Tomorrow's Kin

by Nancy Kress

  Jason ran onto the porch, Colin behind him. “Grandma!”

  Marianne almost stumbled on the broken steps. On the grimy porch she knelt and gathered both of them into her arms. They were dirty and smelled bad, but underneath it was that sweet little-boy scent. And it would only last a few more years, before each became another Ryan, or Noah, or Elizabeth, all of which in various ways had broken her heart.

  No more of that maudlin stuff. She had a mission here, and she was going to accomplish it. “This is my friend Tim,” she told the boys. “Is Daddy inside?”

  “He’s sick,” Jason said.

  “He won’t get out of his red chair,” Colin said.

  Tim said easily, “Let’s let Grandma see to your daddy, and you two show me around. Did that big tree over there get hit by lightning?”

  “Yeah!” Jason said enthusiastically. “It’s all burned.”

  “Poor tree,” Colin said.

  “Show me,” Tim said. “Careful of those steps. They sure need fixing.”

  Marianne threw him a grateful look and went into the house.

  It was worse than she expected. Clinical depression, if deep enough, produced hopelessness and inertia, but this was something more. Ryan sat slumped in the grimy red wing chair, head down, shoulders sagging. He looked up when she spoke his name but didn’t change expression. The first words that leaped into Marianne’s mind were old-fashioned and scientifically imprecise: nervous breakdown. But that’s what this was. Caused by grief, by guilt, by a sense of failure, by some unknowable quirk of his biology? If Jason hadn’t called her, would the next step be suicide? She was looking, she knew, at pure pain, the kind that gnawed at you from inside until there was nothing left.

  She fought to hold herself steady to her son’s need. “Ryan, it’s Mom.”

  He nodded but didn’t speak.

  “I came to help you. You need help, sweetie.”

  She held her breath until he nodded again, slowly. He wasn’t too deep into his private hell to recognize that he could not get out alone.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I promise you, Ryan. It’s all going to be all right.”

  * * *

  Grandma-for-real was different from Grandma-on-Skype. Colin didn’t remember her for real before this visit, but Jason did. Grandma-for-real got things going.

  An ambulance came to take Daddy to a hospital, so doctors could make him well again. Grandma had to go with him to sign some papers—Colin didn’t understand that part, but it seemed important—and Tim wouldn’t let her go alone. That was weird; Grandma was a grown-up. Why did Tim get to tell her what to do? They had a whispered fight about it in the kitchen, and Tim must have won because he drove Grandma in his blue car. There was nobody to stay with Colin and Jason, so they had to go, too.

  While they waited for the ambulance, Grandma made them both take showers. Tim got the upstairs toilet unstuck. At the hospital Tim took them to the cafeteria for hamburgers and French fries, which was good; Colin was really hungry. The hospital was too noisy, though, in ways Colin didn’t like. The swamp was better.

  It was getting dark by the time they got home because they stopped at a supermarket and bought a lot of things. Even though she looked really tired, Grandma started cleaning. She made Colin and Jason help, too. Colin had to find his dirty clothes, which were almost all of them, and bring them to the laundry room to be washed after the bedsheets and pajamas got done. Jason had to do that, too, and then find the dirty dishes all over the house. Grandma told Tim, who was locking all the windows and doors, to clean the bathrooms. He said, “What?” but she gave him the same look that Colin’s preschool teacher gave boys who shoved or hit, and Tim started cleaning. Colin was impressed.

  He and Jason were in their washed pajamas, having milk and cookies in the kitchen, when the other noise started. Colin jumped up so fast he knocked over his milk. “Grandma, the trees are afraid!”

  “Colin,” Grandma said, “it’s okay. I know you’re scared about Daddy, but he’ll be all right.”

  “Not me! Not Daddy! The trees are afraid! And the ground!”

  Tim, mopping up the milk, smiled in a way that made Colin suddenly hate him. “An imaginative kid.”

  Grandma said, “Colin, honey, I know you’re worried about your father, but the doctors at the hospital are—”

  Colin stamped his foot and burst into tears. Nobody ever believed him!

  Ten minutes later, the earthquake hit.

  * * *

  Marianne bent to pick the shards of a broken glass off the grimy kitchen floor. During the earthquake, dishes had rattled, toys fallen off shelves in the boys’ room, a small rickety table overturned. No windows broke. Outside, a few branches were down, but no trees. The glass had broken only because Marianne, startled, had dropped it. She crammed the pieces into the overflowing garbage pail.

  While Tim checked the car and house, trailed by Jason, Marianne brought up data on her phone.

  “I told you,” Colin said.

  “That was indeed an earthquake, epicenter near Attica,” she told Tim when he returned to the kitchen, “although this isn’t supposed to be an earthquake area. Still, there’s a usually inactive fault line, the Clarendon-Linden fault line, just east of Batavia and USGS says—”

  Colin’s words suddenly registered. Marianne said to him, “What did you say?”

  “I told you!”

  The little boy stood with legs apart, clad in pajamas printed with railroad cars, feet planted firmly on the kitchen floor. His bottom lip stuck out. His eyes, Marianne’s own light gray, looked very clear, and he did not blink. The back of Marianne’s neck prickled.

  “You told me what, honey?”

  “That something bad was coming. The trees were afraid. The ground was mad.”

  She said carefully, “How did you know that, Colin?”

  “I heard them.” His bottom lip receded a little; someone was actually listening to him.

  “Heard them talk?”

  “Trees can’t talk, Grandma.”

  The voice of reason from a five-year-old. Marianne would have smiled, but her neck still prickled. “Then what did you hear?”

  “First the ground … it sounded like … like a lot of cars. When they’re far away.”

  “The ground rumbled?”

  “Yes.” He nodded, clearly pleased with the word. “The ground all rumbled. Then the trees sort of … they … it sounds like the machine the Sheehans have for Captain. To make him stop barking. The Sheehans can’t hear it but dogs can. I can, too. Captain doesn’t like it.”

  An ultrasonic emitter. And earthquake measurement depended on infrasonic. Was it possible that Colin could hear above and below the normal human range? Which, Marianne remembered dazedly, was 20 to 20,000 Hertz. How far below that was the infrasonic rumble from plate tectonics? But the trees … Trees didn’t emit sound, did they?

  Colin’s little body had relaxed. He felt heard. He said confidently, “I heard the baby mouses, too. Way down in their hole. They wanted their mommy. Uh-oh—here it comes again!”

  An aftershock, the slightest quiver under the floor, barely perceptible. Nothing else changed.

  Unless everything had.

  * * *

  Her first concern was, had to be, for the boys’ uneasiness over their father. Only they didn’t show any. “He’s in the hospital,” Jason said reasonably, “and he doesn’t have cancer like Mommy did. So he’ll be okay.”

  Colin nodded. He trusted in his big brother, and Jason trusted in the universe. Or maybe they were just being practical, as children could be: Life with Grandma ran more smoothly than life with Daddy. Or maybe their fear and anger were just deeply buried, as Ryan’s apparently had been, and would erupt later when Ryan came home again. Although that might be months away. His diagnosis was “clinical depression with suicidal ideation.”

  Marianne pushed away her own fear and anger to focus on the next concern: Where were they going to live? The boys had
no passports, so Canada was out. She made another call to Stubbins, who was too busy to take it. Was he losing interest in her efforts? Another worry. Without him, she had no source of income, no way to pay Tim, nothing. Although under their intimate circumstances, paying Tim would be—

  Another thing to not think about.

  However, one of Stubbins’s ubiquitous lieutenants relocated Marianne yet again. After evaluation, Ryan was transferred to Oakwood Gardens, a posh psychiatric hospital that Marianne at no time in her life could have afforded, discreetly located near a pleasant commuter town on the Hudson River. Tim, Marianne, and the boys drove to an anonymously furnished three-bedroom apartment, which she also could never have afforded, on the East Side of Manhattan. The boys were enrolled in a private school that usually had a waiting list longer than unspooled DNA.

  Tim said, “Wow. Cute place. Small but sort of … you know, elegant. And Stubbins is paying for this and for Ryan’s hospital, too? What is it you do for him, again?”

  Not nearly enough to justify all this.

  But there was no use questioning Jonah Stubbins; the sphinx was less secretive. Marianne began to unpack the boys’ clothing.

  * * *

  Marianne and Colin took a taxi to the office building on West Fifty-Ninth, a little south of the zone patrolled by private guards hired by the West Side Protective Association. But Colin’s appointment was at noon, not a popular hour for violent crime, and Tim was with them, alert as always. The building guard wanded them and had a tense exchange with Tim about his Beretta, then sent a keypad signal to Dr. Hudspeth. They waited.

  The lobby held sagging chairs and a vending machine. Two large ficus plants shed yellow leaves onto the dingy tile floor. Colin said to the guard, “Those trees are thirsty.”

  “Yeah?” He wasn’t interested.

  “You should give them some water.”

  “The plant service went out of business.”

  “You should give them some water now. They’re crying!”

  The guard looked at him oddly. A voice said from the computer, “Thompson, please send them up.” The elevator door opened.

  In the elevator Colin said to Tim, “I don’t like that man.”

  “Yeah, he’s a prick.”

  Marianne frowned at Tim, who grinned back.

  It was Dr. Hudspeth that Marianne didn’t like. Marianne had chosen her because of her location, right across the park, and anyway how hard could it be to test a child’s hearing? But Dr. Hudspeth seemed to not test many children. There were no toys in the tiny waiting room. The doctor, who smiled constantly over what seemed like too many teeth, had the excessively bright, cloying manner of adults not used to children and possibly not very fond of them.

  In the examining room she said, “Now, pumpkin, just sit there—good! Great! We’re going to play a little game. You like games, don’t you?”

  Colin gazed at her from steady gray eyes and said nothing.

  “Good! Great! Here’s the game: You’re going to wear these earphones. I’m going to press a button on this thing here. Sometimes it will make a noise and sometimes it will not. When you hear it make a noise in your earphones, raise your finger like this. Can you do that for me, pumpkin?”

  Colin nodded, impassive.

  “All right, here we go!”

  Marianne heard nothing. Colin raised fingers, didn’t raise fingers, never changed expression. The test went on for about fifteen minutes. Dr. Hudspeth removed Colin’s earphones.

  “You did great! Now, you go out to the waiting room with your daddy for a few minutes while I talk to Grammy.”

  Colin said, “He’s not my daddy. My daddy’s sick and in the hospital until he gets better.”

  “Good! Great! You go out and sit with … your friend.”

  “He’s Grandma’s—”

  “Colin, stay here,” Marianne said hastily. Grandma’s what?

  Dr. Hudspeth said, “Well, all right, since there’s no problem here. Colin’s hearing is normal, in fact, quite acute. He heard right up to the limits of human hearing, at both high and low frequencies.” She beamed at Marianne and glanced at her watch.

  Marianne said, “What was the lowest frequency you tested? Twelve Hertz?”

  The doctor looked surprised, and not entirely pleased. “Are you an engineer, Mrs.… ah…” She glanced at her tablet. “Carpenter?”

  “No. Was it twelve Hertz?”

  “Yes. That’s the lowest frequency even children, whose hearing is more acute than ours, can hear, and then only under ideal laboratory conditions.”

  “Test him lower, please.”

  Dr. Hudspeth stared.

  “Does the machine go lower than twelve Hertz?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do it.”

  Marianne, former teacher and lecturer, knew how to sound authoritative. Dr. Hudspeth put the earphones back on Colin.

  He raised and did not raise fingers.

  “Mrs. Carpenter, I don’t think he understands. He’s raising fingers at eight Hertz, when he might be feeling physical vibrations in the body but can’t possibly—”

  “Go lower.”

  “This audiometer doesn’t go any lower!”

  “Then we’re done here. Thank you, Dr. Hudspeth. I’d like a printout of the results, please.”

  As they left the office, Dr. Hudspeth peered at the settings on her machine. Colin said, “That lady is upset.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I won’t. And I’m not a pumpkin.”

  “No,” Marianne said. “You’re not.”

  In the lobby, Colin insisted that Marianne buy a bottle of water from the vending machine. Carefully he dumped it over the ficus plants.

  * * *

  Marianne sat with Colin in the tiny bedroom he shared with Jason, who had protested at having to go to school when Colin got to stay home. In the kitchen Tim rattled pans, singing off-key as he made dinner. He was a surprisingly good cook, although Marianne was getting past being surprised by hidden talents in anybody. She sat cross-legged on Colin’s low bed, since his small sprawled body covered the rest of the floor. He was drawing elephants on a sheet of white paper.

  Marianne had the opening she wanted. “Did you know that elephants can talk to each other across long distances by making noises that people can’t hear?”

  Colin looked up. “My favorite book is Brandon and the Elephant in the Basement! I brought it in my suitcase. Do real elephants talk about how Brandon rescued the elephant from the basement?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t speak elephant.”

  Colin laughed and went back to his careful drawing of floppy gray ears. Marianne said, “People can’t hear elephants because their noises are too low—too deep—for people’s ears.”

  Colin said nothing.

  “But I’ll bet you could hear an elephant, couldn’t you?”

  He said, not raising his head but with a certain stiffness in his thin shoulders, “I’m not ’spozed to talk about that, Grandma.”

  “Says who?”

  “Jason. He says everybody at school will think I’m weird.”

  So Jason knew about this, whatever it was, and tried to shield his little brother. “Yes. But I’m not at your school. You can talk about it with me.”

  She had Colin’s attention. He stood up, worn gray crayon in hand, and looked searchingly at her face. “Is that true?”

  It was his father’s phrase: Ryan the scientist, always weighing evidence to find the singular truth he so fervently believed existed. Ryan had never accepted that truth could be many sided. Marianne kept her voice steady. “Yes, it is. You can tell me what you hear.”

  Relief brightened Colin’s eyes. “I hear everything, Grandma.”

  “What everything?”

  He held up his fingers, smeared with gray and green crayon, to count off. “I hear people talk. Well—duh! I hear plants. They don’t talk words, but they make noises. Some are low like that ear doctor’s mach
ine near the end, some are like Captain’s dog whistle, some are like people talking, only they go through the ground. I hear the ground when it’s mad. Low rumbles, like before the earthquake. I hear baby mouses in the ground, sometimes, when they want their mother. Those are like dog whistles, too. If you take me to a zoo, maybe I can hear an elephant!”

  Infrasonics and ultrasonics both, Marianne thought dazedly. How was that possible? Was that possible? How much was the imagination of a five-year-old who believed an elephant could be rescued from a basement? She would have to do some research, including on biosonics. But before that—

  “Colin, if you hear all that, all the time—Do you hear it all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you keep it all sorted out in your mind? Doesn’t it … confuse you? All those noises at once like that?”

  “Sometimes. But now they’re in rows.”

  “Rows? What do you mean?”

  The child stooped and brought up his box of crayons. On the bedspread beside Marianne he laid out a row of six crayons. In front of them he arranged five more, then two, then one in front of that, to which he pointed. “See, Grandma, that’s you talking now. These two are Tim singing and the radio in the apartment out the window. This row is other stuff I hear but it’s not in the front. Then this far stuff, back here.”

  Selective filters for background noise. She said, “Could you always do this, Colin?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Probably not. Marianne remembered Connie’s desperate frustration during Colin’s first three years of life. “He just cries and cries!” Connie had said, crying herself. Had the baby been unable to filter out the constant, multisonic noise that swamped him? But somewhere he had learned to do so. Noah, when he started school and well into the second grade, had been dyslexic, unable to see the difference between “was” and “saw.” The problem had disappeared halfway through Noah’s testing. “Sometimes,” the tester had said, “bright children just learn to compensate.”

  Colin said, “Will you take me to the zoo to hear an elephant?”

  The Bronx Zoo no longer had elephants, nor much of anything else. Funding cuts. But there must be an elephant somewhere.