Burn (8 page)

The grandfather clock in the kitchen struck seven chimes. It had grown light while she was poring over the lists. No one else was awake yet, though Fenn probably would be soon. As soon as she thought that, she heard the sound of water running through the pipes in the walls. Fenn stepping into the shower.

She rushed downstairs, tiptoeing past the bathroom. Visiting hours at Warren's hospital didn't technically start until eight, but the staff had never minded if Lona showed up a little early – they were happy when he had visitors at all. And now, Lona thought, she might have enough information to unlock whatever was hiding in the recesses of Warren's brain. She found a packet of cookies from the pantry and a pair of Gamb's shoes that happened to fasten with Velcro. Maybe she could bribe Warren into being extra receptive today. Jog his memory with sugar and Velcro. It was worth a try. Anything was worth a try.

At the last minute, she grabbed a pen and a crumpled napkin from her pocket.
Running errands
, she wrote, afraid to get any more specific.
Be back—
Before she could decide what time to promise her return, she heard the shower turn off and the door open.

“Lona?” His voice sounded throaty and deep. She loved the way his voice sounded in the morning when it was full of sleep. “If you're out there, could you turn on the waffle iron so it heats up? I was going to make some for breakfast.” She opened her mouth to respond, out of habit, but then shut it. Coming up with an explanation would only delay her, and even if she did answer him, she wasn't sure what she would say.

“Lona?” he called again, but she was already making sure her note was visible on the kitchen table –
Running errands. Be back
– and slipping out the back door.

The same man was attending the entrance that had been there last time. He stood uncomfortably at attention, like his uniform had been washed with too much starch, like the fabric was too stiff to allow his joints to bend.

“No visitors through here,” he said, even as she removed her coat to be scanned. She checked the wall clock.

“No visitors? Really? It's a quarter to eight. Can't I just get in fifteen minutes—”

“No visitors.”

“But you know me. I was just here.” She was going to have to learn his name, clearly, and befriend him. She should have brought him a cup of coffee as a bribe. “Veronica always lets me – it's never been a problem.” She piled her coat on the conveyor belt, and then jumped back when he roughly removed it and handed it back to her.

“Miss, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.” His voice sounded strangled.

Behind Lona, the door flew open. Dr. Froelich, the chief doctor at the hospital – Lona had seen him just a few times, making rounds. He was normally grandfatherly and gentle, with an easy laugh when he talked to patients or their visitors. Today his mouth was set in a hard line. He scanned his badge at the employee entrance and brushed past Lona without even a greeting.

Behind the guard, in the space beyond the security zone, a crackled announcement came over the speakers. Lona couldn't make out the words, but it made the guard whiplash his head in the direction of the noise.

“What's going on? What did that announcement say?”

He wouldn't look at her, though. He craned his neck, back in the direction of the residential wing, back to the part of the hospital Lona couldn't see.

“What's going on?” she asked again. “Can you answer me?” She could hear her voice growing strained as she demanded a response. Behind the guard, a flash of purple scrubs darted past. Lona's heart leapt at the sight of a familiar face. “Rowena!” The nurse stopped, looking around for the origin of her name. Lona waved her hand above her head. “I need to get in. Can you tell this guard that I—”

“Lona,” Rowena said. Her cheeks were flushed red and she looked flustered. “What are you doing here?” As soon as the woman spoke, any reassurance Lona felt disappeared. Rowena usually greeted her with a maternal hug. This time she didn't even smile. She walked toward Lona, but looked distracted.

“Rowena, what's going on? The guard told me that I can't get in, but I just need to—”

“I'm sorry, Lona. No visitors today.”

“But this will only take—” She hated this, having to call over the metal detectors and the x-ray ramp.

“No visitors at all, Lona. We're on lockdown.”

An awful feeling was beginning to develop in the pit of her stomach. “Why won't anyone tell me what's happening?”

“I really can't. Go home, Lona. I'll call you when I can.” Rowena turned, her tennis shoes squeaking on the linoleum.

“Rowena, wait! Can you just give Warren something for me?” Rowena paused, but didn't come any closer. Lona searched for another napkin, like the one she'd left her note on this morning. “Your pencil.” She pointed to the one stuck haphazardly through Rowena's bun. “Can I borrow it? Just for a second.”

Rowena hesitated, looking to both sides to see if anyone else was watching. The security guard was on the phone. Rowena plucked the pencil from her hair and handed it to Lona over the nylon partition. Lona scratched out the names as quickly as she could, before Rowena could decide to leave again, trying to make her handwriting more legible than usual. “Just read him these names,” she rushed. “Tell him they're from me. Please, it's important.”

Rowena paused for only a second before taking one corner of it. “I'll read them. But I don't think it will help.”

“Just try it. Read them a couple of times. Over and over again. See if he recognizes them – if he makes a face, or a noise, or if he – sometimes, you know how he makes that sound? See if he makes the Nehhh sound when he hears any of the names.”

Rowena looked back over her shoulder. The security guard was still on his call. She pulled Lona in, bowing her head in and muttering so softly Lona could barely see her lips move.

“You're not his legal family so you didn't hear this from me,” Rowena said quietly. “Do you understand? Nod that you understand.”

Lona nodded, quickly. She held her breath. The knot in her stomach was beginning to grow bigger.

“It's Warren. He's had an – an accident. He's brain dead.”

“No!” Without thinking, she stumbled against the partition, trying to push the rope aside. Rowena held her back, swiftly and firmly, before the security guard could see what was going on.

“You can't.”

“I want to see him.”

“You
can't
, Lona. His family doesn't even know; we're trying to get hold of them.”

His family
, Lona thought. He doesn't have a family. He has a dead daughter and a wife who never comes to visit him. “
You
don't know, either,” Rowena hissed. “Remember, you don't know because I didn't tell you. I didn't tell you
anything
.”

“What kind of an accident? What happened?” A hiccup escaped Lona's lips before she could finish the sentence. She realized she had started to cry. Rowena put her arm around Lona's shoulder, briskly pulling her in and clucking softly in her ear, warm little sounds made by her front teeth and the tip of her tongue.

“I know,” she crowed softly. “I know this is hard.”

She thinks I'm upset because I'm sad,
Lona realized. She wasn't sad. Not as sad as she should be. She was angry that the Architect was gone. She was furious with him for leaving her. Just when she thought she was getting closer to figuring something out, even the fractured, tenuous connection she had with her vision was now taken away.

It's not his fault,
she reminded herself. People don't will themselves into comas. Men who are still learning to tie their shoes cannot force their brains to shut down.

“What happened?” she asked again. “The accident. Did he fall?”

“We're going to have a full investigation,” Rowena said, stroking Lona's hair. “We'll find out why it happened.” Her voice was shaking. It was soothing that didn't soothe.

“How what happened, Rowena? You said that he was fine until this morning.”

“The aide was new,” Rowena explained. “He was playing the shoe game with Warren. On and off. On and off. His shoes had laces. He left to answer a call in another room.”

His shoes had laces.
Lona knew how this story ended. The speaker crackled again. She still couldn't make out all of the words, but she heard Rowena being paged to the second floor.

“He was only gone for a minute, but that's all it took,” Rowena said. “We're still going to figure out why he would do that. We still don't know why Warren would try to hang himself with the laces of some shoes.”

Lona walked dumbly out into the morning light. The rest of the lot was still empty. She couldn't have been inside for more than ten minutes; on a normal day, official visiting hours wouldn't even have started yet.

“I guess I'm an ass, aren't I?”

She froze, the keys in her hand, then looked up to the source of the familiar voice, still throaty and deep and full of morning. Fenn was leaning against a lamp post on the other side of her car, hands wedged in his pockets. She slowly walked around to the passenger's side. Now she could see his bicycle, tipped on the ground.

“What are you doing here?” she choked out.

He kicked at the bicycle. “Gamb or Ilyf must have forgotten to put the keys to the other car back,” he said. “They were still asleep when I left. Which is why I had to ride this bicycle in the middle of December. Which is the smallest reason that I feel like an ass.”

“You're not an ass,” she said automatically. She was the ass. She was the liar.

“Really? Because that's what it looks like. When I think you might be going off to do something with your parents, and I don't think you should have to do everything alone, so I chase after you on a bicycle because I want to be so
helpful
and
supportive
, and then we end up here. In the mental hospital where the Architect lives. So either it's some amazing coincidence that you had to stop in this parking lot to – what –
ask for directions
? Or I'm an asshole. For believing you.” Her stomach clenched at the sight of his burning eyes. “If there's another explanation, it would be great to hear it.”

She opened and closed her mouth. The times she'd rehearsed this confession, it never looked like this. In her mind, she'd always carefully chosen the circumstances – she'd told him the truth in his bed, in the warm kitchen, on the porch swing. She'd never imagined having to talk about this in a cold, empty parking lot.

“But you can't tell me, right? You still can't tell me anything?”

Lona remained silent.

“I'm going home, Lona.” His shoulders slumped and he started back for his bike. His fingers were red and chapped from his ride.

“Fenn, don't.”

“I don't
want
to be here, Lona.” He spun back around. “I don't want to act like a crazy person, following you around, or wondering where you are, or sitting in front of a mental hospital – a mental hospital, Lona?” His shoulders jerked up and down. She saw his breath curl out of his mouth, a puff of heat against the cold. He lifted his palms to the air and glanced around at their surroundings.
I don't want to feel like I'm crazy. But here I am standing in the parking lot of a mental hospital.

“You're visiting him, aren't you?” he asked. He accused. “Aren't you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Yes, okay?” She grabbed his sleeve to make sure he didn't leave again. “But I can explain. I can explain why.”

“Explain, then.” His voice was blade-sharp and vicious. “Go ahead, Lona. Explain.”

But now her mouth was filled with sand and half-formed rationales.
The Architect is in a coma. I know he's in a coma because I tried to visit him. I often visit him because I'm still trying to figure out my past. I'm trying to figure out my past because I think it might be connected to a strange man's memories.
It was like she was singing a version of that children's song:
I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.
The song could go on and on, listing what the old lady swallowed to catch whatever had gone down her intestinal track before it: spiders. Birds. Donkeys.

But in the end it kept coming back to the same refrain:
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. I guess she'll die.
A chain reaction of events set off by the actions of one crazy woman, taking poisons no one else understood.

“What
is
it, Lona? Why are you visiting the man who ruined our lives? You're a masochist? You miss the Path? You're completely messed up?”

His words bit. Weren't they the questions she'd asked herself every time she came to visit Warren? Weren't they her deepest fears? All along she'd been telling herself that she came to visit Warren in spite of his connection to her past, but what if she came
because
of it?

She took a heavy step closer to Fenn, leaning her forehead against his chest. He didn't push her away but his body was wooden and unyielding. She stared down at his shoes. Brown. Scuffed. It was always easier for her to be honest when she didn't have to look at him. Back in the Path, their conversations happened side by side in the Calisthenics room, rather than face to face. She still preferred talking to Fenn this way, when what she had to say was difficult.

Fenn sighed.
“Sometimes I wonder if it was fair, for us to be together so soon after.” He didn't need to say what “after” meant. There was only one “after” in both of their lives. “I was Off Path for months before you,” he continued, “so I had plenty of time to figure out what I wanted. Or actually, to figure out that what I'd always wanted was you.”

He didn't blush when he said that. It was one of her favorite things about Fenn. He displayed his feelings like gifts. “But you didn't have that, and maybe it's harder for you to—” His voice was shaking.

“Fenn. That's not it.” She finally found her voice. “At all. I
was
visiting the Architect. But I won't need to come back again.”

She told him. Everything. She told him about the first visit here, and the children's books and the hatred she felt that had slowly melted, collapsing into itself until it had become pity. She told him about the way her body ripped itself out of the dream on the night before her birthday. About how, when she was in the dream and a man named Ned, she could feel the cold plastic of the syringe in her hand.

She told him what sleep had become to her: something she dreaded and looked forward to, something she needed and feared, every night hoping that she would be allotted another few seconds of the vision, that she would spot some new clue.

Telling him what had happened made what had happened seem real, finally. All of it was real. Her dream was real, and her fear was real, and the sweaty slip of paper she'd passed through the barricade to Rowena was real. The shoelaces were real. By the time she told him about the shoelaces, her face was wet with tears. The front of Fenn's shirt was spattered from where she'd cried on him.

“Lona. Why would you do that?” She couldn't tell if he was furious or terrified. At least he was talking. “I still don't understand why you ever started visiting to begin with.”

“Because,” she tried. “Because I
need
something. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's because he's the only connection to the whole life I had before, or because I'm completely messed up, or – I don't know what I need, Fenn, but somehow I felt like he could give it to me.”

“He's
dangerous
, Lona.”

“He wears diapers. He's less dangerous than Gabriel.”

“No, he's the one who created Gabriel. And me, and Ilyf, and Endl, and Byde – do I need to list every Pather who has ever died, gone crazy or barely escaped the system that this man in diapers invented? Do I need to remind you about Harm?”

“You don't,” she said. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before.”

He was quiet. It seemed like he was quiet for an eternity, and then she felt him yield. Just a little, and slowly, but eventually she felt his body begin to soften until finally he lifted his arms and wrapped them around her, gently tracing the line of her spine.

“What do you want to do now?” he said finally.

What was she going to do now? She hadn't had time to think about it, between discovering what had happened to Warren and finding Fenn at her car. “Now, I guess, I start at the beginning,” she improvised. “I find them on my own. And call them, or visit them, or – I guess that's what I have to do now. I retrace some steps.”

His hands clasped more tightly around her waist. “You want to keep going?”

“Of course I want to keep going.” It was the only course of action, especially now, when she'd already told Fenn, when she had already ripped off that Band-Aid. She couldn't have the end of the story be,
so I guess I'll just give up.

“Lona, how is this going to work? You're going to track down some men from an outdated directory and then pretend you're, what, doing a survey about the Path?”

“No, of course not that,” she protested, although she realized that she hadn't thought through how the next step would work. “I'll figure out something else to tell them. Or maybe I won't have to tell them anything. Maybe once I see them, I'll just know. Or they'll know. Maybe they will have been expecting me.”

“
Expecting
you,” Fenn repeated mirthlessly. “Said the spider to the fly.”

The phrase gave her chills. “Then I'll meet them in a public place,” she said stubbornly. “Or I'll bring my phone and keep my thumb on the emergency button, ready to dial if one of them pulls out an ax. I'll be careful in every way a human can possibly be careful.”

“It won't be careful enough,” he said.

But he hadn't asked her not to go. And he hadn't said that it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard of. And he hadn't gotten back on his bicycle and ridden away, leaving her alone in the middle of an empty parking lot.

Fenn sighed, backing away from her so he could look in her eyes. “Okay. Which one should we start with?”

He'd inserted the word so casually, it took her a moment to hear it. “Which one should … ”

“Do you just want to go alphabetically?” he asked. “Or do you have a reason to feel more strongly about one of them over the others?”

It was so much more than she had hoped for. “We? Are you  …  are you saying you're going to come with me?”

He ran the tips of his fingers from her cheekbone down to her jaw. “What did you think I was going to say, Lona? ‘Good luck with everything, I'll see you when you get back?' Would you say that to me?”

“No.” Of course she wouldn't. If Fenn asked her to help him, she wouldn't have to think before saying yes. Saying yes would be instinctive.

“Then I'm not saying that to you. Next discussion.” He nodded once, definitively, sealing that matter closed. “Just me, though. Not Gamb and Ilyf. Let's not pull them into this.”

She nodded back, and she didn't protest when he pulled her closer in to him, when he buried his face in her neck and inhaled, drawing strength from her skin. But she could feel his body shudder with fear, and she could hear the way he was trying to control his breath.

“You don't have to,” she said.

“Of course I do.”

Fenn had said that she would have immediately agreed to help him, and he was right. But that wasn't the right comparison to make. She wasn't Fenn, and Fenn wasn't her. If he had asked her, she wouldn't have hesitated before saying yes.

He never would have asked.