by Steven Gould
Mom shook her head. “That’s a new technique. We’ll have to watch out for it. How did you get out of it?”
“I did the jump in place thing. Added velocity right into him—the same direction he’d pull from. Broke his forearm and knocked him through the wall.”
Dad’s eyes went wide. “That’s what that hole was?”
I nodded. “I was getting desperate. Hyacinth was loading up a hypodermic, probably to knock me out.” I reached up and touched the scab on my neck. “Jenkins never got a chance to pull on the wire, but it twisted around a bit as we went though the wall. More abrasion than compression.”
Mom said, “We heard you go through the wall. We’d already peeked in through the skylights by then. What did you do to Hyacinth?”
I told them about accelerating through her legs when she ran after me with the hypo. “I was worried about her neck. Do you think I broke it?”
Dad shrugged. “Don’t know.” From the look on his face, he could have easily added, “Don’t care.”
Mom saw the look on my face and said, “We’ll talk to Agent Martingale and find out.”
I exhaled. “So, now you know everything.”
* * *
Two day later, Mom got Agent Martingale’s status report.
They couldn’t hold the pilot they found in the charter jet parked over at the airport. He worked for the charter company. They made a note of the company that had leased it, though.
They held Mr. Sidney Jenkins on weapons charges. He did not have a local permit and his prints were all over both the handguns Dad removed from his person.
Hyacinth was also good for weapons charges, compounded by her status as a fugitive convicted felon. There was no question about holding her.
Jason, Calvin, and Marius were held for kidnapping with Tara and Jade as initial witnesses, but the most damning witness ended up being Caffeine. Additional charges resulted from the over fifty pounds of marijuana and the several thousand caps of ecstasy found in the office where Caffeine had been tortured. Oh yeah, kidnapping and grievous bodily harm and conspiracy to commit murder.
There was no way Jason was going to release Caffeine in the end.
As I suspected, Jason’s jaw was broken as well as his radius and ulna. Marius had breaks in one carpal and two metacarpals. Calvin had two phalanges and one metacarpal broken.
Mr. Jenkins regained consciousness shortly after we left. Like Jason, both bones in Jenkins’s forearm were broken. He also had a bump on the back of his head where he’d clipped a stud going through the wall, as well as various related bruises.
Hyacinth had a hairline fracture of her third cervical vertebra, and a concussion. They had considered opening her skull to relieve pressure but her CT scans showed very minor swelling and she regained consciousness after six hours.
Caffeine, whose injuries looked the worst, had no broken bones. She had trouble sleeping, though, waking with screaming nightmares. This got worse when she found out Jason was in the same hospital, though under guard.
They moved her into the secure unit of psychiatric where she felt safer, being locked in.
Mom reported that, in Agent Martingale’s opinion, “The tranquilizers probably helped, too. And she met someone she knew there in the ward, who was helping her adjust.”
“Really?” I asked, absently. Then I sat up abruptly and said, “Oh my God. Tony?”
“Yes. Tony.”
* * *
I climbed into bed and stayed there.
It was easy. It was dark inside and dark outside with heavy spring snows. And I was sore, but that went away pretty quickly. Mom would bring me a tray, kiss me on the cheek, and, thankfully, leave me alone.
On the third day Dad stuck his head in and I covered my face with the pillow.
He didn’t take the hint, pulling the pillow away.
“Really, you want to hear this.”
I opened one eye. “What?” I opened the other eye and pushed up on my elbows.
“I got an e-mail from Mr. Aniketa at HFW.”
“Who? What’s HFW?”
“Hunger Free World. They’re the Japanese NGO that Ramachander works for. Mr. Aniketa is his boss.”
I sat up, eyebrows raised. “Is? As in?…
“He showed up in Bhangura this morning.”
“Squeezed?” I said.
“Yes, initially. But mostly they just held him, probably to see if we’d come looking, so he got to sleep a lot and, uh, heal. Finally they put him on a passenger ferry and faded.”
“Heal? What do you mean, heal? What did they do to him?”
Dad didn’t say anything.
“Was it like Caffeine? Did they beat him half to death?”
Dad looked away. “He’ll be okay. Stay away from him, though. Just like your friends from school, they are probably still watching him. I mean it—it’s as much for his sake as yours.”
I covered my face with the pillow. “Understood.”
Dad’s muffled voice said, “Good.”
After he left I tried to regain the advanced level of lumpitude I’d managed for the last three days, but it wasn’t working.
I kept seeing Ramachandra’s face, bloody and bruised, like Caffeine’s. I kept doing math problems in my head or revising the thesis statement for my midterm humanities essay. I was wondering if Jade and Tara were back in school and what had happened to Hector.
And I wondered what Joe was thinking.
Then I was picturing Joe, beaten and bruised, like Caffeine.
I got up, took a shower, and under the hot running water, cried.
THIRTY-FIVE
Davy: “Tea and Sympathy”
Millie was in the kitchen, pouring water from the electric kettle into a tea pot. “Still keeps to her room?”
Davy kicked the counter baseboard. “Yes. I chided her for it and she said, ‘It gives such an elegance to misfortune!’” He smiled briefly. “I thought she was doing better, quoting Austen like that, but it just sets her off again. Apparently Joe likes Austen, too.”
Millie sighed. “Tea?”
“No.” He glared at the icicles visible through the window. More gently he said, “No, thank you.”
Millie smiled briefly, and got down a mug for herself. “You told her about Rama?”
“Not everything.”
“Really? I thought you were going to use it? You said you were.”
Davy kicked the baseboard again. “Yeah. I couldn’t. She guessed he was messed up already. She thought it was on the lines of what Jason did to Caffeine.” He sat down at the table, but couldn’t settle, rising again. “Telling her won’t bring his eye back.”
Millie winced. “No, I guess not.”
“I wish she’d go do something!”
Millie nodded. “Physical activity would be good for her. Snowboarding, maybe?”
“I made that mistake. She started crying.”
“Oh. Joe. The team.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t make her do anything.”
“No. Even if she couldn’t jump away from you, you shouldn’t.”
“It almost makes me wish for the days when she’d yell at me because I wouldn’t let her go to school.”
Millie shook her head.
Davy said, “You know, if I’d let her go to school before she discovered she could jump, she might never have been in this mess.”
Millie snorted. “I was waiting for that. It’s clearly all your fault. I especially like how you arranged for Caffeine to seduce the three freshmen. That was particularly clever. I would never know how to accomplish that.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, half amused, half annoyed.
“También, mi amor.”
He deflated, sitting back down at the table.
“I feel so helpless.”
She sighed and took another mug from the cabinet.
“Have some tea.”
THIRTY-SIX
Cent: “Imaginary Girlfriend”
If they’d forbidden me from ever seeing Joe again, told me never to visit Jade and Tara, I would have gone to them immediately. Mom and Dad didn’t even mention the people who’d been injured, or the potential for injury to others.
It would have been redundant. I couldn’t even think about the guys without seeing Caffeine’s face, bloody and bruised.
I guess you could say life didn’t play fair.
I walked a great deal, mostly in the desert in West Texas. It was meaningless that this was closer to New Prospect than the Yukon. After all, for me, New Prospect was milliseconds away no matter where I was. I wasn’t separated by space and time.
The separation was an act of will harder to overcome than mere distance.
I remembered that Dad had walked here after he’d lost his mother. This was where he’d done his grieving but I didn’t know whether this thought helped me or not.
Would it be any less painful if my friends, if Joe, were dead? It was almost more painful that I could be with them, at our regular table at Krakatoa, in a heartbeat.
By agreement, whenever I left the cabin, I scribbled my destination on the whiteboard in the kitchen. It would’ve made me furious if they’d insisted, but it hadn’t been like that. Mom and Dad had started doing it anytime they left the cabin, along with when they expected to return, and they asked me to do it, too.
Not told.
So of course I had to.
That’s how Dad knew where to find me, walking along a mostly-fallen, rusted barbed wire fence that had stopped being an effective barrier sometime in the middle of the previous century.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
He handed me a water bottle, still cold from the refrigerator in the Yukon, and walked along beside me.
I was irritated and I made up my mind to jump away if he said anything, but he didn’t. He was just there, not even looking at me, but at the desert around us, seemingly lost in thought. My irritation gradually faded and I realized I was glad he was there.
I finally broke the silence. “Are you thinking about Grandmother?”
Dad looked back at me, almost surprised, as if he’d forgotten I was there. He raised his eyebrows. “No. About your mother, actually. Not mine.”
“Oh. I thought…” I waved my hand vaguely at the ocotillo, gravel, and creosote bush.
“I was thinking about that same time, yeah. Did you know your mother had broken up with me right before I found out my mother had died?”
I blinked. “No.”
“Your mother didn’t know about my jumping, yet. I hadn’t lied, exactly, but because I hadn’t told her everything, I’d certainly misled her. When she found out she was furious.”
Dad glanced sideways at me and away. He looked embarrassed.
“I’d done this thing—helped a New York neighbor get away from her abusive husband—but he was a cop and it brought me to their attention.” He laughed humorlessly. “Do you see the irony?”
I thought about it. “Like me helping Grant, Tony, and Dakota. Or the chukri girls. Unintended consequences.”
“Yeah. Anyway, when I was out here back then, I wasn’t just thinking about my mom’s death. I was thinking about your mom, too. Thinking I would never see her again.
“Hard to say which hurt more or even where one hurt stopped and the other began.”
The desert blurred and I blinked moisture away from my eyes.
It’s not like I can say he doesn’t understand.
“I miss Joe,” I said. The feeling in my chest, of incipient sobs, waited, just below the surface.
Tentatively he said, “You only went out a few times.”
That nearly made me jump away. I stopped and turned my back to him and took a deep breath. When I turned, I could tell he regretted saying it, but I went on. “Are you trying to tell me what I feel doesn’t matter? I know what Mom would say about that.”
“True.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m afraid I come by it honestly. Back when I made the mistake of sharing my feelings with my father, he would do much the same thing—though, I suspect, without as good a motive. He did get better, at the end, though. Maybe there’s hope for me.”
I glared at him.
“No excuses, ma’am,” he added.
I don’t know why that should’ve made me laugh, but it did, and the threat of tears died down. “You’re an evil man.”
He nodded, and we resumed walking.
I kept expecting him to talk about the danger of trying to see Joe or Jade and Tara, but he didn’t. Instead he showed me some coyote tracks in an arroyo and pointed out a long-limbed black-tailed jackrabbit stretching up to eat leaves from a sagebrush.
“What were you going to do, when you thought you’d never see Mom again?”
Dad frowned. “I’m not exactly sure. I wasn’t that in touch with my feelings back then. Mostly I was numb.” He gestured at a ledge in the side of the arroyo, like a bench eight feet off the ground, then jumped there to sit on it. He patted the stone beside him.
I joined him. The stone had been in the sun all afternoon and was much warmer than the air. It felt good against my legs as I leaned against Dad.
“I had started work on the Eyrie, and the physical labor helped a bit. But it was hard. I was solitary before I met your mother and it seemed probable that I would go back to that when I was done.”
“Done with the Eyrie?”
“No. I thought I’d go back to the Eyrie when I was done finding my mother’s killers. I was thinking of it as my hermitage—going back to being solitary. But your mother reached out to me and we got back together.”
I blurted, “Joe can hardly reach out to me. We didn’t break up! I don’t think he’s angry about my keeping my secret, ’cause I don’t know!”
Dad put his arm around me and I glanced at his face. The corners of his mouth were hooked sharply down and there were tears in his eyes.
I’d been able to hold it together against my own sadness, but his proved too much. The sobs broke free, and I curled in on myself and cried and cried.
And Dad cried with me.
* * *
Dad jumped me to the cabin hallway, held my arm while I stumbled into my room and sat on the edge of the bed. He helped me off with my boots, and I fell back onto the pillows. He kissed me and pulled a comforter over me.
The sobs had stopped, but not the tears, and I lay there, angry with myself, with my helplessness, but unable or unwilling to move.
I heard Mom and him talking in their room but I couldn’t make it out. At one point Mom’s voice raised almost to a shout and then they moved the conversation downstairs.
They rarely raised their voices with each other and, even if they did, it was more likely to be Dad than Mom. Mom was the calm, reasonable one.
At some point I really did fall asleep because I awoke to find the lights out. I was hungry. I was miserable, but still hungry, so I went downstairs.
Mom was on the couch before a crackling fire of piñon logs. She stood when I came down the stairs. “There’s food.”
“What kind?”
“Oxtail.”
“Mmmm.”
She pointed at the couch. “I’ll bring you a bowl.”
She cooks it all day long so the meat is tender and the broth rich, then makes fresh gnocchi before serving. I don’t know how long it had been waiting for me but it was as good as ever.
I was not quite as miserable after I’d eaten.
“Where’s Dad?” I felt guilty for breaking down like I had, for causing him to cry.
Mom said, “He had to go talk to someone.”
I picked up my bowl and got up. Mom made an abortive grab for it, but I was already standing. “Need some water. Do you want some water?”
Mom looked undecided, her mouth open without speaking, but then she shrugged. “Put on the kettle, please.”
I went into the kitchen and did that, and got spring water fo
r myself, from the tap. I took a gulp and my eyes strayed to the whiteboard.
My last destination, Desert near the pit, and ETA, back by dinner, had been wiped through, though you could make out the faint lettering of the dry-erase marker still. Mom’s Warehouse and back by three PM were also imperfectly erased. Dad’s line, by contrast, was dark and fresh. New Prospect, back by 9.
I blinked. New Prospect?
“Mom! What the hell is Dad doing in New Prospect?”
I sloshed water out of my glass and it fell, soaking cold, onto my sock.
Mom sighed and I realized she hadn’t been thinking about what she wanted to drink. She’d known that I’d see the whiteboard if I went into the kitchen and she’d been trying to decide if she should keep me from seeing it.
I went back to the living room.
“Now, Cent—”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to go find out for myself!”
“I’m going to tell you!” she said quickly.
I came back down off my toes.
More slowly, Mom said, “Sit down.”
I sat down at the end of the couch, took off my wet sock, and threw it down onto the hot hearth where it steamed and sputtered.
“Don’t blame me,” Mom said, “if that catches fire.”
“Stop trying to put me off.” I stretched out my foot and raked the sock away from the fire. “What is Dad doing there?”
Mom took a deep breath. “He’s talking to Joe.”
My jaw dropped open. After a moment I said, “Why?” Then, “Doesn’t that put Joe in danger?”
She nodded. “Yes. Your father and I quarreled about that. But he said you deserved as much of a chance as we did. Your father and I, that is.”
“A chance for what?”
Mom looked away. In a barely audible voice she said, “Happiness.”
Something flickered in the corner of the room and we both turned our head. Dad was there.
He was not alone.
* * *
I thought I was all cried out.
I probably terrified him, first by jumping across the living room to right in front of him, then by sobbing into his shoulder. But, except for flinching as I appeared in front of him, he took it well.