent away, she must have been afraid it would be her next.

  Impulsively I put a hand on her arm. She flinched away.

  She said, "Look, Mum and Dad believed they were doing the best for Rosa. I'm sure of that."

  I shook my head. "I'm no parent. But I don't see how any mother could send her little kid away to a religious order full of strangers."

  She frowned. "But they didn't. How much do you know about the Order?"

  "The name. Rome." Apart from a request that I keep up Dad's payments, which I'd refused, the Order hadn't responded to my emailed requests for information. "Oh, the genealogy business."

  "George, that's not even the half of it. The Order are family. Our family. That's how Uncle Lou made contact with them in the first place."

  "Lou?" He was actually our mother's uncle, my great-uncle.

  "He was in the forces — the American forces — during the war. He was in Italy at the end, and somehow found them. The Order. And he found out they saw us as a kind of long-lost branch of the family."

  "How so?"

  "Becaus
e of Regina."

  "Who?... Not the Roman girl. That's just a family legend."

  "Not a legend. History, George."

  "It can't be. Nobody can trace their family tree that far back. Not even the queen, for God's sake."

  She shrugged. "Suit yourself. Anyhow Lou always kept the contact to the Order, and later when Mum and Dad got into trouble—"

  I eyed her. "Dad sent money to this damn Order. Do you?"

  "Hell, no," she snapped back. "Look, George, don't cross-examine me. I don't even want to talk about this."

  "No, you never did, did you?" I asked coldly. "You left it all behind, when you came here—"

  "Yes, away from that cramped little island with its stifling history. And away from our murky family bullshit. I wanted my kids to grow up here, in the light and the space. Can you blame me? But now it's all chased me here..." She became aware she was raising her voice. Only a screen separated this part of the kitchen from the dining area.

  "Gina, do you think all families are like ours?"

  "One way or another," she said. "Like huge bombs, and we all spend the rest of our lives picking our way through the rubble."

  "I'm going after her." I was making the decision as I spoke. "I'm going to find Rosa."

  "Why?"

  "Because she's my sister. My twin."

  "If you think that will help you sort out your screwed-up head, be my guest. But whatever happens, whatever you find, don't tell me about it. I mean it." She actually shut her eyes and mouth, as if to exclude me.