“Not on your watch,” I said. I’d meant to say it with contempt, but it didn’t come out that way. I felt myself soften a little. “So you want me to just blow it off?”
“Not especially, no,” Ex said. “But I want you two at peace with each other.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We looked at each other in the warm light of evening. He was a hard-faced man, and he didn’t look away from me.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“They’re all out back. The kitchen’s too hot to eat in. And I wanted to talk to you first, so I sent them out.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do the olive branch thing. But I’m not looking to forgive and forget.”
“And I’m damned glad of that too,” Ex said with a rare smile. It crossed my mind briefly that I should ask what he meant by the comment. But he was already walking toward the backyard, and with everything that changed in the course of the evening, by the time we spoke again I’d forgotten what he’d said.
Twelve
I waited until I’d eaten dinner. Midian had cooked steaks in red wine and black pepper. The onions were sweet and tart, and he’d done something with butter and garlic that made broccoli taste good. We sat on the back porch, drinking wine and watching the stars come out. Aubrey sat a little apart, his smile tight and restrained. Chogyi Jake and Midian were both taking up the slack in the conversation by trading jokes and stories, cajoling Aubrey out of his funk and me out of my rage. I was almost feeling human by the end. Ex kept looking over at me, prompting me to make a move. I’d promised to make peace, but I still resented it.
It wouldn’t have killed Aubrey to open the discussion. He could start by apologizing again.
I knew I wasn’t being fair or even particularly rational. I tried to suck it up.
“Aubrey,” I said, and his head came up like he’d heard a gunshot. “You got a minute?”
“Sure,” he said. I led the way back into the house. I was pretty sure the others weren’t going to come anywhere near us until this was over. I sat on the couch, legs folded up beneath me, arms crossed. Aubrey took the hearth, watching me with his best poker face. We sat there in silence for a few seconds.
“Why don’t you tell me about your wife,” I said.
“Okay, fine,” he said, then took a breath, gathering himself. “Kim and I met when I’d just been accepted into the doctoral program. We were looking into some of the same questions, so we had a lot to talk about. It worked. For a while.”
Something changed in his expression, softening it. Nostalgia, I thought. He looked down at his hands as if the story was written on his skin.
“We’d been married for about two years when Eric showed up,” Aubrey said. “She was still here back then. We were both at the university, and she was doing some work on a study at the medical center. The money wasn’t great, but we were doing all right. Eric sent us both e-mail at first. He said he’d read our work and had some questions about the logical structures of parasitism. How parasite—host systems worked, what kinds of patterns you’d see in host behavior modification. He was really interested in reverse-engineering things.”
“But Kim wasn’t interested,” I said.
“She was. At first. Eric took us both out to dinner to talk things over, and it was great. Kim and I had both been swimming in the problems for so long, it was like we talked in code. Just having Eric there to explain things to made us look at everything with fresh eyes. I think both of us were pretty excited afterward. It turned into a weekly thing. There were probably five or six months that everything was great. And then the riders came up.”
He smiled, still not looking at me. He was seeing Eric and Kim, hearing conversations from years before. I might almost not have been there.
“I was amazed,” he said, as if confessing something. “I was delighted. Riders and hosts and the idea of a universe next door that worked in a totally different way from ours, but with common strategies…it felt like revelation. Kim didn’t believe it at first. I think it was just too weird for her. That it offended the scientist in her.
“Eric trained us both. It took a while to believe what we were seeing. I think I bought in before she did. And then Kim just sort of turned off. She didn’t want anything to do with it. We started fighting. I said some things that I shouldn’t have.”
“Indulge me,” I said. My voice was harsher than I’d meant it to be, but I was still pissed off. He looked up at me and the calm and nostalgia vanished.
“I told her it was wrong to ignore evidence,” he said. “I told her that she was being narrow-minded and parochial because she’d come across something that didn’t fit in her worldview. Instead of rethinking how the world is, she was shutting her eyes and pretending it wasn’t true.”
“You told her she was being religious,” I said.
He chuckled, but there wasn’t any mirth in the sound.
“I guess so,” he said. “She didn’t see it that way. She said I was being stupid. Arrogant. Either riders were a fraud and Eric was a con man with his own agenda or they were real and Eric was dangerously irresponsible for having anything to do with them without more information. The last fight we had, she told me that the work with riders had made me either a dupe or an idiot, and she wasn’t going to live with either one.”
“You had to choose between Eric and her,” I said.
“Sort of,” he said. “Anyway. She moved out, got a job in Chicago. It was one of those situations where you had to still work together, because so many of our studies were interlinked. Things cooled off, and we stayed on decent terms. About a year and a half ago, she told me she was seeing someone else. I agreed that it was over, and we had a kind of agreement in principle to finalize the divorce. File the paperwork, all that. But she’s insanely busy, and I was spending half my time working on my research and the other half helping Eric.”
“And seeing other people?”
“In principle,” Aubrey said. “It never actually happened, but I got used to thinking of myself as unattached. If I’d thought there was any chance of Kim and me patching things up, I would never have…”
Aubrey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked up at me. He was tired.
“Look, Jayné,” he said. “The truth is that Kim and I have both moved on from who we were together. I didn’t expect things to happen so quickly with you, and Kim honestly didn’t enter my mind. It’s something I’ve been resigned to for so long, it just felt like history.”
“You could have told me all this over dinner,” I said.
“Actually, I’m not sure I could have,” he said. “I think talking about your ex on a first date is sort of a party foul.”
“Finding out about the wife online isn’t better,” I said.
“How about finding out by snooping through my e-mail?” Aubrey said. “That’s all fine and dandy?”
“What?”
“I said how about going through my e-mail? While I was asleep. My taxes. Or, if you’d like, how about cruising the Internet looking for scraps of my life to pass judgment on? Or, when you get upset, running off without even bothering to leave me—any of us—so much as a note to say you’re okay? All of those are perfectly fine, adult behaviors?”
“That’s not what I’m here to talk about,” I said, feeling the moral high ground shifting under my feet.
“Well, I’ve brought it up,” Aubrey said.
I opened my mouth, a thousand practiced zingers suddenly falling apart before I could deliver them. Aubrey shook his head, something between sorrow and disgust in his eyes.
“I don’t deserve this, Jayné,” he said. “Kim and I aren’t together. We haven’t been for a long time. And as far as I can tell, you’re treating me like I’ve somehow betrayed you personally because I haven’t filed all the paperwork in a timely fashion.”
“I think being married is more than that,” I said.
“Have you ever been married?”