Adaptation (26 page)

Reese felt like she was going to throw up. If Amber knew Dr. Brand, and Dr. Brand knew Amber, that meant—

Reese didn’t want to think about it, but she had to. Was Amber a spy? Had she been lying to her the entire time? Her stomach heaved. Dr. Brand’s words echoed in her mind:
You’ve done an excellent job… you should just continue with your assignment.

She inhaled raggedly as tears came to her eyes. She smelled exhaust on the wind, oil that turned her stomach. When she hit Church Street she crossed over to the park and headed to a
bench on the 20th Street rim. She sat down and stared at the city. Everything looked blurry, as if she were gazing through rain. She realized it was because the tears she had held back were running free now.

Her phone buzzed. Automatically she tugged it out of her jeans pocket. It was a message from Julian, but she didn’t feel up to reading it. She shoved it into the jacket pocket. Her fingers brushed against crinkly plastic. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and remembered that the jacket was Julian’s. She rubbed away the tears on her face, feeling disoriented. Nothing made sense.

With trembling fingers, she pulled a cigarette out and stuck it in between her lips. She found the matchbook Julian had tucked inside the box. She struck a match and it died in a breath of wind. She tried again. Five matches later, she was disgusted with herself for failing to light the cigarette and vaguely nauseous at the idea of smoking, period. But she was nothing if not stubborn, and halfway through the matchbook she lit a flame that caught. The end of the cigarette glowed as she inhaled.

She coughed. The taste of it was acrid. A fleck of tobacco clung to her lip, and she brushed it off. She exhaled a plume of gray smoke. A guy in a blue jacket passed her and stopped, turning back. “Hey, can I bum a smoke?” he asked.

She held out the pack.

“Thanks,” he said.

She was barely half-finished with the cigarette, and already her head was feeling hazy from the nicotine. All she could smell was tar and ash. She was about to grind out the end of it on the ground when her phone rang again. This time when she pulled it out to check, the call was from Amber.

Her stomach fell. She put the phone down on the bench beside her, staring at the photo of Amber that had come onto the screen. Reese had taken it the day they went to the beach, and Amber was lying on the blanket and looking up at her, a half smile on her face. The lip gloss on her mouth was smudged.

Feeling woozy, Reese pulled out another cigarette, lighting it from the glowing end of the first. The phone stopped ringing, and nausea twisted through her. She wasn’t used to smoking, and it was beginning to make her sick. But she couldn’t seem to stop. There was something soothing and yet simultaneously self-destructive about it. It gave her something to do. People came to the park and smoked all the time. She was totally normal. She hadn’t just discovered that her girlfriend—and she realized, in a horrified, heartbroken way, that she
had
begun to think of Amber that way—had been
assigned
to her by some kind of covert government agency. The very thought of it was ridiculous. Her hand visibly shook as she tapped ash from the cigarette onto the ground.

Her phone buzzed: the sound of a voice-mail message arriving.

She couldn’t resist. She picked up the phone and touched the message icon on the screen. “Hey, it’s Amber. I hope your mom wasn’t too upset yesterday! I wanted to call and see if we could get together today. I miss you. Call me back.”

Heat bit at Reese’s fingers, and she yelped. The cigarette had burned down to the filter. She dropped it on the ground, rubbing it into the dirt with her shoe. It lay there like a gray slug, broken and blackened at the tip, and for a moment she thought she really was about to throw up. She bent over, her head between
her knees, the phone clutched in her left hand, and took several shallow breaths. Sweat rose on her skin as her stomach churned.

She saw the shoes of pedestrians pause slightly as they walked past her. She could practically feel them sizing her up, hesitant about asking if she needed help. A girl bent over on a park bench, apparently sick. They must think she was homeless. Or drunk. She laughed bitterly to herself, knowing that the hysterical sounds coming from her must only further confirm the strangers’ opinions of her.

When her stomach no longer felt like it might flip over, she slowly straightened and put her phone and the cigarettes back into the jacket pocket. Below her, the bowl of Dolores Park was mostly empty; it was still pretty early in the day. But joggers were circling the perimeter, and commuters were walking briskly toward the Muni stop nearby.

A small beige van had pulled up on the paved road that ran into the park behind the playground below her. Two men in matching yellow biohazard suits climbed out. They each held a plastic sack and a long pole with an apparatus at the end like a pair of tongs. She watched in growing apprehension as they approached a couple of dark lumps on the ground, piled behind the big green trash Dumpsters. When the men plucked the lumps from the ground with their devices, Reese gasped.

They were birds.

Their wings unfurled limply toward the ground as the men deposited them into the bags one after another.

Reese glanced around the park, shocked that nobody else had noticed. The men walked back to their yellow truck with the dead birds swinging in the plastic bags. They put the bags inside
the van and climbed in. The sound of the engine turning on was distant and small, and nobody noticed that either, and for the first time Reese understood how the government might be able to pull off any number of conspiracies.

It was easy when most people simply didn’t pay any attention.

Reese walked home slowly. Her stomach was gradually settling down, but her legs were shaky. When she arrived, the house was silent. There was a note on the hall table.

She trudged upstairs to the bathroom and turned on the tap, cupping her hand in the stream and rinsing her mouth several times. The taste of the cigarettes lingered, stale and gritty. Feeling as if she were in a trance, she crossed the hall to her bedroom, pausing in the doorway as she saw the painted wall. The wall that Amber had photographed and then shown to Dr. Brand.

A snippet of Dr. Brand’s words floated back to her:
no other evidence of the adaptation chamber.
What did that mean? Reese entered her room, her gaze sweeping over the plastic affixed to the wall, the open electrical outlet, the bulletin board propped against her desk—where she saw the vase of daisies that Amber had given her.

The sight of the flowers stabbed at her.

All those hours with Amber. Discovering how to kiss her. Their date at the restaurant, where Amber had said,
You’re my close-up
. That didn’t even make any sense. Had she been lying the whole time?

Reese went to the desk, picked up the vase in trembling hands, and carried it down to the kitchen. She pulled the flowers out and savagely stuffed them into the trash can as tears splattered onto her hands.

Reese spent the day in bed. When her phone rang,
she pulled the blankets over her head to muffle the sound. When her mom came home from work, Reese heard her calling her name, but she didn’t answer. Eventually her mom came upstairs and opened the door to her room. “There you are. Are you all right, honey?” She sat on the edge of Reese’s bed and put a hand on her forehead. “You’re burning up.” She forced Reese to take two ibuprofen and drink some water. Reese lay back down after swallowing the pills and blinked at her mother. Nothing felt real. Her mother looked anxious. “I’ll get you some soup for dinner. I think you’re coming down with something.”

Reese turned over, facing the wall. Her whole body ached as if she had been pummeled in a fight. She curled her legs up, tucking her hands close to her chest. Her mother stood and left the room.

She must have dozed off, because the sound of her door opening woke her up, and she blinked her eyes against the lamplight. Her mom entered with a tray on which a bowl of soup steamed. It smelled of ginger and lime, and her mom said, “I got you
tom yum
soup.” Reese sat up and drank the soup, spoonful by spoonful, until the salty, tangy warmth seeped into her body, erasing the unsettling feeling that she wasn’t all
there
anymore.

After that, her mom turned off the lamp, and Reese sank into sleep. Dreams rose up and faded away, as if her brain were sorting through a series of movies and trying to select one for her to focus on. She felt as if she were on a merry-go-round, dream slipping into memory and memory slipping into dream.

She saw Amber in her bedroom, sliding out of her own red dress, her skin glowing as if she were made of light. And then David opened the door, and behind him was an endless marble corridor of memorial plaques. He was speaking to her, but she couldn’t make out the words. The walls around David slipped and slid, and then she was no longer in the mausoleum but in the yellow room, where she floated, hands folded over her chest. Safe. The sonorous tone of the bell rang underwater, echoing the beating of her heart.

Reese opened her eyes in the dark. It was the middle of the night. Amber was a liar.

She felt like a fool.

Reese woke up to the sound of the coffee grinder downstairs. Her stomach growled, and as she rolled over she felt as if the entire center of her body had been hollowed out by hunger. She
threw the covers back and stood too quickly. Dizziness made her sit down again on the edge of the mattress, one hand to her head. She took a deep breath and tried again, moving more slowly this time.

In the bathroom she brushed her teeth vigorously, trying to rid herself of the lingering taste of yesterday. She spit into the sink and glanced at herself in the mirror, water dripping from her lower lip. Her face was so pale that the light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks seemed abnormally dark in comparison. Her eyes were slightly puffy from crying in the middle of the night. She dried off her face and went downstairs.

In the kitchen her mom was reading the newspaper and waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. When she saw Reese, she dropped the paper and came over to feel Reese’s forehead. “How are you doing? You don’t seem to be burning up anymore.”

“I’m hungry.” She brushed past her mom to open the pantry cabinet.

“Well, that’s a good sign. Sit down, and I’ll make you some eggs before I go to work.”

Reese moved to the table and slid heavily into a chair. Her mom had been reading the arts section of the
Chronicle
, and the front page lay beside it, discarded. There was a photo of President Randall just below the masthead, shaking hands with Canada’s prime minister.
President Randall Attends Canadian Memorial for June 19 Crash Victims in Toronto.

“Have some juice first,” her mom said, placing a glass in front of Reese. She started, and her mom gave her an inquisitive look. “I’m a little worried about you, honey.”

Reese picked up the juice and took a sip. “I’ll be fine, Mom.”

Her mom watched her for a moment longer and then pursed her lips. “All right. How about some scrambled eggs?”

“Sure.” She stared at the top news story as she heard her mom open the fridge.

TORONTO—On Tuesday, President Randall attended a memorial for Canadian victims of the June 19 crashes at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Cathedral. Approximately two hundred Canadians died in plane crashes in New Jersey and outside Toronto last month. “I’m here to express the American people’s sympathy and shared grief over these senseless deaths, and to assure Canadians that we in the United States are doing everything we possibly can to get to the bottom of what happened,” President Randall said in a brief press conference after the service.

It’s all a bunch of lies
, Reese thought. She pushed the paper away and dropped her head into her hands. She was grateful when her mom set a plate of food in front of her because it gave her something to do. She wolfed down two scrambled eggs and was buttering her second piece of toast when the doorbell rang. Her mom, who had been packing up her briefcase while surreptitiously watching Reese eat, glanced toward the hallway. “That’s weird. Who would be here at eight in the morning?”