Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  “Jamie’s not confused about a thing,” Alicia replies. “And anyway, they changed in the bathroom.”

  I step back into her room and close the door behind me, because I really don’t want to hear the rest. I don’t want to hear Alicia reassure her mom that she doesn’t think of me “that way.” I don’t want to hear Alicia’s mom—who has always been cool to me—say something I won’t be able to forgive.

  Some people have a hard time adjusting to me—I get that. I don’t care what their process of working things out looks like if in the end they treat me like a person. But I don’t want to test that resolution by knowing too much.

  Alicia doesn’t ask me to leave when she returns; she doesn’t talk about the conversation at all. I don’t either. I figure everything’s fine until somebody tells me otherwise.

  “We ought to buy you some shoes to go with that, instead of those flip-flops. I could drive you to the mall in Sebring. It would be fun.”

  I meet her eyes, wondering where she’s coming from. Alicia’s not usually into shopping.

  “It would,” I agree. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to be looking at my shoes where I’m going. Some other time?”

  She smiles. “Definitely.” She raises both her eyebrows. “You gonna tell me what your plan is?”

  If I did, I’d have to explain all sorts of things I’m not ready to. I shake my head. “You might try to talk me out of it.”

  She chews her lip; I can’t tell if she’s suspicious or hurt.

  “I really appreciate your help,” I say. When she doesn’t reply, I add, “I better get on with this.”

  She finally meets my eye, and pulls me into a hug. “Be careful, whatever you’re planning.”

  “I will,” I say, and then I head out the door.

  I should have asked for a ride—it would make things easier than taking public transportation dressed like this. But riding the bus will give me time to get used to the way I’m presenting.

  All the way to Larry’s street, I keep waiting for somebody to say or do something either because they’ve clocked me or because they think I am a girl. I wish I’d brought my ear buds, so I could block out the sounds of traffic and random conversation going on around me. That’s stupid, though—what it would actually do is make me less likely to hear trouble coming.

  Somehow I manage both legs of the ride and the transfer between. Everybody’s too wrapped up in their own phones and music and worries to bother me.

  At the hospice, I use the same story at the front desk that we used at the dealership. They give me directions to his room, and I walk past a courtyard garden, a nurse’s station, and about a dozen doors with patient names written next to them in dry-erase ink.

  I almost pass the door with Larry’s name. I turn abruptly when I spot it, trying to project confidence, like I’ve been here before. I quietly close the door as I enter, and then blink as my eyes adjust to the darkness inside.

  The curtains are drawn to block the low-hanging sun. Apart from the dim light slipping around the edges, the only illumination comes from a flatscreen television on the wall, bathing the room in a blueish glow. Flowers on a dresser cast sinister shadows that move with every flicker of the screen. In the center of the room, an oversized hospital bed dominates the space, undercutting the semblance of ordinary life somebody went through a lot of effort to create with the decor.

  Larry lies on the bed, his head lolling to the side. I take in my first sight of him this lifetime. In my memories he is a giant, angry and frightening, out of control. He appears so weak and emaciated here that I can almost pity him—until I think about the lives he’s destroyed. Mine. Benjamin’s. Who else? Somebody like Larry probably didn’t stop at one victim.

  I walk up to the edge of the bed. I could take my revenge right now; nobody could stop me. I don’t think it would make me feel better, though, and it wouldn’t do anything for Benjamin.

  And I didn’t come here for revenge.

  A television remote and call device is tethered to his bedsheet with an alligator clip. I loosen it, turn the sound down, and place it on the floor.

  “Larry,” I call out.

  He makes a gross snot-clearing sound, but doesn’t wake up.

  “Larry!”

  He blinks awake and looks at me, wild-eyed.

  “Who the hell are you?” he croaks, scratchy and barely intelligible. More memories come flooding back—Larry suspicious, Larry dismissive, Larry belligerent. I feel this weird contrast, like a double-exposed photograph. Part of me remembers that I’m supposed to be scared when Larry’s voice takes this dangerous tone, but he’s not scaring anyone anymore.

  “You don’t remember me Larry? I’m hurt. I remember you.”

  “I’ve never met you in my life,” he says, and starts patting around where his controller used to be.

  “I remember that night at Peace Creek. You, me, and Benjamin. I bet he remembers it too.”

  He pauses in his search and stares at me again. Shaking his head, he gasps. “You can’t be.”

  I stand over the bed. “Look at me.”

  “Janie,” he whispers. His gaze flicks between me and the edge of his bed. Probably still looking for his call button. Then he reaches for something on the other side of him, which I hadn’t noticed before. For a moment I think it’s some kind of back up call device and my heart seizes, but it doesn’t have a speaker or anything that appears to be a microphone.

  I pluck the object out of his reach; it looks like some kind of self-dosing painkiller.

  “Nuh uh, Larry. I’m talking to you. It wouldn’t be very polite of you to check out.”

  “You’re dead,” he croaks.

  “That’s right. Soon you will be too, and I’ll be waiting for you.”

  He stiffens, and I have this momentary worry that I will inadvertently cause a fatal heart attack or something right here.

  I lean in a little closer. “I promise you it won’t be pleasant. You let an innocent man pay the price for my death, but there’ll be nobody to pay for you in the afterlife.”

  This seems to spark some fight back into him. “Benjamin wasn’t innocent! He betrayed me! He had an affair with you!”

  “Benjamin and I never had an affair,” I say. I’m pretty sure that’s true. “He tried to convince me to go back to you on the day you killed me.” That part’s definitely not true.

  He clutches the bed railing. “What are you talking about?”

  “I hitched a ride to the Greyhound station in Winter Haven, because I was afraid of you, Larry. Then I had second thoughts, so I called Benjamin from a payphone. He told me you were a good man, that you were just going through a hard time. He told me I should give you another chance, and he drove all the way out there to bring me back.”

  Larry sinks back in the bed and his face seems to cloud over.

  “Listen to me!” I command. Then I remember that there are all sorts of nurses and other patients around, and lower my voice. “He wasn’t taking me away from you. He was bringing me back.”

  Larry moans, his expression stricken.

  “He was your friend right up until the end, and you took his life for it, as surely as you took mine. He deserved better Larry. So did I.”

  He grips my wrist; his skin is soft as tissue paper, but his grip is hard and a little painful. “You look so beautiful, Janie. Please don’t leave me again!”

  “I can’t stay. My time is past, and you can’t give me back what you took from me.” I glare, and he tries to edge back from me. “But you can give Benjamin back some of what you took from him. You can talk to the police and recant. Tell them Benjamin didn’t kill me. Tell them, Larry, or you’ll see me every night in hell. I’ll make you sorry. Believe me.”

  He raises a hand in front of his face. “Stop! I’ll tell them! Please Janie!”

  I take the phone from the bedside table and dial. As soon as I navigate my way to a human being, I pass the handset over.

  “Don’t let me
down,” I say, “I’m watching you.”

  He’s sobbing as I give it to him, but he’s coherent enough once he starts talking. When he does, I make my way from the room before anybody can show up and start asking me awkward questions.

  • • •

  I’m walking Meetu a week later when I pass Benjamin out in front of his trailer with his little girl, planting flowers, of all things. He waves, and I wave back before realizing he’s actually calling me over.

  “Damnedest thing happened,” he says, getting up and brushing his hands on his jeans. “I got a call from my parole officer today. Larry Dearborn recanted. One of those deathbed confession things. They say that’s how a lot of false convictions are overturned.”

  I do my best to feign surprise. “That’s terrific!”

  Meetu’s tail thumps like Benjamin’s a long lost friend.

  “Yeah,” he says. He pets Meetu, but his eyes stay on me. Looking hard, like he’s trying to peer into me.

  I’m not sure what to do, so I just shrug and say, “I’m glad you’re finally getting some justice.” The words feel stupid as they leave my mouth. He already served the sentence for this crime, and nothing can give that back to him.

  As if he’s read my mind, Benjamin says, “It’ll make it easier to find work. Lot of people wouldn’t look beyond that one line on a job application, before. Once people get a word for you—like convict—they think that word is all there is to know.”

  I nod.

  His little girl makes mud pies in the dirt, and I think about how clearing her father’s name will affect her future.

  “I could watch her for you,” I blurt out. “While you look for work.” My face heats up. He may treat me like a person, but that doesn’t mean he wants me watching his kid.

  “That would be great.”

  I scratch Meetu, trying to act like it’s no big deal.

  “So.” He nods toward Alicia’s trailer. “You gonna ask that girl out? Don’t tell me you’re not interested.”

  “I’m . . . not uninterested.” I take a slow breath. “I guess I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid she sees you different from how you see yourself.”

  I sag. “Yes.”

  “I hear you,” he says. “But if you don’t take a chance on somebody disappointing you, you never give them a chance to surprise you either.”

  When I don’t respond, he adds, “Will you stop being her friend if she says no?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then there’s no sense wanting something and not at least trying.”

  I glance at the trailer. At the rainbow blinds that mark her bedroom window. “Maybe I will.”

  He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Good luck.”

  It feels more like a command than anything else, and I take a couple automatic steps toward her trailer. By the time my brain figures out what my feet have done, it seems more awkward to stop than to keep going.

  Anyway, Benjamin’s right. He sees right through me, the same way I know the real him.

  The same way Alicia has always seen the real me, I realize. My pace picks up a bit, and Meetu responds by bounding forward, dragging me along, like everybody’s figured out my destination before me.

  She comes to the door as soon as I knock. “Hey,” she says.

  “You doing anything?”

  She shrugs. “Watching TV.”

  “Wanna come for a walk?”

  “Sure,” she says, stepping out onto the deck. “Did something happen? Is something wrong?”

  “Nope,” I say, leading her down the steps. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”

  We head down the street, quiet, like we don’t need to babble to fill the space between us. To anybody watching us, we probably look like we’re already a couple. Maybe by the time we come back, we will be. Maybe we won’t.

  Either way, we’ll be okay.

  The Rule of Three

  by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Popular culture failed to prepare me for first contact. Countless starships bristling with canon and rail gun turrets did not fill the skies. The aliens didn’t flood our television and radio bands with messages of conquest or world peace or miracle cures. They didn’t present themselves to the United Nations or to any government leaders. None of that. I was sitting in my condo in a suburb of Washington, D.C. when my mother phoned me from California. It was a Sunday afternoon. I’d just ordered a pizza and I’d planned to watch the big game on my new television. But my mother was on the phone. She’d just had a call from her own mother in her tiny mountain village back in China.

  An alien had landed.

  I charged the plane ticket to my credit card and was on a plane to Beijing two hours later. I didn’t watch the big game and I never got to eat my pizza.

  • • •

  My father is an American who, fresh out of university, traveled to China, specifically Guizhou Province, to teach English. My mother was one of his students, a member of an ethnic minority known as the Miao people, who had left her tiny rural village on a scholarship as part of a poverty abatement program. They fell in love, moved back to the United States, and I was born. My maternal grandmother still lives in China, much as her ancestors did. She manages just fine without indoor plumbing or electricity. She’s never owned a computer or a cell phone or a television. She raised her daughter, my mother, in a house that clung to the side of a steep mountainside half a kilometer from the same river where, according to a third-hand report from her much younger albeit blind neighbor who did own a phone and had actually placed the call to my mother, a “funny-looking fellow fell from the sky in a giant pearl and was teaching the village’s children odd things.”

  I grew up a child of two worlds, which led me to work for the US state department. Which is probably why my mother called me.

  The US government didn’t know about any alien. Nor, as best as I could tell with a few oblique inquiries of my counterparts in Beijing, did the Chinese government. The only ones who knew that an alien was visiting Earth were my maternal grandmother, her blind neighbor, and no more than a dozen or so villagers and their barefoot children.

  My mother had called me at noon. She passed along surprisingly good video shot by a local child on the blind neighbor’s cell phone. I could hear the kid’s laughing commentary as he panned back and forth capturing some trees along the riverbank before moving on to show the water and what looked like an enormous pearl floating there. The trees provided perspective. The pearl had to be at least two stories tall. It looked like nothing on Earth, and certainly nothing that had any business being in my grandmother’s backward village. Except that’s where it was. Not the place where an alien visitor, or an alien invader, would set down. There was nothing significant there, nothing of value, just a handful of people who—a lone cell phone notwithstanding—had never joined the modern world. Nothing but my grandmother.

  In hindsight, maybe I should have passed the video on to my boss, turned the whole matter over to the state department. Probably. Except that thought didn’t occur to me until after my plane had taken off and I was on my way. Instead, some dumb ass heroic notion had sent me racing off to save my grandmother from some science fiction nightmare.

  • • •

  Eighteen hours later, I arrived in Beijing feeling like I was dying. I’d used an American carrier that had opted to serve prepackaged Chinese food including at least one packet that had sat on the tarmac too long and spoiled. An hour into the flight and I was ill, very ill. I’ve never been sicker. I spent most of my flying time locked in an airplane lavatory as the world’s worst case of food poisoning purged everything out of my body. I only managed to get back to my seat in time for landing. I wanted to die, but I had to get to my grandmother. With the help of the airline’s customer service and endless apologies for the food poisoning, I transferred to a domestic flight leaving for Guizhou four hours later. I’d been upgraded to first class with the all the amenities, but couldn’t bear the thought of eating or drinking a
nything. Three hours later, just after 1 a.m. local time, I stopped to pick up my rental car. There was a message from Mrs. Liu, my grandmother’s blind neighbor, letting me know my mother had called ahead. My grandmother was expecting me and would have dinner waiting, no matter how late I arrived. The thought would have made me ill, but I had nothing left in my stomach. I hadn’t even touched the stash of chocolate chip granola bars I’d brought for energy along the walk and I knew I wouldn’t. I drove for three more hours to get as close as I could to the remote village where my grandmother lived. I hadn’t slept on either plane; I’d crossed twelve time zones and been awake for about thirty hours, and still had several hours of hiking along a starlit goat trail.

  Near the end, the sun was just starting to climb above the mountains, chasing the darkness from the narrow valley. The long walk in the dark had made me feel better. Not healthy, mind you, but not like I wanted to die. As I walked up the path to my grandmother’s house I caught the scent of her sour fish soup and I thought it the most welcome aroma in the world. No sooner had my dear sweet grandmother seen me approaching her door then she ushered me in and set a bowl in front of me. I ate two servings, and with every taste of pickled chili, cabbage, tomato, and local fish I felt myself restored a bit more. I’d come home.

  When I pushed back from the table, sated and feeling like a human being again, my grandmother said, “You look terrible. All that big city living is bad for you. You should eat real food.”

  “Yes, grandmother,” I said. “Thank you for the soup. It was wonderful.”

  That made her smile. She squeezed my hand. “Do not try to charm me, boy. You didn’t come so far just because you missed my cooking. You came because of the funny man, didn’t you?”

  Before I could ask her about the “funny man,” she stood up and stepped through a hanging curtain that divided the space. Dutifully, I followed. Her entire house was one small room, smaller than my bedroom back home. One side was kitchen and workspace with a long table and a massive storage chest, the other her modest living area with her bed, a shelf, and a small lamp. There was no bathroom; all of that business took place outside. In one corner of the living area, she’d set up a cot for me, piled high with cloth blankets decorated with intricate designs of white and deepest blue.