A Long, Long Sleep (26 page)

I looked up from my sketchbook, horrified. “No,” I whispered.

He nodded. “My timing could have been better, I guess. But then, if I had let you out right then, you’d likely have gotten sick, too. The plague hit ComUnity that very day.” He took a deep breath. “I was there, alone in my jail cell.

Charges hadn’t yet been drawn up. And as I waited, suddenly I saw people through the bars, sweating and coughing and clutching their chests and then screaming and screaming. . . .” He shook his head. “I huddled in the corner, staying as far away from the death as I could. I was . . . scared. I was so glad I hadn’t found you. I could hear the screaming from the streets, and sirens wailing from the ambulances. And then they stopped, and I realized their silence was more frightening still.” More than his hand was trembling now. “I had no food, no water for two days. And then I started to get sick.”

“No!”

He pursed his lips at me, trying to tell me it was all right. “I was far away from the general population, and I hadn’t touched anyone, so the disease didn’t catch me until it became airborne. I started to cough, just at the end, as the bodies started to decay. By that time, I wasn’t scared any longer. I was almost relieved. I didn’t want to be there anymore. And just then, as I was preparing to die, UniCorp security dressed in biohazard suits pushed open the doors against the piles of dead and shoved antibiotics into my veins.”

He shrugged. “Mom and Dad were dead. Princeton was a ghost town. Mark and Jacqueline had disappeared, headed, I found out later, to one of their off- world colonies. By miraculous chance, they hadn’t brought the plague along. I was drafted into the civil service, and I spent the next five years treating plague victims, quelling riots, and distributing supplies.” He looked at me. “I won’t say you weren’t in my thoughts, because you were. You had to be. You were part of my life for so long, you became an imprint on my psyche. But there was death all around me. I knew you were in one of two places: either safely in stasis or already peacefully dead. Either way, there was nothing I could do for you.”

In my sketch I shaded his eyes. Yes, I could see the horror there. The stern lines that so much tragedy had etched onto his face.

“When I finished my stint in the CS, I applied for an internship at UniCorp.

Ordinary college education had gone by the wayside, but my bout in the CS

counted in my résumé. I was surprised they took me in, but my name was known. Mom and Dad had worked for Mark, and your parents still remembered me. Apparently, in all the chaos, it had never filtered back to them that I’d broken into their home.” He took a deep breath. “I only joined UniCorp for one reason. To get close to them, to ask them about you.”

That startled me. I looked up from my sketch. “Really?”

He stared at me. “You were always in the back of my mind, Rose. I’d never been able to forget you. I frequently wished I could have. I’d have dreams about you.

They would spring up from out of nowhere, with no warning. I wouldn’t even have been consciously thinking about you, and there you’d be again. And every time you showed up, I’d spend the whole dream trying to tell you how much I missed you. I’d wake up and spend the morning pounding my head, muttering,

‘Stupid psyche!’ It seemed I was built around the mold of you. You were my measuring stick. Every person I ever talked to, every friend I ever had, every woman who ever glanced my way was held up in measurement to my memory of you.”

I wanted to smile, and I wanted to cry. It was tragic. I settled for finishing my sketch.

“When I got close to them, finally, I asked them about you. They grew so angry; your father nearly hit me. ‘Leave the past in the past,’ he said. ‘We don’t unbury our dead.’ And I believed him.” Xavier’s voice faded almost to a whisper. “Like a damned fool.” He shook his head. “I was twenty- four. I should have tried harder.” The self- loathing was clear in his voice.

Twenty- four. He would have been only eight years older than me. I cringed as I realized that.

He sat up a little straighter. “I know they debated firing me after that, but healthy, whole people with half a brain were scarce during the Dark Times.

They couldn’t afford to lose me.

So I ended up staying. Working for the devil. I debated leaving, but about that time the true tragedy of the Global Food Initiative came out. And I’d been poisoned, too, along with the millions of others. No children. Ever. Or so I thought —reliable countermeasures hadn’t been developed at that time. And I hated them so much. I knew UniCorp had so much power. I thought if I stayed, I might be able to undo some of the worst evils.

“I started by trying to sabotage the corporation, make the whole thing go under, and then I realized I could work tangentially and use the corporation to actually do good. It’s a slow process, and I keep a lot of it very quiet. I didn’t want power; I wanted to defuse it from men like your father and Reggie. It was really all there was left to do.”

“You realize you’re president now,” I said.

“Unfortunately, yes. I’ve been trying to avoid that. I actually have more control when people aren’t looking directly at me.”

“Elevate Bren’s dad,” I said. “Delegate to him. He’s a good man, and he likes the work. You’re” — I tried to think of a word that wasn’t old—“near retirement.

The board would understand.”

Xavier frowned. “That’s an idea. You’re right; he could do it. Annie had good taste.”

“I like her,” I told him.

“She likes you,” Xavier said. “She told me.”

I couldn’t help but ask. “Why did you call her Roseanna?”

Xavier looked down. “My wife’s sister was among the dead. She was called Hannah. We put them together.”

“You wife knew about me?”

“Of course. We loved each other.”

I wanted to feel jealous, but all I felt was curious. “What was she like?”

He smiled. “Like you,” he said. “Compassionate. Dutiful. Artistic. I told you that you were my measuring stick. She was a bit tougher than you, but Dark Time survivors tended to be. She was a designer in the graphics department. She made up a game for herself, to get me to smile whenever she saw me. I’m surprised she saw anything human left in me in the first place. And she put up with my surliness. And with all the invasive procedures it took to get Ted and Annie.”

“I’m glad,” I whispered. “I’m so glad.” I didn’t need to elaborate. “You miss her?”

“Actually, not so much. Not that I don’t wish she were still here, because I do.

But I feel like part of her is still here.” He gestured around the apartment. “Her soul, maybe. Waiting for me.” He shrugged. “Of course, what do I know? I rather thought yours was, too.”

“It was,” I said. “I gave it to you to hold, like my Young Masters Award.”

“I still have that,” Xavier whispered.

“Well, you had my soul, too. I gave it to you with that last kiss.”

“I never wanted to take your soul,” Xavier said.

“I wanted you to have it. Keep it,” I said with a laugh. “I grew a new one.”

I glanced at the grandfather clock against the wall. The paramedics should have been here by now. Otto. He must have been keeping them at bay. It was a good thing, too. Xavier seemed to have relaxed, but I wasn’t done with the hard questions yet. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

He shook his head. “How could I? Sixty years thinking you were dead, and then my grandson cells me up from out of the blue and tells me he’s discovered Rosalinda Fitzroy in the subbasement, and the entire structure of the universe has changed.” He rubbed his temple, as if he had a headache. “All that time came rushing at me. I split in two inside. As though I’d failed to take the life I was meant to have, and someone else’s life came and stole all those years.

There was the me I knew: father, grand-father, businessman. And then this angry, wounded teenage boy surged up from out of nowhere, and you can’t believe how he hated me. He would scream at me. Sometimes half the night. All the time she’s been right there, literally under your feet! How could you not go and get her?” Xavier sighed. “He blamed me entirely.”

He sniffed and closed his eyes. “You were so pitiful, nothing but bones. And so painfully young.”

I thought about that. He’d had a wife. He’d raised two children. His grandson was the same age as me. I must seem an utter child to him. How ironic. I’d helped teach Xavier to walk.

“I thought about telling you, right at the beginning, while you were still in the hospital. But when you didn’t even recognize me, I thought . . . maybe that’s for the best. How could you not blame me for leaving you there? When I was the only one who knew.”

My sketch was finished. There he was. A careworn, inter-nally tormented old man, with a broken heart behind his eyes.

I always understood things better when I drew them. Xavier’s smile had died during the Dark Times. It was my job to resurrect it, to take it out of stasis and put it back where it belonged. I stood up.

Xavier looked at me, his milky- green eyes curious. I grinned. “You’ve grown so tall!” I said.

He stared at me in confusion. “What?”

“I always say that,” I said. “It’s tradition.”

Xavier took a deep breath and looked down at his knees. “I’m not sure it’s true this time. Age tends to wear on one.”

“As does guilt,” I said. I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Stop hating yourself. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t mine, either. It just happened.”

He lifted his hand and placed it on mine for a moment, then let it fall again. “I missed you,” he whispered.

Tears stabbed my eyes then. “I missed you,” I said. “I missed everything.”

We were silent for a moment. I sank to my knees and leaned my head against the arm of his easy chair. “Well,” I said, “at least now you can have your apartment back.”

Xavier shook his head. “No. It’s yours.”

I shook my head back at him. “I didn’t say I was leaving it.”

“What do you mean?”

I squared my shoulders and looked him dead in the face. “I mean, I’ve finally learned to make decisions all on my own. No more passive lying down and letting others tell me what to do. I know what I want, and I want you. I want you to be my guardian.”

Xavier shook his hoary head adamantly. “I can’t do that, Rose. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Says who? Xavier, when has our being together ever been wrong? I’m not stupid,” I added, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say. “I know what can and can’t be between us. We lost something. That blazing, all- encompassing inferno of first love. And that isn’t fair.” I couldn’t quite keep the tears out of my voice, but I held them back. I had to make him see. “That will never be fair.

And I will always grieve for it, as much as you have. My parents stole you from me as surely as they stole my life. But that isn’t all we had. That was the least of what we had together. We had something more real, something time and age difference simply can’t kill. I know you, Xavier! We were always together. It wasn’t always romantic. You started as my little brother, then became my best friend. Why can’t we go on? Become something else? I’m all alone. I need you now. I need my family.” Damn it, now I was crying.

And his frail arms were around me. “Shh, shhh. Hush, now.” He kissed my forehead with as much tenderness as I used to kiss his, back when he was barely more than a baby.

I pulled away and looked at him. “Xavier, from the very beginning, you’ve been doing everything in your power to show me you still loved me. My studio, my schedule, Desert Roads.” I smiled. “The prism. It was your hand I felt stroke my hair, in this very room, after I was attacked.”

His eyes lowered and I saw that I was right.

“I know you want to be with me. You want to be my family. The only reason you don’t is because you think people will think it’s wrong. Well, burn them!

They don’t know what we are to each other. I know you’re probably horrified by the idea of what we once were to each other, as horrified as I would have been by the idea if you’d suddenly turned three again when I was sixteen. But that’s over. That girl died. And I’m here now.” I looked to the ground for a moment, willing the strength from all my thorny inner briars. “Are you really going to deny me the only love I’ve ever known?”

Xavier looked at me for a long moment, and then he frowned. “Are you and Bren . . . ?” he asked.

I laughed, which fortunately banished the tears I’d been fighting. I knew I be blushing bright pink if I weren’t already red from the burns. “Why do you ask?”

Xavier looked away, and I realized he was afraid that I expected something impossible from him, that I wasn’t ready to let that part of my life move on without him. “I don’t know,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “Maybe one day.

I scare him right now.”

“You’re scaring me,” Xavier said. “I’ve never seen you be anything but passive.”

I shrugged. “Hasn’t done me much good. So,” I said, “do I get you as my family, or do I have to get my board to fire you?”

Xavier laughed.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Now that I’ve found you, I’m not letting you go again.”

Xavier blinked at me. “I thought that was my line.”

My face broke into a grin. “You mean I get to keep you?”