Safe Passage (22 page)

    
At
Biolab
, after his headaches went away,
Izzy
told himself that at the cellular level there was no noisy death, just order. It was not that the slides he observed under the microscope justified the killings or rendered the suffering of the puppies less—only that they revealed some sense behind the nastiness. Ultimately, the experiments could save human lives. When he made his own scientific breakthrough someday—because surely all this would eventually lead to that—then the end would finally justify the means. But when he caught himself thinking that way lately, he sounded like something out of Nazi Germany.

    
"Well, if you're going to have symptoms, I'm glad it's only a Don Juan complex and not headaches," his mother said. She was being flip, but the truth was, now that he doubted he'd make his breakthrough, he was afraid his Don Juan complex might become a permanent thing. It was as if, considering his work, he had no right to such luxuries as a lasting relationship. It did not cheer him that he had analyzed himself so well.

    
His father was coming down the stairs.
Izzy
could not see him from here, but he could hear him walking. He knew his father was all right by the cadence of his steps. They were even and not tentative, as they were during the blind spells. But his father was holding Lucifer in his arms as he rounded the corner into the kitchen, and for a moment he looked to
Izzy
like a child clutching a rag doll in his hands.

    
Then the cat jumped down when it caught sight of its dish, and his father seemed normal again.

    
"Everyone's up early," Patrick said.

    
"Gideon's here,"
Mag
told him.

    
If
Izzy
hadn't known his father better, he would have thought he was about to sigh. "This is going to be doubly hard for Gideon," he said. Then, noticing his mother, he said, "Not watching TV? Not reading the paper?"

    
"You think they're really going to tell us anything new?"

     
"No. I think one way or another, at this point we'll probably hear whatever we hear directly from the Marines." His father said that matter-of-factly, but as he spoke he poured himself a cup of barely tepid tea from the pot on the table and started drinking it. He never drank tea that wasn't steaming. Opening the paper, he sipped tea and looked at the picture of the collapsed headquarters building. He scanned the headlines and then the articles. He did not change expression. Then he said, uncharacteristically, "Oh, shit."

    
"What's in the paper?" his mother shouted. "What did you see?"

    
She jumped up and went around to look at the paper. Her face was the color of chalk. But when his father looked up, they could see that it was not some news about Percival he was reacting to but his eyes. Quite suddenly, they had closed to pinpoints, leaving his irises round and opaque as buttons.

    
"
Izzy
, how about bringing me my medicine?" he asked.

     
Izzy
did as he was told, but he felt blank and empty. Why a blind spell now?
The stress of a new day of waiting?
Of waking to the recounting of the news in the paper?
He just didn't know. He felt almost nauseated with helplessness. This is what it would come to, he thought: a crisis, suffering—and he, who had caused so much suffering, powerless to help.

    
The phone began to ring. His instinct was to stay exactly where he was, observing his father, in case something occurred to him. But when his father turned, he was slow because of his eyes, and his mother did not get up from the table. He went into the phone room and answered.

    
"Oh…is that Alfred?" the voice said.

    
"
Izzy
."

    
It was Beth O'Neal. "Tim just called," she blurted out. "It turns out they
were
billeted there in the headquarters. He was out on a detail at the perimeter of the airport when it happened. They're just now bringing them back in."

     
"That's good news."

    
"Yes, but I don't know how to tell you the rest. The thing is… Percival wasn't with him. The last time they were together was a few days ago. Tim says he doesn't know what's happened since, but the last time he saw him—oh,
Izzy
—Percival was still in that building that got blown up."

    
Mag
knew even before
Izzy
got off the phone. She felt she knew absolutely. She sat at the table, unable to move, while
Izzy
and Patrick hovered around her, telling her it wasn't necessarily as bad as it sounded. It was as if they were deliberately trying to preserve a lie.

    
"Listen,
Mag
. Normally those
Amtrac
vehicles are attached to headquarters, but with all the activity going on, they'd been moving them out to the line companies pretty regularly. So the fact that Percival was still there when Tim was detailed out doesn't mean anything."

    
"You're the one who always says to be realistic," she told him. "Be realistic, Patrick." It seemed completely
hartless
for him to be denying the seriousness right now—
specially now
—while he was blind.

    
"It's true that it might not mean anything, Mother,"
Izzy
said. "Tim went to Charlie
company
at the south end of the airport, but he's pretty sure Percival went with some guys who were moved to Alpha or Bravo company later that day. Beth says he's pretty sure."

    
Mag
said nothing.

    
"Or he could have been on leave,"
Izzy
said. "There were thirty or forty guys away on leave. Apparently Tim and Percival were both due for a leave, and maybe Percival got one.

    
"
Mag
, are you even listening?" Patrick asked.

    
"I hear you," she said. She heard, but she didn't understand. She didn't understand Charlie and Bravo and all that alphabet soup; she didn't know what a line company was. Until a month ago she'd thought Amtrak meant trains until Alfred explained it was spelled
Amtrac
with a
C
on the end, and it was an armored vehicle like a big box on treads. She still couldn't picture Percival driving one. What difference did it make? Percival was dead.

    
"Tim is going to call back as soon as he hears anything. At least we have that." Patrick was saying that because the Marine Corps hotline still didn't have its first list of survivors. It was expected sometime today. But
Mag
knew: Tim would be on the list—they already knew that from his call—and Percival wouldn't. Beth O'Neal deserved it;
Mag
didn't. Death was running in her blood.

    
Patrick touched her shoulder. "
Mag
, don't write an end to the story before you know for sure.

    
She shook his hand away. "It seems to me the end has already been written." He touched her again, but she could not bear it. "Leave me alone," she said under her breath.

    
"Where are you going?"

    
"Upstairs to get out of these sweatpants. Then I'm going to work."

    
"You couldn't,"
Izzy
said.

    
"I could," she said.

    
She ignored the twins, who greeted her at the top of the stairs. She dressed, found a coat, went out the door. She was on her way to work, and it would save her.

    
She felt strangely detached as she drove. It was like the feeling she had yesterday when she seemed to be watching the scene from a distance, only stronger. She'd worked full-time since Simon went to school.
Since Simon's lungs filled up from antibiotics.
Working had insulated her then from what she might feel if something happened to her sons while she was home tending them, and it would insulate her now. It had been nine years and half a dozen jobs since that first one, but she would not think of that. She watched the road. She might have been floating. She remembered one particular job with the Department of Social Services, just after she'd finally finished school. It had taken her eleven years to get her degree, going part time, and without a master's she should have remained doing the paperwork, but a visiting caseworker had quit. She steered the station wagon into the traffic. She could almost believe it wasn't today and Percival wasn't dead. She could almost believe she was still a social worker, all those years ago.

    
Back then, she'd spent her time driving around, visiting cases. There were women whose husbands had left and a man who had been released from a mental hospital, but mostly old people. Mrs. Cohen made her
rugelach
with gnarled arthritic hands, which she'd learned to do as a child in Russia. Mrs.
McClune
told stories in a smoky Irish accent, of failed potato crops and ocean crossings and a schoolteacher who'd sidled his hand up her leg more than seventy years ago, while the rest of the class was reading a lesson. Listening,
Mag
often forgot the time. The only one she didn't like was Mr. Carney, who lived in a dark apartment fashioned from the back room of his son-in-law's grocery store. The place smelled of mildew, and he dwelled on his ailments.

    
One day, she was on her way to his house and had stopped near the one-lane bridge over the creek, waiting for an approaching car to cross. On the drive over she'd been trying to remember how to pitch her voice so Mr. Carney wouldn't yell at her from his denture-sour mouth, "Young lady, I'm eighty-two years old and I can't hear a damned thing you're saying." And then she stepped on her brakes and lost the old man in the winter-dull of her mind, because outside it had suddenly become spring. Green just beginning to show on the trees, the creek swollen from rain. Sky pale blue, air shot through with a golden heat. She stretched her arm out the window, as if she might catch the season in her hand. Below her, on the bank, was a pleasant-looking boy fishing with a makeshift rod. He should have been in school, but the sight of him free in the sunshine was pleasant. He reminded her of someone. She thought of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It wasn't until she began to step on the gas again that she realized it was Percival.

    
She pulled over and left the car on the grass by the road. Percival had not noticed her. He sat by the creek, looking content for once, a sweet-faced boy. He was in the ninth grade then—fourteen, the same age Simon was now, but so small that waitresses in restaurants still wanted to give him the children's menu. He pretended it didn't matter, but a mute fury had grown in him all year. At home he wrapped himself in towels after showers instead of running naked through the upstairs like the younger boys, feigning modesty with the twins and Gideon because "I don't want you to see my hairy dinger." But everyone knew. "Yeah, about as much hair as on the palm of my hand." The previous fall, running high-school cross country for the first time, Percival had won only a single meet. The other runners were all bigger and stronger than he was, better in the final sprint. Patrick said not to worry, it was unusual for a freshman
Percival's
size to win at all; eventually he would mature. But Percival became restless, and during second semester started having trouble with some of his teachers. Now, with track season approaching, he had begun to cut school.
Mag
intended to lecture him and take him back to class. She felt that throwing him out of the car farther and farther from home when he was younger had made him willing to venture wherever he pleased, had increased his confidence in hoofing it. She meant to be firm with him. Besides, she had to go see Mr. Carney. She did not mean to call down the hill in a cheerful voice: "What're you using for bait?"

    
Percival did not seem surprised to see her. He pulled his string out of the water, grinning. On his hook was a waterlogged piece of bologna from the sandwich she had packed him. She'd acquiesced to his queasiness over the school cafeteria and packed him lunches every day, but now she realized he could also leave the premises more easily with a bag of food. She should have been angry, but she was not. Percival was smiling, and it reminded her of the joyfulness of all her sons—of Simon when he was snapping his fingers, and of Gideon with his face full of color while he was running. Her feeling for them surrounded her, and the sun made a warm spot on her back.

    
"You'll never catch anything with lunch meat," she said.

    
Percival shrugged.

    
"Did you eat anything, or use it all for the fish?"

    
"I ate the cookies."

    
"Yes, and three hours from now you'll be moaning on the floor with low blood sugar thinking you're going to die."

    
"I doubt it."

    
She waited for the anger to come. What came was her memory of stopping at the supermarket before she went to work. She had promised to bring bagels and yogurt to Mrs. Cohen; she'd also picked up a few groceries for herself. She went back to the car and got out strawberries and Doritos and a bottle of grapefruit juice. They had a picnic on the bank of the creek. The sun was almost hot; it burned the winter out of her. Her anger never came.