The Mansion

by Boone, Ezekiel

  Oh.

  How could she have failed to recognize it? Of course she’d been in there before. During those months that she lived out on the estate with Billy and Shawn in the cabin, the year she’d let herself drop out of college, she’d come here more than once with Shawn.

  But only once without him. Near the end. When things were so twisted and complicated and broken with the three of them that she couldn’t figure out what made sense anymore.

  She looked in the window again, but the inside truly was unremarkable other than the fire damage. What would have been cathartic, she thought, was if the cabin was still here. But, alas, Shawn had donated it to Cortaca University. If the cabin were still standing where it had been for those long, strange months when she was twenty and then twenty-one years old, she could have looked for some peace.

  Instead, she found herself pacing away from the preserved groundskeeper’s cottage and looking for the plot of land the cabin had once occupied, looking for what was missing.

  How was it, she thought, that she’d been there for a week already and this was the first time it had occurred to her to look for the cabin? Forty or fifty feet past the burned cottage she found a flat piece of land that looked promising, but no, she realized; it was too close to Eagle Mansion still. The view was wrong, and there should have been . . . yes, there! After the trees thickened behind the mansion, a dozen steps in, there were the remnants of a small clearing: the Eagle family burial plot. Shawn’s great-grandfather, his grandfather and grandmother, his mother and father.

  It had been neatly tended when she’d lived at the cabin, with fresh plantings and evidence of Shawn’s intervention, the activity of a caring son, but in the following years it had gone wild. There was a new wrought-iron fence that blended into the woods, but even with the carpet of vines and ivy broken by seedlings and fast-growing pines, she could see the same small, poorly chiseled sandstone markers, the names and dates still unreadable. In some ways, it looked better like this, left to nature. Unmolested. It looked designed to be forgotten. Smart, she thought, the fence, a way to keep this part of him private from the guests wandering the grounds; the fence didn’t have a gate that she saw, so anyone who wanted to go into the small burial plot would have to deliberately step over the thigh-high iron, and there were small, tactful signs respectfully asking guests to stay out. The family cemetery looked more authentic to her now than it had a dozen years earlier when it had been cleared of growth and tended to. It had looked too ready for use back then, as if it were a going concern, ready to take a body at any moment. Now it looked as it should: a part of Shawn’s history. Buried.

  The cemetery oriented her, and she moved back out of the woods and then took another two dozen, three dozen steps and stopped. She felt a cold shiver go down her back. She turned to look at the main building and then down to the river. Yes, she thought. This was it. This was where the cabin had stood. This was where Shawn and Billy had come after they graduated, the two of them living barely a step above savagery while they built the bones of Nellie and what went on to become Eagle Logic.

  It wasn’t that long ago, really. Twelve, no, thirteen years since she landed here. Good god, how had Shawn talked her into coming back with him after that Halloween party? But he had, and she’d spent the night, and when she woke in the morning, Shawn’s arm flopped over her shoulder and his hand cupping her breast, she didn’t want to leave. There was that first awkward and charged moment when she’d opened her eyes to see Billy on his pad, staring at her from his sleeping bag, but then he’d raised a hand in greeting and rolled over to give her the privacy to get dressed. She went to go pee, both amused and disgusted at having to use an outhouse, and when she got back, Billy was sitting on the porch of the cabin on one of the tree stumps that passed for furniture.

  “I’ve got some coffee working,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “Figure you can use some after last night. I’m Billy. Shawn’s roommate. You can go wake him up if you’d like.”

  “Thanks. That’s okay. Let him sleep a bit. I’m not in any hurry. And thanks for the coffee, too.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. It’s terrible coffee, made worse by the fact that we don’t have any sugar or milk. As an added bonus, it’s going to take forever to make. The woodstove has to heat up and then boil the water and then, well, it’s a process.”

  He went in and brought her out a blanket to wrap around herself, and then in a while, went back in the cabin again to bring her out a cup of black coffee that was, as advertised, terrible. They talked and talked, and it wasn’t until Shawn came out the door, looking sheepish and yawning, that she realized she’d been chatting with Billy for the better part of two hours.

  “Hey,” Shawn said. He’d put on a pair of jeans but was barefoot despite the cold, and he pulled a red Cortaca University sweatshirt over his bare chest. He hesitated, and then he walked to her, leaned over, and kissed her.

  That was nice.

  She didn’t remember how exactly it came about, but she spent the day there, and then the three of them drove to Cortaca so she could make her shift at the Stardust Bar. She was exhausted by the time she was done, dead on her feet, but when she left work, she saw Shawn sitting on a bench on the pedestrian mall outside the bar. He was huddled over his laptop, banging away at the keys. She stood over him, and when he closed up his laptop she took his hands in hers. They were so cold they burned against her fingers. He had his hood up and his coat zipped, but he was shivering.

  “How long have you been waiting?” she said.

  “My whole life,” he said.

  She was twenty.

  She’d never heard anything so beautiful. Of course she’d fallen in love.

  He walked her back to that rattletrap car of his and they swung by her apartment so she could grab a change of clothes and her toothbrush. Billy was curled up in the backseat, asleep—now, as she thought about it, for the first time it occurred to her that he was probably passed out drunk—and stayed asleep the whole drive and even once they parked in front of Shawn’s cabin. So she spent her second night with Shawn, and while it wasn’t every night that month, it was most of them. Sometimes she borrowed a roommate’s car to get to Whiskey Run, and sometimes Shawn picked her up or lent her his car so she could get back and forth to classes and her job. She was in love and felt like her life in Cortaca was just a waiting game for when she could get back to the cabin to see Shawn. Classes, her friends, her shifts at the Stardust Bar, Thanksgiving with Marge’s family in New York City—all of it was like moving underwater compared to being with Shawn. She started missing a few classes here and there, for an extra few hours or days at the cabin. Accordingly, her grades began to suffer. Still, she pulled an A, two B pluses, and one B minus.

  She’d planned to spend the five weeks of winter break living alone in her apartment, picking up extra shifts at the bar, but instead, she went to live with Shawn and Billy in Whiskey Run, taking the station wagon back to Cortaca whenever she had to work. For Christmas, her roommate Marge flew her out to Hawaii to be with Marge’s family, and Emily spent the entire week sick with longing to be back with Shawn, the beachfront house wasted on her. New Year’s Eve in that tiny cabin, the woodstove glowing red, snow coming down in fits and starts, was the happiest she’d ever been.

  And all these years later, standing outside Eagle Mansion as a thirty-three-year-old woman, married to the wrong one of those two boys, when the idea of being twenty, and then twenty-one, seemed like such ancient history, Emily couldn’t figure out when things first turned sour with Shawn. There had to have been an initial moment. There had to have been a singular point in time when, if she could go back and press down her finger, it all began to unravel. Was it when Shawn started traveling to try to find investors to give them seed money for the next stage with Eagle Logic, leaving her and Billy alone for such long stretches, days at a time? Was it before that, when Billy was the one who helped her with the dishes and other chores, Shawn so quickly acclimatizing to th
e idea of being taken care of? Or was it before that, when the spring semester started and she didn’t go to class, when she first threw her life at the feet of a man who didn’t seem to appreciate what a sacrifice it was for her to drop out of college? Or, maybe, she thought, it started even earlier than any one of them understood, on that very first morning that she woke in the cabin to see Billy looking at her. In the early sunlight of that November morning, as he lay in his sleeping bag and nest of blankets watching her sleep in the arms of Shawn Eagle, that, Emily thought, was when Billy made his choice.

  Because in the end, it was as simple as that. A choice. For all of them. The choice that both Shawn and Billy had to make was between her and Eagle Logic. And maybe it was because she was insecure, or maybe it was because she was trying so hard to escape her past, but when it was her turn to choose, she chose the one who needed her the most, not the one who wanted her the most. It was a coward’s choice, but it was too terrifying being in a relationship where she was the one who loved more. With Billy, the reassurance had been—still was—that he needed her more than she needed him. She loved him, she did, but if push came to shove came to hit came to punch came to . . . She’d be able to walk away. Her mother had never been able to walk away. And back then, she’d known that if she stayed any longer with Shawn, it would be too late for her to walk away. The roots would have sunk deep and tangled, and she would never be in control; how could she be in control when she loved Shawn enough to give up on college, but he didn’t love her enough to give up on that stupid program he was working on? But Billy was willing to walk away from all of it if it meant she left with him, and there was a power in that. She’d seen her mother . . . No. It wasn’t just what had happened with her mother. Billy was handsome, in a different way from Shawn, but still handsome, and he gave all of himself to her even before she gave everything back.

  With Shawn, there was such a large part of him that he kept locked away from her. He never talked about his parents or his childhood, even though they were living a stone’s throw from the burned-out groundskeeper’s cottage. He rarely asked her about herself, either. Sure, he mostly listened when she talked, and when he paid his full attention—when he was bored of working or when he was ready to get laid—he could be so charming and sweet, but it always came on his schedule. He loved her, and she made him happy, but as much as she felt like Shawn wanted her, she was never completely sure she could count on him. Billy was different. Billy was open with her. Billy didn’t just want her, Billy needed her.

  He told her, in stuttering fits and starts, about his own childhood, similar and yet so different from hers. A drunk father disappearing when he was nine, replaced by a series of his mother’s boyfriends, some for months, some for days, men drifting through his life who rarely left anything behind but empty bottles. His mother, mercifully dead his freshman year of college, finally overdosing. His mother, who had once wanted to be an artist, had almost certainly been turning tricks for a time, those boyfriends passing through probably deserving of quotation marks around the word boyfriend. But he didn’t blame his mother. He admired her, in a way, he said, because she did the best she could by him, and even if her best wasn’t very good, it was all she could offer. When he told Emily that, he was crying, and of course she cried, too, and looking back on it, she knew his willingness to cry and his ability to make her cry along was at least one of the reasons she fell in love with him.

  It was true. She was in love with Billy, and she was in love with Shawn, and there were weeks of both boys claiming that without her they would never be happy. And then, finally, that one final, long, drag-out night of yelling, of the three of them going back and forth, of words that were hard to take back, the door of the cabin swinging open, slamming closed, accusations, admitted truths.

  So, yes, maybe it was a coward’s choice, but in the end, she chose Billy. And maybe it was the wrong choice, maybe she should have taken the risk and stayed with Shawn, but it worked out, didn’t it? Here she was, all these years later, back on the same piece of ground where it all started, and she was still with Billy.

  She kicked at a small rock on the lawn. It rolled through the wet grass where the cabin had once stood and then plonked against a tree. She turned to look back at Eagle Mansion and then up to where the Nest seemed to defy gravity, floating above the building. Her husband was up there now, still working, still carrying on whatever conversation he was having with Nellie.

  She hadn’t noticed the rain go from drizzle to a continuous assault, but she realized she was shivering. Her pants were wet, and a few drops of rain had worked their way inside her coat and down the front of her shirt. She felt a cold draft go up her spine and she shuddered.

  Would Billy make the same choice again, if he was given the choice? Would he choose her over Nellie, would he decide that Emily was worth more than a computer program? Would Shawn make the same choice he had made? Would she?

  Because in some ways, it felt like there were three of them living out here in the woods again.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  NOVEMBER RAIN

  Seventh Day access. He’d been so blithe about it, joking to Shawn that it made him God. And it hadn’t really been a joke. Sure, Nellie wasn’t designed to be an AI, but she was alive in her own way, so if Billy created Nellie, then yeah, he was, if not the God, a god. In Nellie’s universe of code, he and Shawn were the dueling gods of creation.

  But if God had created the universe in seven days, Billy had burned through seven days and then two more, and he wasn’t sure he’d made any real progress in fixing what he had tried to create so many years ago. The good thing, the blessed thing, however, was that it was time to get the stitches out. Nine days since he’d started working in earnest, ten days since coming to Eagle Mansion.

  Or maybe, at this point, it was eleven days? It was . . . He realized he had no idea what time it was. Nellie had been bugging him for hours and hours to go down to the infirmary, but he felt like he was maybe close to finally getting at something in the source code, and he’d ignored her and kept working. It was only when Nellie turned the air-conditioning in the room all the way up and dropped the temperature twenty degrees in twenty minutes that he stopped.

  “Okay, okay!” he said. “I can take a hint.”

  Good. It’s nearly four in the afternoon. You have been working without rest for forty-seven hours and eleven minutes. You were scheduled to have your stitches out yesterday afternoon. Please head to the infirmary so I can finally get it done.

  “Finally? Shit. We programmed you to be passive-aggressive?”

  Perhaps you should wait to insult me. You do realize I’m about to take your stitches out?

  He laughed. She really could be funny sometimes.

  Once he was headed down the stairs to the infirmary, he couldn’t remember why he’d been putting Nellie off. He couldn’t wait to have the stitches out. His hand had stopped hurting pretty quickly, but oh, it itched! The itch was a constant companion. He couldn’t scratch it through the bandages, which was probably a blessing, because he was sure he would have scratched himself raw, but that meant the only small relief he could find was to squeeze gently on the surface of his palm. When he was working, despite the awkwardness the bandages caused on the keyboard, the itchiness sometimes receded to the background. The same thing that allowed him to forget to shower or eat until Nellie nagged him into it, that meant he slept at odd, slanted hours, also meant that his entire body sometimes seemed to fall away from consciousness. But too often, the thing that brought him out of the opium stupor of working was the tickling sensation of the stitches and his flesh knitting itself back together. He could feel the gash healing, feel the skin growing and sealing shut. It was unbearable.

  He sat down, and one articulating arm gently steadied his arm and hand, two others worked to form a sterile tent from surgical paper, and the fourth danced unseen, behind the screen.

  I’m giving you a small injection of antibiotic
s. You’ll feel a slight pressure, and then pressure again when I remove the stitches, but it shouldn’t cause any pain.

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t know what pain even is, really.”

  If you’re worried, I can apply spray anesthesia. OR MAYBE YOU NEED A DRINK.

  His head snapped up. He’d been staring at the way the surgical drapes made his hand seem to disappear. But she’d said it. Hadn’t she said it? Or maybe not. It was late. Early. However you wanted to look at it. He looked around for the soft green light that Nellie used as a focal point—sometimes the shape shifted, moving subtly from ball to something that resembled a water bottle—but it wasn’t present.

  She’d been doing that to him for the past couple of days. He was sure of it. He’d be working and talking, and it would be Nellie, and then she’d slide something in using that other voice of hers, the Nellie that wasn’t Nellie, and then keep talking as if nothing had happened. But when he’d ask her, she insisted she hadn’t said anything, that Billy was just working too hard, that he needed to take better care of himself.

  Or maybe he needed a drink.

  He was hearing ghosts.

  He felt pressure on his hand, and, despite what Nellie had said, the slight prick of a needle, and then, quickly after, a much more reassuring pressure, barely the weight of a glass of water, and then heard the snip of the stitches opening. There was a sudden spike in itchiness—the stitches pulling out of his flesh were the worst of all, an army of ants inside him—and then, oh! Oh! Relief! He could have wept. The relief brought with it a sudden surge of warmth and tiredness. He was ready to go to bed, he thought.