If they’re ghosts, Luke had asked, then how come we’re not scared of them?
Clay just looked at him as if he’d fallen off the turnip truck—which, apart from an expression of mute dispassion, was the most frequent look he used on Luke in those days.
On the main instrument panel, the ocean floor dropped beneath the yacht: 2,309 feet, 2,316, 2,325, a brief rise to 2,319, followed by a dip to 2,389. A different world existed down there—an inverse of the one human beings existed on. After a hundred feet, it was permanent midnight.
“Didn’t mean to put your feet to the flames earlier,” Leo said. “Asking about your brother and all.”
It didn’t really matter to Luke. He hadn’t spoken to his brother in years. Clayton had never cared about maintaining their connection, anyway. A day, a week, a year, a decade. Time was immaterial to him—and people were even more forgettable.
“Hope,” Leo said. “That’s the hardest part. Maintaining hope after what happens, happens. Because it already happened to my wife.”
Leo’s eyes met Luke’s—Luke caught that wretched need to tell him what had happened. And Luke would let him. That was part of the pact in this new version of the world. Listen to people’s stories, tell your own. It was the only way to cope sometimes.
“I met her in middle school,” Leo said. “Mona Leftowski. The skinniest, gangliest, most remarkable girl. We lived on the same block, and I made every excuse to spend time with her. That didn’t mean I was stuck doing girly things. Mona had a slingshot; we’d peg cans down at the town dump. One time I suggested pegging one of the dump critters—the big rats, maybe a raven—and she slugged me so hard that my shoulder was purple the next day. God, she was so mad. She said that ugly creatures got a right to exist same as you or me.”
Leo chuckled, the skin at the edges of his eyes crinkling. He gave Luke a knowing shrug that said: You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you?
Luke had. Just about everyone left had heard it, or lived it, or both.
“I proposed to her on her nineteenth birthday. Down on one knee in Doyer’s Burger Barn, of all places. When she said yes, my heart just about floated out of my chest and bobbed in the rafters like a balloon on a string. I took over my father’s business. Mona taught at the local elementary school. We had great years together, twenty-one of them in a row. The last two were harder, sure… but hell. That’s life, right?”
Leo refilled his glass and drained half at a go, his Adam’s apple jogging.
“Happened first was, Mona forgot our anniversary. It wasn’t such a big deal, except she had a mind for dates. But what the heck, Mona forgets our anniversary. No big deal.”
He finished his drink and poured another belt. He didn’t drink it; he just cupped the glass in his hands as if to draw warmth from it.
“It happened so gradually you could half convince yourself it wasn’t anything to worry about. You could say: Well, hell, Mona is past fifty; a little memory loss is par for the course. But it got worse. She forgot to flick the turn signal when she was driving. No big whoop—our town was small, traffic’s light. But then she forgot that a red light means ‘stop’ and blew right through an intersection; our Toyota got T-boned by a Lincoln. She was okay, thank God, but after that we decided it was best that I hold on to the car keys.”
Leo beheld Luke miserably over the rim of the glass.
“Mona brought it up after the accident—was it Alzheimer’s? Early onset? That made the most sense. Heck, at first that’s what all the wonks thought it was, too—a hyper-aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s. But as we figured out, the ’Gets is something else entirely. She started writing notes to herself. When it was getting bad, I mean, when she was breaking out in those god-awful scabs. She’d fill notebooks with dates and times and little fragments of info. She had a stack of them, all filled with her neat schoolteacher’s handwriting.”
Luke set a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you don’t have to—”
Leo waved Luke’s suggestion off with impatience. “What, am I dropping your mood, Doc?”
Luke thought: The story I could tell you, my friend, would sour your mood far worse. So don’t you worry about it one bit.
“Go on, Leo.”
“I watched it,” Leo continued. “God. I watched her forget. Then one day, she’s staring at me across the kitchen table. And her mouth falls open and out comes a half-chewed dinner roll. She hadn’t spoken for days at that point. I don’t even know how much of her was left anymore. We sat that way for a few hours. Mona slumped there, mouth open. I tried to close it for her, but it’d just fall right open again.
“That night, I carried her upstairs and undressed her. I took off her… Doc, she was wearing diapers. Those were hard to lay your hands on by then. Pharmacies all sold out. It busted me up to pull those god-awful things on and off my wife—but if you love someone, you love them in all their states, don’t you? Sickness and health.
“I put her nightgown on and put her in bed and lay down beside her. I was crying, yeah, but I tried to be real soft about it. I don’t imagine it troubled her. Sometime that night, she… stopped, I guess? It happened quickly, which was a relief. She forgot how to live, or… damn it all, I don’t know how this disease finishes us. It didn’t seem real.”
It didn’t seem real. Luke understood that. He’d felt the exact same way the day his son had gone missing.
“I’m so sorry, Leo.”
Leo sawed his palm across his nose. “It’s all percentages, Doc. Life is percentages. When Mona came down with it, hardly anyone had gotten the ’Gets. Less than 1 percent of the population. But that’s the thing about percentages—no matter how small, they’ve got to affect someone, right? After Mona passed I sold the house, packed up, and caught on as a commercial boat captain. When the ’Gets started spreading, a few guys at my company started ferrying supplies to the Hesperus.”
Luke said: “Is that what I am, then? Supplies?”
Leo smiled. “The work keeps my head straight. I like to think I’m doing a bit of good here. When your brother went down… I’m not a religious man, but I prayed he’d find answers. Not for me. The one it could’ve helped is gone from my life. But I harbor that hope all the same.”
The marine band radio squawked.
“What’s your ETA, Bathgate?” someone asked.
Leo consulted his monitors and then keyed the mike. “This is Bathgate. Thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes. Over.”
“Bump it up.” A prolonged silence. “Something has surfaced from the Trieste. It’s… Is Dr. Nelson with you now?”
“He’s right beside me. Over.”
“What’s surfaced is… You better get here as soon as you can manage.”
A knot—something as hard and sticky as clay—twisted in Luke’s stomach.
“I’ll go full bore, then. Bathgate out.”
Leo adjusted his controls. The turbines churned. The yacht surged.
“Home again, home again,” Leo sang. “Jiggedy jig.”