Harlow shrugged. “Everybody has to have a hobby, I suppose. Whatever makes you happy, Aunt Stella. Don’t know if I could stand the extra information. Bad enough that doorknobs and sidewalks talk.”
Corey said, “You have a business interface, don’t you?”
“Of course, business. Phone calls. That’s it. I block the rest.” He moved his jacket to his shoulder. “Everybody who wants to stay sane does that. Too much noise otherwise. Silly ads and chatty appliances.”
“I suppose,” Corey said. “I hadn’t thought about it that way before.”
He smiled at her again, like he had when he’d passed her desk, all teeth and glittering eyes like a light flicking on, then it was gone. “Your message said there were more papers to sign. I should get to them.”
“And more for tomorrow too. Today’s are on my desk.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m just dying here,” said Stella from the light switch.
Corey looked down at her guiltily. Stella’s arms seemed no more substantial than flower stems, and dark mottles covered the parchment-thin skin.
“Are you comfortable, ma’am? Can I get you some water?” She moved the pillow under Stella’s head to give her a better angle.
The old woman’s eyes peeked from between the eyelids. A tip of tongue moistened her lips. Corey leaned close. “Yes, dear. That would be nice,” Stella whispered. Corey smiled. Stella always called her dear or deary, terms of endearment Corey had never heard from anyone else. They were archaic, like Stella.
Water poured from the faucet before she reached it. “Forty-two degrees and pure as a spring,” said the sink’s voice in Corey’s head. Beside the sink sat the microwave, and beside that the coffee maker. Four white cabinets containing medical supplies filled the rest of the space to the counter’s end. She could smell the ointment she rubbed into Stella’s elbows and knees. The jar’s lid was loose, so she tightened it. When she returned to the bedside, Stella appeared to have gone asleep, her face tilted to the side, her breath raspy and dry. Corey reached to touch Stella’s shoulder.
“I’m still with you,” said the microwave. “Just wandering around the room. I love the new interface, deary.”
Stella turned on the pillow, and when the straw touched her lips, she drank gingerly. “Oh, that’s better,” she murmured.
The old woman swallowed a couple more times as if it hurt. “Your young man is gone,” she said.
“My young man?” Corey’s fingers rested on the bed’s cool, aluminum side rail. “Oh, Harlow!”
The outer room was empty. On her desk, the papers were signed. In the trash can, next to her wadded note, lay a pen. The trash can, with a hurt tone, said in her ear, “This is a mixed-composition non-recyclable item. It should be disposed of properly.”
Corey straightened the papers before bending down to retrieve the pen.
“Thank goodness,” the pen said when she picked it up. “I’m properly functioning and three-quarters full.”
It glistened in her hand, an ordinary black and gray business-person’s pen. “So, why’d he throw you away?” The pen’s button depressed smoothly under her thumb, revealing the ball point with an authoritative click.
“I skip sometimes,” it said, sulkily. “It’s a manufacturing flaw. Not my fault.”
“Did you tell him?” She clicked the pen closed and set it on the desk next to her pencil.
“He never ever listens. He misspells all the time, you know. Will he make a correction? Nope. I might as well be mute.”
“I’ll bet he’s hell on pencils too,” said the pencil.
“Oh, yes. He chews them when he’s thinking.”
“The bastard.”
Corey said, “How old are you?”
“My battery expires in six months, but I wanted to go down writing.”
“Do you mind if I use you to compose a note? My pencil is reluctant.” She opened a desk drawer for a piece of paper.
The pencil barked, “Not reluctant! I’m solar powered. No expiration date, if she would just quit using me!”
“Not at all. I’m here to serve. Umm, I do skip occasionally. Is this to be a final draft?”
“Just a note.” Corey held the pen next to her ear, clicked it open then closed a few times. The paper’s blankness seemed a mile wide. What could she write on it? What could she tell the doctor? He’d seemed as confused as she was at first, and apologetic. “Ovulation has been blocked for you. Technically, I don’t know how it could happen.” She had closed her eyes on the examination table, ticking off the symptoms that had brought her in: light-headedness, tender breasts, constipation and fatigue.
“Are you sure it isn’t a vitamin deficiency?” she had said.
He shuffled through screens on his clipboard. “No, you’re eight weeks along, give or take a couple days. There’s a heartbeat. I’d have to do field work in back-country Africa for an opportunity like this. It’s fascinating.”
Then he talked to her about abortion. “If we had caught it earlier,” he said, “we could consider a fetal extraction and a normal laboratory gestation. But… eight weeks.” He shrugged and told her to take a day or two to choose the best date to come in.
Corey twirled the pen from finger to finger. Her other hand rested on her belly. It was hard to imagine a second heartbeat inside her. The idea was so… retro. The only picture she could associate with it was of a frontier woman sitting on the seat of a covered wagon, her hands loose on the reins, a belly full of baby resting on her legs. She thought about talking to Harlow. “By the way,” she might say, “you know how sometimes the most unlikely things can happen?”
“Is this to be a business correspondence?” said the pen. “I can suggest several good salutations if that is the case.”
“How about letters to distant boyfriends?” The pen clicked open and closed again under her thumb. “No, forget it. I’m thinking.”
She looked at the clock on her desk that she’d brought from home when she took the job caretaking for Stella. It was an old clock. Pre-sentient. Practically an antique. Thirty minutes until she could go home for the day, the glowing numbers told her. It could talk, though, if she asked for the time. So it could listen. Corey wondered if Stella could access it from the other room. Was it listening to her right now? Could she hear the breathing? The pen clicking? The oddness of her thoughts?
Corey put the pen in the middle of the blank paper, pushed away from the desk. Maybe Stella needed company. Poor woman. On death’s bed with no one to sit with her. Harlow was her only relative, and he came by twice a week. What must it be like to be in her place, tied by gravity and age to the bed?
Stella’s consciousness hovered in the middle of the room. She upped the sound reception on the coffee pot, and it seemed she moved toward it. When she zoomed in on the television, she moved there. In the bed, she giggled, and the giggle echoed in the microwave and the sink and the telephone, her voice leaking from each.
She peeked at herself from the television. Old woman, still beneath the sheets. Could that bag of infirmity really be her? Straining, she raised her hand off the blanket and wiggled her fingers in a weak imitation of a wave. Her arm struggled to hold the hand even in inch in the air. Her shoulder ached, and the muscles in her back were within an instant of cramping. She dropped the hand back to the bed.
A brush of air touched her. But it wasn’t her skin that felt it; it was the much more sensitive light switch. She could feel more than pain again! Stella turned the television on its gimbal so she could see the door. Corey walked in, quietly, but her shoes scraped loud enough for the microphones in the room. Stella listened mightily. Yes, she could hear the young woman’s breathing, the rustle of her skirt against her legs.