Aid workers brought us blankets and bottles of water. A professional team arrived who regularly dealt with collapsed buildings and cave-ins and knew how to remove debris without risking further collapse.
“How many were in your party?” one of the professionals asked me.
“Six,” I said. “Myself, my wife, three children, and my friend Marek Svoboda. My wife and son were taken to the hospital, and these are my two girls.”
“We found another body in a chamber back that way.” He pointed. “We haven’t cleared enough to reach her yet, but she’s female, a child about the age of yours. You don’t know who she might be?”
I frowned. Alex shouldn’t have left a body behind. It should have disappeared when her waveform resolved, just as the other Jacob’s had. The truth hit me like a bath of icy water. When my two minds were coming together, and I was glimpsing flashes of both our memories, there was a moment when I felt like I might have resisted, might have held back or even prevented the collapse. It was an odd thought, scientifically, but wave collapse had always shared a strange connection to consciousness. If Alex had resisted collapse, however, then that meant…
“That’s my daughter, too,” I said. “And she’s still alive.”
CHAPTER 41
“A little higher on the left,” I said. Alessandra lifted the left side of the Happy Birthday banner fractionally. “Perfect. Now climb down and help me with these balloons.”
The summer sun streamed through the windows, giving the dining room a bright, cheery air. Alessandra and I untangled the strings of a dozen latex balloons and tied them to the chair backs in pairs: two reds, two blues, two yellows, two greens. Claire walked through with a pile of presents, radiant herself in an orange sundress and ribbons in her blonde hair.
“Tell Sean to come down, will you?” I said. “He can help, too.”
Sean charged into the room at top speed and crashed into the opposite wall to stop his momentum. He had come home from the hospital just two weeks ago, but he was gaining in strength and energy every day. The plastic surgery had made the skin grafts on his face almost undetectable, and the doctors said that, given how young he was, the remaining scars would fade in time.
“Look what I made!” Sean said. He had taped five sheets of paper together and scrawled his own banner that read, “WELCUM HOME!” He had decorated it with pictures of fighter jets and dinosaurs, which was what he used to decorate everything.
“Great,” I said. “We’ll hang it up under the other one.”
It had long been a tradition in our house that no birthday was complete without noisemakers, so I distributed horns and whistles to everyone’s places around the dining room table. The flowered tablecloth was bright and festive, with colors that matched the fresh blooms in a vase at the center. Everything was ready.
Alessandra threw her arms around me and gave me a kiss. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.
The doorbell rang. “It’s them!” Sean shouted and galloped for the front door. I heard him wrench it open, and a brief pang of dread hit me, remembering Elena opening the door for the varcolac. But that nightmare was behind us now, and slowly but surely we were healing from it. Today was a celebration of that.
“It’s not them!” Sean shouted at the top of his lungs. “It’s only Uncle Marek!”
I went to greet Marek with a handshake so firm it would have crippled another man, and we exchanged looks of satisfaction. There was no need to thank him or say what I was feeling. It was understood. Colin arrived a few minutes later, and the room began to bustle with laughter and conversation.
Our van pulled into the driveway with Elena at the wheel. “They’re here, everybody!” I said.
The conversation hushed, and we watched from the window as Elena unfolded a wheelchair from the back and helped Alex transfer into it. Elena took the handles, ready to push, but Alex waved her off. She used the hand controls, and after one bump into the rail, managed to maneuver up the newly installed ramp. Elena held the door open while Alex motored into the house.
“Surprise!”
The clamor startled her at first, but then she looked around at everyone and smiled. Her new skin was still pink—not a graft like Sean’s, but a nearly complete replacement. Her hair had only just started to grow back, though it was coming in unevenly, some clumps growing better than others. Almost every system in her body that could go wrong had gone wrong, and she had spent months in the hospital fighting infections that had nearly claimed her life half a dozen times.
But here she was, alive and improving dramatically each day. The most painful parts were behind her, and now, at long last, she was home. Alessandra ran up with tears in her eyes. “Welcome home,” she said and gave her sister a careful hug.
The varcolac had not reappeared, and for all we could tell, both Alex and Alessandra were here to stay. Alessandra had visited the hospital every day, and the two were now as tight as any pair of twins—tighter, even, since they shared so much history that they seemed to read each other’s minds. I was still sorting through the task of explaining to the government and our medical insurance how I suddenly had three daughters where I had previously only reported two.
We headed for the dining room, where we had cheesesteaks for lunch (Alex and Alessandra’s favorite) and shared stories about the days when the world had gone mad, some of which still hadn’t been heard by everyone in the room. For dessert, Elena had made a pair of birthday cakes, one a reverse image of the other. We sang, the girls blew out their candles, and Elena passed around generous slices with scoops of vanilla ice cream.
After dinner, there were presents. Alessandra picked up a blue-striped box and started tugging at the bow, but I waved her down. “Open that one last,” I said.
They took turns opening the other presents: a pair of necklaces from Claire, tickets to a Phillies game from Colin, and a beautiful pair of hand-carved, Romanian crosses from Marek. Finally, I handed them the blue-striped package.
They tore off the wrapping together and shrieked as they saw the familiar Google letters with the outline of an apple in place of the red o. They knew what it was before they even opened it.
The box was much larger than the actual gift, stuffed as it was with cushioning bubbles and elaborate, decorative packaging. Inside were two new pairs of eyejack lenses, complete with Google Apple’s new stereo technology. This allowed a pair of viewers to record viewfeeds of the same event from different angles, and the software would stitch the feeds together into a three-dimensional immersion view. Alex and Alessandra threw the directions out with the wrapping paper, but they soon had their new toys up and running.
Elena and I watched as the two of them circled Claire, recording her as she tickled Sean to the point of tears.
“Hey, don’t make him wet his pants,” Elena called.
I put my arm around her and touched my head to hers. “It’s a great family you have there,” I said.
“I always knew she needed a friend,” Elena said. “It’s perfect, really, how it turned out.” Her forehead creased as she said this, and I knew the statement was intended to convince herself as much as me. She was remembering the horror, and worrying how it would affect our kids’ lives.