Jason pulled him back into the hall. “Okay,” he said, “I know what to do. We’re going to call Grandma!”
Colin frowned. “Daddy said that Grandma is doing something bad.”
“She’s not. Don’t say that again! Grandma will help us. She’s Daddy’s mommy, and mommies help when people are sick.”
Colin, having no experience with mommies, thought about this. “Okay. But do you know how to do Skype?” Daddy always set up their Skype calls with Grandma and then left the room. Sometimes it seemed to Colin that Daddy didn’t like Grandma. But if she was his mommy… The whole thing was too confusing.
Jason said, “I think I can do Skype. Maybe.”
He could. Colin, watching Jason at the computer, was full of admiration. When Colin was going to real school, he’d be able to do all these things, too.
The computer made the ringing-phone sound. “You did it, Jase!”
“Hello?” Grandma’s voice said, and there she was on the screen. When Colin had been little, he’d thought that Grandma was inside the computer, but now he knew better. She was far away, and very busy, maybe or maybe not doing something bad.
“Hi, Grandma,” Jason said. “Can you see me? Colin is here, too. You have to come to our house. Daddy is acting all weird. I think maybe he’s really sick.”
“And the toilet’s broken,” Colin said, in case Grandma could help with that, too.
Grandma made a sharp, high sound. “Did Daddy fall down? Is he breathing?”
“Yeah, he’s breathing good,” Jason said. “He’s sitting in his red chair. For three days. And he says he has to go home, but he is home. He doesn’t know I’m calling you. Should I call 911?”
A man appeared on the screen behind Grandma. He had really blue eyes. He was buttoning up a shirt. “Jason, I’m Tim, your grandmother’s friend. Are you okay, son? Are you alone in the house?”
“I’m here,” Colin said indignantly.
The man smiled. “So you are. Marianne, where are they?”
“Basville, in New York State. Between Rochester and Syracuse. Ryan moved after Connie died.”
“We can be there in five hours.”
Grandma said, “Don’t go out of the house, Jason, Colin. We’re coming as fast as we can, okay?”
“Okay,” Jason said. “What color is your car?”
The man smiled. “Blue.”
“I like blue,” Colin said, so as to not be left out of the conversation.
Grandma said, “Do you have your father’s cell phone?”
“No,” Jason said. “But I can get it from his bedroom.”
“You do that, Jason. Keep it turned on because I’m going to call you a lot. Meanwhile, you boys just sit and watch TV, okay?”
“Yes!” Colin said. Usually they weren’t allowed much TV. Maybe this would be good. Maybe Grandma would get Daddy well again. Maybe Tim would take Jason and Colin to the swamp in his blue car. Maybe everything would be all right.
Marianne called Jason every twenty minutes on Ryan’s cell, trying to keep the conversation light: “What are you watching on TV?” “Is that a good cartoon?” “What is the Hero of Heroes doing now?”
“They’re fine,” Tim said. He drove expertly along the New York State Thruway, after a too-long delay at the border crossing caused by prolonged computer checks on Tim’s guns. It seemed to Marianne that she’d held her breath for the entire half hour. She didn’t really know much about Tim’s past, nor how the arrest in Albuquerque might have affected his legal status. Of course, the charges had been dropped….
“Surprised that I’m clean, aren’t you?” Tim said, when they finally drove away from Customs. “You never asked, but you thought I was a dangerous criminal with a long rap sheet.”
“I don’t know what you are,” Marianne said tartly.
“Sure you do.” He reached out and gave her shoulder a caressing squeeze.
How did this happen? Every day that she and Tim had been lovers, the situation had struck her as preposterous. He was seventeen years her junior; his most intellectual activity was computer games; she didn’t love him. Nor did he love her. But nearly every night they reached for each other, her hunger fueled by long abstinence and his by, she suspected, sheer animal hypermasculinity. They gave each other considerable sensual pleasure. She had stopped worrying what he thought of her aging body. This, she knew, was helped by the surreptitious survey all women make of each other; she looked younger than her age.
And they were considerate of each other, which also helped. They stayed away from subjects that might hurt: her children, his past, Sissy, Harrison. Albuquerque. Conversation was light, and if it didn’t satisfy Marianne, she never said so. Nor did he. They were careful, and tender. None of which made the situation any less preposterous.
Her cell rang. Stubbins, agitated enough to forget to shed his down-home persona, said, “What the hell do y’all think you’re doing? You back in the States?”
“My son is in trouble, Jonah. I’m going to him.”
“What kind of trouble? You got Saunders with you?”
“Yes. Ryan—”
“If it ain’t one thing with you, it’s some other fucking thing! You need another lawyer?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know yet. I’ll call you later.” She hung up and put the phone on silent. To Tim she said, “How did he know?”
Tim threw her an amused glance. “Your cell. Plus a tracker on my car and probably bugs in the house. You think Stubbins doesn’t know where you are every minute? He doesn’t want any more scandal anywhere near his spaceship.”
“Then he shouldn’t have hired me in the first place!”
“A complicated man, you told me once. This our exit?”
The house sat at the end of a country road, not far from the Reardon Wetlands Preserve. It seemed that even jobless, Ryan could not let go of his obsession with purple loosestrife. Or with aliens.
Ryan, did you— But she would never ask that.
She had a sudden piercing image of him as a small boy, her quiet and secretive middle child, looking from Elizabeth to Noah as the two shouted at each other about something or other. His fair hair, now darkened to shit brown, was always falling into his eyes. But when Ryan thought he was right, the gravitational pull of a black hole couldn’t move him.
Jason ran onto the porch, Colin behind him. “Grandma!”
Marianne almost stumbled on the broken steps. On the grimy porch she knelt and gathered both of them into her arms. They were dirty and smelled bad, but underneath it was that sweet little-boy scent. And it would only last a few more years, before each became another Ryan, or Noah, or Elizabeth, all of which in various ways had broken her heart.
No more of that maudlin stuff. She had a mission here, and she was going to accomplish it. “This is my friend Tim,” she told the boys. “Is Daddy inside?”
“He’s sick,” Jason said.
“He won’t get out of his red chair,” Colin said.
Tim said easily, “Let’s let Grandma see to your daddy, and you two show me around. Did that big tree over there get hit by lightning?”
“Yeah!” Jason said enthusiastically. “It’s all burned.”
“Poor tree,” Colin said.
“Show me,” Tim said. “Careful of those steps. They sure need fixing.”
Marianne threw him a grateful look and went into the house.
It was worse than she expected. Clinical depression, if deep enough, produced hopelessness and inertia, but this was something more. Ryan sat slumped in the grimy red wing chair, head down, shoulders sagging. He looked up when she spoke his name but didn’t change expression. The first words that leaped into Marianne’s mind were old-fashioned and scientifically imprecise: nervous breakdown. But that’s what this was. Caused by grief, by guilt, by a sense of failure, by some unknowable quirk of his biology? If Jason hadn’t called her, would the next step be suicide? She was looking, she knew, at pure pain, the kind that gnawed at you from inside until there was nothing left.