Sissy found more blankets in the tiny coat closet, covered Marianne, and stood looking down at her. “Does Harrison do this often?”
“No.” Oh God, she hadn’t even told Sissy or Tim what had happened. Her illness, her frantic worry… Sissy didn’t even know. Marianne said, “Yesterday his daughter killed herself.”
Sissy drew a sharp breath. She squeezed onto the sofa beside Marianne. “How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Harrison said that Sarah’s baby wouldn’t stop crying and Sarah just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Sissy grimaced in disgust. “That’s no reason to kill yourself. Plenty of babies won’t stop crying and their mamas don’t kill themselves. How does that help? It’s just cowardlike.”
“Sarah might have already had postpartum depression.”
“So what? You don’t kill yourself if you got kids to take care of. You just don’t. You don’t have that right.”
Marianne said nothing. The other side of Sissy’s sure confidence was a kind of arrogance that the young woman was completely unaware of. But Sissy’s hand holding hers felt warm, reassuring. On the floor, Tim snored softly.
“Still,” Sissy went on, “I can see how Harrison got drunk from shock. I’ll watch him real carefully. But Marianne—you should face something.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry to say this, but you should face it. That man is going to leave you now.”
Marianne pulled her fingers from Sissy’s. “No, you don’t understand, he—”
“I do understand. You don’t. I’ve been watching you two whenever he picks you up at the office or the airport, which incidentally isn’t that often. I know, I know, he’s doing important work. But he’s one of those with tunnel vision, Marianne, and his tunnel just cracked wide open to the sky. He’s going to panic and lash out and leave you. You need to be ready for that.”
“You’re wrong, Sissy.”
“I hope so. Now you sleep.” Sissy switched off the light and went into the bedroom to watch Harrison.
Marianne thought that sleep would be long coming, but it wasn’t. One careful shift of her body on the sofa and she was out. The next morning, Tim and Sissy made breakfast that neither Marianne nor Harrison could eat. When it was clear to Sissy that both of them were done vomiting, she and Tim tactfully left.
Harrison slept most of the day. When he was awake, he wanted to be alone in the bedroom. The day after that, he spent hunched over his computer, surrounded by an invisible and impenetrable wall. The third day he flew to Indiana for Sarah’s funeral. Politely, distantly, he asked Marianne to not accompany him. Even before he called her from Terre Haute, she knew what he would say.
Before he returned home, she’d moved out.
Tim put her furniture into storage. Sissy made a back room at the Star Brotherhood Foundation into a bedroom. The office that Jonah Stubbins had made possible had a bathroom with shower. Marianne ate her meals out, or ate what Sissy provided for her. She lost weight. She slept badly. The only thing that helped was work, and then more work. When there was nothing to work on, she read on the Internet, using Harrison’s password for access to sites she could not have accessed on her own.
Karcher’s initial research had spawned dozens of studies on both infants and mice, even though funding for science had all but disappeared since the Collapse. It was clear that something had affected the children’s brains in utero, but unclear just what that something was. Humans had always varied enormously in auditory structures—and perhaps mice did, too. With something that small, it was difficult to tell. In fact, nobody was even sure what all the auditory structures were. The babies’ receiving areas, on the upper temporal lobes, had increased neurons, or decreased neurons, or neurons with unexpected connections. Sometimes one end of the area was larger, sometimes the opposite end. Other brain activity in areas associated with hearing—auditory thalamus, Brodmann area, hippocampus, superior temporal gyrus—also differed from one child to the next. Some EEGs showed statistically significant enhancement in alpha-wave activity; some did not. Strange cortical behavior resulted from exposure to gamma waves.
Basically, nobody understood what was going on in these kids’ heads.
What was understood was that a small percentage of post-spore infants was deaf, and the rest cried nearly every moment they were awake. Eli Lilly’s renamed infant tranquilizer, Calminex, had not yet cleared clinical trials but already had ignited a firestorm of online controversy. Was it right to drug small children? Was it right not to drug them, when so many failed to thrive due to their constant agitation? What would be the long-term effects of that many stress hormones constantly flooding developing nervous systems? What would be the short-term effects of the drug? Would parents who used it be abusers of their children, or realistic people adjusting to circumstances?
The Eli Lilly research lab was hit with a truck bomb. The company did not discontinue trials.
“Marianne,” Sissy said one afternoon at the office, “why don’t you go for a walk? You’ve been plopped in front of that computer for three hours.”
“I’m fine.”
“Three solid hours. I timed it.”
“I’m fine.”
“No. You aren’t. Come eat something with me. You didn’t have any lunch.”
Marianne clenched her jaw and kept on reading.
The ecological disruptions around the world were slowly righting themselves. Every once in a while, someone would report sightings of live mice living in the wild. None of these sightings were substantiated. Most of the time, when Marianne tracked down the reporters, they also believed in elves or Martians or demons inhabiting their basement.
Of Harrison’s research on spore-resistant mice, she found nothing at all. It was secret, or incomplete, or had led nowhere. Like her and Harrison.
“It’s a good thing,” Sissy grumbled, “that we’re going to New Mexico next week for that big speech. At least it’ll get you out of that chair.”
Marianne went on reading, leaning in closer to the computer screen. Trying to fill up as much of the world as possible with its digital light.
CHAPTER 15
S plus 4 years
Who could live in this heat?
“You’ll like Albuquerque,” Marianne had told Sissy. Sissy could tell it was a brave try at being cheerful, which Marianne definitely wasn’t. “The desert is gorgeous, in an austere sort of way. And our hotel is right on the Rio Grande.”
Well, Marianne was wrong. Sissy didn’t like Albuquerque, not from the second she and Tim and Marianne stepped off the jetway into an airport where the AC was broken. At eleven in the morning it was ninety-one degrees outside, even hotter inside. And never mind all that shit about it being dry heat—ninety-one degrees was ninety-one degrees, and all three of them were sweating like stinky waterfalls by the time they reached the hotel.
Which did have working AC. It was cranked up so high that the sweat dried instantly and Sissy rooted in her bag for a sweater. Fortunately, she’d brought the heavy purple one with the pink sequins. The Rio Grande, visible from their sixth-floor hotel suite, didn’t look like much of a river, even if Marianne did say that it was classified as “exotic” because it was a river that flowed through a desert. Sissy had seen creeks with more water in them. Also, the Rio Grande looked just as hot as everything else outdoors. Not that Sissy planned on going outdoors. Marianne’s speech would be in the grand ballroom right in this hotel, which also had two restaurants and a dance club on the top floor. Sissy had brought her dance clothes. She wasn’t setting foot outside.