Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (39 page)

"Don't ever say that again, Petey. You didn't do shit for me, and you only think you did."

"No ice cream, then?

"No," I said.

"You could come to my house. You ever been over to my house?"

"I've driven past it," I said. He had a sad house where he lived with his mother. She was a thin, hard-eyed woman, who had handled as much nonsense as anyone with the men in her life. Her husband was locked up, too. Their yard was a wreck. There was peeling paint. "I don't want to go over there. Your mom's there, right?"

"Not right now," he said.

"Well, I'm not going over there. Look, you should go. I've got chores."

"Did you have a while when you didn't have to open your arm up?" he said. He said it softly. "You know, when Dolores was in...? I was thinking maybe it was good she got locked up so you wouldn't have to do that anymore."

I touched the shunt. It was there. It hadn't moved.

"She doesn't do it anymore," I said. "She stopped when she got arrested. I think Dolores has quit smoking dope, anyhow," I said. "Her only medicine is whiskey. That's still legal."

He nodded, uncomfortably. "Whiskey's good for warming up in the winter," he said.

"That is true."

The wind was blowing. I was getting all that cold air in the house. I thought about stepping outside with him, but I also thought my father died in prison. He hadn't ratted anyone out for a walk.

"You done?" I said.

"Maybe I could see you later sometime," he said.

I shut the door. I heard him standing on the porch long after and I heard him walk to the end of the porch and crunch away into the snow. I heard him driving away.

Over dinner, Dolores looked over at me. "I heard that pickup truck of his driving up."

"I sent him away," I said. "I think he was drunk."

"That fool boy already out of prison, then? Didn't think he could make bail to save his life, and I half expected his momma to come calling to get the charges dropped. I knew he had a record before."

"He's been out, Dolores. He's been out since before you were put away." "That fool. That little fool."

"You want to watch the TV tonight?" said my mom. "Have you been watching the box, Dolores?"

"Your mother called me Dottie," she said. "I don't have Alzheimer's that bad, yet. I remember things. I remember plenty. I still got a mind like a trap. Things go up there they never get out. Girl, eat your cabbage. Don't worry about me. I'm just an old woman, and I'm tired."

Momma poked at her food, but didn't eat it. She said she was on a diet, again. I figured that meant she had found a man to date her. I figured there'd be dating around here, then, and she'd be in and out, distracted, and maybe there'd be a man's name to learn in the morning and maybe not. It had been a while since there was a man around for breakfast. Anyway, I didn't think anything about what she was saying. My shunt was probably no good for years, but we never bothered to check in with the doctor about it. We couldn't afford to check these things unless they were breaking.

Big Dolores told me she was going to go get the goats in the barn and I could come if I wanted. She said it like it meant something, the way she said it. She said it like she didn't want to be alone in the night, didn't want to feel like a criminal locked up for being too poor to buy drugs legal so she has to go to the illegal kind, and shaking and sick and sitting out in the cold while strange men in uniforms treat her like a bear they caught in a dumpster. She looked at me with this big, quiet, expectant face. "You want to come out with me, Jujube? We can check the goats together. It'll be like when you were just a baby."

"I wish everyone would stop calling me Jujube. And Junebug and Girl and all those other stupid nicknames. They're not my name," I said. "I have a name and nobody ever uses it. I'm June. I'm June Jiminez Nguyen. I wish you could just call me my real name, for once."

"Okay, June Jiminez Nguyen," she said. "I'll start calling you that if it's what you want." I was pushing food around my plate. I was too sick and tired of waiting to eat. She left us, for the yard lights and the snow everywhere. "You're just sour 'cause your boyfriend got himself arrested stealing from us," said my mom. "Told you he was no good."

"He's not my boyfriend," I said. "I hate him, actually, and I don't know why everyone thinks we're anything. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him with a gun." I left in a huff. I went to my room.

I try to picture Dolores' life. I try to imagine it all laid out in a row, and I can't. I spent most of my life on the farm avoiding hers. She was a mystery, sitting on the porch and smoking while animals filled the old farmyard. She was out there when I got home from school. She was there, and we looked at each other over the wide expanse of time and emotion that divided us, because I resented being used for my blood, and I resented being forced to help her with the animals, and I resented being in that little town, way up in the north country where winters came like an annual disaster. How could I know what she felt for me? How could I know what she felt, when I was too immature to think of anyone but myself?

That night, Big Dolores went out to her goats in the barn. She chased them out into the freezing cold snow. She couldn't bear to hurt them. They were such strange, affectionate creatures, butting heads and rubbing up against her and sticking together no matter what. She didn't want them around her, right then. She tried to get the cats out, too, but that was next to impossible. There were so many of them, and they were hard to herd out into the cold, and she only had so much strength to finish the job after driving out the goats. She pulled the generator into the barn, shut the doors tight, closed all the windows, and flipped it on so the exhaust fumes would fill up the place. Gasoline ought to be illegal. I don't even know where she got that old generator. Some of her cats were in there with her, and she watched them falling down all over themselves, sinking into sleep before she did, but running from it and falling and tumbling like little clockwork dolls that wound down.

It was a long time before anything else happened. The goats were screaming from the cold, clattering to get into the barn and when that didn't work they came up to the house. They were jumping up to the windows, climbing all over the porch and making all kinds of a racket. Momma was getting ready for work. She saw them, and she was angry that Dolores had let them get out and up to the house like that, and then she realized Dolores wouldn't have done that. Dolores wouldn't have thrown her goats out into the night on purpose, and if they got out she'd be the first to chase after them. She grabbed a coat and ran to the barn.

Dolores was in there, with her cats, and the generator running hard, full steam. It had been running long enough and the barn was just small enough and anyway Dolores was in such poor health by then that it didn't take much.

It wasn't long after the funeral, once the goats had all been sold off and the cats taken away by the county, that Momma took me in to get the surgery done, and in the hospital waiting room while we were figuring out what we could afford and we hadn't said anything to anybody about the shunt in my arm yet, except to see if we could afford a consultation about it, and we saw Petey come through bleeding in the head and throwing up being helped along by a volunteer firefighter. He had been in an accident. He was screaming. There was a cop behind him, talking into a radio. My momma jumped up for him, because we knew him and he was hurt, and she told me to stay with him while she called the boy's mother. I was running with him, then. He reached out a hand to me from the wheelchair they threw him into and he asked me what the hell I was doing there, and I asked him what the hell was he doing there. He was choking up blood so he couldn't say anything else. He was stoned and laughing about it, and then he was bound to a gurney.

He shouted my nickname through the blood, "
Jujube!
" He said that he loved me.

"This your boyfriend, Jujube?" said the nurse, the doctor, the cop. "Is this your boyfriend?"

"He's just a friend," I said. "Can I sit with him until his family gets here?"

Nobody stopped me.

He was in an accident. He was drunk and stoned and driving on icy back roads and in an accident and the cop and fireman that found him ran him in here until he was healed enough to be arrested. He had to get more blood in him. He had an IV filling him up with blood. He was B positive. It said so on the bag. I knew my mom was going to find us in this little country hospital. I knew the police would come in soon, and they were waiting in the hall writing reports and calling the DA to coordinate the evidence. I knew the doctor would only be a moment, too.

As soon as we had a moment alone, I opened the shunt on my arm, and sat with my back to the door so I'd have a second if someone walked in to cover it with a sheet or something. I pulled the outflow from my arm and gently peeled back the IV on his. I could find a vein, couldn't I? I had it right there in front of me, in my naked arm my whole life.

"What...?" he mumbled something, but the painkillers had him mostly knocked out, the loss of blood and the marijuana and alcohol and head injury and wasted hours and wasted life. He was zoned out, stoned out, and nearly dead already.

"Big Dolores died because of you," I whispered. "You ratted her out and all of Drummondville. I know it. You sold her upriver so you could stay free as a bird."

I stuck the shuntline into his IV needle. I bled into him. I accepted no return line.

It didn't take long. A few minutes is all it takes to bleed out a pint. It doesn't take much to clot up things, and he had lost blood already, and had already had such damage done in the wreck. I slipped my shunt line back, and slipped it under my shirt. I carefully put his own IV line back in place, like nothing had happened.

"I didn't," he said, when I was doing it. "You hated her," he said. He was strapped down, and he was weak and no one would come if he shouted, if he could even man age to shout, and his body was turning purple like a bruise from where the blood was clotting along his arm. "You told me every day how much you hated her," he said.

I didn't say anything. It was almost done. I was staying to make sure he didn't push the button for the nurse to come. He never thought to push the button. I'm like my dad, and my granddad, deep down.

Big Dolores was mine to hate. She wasn't anyone else's. I would have opened my arm for her another twenty years if I had to. I would have done it forever.

I only had to do it that one last time, though, with Petey.

The nurses were there in minutes because of the way the monitors started beeping. I was already done, with my own shunt hidden up under my sleeve. They thought they had put the wrong type in, and they lost time trying to test his blood, trying to figure what his blood type was, while he was there, having a bad reaction, clotting up his arm, into his weak, wounded body, his eyes glazed over and getting pale and sicker by the second. They told me to step outside. I went without a word.

Nobody figured it out.

My momma believed me when I said I didn't want to have my own procedure in the same place he had died on account of bad blood. My type was rare enough I couldn't afford the risk.

I still have the shunt. I could never afford to take it out.

I work in a factory in Rockaway, like I said. I help assemble little recycled tablets from the line and box them into storage containers for the trucks to haul to the shipyard. I sit alone in a big room, surrounded by machines. At night, I sleep in a dormitory with seventeen other women, who each work on different parts of the line. I have to rinse out the shunt when I shower with them, and they ask me what it is, and I tell them my grandmother had Parkinson's, and I was her blood type, and if I save up enough I can get the shunt removed. That's all I say about it.

I wonder how many people out there got stories burning them up inside, anger and fear and lonely nights leaving me staring into the way the teeth of the springs grip the blue mattress over my head. The springs chew at the cheap mattress until it wears down. I wonder how many people are like that, never saying a thing. I wonder what Dolores would have done if I had gone out with her that night, to check the goats.

I guess I'm going to save up again and get the shunt removed. I guess I'll live with the scar when it's done.

James Patrick Kelly says, "I want to thank my friends in the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop for helping me navigate this story through the gender minefields it attempts to explore.

In other news, I'm working on a novel that will feature the further adventures of Mariska Volochkova, whom
Asimov's
readers may remember from 'Going Deep' (June 2009) and 'Plus or Minus' (December 2010)."

Daya had been in no hurry to become a mother. In the two years since she'd reached childbearing age, she'd built a modular from parts she'd fabbed herself, thrown her boots into the volcano, and served as blood judge. The village elders all said she was one of the quickest girls they had ever seen—except when it came to choosing fathers for her firstborn. Maybe that was because she was too quick for a sleepy village like Third Landing. When her mother, Tajana, had come of age, she'd left for the blue city to find fathers for her baby. Everyone expected Tajana would stay in Halfway, but she had surprised them and returned home to raise Daya. So once Daya had grown up, everyone assumed that someday she would leave for the city like her mother, especially after Tajana had been killed in the avalanche last winter.

What did Third Landing have to hold such a fierce and able woman? Daya could easily build a glittering new life in Halfway. Do great things for the colony.

But everything had changed after the scientists from space had landed on the old site across the river, and Daya had changed most of all. She kept her own counsel and was often hard to find. That spring she had told the elders that she didn't need to travel to gather the right semen. Her village was happy and prosperous. The scientists had chosen it to study and they had attracted tourists from all over the colony. There were plenty of beautiful and convenient local fathers to take to bed.