Grave (41 page)

There was deceptive calm and quiet here and cool spring breezes, but mostly there was light, deep strong light ubiquitous as the air. Everything was so fresh, so clean, and beside me I saw Jessie craning her neck to take in the china-blue sky, pulling in long, savoring breaths. She pivoted on one foot, a single slow revolution, and shook her head.

“Always seems to come back to this,” she said quietly. “This beach. Real or imaginary. Every single time.”

“He’s making fun of us,” I said. Was he? Or was this some little hint, a single dropped stone on the pathway to find him, and we’d just lost our sense of direction? The last good place. The last place that
was
anything. If Death himself were... dying, somehow, was where we stood now his own final rallying surge of vitality, his last gasp?

“Any time you think you know where to go next,” I told Jessie, “just yell. Any idea.”

No answer. She took in another long, audible breath, savoring the clean sweetness of the air.

“I never thought I’d actually be happy to
breathe
,” she said softly.

So matter-of-fact. So pacific. I remembered how people with the plague, sometimes, could become so angelically peaceful right before the end, the fight drained from them altogether. It was creeping over me now too, that same sudden yielding lassitude, the same yearning to give in and give up. She’d said we had to keep going, it was all we had left to do, but weren’t we just kidding ourselves? Wasn’t all that was really left to us just standing still, standing right there? Saying another goodbye? It was so beautiful, like Lake Michigan but also like all the memories I had from when I was little, that time we went to Cape Cod; if I went down to the shoreline, I was sure I’d find that same salty rubbery seaweed floating in the water. I was scared to go down there and I didn’t know why.

Because maybe he, it, was waiting out there, on the horizon, just like before when he came to greet us and love us and swallow us whole. Because maybe all this wasn’t just mockery after all, not just a random bit of fruit casually tossed just out of Tantalus’s reach. Maybe he was lulling us, distracting us, with sunshine and sweet memories and our own long goodbyes, so he could slip away somewhere like an animal and quietly, finally cease.

We had to get out of here, before I decided to forget why we ever came.

“We have to go.” I tugged on Jessie’s sleeve, insistent like a child. My younger self, at Cape Cod.
Can we go to that Clams-’N’-Cones on the highway, for fried clams? Can I have soft-serve?
“Over that next ridge, or... somewhere. Now. We have to keep moving. We have to. You said so. You said it yourself.”

Jessie said nothing.

“We can’t just stay here,” I said. “Waiting. It’s selfish. Horribly selfish. We have to try. That’s all that’s left to do. You
said
so.”

Jessie folded her arms across her chest, gazing out at the water. Staring as if she awaited something, someone, to rise up and flood us with his own all-consuming light. Just like me. Just like before. I didn’t like her and I didn’t understand her and I knew she felt all that doubly for me, and I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, go on without her: I’d been alone before, all alone, after Ms. Acosta and before poor lost Nick, and I couldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t. I held my breath, standing there in the clean sweet illusion of air.

Then she shook her head hard, like wrenching herself from a daydream, and as if
I’d
been the sorry lingerer, she jerked her head impatiently toward the sands.

“Up that way, I guess,” she said, already starting to walk. “Over the next ridge. Better than just standing around here doing nothing.”

Her eyes flickered back toward the water, the tiny shadowy outline on the horizon of a phantom city always out of reach. Her steps faltered, hesitated.

“I guess it is, anyway,” she said.

Then she turned her back on the water and we headed up the ridge. A seagull flew overhead calling and crying out and even though I heard its long cloud-trail of a caw, felt its shadow fall on me and then swiftly depart, I never saw an actual bird at all.

TWENTY-SIX

NATALIE

“M
y life was saved,” she said, “so that I could stop you.”

Grandma. You could be so stupid sometimes, about the most obvious things, when you were actually so
smart.
But I’d heard scientists were like that, sometimes, and artists too. They didn’t live in the same reality as everyone else. But that hardly meant reality didn’t exist.

“I’m not stopping for anything,” I said, “and if anything did stop me, it won’t be you.” I hugged Sukie my doll where she sat safe in my jacket, warm and lumpy inside where I’d stuffed her gut full of all the extra lake stones she could carry. “Just because you failed, that’s no reason I should give up—”

“One had to be careful at the lab, working with young children.” Grandma shook her head of ruined, broken-off hair, hunched forward like an ape as she talked. “When they were the participants, in the experiments, it was so easy for them to get attached to you, start thinking they cared for you, and you for them—a terrible mistake.” She smiled again, like she thought I just couldn’t get enough of seeing her missing teeth. “That could be fatal. To do what we had to do, every day, you had to cultivate and nurture a certain sense of ruthlessness.”

“You were plenty ruthless,” I said. “When you had to be.”

“Jonathan, the one you called ‘Daddy’ when you were little—we never did figure out just why you got so attached to him in particular. He barely saw you half the time.” She laughed in reminiscence, not hearing me, not hearing anything but her old-person memories unwinding like a spell to invoke them in the flesh. “But I suppose it flattered him, your trying to toddle around after him everywhere he went, so the Daddy part stuck. You really had to be careful with the younger children.”

She pressed her fingers to her temples like her head were killing her, but there wasn’t any pain in her face. “I got a visit,” she said. “I was dying. Or thought I was. Not of the plague—like you, like a trifling percentage of people, perhaps I was immune. For whatever good it did me. I got the flu last winter, some horrible strain. I couldn’t breathe. I lay there in an abandoned house, all alone, curled up on a filthy mattress piled with filthy blankets and coats and dozens of them couldn’t get me warm. I could feel my lungs filling up like I was drowning. And then, I saw him.” She laughed, and it was like hearing the grinding wheeze of a car trying to start in the winter. “First he looked like Jonathan. Then... his face changed, somehow, right there in front of me, and he became this skinny dark-haired boy. I knew that face too, it was one of our hardier experimental subjects—but it wasn’t him. It
looked
like him, but it wasn’t him. Just like it hadn’t been Jonathan, before.”

Her head bobbed and her neck curved down, imitating the motions inside her throat as she swallowed. “He said—he said that I was finished, that everything everywhere was finished, in ways I couldn’t even start to imagine. Because of the lab. Because of everything we’d done. I knew he wasn’t lying. That he wasn’t... human, he was something far beyond that. I just knew, just like I knew that he meant every word and that he truly could do it. He could end everything, everywhere, in ways that made our poor accidental plague look like a day at the races. I—I screamed, I was so frightened. Because he was standing there, knowing who I was, wearing that false face he’d stolen God knows when or how, and I knew it was true. Every word. And he laughed.”

The Friendly Man. Again. Friendly to everyone but me, always everyone but me. “I’ve met him,” I said, trying to sound bored and scornful. “He’s no big—”

“He said I’d live through the flu, just like I’d lived through everything else that was done to—happened to me, before that. Not because I deserved to live, but because I didn’t deserve the peace, the surcease, of death... and that nobody would ever have that again, nobody would have
anything
ever again, unless I made sure the lab ended its work forever. That wasn’t just humanity’s last chance—it was everything’s last chance. I had to stop it, me personally. Or know that when everything finally ended, it was all because of me. All of it. Me. And I knew he meant it. Every word.”

Her eyes dulled suddenly, their feverish glassiness filming over with dust. “Then he laughed again. And he said, ‘Well, you wanted to be God, didn’t you? So how’s it feel?’ And then... and then, he was gone.”

She sat there, silent now, stewing in her own misery like something half-melted and sodden in its puddle: a dropped ice cream cone, a filthy boot-stomped chunk of slush dissolving in a March thaw. I folded my arms around me, pressing the spot where Sukie nestled safe against me, and smiled.

“You certainly took your time getting
back
to the lab,” I said. “If you ever did. I never saw you there.” Although, in fairness, I hadn’t been back there very long, it took me ages to get out of Paradise. Although, also in fairness, I’d accomplished all by myself in weeks, days, hours, what had taken her years. Let her talk. Let her scream and faint and piss herself at the thought of him, my dueling partner.
My
enemy. He didn’t scare me, and I didn’t need her anymore.

“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” Grandma said. “I don’t wish to discuss it. I’m just lucky to be alive. But I finally got away from... all that. I got here. And I found
you
.” She started laughing again, that nasty wheezing sound I’d already grown to despise. “When he told me my fate, I knew he meant every word, but I also never dreamed the lab could possibly return again, in any form, after the plague and the utter destruction of—I never dreamed it. Never.” She shook her head, amazed at her own obstinacy. Her own idiocy. “But then—but now—I’ve found you. And heard all your plans.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Scrape away the thick patina of all that crazy, and maybe she still had half a working brain left after all. Enough to see that she was too late to stop me, and he was too weak. No matter all this, no matter what anybody said. He was always so willing to sit and talk with anyone who wasn’t me.

“I walk my own roads,” I said. I lifted my head to prove the point, gazing down the twisting forest road that led to the beach, but it was all so bleak and terrible I had to turn away. The ghosts, the faded wisps of them dissolving all around us like bits of grimy tissue paper in a great brackish puddle, even they couldn’t stand what they saw around them, couldn’t believe we’d been brought to this. By a jealous, vindictive, rotten, greedy little demigod who mistakenly thought he should have charge of everything. “You don’t have anything to say about that, not anymore—and he certainly doesn’t, either. Times have changed. I’m grown up.”

No answer. Just like the old days, when she’d just turn her head on her long, curving neck and glide away if you said anything she didn’t have time to, didn’t care to hear. She must have realized, crazy or not, that her little stories weren’t getting her anywhere.

“This is between me and him now,” I said. “Just us. Not you. You’re not part of this anymore.”

“You can’t continue this,” she replied. Her chin rose up high and haughty like it still mattered if someone offended her, denigrated the position, the dignity that nobody had anymore. “You absolutely cannot. However abortive your attempted experiments have actually—”

“
Two people
,” I whispered from between my teeth. “That’s two more than you ever thought possible now, you just got through saying so. All by myself. I don’t need him, and I’ve decided, I definitely don’t need you.”

I could tell I was getting tired, drained from the anger of having to waste my time with her, because the sky and the light seemed to be growing even dimmer, big malformed dark spots floating just at the edge of my vision and then vanishing. Just a trick. Another of his stupid useless tricks. Grandma’s eyes had gone big and bright, like a hawk’s spotting a rabbit.

“Do you know who your real father was, Natalie?” she suddenly said. “Never mind Jonathan or any other happy surrogate figure, do you know who he really was? Well, I don’t. Nobody did, including your own mother. She was quite young, barely out of her teens, and found herself pregnant—amazed that sex with random men could somehow result in that, typical of her sort—we paid her a very comfortable amount of money to see the pregnancy through, and to give you to us for safekeeping. And after all the care and attention we gave her, all the money, she changed her mind at the end. She thought she was really the one in charge of everything, and not me. She actually tried to
threaten
me. I had to take care of that. And I did.” She nodded, at nothing and nobody in particular. “I see you haven’t fallen far from the tree.”

Was this supposed to mean something to me? Was it seriously supposed to hurt my feelings? A human mother was nothing but genetic material, long since donated to a better cause, and it meant nothing to what I was now. “She was trying to
stop
you, right? Stop you from your experiments, from making me what I am? Well, you didn’t listen to her pathetic little threats, and I’m not listening to yours. The work goes on. That’s what you always told me. The work goes
on
.”