They spent an hour browsing through the toy store, stayed long past the end of the rainstorm, holding hands and looking at the toys of their youth, and then separated when she became involved with the kaleidoscope selection, began reminiscing about the kaleidoscope her father had bought for her to take as a present for a birthday party, but then her parents were killed a few days before the party and so she’d kept it, kept it for eight or nine years and through a series of foster homes, kept it until she was fourteen, when one of the boys she was living with, when she wouldn’t give him a kiss, smashed it with his boot, so she smashed his jaw with her fist, and after that started sneaking out of the house, and after that started shoplifting, and then auto-thefting, and so on, so forth.
“Maybe things would’ve been different,” she said, “if I’d never lost that kaleidoscope.”
“Maybe,” he said.
He said this even though he knew better, knew that the Oracles would have plucked her out of a mansion dream house just as easily as they would have picked her out of juvenile detention — it had happened before — just that more often than not the places the Oracles plucked these girls from were of the detention or psych-ward type, though you couldn’t blame the girls for this. They’d been imbued with unchecked mystical strength and intelligence, and it seemed nitpicky to complain when that sometimes also led to deviant, violent, often troublesome behavior.
He had admired Oyemi for this ability to seek out these young women, troubled perhaps the way she had been troubled before she’d discovered her own powers. He admired her ability to take what everyone else saw as weaknesses, as difficulties, and transform them into cold, hard, sharp strengths. When it came right down to it, aside from the fact that she had asked him to kill the one woman he’d come to love, he had liked Oyemi.
Though, liked was maybe too strong a word.
After a while, he’d tired of each new kaleidoscope she picked up and gazed into and so drifted away to the models and toy engineering sets and there found a ridiculous piece of crap that he couldn’t help but fall in love with.
It was a building kit and on the cover of the box was a Tyrannosaurus rex made from winches and girders and struts and, where there should have been clawed feet, tank treads. He pulled the box down from the shelf and looked at it. He pictured its pieces spread out over the light-gray rug in his cold, sterile living room, and for a second, he considered buying it, and then Emma came up behind him and looked over his shoulder at the box in his hand and laughed and said, “Boys and their dinosaurs.”
“Damn right,” he said, and looked at her and asked, “Find a dolly or something?”
She smiled and sheepishly, but not really, held up a twirling baton. “Guilty,” she said. He laughed and she laughed and said, “No, but wait,” and then she spun it and twirled it and threw it and spun herself and caught it.
“I used to be good at this,” she said. “You know,” she said. “Before.”
She ran her small routine again. He wanted to clap but smiled instead.
“We should get these,” she said, gripping it like a cop with his baton and then swinging it forcefully down over her head, “but, like, for all of the girls. We could put together a routine — I’d choreograph it of course — and the monsters, they’d see the bunch of us with these batons about to bash their skulls in — the fucking monsters wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”
She twirled it in her fingers lazily and smiled shyly, but he caught a hint of real shyness in that shy smile this time, and she said, “Right?”
“Definitely,” he said, and he bought her the baton, and now, since he couldn’t find here what he’d really hoped to find here, what he hoped to find everywhere he looked, he wanted to buy himself that damn Tyrannosaurus rex, but the store had changed. It was still a toy store, if you could call it that, but full of European toys, promising education and not a whit of fun.
He picked up yet another blocky, handmade wooden toy car and placed it back in disgust and then left.
He had a plane to catch.
Though by all accounts, he missed that plane, checked in, obtained an electronic boarding pass, but never boarded, and perhaps he purchased two tickets, boarded under an alias, but it is also easy enough to imagine a slightly different scenario.
Easy enough to imagine him stealing a car instead. Taking this car up the Hudson and across the George Washington Bridge and out of Manhattan and north.
Maybe he drove north, through Paramus and past Mahwah, north along the Hudson River. Maybe he took I-87 for nearly two hours north and then turned off toward Hunter but didn’t stop in Hunter, but turned onto an unmarked, little-used road and followed it for another twenty minutes, and turned off it onto a private driveway that wound for another two miles, but even before he wound his way up the drive, maybe he felt, even if he couldn’t see, the smoke in the air, thick plumes of it billowing up and out, black enough that the presence of it was palpable even against the black, moonless night, and when he arrived, maybe he wasn’t surprised to find the compound ablaze, and if there was one piece of it not on fire, he could not tell by looking at what was in front of him.
And once there, maybe he waited. Waited for the fire to jump through the tall metal gate and catch hold of the woods surrounding the compound. Or waited for something else. Perhaps he sat in his car and watched the flames burn hot for as long as he could, until the smoke became too much for the car’s filter. And while there, he hoped, what? To see some sign of Emma, perhaps. Some sign from her? She was dead (or if not dead, if her death was faked, they had already established their rendezvous plans). But still. Maybe this is where he had come, why he missed his first flight out of the city.
And maybe he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A movement, a shadow cast by the flames, he was sure, but for a second, maybe he thought it was Emma. He could picture her stepping out of the woods, mystically untouched by the flames that raged only on the other side of the gate, stepping out and rapping her knuckles on the passenger window to get him to unlock the door.
He would have liked to have had her with him then. If she were around to console him in this moment, he wouldn’t need consoling in the first place. But still. Maybe he wanted to be there with someone. He wanted to have someone there to hear him say, What happened to it all? He wanted someone to hear him say, There was something special here. We had something real. The Regional Office was something real. Say, What went wrong? He wanted someone there to acknowledge that something great and singular and brilliant and wonderful was going away, had already gone, in fact. Even now, as he watched Oyemi’s compound burn, he wanted there to be at least one other person watching with him who knew what was happening, one other person to be sad about it with him, to regret, not the fact that he was instrumental in its demise, but that the Regional Office had become a place where demise, where violent upheaval and near-total annihilation, seemed inevitable. Seemed the only option left.
He would have sighed. The smoke and heat would finally have been too much. He would have thrown his car in reverse, turned the thing around. He’d have checked his rearview mirror, the sky lit by the false sunset of Oyemi’s compound burning out of existence, and he’d have wondered at how quiet it was, at how the road in front of him was nothing but peace and quiet and calm. Even as he drove, he would have thought about Emma, looked for her out in the woods on either side of the road. He would have wished she were there beside him, and at once, the idea that she had slipped into the trunk of his car while he was distracted by the flames would have become for a second so real that he pulled over, stepped out of the car, and opened the trunk, but, of course, she wouldn’t have been there.