The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  “Glout has a lab, his own lab, but I can’t figure out where it is. He said to me on the phone once that Cal looked fine. He had to be watching him.”

  Gao nodded. “On a screen. Makes sense.” He stooped to pick up one of the fallen screen decals, placing it on the desk.

  I walked past him toward the old-timey monitor embedded in the wall. “Maybe not a screen but a window.”

  Gao joined me. We looked around the whole frame for a power button. Nothing. In the middle of the wall, thirty inches left of the monitor, was a light switch. I tried it.

  “Oh,” Gao said.

  Beyond the monitor frame, a room had been dimly illuminated. It was better-looking than the cells two floors down. Larger, more bedroom and less dungeon. In the yellow glow of a nightlight, we saw a little bookshelf, a round carpet, a wooden desk, a twin bed. On the bed was a bundle of blankets that could have been just a bundle of blankets. Or it could have been a boy.

  The room had an open door to the right that probably led to a bathroom and a closed door on the far side, straight ahead of us.

  “It’s off a corridor parallel to this one,” Gao said.

  We walked quickly out of the room, left down the hallway, left again and again. The third door had no number and was standing ajar. It opened onto a narrow corridor. At the other end was a door with no handle. I felt it unlock as I pushed.

  The little bedroom seemed dark, coming from the hallway. The window I had looked through was a one-way mirror, reflecting my shadowy shape and the doorway’s rectangle of light. I stepped forward, letting my eyes adjust, until I stood over the little bed, staring down at the knotted bundle of blankets.

  A dark head of hair. An impish nose. The eyes of the old soul closed. Almost motionless, but for the near-imperceptible rise and fall of his breathing. Calvino. Alive and sleeping peacefully.

  The pillow was pushed to the side and his head rested on his hand. I reached out to touch his face. He twitched a little. “Cal,” I said quietly. “Cal?”

  He squirmed, pressing his face downward.

  “Cal,” I said. “I’m here to take you home.”

  His eyes fluttered open. For a moment he was too groggy to understand, and then his eyes flung open. “Nat!” he said. He threw his arms around my neck. “Nat,” he said again, squeezing harder.

  “I’m here, Cal. I’m here.” As I held tight to the bundle of pajamas and ribs and tousled hair, I felt something strange. It seemed as though something was expanding in my chest, taking up all the room so that I couldn’t breathe. Any moment now I would burst into pieces. But at the same time, I had the sense that I’d been falling down a long, long tunnel into darkness, and now I’d landed on something soft, and steady, and sure. My face hurt.

  Cal pulled back and stared at me, his eyes wide. “Nat, you’re crying,” he said. He was only surprised for a second. Then, with the ease he always has for ignoring the unimportant things, he smiled. He leaned forward and kissed my eyebrows, first one, then the other. “Don’t cry, Nat. We’re together now.”

  36

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 15–17

  Joey told me afterward that he and Tabby had put their marvelous acting to work, staging a screaming match in the lobby while Gao called the SFPD. I didn’t have any regrets, not really, but I would have paid good money to see that show.

  I assumed the blown-up wall would be a problem, but lucky for me RealCorp had bigger problems. The police took a dim view of Ayles’s little parlor game, especially in light of the fact that he’d played it before. There were seventeen “adoptees” at RealCorp that night, and the game wasn’t new. The Bay Area has never been short on orphans. I could tell from the way Gao described it that the investigation would take a while.

  I didn’t go back to work right away. I figured if they were going to forgive me at all, they would forgive me two days more. On Monday, Cal slept until lunchtime and I sat in the armchair next to his bed, watching him. Once he woke up he wanted to tell me, in as much detail as he could remember, everything that had happened to him from the minute Dr. Baylor took him out of class to the moment I woke him up at RealCorp. He talked and I listened all the way to dinnertime, when Tabby, Cass, and Joey joined us. Tabby made pizza. Cal was so giddy he hardly ate, and it felt like a celebration, even though I still had this tightness in the back of my head that told me it wasn’t a celebration, it was a reprieve.

  On Tuesday, Cass loaned me the car, and Cal and I drove to Point Reyes. We hadn’t been there together since Mom died. It was one of the glorious days of October with shining waves and cloudless skies. The tall grass rustled in the wind, obscuring the sound of the ocean, so when we arrived at the sandy beach, the sea took us by surprise. Cal ran along the cool sand back and forth, never farther than twenty feet from where I sat, as if bound to me by an invisible tether. When he finally dropped down next to me, he was pink-cheeked and breathless. I waited for a while and then I told him about Mordecai’s Hill, and how I’d gone there looking for his father, Dylan Hoffman. I told him the truth about all of it, I just left out some of the details that would give him nightmares. “He really wanted to be a part of your life,” I said, looking down at where he lay in the sand, his eyes wide and solemn.

  “Why hadn’t he before?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It seems like while Mom was alive she didn’t want him around, and then once she was gone . . . Well, it was probably hard to jump in like that. Would you have wanted him to show up on the doorstep right when Mom died?”

  He shook his head slowly. After a while, he asked, “What was he like?”

  “He was pretty likable. He was earnest. Most people care about nothing, but things really mattered to him, you could tell. And when he realized all his Puritans were in danger, he wanted to be there with them. Not a lot of people would.”

  “So he was brave. Like you,” Cal said.

  “It’s easy to throw your fists around when you’re not afraid of anything. Sometimes it’s too easy—sometimes it’s just stupid. But Dylan made an intentional decision that he knew would probably result in his death. A choice. It’s different—you know?”

  Cal sat up and nodded, very serious. “Do you think he did the right thing? Is that what you would do?” He swallowed. “I mean, do you think it’s right to give up your life like that?”

  He had never asked it that way before. I pushed my feet deeper into the sand and looked out at the waves, so seductive in their timelessness. A view unchanged for hundreds of years. One could easily imagine slipping through the ligatures that kept us in place, turning back to the mainland and finding that we’d traveled to another time.

  I didn’t want the burden of offering a verdict on Hoffman—or a verdict on Mom’s suicide, which was really at the bottom of Cal’s question. But the burden was mine. This was Cal, with all his anxieties and his never-ending pain from the past and his justified fears about the future. And things looked different to me now. I still couldn’t see the path Mom had taken, but I did understand that she had followed her instincts there, and I understood that instincts cannot be ignored. “That’s hard to answer, Cal. To be honest, I can think of situations in which I would give up my own life. And once you can think of one situation, it’s hard to judge someone else for choosing another.” I looked at him. “What do you think?”

  He dropped his head slowly against my shoulder. “I think I would never do that as long as you were alive. But otherwise I could think of situations in which it would make sense. Even though I would be too afraid to do it probably.”

  I put my arm around him. “Yeah. Good answer.”

  * * *

  —

  On the way home I called my supervisor at the Landmark, Elsa Muir, to beg for my job. She was mostly silent as I explained, minus the key details of who and why, that my brother had been abducted, and then she surprised me by saying I was the third-b
est cleaner on her staff and that she would count the days I’d been gone as short-term disability. I overcame my surprise and thanked her. Someone else had whispered in her ear, I suspected, but I couldn’t tell who—maybe Gao. Whoever it was, I owed them.

  I showed up to work on Wednesday on time and with Cal in tow. We hadn’t really thought through the arrangement, but we both knew that he couldn’t go back to school and neither one of us wanted the other one out of sight. I knew it wasn’t sustainable. I just decided to postpone the problem. Marta gave Cal a massive hug and then set him to work sorting all the toiletries on my cart and hers. I vacuumed. I made beds. I put hair dryers away and scrubbed toilets. I glanced up at Cal at least once every minute, as if he would vanish if I looked away for too long.

  Close to lunchtime, Elsa called me to say that there was someone in the atrium who knew me and wanted to invite me to lunch. I stared at De rerum, trying to decide if this was the moment when I had to bundle Cal into a stolen getaway car. “Who is it?”

  “Madeleine Porter.” When I was silent, she added, “It’s the third time she’s come asking for you. An older woman. Looks very respectable.”

  I searched my memory, but nothing came to mind. “Okay, thanks.” I did a quick search for her on De rerum but found nothing—or, rather, a tennis player and a news anchor, but neither was familiar.

  “Cal, we’re going to the atrium to meet someone for lunch.”

  His head popped up from behind the cleaning cart. He was reading on the job again. “Who?”

  “Someone named Madeleine Porter. I don’t know her—does her name ring a bell?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay, well. We’ll go, and if it turns out to be someone we don’t want to have lunch with, we’ll just leave.”

  He looked concerned. “Do we have a way out?”

  I smiled. “We always have a way out.”

  Cal nodded, believing me. He tucked his book into his backpack as I parked my cleaning cart, and then we made our way downstairs into the atrium. We stood there at the edge of the glittering crowd, me with my maid’s uniform and my overprotectiveness, and Cal with his oversized backpack and wide-eyed wariness, looking for all the world like two desperate orphans on the lam.

  I saw a hand waving at me. She sat a few tables to my right—a woman on the far side of seventy, with very neat, short hair and a periwinkle cardigan. It was the tough old bird from the subway. She smiled.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Cal.

  He nodded, relieved, and followed me to her table. She stood up as we approached and put out her hand. “Natalia, I’m Madeleine Porter,” she said, shaking my hand. “Please excuse what might seem like an impertinence—I mean in tracking you down to your workplace. Do you mind?”

  I liked the way she said it, genuinely asking if I would excuse it rather than assuming I would. “Not at all. I’m glad to see you’re well. This is my brother, Cal.”

  Cal put out his hand. “Calvino Peña,” he said.

  Madeleine shook it. “Very good to meet you. Would you both like to join me for lunch?”

  I accepted. Cal put his giant backpack down and I ignored the outraged glances I was getting for sitting at an atrium table in a maid’s uniform. Madeleine ignored them, too. After we ordered, she treated Cal to an Alexandre Dumas version of our subway debacle, casting me as a swashbuckling heroine and herself as a damsel in distress. I resisted the impulse to correct her because Cal was mesmerized. Then, thanks to Cal’s book of maps, we got on the subject of travel, and the two of them had an animated conversation about India, Peru, Ireland, and British Columbia, all of which Madeleine had been to. She’d been a teacher for decades, which went a long way toward explaining her easy rapport with Cal, and after retiring she’d dedicated herself entirely to “indulging helpless wanderlust,” as she put it. Cal swooned at this phrase with all the reverence of a novitiate. By the time we got to dessert, he had made a new friend and was looking more himself than I’d seen him since Monday.

  “Well,” Madeleine said, sipping her coffee with a satisfied air. She glanced at Cal, who had been momentarily silenced by a towering ice cream sundae. “I have an ulterior motive for inviting you to lunch, and I hope you’ll bear with me as I explain.” This was directed to me, and I nodded. “After your kindness to me last week, I did my best to find you.” She smiled. “It took a little effort, but my request with the transit police apparently made its way eventually to an Officer Edward Gao of the Oakland police.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Gao was my trainer in high school.”

  “Gao called me in order to understand why I wanted to locate you, and when I explained, he told me a little more about your situation. He warned me that you would be very displeased at our meddling, but between us we thought of a proposal.”

  I didn’t say anything. I flipped through a dozen speculative possibilities, coming up with nothing, and watched Madeleine’s bright eyes dancing with anticipation. “Officer Gao explained to me, and I quite agreed, that Calvino would not do well in a traditional high school. Those programs are designed entirely for waned adolescents, and are not suitable for young people such as Calvino.”

  She said it like he was a member of a privileged group, rather than a freakish rarity, and I could see Cal’s shoulders lifting with a sense of importance as she spoke. “I first became a teacher when I was twenty-two years old. And that was many, many years ago. Before waning was consistent. Before high school became a place where police officers taught teenagers to defend themselves and the rules that make society function. Before they stopped teaching poetry.” She smiled. “So I know what it means to teach adolescents who have all of Calvino’s remarkable capabilities.” She glanced at Cal but put the proposal to me. “It would be a great privilege to be a part of Cal’s education. If both of you are amenable to it.”

  I looked at Cal and saw the pleading in his eyes. I swallowed. “I think we are both amenable. But perhaps not well financed—”

  “No,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m sorry, I should have clarified. I mean that it would be my privilege to tutor Calvino without remuneration. Or, more accurately put, still being alive, thanks to you, is remuneration enough.”

  37

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 17—EVENING

  I decided to talk it over with Gao that evening at our training session. After skipping on Monday, I had received a terse message on Tuesday that said No more days off, and I decided it would be a good idea to stay on Gao’s good side. Cal and I showed up at 8:30 p.m. and Gao pointed Cal to a leather armchair near the boxing ring where I’d seen an overweight retired cop who everyone called Daisy parking himself during the day. “You can read over there,” he said.

  Cal threw his arms around Gao’s waist and said, “Thank you for helping my sister even when she refuses help. And thank you for finding me a teacher. We love you.” Then he curled up in Daisy’s chair and pulled out his book.

  Gao was momentarily speechless. Then he said, “Isn’t he a little young to be reading Edith Wharton?”

  I shrugged. “He’s precocious.”

  He considered it for a moment longer. “All right.” He turned and pointed to the mats where I had been pummeled to pieces the week before. “Let’s do some planking.”

  Resigning myself to my fate, I took my water out and padded over to the mats.

  “One minute hold, ten toe taps, then repeat,” he said.

  I stifled a groan and got facedown on the floor. Gao sat down in a folding chair. As I propped myself up on my elbows and toes, I asked him, “What do you think of Madeleine Porter? Honestly.”

  “I checked her out. She is exactly what she says she is. Won several teaching awards before high schools were transferred to the academies. I’d take her up on it. Cal has no place in a regular program.”

  The one-minute timer beeped. I started my toe taps. “I g
uess it’s the best offer on the table. Cal already loves her.”

  “I thought he would.” He watched my toe taps critically. “What did you think of her?”

  “She’s wealthy enough to eat at the Landmark and pay for synaffs. Those are two strikes against her.”

  Gao pulled his mouth into a grimace. “That’s your prejudice talking. Sounded to me like she was taking a very moderate dose, just enough to enjoy her old age. Besides, it will make her a better teacher for Cal.”

  I was still toe tapping. “If I’d met her before high school,” I breathed, “I probably would have loved her, too.”

  Gao nodded. “Yeah.” Ten seconds into the third plank he changed the subject. “We made an arrest today in the Philbrick homicides. SFPD, not Oakland. The younger son, Troy Philbrick, had been at the family vineyard in Napa. He drove down and made a confession.”

  I didn’t say anything. I waited the minute out and started the toe taps. “Okay,” I said.

  “He explained that he killed his parents for messing with his dosages. I haven’t questioned him, because he’ll be processed in SF, but I suspect the GPS on his phone will be used as evidence. Depends on how his defense handles the case, of course.”

  I thought about this while I moved on to the fourth minute-long plank. “He was at my house for several hours,” I said, my voice strained.

  “Yes,” Gao replied. “I figured. So, we’ll see how he pleads.”

  “Why wasn’t I brought in for questioning?”

  “There was footage of you on BART leaving well before the Philbricks were shot. Whereas the bridge cameras show Troy leaving San Francisco just afterward.”

  I dropped to the mat and turned on my side to face him. “You have to understand, I wouldn’t testify against him in court. If he asked me to, I’d lie.” I was panting. It made me sound desperate when I wasn’t.