I finished the water and told him I'd had enough. He put the glass aside and continued to stand there looking me over.
"Guess you know," I said after a bit.
He didn't bother nodding. "You weren't surprised, were you. Knew it almost your whole life and never told anyone."
"That how it was for you?" I asked.
He pressed his lips together. "So, was this premeditated or spontaneous?
I frowned. "What?
Loomis took a breath and let it out; not quite a sigh. "Were you always planning to save someone's life or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing?"
I hesitated. "I was gonna say spur of the moment but now I'm not so sure. Maybe I was always gonna do something like this and never knew it."
Loomis's eyebrows went up. "Good answer. Insightful. More than I was at your age. Otherwise—" he shrugged.
"Otherwise what?"
"Otherwise you're just as much a dumb-ass as any of us."
I was offended and it must have showed. He laughed and patted my hand.
"Hackles down, kid. Till the body cast comes off, anyway." He looked me over again. "Damn. Even I never took a beat-down this bad."
"Was it for nothing?" I asked.
Now it was his turn to be confused. "Say again?"
"Phil Lattimore. Did I save him?"
Fuck, no. He grimaced and poured another glass of water. Before I could tell him I didn't want any more, he drank it himself. "There are two rules, cuz. Number one: Never tell anyone. And that's anyone, even family. Never. Tell. Anyone. Never. And rule number two: Never try to save them. You can't do it. All you can do is make things worse." He gestured along the length of my body. "Exhibit A."
Alarm bells went off in my mind; I shut them out, made myself ignore the cold lump of apprehension in the middle of my chest. I'd be getting more pain medication soon; that always made all the bad feelings go away, physical and emotional. "Yeah, but I knew I was gonna be all right."
Loomis stuck one fist on his hip; the move was pure Ambrose. "You call this 'all right'? Hate to tell you, cuz, but after the casts come off, you've got a whole lot of physical therapy ahead of you and you'll probably lose a year of school. At least a year."
"You know what I mean," I said defensively. "I knew I wasn't gonna get killed. It was just Phil Lattimore. No one else."
"Yeah, that was all you needed to know, wasn't it? Only this Phil Lattimore would die so that meant everybody else would be all right." He looked at me through half-closed eyes. "Like you and Ambrose."
The lump in my chest was suddenly so large it was hard to breathe around it and my heart seemed to be laboring. "Ambrose wasn't driving, we had a flat—"
"He ran into the road after the car you were in," Loomis said. "One of those things you do without thinking. The car that swerved to keep from hitting him hit another car, which in turn hit the car you were in. Which hit him before skidding into yet another car." I started to say something but he put up a hand. "There were two fatalities—this Phil Lattimore person who was apparently too cheap to install airbags in his old land yacht and got spindled on the steering column, and someone else who you apparently hadn't met."
"But Ambrose is ali—"
"Alive, yes, and will be for another fifty-odd years," Loomis said, talking over me. "Exactly how odd nobody really knows yet. The doctors told my parents it's a miracle he survived that kind of head injury. They won't know how extensive the impairment is until he wakes up. My mother believes he's going to wake up any minute because he's breathing on his own."
It was like I was back on the floor of the car with some thug kneeling on my ribs, but harder, as if he were trying to force all the air out of my lungs.
"Hey, stay with me." I felt Loomis tapping me lightly first on one cheek and then the other. "I wasn't trying to be cruel." He ran a small ice cube back and forth across my forehead. "But you had to be told."
I started to cry, my tears mixing with the cold water running down from my forehead.
"Shouldn't have happened," Loomis went on. "Wouldn't have, but they just won't talk about it in front of the kids. They tell you everything else—why we keep the traits secret, how to be careful around those poor souls who have the misfortune and/or bad judgment to marry one of us, how to cover if you say something you shouldn't to an outsider. But not how I 'accidentally' broke a kid's wrist playing football so he couldn't go to the municipal swimming pool afterwards like he planned and drown. And he didn't. He went straight home because he didn't know his wrist was broken and he drowned in the bathtub. His parents were investigated for child abuse and his sister spent eight months in foster care."
"Stop," I said. "Please."
"They were all so mad at me, the family was." Loomis shook his head at the memory. "They claimed they weren't, they told me it wasn't really my fault because I didn't know any better. Everyone kept telling me they weren't upset with me even after the authorities found out I had broken the kid's wrist and called me in for questioning. Along with Mom and Dad and Rita. Ambrose was a baby; they examined him for bruises."
"OK. Now stop," I pleaded. "I mean it."
Loomis was talking over me again. "It all came out all right, there was no reason to be upset with me. They said and they said and they said. But after my mother searched my room and found my journal with everybody's dates in it—then they got upset. Oh, they got furious with me. I said it was my mother's fault for snooping and then telling the rest of the family about it but they weren't having any of that. Writing down those dates—how could I have done such a thing? I stuck it out till I was sixteen and then I booked."
The silence hung in the air. I closed my eyes hoping that I'd pass out or something.
"When you're well enough to travel," he said after a while, "you'll come with me."
My eyes flew open.
"Death is the one thing you never, ever even try to mess with. Everything in the world—everything in the universe changes. But not that. Death is. If you went down to the deepest circle of hell and offered resurrection to everyone there, they'd all say no and mean it."
"That's not where you live, is it?" I asked.
Loomis chuckled. "Not even close."
"They won't beg me to stay, will they? They all hate me now."
"They don't hate you," Loomis said, patting my hand again. "They love you as much as they ever did. They just don't like you very much any more."
The nurse came in with my pain medication and I closed my eyes again. "Let me know when we leave."
EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE
Rachel Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of venues, including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine, and has been collected in several year's best. She lives in Bakersfield, California, with her husband and two cats, and is seriously considering whether or not to become a crazy cat lady by adopting all four stray kittens which were recently born in her yard.
Lucian packed his possessions before he left. He packed his antique silver serving spoons with the filigreed handles; the tea roses he'd nurtured in the garden window; his jade and garnet rings. He packed the hunk of gypsum-veined jasper that he'd found while strolling on the beach on the first night he'd come to Adriana, she leading him uncertainly across the wet sand, their bodies illuminated by the soft gold twinkling of the lights along the pier. That night, as they walked back to Adriana's house, Lucian had cradled the speckled stone in his cupped palms, squinting so that the gypsum threads sparkled through his lashes.
Lucian had always loved beauty—beautiful scents, beautiful tastes, beautiful melodies. He especially loved beautiful objects because he could hold them in his hands and transform the abstraction of beauty into something tangible.
The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. "Take whatever you want," she sa
id, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.
Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. "Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?" Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose's hand. I love you, he would have whispered, but he'd surrendered the ability to speak.
He led her downstairs again to the front door. Rose's lace-festooned pink satin dress crinkled as she leapt down the steps. Lucian had ordered her dozens of satin party dresses in pale, floral hues. Rose refused to wear anything else.
Rose looked between Lucian and Adriana. "Are you taking me, too?" she asked Lucian.
Adriana's mouth tightened. She looked at Lucian, daring him to say something, to take responsibility for what he was doing to their daughter. Lucian remained silent.
Adriana's chardonnay glowed the same shade of amber as Lucian's eyes. She clutched the glass's stem until she thought it might break. "No, honey," she said with artificial lightness. "You're staying with me."
Rose reached for Lucian. "Horsey?"
Lucian knelt down and pressed his forehead against Rose's. He hadn't spoken a word in the three days since he'd delivered his letter of farewell to Adriana, announcing his intention to leave as soon as she had enough time to make arrangements to care for Rose in his absence. When Lucian approached with the letter, Adriana had been sitting at the dining table, sipping orange juice from a wine glass and reading a first edition copy of Cheever's Falconer. Lucian felt a flash of guilt as she smiled up at him and accepted the missive. He knew that she'd been happier in the past few months than he'd ever seen her, possibly happier than she'd ever been. He knew the letter would shock and wound her. He knew she'd feel betrayed. Still, he delivered the letter anyway, and watched as comprehension ached through her body.
Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father's silence was a game.
Rose's hair brushed Lucian's cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn't hold her tongue any longer.
"What do you think you're going to find out there? There's no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you're making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?"
Grief and anger filled Adriana's eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian's sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived; his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.
It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own body to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. "Just go," she said.
He left.
Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.
While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn't know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn't what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.
Mazatlan was a twenty-something's cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn't twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.
She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence's patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana's father—not to his memory, but to his death.
"Good riddance to the bastard," said Lawrence. "If he were still alive, I'd punch him in the schnoz."
"I don't even want to think about him," said Adriana. "He's dead. He's gone."
"So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?" asked Ben.
"I'm not sure," said Adriana. "Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that's all I know."
Lawrence sniffed the air. "Excuse me," he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. "The kitchen needs its genius."
When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana. "He's got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all."
"Really," said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers' quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she'd never understood.
Birds twittered in the orange trees. The fading sunlight highlighted copper strands in Ben's hair as he leaned over the mosaic table, rapping his fingers against a carnelian-backed crab. Through the arched windows, Adriana could see Lawrence mincing carrots, celery and almonds into brown paste.
"You should get a redecorator," said Ben. "Tile floors, Tuscan pottery, those red leather chairs that were in vogue last time we were in Milan. That'd make me feel like I'd been scrubbed clean and reborn."
"No, no," said Adriana, "I like where I live."
"A no-holds-barred shopping spree. Drop twenty thousand. That's what I call getting a weight off your shoulders."
Adriana laughed. "How long do you think it would take my personal shopper to assemble a whole new me?"
"Sounds like a midlife crisis," said Lawrence, returning with vegan hors d'oeuvres and three glasses of mineral water. "You're better off forgetting it all with a hot Latin pool boy, if you ask me."
Lawrence served Ben a small bowl filled with yellow mush. Ben shot Adriana an aggrieved glance.
Adriana felt suddenly out of synch. The whole evening felt like the set for a photo shoot that would go in a decorating magazine, a two-page spread featuring Cozy Gardens, in which she and Ben and Lawrence were posing as an intimate dinner party for three. She felt reduced to two dimensions, air-brushed, and then digitally grafted onto the form of whoever it was who should have been there, someone warm and trusting who knew how to care about minutia like a friend's husband putting him on a raw food diet, not because the issue was important, but because it mattered to him.
Lawrence dipped his finger in the mash and held it up to Ben's lips. "It's for your own good, you ungrateful so-and-so."
Ben licked it away. "I eat it, don't I?"
Lawrence leaned down to kiss his husband, a warm and not at all furtive kiss, not sexual but still passionate. Ben's glance flashed coyly downward.
Adriana couldn't remember the last time she'd loved someone enough to be embarrassed by them. Was this the flavor missing from her life? A lover's fingertip sliding an unwanted morsel into her mouth?
She returned home that night on the bullet train. Her emerald cockatiel, Fuoco, greeted her with indignant s
quawks. In Adriana's absence, the house puffed her scent into the air and sang to Fuoco with her voice, but the bird was never fooled.
Adriana's father had given her the bird for her thirtieth birthday. He was a designer species spliced with Macaw DNA that colored his feathers rich green. He was expensive and inbred and neurotic, and he loved Adriana with frantic, obsessive jealousy.
"Hush," Adriana admonished, allowing Fuoco to alight on her shoulder. She carried him upstairs to her bedroom and hand-fed him millet. Fuoco strutted across the pillows, obsidian eyes proud and suspicious.
Adriana was surprised to find that her alienation had followed her home. She found herself prone to melancholy reveries, her gaze drifting toward the picture window, her fingers forgetting to stroke Fuoco's back. The bird screeched to regain her attention.
In the morning, Adriana visited her accountant. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he slipped trust fund moneys from one account to another like a magician. What she planned would be expensive, but her wealth would regrow in fertile soil, enriching her on lab diamonds and wind power and genetically modified oranges.
The robotics company gave Adriana a private showing. The salesman ushered her into a room draped in black velvet. Hundreds of body parts hung on the walls and reclined on display tables: strong hands, narrow jaws, biker's thighs, voice boxes that played sound samples from gruff to dulcet, skin swatches spanning ebony to alabaster, penises of various sizes.
At first, Adriana felt horrified at the prospect of assembling a lover from fragments, but then it amused her. Wasn't everyone assembled from fragments of DNA, grown molecule by molecule inside their mother's womb?
She tapped her fingernails against a slick brochure. "Its brain will be malleable? I can tell it to be more amenable, or funnier, or to grow a spine?"
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