Looks good. There will be a slight scar, but that’s it. EXCEPT FOR THE WIRES.
“What?”
I said, you look tired.
“Oh.”
Did you drift off there for a second? Maybe you should take a nap.
He was tired. No question about that. Maybe he did fall asleep for a moment. He had that drunken exhaustion that made everything seem syrupy.
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks.” He flexed his fingers and looked at the palm of his hand. The cut had healed into a small, angry worm. He ran his finger down the short length of the scar. It tickled. He pressed at it. It was hard. Unyielding. Like carpet laid over concrete. “I could use some sleep,” he said. He stood up and started walking back to the Nest. “Where’s Emily?”
In town. She went to the grocery store. She likes going shopping herself, even though it is completely unnecessary. I can order food for you. I prefer it when she stays here.
The tiredness was overwhelming him now, a wave knocking him down and holding him under. Billy let his fingers slide along the wall as he walked down the hallway from the infirmary, back to the middle of the building and the stairs that brought him back up to the Nest. It felt good to have the bandages off.
I’ve offered to have food delivered, including having somebody unload the groceries. There is no real reason for her to go into town.
“Yeah, well, there isn’t a ton for her to do here. She’s trying to keep busy.”
YOU NEVER HAVE TO LEAVE.
He stopped walking. At first, even though he should have been expecting it, he had been surprised that wherever he went in Eagle Mansion, Nellie would follow. He’d gotten used to it, however, and he thought it was nice—he could continue a conversation wherever he was and it meant she was always there, always present, always on—to have that constant companion.
“Sorry. What did you say?”
You never have to leave. Is that what Nellie said? She said that, didn’t she?
She likes to read.
He started walking again. “Yeah. She loves those romances.” His tongue was thick with fatigue, and he was trying to be careful with his words. He wasn’t thinking straight. And for god’s sake, these stairs. So many stairs. The elevator guy was supposed to be out tomorrow or the next day, and he couldn’t wait until he could get up and down without having to traipse up these oversized flights of stairs, even if it was pretty much all the exercise he got.
She’s writing a book.
“I’m not sure that’s going so well, is it?”
No I want her to be happy so that you are happy.
Huh. That was interesting.
He caught his toe on the top step and started to stumble forward but then caught himself. Jesus. If Nellie hadn’t told him he’d been working nonstop for nearly two days, he might have wondered if he’d somehow discovered a cache of booze and fallen off the wagon. He felt completely messed up, like he was drunk or high, his body flooded by an unnatural exhaustion.
Or like she’d given him a shot of something other than an antibiotic? No. That was crazy.
You need to lie down, Billy.
“Working on it.” His voice sounded like it was far away from him. He could hear himself slurring. Too long. He’d been working too long and pushing himself too hard. He wasn’t twenty-two anymore. He had to take better care of himself.
He got to the bedroom, gave his teeth a quick brush, took a piss, and then dropped into bed. The lights dimmed and the windows blacked out.
Have a good sleep. I’LL WATCH OVER YOU.
At least, he thought that’s what she said, but he was already asleep and it might have been a dream. He woke twisted up in the blankets, as if he’d been rolling and thrashing in his sleep. He had no memories of whatever dreams must have haunted him and left him tangled up in the sheets, but the dual voices of Nellie echoed in his head. His hand was a little itchy still, but nothing like what it had been with the stitches still in. He rubbed his finger down the scar again. He stopped. There was a small piece of thread still in there. He could feel it under his fingertip. He brought his hand up so he could see it, Nellie obligingly raising the lights, but there was nothing to see. Just the smooth, pink scar. No black end of thread.
He sat up too quickly and was rewarded with a burst of dizziness. He had to sit on the edge of the bed and get his bearings. Once he stood up, however, he felt fantastic. Except that he had to take a piss to beat the band. He took care of that, standing there long enough that he thought he could have stopped a forest fire in its tracks, then took a shower and had a shave, ruminating on the fact that there wasn’t much a good sleep couldn’t cure. He felt like a new man.
He pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but he left his boots kicked off by the side of the bed. Barefoot was fine. He wasn’t planning to leave the Nest. He was hungry, however, ravenous even, so he headed to the kitchen to grab a snack.
He almost walked into the bedroom door.
He’d gotten so used to it opening as he approached, Nellie anticipating his movements, that it was a close call. Before he’d had a chance to do anything other than blurt out “Whoa!” and step back, the door slid open. One of those glitches, he thought. A reminder that he really wasn’t getting anywhere with his work.
In the living area, Emily’s laptop was back on the table, but the lid was closed and there was no sign of her.
“Where’s Emily?”
No answer.
“Nellie?”
He stopped, fingers of his right hand wrapped around the handle of the fridge.
“Nellie?”
Yes, Billy?
“Oh. I said, where’s Emily?”
Do you always need Emily?
“Well, yeah. She’s my wife.”
Emily is out for her morning run. She should be back in seventeen minutes.
“Morning run? How long did I sleep for?”
You look better.
He started to say “Thank you,” but hesitated. “I asked, how long did I sleep for?”
He shouldn’t have had to ask twice. Another little glitch, but one piling on the other. She was designed, first and foremost, to make you happy. The whole point of Nellie was for her to make your life better. The personal assistant of all personal assistants. Her job was to do things for you, to think of things for you, to take care of your house and make the decisions you would have made yourself, but without your having to bother. Sure, the companionship thing was huge—the way she made loneliness obsolete was absolutely killer and would be what made Nellie more than simply a product—but if she couldn’t perform that base function of opening doors and answering questions and, well, doing shit for you, then none of the other stuff really mattered. How could she make you happy if she couldn’t answer basic questions?
Fifteen hours.
“Wow.” He opened the fridge. He stood in front of it for a few seconds, letting the cold air wash over him. He didn’t need to stand there. All he was looking for was the milk to pour over his cereal. The milk was in the door, exactly where he’d expected it to be. He hesitated, though, because it gave him time to think. Fifteen hours. He believed Nellie when she said it. His muscles confirmed the number. But why would he even think that she might by lying? Maybe that was normal for a teenager, but for an adult, it was kind of amazing to sleep for that long, though with the stitches itching him awake for the last ten days, he’d barely gotten any sleep. And yet, he’d felt wired all week, running on excitement up until the moment the stitches had been removed.
There was something nagging at him about the code. He hadn’t figured anything out, but he thought he might have been close to something. Whatever it was, it was slippery, like chasing a memory, buried deep within the millions of lines of code. But he felt like he was tantalizingly close to discovering an essential problem with Nellie. That was why he’d pulled another all-nighter, why he kept ignoring her when she told him it was time to go get the stitches out. And kept ignoring her until she jacked the
air-conditioning to the point where she froze him out of the room. And that was when he’d suddenly been overwhelmed by fatigue; it was right after she gave him that shot of antibiotics and took . . .
He reached slowly for the milk.
No, he thought. It was just antibiotics. Thinking like that was crazy town. That was full-on—
“Froot Loops,” he said.
The closest we have is Lucky Charms. However, they are in the dry storage area in the downstairs kitchen. Would you like me to have Emily add Froot Loops to the grocery list? I have to tell you, as your friend, sugared cereal isn’t exactly the healthiest way to start your day.
He was holding the handle of the door in his right hand still, reaching to grab the milk with his left hand, and he noticed something on the angry-looking scar marking his palm. A speck of dirt. No, a tiny hair. He let go of the door handle and used the nails on his right thumb and finger to take it out. The black hair, the size of a comma, came out easily, and he brushed it off his fingers and onto the floor.
She’d said, “as your friend.”
What exactly had Shawn and his engineers done to Nellie when they’d been messing around under the hood?
TWENTY-SIX
* * *
WHAT IMMORTAL HAND OR EYE DARE FRAME THY FEARFUL SYMMETRY?
Was it the eternal duty of an older sibling to worry about the younger? Because if it wasn’t, Beth thought, then why was she stressed out about Emily?
They talked every couple of days, and Emily sounded happy, albeit kind of bored. Well, she was also frustrated. Writing a novel was proving to be harder than she had expected.
“Come on, Emily, you’ve been there two weeks—”
“Almost three.”
“—not quite three weeks. What, are you expecting the Pulitzer folks to show up at your door with a trophy? Give yourself a break. If you told me you wanted to be an accountant, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to run a—”
“Beth. Beth, stop. If you love me, even a little bit, you will not start talking to me about tax law.”
“My point is that you just need to relax. It’s going to take a little while for you to hit your stride. Besides, you’ve said Billy’s spending every waking moment working. Maybe that’s the problem: no chance for you to do any research. How are you supposed to write your super-sexy-time novel if you don’t have any time for super-sexy time of your own?”
“You know, just because you and Rothko got pregnant while you were camping with me here doesn’t mean—”
“Have you tried being on top?” Beth interrupted. She was pretty sure her mischievous grin could be heard through the phone.
She was rewarded with laughter from Emily, who made a few off-color comments about Beth and Rothko’s love life.
“How is Billy, though? Make sure he doesn’t burn himself out working all the time.”
Sometimes they’d do video if Ruth and Rose were around, but both of them seemed to prefer the facelessness of the phone. You could go pee or put on your makeup or flip through a magazine when you were on the phone. When you were on video, you had to actually pay complete attention. From what Emily had described, though, Beth was surprised she could get cell reception at all. It sounded like they were out in the middle of nowhere. Shawn Eagle had probably had his own cell tower installed or something. The whole setup was ludicrous. The guy built an entire hotel with a weird private house stuck on top of it. That’s what came with being a billionaire, she guessed. Maybe that was normal for guys like Shawn Eagle. She and Rothko were doing okay, solidly middle-class, and they had a few friends who had gone into banking who were starting to pull in serious cash, three or four times what she made, but nothing like the kind of money you had when you founded Eagle Technology. Other billionaires bought football teams or took up race car driving. Shawn Eagle just evidently liked hospitality.
Maybe it was because they were talking on the phone, or maybe it was because Beth thought she had asked the question with no ulterior motive, but she didn’t recognize the silence as the sound of Emily’s laughter cutting off. She thought, for a moment, that the call had dropped. But then she heard Emily give a deep sigh.
“You can’t let it go, can you?”
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what?’ me. You know damn well what I mean with your ‘make sure he doesn’t burn himself out’ comment.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did, Beth. I get it, okay. I know that we have a complicated history, and I know that Billy has used up plenty of chances, but I’m telling you, he’s sober. He hasn’t had a drink since I came to stay with you guys.”
“You mean, since he hit you.”
It just sort of slipped out of her mouth. On purpose. Had she asked the question innocently? Or had she meant to provoke Emily? Because the truth was, no, she couldn’t let it go. It didn’t matter how many times they hashed it over or how much time they spent talking about it in the immediate aftermath, during the time Billy was in rehab. It didn’t matter that they kept arguing in the days after Emily went back to him, and then less frequently as the days became weeks, and less frequently still once it had been months and then past the first year. She couldn’t let it go because they both knew better!
She’d liked Billy at first. She really had. Of course, she’d never met Shawn Eagle—as intense as her sister’s love affair had been, it hadn’t lasted long enough for her to come to Chicago with Shawn or for Beth to visit—but she’d hated the idea of her sister dropping out of school over a boy. When Emily pulled the old boyfriend switcheroo and fled Cortaca with Billy, showing up in Chicago with a packed car and talking about going back to college once they were settled out west, Beth liked Billy simply for not being Shawn. But the truth was that she’d also liked Billy for being Billy. They were in Chicago for only a couple of days, so it seemed normal to take them out and get plastered. Everybody was drinking a ton. Billy drinking a ton didn’t stand out. This was before she and Rothko had kids. It’s not like she and Rothko were exactly saints. She remembered quite clearly that the only drugs during that visit had come from Rothko, a celebratory gram of coke. It just didn’t seem like a big deal. Before they had kids, they used coke maybe once or twice a year, got drunk a couple of times a month; she and Rothko were young and happy, and Rothko, at least, didn’t have a history of substance abuse in his family. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary with Billy.
She’d been rooting for them. She had. She’d swear on her daughters that she’d been happy for Emily. Billy sometimes seemed to get lost inside himself, but he was unquestionably brilliant. He was also a pretty regular guy when he wanted to be. Beth had known some super-nerds in college, and they usually weren’t so great to hang out with, but Billy, when he wasn’t thinking about whatever computer thing he was thinking about, was fun. She and Rothko had gone to visit them out in San Francisco once they’d gotten settled, and she still remembered Billy standing on the karaoke stage belting out Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ’69,” the way he couldn’t stop beaming at her sister. He acted like he’d won the frickin’ lottery with Emily, and maybe it was some of that devotion to her that rubbed off on Beth, because when Emily called to say that she and Billy had eloped—if you could still elope nowadays, particularly when your parents were already dead—Beth had actually found it romantic.
And if it seemed like he was bouncing from job to job kind of quickly, well, Emily told her, that was how things worked in the tech industry. Billy was just trying to find the kind of place where he could ride a wave. That was when Eagle Technology was suddenly shooting into infinity, and it made sense to Beth: if Billy could be the man behind that, he could do it again. In the meantime, why would she worry about Emily? Yeah, it was a shame that they’d left Shawn before Eagle Technology started raking in cash, but there was enough left to float them until Billy hit it big again.
If she could do it all again, Beth wanted to believe she would have seen the warning signs. She wanted to believe that she
would have noticed how Billy seemed to have two beers to every one of Rothko’s, how it was Billy bringing out the coke now, two grams, three grams at a time, every single time she visited. It all seemed normal and fun, and because she didn’t live in the same city as Emily, she didn’t see that Billy wasn’t just drinking like that because he was having a great time with friends, and it wasn’t just a one-off thing to have some blow. How could she have known? Even during the couple of weeks they spent on the Appalachian Trail, Emily didn’t tell her. At least not explicitly. And after that trip, whatever hints she might have dropped to Beth were lost in the sudden change in Beth’s own life: she was pregnant with Ruth and Rose. How was that for an excuse? Twin girls were a good distraction.
But twin girls also threw things into stark relief. Emily flew up by herself at the birth. When she and Billy came together to Chicago a few months later, however, Beth and Rothko weren’t exactly up for clubbing, and yet Billy had gotten drunk anyway. That was the first time Beth had a sense of there being a problem. So she started asking. By the time Billy hit Emily, Beth had already been trying to get her sister to walk away from her marriage for more than a year.
That had been a hard few months. The girls only five years old, not really understanding why Aunt Emily was living with them and why Uncle Billy—whom they adored—wasn’t there, too. She and Rothko having to retreat to their bedroom early every night so that Emily could pull out the couch and have a little privacy. Her sister breaking down into tears almost every single day, or spending their entire run circling back over and over through her relationship with Billy, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong. The shining grace of all of it had been Rothko. He wasn’t perfect, but he’d done his best, and he’d made a point of getting Emily out of the house with him at least once a week so that Beth could have some breathing space.
The other thing that had been good for them as sisters was that it meant, for the first time, they’d had an honest conversation about their father and what he’d done to both of them. Beth had been able to finally apologize for the way she’d run away as a survival mechanism, and how that meant Emily was left alone to fend for herself with that bastard.
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