"Do you love him?" Joan demanded.
Clara gasped. "Of course!"
Joan squeezed her hand. "Then go to him. He's in his office. Go now. I'll take over with the baby.
"Just try. This once," Joan said, and gave her a smile. "You can handle it. All he can say is no, right?"
Clara gazed at her mother, nodded with a sigh.
"You're right."
She handed the infant over and kissed her mother on the cool, dry, glittering scales of her cheek.
"Maman, I am so glad I found you."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Gazing out over the skyline of Manhattan, the dirt, despair and poverty veiled by a spectacular smog-generated sunset, Finn felt again the weight of that newborn child resting in his hands. He had delivered plenty of babies. The birth of this one, however, raised a visceral reaction - fierce joy that she had survived, and despair that he would never hold one of his own.
He didn't want to think about Clara, but she was an insidious presence in any thought pertaining to babies. She had lost weight in the past days. Since Finn hadn't seen her, the gauntness seemed all the more severe, the shadow of sadness all the darker in her gray eyes. Until she had accepted young Mary Louise from his hands, and her eyes had shone with the same fire of achievement he had felt. Clara had vanished with the baby, carrying her away to the neo-natal unit to begin blood replacement treatments. Finn was avoiding the neo-natal unit. He checked his watch. He'd give it another twenty minutes. By then Clara should be safely gone. Because if he saw her he wasn't sure what he'd do - kiss her or kill her. Probably kiss her.
"Bradley?"
He whirled too fast, got tangled in his own legs, the cane and the cast, and went down on his hindquarters. Clara reached out, took a step toward him, then folded back in on herself like a frightened touch-me-not. Finn got his feet under him, and limped behind the desk, placing it like a buffer between him and her disturbing presence.
"Hi," Finn finally said.
"Hi."
Long pause. Finn had to fill the silence. "How's the baby?"
"Doing wonderfully."
"We did it," Finn heard himself say, and then he smiled at her.
Tears clouded Clara's eyes. "You looked at me. This is the first time since ... since ... that you've really looked at me." Finn couldn't think of anything to say. "What do you see, Bradley, when you look at me? Monstrous killer? The woman you made love with? Which?"
"I don't know, Clara. You tell me which one you are. Explain to me how you could plan genocide when you'd been trained as a healer."
She half turned, gave him her profile. In a soft voice she began. "For years I'd had nightmares about my mother's death. The wild card had killed her. There was something monstrous about the way it killed her. That's what they told me. Papa hated wild cards. Pan hated them, but with a scientist's objectivity - they would destroy the human race. I was a motherless child being raised by men whose strongest emotion was hate. For years as I studied and worked I lied to myself, told myself I was doing this for the sake of humanity, freeing those poor souls from terrible suffering." She paused, drew a shaky breath.
"It was a lie. I was doing it as a way to take vengeance against the disease that had stolen my mother." She turned to him. "And then you, a wild card, a joker, destroyed my beliefs. You weren't suffering, horrifying, praying for death. You were living and loving, and you showed me I was the one with no life, no joy. And then you gave me back my mother."
"Yeah, I'm swell, but that doesn't tell me what you want from me, Clara. Forgiveness? Okay, I forgive you. I don't think it matters a damn because you have to decide if you can forgive yourself - "
"No."
The single word interrupted his diatribe. Finn gaped at her. "No? No, what?"
"I don't want your forgiveness."
"Then what the hell do you want?"
"I want to know if you still love me."
They had both lost that stiff, on their dignity pose, had stopped talking like characters in a soap.
"Don't the two sort of go hand in hand?" Finn asked.
"I don't know, do they?" She paused for an instant. "Do you love me?"
Finn hesitated, hedged. "Do you love me?"
That dimple was starting to appear. "You have to go first."
"That's not fair. I have more to lose."
"How do you figure that?" she demanded.
"I get rejected more," Finn said.
"You can't know that. I was terribly unpopular in school."
"Goddamn it, Clara, if I can survive you driving me crazy I'll probably love you 'til I'm old and gray."
And then she was in his arms, laughing and crying. Her tears dampened his shoulder, her cheek warm to his touch as he stroked back her hair. They kissed, and it took a few moments for evil reality to intrude.
Gently he took her by the shoulders, held her at arms length. "Clara, I don't know how long we've got together.... His voice failed for an instant. He coughed to clear the sudden tightness. "The virus ... But however long I've got, I want to spend it with you."
"I'm working on a vaccine," she said, her voice a thin thread of sound.
"And you keep working on it, but you can't work too late at night, and you gotta work here because I want to be with you," Finn said.
Clara sighed, and snuggled in close. "What else can we do, Bradley?" she asked after a few moments of silent communion.
"Live and hope."
And he found reasons for both in the taste of her lips.
The Color of His Skin
Part 8
"The Sharks got away with three vials before van Renssaeler could destroy them," Hannah was telling them. "Pan Rudo escaped too, with this General MacArthur Johnson."
Father Squid's voice was calm and soothing. "The police have assured us that every possible step is being taken to find and apprehend them. Dr. van Renssaeler has come forward and is willing to testify. The authorities - "
"- will do nothing," Gregg interrupted. "Every last person infected by the wild card virus is now under a sentence of death."
The voice, coming from high above them, caused everyone gathered in the room to peer up into the shadowed, distant ceiling, where the hulks of the Turtle's old shells loomed, dark ghosts of a painful past. Gregg could see the fuzzy image of the people in the room below: Dutton's skeletal face, Hotair in the midst of his flames, Oddity standing silently against the wall, Father Squid, Troll, Jo Ann and her husband, maybe a dozen or more others.
And Hannah. She peered up to where Gregg was hiding, but his myopic sight could tell nothing about her expression. Still, seeing her again sent the air rushing out of his lungs. For a moment he couldn't breathe, making eye contact with her in the darkness. Somewhere down below, Gregg heard the click of an automatic weapon being taken off safety. The scent of the crowd was bitter and fragile.
"Oh, Leo Barnett will say he's very concerned," Gregg went on from his perch on the shell. "He may even put together a task force to study the problem, but nothing will happen until it's too late. When you're all dead, maybe they'll build you a nice wall with all your names on it."
"Who are you?" Hannah called.
"You won't believe me. No one believes me."
"Try us."
Gregg wriggled out the blackened, ruined interior of the Turtle's shell, which still smelled faintly of smoke, sweat, beer, and old food. Someone hit a switch, and Gregg blinked as the tracklights around the ceiling illuminated him. "It's Battle ..." he heard someone say as he made the short leap from the shell to the wall alongside. The pads on his multiple legs gripped the wall; headfirst, he wriggled down to the ground. He could smell the stench of Hotair's Sterno flames, the sharp tang of oil from the weapon he knew was tracking him, and the floral scent of Hannah's hair.
He started toward her, but as he passed Troll, the joker grabbed a handful of loose skin just behind his head and lifted him like a kitten in the grasp of a mother cat. Gregg's legs began to pump in an automatic frenzy, but the grip was tight and unbreakable and his limbs pumped uselessly in the air. Troll turned him, and Gregg saw the man's grim face.