“So I heard. That’s great. I wish I could have seen it.”
She scooted up in bed.
“It was so cool, Park. I just realized that I had to stop trying to run through that last gap before it closed. If I just waited, it swung back around. I used the Rod of Torquine, jammed it in there, slipped through, and I was in the center.”
He put a hand on the side of her face.
“What was there?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was just quiet. It was just so perfectly fucking quiet.”
Then she was gone again, repeating her adventure, starting with the first up arrow.
Park looked at the wall beyond which we had killed the three invaders.
“How much longer are we safe here?”
There was no calculation I could conjure to answer that question.
“We are not safe now. Every second we spend here increases our risk. But I cannot say for certain when the risk will outweigh the benefit of having a single position to defend rather than committing to travel.”
He thought.
“Will they come back before dark?”
“Would your neighbors question the appearance of black-clad men with assault rifles storming your house in broad daylight?”
“Now? Today? I don’t know.”
I shrugged.
“Then there is a risk that they will come in daylight.”
He took his wife’s hand.
“I have to do something.”
He looked at his daughter.
“And I have to know she’s safe.”
With great discomfort I stood and brought the baby to him.
“We are, none of us, ever safe.”
He put his free hand on her head and looked up at me.
“I just need to know she’s somewhere safe. Just until I come for her. Just until I do what I have to. Do you know a place?”
I felt the weight of the gun holstered on my ankle, the knife strapped against my crotch, the lines burned into my legs. And I thought about somewhere safe for a baby girl.
“Yes, of course. I know a place. Until you come for her.”
Omaha grunted. We both wrinkled our noses.
Park squeezed Rose’s hand and stood up.
“Come on, I’ll show you how to change a diaper.”
He did. A simplicity that I watched carefully, certain I could never master it.
And, knowing what course of action he was committed to, and the resolve that he required, I showed him something as well. A crime. A coldblooded act. Irrefutable guilt. Armor in his cause.
27
7/13/10
WE’RE ALONE AGAIN. Rose. I’ve done things. Things I believe are right. Things I have to do.
I think you would agree with me. That there wasn’t any choice.
You said I couldn’t take care of her. And I can’t. I can’t take care of her.
She can’t be safe. Not as long as the world is this way.
Jasper says it’s just changing. As if that is a small thing. Which I suppose it is.
Everything is always changing. Look at how you changed me. How we changed each other. How Omaha changed us both.
But it’s still my world. The world where my father and mother met.
Where she called him Peaches. Where I ran away from them to try to find a different way of understanding. Where I met you. This is the world where you wouldn’t let me go. Not that I tried to run. This is the world where my mother died and my father killed himself because he couldn’t live in it without her. This is the world where you got pregnant.
Or is it? Or is that the world that was? Is this already the new world? The world where you got sick. And where Omaha was born. If it is, then it is her world. And she’ll need to know how to live in it.
But only if it has time to breathe.
Afronzo Senior said they were “tapping the brakes.” Trying to slow things down, give the new world a chance to be born.
My daughter’s world. A world that should not have the crimes of the old world polluting its birth.
I have to do something. You understand, Rose. I know you understand.
You said it when we met. I will die one day wandering into traffic. But I’m not wandering. I’m walking straight across all five lanes.
I have to do something. Someone has to do something. Otherwise, why?
I love you.
Good night.
28
WHEN I ARRIVED AT LADY CHIZU’S OFFICE, MY HANDS WERE not in my pockets, but they were full.
In one hand I carried the gift I had promised, a flower, a random lily, plucked from a withered bush in Rose’s garden, fragrant. In the other I carried Omaha Garden Haas. Sleeping still. As she had been since I took her from the car seat Park had showed me how to install in my Cadillac.
Lady Chizu received the flower with all her long-accumulated graciousness. The child she received into her presence with a slight pursing of thin lips.
“This is unexpected.”
I said nothing.
Chizu indicated the breakfast laid out on her low desk, set for two, noodle soup with spicy egg and salt cod.
“Is she old enough for milk?”
I tipped my head at one of the well-mannered, fabulously cheekboned young men who had escorted me in. A countermeasure in light of my hands not being pocketed. One carried the diaper bag I’d had draped over my shoulder when I came off the elevator.
“I have powdered formula. If someone would be so kind.”
She nodded.
I looked at the man.
“Three scoops, six ounces filtered water. Room temperature, please.”
Both bowed and left.
Chizu took a slight step back. I walked past her toward the table.
She observed my stride.
“Your wounds.”
There was a small blue vase standing empty on the table. I slipped the stem of the lily into its mouth.
“Yes.”
I placed the now-empty hand into my pocket.
She approached, small gliding steps.
“I am curious.”
“Yes?”
She lowered herself to her cushion.
“When I invited you to breakfast, did it occur to you to think how you would eat with your hands in your pockets?”
I smiled.
“No, it did not.”
She pointed at the second cushion.
“I would not have made the invitation if I had not intended for you to be comfortable.”
I took the hand from my pocket and used it as I lowered myself, edging onto my bottom rather than sitting on my legs in her manner. Omaha burrowed more deeply into my armpit.
Chizu picked up a set of plain bamboo chopsticks.
“Were your legs injured in execution of my concerns?”
I was looking at the wall behind her. The typewriters were gone. In their places, filling only a handful of the cubbyholes, were a variety of objects: a lone thumb drive that seemed to have been crafted into the proximal phalanx of an actual thumb, its beaded thong draped over a framed screen grab image of a warty hag sitting astride a dragon. An iPhone running an animation of a bearded dwarf in plate armor, his long red hair wreathed in white roses. A framed and numbered piece of collage by Shadrach that I may or may not have seen at his show. And a hard drive, carefully disassembled, all the components laid out with schematic precision around a small card of linen stock on which someone had executed a beautiful copperplate script that spelled out a name with no vowels.
I looked from the displays to the lady.
“Yes. There were many unexpected turns of events.”
“That is apparent.”
One of the cheekboned men returned, placed a filled baby bottle on the table next to me, placed the diaper bag, now properly screened, at my side, bowed, and left.
Chizu’s chopsticks were poised over her bowl.
“How is this best accomplished so that we might all eat?”
I considered the technical difficulties involved in eating hot soup one-handed while feeding a baby.
“It would be easiest, I think, if the ladies eat first. And then I may ask for your help.”
She nodded, dipped her chopsticks into her bowl.