“It ain’t enough.” Joey’s voice was almost a wail and there was fury in her eyes.
“No,” Michelle replied with her mouth set in a grim line. “It never is.”
30
Friday,
December 25
Christmas Day
The Pampas
Western Uruguay
“You need to let well enough alone now, Mr. L.,” Mrs. Clark said sternly. “It’s not right to be moving the girl every few days hither and yon across the globe. By whatever unholy means you’re using to move us.”
The wind boomed and hissed and made the long green grass lie down by ranks and then pop up again as it shifted. It was a warm, fair spring day here in the Pampas, in western Uruguay. A crappy little country nobody up in el Norte knew about…
“I trust we’ll be able to leave the girl be for a spell, to find herself a place in this land, forsaken by the good Lord as it is,” Mrs. Clark said pointedly.
Tom shook his head. He realized his thoughts had wandered down a side path-and into a standing microsleep her voice had jarred him out of. It was the only kind of sleep he allowed himself these days. And mostly because he didn’t have a choice: it just snuck up on him.
“ Mr. L. Are you quite certain you’re listening to me?”
“Huh? Yeah. Sure. I-I just nodded off for a moment there. Been working late… in the office.”
She sniffed a sniff that plainly said, If you don’t want to tell me the truth, I’m sure it’s your business.
“Very well,” she said, taking in his red, sunken eyes and three-day stubble. “You can go in and see the girl.”
Nodding obediently, Tom stooped to pick up the big package he’d set before the doorstep. Its weight posed him no problem; it was big enough to be tricky to hold on to, though. It was wrapped in paper where fucking teddy bears cavorted with candy canes, and tied up with gold ribbon and a vast gold bow.
The girl of course was not much more than a decade the redheaded old dragon’s junior. But Sprout was, and would always be, a girl. The girl, to Mark.
“Tom!” he said aloud, snapping his head upright and clocking the top of it painfully on the doorjamb into the sheepherder’s hut he’d had refurbished as another bolt-hole months before. “I’m Tom, God damn it. Not fucking Mark.”
Behind him Mrs. Clark sniffed loudest of all. No need to wonder what that one meant.
“Sprout?” he called tentatively. “Sprout, honey?”
“I’m in here,” she called.
The place was dimly lit by electric lights powered off a generator fueled from huge buried liquid propane tanks-some of Tom’s make over. All his efforts couldn’t stop it smelling of lanolin and ancient cigarette smoke. Some elderly wool rugs, their once-bold patterns faded by age and various accretions, didn’t help much with either smell.
He knelt and set down the gift-wrapped box. Straightening and turning, he hit his head on the frame of the door at the end of the low hallway. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“ Mr. L.!” came Mrs. Clark’s reproving bark.
“Sorry. Fuck.” He ducked low and stepped in.
Sprout lay on her belly on a futon with a red and black flannel spread, her stockinged feet in the air. His heart turned over. The half-assed light of a bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling made her look for an instant as if she really was the age she acted. She was just turning, plucking an iPod earbud from beneath a sweep of grey-threaded blond hair.
“Daddy!” she said. Her face lit with a smile. She jumped off the bed, leaving a big hardcover book open to show color paintings of dinosaurs. She caught Tom in a fierce hug and buried her face against his chest. “You’re coming home.”
He blinked. He wasn’t thinking too clearly. But he’d be okay. He always was. “Uh-yeah. Yeah, sweetie. I’ll be coming home to stay. Like, soon. Once I take care of some… uh, business.”
A great sense of peace flowed through him. It was as if the warmth of her body suffused his soul. He sagged. His eyes sagged with foolish tears. Knock off the bourgeois sentimentality, he ordered himself sternly.
But it was just-just such a relief. To feel safe. Accepted. Loved.
I don’t want to leave, he thought.
His daughter pulled away. She looked into his blue eyes with clearer ones the same hue. Tears ran down her smooth cheeks. She smiled. It seemed a touch sad, somehow. “You’re going away,” she said.
He shrugged. “Well, sweetie, a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. It’s my duty. Like, destiny.”
She reached up and took his face in both hands. He blinked in surprise. She’d never done that before. Sprout pulled his face toward hers. Uncomprehending, he yielded.
She kissed his forehead.
“Good-bye,” she said, speaking more carefully than usual. “You tried your very bestest to make everything all right for me. Thank you.”
She let him go. He smiled at her. “Sure, Sprout. Anything for you, honey.”
He turned back to the low dim hallway. “Here,” he said, turning back with the huge box cradled dubiously in his arms. “Merry Christmas.”
She squealed with delight. “Oh, what is it? What, what, what?”
“Open it and find out.”
As she dropped to her knees and began to tug at the bow he crooked a grin and nodded at the open book on her bed. “I hope you like dinosaurs.”
Blythe van Renssaeler
Memorial Clinic, Jokertown
Manhattan, New York
The third season of American Hero was playing on the static-ridden television mounted in the corner of her room.
Jerusha watched it mostly because it was easier than turning her head. Peregrine was interviewing someone called Adamantine, whose disturbingly smooth body looked like it was computer-generated rather than real. Their words sounded like so much mush in Jerusha’s ear. “I’m very proud to have been chosen for this show,” Adamantine droned in a voice pitched heroically low. “I’m ready to prove myself here, and to prove to America that I deserve to be the next American Hero, like the great heroes who have been here before me.”
Do you know how stupid you all sound? she wanted to rail at Peregrine, at Adamantine. It was all so petty, so unimportant. That was the one lesson she’d taken away from her own stint on the program: none of it mattered at all.
Dr. Finn cantered into the room, his hooves bagged in sterile slippers, muffling the clatter against the linoleum floors. The centaur snagged the chart from the wall holder, glancing over it. His blond head-the hair touched with grey at the temples-shook as he made a note and placed it back. He placed his pen back in the pocket of the lab coat he wore.
“Take two aspirin and call you in the morning?” Jerusha said.
He favored her with a wry smile. “I wish it were that simple.”
“Pretty much anything would be simpler than this.” Jerusha lifted an arm, stabbed with a double set of IVs. She was surrounded by a metal forest of poles with plastic fluid bags hanging from them. A tray piled with plastic-domed plates sat on one side of the bed, from which wafted the smell of cafeteria food.
Finn’s tail flicked, almost angrily. “Your body’s locked in overdrive, Jerusha. You’re burning up calories at an impossible rate. But your digestive system isn’t absorbing nutrients very well at all. That’s why you’re constantly famished. Your body’s devouring itself because that’s all it has to feed on.”
“So tell me that you can fix it.” She saw the answer before he spoke, and fear stabbed her. “You can’t, can you?”
“Not yet. We’re still running tests, and we have a few ideas to try. We’ll figure this out.”
“You do a good job of sounding confident, Doc. And if you don’t figure it out?”
“We will,” he said firmly. “Now, get some rest, and let me get back to my lab work. I’d hate for you to think that we’ve been taking all that blood for nothing.” He checked her IV levels, patted her shoulder, and left the room. She smiled at him, because she thought it was what he would want to see. The brave patient, suffering in silence.