Parable of the Talents (42 page)

Kayce said she and Madison were the only parents I had to worry about, and I was an ungrateful little heathen not to ap-preciate what I had.

That was that.

When I was 15, an enemy at school told me my real mother was not only a heathen but a whore and a murderer. I hit her before 1 even thought about it—and I discovered that I didn't know my own strength. I broke her jaw. She was screaming and crying and bleeding, and I was

horrified—scared to death. I got kicked out of school, and very nearly collared as a juvenile felon. Only Madison and our minister working to-gether managed to keep my neck out of a collar. This was the beginning of the worst part of my adolescence. I was grateful to Madison. I hadn't thought he would fight for me. i hadn't thought he would fight for anything. He had become even more of a shadow as I had grown. He repaired aging com-puters for poor working people. He had seemed closer to his tools than he did to me, except when he was feeling me up.

Then, on Saturday, after my troubles had been papered over, while Kayce was attending some women's-group thing at Church, Madison explained to me how grateful I should be to him. He had saved me from a collar. He read me an article about collars—how they hurt, how they can "pacify" even the most violent criminal and still leave him able to do use-ful work, how the holder of a collar control unit is "a virtual puppet master" as far as the convict is concerned. And al-though the pain that the collar can deliver is intense, it leaves no mark and does no permanent harm no matter how often it must be used.

Madison gave me some other articles to read. As I took them, he reached out with both sweaty little hands and felt my breasts.

"It wouldn't hurt you to show some gratitude," he said to me when I pulled away. "I saved you from something really brutal. I don't know. You're so ungrateful. Maybe I won't be able to save you next time." He paused. "You know, your mama wanted to let you go on and be collared. She thinks you hurt that girl on purpose." Another pause. "You need to be nice to me, Asha. I'm all you've got."

He kept after me. There were times when I thought I should just sleep with him and be done with it. But I was back in school by then and I could stay away from home most of the time. He was such a godawful whiny man. My only good luck was that he was small, and after a while, I realized he was a little bit afraid of me. That was a shock. I had grown up timid and afraid of almost everyone—resentful, but afraid. I had to be provoked suddenly and severely to make me react with anything other than argument. That's why I was so upset when I broke the girl's jaw. Not only did I not know that I could hurt someone that badly, but I wasn't the kind of person who hurt people at all.

But somehow, Madison didn't know that.

He wouldn't let me alone, but at least he didn't use phys-ical force on me. His moist little hands kept wandering and he kept pleading, and he watched me. His eyes followed me so much, I was afraid Kayce would notice and blame me.

He tried to peek at me in the bathroom—1 caught him at it twice. He tried to watch me in my bedroom when I was dressing.

At 15, I couldn't wait to get out of the house and away from both of them for good.

FROM
The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
THURSDAY, JUNE
7, 2035

I'm back at Georgetown. I need to rest a little, check in with Allie, clean up, pick up some of the things I left with her, and gather what information I can. Then I'll head for Ore-gon. I need to get out of the area for a while, and going up where Marc is seems a good choice. He won't want to see me. He needs to be part of Christian America even though he knows that Christian America's hands are far from clean. If he doesn't want me around reminding him what kind of people he's mixed up with, let him help me. Once I've got my child back, he'll never have to see me again—unless he wants to.

************************************

It seems that I can only stand myself when I'm moving, work-ing, searching for Larkin. I've got to get out of here.

Allie says I should stay until next week. She says I look like hell. I suppose I did when I arrived. After all, I was pre-tending to be a vagrant I've cleaned up now and gone back to being an ordinary woman. But even when I was clean, she said I looked older. 'Too much older," she said.

"You've got your Justin back," I told her, and she looked away, looked at Justin, who was playing basketball with some other Georgetown kids. They had nailed an

honest-to-goodness basket-without-a-bottom high up on someone's cabin wall. Early Georgetown cabins were made of notched logs, stone, and mud. They're heavy, sturdy things—so heavy that a few have fallen in and killed people during earthquakes. But a nailed-on basket and the blows of a newly stolen bas-ketball did them no harm at all. One of the men who had a job cleaning office buildings in Eureka had brought the ball home the day before, saying he had found it in the street.

"How is Justin?" I asked Allie. She had set up a work area behind the hotel. There she made or repaired furniture, re-paired or sharpened tools, and did reading and writing for peo-ple. She didn't teach reading or writing as I had. She claimed she didn't have the patience for that kind of teaching— although she was willing to show kids how to work with wood, and she fixed their broken toys for free. She contin-ued to do repair work for the various George businesses, but no more cleaning, no more fetching and carrying. Once Do-lores George had seen the quality of her work, Allie was al-lowed to do the things she loved for her living and for Justin's. The repair work she was doing now for other peo-ple was for extra cash to buy clothing or books for Justin.

"I wish you'd stay and teach him," she said to me. "I'm afraid he spends too much time with kids who are already breaking into houses and robbing people. If anything makes me leave Georgetown, it will be that."

I nodded, wondering what sort of things my Larkin was learning. And the unwanted question occurred to me as it sometimes did: Was she still alive to learn anything at all? I turned my back on Allie and stared out into the vast, jum-bled forest of shacks, cabins, tents, and lean-tos that was Georgetown.

"Lauren?" Allie said in a voice too soft to trust I looked around at her, but she was hand-sanding the leg of a chair, and not looking at me. I waited.

"You know. . . I had a son before Justin," she said.

"I know." Her father, who had prostituted her and her sis-ter Jill had also murdered her baby in a drunken rage. That was why she and Jill had left home. They had waited until their father drank himself to sleep. Then they set fire to their shack with him in it and ran away. Fire again. What a cleans-ing friend. What a terrible enemy.

"I never even knew who my first son's father was," she said, "but I loved him—my little boy. You can't know how I loved him. He came from me, and he knew me, and he was mine." She sighed and looked up from the chair leg. "For eight whole months, he was mine."

I stared at Georgetown again, knowing where she was going with this, not really wanting to hear it It had a nasty enough sound when I heard it in my own head.

"I wanted to die when Daddy killed my baby. I wished he had killed me too." She paused. "Jill kept me going—kind of like back at Camp Christian, you kept me going." An-other pause, longer this time.
"Lauren, you might never find her."

I didn't say anything, didn't move.

"She might be dead."

After a while, I turned to look at her. She was staring at me, looking sad.

“I'm sorry," she said. "But it's true. And even if she's alive, you might never find her."

"You knew about your baby," I said. "You knew he was dead, not suffering somewhere, not being abused by crazy people who think they're Christians. I don't know anything.

But Justin is back, and now Jorge's brother Mateo is back."

"I know, and you know that's different. Both boys are old enough to know who they are. And. . . and they're old enough to survive abuse and neglect."

I thought about that, understood it, turned away from it

"You still have a life," she said.

"I can't give up on her."

"You can't now. But the time might come...."

I didn't say anything. After a while I spotted one of the men I had gotten information from back before I began working in Eureka. I went off to talk to him, see whether he'd heard anything. He hadn't.

************************************

It seems I'm to have a companion for my trip north. I don't know how I feel about that. Allie sent her to me. She's a woman who should have been rich and secure with her family down in Mendocino County, but, according to her, her family didn't want her. They wanted her brother, but they'd never wanted her. She was born from the body of a hired surrogate back when that was still unusual, and although she looks much like her mother and nothing like the surrogate, her parents never quite accepted her—especially after her brother was born the old-fashioned way from the body of his own mother. At 18, she was kidnapped for ransom, but no ransom was ever paid. She knew her parents had the money, but they never paid. Her brother was the prince, but some-how, she was never the princess. Her captors had kept her for a while for sex. Then, she got the idea to make herself seem sick. She would put her finger down her throat when-ever they weren't looking. Then she'd throw up all over everything. At last, in disgust and fear, her captors aban-doned her down near Clear Lake. When she tried to go home, she discovered that just before the Al-Can War began, her family left the area, moved to Alaska. Now, more than a year after her kidnapping, she was on her way to Alaska to find them. The fact that the war was not yet officially over didn't faze her. She had nothing and no one except her fam-ily, and she was going north. Allie had told her to go with me, at least as far as Portland. "Watch one another's backs,"

she said when she brought us together. "Maybe you'll both manage to live for a while longer."

Belen Ross, the girl's name was. She pronounced it Bay-LEN, and wanted to be called Len. She looked at me—at my clean but cheap men's clothing, my short hair, my boots.

"You don't need me," she said. She's tall, thin, pale, sharp-nosed, and black-haired. She doesn't look strong, but she looks impressive, somehow. In spite of all that's hap-pened to her, she hasn't broken. She still has a lot of pride.

"Know how to use a gun?" I asked.

She nodded. "I'm a damned good shot."

"Then let's talk."

The two of us went up to Allie's room and sat down to-gether at the pine table Allie had made for herself. It was simple and handsome. I ran a hand over it. "Allie shouldn't be in a place like this," I said. "She's good at what she does. She should have a shop of her own in some town."

"No one belongs in a place like this," Len said. "If chil-dren grow up here, what chance do they have?"

"What chance do you have?" I asked her.

She looked away. "This is only about our traveling to-gether to Portland," she said.

I nodded. "Allie's right We will have a better chance together. Lone travelers make good targets."

"I've traveled alone before," she said.

"I have too. And I know that alone, you have to fight off attacks that might not even happen at all if you aren't alone, and if you and your companion are armed."

She sighed and nodded. "You're right I suppose I don't really mind traveling with you. It won't be for long."

I shook my head. "That's right. You won't have to put up with me for long."

She frowned at me. "Well, what more do you want? We'll get to Portland, and that will be that. We'll never see each other again."

"For now, though, I want to know that you're someone I can trust with my life. I need to know who you are, and you need to know who I am."

"Allie told me you were from a walled community down south."

"In Robledo, yes."

"Wherever. Your community got wiped out, and you came up here to start another community. It got wiped out and you wound up here." That sounded like Allie, giving only the bare bones of my life.

"My husband was killed, my child kidnapped, and my community destroyed," I said. "I'm looking for my child—and for any children of my former community. Only two have been found so far—two of the oldest. My daughter was only a baby."

"Yeah." Len looked away. "Allie said you were looking for your daughter. Too bad. Hope you find her."

Just as I was beginning to get angry with this woman, it occurred to me that she was acting. And as soon as the thought came to me, it was followed by others. Much of what she had shown me so far was false. She had not lied with her words. It was her manner that was a he—filled with threads of wrongness. She was not the bored, indifferent person she wanted to seem to be. She was just trying to keep her distance. Strangers might be dangerous and cruel. Best to keep one's distance.

Problem was, even though this girl had been treated very badly, she wasn't distant. It wasn't natural to her. It made her a little bit uncomfortable all the time—like an itch, and in her body language, she was communicating her discomfort to me.

And, I decided, watching her, there was something else wrong.

"Shall we travel together?" I asked. "I usually travel as a man, by the way. I'm big enough and androgynous-looking enough to get away with it"

"Fine with me."

I looked at her, waiting.

She shrugged. "So we travel together. All right."

I went on looking at her.

She shifted in her hard chair. "What's the matter? What is it?"

I reached out and took her hand before she could flinch away. "I'm a sharer," I said. "And so are you."

She snatched her hand away and glared at me. "For god-sake! We're only traveling together. Maybe not even that Keep your accusations to yourself!"

"That's the kind of secret that gets companion travelers killed. If you're still alive, it's obvious that you can handle sudden, unexpected pain. But believe me, two sharers trav-eling together need to know how to help one another."