Archetype (5 page)

W
hatever Declan said to Dr. Travista worked, because they allow me to run today. I welcome this run. I need this run. I run hard and fast, using each step to release the anger raging inside. I am angry with myself for what I did to my own husband. I am angry with Dr. Travista for the violating tests he performed. And most of all, I am angry with
Her.
This is all Her fault.

Are you complaining?
She asks.
You got what you wanted in the end, didn’t you?

I widen my strides and pump my arms. My breathing increases.

You’re ignoring me?
She laughs, and it is low and deep.
You can’t ignore me. It’s literally impossible. There’s nowhere you can run.

I do not respond and She falls silent. Before I know it, it is only me and the whisper of my feet over the rubber track.

My quick, even breaths.

The slide of my arms against the silky material of my top.

 • • • 

I ducked behind the wide trunk of a tree and searched for Foster. He peered around the trunk of another tree nearby, fingers playing over the barrel of his plasma rifle. He caught my gaze a moment later and nodded. His expression mirrored the intense, focused feelings coursing through my veins.

We’re ready.

He motioned the all clear and the team moved as one silent, deadly entity. Pride washed over me for my well-oiled team as they ducked and rolled out of the shadow. The night was silent except for the whisper of our boots through the grass.

 • • • 

She remains silent, but I know this is Her doing. The waking dream stops my breath and I stumble. My knees knock against the rubber floor and my palms slap hard and sting.

In seconds, two orderlies are on either side of me. One prepares to fill me full of a sedative, while the other reaches out to restrain me.

I raise my hands defensively. “I am okay. I . . . I twisted my ankle.”

A lie, but I am desperate to stop what they plan to do. I cannot afford another “setback,” especially over something as ridiculous as a dream.

Rather than pump me full of drugs, the orderlies help me to my feet and I affect a limp of my right ankle. I even wince at the appropriate moments.

We are nearing the glass door when Dr. Travista and Declan rush through. Declan lifts me off my feet and carries me to a bench. The orderlies must have explained the situation to Dr. Travista because I am barely seated before he eases my shoe off and presses his thumbs and fingers into my foot and ankle.

“I don’t feel anything out of place,” he says. His eyes narrow when he looks at me, and I fear he might question my noninjury. “How bad does it hurt?” His gaze does not leave my face as he waits for my answer.

I clear my throat. “Not very. Just a twist. It surprised me. I did not mean to scare anyone.”

Declan exchanges a quick glance with the doctor, and his attention is back to me before I can blink. “Can you stand?”

I do, and when they request that I press down on my foot, I do that, too. I wince but assure them it is already better and that I do not require assistance to my room. Declan is beginning to insist, when a young man in a suit enters the room.

“Mr. Burke,” he says, “sorry to interrupt, but you asked me to let you know if any of the board members showed up unannounced.”

“Which one?” Declan asks, his voice tight.

“Mr. Thomas and Mr. Barbosa, sir. They insist on seeing the—”

“Mr. Tulley,” Dr. Travista interrupts and gives Declan a passing glance, “why don’t you and I go upstairs where I can greet these men myself?” He looks at Declan. “If that’s all right with you, of course.”

Declan takes him by the elbow and they move several steps away. He lowers his voice, but his words carry easily to me due to the room’s acoustics. “I want to know
exactly
what they know and how they found out. I want to know who talked.”

Dr. Travista lays a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle everything.”

Declan squares his shoulders and glances at me. “Thank you. I’ll be along shortly.”

The room clears, with Declan never taking his gaze off the glass separating the room from the hallway. He stands rubbing his chin, a million miles away.

“Is everything all right?” I ask. I cannot make any sense of what has happened, but he is clearly upset about it.

“Fine,” he says and faces me with a guarded expression.

It is the first we have been alone since last night, and I have been going crazy over what we would say to each other. By the look he gives me, his usual kind words will not come easy. And they shouldn’t. The fault lies with me, and only I can clear the air.

“I want to apologize,” I say. “But also, I think you misunderstood my intentions last night.”

Declan sighs as if a weight has lifted and averts his eyes. “I forget you aren’t who you used to be. I should be apologizing to you.”

This takes me aback. He never talks of how I used to be, but if he had, I never would have expected this. “I do not understand. What was I like?”

His eyelids fall shut and he shakes his head. “Never mind.” He takes my hands and draws me close. There is an abrupt softening in his expression, and I wonder how he can swiftly change—or hide—his emotions like that. The sea in his eyes now shines as they look into mine. “I love you more and more with each passing day. I never believed that was possible.”

I am on the verge of tears because of this declaration, and my insides twist knowing how I have truly deceived him.

Put on your big-girl panties and get the fuck over it
, She says.

I ignore Her and draw close to Declan. “Come to my room with me?”

He smiles, biting his lower lip. “I can’t. Not with”—he waves a hand absently toward the ceiling—“the sudden business I need to attend to. Besides, it isn’t private. I completely lost my head last night when I let it go that far.”

I pout and he kisses me, then murmurs against my lips. “Soon, my love. Just keep getting better and we’ll go home where we’ll have all the privacy we need.”

 • • • 

My cylinder now faces the opposite direction. I know I am closer to the new monitors because the heartbeats are louder and Sonya now faces the wall to my right to read the screens. I still do not know who Patient 2 is, and this bothers me.

Instead of computers, I now face a row of hospital beds dressed in white sheets with inclined backs. White cabinets cover the walls. Curtains hang between beds for privacy, but as of now, there are no patients.

Noah scans the room when he enters. Maybe this is his first time visiting since the rearrangement. “Looks good in here.”

Sonya, who sits in a wheeled stool with a heavy book in her lap, looks up and slaps the tome closed. “You should throw a few more tantrums.”

His face does not shift in emotion one way or the other. “It’s what she wanted. Tantrum or no, you know you would have gotten all of this anyway.”

Silence is her response, and she presses the book to her chest as makeshift armor. The title,
Infertility in the New Era,
is all I can read, as her arms cover the author’s name.

Noah shifts his weight on his feet. He brings his hands up to his waist, and one is coated in dried blood. Sonya must see it, too, because she curses under her breath.

“You went with them, didn’t you?” she says in a reprimanding tone.

She walks to a cabinet across the room with a purposeful stride, shaking her head in a disapproving manner that makes even me want to look away in shame. She drops the book on the shelf under the cabinet.

“I haven’t cleared you for duty,” she tells him and yanks open a cabinet door.

“I don’t need your approval,” he says without pause.

He meets her eyes and they stare each other down in a battle of wills that she eventually wins, because he looks away first.

I think I like her.

She nods her head toward a bed, and he hesitates but eventually strolls over. He sits and passes over his hand. As she wipes it down with an antiseptic, she glances up at his face every now and then, waiting for him to shift his attention back to her. Or maybe she waits for him to look my way. I know I am waiting. He has not looked at me once since arriving. He fixes his gaze on the floor.

“They’re fine,” she says quietly, “in case you’re curious.”

Not a single flinch of muscle breaks his stony expression. “I assumed as much. I hadn’t heard otherwise, so I figured she’s still kicking.”

Her hand freezes over his for a moment before finishing. She throws the swab in a trash can and unwraps a bandage.

“What’s her name?” she asks casually. “Referring to her by a patient number is getting ridiculous.”

Noah’s jaw sets firmly and he nods toward the bandage. “I have somewhere else to be.”

Sonya slaps the bandage on his hand, making him wince. “Get a fucking haircut and shave that shit off your face. You may not be human on the inside, but you could at least look the part.”

Anger flushes his cheeks, but at least now she has his full attention. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means grow a fucking set and man up.” Her eyes scan him from scruff to scuffed boot. “If she could see you—”

He jumps off the bed. “Well, it’s a good goddamn thing she can’t,” he says and storms out of the room.

The door slams behind him and Sonya flinches. “—she’d kick your ass,” she finishes quietly, and the words seem to echo in the empty room.

Yes. I definitely like her.

 • • • 

Declan clips an Electric Indigo lotus flower from their dedicated section in the garden and passes it to me. He knows these hybrid lotus flowers are my favorite.

“Tell me again how we met,” I say and bury my nose in the cloying scent of the flower.

He smiles as if he loves reliving this memory as much as I love hearing it. They are only stories to me, and I hope to remember them for myself one day.

“You were eating lunch by yourself in a park. I happened to be in Richmond for a business meeting. Before it even began I decided the perfect spring day was too beautiful to waste and found myself drawn to the park.”

I do not ask him about Richmond anymore. I have no memory of glass skyscrapers and paved roads and walkways and hundreds of people, but I can imagine now what it must look like from the books I have been reading. It must be amazing to see buildings made of steel and glass, domed or pointed or slanted or square roofs. The men who design them do amazing things. Impossible things.

“You drew me in like a magnet,” he continues. “And in the days that followed, we met there for lunch and conversation. Same time, same place.”

“Was I madly in love with you?” I ask for the first time.

His sea-green gaze darts to me and back to the gray paving stones under our feet that are wet around the edges from the recent spray. He tucks his hands into his pockets, bunching the sides of his suit jacket back.

“I like to imagine you were,” he answers carefully.

“I was not?”

“It took you some time; that’s all. You were difficult to”—he pauses for the space of two heartbeats—“acquire.”

I laugh, but there is something about this word “acquire” that rings of another meaning. “You make it sound like I was a difficult purchase.”

He sighs and slows to a stop. “There are a lot of things about the world we live in that you don’t understand. Things you’ll find out in time.”

My heart begins pounding and my previously happy feelings melt away. “The time is not now?”

“You aren’t ready. Your mind is still fragile from the accident and I’m wary to rush you.” He edges closer and cups my face. “I don’t want to lose you. Taking it slow is our best chance.”

I don’t know what he sees in my face, but he pulls me out of the view of curious glances from the employees working in the garden. He pushes us through a doorway I have never noticed before and into a small, empty hallway. More nondescript doors lead off to places I am unaware of.

My curiosity is piqued and I want to inquire about this place but am suddenly against the wall and his mouth is on mine. He is not careful and my body heat rises in response. His fingers thread into my hair, and when he pulls away, it is only to leave us heaving for air and filled with longing.

“I love you so much,” he says. “More than you’ll ever imagine.”

I reach up and cover his hands with mine. I do not understand this outburst of emotion, but I know what my response should be. “I love you, too.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire,
She says and chuckles.
You’re much better at this than I ever gave you credit for.

She is right. It is a lie. I care for him, but I cannot say it is love. Not yet.

Declan’s smile is wide and amazing and I cannot help but smile in response. “When this is all over with, I want to renew our vows. Will you do that for me?”

I nod, but my stomach twists uneasily. Still, I affect a smile of utter happiness. I do not need to see a reflection of myself to know it is perfect. “Of course. Anything.”

Anything to go home.

D
r. Travista does not ask me how I am. He has not asked since that day. Instead, he watches me read the bindings of his books again and again. I will read them until they are in tatters and still have no idea what they are for. It makes no difference, because I only wish to stay far away from the window and the thick layer of snow on the ground.

“Have you read any of the books I sent you?” he asks.

I shrug one shoulder. “It seems I am not much of a reader.” She likes them, so I stopped reading to spite Her. If She wants to screw with me, I can screw with Her. “I think I will stick with the gardens and running for now. I like to do those things.”

“What about the stars? You like the stars. Maybe you have an interest in astronomy. We could manage a telescope—”

“I only think they are pretty,” I say. I have no interest in studying them. “The mystery of them is what holds my interest.” The mystery of some niggling memory drawing me to them, actually. I feel it is just there, at the back of my memory, trying to dig its way to the surface.

“That makes sense.” He taps something into his tablet, adjusts his eyeglasses, and then clears his throat. “Declan says you two are becoming close again.”

Hiding my face to answer would only help the lie, so I give him a glassy-eyed look and smile broadly at him. “Oh yes. I love him very much.”

“I’m curious. What do you foresee for your marriage?”

My breath catches, but I do not think he notices. “I do not understand the question.”

“What are your plans when you get home? When people are married, they have hopes and dreams for a particular future. What are yours?”

I do not have an answer for this. I have not thought beyond returning home.

The answer is family,
She says.
Living happily ever after.

I want to ignore Her, but I need an answer for the doctor and have no other response than the one She has given me. “I would like to have children,” I say.

This answer intrigues him, and his thick wiry eyebrows rise as he pulls the glasses from his face. “Oh? And how many do you think you’d like to have?”

Be vague,
She warns.
Specifics will only lead to trouble.

“I do not know,” I say and fold into the leather chair across from him. The cold leather seeps through my thin pants but only slightly penetrates my sweater. “I have not thought too much about it.”

Audible clicks time perfectly with the taps of his fingers over the tablet. “Well, I’m happy to report to you that children are very possible. Your tests came back with positive results.”

This makes my mouth and throat run dry. “There was a question?”

He sets the tablet aside and crosses his legs. His arms spread over the overstuffed sides of his leather chair. “Well, yes. Fertility is questionable with a majority of the female population, and because of your accident, we feared you would lose the ability to bear children.”

I sit up, curiosity piqued by only one thing he has said. The other I could come back to later. “Fertility is questionable? How so?”

He shrugs very slightly. “That seems to be the big enigma for us all. Nobody can seem to pinpoint the exact reason, so they blame it on Mother Nature. Her way of compensating for the overpopulation of our species.

“Unfortunately, we’d already begun taking the steps to take care of this ourselves. Globally limiting families to one child, and at that time—oh, I’d say this started roughly two hundred years ago—couples could change the sex of their child to whatever they wanted. Men wanted their family lines to continue, you see, so they chose male children more often than not.

“The women who are fertile these days,” he continues while he stands and moves to one of his bookcases, “are only fertile into their late twenties, early thirties at most. It isn’t disease or genetics, just the unfortunate way things have progressed.”

“But if you have the ability to change a child’s sex, why not make more girls?” I say when I am sure his long explanation has ended.

He finds the book he was looking for and pulls it free, then heads back to his chair. “It has been outlawed after what happened last time. We do not want to risk a shortage of boys. Forcing nature to do our bidding is a risky business.”

“I see.”

He hands me the heavy book, then sits. “You are blessed with the ability to bear children, so you don’t have to worry about it. At least not for a few years yet. You’re still young.”

I am unable to respond because I am staring at the very book Dr. Sonya Toro was reading in my last nightmare. And Dr. Travista wrote it. Under the title
Infertility in the New Era
, it reads,
Our Steps to a Cure.

My head feels light, but I cannot allow Dr. Travista to realize anything is wrong. He will ask too many questions, so I shift my focus back to his last statement in order to continue the conversation. “Does Declan know?”

“That you can carry a child? Of course. I told him right away. This has been a concern of his since the accident.”

I bite my lip and shift my weight in the chair. “I wish to know about this accident.”

He stands and pats my shoulder. “You should focus on your future, on becoming better so you can go home.”

He is good at diversion.

I want to be better.

I will be better.

 • • • 

We reached the outer walls and everyone wordlessly painted themselves into the dark stone structure and shadow. I glanced to either side of me, settling on Foster’s cool expression. His gaze searched high and I followed it to the empty night sky. This close to the compound, the glow of lights drowned out the cluster of stars.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“They’ll come.” I was confident they would, but the timing was off. I didn’t like it. “They’ll come,” I repeated.

Foster nodded.

“And if not, we’ll just create our own diversion.”

I grinned, and his tilted smile followed a moment later. “No doubt it’ll be better, too.”

“At the very least it’ll be more fun.”

His elbow knocked into my side. “You’re the only person I know who can turn war into a good time.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Might as well be you.”

 • • • 

Discovering the door and its subsequent hallway days before opens my eyes to what I have been missing with my focus so narrowed on nightmares I would rather forget, my husband, and returning home. With fewer visits from Declan these days, I have plenty of opportunities to enlighten myself.

I find a new exhilaration in my daily garden walk. Not because of the exercise it affords or because of the flowers and their amazing aroma, but because of what I learn in my covert search. I find ways to listen to conversations before anyone realizes I stand nearby, learning names and, in very few cases, about families.

This is how I learn the workers in blue lab coats are botanists studying the medicinal applications of the plants in the greenhouse garden. I suppose it makes sense to employ this type of study in a hospital.

Once I satisfy my garden walk, I take leisurely strolls through the corridors, keeping to the far wall, well away from the half windows lining the outside walls. The nearly white sky tells me there has been a heavy snowfall.

I pass men—I am the only woman here—in various colors of lab coats: white, pale blue, and bright red. Dr. Travista and the other doctors who assist him wear white. While there is a concentration of white lab coats in my set of hallways, the occasional red coat appears and pays me special attention. They think I have not noticed because I pretend to study any one of the multiple abstract paintings, fingering the dips of paint, the texture of the canvas. In reality, I watch everyone’s destination, and in particular Dr. Travista’s.

I have a good view near a cross section of the hallway that splits to three others. Each white hallway is identical to the next. I do not leave my hallway. Not yet, anyway.

Dr. Travista visits one room in particular across this epicenter every day. He never knocks or begs permission to enter this room as he does mine. Instead, he enters with a “Hello, dear. How are you feeling today?” Then the door slides behind him and I learn nothing else, but my instinct tells me I am not the only patient on this floor as I have long believed.

 • • • 

“Do you like the paintings, Emma?”

I sit with my back to the windows in Dr. Travista’s office, my sweater wrapped tightly around me. This question, though simple enough, tells me the red-coated men are not only watching me but reporting my actions. I have suspected they are security and now know for certain. “Yes, I like them very much.”

“Would you like one in your room?”

I cannot bear to have even one of these atrocious abstracts hang near my photograph of the sea. “No, thank you.”

“If you change your mind . . .”

I smile at him. “I will let you know.”

 • • • 

I find paint and canvas in my room. Below the easel is a tan drop cloth. I should be exasperated by this gesture because I have shown no interest in painting. Perched on the edge of my bed, I study the simple setup for a long time. My fingers scratch slowly up and down my thighs, itching to touch a brush, and I bite my lip. Can I do this?

Just try it,
She tells me.
You might like it.

Her nudging sends another image to my mind, one where I stand and knock it all to the ground, but I cannot bring myself to do this. It feels very wrong. Wasteful. That, and I realize I would like to try it.

Standing, I approach the table and rifle through a box of ten white tubes with colors on the ends indicating the hue inside. A rectangular board with a hole in one corner. A cup full of brushes. A jar of water. Folded blue rags.

It feels natural to slide my thumb through the hole in the board and squeeze on the colors: titanium white, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium orange, cadmium red medium, alizarin crimson, phthalo green, phthalo blue, dioxazine purple, burnt sienna, and ivory black.

Beginner colors,
She says.

I am a beginner,
I say.

She does not respond.

I study the blank canvas for a long moment and am resolved to mimic one of the paintings in the halls, but another idea forms. I do not know if I can do it, but I can only try. If I try something, I am one step closer to my goal.

Freedom,
She says.

Diversion,
I think, which is only a fancy word for appeasing my curiosity about the hallways and their occupants.

I choose a brush. Before I realize what I am doing, I am mixing colors and making long strokes over the surface of the canvas. I angle the tip of the brush in ways to smudge the lines, which changes the look and texture of the paint.

I am surprised when I am done, and I have no sense of how much time has passed. I have painted the sea. A beach with an archway wound in soft white fabric flowing in a breeze. Indigo flower petals litter the sand. The sun dips low in the background, casting the sky in burnt oranges and reds.

And carefully, very carefully, almost unseen to the naked eye, I have painted a symbol into the peaks and dips of the sand: intertwined hearts. My mind conjures the word “luckenbooth.” It is near the bottom left corner and almost obscured in beach grass.

It’s beautiful,
She says.
You’ve captured it almost exactly.