The Reach

by Nate Kenyon

  The land lies abandoned as all around it life goes on. The Wasserman Facility has joined the ghosts of its kin, and memories of the laughter and screams of the children are all that remain, until even those drift away, carried by the stiff breeze.

  The burial was held on Wednesday morning, in a graveyard in Wellesley adjacent to a white clapboard church. About fifty people gathered under a drizzling rain, their faces matching the color of the sky. Black umbrellas clutched in white-knuckled fists held off the worst of it. The expressions of those in the first row were blank, or tired, or bored.

  They probably barely knew her.

  But as Jess Chambers looked more closely she began to see familiar faces. A few of the mourners were colleagues; she recognized Professor Thomas with a younger woman, who clung to his arm with one hand and clutched a handkerchief in the other. Some of those gathered along the right were students, red-eyed and blowing their noses into white tissue as Jean Shelley’s casket swung and scraped against dirt on its way down.

  The casket was a symbolic gesture. They had been unable to recover anything at all from the wreckage of the fire. The inferno in the observation room had blazed so hot and strong that even Shelley’s bones had been reduced to dust, every trace of her existence erased and blown away.

  Evan Wasserman, or what they thought was left of him, would be laid to rest tomorrow in the plot adjacent to Jean Shelley, as his will had requested.

  She searched the faces again, looking for those who might appear to be a bit more out of place. She recognized two of the investigators who had already spoken to her at length at the hospital, and another younger man who might be a plainclothes cop. But nobody else stood out. Anyone left from Helix or the Wasserman Facility would be too smart to come here, she thought. Their business with Sarah was done, and Shelley’s and Berger’s deaths had probably thrown everything into chaos. They would wash their hands publicly of the entire mess. If there was anyone left at all who knew the full truth.

  The whole story was still coming together in bits and pieces, very few of which the investigators had shared with her. But they clearly didn’t know everything either. What was clear was that Jean Shelley, with a large portion of the significant holdings she had inherited from her father’s steel business, had founded Helix Pharmaceuticals nearly eight years before with at least two other players. It was a privately held company specializing in gene therapy and small-molecule drug discovery, and had remained fiercely independent and guarded until recently, when rumors had begun to float about an investment opportunity. It was said that the company was offering a significant stake in a particularly exciting preclinical program, before an IND had even been filed. They would need a large cash infusion to move into clinical testing. None of this had been confirmed yet, but it was likely only a matter of time before more details came to light.

  Why someone with a fortune as large as Shelley’s would have taken a job on the faculty of a small graduate school wasn’t immediately clear. The most obvious explanation, that Shelley had planned the whole thing even as far as five years back, raised other unsettling questions that Jess would rather not explore. It was more likely that she had done it simply because she could, and because it left her closer to where Sarah was being held.

  For the past two days, Jess had been struggling to come to terms with a new image of herself, and it wasn’t pretty. She had let Jean Shelley play her like a fine baby grand. The professor had manipulated and controlled her nearly every step of the way.

  The fact that Shelley was an authority figure should not matter in the slightest, Jess told herself. She was being trained to notice just this sort of deceit in other people. She should have been more aware of what was happening.

  She felt unbalanced, unsure of herself or her own motivations.

  But this wasn’t the only thing she was struggling to understand. Another part of her mind had yet to face something even more unsettling. Shelley and Gee had told her she was a psi carrier. What’s more, she had been dosed with some sort of drug. Were they telling the truth, and if so, what exactly had it done to her? What did it all mean, if anything?

  The minister said his last few words and closed his Bible with a snap, hunched against the wind and drizzle. When the ceremony was finished and the mourners had begun to file away, Charlie gave her a gentle hug, careful to avoid the painful spots. Then she held her at arm’s length and looked her over. Jess knew she was pale and rumpled, out of sorts. “You’re the walking wounded, girl. Should have stayed in that hospital bed.”

  “I had to come, Charlie.” I had to see her into the ground. Even if she’s not really in there.

  “Don’t I know it. But that doesn’t mean a whit to your poor old body.”

  “I’m fine, really. Just some scrapes and bruises. I’m like one of those dumb lucky miracles, people who get hit by lightning and walk away with barely a scratch.”

  “Are you done with the talking?”

  “I’ve got interviews later today. They let me off the hook to come here, but they’re itching to get back to it.”

  “What are you telling them?”

  “Nothing really. They don’t know a thing about Sarah. Children’s Services had her as deceased for years. As far as the government’s concerned, she doesn’t exist, and I’m not going to do anything to change that.”

  The official theory so far of the destruction of die Wasserman Facility was a rupture in the ancient gas line that ran all the way from Blue Hills to the old Boston State Hospital complex. Pockets of trapped gas had gathered in various locations underground, and when one of them was sparked by an electrical short the explosion caused a chain reaction, taking Wasserman’s building down along with the surrounding brush and half the street.

  How that explained die rest of it, Jess had no idea. There were too many dead men at die scene, along with die pieces of the destroyed helicopter scattered among die debris. Someone would have to be held accountable.

  “You done good,” Charlie said. “I know it might not seem like it right now, but what happened is the way it had to be. Someday you’ll see it the same.”

  “Maybe, Charlie. Maybe you’re right. But it doesn’t keep me from feeling pretty damn guilty. A lot of people died. I could have done something differently, gotten her out somehow without causing her to tear the whole place to shreds. You know?”

  “They would have killed you, to keep her,” Charlie said. “You know it as well as I do. There was nothing that could have changed that. It was fate. That and the almighty dollar.”

  Jess looked out across the cemetery to the street. For some reason, she thought about Maria’s face. Embrujado. Haunted. Something shiny winked in her eyes, and then was gone. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said.

  “What you need is a hot bath, lots of bubbles, and someone to scrub you raw.”

  “I’m going to disappear for a while, Charlie,” she said. “I’m leaving Thomas Ward. I just can’t bring myself to care about the degree anymore. This whole experience has changed my perspective. I don’t know if psychology is the field for me.”

  “Take your time, sweetheart. Don’t make any rash decisions. The mental health field will be a colder, darker place without you in it. Can I see you back to the hospital?”

  “I’ve got an errand to run first, a couple of them actually.”

  “I’ll go with you, then. You blew up my car, I can’t go anywhere else right now anyway.”

  Jess looked at Charlie and saw that there would be no changing her mind. She smiled, insanely glad at that moment to have such a friend, and wondering how on earth she had earned the honor. “We’ll take a taxi,” she said.

  Over one hundred yards away, Philippa Cruz lowered the binoculars and handed them to the driver standing to her right, and he switched the umbrella he was holding to his other hand to take them.

  Droplets of water spattered the shoulders of her suit jacket. She rubbed at her eyes to get the grit out. She’d forgotten the last
time she had slept. Her hair was lying limply across her face and the fine lines around her mouth and brow had become more pronounced. It had been a very long couple of days.

  They were parked among a row of other cars and far enough down the street to remain unnoticed, but she had a clear line of sight to the graveyard and the small group of people gathered there. With the high-powered binoculars, it was almost as if she stood shoulder to shoulder with Jess Chambers.

  “No sign of her,” Cruz said. Not that she had expected the girl to be there anyway. They would be keeping her out of sight for a while, maybe forever. That is, if she was still alive.

  Cruz had been on the premises when the disaster had taken place. Unlike Steven Berger, she had decided early on not to stick around and see what happened. Cruz was not interested in saving any lives except her own, and she supposed that saving lives had not been Berger’s motivation either. He had remained out of pure greed. They had not had the time to remove their most sensitive and important research, and he was simply trying to protect his valuable assets.

  What Berger didn’t know was that Cruz had been keeping separate records on all of her own findings since the beginning. She was far too smart to lose them in something as silly as a fire.

  She watched as the mourners slowly filed out of the cemetery. The big black woman hugged Chambers and they talked for a few minutes. Then a taxi pulled up to the curb, and the two women got in.

  Cruz was dying to know what exactly Chambers could do now, if anything. She had received four separate doses of the dimerizer drug, which should have been enough to induce psi gene expression for some time. But it was impossible to tell for sure without a blood test.

  Through careful research, they had identified her as one out of a possible three carriers in the area. Shelley had been instrumental in making all that happen, using her many contacts in the medical community to identify those with a family history of the particular type of autism that served as a marker for psi, then working up detailed psych profiles based on any significant events or trauma in the subject’s past. The final step, DNA testing, was a relatively simple process that could be accomplished by acquiring hair, blood, or skin samples.

  Their extensive research had shown that psi carriers often formed some sort of mental link to each other. Shelley had hoped that Jess would be able to draw Sarah out and influence her to perform for them. The evidence was still foggy on that, as far as Cruz was concerned. She strongly suspected that it was her new formulation of the dimerizer drug that had caused the girl to come out of her fugue, but now they might never know for sure.

  The ultimate plan had been to make Jess Chambers the second subject in the later phases of their testing model, in order to verify the effectiveness of the drug candidate. Psi carriers would be the first target, and she was a perfect choice since she hadn’t shown any obvious signs of ability before. The gene was natural to the carriers and simply had to be activated and then controlled, which was a much easier thing than cloning and implanting the gene on an adenovirus, then injecting it into the muscle tissue of a noncarrier.

  One step at a time, Cruz thought. It was difficult for her to hold back, to let the science develop. She was so eager to try new things.

  Now they would have to come up with an alternate plan. Another carrier, perhaps. Or she could just go ahead and clone the gene, multiple samples of which were still sitting in storage in a safe location. Either way, she would have to let the girl go for a while. The shiny new facility in Alabama was empty and waiting for them, but everything was too hot at the moment. She needed to sit out the storm.

  Moving everything overseas for a year would serve the purpose nicely.

  She opened the back door to the car and slid inside, welcoming the warm, dry puff of air against her skin. The Asian man in the back offered her a small white towel. She dabbed at her face and neck. The towel had been heated against the vent. That was the most pleasing part of Asian culture, their thoughtfulness.

  That and the money this man could offer her. Enough to fund the project for two more years in relative quiet and seclusion.

  The Asian man asked her if she was comfortable. She smiled, nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Shall we go? I believe the plane is waiting.”

  He gave the nod to the driver and they pulled out into traffic, the long black car blending in among the others as they wound their way toward a new future.

  Jess and Charlie stopped briefly at a Hallmark gift shop, and then climbed back into the taxi for the ride to the group home in Cambridge.

  The general feeling about public housing for the mentally ill in Massachusetts has seen a dramatic change in recent years. State-run permanent residence programs are few and far between. The Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, or DMH, provides mostly rehabilitative residential programs; group homes and shared apartments are the rule, and patients may remain in them until they learn how to live on their own.

  The Young Adult Shared Apartment Program is part of DMH’s Specialized Rehabilitative Residential Programs, and it is exclusively for clients between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven. Residents share an apartment with other roommates, and receive twenty-four-hour counseling and support, including educational and community activities.

  Charlie remained in the car. Jess was directed by a very cheerful woman to the third level of rooms, where Dennis Brigham was being introduced to his new surroundings.

  The young man was sitting on his bed and a counselor was working with him on tactile impressions, letting him touch and examine the comforter, the pillow, the small study desk that would remain his property through the duration of his stay.

  Jess stood in the doorway and studied him. He still had the same red baseball cap yanked down tightly over his head, and his socks were pulled up over his calves. He had been cleanly shaved this morning.

  “Hello, Dennis,” she said. “How are you feeling today? I’ve brought you something.”

  He cocked his head at her and offered a very wide smile, but she could not tell if he recognized her or not. She kept some respectful distance between them, and held out the fluffy white teddy bear with the red ribbon around its neck. It was the best the Hallmark store had to offer, and though it looked nothing like the one she had given to Sarah, the one Dennis had tried to take from her that day in the playroom, it would have to do.

  The counselor, a pleasantly round man in his thirties with glasses and a receding hairline, took the bear from her and put it on the bed. “He’ll need to get used to it,” the man said. “There are a lot of new things in his world these days. We’re working on touch. He’s got a bit of an issue with personal contact.”

  “I know,” she said. “I was with him, before. I helped out a little bit at the Wasserman Facility.”

  “Ah, okay. So you do know, then. Would you like a moment with him?”

  She nodded. Dennis had picked up the bear and was clutching it to his chest, rocking with it, slowly rocking back and forth.

  “Do you love me? Then say it. Saaaayyyy it.”

  “I love you, Dennis,” she said. “I’m very sorry about what happened.”

  The counselor had been taken by surprise when Dennis picked up the bear so quickly. Clearly there was some connection between the two of them. He watched the worn-looking young woman with concern as tears rolled down her face, made as if to touch her arm, then thought better of it. This one did not look like she liked to be touched either.

  He left them alone, closing the door quietly behind him.

  A day later, Jess was well enough to be released from the hospital. Otto howled at her when she returned to her apartment, wrapping himself around her legs and purring loudly. Charlie had been good enough to feed him, but he was clearly starving for attention. She gave him enough tight squeezes that he eventually wriggled out of her arms and went stalking off across the floor with his tail held high, as if suddenly offended by such a shameless show of need.

  She spent the next two da
ys answering a few more questions from investigators, painting in the eaves by her window, and watching the leaves fall. She was intent upon appearing to the outside world as though she were resuming her routine, and so she went shopping, saw Charlie for lunch, and played at the life of a normal twenty-something in the city.

  But inside, she was itching to go.

  A week after the fire that destroyed the Wasserman Facility, she made a few calls, notifying the school and landlord of her intentions, then packed Otto into the car and delivered him to Charlie, who accepted the burden without a second thought and gave her the information she needed. Jess saw her chance and took it.

  The address she had been given was a single-family home in a residential pocket on the outskirts of Framingham, small but carefully kept on a corner lot. Traffic was light in this neighborhood.

  Jess noticed the children’s slide and swing set, partially obscured by the hedge and gate on the side of the house. She rang the bell, and a young woman opened the door. She was pretty and lithe, with hair that tumbled across her shoulders in thick, dark curls. A little boy of about four peeked out from behind her legs. “Welcome,” she said. “Come on in. Jay-jay, go find a toy to play with, please.”

  Patrick was waiting for her in the living room. “You’ve met my sister and nephew, then,” he said, when she entered. “Isn’t he a little devil? Kate, we’ll be a few minutes.”

  “I’ll take him outside to play,” she said. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

  When the woman had left them alone, Patrick crossed the room quickly and drew Jess into his chest without a word. She remained stiff at first, and then felt herself relax and return the embrace. She was surprised to realize that it felt good.

  “You’re all right,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but a statement of relief. She nodded anyway. “I wasn’t sure of the details,” he said. “Charlie feeds me pieces of information when she can.”

  “Thank you,” Jess whispered.