Blue

by Lou Aronica

  “You need to see our doctors.”

  Becky looked at her inquisitively, but didn’t say anything.

  “Tamariskian medicine can’t be exactly the same as your medicine. None of the other sciences are. Maybe our doctors can find something that yours haven’t. Some solution that could be interpreted for them.”

  Becky nodded. “I’ll try anything. I’m really scared about this.”

  Miea reached for Becky’s hand and held it to her heart. If it were possible for Miea to transfer some of her life force to Becky, she would do it unreservedly.

  Again, neither spoke for several minutes.

  “Something good has come from this,” Becky said.

  Miea squeezed Becky’s hand and then sat back.

  “I told my parents that I wanted to have equal time in both houses from now on. That means my father can come here more often to find a cure for the blight.”

  Miea felt her eyes well up again, but she wiped the tears away before they started to run. “Becky, you need to understand something. What’s happening to you probably has your father devastated. You’re probably the only thing he wants to think about now. He can’t be concerned with Tamarisk. How could he be?”

  “Because I am,” Becky said emphatically. It was the first time her voice had sounded strong since she arrived. “I am, and he knows what this means to me. Maybe your doctors can figure something out, but if they can’t, I know I can’t do anything to make myself better. If I can do something to make Tamarisk better, though, then I’ll do it. My father will be with me the next time I’m here. I guarantee it.”

  “Becky, if it doesn’t happen, I’ll understand. If you don’t want to come here anymore, I’ll understand that as well.”

  Becky leaned forward and touched Miea’s shoulder. “This is the only thing I have to look forward to,” she said.

  With that, they collapsed into each other’s arms again.

  17

  Today had been Becky’s first decent day. For the first time since the experimental treatments began, she didn’t feel like her bones were made of rubber. She could read without feeling nauseous, and she even had a little lunch. The doctors had told her there would be many days like this; potentially a lot more if the treatments did their jobs. Even if they didn’t, she still had a tiny bit of time before her body really started to break down. On days like this, it was hard for her to believe that she was as sick as they said she was. It was just like it was with the dizzy spells and bloody noses. She’d feel awful for a while and then feel better, close to normal. At this very moment, she could nearly convince herself that she was still going to be okay.

  She was going to go back to school tomorrow. Mom had major issues with that, but Becky really needed to do it. What was she supposed to do, lie in bed until she wasted away? She missed her friends and some of her teachers. She missed Ray, the custodian who called her “petal,” and Janet, the security guard who told her stories about her rambunctious twins while Becky waited for the bus home. She hoped it wouldn’t be too weird for everyone else. People sometimes got squeamish around someone who was really sick and she knew at least one person would think that what she had was contagious. She didn’t want to be a distraction and she didn’t want to be a circus freak. She just wanted a tiny bit of her life back.

  She was looking at a photo album in her room when Lonnie arrived. Lonnie had been to the hospital to see her a couple of times, but this was the first time she’d come to the house since Becky got back. They hugged briefly and then Lonnie sat on the bed next to her.

  “What are you looking at?” Lonnie said, pointing to the photo album.

  “Last summer in Maine.”

  Lonnie leaned toward the album and flipped the pages. “Any pictures of Mr. Gorgeous in here?”

  Becky laughed. “His name was Kyle and, no, there aren’t any pictures of him in here. My mother is the one with the camera. Do you think I dragged her over to the dock and asked her to take a few shots of the first guy who ever kissed me?”

  “You would have if you were really thinking.” Lonnie moved away from the album. “So how are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay today. Tomorrow? Who knows? I’m fine right now, though. I don’t have another treatment until next week.”

  “That’s good. I’m really glad. Everyone is asking about you.”

  “I’m going to school tomorrow.”

  Lonnie pulled away from her and twisted her face. “You are?”

  “You’re not going to go off on me about this the way my mother did, are you?”

  “I’m not gonna go off on you, but why? I mean, if I didn’t have to, I certainly wouldn’t.”

  “I want to. I’m not going to be only a sick person for the rest of my life. I can walk, I can talk, and my brain still works. I’m going to school.”

  Lonnie shrugged as though she never would have had this idea. Actually, she wouldn’t have. “If you say so,” she said confusedly. Then she turned to Becky with concern on her face. “What if you have, you know, another episode?”

  “I’ll be fine. I have no intention of getting into another debate with Phil Keller.”

  “He felt terrible about that, you know. He thought he sent you to the hospital.”

  Becky rolled her eyes. “Great. So now I have to go up to one of the biggest jerks in school and make him feel better.”

  Lonnie waved her hand. “Nah, don’t bother. In fact, when you get to class, maybe you should stagger a little when you pass his desk.”

  Becky laughed loudly. “That’s awful.”

  “But a good idea, right?”

  “A great idea. Even though I’m not going to do it.”

  “You should. He deserves it.”

  They both chuckled and sat back against the wall next to the bed.

  “How have your parents been?” Lonnie said, the smile fading from her face.

  “About how you’d expect them to be. You know my parents. Mom’s trying to make things happen and Dad’s trying to prop me up.”

  “And you’re really gonna shuttle back and forth every other day?”

  “It’ll be fine, at least for now. Mom tried to convince me that all that ‘extra traveling’ was going to wear me down. I reminded her that Dad lives in Standridge, not Miami. She has to understand that this isn’t open for discussion.”

  “I would imagine that’s a little difficult for her to understand.”

  Becky imagined that it probably was. She didn’t make this demand because she wanted to hurt her mother, even though she knew it was hard for her to hear. She did it because it was the closest she could get to the balance she had so desperately been missing since her parents split. Other than having her father move back into the house with Mom, Al, and her—now that would have been a demand—she couldn’t think of anything else. Becky needed to be with her father as often as she was with her mother now. She’d missed too much with him and they’d finally gotten back to a good place. She didn’t want him to get the short end of things any longer.

  Of course, there was also their mission in Tamarisk. Becky refused to believe it was a coincidence that her illness kicked up to this level at the same time as Miea asked for more of her father’s help. Tamarisk needed them and only something this extreme would let them get there more often. If Becky really was coming to the end of her life, she wanted this end to have some meaning. She wanted to do something more than simply die. If she could help save Tamarisk—even if the only thing she did was provide transportation for her dad—then something good would come of this.

  Mom would never understand that part of it. Becky couldn’t even try to explain it, considering the way Mom reacted to the very mention of Tamarisk. Becky would say something again at some point, but not now.

  “Listen, Lon, there’s something I haven’t told you.”

  Lonnie’s eyebrows rose. “Under normal circumstances, I’d be bracing for bad news if someone said that to me, but we kinda did the bad news part already.�
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  Becky smiled warmly at her best friend. “This isn’t bad news. You’re gonna think it’s pretty weird, though.”

  “I’m ready. I think.”

  “Part of the reason I need to spend more time at my dad’s is because I can do something there that I can’t do anywhere else. I can travel to Tamarisk.”

  Lonnie’s jaw dropped, but it did so in slow motion.

  Becky had to laugh. “You look hilarious right now.”

  “I’m glad I’m around to amuse you.”

  Becky bumped her shoulder against Lonnie’s. “It’s okay if you don’t believe me.”

  “Becky, are you sure you can do this?”

  “Am I sure I can do something that I’ve done more than a dozen times? Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “I mean, are you sure it’s not . . . you know?”

  It took Becky a moment to figure out what Lonnie’s question meant. “You mean am I sure that my disease isn’t making me hallucinate? One hundred percent sure. You can ask my dad about it if you want.”

  “Your dad knows about this?”

  “All about it. He comes with me now.”

  Lonnie shook her head quickly and then sat up on her knees. “Your father travels with you to a fantasy place the two of you made up?”

  “Well, it sounds unrealistic when you say it that way.”

  “Is there a way to say it where it doesn’t sound unrealistic?”

  Becky took both of Lonnie’s hands. “Lon, it happens.”

  Lonnie stared at her for the longest time, as though she were trying to read her mind. “You really do this?”

  “Really.”

  Lonnie threw herself on the bed. “That is unbelievably cool.”

  Becky was so glad she’d finally told Lonnie. Now that she had, she couldn’t remember why she hadn’t told her right away. Finally, they could talk about this the way they talked about everything else. Becky told her about Miea, and her trip on the waccasassa, and the kingdom congress, and the way everything looked, felt, smelled, and sounded. Lonnie asked lots of questions, and Becky regaled her with details. It was nearly as exciting as when she’d discovered it.

  Then she told her about the blight. For some reason, she got all choked up when she did it. She totally didn’t see that coming and she needed to go to the bathroom to get some tissues.

  “So Tamarisk is sick, too,” Lonnie said when Becky got back.

  “Really sick. We’re going to fix it, though. I really believe my father can do it.”

  Lonnie nodded and then seemed lost in her thoughts for a moment. “This is an amazing thing,” she said. “I mean, it kinda changes everything, you know?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  They locked eyes again and Becky saw that Lonnie’s were glistening. “Thanks for letting me in on this,” she said with a little catch in her throat.

  Becky wrapped an arm around her best friend’s shoulders. “I’m so happy I can share this with you.” Becky pulled her closer and Lonnie rested her head against her. “You do realize, of course, that we won’t be divulging this secret to the Phil Kellers of the world, right?”

  Lonnie chuckled. “My lips are totally sealed. At least until lunch tomorrow.”

  One of the first things Chris learned as a father was that being one allowed you access to previously unavailable resources. The ability to function coherently at two in the morning when a baby needed soothing, a bottle needed heating, and a diaper needed changing at the same time. The ability to navigate through a little kid’s tantrum without either screaming or running away. The ability to perform the same bit of slapstick several dozen times in a row because it made your child laugh. The ability to bear up when your preteen chose a sleepover at a friend’s instead of the plans you made with her the week before.

  When Becky told him that she wanted him to continue to work in Tamarisk, Chris tapped as deep into this reserve as ever. He couldn’t think about Tamarisk now; he could only think about what was happening to Becky. Trying to solve the problem in Tamarisk required energy, initiative, and optimism he didn’t have. A part of him didn’t even want to save Tamarisk. If his daughter was dying, then it didn’t really matter if anything lived, did it?

  Except that it mattered to Becky. She’d made that as clear to him as anything she’d ever said. Therefore, he dug into that well and convinced himself to commit to finding a cure to the blight. There was even a side benefit to it. Being in Tamarisk constituted extra time with Becky, time when she would otherwise be asleep. Every minute meant more now. The ticking clock he’d been hearing since Becky had started high school now drowned out nearly every other sound.

  Today, they finally got out of the conference room and visited the vast planting fields of Ribault. This tiny agricultural town had recently celebrated an improbable victory in the kingdomwide teen speedcatch tournament. Banners congratulating the players still hung everywhere. The landscape, however, was far from celebratory. A study of ash on black. In the distance, Chris saw patches of green, but he had to remind himself that this wasn’t a sign of health. Healthy foliage was a rich blue here. Green indicated the banding that precipitated necrosis.

  The plan was to examine the green portion of the field. The ashen vegetation was already too far gone to provide useful data. Tamariskian botanists had erected a mobile workstation so they could analyze cuttings and provide him with data. Becky stood next to him, glancing toward the party already gathered there.

  “We’re going to be doing a lot of walking and bending,” Chris said. “Are you sure you’re up for that?”

  “I’m fine. Really fine, actually.” She took a deep breath. “As messed up as everything is here, it still smells so good.”

  Involuntarily, Chris inhaled deeply. The smell of Tamarisk was sweet, reminiscent of the chocolate and raspberries Becky loved so much. The sounds of nature here had a certain musical quality as well, though it was a discordant one, like a Philip Glass composition. As he listened, though, he heard some of the sounds harmonize, major chords against a diminished background.

  “If you get tired, I want you to come back here and sit.”

  “Dad, I’m really fine.”

  She wouldn’t tell me if she wasn’t , Chris thought. There was no chance she’d sit around back here when all the action was out in the fields. He’d have to watch for signs of Becky wearing down.

  When they arrived at the workstation, one of the botanists handed him a piece of paper. “This is the data we compiled from cuttings we took thirty minutes ago.”

  Chris examined the paper but could determine little from it. This was clearly a printout of some set of calculations, but the terminology associated with the calculations was foreign to him. While Becky and he had invented scores of plants and animals while creating Tamarisk, they’d spent little time talking about science. The physical laws were all in place—Becky had insisted they be very close to the ones she already knew—but the details of those laws were not. His guess was that the Tamariskians therefore invented their own approach to science (however this kind of thing worked), one that of course had a different set of criteria from any Chris knew. Was this how Tamarisk filled in all the blanks Becky and he left in its design? This place would be a remarkable study in parallel evolution. Sadly, that study would never happen. Chris could only get here with Becky, and under the most optimistic circumstances Becky’s remaining visits were numbered.

  He forced himself to drive these thoughts away. He was here with a specific goal, and the goal was getting farther away as Tamarisk proved more exotic. He could barely think of where to start.

  He reviewed the paper again and asked the botanist a few questions in an attempt to create a common vocabulary. When this proved frustrating, Chris decided to start in a more fundamental place.

  “I’d like to examine the fruiting bodies of the blight. Is there a way for me to magnify a cutting?”

  The man patted an octagonal box made of some sort of crystal. “That’s what this do
es here.”

  “Thanks.” He turned to Becky. “Beck, can you get me a couple of fresh cuttings?”

  “Sure,” Becky said, getting a cutting tool from another botanist. She returned with two leafy stems.

  Chris took the cuttings to the box and ran his hand over the surface of the machine. It was as smooth as plastic, but unquestionably some kind of crystal.

  “Okanogan,” Becky said.

  “What?”

  “It’s made of okanogan. The crystal you can mold, remember?”

  Okanogan, yes. Hearing the word was like hearing the name of an old high school friend, vague familiarity leading to a smattering of memories. Becky had come up with okanogan because she wanted the walls of Miea’s room to shimmer.

  “You place it in here,” the botanist said. He took one of the cuttings from Chris’s fingers, slid out a drawer, and lay the cutting down. “Then we view it on the other side.”

  One side of the octagon was a viewing screen, made up of the same okanogan as the rest of the machine. A magnified image of the cutting emerged along with a set of numbers running down the side. The botanist showed Chris how to adjust the magnification and Chris examined the fruiting bodies on the stem. This was where the blight sprouted on this individual plant, and studying them in different fields at varying stages of blight would teach him something about the way the disease progressed. He was surprised to find that the bodies had barely presented on this particular cutting. Considering the necrosis of much of the field, he’d expected a more advanced stage of the blight in all vegetation in the area. He looked out on the field. It seemed bluer up close than it had from his original perspective. If anything, he would have thought the field would seem bluer farther away. More oddities of Tamarisk.

  “That’s strange,” the botanist said, leaning toward Chris to get a better look at the screen.

  “What’s that?”

  “The composite figures aren’t the same with this cutting as they were with the one I showed you before.” The botanist retrieved the paper he’d given Chris on his arrival. “No, not the same. Similar, but perceptibly different.”