Burn (2 page)

“Slide it through the metal detector.”

Lona looked down at the plastic-wrapped paper plate in her hands. “It's just cake.”

“Slide the cake through the metal detector.”

She sighed, but set the plate on the conveyer belt next to her shoulder bag. The regular security guard wouldn't have made her do this. Veronica knew her – she would have gazed up just long enough from her knitting project to smile and wave Lona through.

When this new guy handed back her plate, the frosting had a thumb print in the middle, the clingy plastic wrap dipped down into the hole like a moon crater. “We just have to check,” he said defensively. “People could hide keys or knives in there.”

She made her way back to the residential wing. It was craft hour; some patients were painting watercolors in the common area. Mrs. O'Hare's Monet was beautiful. She was a retired art teacher. It must be sad for her husband, who Lona saw visiting sometimes. Mrs. O'Hare remembered everything about how to hold a paintbrush, but had no idea who he was.

Before Lona could open the door to the intensive care wing, it flew open and a bosom-heavy nurse smashed into her, trilling a theatrical scream.

“Christ, Lona.” Rowena was her favorite nurse on the ward. A retired opera singer who still behaved like she was on stage. “Oooh, what's that? Someone having a birthday?”

“I did,” she admitted. “Yesterday.”

“Happy Birthday! Party?”

“A little one.”

“Am I going to be disappointed when I ask if that cake is for me?”

“I'm sorry. I should have brought more.” She'd planned to. But when she got up this morning Gamb was eating it with a fork, digging out the frosting flowers without even having the decency to look guilty. Lona salvaged the only intact piece she could.

“Oh, my butt doesn't need it anyway.” Rowena absentmindedly ran a hand over the thick padding of her hips. “He'll be excited to have the cake. And the company. Nobody else ever comes to visit him.” She checked her watch. “You all should stop by the common room later. After crafts we're showing a movie.”

Lona nodded, but she doubted she would come to the common room. The idea of lingering nauseated her. She made these visits in secret. Fenn wouldn't understand why she came here; she could barely understand. She hated herself every time she walked through the door.

His hair had gone white, the fast-forward aging that happens sometimes with trauma victims. Not salt and pepper but salt and nutmeg, with flecks of his original warm brown. Today he wore a fleece tracksuit that zipped up the front – he was allowed to have zippers but not buttons, which could be removed and swallowed – and a pair of white Velcro shoes on his feet. He was not allowed to have lace-up shoes.

“Hi, Warren.”

He looked up from the picture book on his lap. She knew the title without having to see the front; it was a favorite.
Dilbert Ducky's Big Adventure
. Sometimes he pressed the book into Lona's hands, asking her to read it to him, but not today. Today his eyes lit up when he saw the cake in Lona's hands.

“Cookie!”

“Close. It's cake. It's birthday cake, Warren. Yesterday was my birthday.” She crumpled the plastic wrap into a waste can and searched for a plastic spoon in the drawer where he sometimes collected them. He wasn't allowed forks. “Do you want to feed yourself?”

He opened his mouth like a baby bird. She spooned a small bite in, using the hard edge of the utensil to scrape a smear from the corner of his lip.

Why was she here?

Six months ago, she couldn't have imagined this. Six months ago, Warren was just the Architect, the man who designed the Julian Path as a monument to his dead son. He was also Genevieve's father. The Architect responded to the trauma of her death by erasing all of his memories with an electrical remmersing prod.

The first time Lona visited him, she wanted to see him miserable. She wanted to hate him. But then Rowena led her to his room, rapping brusquely on the door and shoving Lona inside. He was still in his crank-up bed then – he hadn't yet learned how to walk – stroking a plush pony.

“You have a visitor, Warren,” Rowena had said, pushing Lona down into one of the chairs next to the bed. “First one. I'll stop back in twenty minutes to see how you're doing.”

The Architect looked at her and his blue eyes were wide and benign. “Hi-hi!” he said. “Hi!”

She wanted to hate him. But when she opened her mouth, what came out was, “Hi, Warren. My name is Lona. It's nice to meet you.”

“Story?” he asked hopefully when the cake was gone.

“There's a movie outside. I think it's
Bambi
. Do you want to watch it? The beginning is scary but you'd like when the baby deer and the skunk become friends.”

He shrunk back against the armchair. “No. No out. Story.”

“Fine. A story. Not Dilbert, though. I can't read that again.”

He held out the duck story hopefully.

“No,
not
Dilbert. Something else.” She picked through the selection on the shelf. “How about this one?” She pulled out an unfamiliar hardback that had a pig and a porcupine on the cover. One of the nurses must have brought it from the library. She settled on the arm of Warren's chair, making sure to hold the book so he could see the illustrations.

“
One day, Oink decided to conduct a science experiment
,” she began. “
He asked his friend Spike to help set up his laboratory
.”

“Nehhh,” he interrupted. “Nehhh!”

“Right, Warren. It's an exciting story.”

“Nehhh!”

She'd thought, once, that the exclamation was his daughter's name – that he was trying to say “Neve”, the nickname Genevieve preferred. Doctors told her this wasn't possible – his brain scans on memory tests were flat. He didn't remember Neve. “Nehhh” was just an exclamation.

The book was funny, a
Sorcerer's Apprentice
-like tale that involved Oink and Spike surfing waves of expanding soap bubbles as they tried to stop their Magical Multiplying Solution. When Lona reached the end, she turned back to the beginning, without prompt, to read it again. Warren always liked to hear stories twice in a row, sometimes three or four times. When she finished the second time, she made a big show of closing the cover and putting it back on the shelf so he would know he wasn't going to get a third reading.

“Okay, Warren. It's time for me to go now.”

He shook his head furiously and squirmed; he'd tucked something behind his back. She looked down to the floor. Her bag was missing. “Warren. We've been over this before. I'm still going to leave, even if you hide my things. It just makes me waste time looking for them, which makes me late, which makes me not want to come back.” Warren tucked his head in shame, slowly pulling the bag from behind him.

“Thank you. I'll come back soon. Maybe next week.”

“Soon.”

“Soon.”

He didn't have any concept of time. Lona could leave to get a soda from the vending machine down the hall, and when she returned he was just as happy to see her as if she'd been away for months. He didn't have any concept of anything. Warren had gotten what he always wanted for the children of the Julian Path. A clean slate.

Clean slate didn't mean purified slate, though. His had been wiped down, but it was impossible to remove the grime that had already burrowed below the surface. He was still responsible for his daughter's death. He just didn't have to spend every day remembering it.

Rowena appeared at the door, now wearing a pipe-cleaner necklace that someone must have made her in crafts. “We're doing root beer floats with the movie,” she cajoled. “Are you sure you don't want to join us?”

Lona slung her bag over her shoulder. “Thanks, but I have stuff to do.”

“Stay!” Warren pleaded. He'd grabbed the edge of her coat; his fingers were stubby and sticky and brown with cake, and looking at them suddenly filled her with revulsion.

Why did she keep coming here?
It made her uneasy that she couldn't articulate it. She didn't enjoy spending afternoons with a 170-lb toddler, reading the same books over and over again. The visits didn't feel like virtuous acts; they were filled with irritation, not compassion. But she was still choosing them, again and again, even though Warren didn't deserve them. Even though it meant lying to Fenn. Even though it would devastate him to find out.

“Lona?” From the tone of Rowena's voice, she could tell it wasn't the first time the nurse had called her name. “I asked if you wanted a root beer float for the road.”

Lona shook her head and moved toward the door.

“Bring a friend next time,” Rowena suggested cheerfully. “It would be nice to see more young people here.”

“I don't have any friends who know I come here.”

“Tell them you can get community service credits for volunteering,” Rowena offered. “We've partnered with schools before.”

“No,” Lona said, because she'd phrased it wrong. What she should have said was,
If my friends knew I came here, they would no longer be my friends.

A car was in the driveway at home, a blue station wagon Lona didn't recognize. She hung her coat by the front door and sniffed the sleeve of her sweater. The hospital had its own odor, like lemons and stale bread. She wanted it off her.

“Hey, are you back?” Fenn called from somewhere in the house, but she couldn't answer him smelling like hospital. It felt like reveling in her dishonesty. She ducked into the hallway bathroom, stripping off her sweater down to the short sleeves she'd worn underneath, scrubbing her face and arms until they were red.

In the kitchen, Fenn poured coffee for a small, wiry woman with a long ponytail.

“Talia!”

It was funny – Lona used to think the ex-Monitor had a hard face, one that reminded her of a weather-worried stone. Six months later, the fine lines around her mouth looked like laugh lines, not frown. The clothing helped. As a Monitor for the Julian Path, Talia had worn regulation black; today she was dressed in a green pullover and jeans.

“Where did you end up?” Fenn eyed her, briefly, before pouring her a cup of coffee. “I thought you'd be back an hour ago.”

“You probably just missed us.” Talia slid the sugar to Lona. “Gabe and I were out doing errands all afternoon, but we were in the neighborhood so we decided to stop by and show you guys the new car.”

Just missed them
? Oh. Right. Her stomach fluttered as her memory returned. That was the fake destination Lona had given Fenn: going to drop some papers off at Talia's.

“I should have called first,” she stammered. “When you weren't home I went to the mall instead. Just wandered around, didn't buy anything.” She thought she saw Talia look at her, out of the corner of her eye, but tried to ignore it. “Are we doing Tuesday dinner a day early?”

Finally, Talia stopped looking at her and turned to Fenn. “If the chef says we're invited. We might as well; we're already here.”

“It's just spaghetti. I'll add more noodles.”

The back door banged open and a small boy flew inside, a mess of knees and elbows. Behind him, Gamb's arms extended like talons, swiping at the air. “RAAAWWR,” he snarled. “I am a Ty-Gamb-isaurus Rex. I am going to EAT YOU FOR DINNER.”

“Gabriel, tone it down in the house,” Talia called as he rounded a sharp corner, but she was smiling. Talia had been terrified of taking full custody of Gabriel; she'd never been approved for parenthood. She insisted she was better equipped to deal with machines, not people. It made Lona happy she'd been wrong.

“How is he doing?” Fenn asked.

“He's a weird little dude. Really precise, I guess the best word would be? Like this afternoon I said, ‘Okay, go get in the new car,' and he said, ‘It's a
station wagon
.'”

“Do you ever think he remembers anything?” Fenn had lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “From before Path?”

Before Gabriel was admitted to the Julian Path, his mother tried to drown him in the bathtub. Erasing his memory prepared him to accept his new life as Julian – his Path name had been Djna, signifying he'd been born April 10, and Sector 14 like Lona.

“I don't know. Sometimes I think he does. I'll be reading him a new book and it will seem like he recognizes the plot already. Things like that. The therapist says I'm just imagining things. And why would I want him to recover his previous memories, anyway, when his childhood before was so shitty? Besides, it's possible he's just really freaking smart, and he knows that all kids' books are eventually going to end with the bunny deciding to come home.

“How's
your
school going?” Talia continued, turning her attention back to Lona. Her tone was casual; Lona hoped that meant she believed her story about going to the mall. “If we're doing Tuesday dinner now, we might as well get the official stuff out of the way. You're not behind on any assignments, are you? And you've scheduled your college entrance exams?”

Part of the court arrangement that allowed Lona to live in the farmhouse instead of with Talia required that she finish the rest of high school through self-paced home study, keeping a certain grade point average and maintaining weekly check-ins. Talia was caring, but efficient. She didn't try to parent, and Lona liked that about her – that she hadn't forced some unnatural intimacy.

“School's fine. Boring. The proficiency tests for eleventh grade are easier than what Julian was doing in ninth.”

“If Lona proficiencies out early, we can start college together in the fall,” Fenn explained. “We actually have a campus tour and interview scheduled for tomorrow, with the dean who contacted you a couple months ago.”

“That's great.” Talia looked pleased. “I was hoping you'd get in touch with him. High school's a nightmare however you spend it. Better to get it out of the way early.”

Fenn opened the lid of a pot sitting on the stove and Lona smelled fresh tomatoes. He'd become the best cook in the house. He had the most time: Lona still had classes, and Ilyf had recently been recruited to work for a computer security company, something complicated with weird hours, and Gamb couldn't be trusted to microwave a potato without a kitchen disaster.

He dipped in a spoon and frowned. “I think this needs more basil. I'll go grab some from the greenhouse.”

“Lona and I can do it.” Talia was already scooting back her chair and looking meaningfully at Lona. “I should earn my supper.”

There hadn't been a working greenhouse when the house belonged to Genevieve's family. Just a glass building down a path from the main house, unkempt, littered with leaves and mouse carcasses. Fenn cultivated it, making neat rows of cucumbers, tomatoes and asparagus, each labeled with seed packets on raised wooden beds. It was warm in here even when it was cold outside, the sun getting trapped by the glass, holding in moisture.

“Are you sure everything's okay?” Talia pushed aside the tomato vines to try to reach a particularly red fruit in the middle.

“Why wouldn't it be?” She froze, worrying that Talia could smell the hospital on her.

“Gabriel and I weren't running errands for very long before we came over,” Talia said. Her voice was even. Not an accusation, but an invitation to Lona to explain more. “We only went to the bank.”

“Then I guess I must have really just missed you. Bad timing.”

Talia nodded, slowly. “Lona. If anything is bothering you, that's what my job is. In case there's something you didn't want to mention in front of everyone else.”

She felt a sudden, desperate urge to mention where she'd been that day. She wanted to tell someone how she visited Warren and fed him cake, and she wanted someone to stroke her arm and tell her it was okay. Or to shake her and ask her what she was doing and tell her to stop. Or at least to help her understand why.

If she could tell Talia about Warren, then maybe she could tell her other things, like about the dream from two nights ago. She could explain how scared and out of control that dream had made her feel.
She could still feel the thumbtacks scratching on her skin
.

“What is it, Lona?” Talia asked.

“It's—”

“Yes?”

Lona swallowed down the urge to say more. That should be her penalty, for doing something she knew would hurt everyone else. Her penalty was silence.

There was one thing she
could
mention today, though she was shy about asking. Speaking out loud meant vocalizing beyond birthday candles that what she wanted was important.

“There
is
something I was hoping you could help me with. As my guardian.”

“That's what I'm there for. To guard you.”

She stalled by plucking a few basil leaves off a plant, tucking them into her hand and feeling the coolness against her skin. “I know my Path admission records didn't have any information on my parents. But I wondered if there could be more that wasn't included with those records.”

“Lona, we went over this six months ago when you first brought this up. I found you myself, outside the Center, in the middle of the night. If anyone would know any more about your admission, it would be me.”

“I know. But maybe not admission records. Maybe hospital forms? Maybe they did genetic testing, or they have samples of my DNA or something.”

“Even if they did, it wouldn't matter unless there was someone to match the DNA with. You'd already have to have a parental candidate in mind.”

“I know. I just thought. I don't have access to any of my own records until I'm eighteen. I looked it up. But I thought that as an employee – and as my guardian—”

“Lona, in nineteen years working in Path I don't think anyone was ever left with as little information as you came with. Most people at least left a note pinned to their kids' blankets.”

She wasn't trying to be cruel. Talia spoke bluntly whether it was harmful or not. Her career had, after all, been spent around machines. The underlying message wasn't comforting, though:
Nobody has ever abandoned a child as thoroughly as your parents abandoned you.

“But you could try.”

“I'll try. If you're sure you want me to.”

“Why wouldn't I want you to?”

“Because you might not like what you found out. If you could find out, but what you found was a background like Harm's, which would be better – to know that or know nothing?”

Harm. Lona shuddered at the name. Harm the beautiful, Harm the ex-Pather, Harm the sociopath, who had lived with Julian along with seven other Strays. In the last memory she had of him, he was launching himself at the officers who were trying to remmerse her, ripping at skin with his teeth and nails. Lona remembered his file. He was abandoned when he was a few weeks old by a mother who already thought he was evil.

“I think I'd rather know.”

Talia nodded. “Okay,” she said. Then she pointed toward the house. In the kitchen, Fenn's head was bent over some culinary task. All Lona could see was the top of his curls, but those curls made her smile. He looked up, as if he'd felt her eyes on him, and waved with a slotted pasta scoop in his hand. “I'm just saying that you've had two families in your life. One didn't want you,” Talia said. “And one of them obviously does. And I know which one I'd pick.”