The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  “I’m sure having you helped.” He looked at me earnestly, wanting to hear that this was true.

  Perhaps with time, Cal had felt that it was better to have me around than not. It was what I aimed for every day. Making it worthwhile for Cal to have me around. But I had not helped him that day. Not at all.

  “I couldn’t take the memory away. I couldn’t take the pain away.” I stood up and walked over to the open window. It felt suddenly overly warm in the room. “They seem so strong,” I said, “because they survive unspeakable things. But children are fragile. They can break and still survive.” I thought about the chasm that often seemed to separate me from Cal. It was partly the chasm that separated me from everyone, because the absence of feeling makes all people, to some extent, incomprehensible. They become a dull roar, an expressionless mass. But it was also a chasm partly made by the things that had broken inside Cal the day we found our mother dead by her own hand in our apartment. I was just trying, day by day and with limited means, to build a bridge across to him. A bridge made out of toothpicks. Slow work. Maybe hopeless.

  When I looked up, Troy was standing next to me. I liked the way he stood there—somehow not imposing, not expecting, and not inserting himself into a moment of weakness. He just seemed to be holding his hand out across the void: I’m here; I’m not dull or expressionless.

  I closed the two feet of distance between us. I leaned forward and kissed him. His hands fell to my waist and neck and drew me closer. I took hold of his loose tie and pulled.

  He smelled like soap and hay, and the pressure of his hands was confident but gentle. More giving than demanding. For a while as we kissed, I lost sight of everything beyond the taste of his mouth and the way his eyes seemed like different eyes at that distance: clear and full of familiar meaning. I didn’t have to pull away. The kisses ended on the strength of the story that had brought them about. Cal was there in the background, his grief lingering like a specter.

  We drew back. Troy’s smile was one of wonderment, as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d really meant to grace him with kisses. That was one I hadn’t seen before. He took my hand and pulled me over to the couch, putting his arm around me. We sat that way for a while as I pondered the unexpected ease I felt in his company. Normally, sitting still next to someone I’d been kissing and then wasn’t would seem pointless.

  “So what are we going to do about Cal?” Troy asked quietly.

  That surprised me. I hadn’t expected a “we.” I sat up and looked at him; his arm dropped to my waist. “I’ve been trying to locate his biological father. Prove paternity, challenge the adoption.” I paused. “Do you have ideas?”

  Troy tipped his head a little and considered. “I’ll start by talking to my dad.”

  “You think he’s persuadable?” I still knew nothing about Tanner Philbrick, apart from the fact that he dripped money and adopted Cal. He could be a gold-bar bully or he could be a gilded pushover.

  “Not in the usual sense,” Troy said, frowning at a spot on the wall. “But there are buttons I can push.”

  As I thought about that, I recalled the whiff of wrongness at the Philbrick mansion, the strange inner workings of it, the tang of invisible blood. I decided to do some button-pushing myself. “So how does it work,” I asked lightly, “with the mom, the stepmom, and the dad? Are they all under the same roof?”

  Troy shook his head. “My mom has her own house over in Sea Cliff. My dad and Monica live at the house in Pac Heights.”

  “You get along with Monica?”

  Now the guardedness crept into his eyes, and the arm around me tensed. “More or less. Charlie gets along with her better.” He gave a dry chuckle. “Charlie gets along better with all of them.”

  I waited, figuring that one might unpack itself. Sure enough, it did.

  “Parents all want you to be perfect. They just don’t agree on what perfection is.” His arm around me relaxed a little, and his thumb tapped my shoulder gently. “Charlie knows how to give each of them the perfection they’re looking for. He’s obedient for Mom. He’s ambitious for Dad. He’s beautiful for Monica.”

  I shifted a little so I could see his face. He was looking inward, thinking.

  “I don’t know how to do that,” he said quietly. “No matter what drops I’m taking, I can’t seem to show them the side they want to see.”

  I reached up and traced the line of his jaw. “You’re no shape-shifter,” I said. “So what? That just makes you honest.”

  He gave me a quick, wistful smile. “No one at my house seems to think honesty is perfection. Besides,” he said, looking away again. “I’m not that honest. And I’m nowhere near perfect.” Suddenly a gloom settled on his brow, heavy as a storm cloud.

  I watched him. I thought about how much money his synaffs probably cost and also how much pain they probably cost him. There was some sense in the wish to balance one’s emotions, so that it wasn’t just endless ecstasy, but clearly balance came with consequences. I didn’t understand how these fancy synaffs worked. With a regimen like his, was the sadness caused entirely by the synaff, or did the synaff simply allow for real things to upset him? If I acted sympathetic, was I pretending to sympathize with a feeling? Or a drug?

  I decided on the former. “Perfect is boring anyway,” I suggested.

  He didn’t say anything. He was lost in a dark tunnel, all noise and nightmares, and my voice didn’t reach him.

  I took his hand and held it tight the way I sometimes do with Cal, trying to send him some vestigial current of reassurance, lost to my brain but stored in the vessel of human skin. “Troy?” I said. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  He pulled himself out of the dark place and locked eyes with me. “No,” he said. “I can’t.” He pressed my hand and made a visible effort to move onward. “Do you have a photograph of Calvino?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I got up and reached behind the bookcase for the key that hung there; then I unlocked the top drawer of the dresser and opened it. Troy had joined me, which I hadn’t counted on, but there were no more secrets there anyway.

  He stared down at the drawer’s contents and pointed. “Is that . . .”

  “Yup,” I said. I don’t know anything about guns, thanks to Gao and his generous disdain. All I knew about this one was that it was semiautomatic and acquired legally. The police had no difficulty concluding death by suicide, so they’d given it back. Now there it was, eating a hole in my dresser, nestled in a black velvet shirt of Mom’s that I’d kept because it still had traces of her perfume. “It’s surprisingly hard to get rid of a handgun,” I said. “Throwing it into Lake Merritt isn’t really an option, and selling it seems only slightly less stupid.”

  He raised his mesmerized eyes to look at me. “You don’t want it for protection?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe in guns. Weapons for weaklings, says my trainer. Besides, I have lipstick, remember?”

  He smiled. “Yes, I do.”

  I showed him the picture of Calvino that was most recent, taken on his tenth birthday. Cal grinned at the camera, his arm around my waist. He was wearing a costume crown and a vintage baseball shirt, both courtesy of Tabby, and his eyes were high on happiness and chocolate frosting. Troy studied the picture, a slow smile edging across his face. “Look how much he loves you,” he said quietly. He handed the photo back to me and briefly cupped my chin in his hand. “Not hard to see why.” He smiled. “I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”

  “Thank you.” I meant it. I didn’t think Troy would get far. Unless he planned to drown his dad in boyish sweetness, his odds didn’t look good to me. But hey, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Troy had a very well-hidden mean streak.

  “Are we still on for the bookstore?” I asked, leading the way back to the entrance. “I’m heading to Marin County in the morning. Hoping to find Cal’s dad.”

  He follow
ed me to the door of the apartment. “Why don’t you let me know when you’re on the way back?” He winked. “That way I’ll have your phone number.”

  I smiled. “Deal.”

  He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed the knuckles softly, managing to make it both gallant and playful. “Bye, Natalia,” he said.

  I watched him pad across the psychedelic carpet to the stairs, and then I walked back to the apartment and stood in the silent living room, listening to his car door open and close, the motor starting and receding.

  * * *

  —

  Troy had left the photo of Cal propped up against a lamp. Instead of putting it back in the closed drawer, I picked it up again and found, tucked behind it, another one. Mom was pregnant and I was seven. The day was vivid in my mind. A planned excursion to the amusement park, money saved up for rides and candy, an event anticipated for weeks. At the entrance, Mom had bought an extra ticket for a wispy pigtailed girl who was short on cash, and I could still see the way she put the ticket in her palm: firm and full of purpose. “Here it is,” she said sternly, “but I’m giving it to you on one condition. You have to have fun. Understand? No disappointments today. Only fun.” The girl smiled, getting the joke, and giggled. As we walked through the park I held Mom’s hand and glowed with pride; she was beautiful, and generous, and funny. My mom. The love filled me to bursting. In the picture I had teeth missing and a radiant smile, and I was pulling Mom’s face sideways into mine with passionate, possessive joy. Mom had her eyes closed and her face bunched up like I was squeezing too hard. I could recall the day but not the flame that had burned in me. Both of those people in the photo were gone.

  25

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 13—NIGHT

  I didn’t sleep much Saturday night.

  By the time I’d showered and pulled the bed out of the wall, my confidence in Troy was sagging like a year-old mattress in the Tenderloin. What kind of persuasion did he plan to offer Daddy Philbrick? I wasn’t sure Troy even knew what persuasion looked like. More likely, he would find himself indignantly sticking up for the two Peña orphans, which meant Philbrick would learn way more about me and Cal than I ever wanted him to know. Then what? Any confrontation I had with Philbrick was bound to be harder, messier.

  Then, as I lay in the darkness and listened to the cars on Lakeshore, I started to wonder about choice. How, exactly, could Troy not have a choice? What did that look like? I’d always thought the wealthy took synaffs recreationally, but what I didn’t know about the wealthy would overflow the Philbrick mansion. Were the synaffs a prescription? Did he have some kind of condition? Was someone else making the choice for him? The dark ceiling above me had no answers.

  Two cats yowled and the scent of tuberose threaded into the room. A waiting car idled just outside the window, then gunned its motor and faded into the distance. I finally fell asleep but woke again at dawn, hauled out of dreamless rest by the sound of the casement window slamming in the wind and the real problem pounding at my head: Cal. I got up to latch the window and stared out at the black trees shuddering in the wind. Cal had just spent another night out there. It’s just not true that everything looks better in the morning. Sometimes it looks bleak, and in the gray light you can see the nasties that were hiding under the bed in the darkness.

  * * *

  —

  We left Oakland at 8:30 a.m. with the idea that we might catch Hoffman before his sermon. The day before had been all sun and splendor; this one was all fog and gloom. San Quentin looked menacing in the gray mist, like a Hadrian’s Wall trying to stop a horde of monsters from descending upon us.

  At 9:30 a.m. we were still in the car and my phone rang. It was a San Francisco number that I didn’t recognize. As I said hello, the lunatic hope that Cal had gotten to a phone buzzed at the edge of my brain.

  “Miss Peña.”

  He was calling from his decal, not his office phone. I had no trouble recognizing Dr. Hugh Glout’s voice, even though he was surrounded by noise on his end. “Dr. Glout. Finally.” There was a whooping cry in the background followed by cheers. “Quite a party this morning at RealCorp,” I commented.

  “I’m at a parade in North Beach.”

  Not where I’d imagined the skeletal Glout spending his Sunday mornings, not by a long shot.

  “I’m calling with some news,” he went on. His voice sounded strange because he was raising it to talk over the crowds. He was feeling something, but I couldn’t tell what. Anxiety?

  “Is Cal all right?”

  “Cal is fine. I’d be lying if I said he looked happy, but he looks fine.” That was something, at least. Assuming I could count on Glout’s notion of “fine,” which I wasn’t entirely sure I could. “However.” A trumpet blared in the background, and Glout paused. “What I have learned so far about Cal has changed his status.”

  “What do you mean? What have you learned?”

  “He is . . .” Glout paused and I could hear him readjusting, pulling back to recast what he wanted to say. “RealCorp usually brings in twenty to thirty kids a month for additional testing. It’s always informative. We test whenever kids go beyond the median waning age.”

  That sounded hopeful. Cal was one of many. “Yes?” I prompted him.

  “There would be no way for you to know this, because it’s very gradual and we have international data. But across the globe, the waning age is getting slightly younger each year. A generation ago it was 10.8. Now it’s 10.1.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do with those numbers. “Is that fast?”

  He let out a short cough of surprise. “Very fast. Terrifyingly fast.”

  “I see.” But I still didn’t see how this changed Cal’s status.

  Glout tried again from another angle. “How much do you know about what happens in the brain when people wane?”

  “Not much. Only what we see on the outside.”

  “Okay. Imagine that you’re looking at a child’s brain. It’s like a network of roads going everywhere, connecting all over the place, with some main roads and lots of side roads. When waning happens, more and more of those roads go unused until eventually, all you have is one main road with deep tire grooves. In adults, those grooves are so deep you can’t get the car out. You just keep going back and forth on that same road. The rest of the roads are still there, probably, in theory, but they’re overgrown and abandoned. That’s a scientifically inaccurate but metaphorically useful picture of how it works.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “That is what happens to all of us, even children who wane late. Except for Cal, it seems. Cal doesn’t seem to be abandoning all his side roads. On the contrary.” A cymbal crashed and the trumpet sounded again, but quieter this time. It had moved along on its slow march. “He is trailblazing. He’s making new roads.”

  I listened as the pumping music of Glout’s parade tooted and a kid shrieked with delight.

  “We’re not sure why,” Glout went on into my silence. “I’m hypothesizing that the timing of your mother’s death may have something to do with it, but that’s just a guess. Maybe that event, that trauma, violently engrained some of the processes that in other children start to disappear. Then again, lots of kids suffer traumas at this age and still wane, so I might be wrong.”

  I heard Glout’s guess, and I thought about it, and I saw in my mind the evidence Glout had not seen, accumulating over the last year. Cal’s inexhaustible grief, his dizzying highs and lows, his sudden tendency to fall apart at unexpected moments, his endless, imponderable questions.

  The first time he asked me about Mom was about a month after her death. I’d woken up in the morning to find him sitting in front of the open closet, looking at her shoes. Sneakers, loafers, and a pair of scuffed pumps. They looked old—crooked and creased with the shape of her feet. Too old, as if they’d been stashed for twenty years, not four weeks. Cal�
�s tearstained face looked up at me. “Why?” he asked me.

  For a moment I wasn’t sure what he meant. Why are her shoes still here? Why do they look so old?

  He swallowed and pushed the words out. “Why did Mom shoot herself?”

  Slowly, I sat down next to him on the floor. Even though I’m not that dumb, I tried the easy answer first. “She took a really bad dose. It messed her up.”

  He looked at me with mournful condescension. “You know that’s not really why.”

  I considered the old soul in Cal’s eyes and something tugged at me—an awareness of something bigger than me, more profound, more discerning—in the person who was my little brother. It commanded honesty. “I don’t know, Cal,” I said. “I don’t get it, either.”

  This made the tears well up in his eyes. “But you’re like her,” he whispered. “You’re grown up. You’re supposed to understand her.”

  “I know.” What Cal didn’t know was that I spent just about every night trying to reason myself through the same question. So far, I had no answers. Her death defied explanation. She wasn’t supposed to feel. She wasn’t supposed to want to feel. She was supposed to be impervious to the absence of emotion. She was supposed to be rational, and she was supposed to survive. “But I guess we’re not alike enough,” I said.

  Cal suddenly started sobbing, and his hands grabbed at me with desperation. “You can’t be like her,” he wailed. “Please don’t be like her. Please don’t.” He looked me in the eyes, his face close to mine, searching for proof of something. “Promise me, Nat.”

  I looked back at him, unflinching, willing him to see certainty. The workings of her mind, the gravitational pull of forgotten emotions, those were all a mystery to me. I had never even seen the path that led her to the edge. “I’m not like her, Cal. I promise.” It wasn’t enough, but it was true.