“Someone carrying a flashlight.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah. Hand me my jeans.”
In my experience the only thing better than watching Amanda put on her jeans was watching her take them off, but Gordo distracted us by knocking at the door. “Turn off the lights when you come out, okay? I don’t want the whole place lit up like Times Square.”
She finished buttoning up. “I thought we were here to get away from scary strangers.”
“Probably it’s nothing,” I said. “False alarm.”
We found everyone gathered in the main room, looking sleepy and irritable. Gordo had drawn the drapes, and he waited as Amanda and I settled onto the sofa. He had a phone in his hand and a pistol in what looked like a military holster at his hip. Usually it would have been Damian who dominated the gathering, but tonight Damian was just one more endangered Tau. He sat quietly with the rest of us.
Gordo said, “I’ve got three people on the perimeter and they’re watching all the access points. Anybody approaches the house, they’ll see him. That doesn’t mean we’re altogether safe. I’ve got Marcy Britnell on the west side, she says there was what looked like a flashlight in the woods and she’s found fresh footprints tracking past the property on an oblique angle, like somebody was scouting us out. Maybe one set of footprints, maybe more, hard to tell at night on muddy ground. So we’re being careful. I can’t see why anyone would be out there at two in the morning after a rainstorm for innocent purposes, but we can’t rule out a lost hiker or a drunk trying to find his way home. It may seem isolated here but there are plenty of people living closer to the docks, so let’s not draw too many conclusions, okay?”
Good advice—we all nodded sagely—but easier said than done.
Amanda was still sleepy and she snuggled against me. I saw Damian’s eyes linger on us a moment. He didn’t seem jealous but he did look a little frustrated. Or maybe it was just the weight of the responsibilities he had recently shouldered.
It occurred to me to wonder what I might have been doing if Damian hadn’t more or less adopted me a few years ago. Six months after I joined the Rosedale tranche I had been working in Walter Kohler’s ad agency, putting together text and images on an Apple platform and proofreading copy on the side. The job was well paid but was only mildly interesting, and Damian told me I was wasting my time there. “Come work for me. I talked to Walter, and he’s agreeable, if that’s what you want.”
“Work for you doing what?” Back then, Damian’s main business had been his law practice. “I don’t have any legal training.”
He told me he was setting up a Tau-specific pension fund (which would eventually become TauBourse) and devoting some of the profits to pro-bono work on behalf of the Affinities, including petitioning InterAlia for greater transparency in their management of Affinity groups. He had already enlisted all the legal talent he needed, but what he wanted was a cadre of people who understood Tau and who were flexible enough to act in various capacities as needed, from driving cars to conducting research to writing briefs. Gophers, in effect, but we would be described as “consultants.” The drawback was that none of this would exercise my artistic talent.
And I surprised myself by being okay with that. Photoshopping images of puppies for pet food ads was what I had been doing with my artistic talent lately, and the muses weren’t impressed. I liked Damian’s passionate attitude toward the Tau Affinity and I was excited by the idea of playing a role in its evolution. Plus—no small thing—Amanda had already agreed to join his team. The work appealed to her serious side, what Lisa had once described as her desire “to do good ferociously.”
Since then I had driven cars for Tau, written press releases for Tau, arranged catering for Tau, rented hotel rooms for Tau, negotiated property purchases for Tau, even mopped floors (on one memorable occasion) for Tau. Damian was my boss, but we tended not to use that word. He initiated and organized the work, but we performed it collaboratively. Even the menial work contributed something to Tau, which made it bearable, and most days I was working alongside Amanda, which was more than merely bearable. In just a few years that work and those relationships had fused into what I thought of as the heartbeat and the music of my life.
Some days it made me feel invulnerable. I was Adam Fisk of the Tau Affinity, with a host of loyal brothers and sisters—almost seven million of us, according to the most recent census. Take me on and you take on my tribe. But I wasn’t invulnerable, and neither was Tau, and this weekend retreat had made that obvious.
We needed to stay together where Gordo could keep an eye on us, but that didn’t mean we had to stay awake all night. Professor Navarro had the bright idea of moving sheets and blankets into the living room for makeshift beds, which we did, and he promptly curled up on one of them. Navarro wasn’t one of those elderly people who have trouble sleeping: he snored like a drunken longshoreman.
Amanda stretched out on the sofa, and I was about to move to a blanket on the floor when my phone buzzed. Rachel Ragland’s number. A call at this hour probably meant she was drunk, either belligerent and accusatory or wanting to make tearful amends. I considered ignoring the call. The ugly word “tether” echoed in my head. I took the phone to a vacant corner of the room. “Rachel? What is it?”
But it wasn’t Rachel on the other end. It was her daughter.
* * *
“Is that Adam?”
“Suze?” I asked.
“Adam from the beach?”
“Yep, it’s me. What are you doing awake at this hour?”
“I still have the picture you drew of me. I colored it.”
“That’s great. Suze, is your mommy around?”
“Yes but not awake.”
“Maybe you should be asleep, too. Does she know you’re using her phone?”
“No,” she said, and for a moment I mistook the tension in her voice for guilt.
“Well, it’s not a good idea to use your mom’s things without her permission.”
“I’m sorry.” Suddenly she sounded near tears.
“Suze … is something wrong?”
“I wanted to ask her, but she won’t wake up!”
“I don’t understand. Are you at home?”
“Yes!”
“Your mom’s in her bedroom?”
“No! She’s on the couch! I’m looking at her right now!”
“What happens if you try to wake her up?”
“Nothing!”
Amanda overheard some of my end of the conversation—she sat up and gave me a concerned look. No one else was paying attention. Gordo sat by the window, his own phone in his hand, talking to one of his security people. Navarro’s snoring had settled into a growling rhythm, like someone trying to start a chainsaw.
“Go to her now,” I told Suze. “See if she wakes up.”
“Okay…”
“Are you with her?”
“Yes.”
“Can she see you?”
“Her eyes are closed.”
“What if you touch her?”
A pause. “I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get the blood on me.”
I closed my eyes and said, “Suze, tell me about the blood. Is Mommy hurt?”
“She cuts herself sometimes. Maybe she cut herself too much.”
“Try to wake her up. Say, ‘Mommy, wake up!’ Real loud. Can you do that for me?”
She didn’t just call it out, she screamed it. When she stopped, I said, “What happened?”
“Nothing! Maybe her eyes came open a little bit but they closed up again.”
“Okay,” I said, though okay was far from what I felt. “Okay, Suze, you need to call 911. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yeah but…”
“But what?”
“Mommy said never call 911 if she’s passed out. Because people might come and take me away from her. She said just wait for her to wake up. But there’s more blood this time. Your number was in the phone so I called it instead.”