I asked quietly, "Artificial tears?"
She pressed through a door into the master bedroom. An emaciated female form indented the poufy sheets of the enormous canopied bed. Her skin was yellowed, like parchment, and the muscles under her face had atrophied. Medical equipment all around-poles and IVs and monitors. Her left arm dangled off the edge of the mattress. A nightstand held endless pill bottles. Harriet Landreth's eyes pulled over to us, but she couldn't turn her head. Her mouth tensed in a faint smile.
It was stronger in here, that scent, the one that draws vultures across desert miles.
Glenda crossed and picked up Harriet's right hand-dead weight-and set it on a tray holding a computer mouse with a tiny protruding bud. She guided her younger sister's finger to the bud until Harriet blinked twice.
"Hungry, love?" Glenda asked.
Harriet's eyes rolled to a computer screen, and her finger made some minuscule movements. A speaker emitted a loud, synthesized voice, startling me. I CAN'T EAT ANY MORE OF THAT SOUP YOU USE TOO MUCH SALT.
Glenda waved off her sister. "Then I'll bring you plain chicken broth, and you can quit nagging at me with that horrible voice." She shook her head at me, morbidly amused.
The slow, electronic words issued again from her sister's synthesizer. WILL YOU PUT MY LEFT ARM BACK ON THE MATTRESS IT IS BOTHERING ME.
"You can't feel anything, love."
PHANTOM PAIN PINS AND NEEDLES I CAN NOT STAND IT.
Glenda circled the bed, picked up the dangling arm, and set it on the sheets next to Harriet's side. As Glenda moved around, picking up dirty cups and plates, I stood in the bustle, overwhelmed and trying not to act it. A cord snaked from the computer monitor, leading to a digital telephone on the nightstand.
"You should have seen this cat on the TV. It jumped and jumped over a ball of yarn, and then the Jewish comedian said it was raining cats and cats." Glenda chuckled. "Cats and cats."
THAT SHOW WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME HA HA BAD ENOUGH TO WATCH BUT TO HEAR IT DESCRIBED HAVE MERCY IT IS NOT AS
THOUGH I CAN RUN OUT OF HERE.
Glenda waved a hand our way, dismissing us both from consideration, and withdrew, leaving me alone with Harriet.
Those dark pupils tracked over from the computer screen, finding me. Sentient, intelligent eyes, beautiful blue.
YOU ARE A FRIEND OF TRIS.
I assumed it was a question. Looking at her, I couldn't bring myself to lie. "Not a friend, exactly. I'm trying to find her. My name's Nick."
WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO FIND HER.
I sensed she was angry, but, unable to read tone, I felt unmoored. "My stepfather was killed seventeen years ago. I think she may know something about it."
I HAVEN'T SEEN TRIS IN YEARS.
A lie, based on what Glenda had told me at the door. It occurred to me that Harriet had agreed to see me only so she could find out what I was up to and notify Tris.
I cleared my throat. "Do you know where she is? I'd really like to talk to her."
Her muscles moved in fleeting twitches just beneath the papery skin. WE ARE NOT IN TOUCH.
"It's not only for me," I said. "I need to warn her about something." Those blank eyes stared back at me. "I think she might want to talk to me, too."
A long wait as that finger pulsed against the bud. And then, YOU COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THE FIRST THING ABOUT HER.
"I understand more than you realize."
Harriet's blinks were getting longer. She was having trouble holding her eyes open.
"Can I leave you my phone number to give her if she does contact you?"
Beyond her dry lips, her tongue worked, her jaw clicking with agitation. A spider thread of drool reached down and touched her shirt. YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE.
Her eyes closed and didn't open. Her hand slipped from the keyboard and she shifted slightly, her other arm sliding from the mattress again so the hand and forearm dangled over the edge. I couldn't tell if one of the tubes snaking through the sheets was feeding her air, but the rise and fall of her chest seemed to grow more regular. For a time I studied that cord running from her computer to the digital telephone, my heart pounding. Then I eased to her bedside.
The computer of course had a massively simplified interface. I touched the tiny bud, nudging the cursor over to the address book icon. Scrolling down, I looked under the L's. A few Landreth names I didn't recognize. I was disgusted with myself, breathing hard and trying to be quiet. I was terrified that Harriet would rouse and stare up at me with accusing eyes, and I would have not a single thing to say for myself. I searched farther down and found a single initial, T. And a phone number. Pulling a pen from the nightstand, I jotted it down on the back of my hand. Using a reverse directory, Induma could generate an address in seconds.
Harriet's breathing took on a slight wheeze. I started for the door but stopped after a few steps. I walked around to the other side of the bed and lifted her dangling arm. It was unbelievably light, like the wing of a seagull. I laid it gently by her side and tucked the sheet around it.
In the front room, Glenda sat dwarfed in an armchair, watching a dog with its head stuck in a red plastic bucket.
"She doesn't have long now." Glenda kept her eyes on the TV.
"Maybe Tris'll make it back to see her."
She scoffed.
Outside, the breeze was hot and smelled sharply of vegetation. I paused on the manicured front lawn, grateful for the openness, the shoved-down horizons, the bobbing palm trees. My chest felt tight and full, like I couldn't get enough air into it.
I stood there a few minutes, just breathing.
Chapter 44
The phone number sourced to a ground-floor apartment in San Fernando that backed on a French-dip stand and a mechanic's shop with grease puddles and weeds overtaking its cracked-up asphalt. The stale air made my shirt itch, no small feat since I was wearing one of Alejandro's comfortable Dri-FITs, excavated from Induma's coat closet. The heat of the pavement came up through the soles of my sneakers, and a street crew's mess up the block wafted over tar-bitter air.
The numbers had long fallen off the door, but their echo remained in the less-faded paint beneath where they'd been nailed. An air conditioner, hung out the window, dripped water and banged away like a jalopy. Competing for dominance, a TV blared-some scripted argument between talk-show participants, their voices fuzzed with static at the edges. I knocked.
A voice, less irritated than run-down, bellowed, "I'm coming, I'm coming."
A squat woman in her fifties opened the door, drying her hands on a stained apron, cinched unflatteringly between the bulges of her midsection. She wasn't obese, but thick, spreading with age. Her unwieldy breasts had descended to rest against her stomach. She glanced up at my face and stiffened, her hands freezing in the swirl of fabric.
She flung one of them up to shove ineffectively at her bangs, pasted to her sweaty forehead. Her hair was thinning, so I could see a shine of scalp at her crown. Behind her a dirty skillet sat on a stovetop, and the place reeked of bacon grease. A rainbow-bead curtain, still undulating from her movement, blocked a doorway to her right.
"Oh, sorry," she said. "I was expecting someone else." A patch of eczema had claimed her elbow and made headway up the back of her forearm. She scratched at the white, flaking skin, her nails giving off a sound that made my spine arch.
"Sorry to startle you."
"I wasn't startled." She emitted a nervous laugh. There was something familiar in her eyes-not their shape but the way they creased with her forced, semiaggressive grin.